Who are my Cross Dressing Friends?

A very happy Friday to you, dear reader. My Cross Dressing furnace is shut down for the warm southern months, but the pilot light between my ears flickers steadily. While I won’t have many new tales of pubic daring-do and fashion-don’t to relate to you here for a while, I do expect that I will need to vent the gathering fumes periodically, if only for safety’s sake.

So, who are my Cross Dressing friends? Well, readers of this blog are certainly in the mix, but there is another group. A group that I have already met, but am yet to know.

Got that?

Hmmm. Fair enough. Perhaps a few more words are required.

Unless I am more deluded than I like to think I am, I managed to obscure my habits from the world for years. I believe that I did a pretty good job of that in fact. My wife was, after all, surprised when I did get around to introducing the other woman in our relationship to her. I have every confidence that the rest of my family, my neighbors, friends and professional colleagues are equally in the dark about my life in the pink.

They really have no reason to think of me as anything other than a pretty regular guy apart from the normal ticks and quirks of personality that I mark my territory with. There is nothing in my typical day-to-day appearance that would indentify me as being active in any sort of TG Sorority. My movement and mannerisms (again in the typical day) are all guy too. On the golf course, while my scores would likely improve if I did indeed swing like a girl, I do not.

So the cloak is fairly effective. There are hundreds of people that I keep society with that do not know Petra Bellejambes and have no reason to suspect her existence.

Now, take a look with me through the other end of the telescope.

Amongst the hundreds of people in my current social universe, and amongst the thousands through all the years, it is a mathematical certainty that I have known, that I do know, and that perhaps today I am very close to a Cross Dresser who I do not know is a Cross Dresser.

And the Cross Dresser is but a single slice out of the fruity and nutritious Transgender Pie. How long would I need to flip pages of my high school yearbook before seeing a picture of an ancient and slight acquaintance who is living today happily in a different gender, or unhappily in the same gender? Not long, I suspect.

When I think of the countless commercial client presentations and theatrical audiences I have held temporary spell over through the decades, the numbers get really big. I must believe that within those rooms there have been at least a football squads worth of fellows furtively snapping a garter strap beneath the flannel trousers.

We are a stealthy bunch. We learn to be stealthy early. We optimize around stealth. We know how to cover tracks. We are expert at amplifying characteristics that convince our audiences, and sometimes ourselves, that there is nothing unusual going on within or without us.

And so, while I know Cross Dressers who I am friends with, I do not know who my Cross Dressing friends are.

We live in a good time friends, that is to say we live in better times than came before us. There are better times ahead I believe, most avowedly. I am hopeful that things will continue to trend towards openness in these matters, towards a fuller acceptance of gender diversity, towards a tearing down of the wall that separates our false binaries.

Surely as this happens, we will all get to know some of our friends a bit better, and vice versa. And that can only be a good thing.

Have a happy weekend.