Advantages of Having a Crossdressing Husband:

None, as far as I can tell.
Someone posted this ‘wish list‘ (or this one, or this one) of the good things about having a CD for a husband, and I mentioned how it was this kind of article that bothered me so much way back when. Ironic or not, I was about 300% more positive about having a CD for a husband than most of the women I met online too.
But this list, I suspect, was written by a CD, not a wife, or maybe it was written by a very cheerlead-y wife in an optimistic mood. (If anyone has any info on the actual origin/writer of this piece, I’d love to hear it.)
While I think it’s an advantage to have a considerate, gentle, domesticated husband, conflating one with the other is a mistake. I know considerate, gentle, domesticated men who are husbands who are not CDs. I have met CDs who are insensitive, beer-cracking, remote-stealing boors. And while I know that many CDs feel that their desire to be feminine makes them – well, more feminine – I’m not sure that CDing has anything whatsoever with how nice a man is, or how nurturing he is.
What I think CDing *can* do for a man is bring along the kind of crisis that forces a man to dig deeper into himself, to think hard about difficult issues of identity, and to think about who he wants to be, and how. Likewise, for a couple, that same kind of crisis can open new pathways: to conversation, to the meaning of trust, and to a reconsideration of expected gender roles and even sexuality.
But it doesn’t do any of those things automatically, by any stretch. It requires a great deal of integrity, responsibility and sheer nerve to face this stuff and deal with it in a way that isn’t destructive to self or family. And someone capable of that is not a “good man” nor a “good CD” but really just a good partner, spouse, parent, or child.

So You Think You Can… Queer Gender?

Tonight Betty & I saw about 10 minutes of that new So You Think You Can Dance? show, and what I saw made me ill. I like dancing, and I love watching dance.
The problem was this: one contestant is a 6′ tall woman, graceful and strong, who got on the show doing Irish dancing. During the elimination rounds, from what I can figure, different groups of dancers are put with different choreographers, blah blah blah. This tall woman wound up with a Latin dance choreographer, and at some point he picks up a tiny woman (she was maybe 96 lbs, if that) and kind of had her twist around him, like a snake, or a vine, from about his shoulder to the floor.
The tall woman knew she couldn’t do that with any man in the room; she was taller than all of them. Interestingly, the choreographer was significantly shorter than her, and shorter than the other men in the room.
But not being willing to give up, she tried the move with him, and about halfway through the twist, they both fell over, because he couldn’t support her 6′ tall frame.
She got upset (you know how weepy these reality TV shows are) and his response was to play a joke on her, by showing the “final move” for the dance number, where he literally threw this tiny 96 lb. woman all over the place – over his head, off to one side, through his legs, upside-down – and the tall dancer just left in disgust, knowing she’d lose because she couldn’t be tossed around like that. Ha ha, what a funny joke, to make a tall beautiful woman feel like a horse. I wanted to smack him for her.
Anyway, I just sat there feeling like Buster Keaton on the set of a Marx Brothers movie* thinking, “But there’s such an easy solution to this problem – let her toss around the smallest guy there, or the 96 lb. woman the guy was using!”
But alas, primetime is not ready for such radical gender inversion, not yet.

* During the 1930s, the late, great Buster Keaton often worked at MGM working out gags for other comedians .

Five Questions With… Alice Novic

alice novic, richard novicAlice (Richard) Novic is the author of Girl Talk magazine’s “Go Ask Alice” column and also the author of the newly-published Alice in Genderland, a modern (readable!) memoir by a crossdresser. Dr. Richard Novic, Alice’s male self, is a psychiatrist who lives with his wife in the LA area, and his femme self, Alice, has a steady boyfriend.
1) How did being a psychiatrist aid/hinder your self-acceptance?
Well, Helen, I’d have to say it’s good to be a crossdresser and a psychiatrist. As I trained in psychiatry, I came across more people and ideas than I ever would have encountered on my own. That perspective gave me the confidence to shrug off all the conventional negativity about crossdressing, and instead see it as an exuberant and healthy part of human diversity.
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