WhatDo Crossdressers Want?
What do crossdressers generally want? They usually want to integrate crossdressing into their lives in some comfortable way. They want to understand it and want to control it.
Everybody's different, by the way; these are just representative types of things that people bring in (when going into therapy). They may want to overcome the shame and guilt associated with it. They may want to get rid of it, or make sure it doesn't develop into a crossgender identity full time. Those are basically the type of issues that come up when crossdressers come to see me.
What is the therapy? First order of business for most people, if they are not already connected with the paraculture, is to refer them here (to ETVC) because the number one concern that I see with crossdressers who don't have any contact with the paraculture is the overwhelming shame and guilt, the secrets.
"I have a secret and nobody knows about it and I'm the only one and I hate myself and what's wrong with me? That kind of thing. They've been living with it their whole lives, and don't even know that this paraculture exists.
What generally happens once they come to ETVC is they come back to me and say, "Those people are normal!" I hear that all the time. They start out terrified; there's a lot of fear about walking in this door "Who am I going to see? Is anyone going to talk to me? What are these people like? And they invariably come back and say, "Gee, I found somebody just like me." And that feels wonderful.
The work that this organization is doing, and other organizations like it, I cannot commend enough, particularly now that there is a lot of outreach going on. I have some contact with the hotline right now, and I am very impressed with that. The word is getting out. There are so many people who will no longer have to be so alone with this.
The number one thing for a crossdresser is to get them in contact with others. One exception is when the person is absolutely sure that what they want is to get rid of the crossdressing behavior, and then itís not necessarily the best thing to have an exposure to other crossdressers, but those people are a minority.
For control, understanding, and integration, what happens in the psychotherapy itself? If the person is in a relationship and the secret is out, I always want to involve the spouse, if possible. That is very helpful. Crossdressing can become a symbol for a lot of other issues that are going on in the relationship, that have to do with power, control, autonomy, and trust. It can become much more than it actual is, and it is a good idea to bring this up and include the spouse, and what the limits to the crossdressing are with the spouse, what the issues are with children, and so forth.
The most important thing to the crossdresser is usually how does this affect my relationship, or if I don't have a relationship, how will it affect a relationship.
Because the crossdresser does this part time, there's not the issue around work. We're not dealing with the same kind of issues as the transperson who is living the female gender role full-time. So we do a lot of couples counseling. Then if you want to get into really understanding the crossdressing, to understand yourself in the context of it, I have a number of questions that we deal with over time, and this depends on how deep you want to go. What I Just mentioned up to now is what a lot of people do; they just want to work with their relationship and don't have a real need to go further.
What we do with the crossdressing behavior itself is assess when, why, and under what circumstances do you crossdress? We look at intensity, frequency, and duration of crossdressing patterns. Do you feel you have a choice? Is this a part of who you are, or is it not? Is it more a compulsive type of thing that seems to overwhelm you, or is it an expression of who you are? What is going on here, let's take a look at that. What is the function of it in your life? How did it start? How does it develop and change overtime? Is it just sexualized, or is it a part of your gender identity?
What happens to your crossdressing when you fall in love? If it goes away, which it does with a lot of people, then you can develop an understanding of what we call in Jungian theory the 'anima'. The anima, in the biologic male, is the image of the feminine, or the woman within the man. Every man has that, and Jung writes a lot about this, but never with respect to crossdressers.
When the non-crossdressing heterosexual male falls in love, he projects his own anima out. With the crossdresser, when he falls in love, sometimes he projects his own anima out and stops crossdressing, but other times what he is doing is having a relationship with his own anima. He has a blissful, sometimes an almost in love relationship with an internal image of the feminine, that he needs to concretize, he needs to put into the world and have a relationship w ith.
We want to know what is the crossdressing related to in terms of when the overwhelming need comes. What a lot of people talk about in therapy is that it is related to assertion and reward. Sometimes crossdressing is a reward for something, and sometimes it's an avoidance response, a fear of assertion of the male side. That isn't always the case, but it is something I have commonly found when working with such people.
We have to assess, for instance with dream interpretation, whether the unconscious is pushing the psyche in a female or a male direction. Often the conscious self is unaware of what the unconscious is doing. Who is the whole person? Who is the second self? In the crossdresser, first is the male and second is the female. What is the male identity like,the female identity like?
Can the male have access to the female? It's very important for you as a crossdresser in the masculine to be able to tap into some of that stuff that you can get in the feminine.
The question I always ask people is, do you want to keep these two separate, or do you want to integrate? If you want to keep the male and female selves separate, then it is important to get them working together, cooperating rather than competing. If the crossdresser has no conscious awareness of this, the female side will often try to gain control, and that is the origin of many problems I see in therapy.
Dr. Lin Frazer is a therapist in San Francisco
