Summer Dressing Stuff

What does Summer mean to you? Summer is my favorite season, as I hate being cold (says the chick who goes to school in the mountains). Many people love summer because it still represents freedom to them, even if school ended for them decades ago. I guess it still represents that to me, but it was also something else–the time when I had the most opportunities to dress as a woman.

I started dressing when I was in junior high. I used money I earned from a paper route to order skirts and dresses and such from the Sears or JC Penny catalogues. Back then, there was only one place I knew of that sold any kind of “transformation” clothing–and I knew of it through ads in the back of Penthouse magazines my brother “found” (I’m sure he, like me, read it for the articles.) I won’t mention the name, as it still exists and competes with the sponsor of this website. The prices for things were too expensive back then, as I was saving for college, and could only spend so much per paycheck.

Instead of breast forms, I’d use socks or water balloons. Hip pads were t-shirts (which I know some girls use very effectively–I didn’t.) I’d spend hours watching tv or whatever while dressed. It really was heaven.

Still, summer is when my parents would go down to the house in Delaware, that dad was working on to be their retirement place. Sometimes, my older brother would go with him, which meant the house was mine for a week to ten days (as I had a job, I was allowed to stay home.) Oh, the joy of being alone for a time! I could dress as I wished for as long as I wished with no chance of someone walking in and discovering me. So yes, Summer meant freedom, but in a different way–the freedom to be who I really was.

Summer is also when I stopped dressing and “purged” the first time–in August 1983. I was 16. I looked into the mirror one day and saw a freak staring back, and determined that I had to stop this “girly” behavior. Man up. So I took five years of carefully collected and hidden wardrobe out to the rust crumbling burn barrel in the yard, coated it in lighter fluid and burned it. I didn’t stand and watch it–I just walked away. Later, I removed any non-burnt items and threw them into the trash behind the Burger King where I then worked. Within minutes, after the fire started its work, I felt a deep loss and fell into a deep depression which, in many ways, I have never recovered from.

Now, almost 40 years later, I look down as I type and see breasts–MY breasts–not water balloons. I’m wearing a dress, and I wear them as casually as I used to wear t-shirts back then. Yet summer still represents that sense of freedom for me, if only as a leftover echo of the teen boy who couldn’t understand what was happening inside of them, and the teen girl who never had a chance to be who she was meant to be.

Be well.
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Tags: featured, Identity, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul