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� In this diary, I record my life as a transvestite. Perhaps it will help somebody else, who finds their lifestyle doesn't quite match that endorsed by the 'tranny mafia'. Well, I've been there... and survived. The debriefing starts here.

�loves: All kinds of stuff that society thinks I shouldn't.

�hates: Microsoft. Obviously.

�reads:
secret-motel
artgnome
enfinblue
stepfordtart
ten-oclock
boombasticat
lawliiet
annanotbob
fifidellabon
my-serenade

Lynn Jones
Becky
Samantha

Sprechen sie Latin?
1:25 p.m. -- 2008-07-30

"What's so wrong with wanting to wear a skirt?" askes 'Steph'... "The Romans wore skirts for years and it didn't seem to do them much harm !!!"

Compared to the Roman upper classes using lead oxide as makeup, and adding it to wine in powdered form as a flavour enhancer, I'm sure skirts did them almost no harm at all. Exposure to lead, however, will send you madder than a bucket of frogs.

It's all context, though, isn't it? In the early Victorian era, the umbrella didn't really exist. Ladies had parasols, but that was all. A city gent would have been cross-dressing if he'd accessorised with one.

In the Regency period, gentlemen wore wigs and makeup. Oliver Cromwell wore his hair kind of long and wavy, don't you think? Rembrandt's self-portraits show more than a few frills and lacy bits. Texan gentlemen of the 1920s wore their boot heels kind of high. J. Edgar Hoover... no, let's not talk about J. Edgar Hoover.

Almost everything that we think of as characteristically feminine is only temporarily so. A little over a hundred years ago, baby girls were dressed in pale blue, while boys wore the 'more manly' pink that indicated health and robustness.

So what does this tell us about cross-dressing? That it can't really be about the feel of certain materials, or the cut of certain garments, because every one of those garments has (at one time or another) been 'allowed'. Personally, I love the cool snugness that I feel when wearing Lycra. But if that was all that really mattered to me, I'd get a racing bike and then I could feel that way as often as I wanted. I'd look a bit of a wally, taking my cycling far too seriously... but nobody would think I was a pervert.

Dressing in cyclists' Lycra wouldn't have anything to do with transvestism, though. It might be practical at times, but it wouldn't be sexy. Does that make sense? In the same way that there are mens' and ladies' umbrellas; mens' and ladies' jeans. It's a terribly subtle world out there. The cross-dresser needs to cross-dress; not to get away with wearing something gender neutral, and not to wear something of a similar style or material. He needs (I'll say 'needs', although that word comes with connotations...) to wear clothing associated with the opposite sex. Putting on a kilt or a toga in Roman times wouldn't necessarily have been an erotic act... although you can bet your bottom dollar there were always distinct styles for each sex. And yes, there were gender-dysphoric people back then, too.

Even today, the kilts survives. (You can thank the Romans for introducing the bagpipes as well...) And once again, there are ladies' ones and gents' ones. Kilts, that is. Not bagpipes. Who knows what new products, fashions, materials and customs will appear in the remainder of my lifetime? I have a few ideas, and they'll probably all turn out to be wrong... but I know for certain that there will always be a few people breaking the 'rules'. Not just comedians and pop stars in search of an eye-catching image, but that most elusive of creatures, pervus trannius.

Those who have been reading regularly (and revising for next week's test) will recall that although it has Latin roots, the term 'transvestite' was actually coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in a book that was published in 1910. I have no idea how the Romans addressed our trans-sisters in ancestry. I reckon they either said "Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem," [1] or "Apudne te vel me?" [2]

And some of the ladies probably said "Quomodo cogis comas tuas sic videri?" [3]

Still, de gustibus non est disputandum, [4]eh?



[1] In the good old days, children like you were left to die on windswept crags.

[2] Your place or mine?

[3] How do you get your hair to do that?

[4] It takes all sorts.

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