Help! My Husband/Boyfriend is a Crossdresser!

The yin-yang symbol above is the ancient symbol for the interplay of male and female energies.

Notice the white area has a small region of black within it, and the black region has a small white part. Maleness contains a small part of femaleness, and vice versa. That is what allows men and women to relate to each other. To relate, things must be alike. For a man to relate to a woman, he must have a small part of femaleness within him.

Some crossdressers take this female part imagine it to be the entire self. They focus their attention on this part and lose sight of the rest. It's like holding a small object close to your eyes, so that it fills the visual field and appears huge.

The female part of a man is not imaginary. It is really there--it is really female. When a man looks at it, he can easily say, "Oh! Within me is this truly female nature."

No matter how deeply he looks into this well, he cannot see the bottom. So he may falsely conclude, "Since this goes to my core, it must mean I'm really female!" And some do make that inference.

As long as they look at the female, there is nothing to refute that conclusion. The only answer is to widen the perspective--to look also at the male self, which also goes to the core. Because he has been a man all his life, his male side has become familiar--he tends to take if for granted, and forget how important it is.

Since this is one of the keys to crossdressing, perhaps if a wife or girlfriend understands it, that insight will help her constructively cope.

Besides the above, and what is already said in my other essays, I would like to just offer a few other bits of advice.

Be Constructive

Try hard to separate your emotional reactions from your logical ones. Part or what is going on is that he feels unhappy, unfulfilled, or disillusioned with his male life. Those are understandable feelings. Maybe you can help with those. At least you can help by understanding and sympathizing.

If he feels like attending a regular support group, then maybe you shouldn't begrudge him that. Maybe that will be enough for him to express the urge and even "get it out of his system."

Communicate

Communicate. Keep talking to him about it. Be supportive and sympathetic. Don't be afraid to point out his own errors in thinking, but always do so in a constructive way, never in a way that is demeaning, critical, or insulting. Regardless of what he is doing, develop and cultivate an alliance with that higher part him--the part that seeks to do the right thing, and that is alert to self-deception.

Be Spiritual

Crossdressing is often associated with feelings of anxiety, confusion, uncertainty and disappointment. A crossdresser uses crossdressing to try to give his life meaning. He needs some other way to do this.

The only real solution is to become a very spiritual person.

Notice I said "very spiritual" and not just spiritual. It takes much more than just going to church. It means understanding that spirituality and spiritual development is the most important thing in life, and only real solution to life's problems.

Sure, I could tell you there are other solutions, but those are only quick fixes and patch jobs. They might work for a while. But ultimately they just substitute one illusion for another. And if you substitue another illusion for crossdressing, eventually a man will become disillusioned again and may return to crossdressing.

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