Why do some men choose to wear women’s clothing? I can think of three main reasons and one less obvious reason. Only one of these applies to me.
- The young Achilles was dressed as a woman by his mother Thetis in order to prevent him taking part in the Trojan war. He was disguised as a princess at the court of Lycomedes, King of Skyros. His essential maleness betrayed him when Odysseus, disguised as a street trader, offered him a selection of women’s clothes and jewellery together with a spear and a shield. He went for the spear straightaway.
- In The Merry Wives of Windsor – now there’s a play written for a franchise if ever I saw one – Falstaff visits Mistress Ford, but is warned of the impending arrival of her jealous husband (for some reason known only as Ford rather than Mr Ford). Mistress Ford and her friend Mistress Page disguise Falstaff as an old woman to enable him to escape. However, Ford – believing this to the ‘Fat woman of Brentford’, whom he hates – gives Falstaff a beating anyway.
- Charles Edward Stuart, aka the Young Pretender and Bonnie Prince Charlie, led the Jacobite rising to restore the Stuart monarchy. After his final defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, he evaded capture by government forces when he took a boat ‘over the sea to Skye,’ aided by his friend Flora McDonald who disguised him as her maid Betty Burke.
- In the 1959 American comedy film Some Like It Hot, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon see Mafia mobsters commit a crime and escape by disguising themselves as women. Musicians by trade, they join Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopaters, an all-female band travelling by train to Miami. They fall in love with the lead singer, Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe.
I am not one of these either, although I do admire the disguised men with the obvious exception of the lecher Falstaff.
The final category is men who dress as women because they identify as female. This is me. Previously in an undercurrent, now overwhelmingly in an ocean wave that breaks upon the shore in endless repetition. There were times when I would see a beautiful well-dressed woman in the street, and I would want to be like her, or even be her. Or when I saw a woman expertly and quickly touch up her makeup on a train. Or when I saw a young couple in a niche clothing store, and the woman said to the man, Now, what shall I dress you as? On these occasions I experienced a sense of inner melting and dissolving, as I identified with the other so completely.
For me, dressing in women’s clothing is an essential expression of femaleness. If I had been born a woman I could have got away with jeans and a sweatshirt and flats. My accrued female experiences, supported by my body shape, would have seen me through. But I was not so fortunate. I have to emphasise my femaleness in the way I dress. My chosen outlet is black, with heels and pearls. And I have to look as beautiful as I can make myself. This is not to please men (I shudder when I think of that) or to conform to a gender stereotype. It is fundamentally who I am.
I find that if I had to spend a long time in boy mode – for example on an extended weekend on a family trip to a European city, let’s call it Berlin – then my sense of femaleness starts to fade a little and I am in danger of wondering if it was all a dream. But I am now too far gone for that to be a real threat.
Conversely, when I am dressed as Ariane, and particularly when I am out in public, I feel whole, complete, fully human, fully myself. It is so wonderful that words are hard to find.
and katieglover
