Finding Yourself Through the Crossdreamer Community

Last year I contributed a chapter on the crossdreamer community to a book on trans people and the internet. The book project was ultimately cancelled, so I have decided to publish the paper here instead.

Crossdreamer liberation is about self-acceptance
Illustration: Molay/andresrimaging/Risto Viitanen

Gender variance is breaking cultural and social taboos. This is the major reason being trans and gender variant can be so difficult. By breaking taboos, you risk losing your friends, your family, and the respect of your community.  

There is another group of taboos that are just as strong, the ones associated with sexuality. Communities world wide police desire, forcing people into very narrow boxes of normalcy. 

Crossdreamers exist where the violations of the norms of gender and sexuality intersect. Crossdreamers are men and women who not only dream about being a sex different from the one assigned to them at birth, but who have erotic fantasies about this.

This is the story about how crossdreamers started organizing online communities to explore their identities and sexualities. This is not going to be an “objective” and “disinterested” article. I have played an active part in building this community. Nor do I claim to represent all crossdreamers.  

Note that I use the term transgender as a broad umbrella term for all gender variance. According to this definition all crossdreamers are transgender, even if they are not all suffering from gender dysphoria, and even if only a minority of them are transsexual.

Psychological repression

Some transgender people become what I have called “splitters”, people who manage to divide their psyche in two, leaving one part for the inner sex and one for the outer. I have been aware of my female side since I was nine years old, but I managed to keep this side of me separate from my conscious gender identity as I grew up. I thought of myself as male, even if I considered myself a “failed” one.

Resources for Partners of Transgender People

Crossdreamer and transgender resource directory

Home | Articles | Resource sites | AGP Debate | Books | Science | Forums | Blogroll | For Partners |  Dictionary | Essential posts

When I found out my husband is a woman inside, I started googling. I wanted to find information for people who have a transgender spouse, forums with support for partners of transgender people and stories of couples that had found a way to make it work. Here is what I have found.

When the one you love is trans. Image by Kannaa.

By Sally Molay

Blogs

• She Was the Man of My Dreams (About the male-to-female transgender experience from a spouse’s perspective.)
• enGender/My Husband Betty (Helen Boyd's journal of gender & trans issues.) 
• Accidentally Gay (By a man in a same sex marriage after his wife transitioned to man.)

Forums

• TransFamily 
• Spouses of Transgender Community Group
• Engender_Family
• The My Husband Betty Forum
• Spouses of Transgender
• Mypartneristrans (on Reddit)
• Soffa Trans (on Facebook)

Fixing up The Crossdreamer Portal

I have spent some time cleaning up The Crossdreamer Portal, our guide to sites and forums of interest to crossdreamers and crossdressers in particular and other trans and queer people in general.

Here's what has been done:

• Implemented new visual profile, with a design more similar to Crossdreamers.com. (Text on white background is generally easier to read.)
• Moved blog extracts over to the right hand column for easier access and less clutter.
• Reduced the number of direct feeds from crossdreamer blogs. Blogs who have not been updated since 2013 have been moved into a "other" list at the bottom of the left column.
• Reduced the number of links from the crossdreamer forums (Crossdream Life and the crossdreaming reddit). The previous list was a bit too overwhelming.

If there are sites you think are missing and should be included, please let me know. Add a comment to this blog post.

Visit The Crossdreamer Portal now!

Must Read Transgender and Crossdreamer Reflections by Felix Conrad

If you have not done so already, you should go over at the Transcend Movement site and read some of the transgender and queer philosophy of Felix Conrad.

The Transcend Movement has a beach club feel to it.
This will all be explained later on.
(Illustration by alexaldo)

During the last couple of months Felix has written several very interesting blog posts on crossdreaming, crossdressing, trans and queer over at his Transcend Movement site.

We are on the same page, Felix and I, but he has his own, unique take on crossdreaming, and there are definitely places where we look at things  differently. This is exactly as it should be.

I should add that Felix has his own way of presenting his arguments -- provocative, with lots of irony, and a refreshing disrespect for political correctness. Don't let that stop you! There is gold here!

Here are some of the blog posts you may want to take a look at:

"Why Caitlyn Jenner is a bad role model for (some) crossdreamers"
Felix argues that whatever a rich American celebrity does transgender wise is of little relevance to most MTF crossdreamers.

"The cause of autogynephilia: erotic target location errors"
Felix is kinder to Ray Blanchard than I am, but read this intelligent critique of the "erotic target location error" part of the autogynephilia theory.  (And if none of these words and names mean anything to you, read the blogpost anyway! He is revealing the logical errors of traditionalist science here.)