Confessions of a part-time girl

Proportion
8:56 a.m. -- 2008-06-25

A quick search will reveal a number of tests that you can do, offering you a series of choices and ultimately delivering a score that indicates your level of tranny tendencies, your percentage of maleness versus femaleness, your balance of yin and yang, or whatever. Most of them are just frivolous fun, and don't really indicate a thing.

The idea of a percentage or proportion of femininity is a recurring one, however. Transvestites seem drawn to speculate as to the level of girlie influences in their everyday life.

This figure bears no relation to the reality of their life: a person who obsesses about their girlish side might still only spend two percent of their life actually cross-dressing; another might have made no real effort to find a feminine side, but might often wear a dress while he sits on the couch watching a football game and drinking beer.

Like all people, transvestites are hard to categorise or sum up. Each is different.

The proportion of time that one spends 'en-femme' is one measure you might attempt to examine them by; another is the degree to which they have disrupted their maleness, in pursuit of the feminine ideal. For example, plucked eyebrows, shaved body and limbs, piercings in both ears... we're not discussing permanent changes here, but these changes are still going to cause a certain amount of inconvenience in the cross-dresser's normal (male) life.

I remember when Lucy and I decided we should go swimming from time to time... A good plan, to do something together and get healthy: then I remembered my recently-shaved legs, and had to decline.

This is just one example of how living with a cross-dresser must be a series of small disappointments. (Not least because Lucy would probably have preferred a hairy, muscular man in bed.) Some kind of compromise will need to be found, or the relationship will suffer.

I know one tranny who staunchly defends his right to shave and grow longish nails, saying "It's my body. I wouldn't demand she had her hair coloured or styled a certain way..." In other households, rules have been established, such as shaved legs being OK during the winter, but allowing the hair to grow back in time to wear shorts in the summer.

What you and your partner choose to do is something to be decided between the two of you - and your solution need not match that of anybody else. The tranny needs to bear in mind that his desire to have a smooth chest, or permanently painted toenails, could well be doing harm within the relationship. At a subconscious level, perhaps, but he's making himself less manly and therefore less of a catch. (She's evolved to seek a strong mate who can defend her and provide for her children.) The needs of his wife or girlfriend are therefore being neglected, if just a little.

There is also the problem of the Tranny Ratchet (see an earlier article) whereby his degree of cross-dressing gradually increases as he pursues his ideal look, and tries to recapture the highs he initially got when dressing. To the wife or girlfriend, plucked eyebrows are not just plucked eyebrows: they are one more step down the road that she fearfully imagines leads to hormones, breast implants, facial surgery, castration...

The single transvestite can do whatever he pleases, of course, although even the semi-permanent things like getting pierced ears might reduce his chances of getting another girlfriend. (Although anybody who isn't freaked out by your androgynous look is less likely to freak out later...)

Just be aware of the harm that you are doing to your loved ones, both in the immediate sense and by implication. They will feel that the man they love is slipping away, and that each step will lead to another, less easily reversed one. They are hostages to your cross-dressing, who live in fear that they will also be ridiculed by their neighbours and society in general, as a result of your increasingly "out" stance.

Just how masculine are you? And how feminine? And how will you feel tomorrow?

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