How did you get this way?
What kinds of things happened in your childhood that may have been a contributing factor? What I say is based on listening to lots of life stories of lots of different people. There are basically two paths; well, there are three, but two that are very different.
One is the gender dysphoria secondary to homosexuality. That's the sissy boy. there’s a lot of work being done by Susan Coates in New York now and Ken Zucker in Canada and Richard Green at UCL working with crossgender identified boys. That's not most of you, in terms of what I see in practice when we talk about your history, and when I interact with you here.
There's usually been a very close family system, very close to the mother. If you ever read some of the psychodynamic literature by Robert Stoller he talks a lot about this group. He calls this 'primary transsexualism'. This child never really has any conflict, and the theory is that he never separates from Mom in the separation individuation stages of development, which is between ages 2 and 4.
This also may be the person who has a biologic basis to the crossgender behavior. We don't know. The biologic studies are inconclusive, but we do have some. Louis Gooren is doing some really good work in the Netherlands, and Eicher and Doerner are in Germany. With these extremely effeminate boys, there may have been some 'in utero' effect on development of the brain. Joe Gonzalez over here (in the audience) hopefully is going to find out with his PET scans and other biologic research, and perhaps some day working on the biologic end of gender disorders we will know more.
These boys are always very effeminate. They are like a girl from the word go. They are only attracted to men, and have always been. They are apparently at a very early age trying to repair some kind of damage to the Mom by becoming the Mom; Susan Coates' work' on this is absolutely fascinating. They often come from homophobic backgrounds, a lot of Catholicism or other religious backgrounds.
This is also the phenomenon that we see when we look at crossgender identity in non-Western preliterate and cross cultural studies. Many cultures have a place for this population, a third gender if you will. There's the berdache in Native American studies, the acault in Burma, the Kahunain the South Pacific, the hijras in India.
What you tend to find there is people who are somewhere in between the spirit and the flesh. They are often priest-like people, or shamans. They will often live in the female gender and marry men. The majority of people in our culture who start out that way develop a homosexual orientation as adults, and seldom take the extreme path of transsexuality.
Both seem to come from a background where there is very little touching. This may not apply to you, but I have found it commonly among most clients. They didn't get a lot of touching and they didn't have much discussion growing up in their family system about sex, or sexuality. So when the child is developing, he develops his sexuality in private, and then he may reinforce his crossdressing with masturbation.
He doesn't tell anybody about his crossdressing. He never learned anything about it, or that anyone might ever condone such a thing. Often they come from a working class background. Lots of people I work with are not themselves working class, but are professionals who have come from such a background, where male identity and female identity was polarized. There was a big difference between who men were and who women were.
Usually mother was not available all the time. She was there, but it was not the close kind of thing I was taking about with the sissy boys. She's not there all the time, and she's often withholding, particularly when it comes to touching. The father is either inconsequential, absent, or he is disliked. He is a negative, or at best a neutral. Even so, the father is sometimes perceived as more nurturing than the mother.
Women have the power in this kind of family, or that is what it looks like to the child. It is often an extended family and there are a lot of women around, so the child is often in the company of women, and he likes that. These are mother's sons rather than father's sons. Possibly in this family a girl was wanted; this happens sometimes. Somewhere along the line the child decided it was better to be a girl.
Occasionally you run into sexual child abuse, and in the cases where that happens, often the crossgender identity is developed as a response to that. That's when you get into dissociative states and multiple personalities.
Once in a while I will talk to someone who was forced to be crossdressed, but that is rare. You see that in the literature, but in my practice most people remember that they crossdressed themselves. It was something internal . Some people recognize it was a transitional object for Mom. Mom was gone and they put the clothes on to be close to Mom. They felt with the clothing there was a safety and comfort and security, kind of like holding, the feeling of being held.
Most of my clients were introverted and shy, and their social and sexual skills were not well developed. There wasn't a lot of dating or a history of many different women--very little contact with real girls. So there was a lot of opportunity to develop the image of the feminine in private.
The thinking orientation comes out in the kinds of jobs that are picked--large numbers of engineers, and computer people, and people who are comfortable with things and manipulating the environment. They are interested in details, concreteness. Sensation types concretize experience. They concretize the image of the feminine to make it real. and it feels good, and gives them security.
One of the things that I find very interesting is that I have only found this kind of phenomenon in the West, and Japan. I am only aware of it in the United States and Canada, Northern Europe, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The other kind I was talking about earlier, the sissy boy and the effeminate homosexual, is what you see more often in less technological cultures, including Southern Europe.
What I think might be going on is that as we become industrialized, we have a nuclear family where we don't have much contact with the father. The father is out in the world, and there is not much available role modeling there. also, when we look at the cultures where the non-homosexual type is prevalent, and now I'm getting into Jungian theory, they are cold and untouching cultures and there is little connection with the goddess. The cultures are not warm and spontaneous and connected with the earth.
I think what happens in our community is that a lot of you are in touch with that at a very deep level. You are introverted sensation types and you recognize that it is missing and you need to concretize it. The culture needs to do it. We need a lot more female images out there.
In the Southern European cultures, at least, you do have the Madonna--I'm not saying that's great--and there are a lot of cultures in the East with a wide variety of goddess images, where the image of God is not patriarchal , not male identified. I think you're hooking into the lack of that in this culture at a very early age. This ability is typical of sensation types. That's getting off into Jungian theory, but I think that's what's going on.