10 years with Crossdreamers!

The Crossdreamers blog was founded 10 years ago this day. Here's to the next 10!

The first post on this blog was posted on August 24 2008.  The first few paragraphs were:

There are a large number of men out there that have secret dreams about how it would be like to be a woman. 

I am not only talking about the visible ones, the cross-dressers and the transsexuals who have become public figures. 

No, I am also talking about what appears to be "ordinary men", with no immediate plans for sex reassignment surgery or hormone treatments, but who nevertheless harbors feelings that many will find strange and hard to understand.

I promised to  "test any scientific, psychological, religious or philosophical theory that might throw light upon the subject, how far fetched they may be," as well as presenting the thoughts and fantasies of those I later came to call crossdreamers.

And so I did.

Confessions

At its birth the blog was called "Confessions of an Autogynephiliac." A leading American transgender activist told me that the name was bad on at least two levels:  The word "confession" implied guilt, and the word "autogynephiliac" implied support to Ray Blanchards invalidating autogynephilia theory. She was right on both counts.

I had from the very start been very critical of Blanchard's theory, but reckoned that since this was the term people like me would use when searching the internet, it made sense to include it in the title.

I soon realized, however, that the term could not be salvaged or "appropriated" by the transgender community. Sure, it was very important to write about such erotic fantasies, as ignoring  them had caused so much suffering among gender variant people, but the term itself referred to Blanchard's unfounded and misleading explanation for the phenomenon, so it had to go.


Broader scope

The scope was later expanded to include female to male crossdreamers (who were completely invisible at the time) and transgender issues in general.

In 2011 Jason and I established the Crossdream Life online community together with other crossdreamer friends. The forum is still alive and thriving.

It was the members of the Crossdream Life forum who gradually came to widen the understanding of the term "crossdreaming" to mean something more than "erotic arousal from imagining oneself as ones target sex". It is now used to cover many types of fantasies and ways of expressing gender variance.

Tipping point

I must admit that back in that distant past, in 2015, I actually believed that there would soon be less need for someone writing about crossdreaming, and fighting the toxic "autogynephilia" theory. Time announced the "transgender tipping point" in 2014, and it certainly looked like the age of transphobia on its last leg, in the same way gay and lesbian had achieved recognition from the 1970s and onwards.

I still believe we are on the right track, socially and culturally. Indeed, I see the current backlash as a symptom of how far we have come as regards a greater tolerance for gender diversity. The fascists and the reactionaries attack transgender people, precisely because we have succeeded. Transgender people have become a symbol for a humane society dominated by diversity, respect and tolerance.

Unfortunately, the unholy alliance of transphobic radical feminists (who are neither radical, nor feminist) and the extreme right has understood that the autogynephilia theory can be an effective weapon in their political struggle.

Ray Blanchard and J. Michael Bailey are helping them, writing for TERF blogs and supporting reactionaries on twitter, and in that way keeping the concept alive for now.

In other words: There is still need for blogs like this one.

The good news is that we now have a large army of knowledgeable gender variant people, who are helping crossdreamers see through the bigotry and prejudices. I suppose this blog, and its associates and friends, have contributed to that victory.

Back in 2015 i published a post on the history of this blog and its community. It gives you the essential info on what this is all about.

Photo by Maksym Azovtsev.