What Do Admirers Not Admire?

Preface: Dear crossdressing ‘sisters’. It sometimes seems strange that we are all classed together with one word – crossdresser. We know that we come with many different shapes, sizes, interests, beliefs, etc. However, we are all united in the eyes of the world as one body. I am going to write below about our friends, the admirers, and what some of them sometimes do not admire about some of us.

If your reaction is “who the hell are they to tell me what they admire or do not admire? I am my own person” you are spot on. Although lumped together in one generalization we are all our own individual persons. We are individuals who do not need to conform to anyone else’s notion about what a crossdresser should look like or should behave like.

I know many of us do not appreciate her femme identity being sexualized and objectified by others. Kudos to you.

However, this article is being written by one who appreciates the attention some men have given her and who, over the years, has learned a bit about what those men like and do not like about the crossdressing population. Just like not all CDs are the same, so too not all admirers are the same. Please accept and excuse the generalizations that may appear below. – Linda

In my last article I wrote about the ways that admirers may come to be admirers. Of course, you know that in our transgender world admirers are those folks, male or female, who are aroused by the possibility of being intimate with a MTF trans person, either TS or CD. That arousal is usually but not always a sexual arousal.

But is it all milk and honey? Just put on a dress and you will find admirers beating a path to your door? Not really. I have had a chance to be with many admirers and to learn their insights and prejudices about the trans world.

As a balance to last column’s love-in I want to share with you some of the things I have learned that the admirers I have known do not admire about some crossdressers. I trust you will not recognize yourself in any of these profiles. If you do remember that it is his problem, not yours. As Popeye would say, “I yam what I yam.” However, I think their insights and experiences can provide some lessons for our own self-improvement.

Crossdressing is more than just putting on a nice dress. Several years ago, I was at one of those multi-day gatherings that used to be popular but have since largely drifted off our calendars. They had names like ‘Gal’s Spring Fling’ ‘Be All’, ‘Texas T Party’, ‘Southern Comfort’. It doesn’t matter which one this was. I had been lucky enough to score a date for the banquet with one of the few admirers sure enough of himself to be there. There were lots of prettier (and younger) T-gals there but two nights earlier he had picked me up and we had been almost constant companions the rest of the weekend. We would be parting the next day. I was curious to know why he had picked me for his date. There were lots of willing gals and lots of unwilling, too, so how did he know I would be one of the willing and from that herd why me?

His answer stuck with me. “Crossdressing is about more than just the dress,” he said. He invited me to look around and tell him what I saw.

“A lot of pretty t-girls,” I said, “what do you see?”

“Yes, I see some pretty girls, but I also see a lot of men in dresses,” he replied.

Ohhh, that was cruel, I thought. “We are all men in dresses,” I retorted defensively.

“No,” he said, “the CD’s I like, and that includes you, go a step, several steps, further. Look at how many of them are sitting. Listen to them talking. Watch them eating,” he said to me in a low voice so no one else could hear.

A illustrative cartoon from the late Christine-Jane Wilson.

I looked. I listened. I watched. It did not take long to get his point. There were dozens of beautifully dressed CDs sitting with shoulders slouched forward at their tables. Some were talking–obviously with food in their mouths. They were talking in their rough male voices. They had probably long since given up trying to feminize their voices. I think they were comfortable with themselves. Of course they were comfortable or they would not be there but frankly their posture, their speech, mannerisms, and eating habits put them way down the ‘pass-ability scale’.

“Now look at the wives and other GG’s present,” he continued, “check their posture at the tables. Notice how they are talking.” Not all GG’s had an upright posture but there were enough that the difference was noticeable.

“I guess it is obvious why it is mostly the males of the species that have back problems later in life,” I observed. “But isn’t it that we CD’s are in our home element that at each table we seem to be dominating the conversations. The wives are the outsiders, the learners.”

“That is the point of the difference,” my friend emphasized, “if you gals tried to be more like the GG’s you would not be leaving others on the outside. You would be including them. You would be curious to find out about them. Real males in their alpha role don’t care that much about the outsiders or what they think. How do you think that makes a potential admirer feel when the tranny he wants to admire does not care what he thinks or feels?”

“I guess they don’t feel a need to try to impress anybody,” I said as I tried to defend my ‘sisters’.

“That’s exactly the point,” my friend replied, “They don’t need to impress anybody and they succeed. But dating is a game of giving off positive impressions. Do you know what attracted me to you? You were standing at the bar talking with a group of other ladies. You had one foot forward, one arm was across the bottom of your rib cage as it supported the other arm holding your drink. I heard you talking and your voice was sweet and feminine. I listened in and you were caring about what another gal was telling you. There was no attempt by you to dominate the conversation. It didn’t hurt either that your low-cut dress revealed your cleavage. It looked so real.”

“And now that you know the secret?” I interjected.

“Just increases the respect I have for the lengths you go to in achieving the full package,” he replied. I blushed.

We spent a wonderful few days together at that convention.

Lesson #1: Crossdressing is about more than just dressing.

I don’t go about life trying to find admirers and have them pick faults with us t-gals. That would not be very good for my, or anyone’s ego. However, over the years I have heard my share of frustrations from others and they stick in my mind. Sometimes it is the littlest things. I remember something from years ago at a nightclub called the Queen Mary in Los Angeles. Back in its day the Queen Mary was one of the great meeting places for drag queens, t-gals and their admirers.

I was chatting with an admirer and another t-gal, an older gal but very well put-together. At one point she left our group to get another drink or perhaps it was to go for a wee wee or a smoke. “She’s cute,” I said to our admirer friend. I was hoping he would be interested in her as it was obvious that she was interested in him.

“Yes,” he replied, “but did you notice that hair?”

“What about it? I think it looks nice. She told me she’d had it styled by Jim Bridges (the legendary hair stylist who also operated a boutique for the transgender community and had his store around the corner from the QM.)

“Not her wig and yes that does look nice,” he replied, “I mean what she has coming out of her nose and her ears.”

I winced. Yes, I had noticed it but brushed it off because I thought nose hair was something most people would not notice. Nose and ear hair, eyebrows, too, are things that grow quickly on ageing males but not on their female counterparts. I tended to notice the detail among my ‘tranny sisters’ because my wife was quick to point them out on me. When in drab or drag she did not like to see me with nose hair protruding. God bless her. One of her first purchases for me when she learned of my crossdressing was a nose hair trimmer. Now I use it almost every time before ‘Linda’ goes out. However, back in the day I did not notice that other people were noticing.

That evening at the Queen Mary I did not get a chance to tell my t-gal friend why she had lost the chance to be with a man she obviously liked but I never forgot the lesson.

Lesson #2: Sometimes it is the smallest things that make the biggest impressions.

Speaking of older gals that brings up another thing I have learned about admirers. I once was having a nice chat with a young man and by young, I mean he was probably in his 40s. Nice looking and muscular I was assuming we would end up the night being intimate with each other. I guess he was thinking that way, too. We were also having a great conversation.

When I am en femme I do not like to tell or give visual clues as to my true age. Recently I have started to wear grey wigs but that is years after many of my GG contemporaries had gone grey. Back at the time in question I was appearing as a hot babe with honey blonde hair. For all he knew I could have also been in my 40s, perhaps early 40s.

That is, he could have thought so until, in our conversation, I let something slip about how I had watched the first moon landing at a girlfriend’s place in Toronto while I took a college summer course. He said his mom had watched the moon landing when she was in college, too. I know a lightbulb went on in his brain. ‘This hot t-gal is as old as my mother,’ he must have thought.

There are guys who like cougars and there are guys with Oedipus complexes, but this wasn’t one of them. Once he realized I was maybe 25 years older than him and that put me in my sixties, somehow my sexual allure diminished in his eyes and in other parts of his body, too.

Lesson #3: We may be only as old as we feel but ageism does not respect our feelings.

“How do you get all this male attention?” I recently asked a t-girl I know.

“Let’s be clear,” she replied, “I don’t get a lot of attention but generally the attention I get is the attention I want.” She went on to explain how in clubs she would spend time watching and scouting the crowd to see how people acted and reacted to situations. If a man was withdrawn and tending to leer at the girls, he was judged to be bad news. If a man was open and friendly, she was drawn to him and not averse to making the first approach. Sometimes it only would take a few words by her to spark a beautiful friendship. Lately she has been putting herself out there through various dating websites and even CraigsList ‘Missed Connections’.

“How does that work for you?” I asked. She just smiled.

Lesson #4: Often if you don’t put yourself forward you will not get what you are seeking.

Finally, dating admirers is not always a bed of roses. Of course, be prepared to deal with the change in personality that overcomes many men shortly after ejaculation is achieved.

But it gets worse, much worse. Once in San Diego I met up with another t-girl and we had a great night out. I was there on holiday. She was from Jacksonville, Fla. and attending a work training session. In her male life she was an aeronautic engineer of some type. As a gal she liked being very sexy and attractive to male ‘clients’. It was only a few years later that I read a brief news story about her reprinted in TGForum. She was being remembered in the Trans Day of Remembrance. The article mentioned her male name but also her femme identity. She had been killed in front of her home presumably by someone she had brought home or she had agreed to meet there.

Lesson #5: Be careful out there.

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Tags: crossdressing, featured, passing

Category: crossdressing