Are crossdressers otherworldly folks with a special insight? Perhaps we are not to be so easily dismissed as …whatever you might be thinking.
The status of ‘man’ or ‘woman’, with its privileges and its assigned vulnerabilities, is guarded ferociously in most cultures. The first thing we want to know about a baby is its anatomical sex, and this remains the first thing we want to now about others we encounter.
If a person is approaching, we want to know right away - man or woman? We use clothing first as our marker, then posture and gait. As they get closer we will assess their other behavior against the expectations generally held for men and women, adjusted for the expectations we have regarding age, class or ethnicity. Finally, their facial expression and small details of grooming become important. Every observation is checked against norms for their gender again and again for interpretation. We want to know- roughly in this order- Are we safe physically? Is this person of potential sexual interest? Could this person be of value to us?
No wonder we think that gender identity, and therefore easily decoded expression, is so important. Our life depends on it!
Or does it? Ask a crossdresser.
As shamans, we have a different experience with the powerful genies of gender. We are not caught in the common views of gender that are grossly inaccurate. We can see that our mythology of gender is blinding our society to its own most essential resource — the deeper truth of its people.
It might be said that crossdressers are children who didn’t grow up as we were told to. The next time you see very young children- look more closely. Do your best to ignore that voice in your head classifying them as ‘boys’ or ‘girls’, which is altering your perception of them. When you look a a shaman would look, you will be amazed at the similarity of boys and girls, sharing a rich set of personal characteristics- energy, curiosity, truth-telling, generosity, etc.
Now look at their adults. Topheavy with rules, blinded by all sorts of emotions and preconceptions, and intently trying to suppress the children’s energy and restrain their expression. And soon enough you will hear a command or an explanation that includes a gender norm- telling them that a privilege or a restriction is theirs because of their anatomy.
Granted, children need all sorts of teaching to be able to navigate the world. But your local shamanic cross-dresser will advise you to be more thoughtful about how you do it. The diminution and restriction of women has effectively negated the contribution of half the population. The exaggeration of social value and permissiveness granted to boys has promoted and protected a culture of sexual objectification, leading to emotionally shallow and all too often abusive relationships. Worse still, individual boys and girls grow up with emotional and intellectual lobotomies based on what they are told is ‘their’ gender.
Career and other situational expectations, social role in groups, potential sexual relationship, etc. add to the cross-linking of gender stereotypes with everything of value, and lead to capture by the mythology of binary gender.
Our crossdressing shamans are guided by a vision that combines the worlds of the mythological ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Cross-dressers choose clothing as others do, to code their identity. Their reality is a benign one. Cross-dressing is truth-telling, and the motivation is the human need for integrity.
A lot of people have a stake in maintaining special privileges for each of the two sexes, but this entails restraining and punishing those who wish to maintain their wholeness, ignoring socially prescribed limits on males and females.
The crossdressers’ world is one where each of us can adopt masculine or feminine appearance and roles as we feel appropriate. This allows for important freedoms for both males and females. Men can still be manly and women womanly. Some men will also be womanly and women manly. One’s underlying biological sex is normally detectable, so there is no sexual identity confusion.
What is the problem?
There are times I see that the movement of my dress, or the sound of my heels, arouses men. It is a conditioned response, but this then both intrigues and angers them. Sometimes women find my maleness attractive and are surprised and pleased that a dress and heels also works as a frame for it. Perhaps they can feel I will be more sensitive to their individuality and not objectify them. Perhaps they see their maleness.
Perhaps the problem is that if men can adopt the manners and appearance of women, then women are left without a special set of tools for attracting a good man. Conversely, if women can look and act like men, then why should men retain the power they do? I see women expressing disorientation or disapproval at my appearance, as if my wearing a dress was a mockery of the status of ‘woman’. It is, rather, an embrace.
Crossdressers can trigger deeply held fears. Are we sexually confused or intentionally deviant, and attempting to engage others in our aberrant world? A sympathetic onlooker might assume we are gay but don’t know it yet. Some might surmise that we are exhibiting a pathology related to faulty upbringing and gender differentiation. Perhaps we can be explained as undisciplined- recklessly returning to issues already litigated and lost in childhood.
Cross-dressing is not a dilution of the status of men or women- it is a clarification of important truths about women and men.
Female crossdressers are common, now- with expanded ranks in police and first responders of all kinds, military grunts, garbage collectors, construction laborers, and astronauts- and sharing full duties with men. It is now common knowledge that manliness is not limited to males.
Society has accepted some liberalization for males by allowing men to be teachers, nurses, secretaries, clothing sales clerks, etc. We abandoned obviously outmoded ideas about what work was appropriately designated for women. But we hang on to insisting that boys and men cannot dress as women do. Why?
It will have to pass. Women’s appearance standards interfere with men’s appreciation for their actual personal diversity and capacity, and women want out. One of the shamanic duties of male crossdressers is unlinking ‘dress-wearing’ from ‘female’ , and this helps women and men alike.
Men’s hold on the social and economic power structures continues to favor men over women. This exclusionary system only makes moral sense if men are specially qualified for cultural dominance, for reasons other than brutality. The shamanic duty of female cross-dressers, of which there are many who don’t think of themselves as cross-dressers anymore, is to demonstrate wordlessly that manliness is easy to perform, and doesn’t require abuse- but that abuse is a temptation to anyone with power. I hope this revelation too will find its way into our training of children, so we are focused on how to manage our power for collective good, rather than how to deny our understanding that what we are being taught is a damaging myth.
