Written by Steve:

I’ve read through the contents of this website and it’s been extremely encouraging and informative. I very much identify with the recommendation of Buckners article on The Transvestite Career Path which was highly informative and rang so many bells in my development as a CD.  I became a Christian at age thirty-five and am now in my early sixties.  I love the Lord and am committed at church and heavily involved.  I am married with adult children and my wife knows about my CD, albeit that she did not know the extent of my problems until recently.  We both suffered rotten childhoods, her with an abusive alcoholic stepfather and me with a volatile and unstable mother.

Recently, my sister told my nephew (who is in his mid-thirties) that my mother had CD me as a baby and toddler.  He brought it up when I met him and scoffed at me.  I obviously do not recall this but I do recall my older sister CD me as a three-and four-year-old.  My mother encouraged this and whooped with delight whenever I was CD and several photos exist in the family photos of me CD as a young boy.

My father would always take a photo of me CD and he seemed as delighted as my mother whenever this happened, laughing and joining in the delight.  To be honest I loved being CD by my sister.  When I was, everything changed.  I was the delight of my parents; I was dressed in pretty dresses and I felt loved.  The last time I was CD by my sister I was ten years old.  She did full make up on me, put me in a blue dress with a sash and I had my photo taken in the back garden by my father.  My mother was ecstatic.  All through my childhood my mother and father would tell me I looked like a girl and I distinctly recall them saying on separate occasions that I should have been born as a girl.  At school, when I was thirteen, a teacher arranged a series of sponsored events such as sponsored walks etc to raise money for school improvements.  One of these events was a womanless beauty pageant where the boys dressed as girls and were judged on beauty and femininity.  I dared not enter knowing full well that I would have got an erection that would have shown had I joined in and tried on a dress.  I remember my father grinning broadly at the dinner table when I mentioned the pageant saying that I should enter because I was the prettiest and would easily win.

The reasons behind my father’s actions have nothing to do with his macho nature and trying to toughen me up, as someone suggested.   My mother totally dominated him and wore the trousers in their relationship.  Throughout my childhood and adolescence, we as a family, were in thrall to her temper tantrums, my father too.   Some of the comments she made about him in our presence were very damaging too, such as describing him as a failure.  I suspect that the reasons behind his feminising comments to me were to do with off-setting his own inadequacies in his male role and the failures in his life and placing them onto me.   He was an RAF electrician and tried to get promotion to officer but failed miserably.  I recall seeing his fragile confidence collapse in front of my eyes as an eleven-year-old.  If you have time to look at the concept of Vulnerable Narcissism (as opposed to Grandiose Narcissism) then you will see his character writ large in front of you.   He seemed determined to make my sister, my brother and I fail at school, openly telling us that we were not intelligent enough to go to university.  We all left school with minimal basic qualifications and I think that subconsciously he made us fail in order to justify his own lack of academic and career success.

The relationship between my parents can be summed up in the image of him as a benign older sheep dog and my mother as a small terrier constantly yapping at him and nipping his ankles.  He was a very poor male role model.  The comments they both seemed to enjoy making were very disturbing for me as a boy trying to grow into a heterosexual male and form my identity and I blame them both for my CD behaviour and my struggles through life. The motivation from my mother appeared to be revenge against men (her father had been a violent alcoholic) and, perhaps, a desire to have a second daughter. She was an extremely frightening woman with a ferocious temper who once made me pass out aged eleven when she rushed at me and shouted in my face.  I was unconscious for around eight minutes or so and came to, with my parents sitting over me while I recovered on the sofa. They at least had the decency to look genuinely panicked.  Her default position in all circumstances was temper tantrums, extreme anger and shouting.

My CD career path started in earnest in secret when I was eleven and twelve and I wore my sister’s dresses and my mother’s underwear and this progressed to me wearing her pantyhose, panties, bras, petticoats and my sisters long evening gown.  This was the culmination of constantly being told in a drip of comments that I should have been female and being CD and photographed.  When I came home from playing cricket one day there was no one in the house and I recall trying on my mother’s lilac nightdress and giggling in my bed before replacing it in her bedroom.  My parents were not the only one’s who contributed to my CD persona though.

My grandmother once alluded to me being a girl and my uncle did too.   When each of us children were born my father would send a telegram to his parents and my mother’s parents telling them of our births.  The telegrams (this was the 1960s before widespread availability of phones of course) would say something to the effect:

Catherine (my older sister) born …(date)..(weighing)…mother and baby doing well.
David (my older brother) born … (date) …(weighing) mother and baby doing well.
Stephen (me) (born) … (weighing) …mother and baby doing well.

In my case my Uncle Royston doctored the telegram when it arrived and added an ‘ie’ to the end of my name rendering me Stephanie in the eyes of my other uncles and aunts and my grandmother for several hours before he told them the truth.  This stood as a family joke for years after (my mother told me it with undisguised glee once) and I remember him telling me when we were visiting my grandmother one time, when I was a child – smirking at me and my discomfort that he had tricked everyone into thinking I was Stephanie for a few hours.  I suspect that there was some family truth known to them and not to me throughout my childhood; that is that my parents wanted a second girl and not another son.  My older sister was always at loggerheads with my mother.  She has a far stronger character than I do.  My older brother is as quiet and passive as my father.  They are like two peas in a pod and get on more like brothers.  They found each other hilarious during our teens and I was often the butt of their jokes.  Perhaps my mother wanted a more compliant and less confrontational daughter than my sister.  My father had my brother.  I ponder that I, with my compliant personality, was the boy that my mother wanted to meld into a girl who she could chat to without the clash of personalities that she felt with my rebellious sister.

I was not the only sufferer in my house though.  My parent’s behaviour had its effect on my sister too.  The lack of love from our mother and the lack of any affirmation from our father affected her in different ways to me.  She became promiscuous in her teens and would sneak out of our house at the age of fourteen and fifteen to meet boys in the local area in the middle of the night.  She was found out one morning and I was woken to the sound of my mother’s ranting (what was new) at about 2am when my mother had heard voices calling to my sister below her window.  No transgressions of our parent’s rules were ever taken lightly or talked calmly through, every mistake or transgression as children was treated with a ballistic rage of shouting from my mother.  My sister escaped to be a nurse cadet at aged sixteen and eventually married a forceful and decisive man (perhaps looking for a male leader) who dominated her throughout her marriage.  The worst of it is that he was a Muslim from Egypt and she entered with great relish into Islam.  Why would she want to be a Christian after the example my parents set her?

My sister’s Muslim faith contrasted greatly with our childhood because we were all taken to church as kids and my parents were church elders for years and my father played the organ while my mother was church secretary for a decade or more.  Just to blow your minds even further, when my wife and I became Christians, we tried to forge a more open relationship with my parents as we had our Christian faith in common – supposedly.  They had never welcomed inquiries about faith and much preferred to make small talk about church – criticising the vicar’s sermons or the behaviour of other members of the congregation.  For example, I recall my mother returning from church in a serious strop one Sunday lunchtime when I was a teenager.  One of the men serving communion had been wearing a red tie (red signifying blood) and my mother thought this ‘highly disrespectful.’  I never once saw them read the bible, refer to a bible verse or pray, other than in church.  Their faith was an extremely formal and strait jacketed brand of Christianity.   When my wife and I became Christians, I was keen to talk to them and share stories and opinions, just as I could with the people at my church.  My parents were anything but keen and would often simply get up and walk out of the room if faith was mentioned.  They called it ‘talking about religion’ and didn’t welcome it.  Finally, I cornered them in their house during one visit and persisted with questioning them to find out what they believed, refusing to be brushed off.  My wife and I then discovered that neither of my parents believe the bible stories.  Nor do they believe that Jesus is the Son of God.  They believe he was Joseph’s son.  When I said to my father ‘well you’re not a Christian then are you,’ he leapt forward in his seat and nodded earnestly and said that he was a Christian.  He has always had the ability to hold enormously contradictory views in his head and deny they are contradictory.  I curtailed contact with them in the early 2000s and have not really had a relationship with them since, rarely seeing them or interacting.  They are simply to frustrating.  My parents constantly gaslighted us and we were often told that we were a ‘normal’ family as children, and in later life whenever I had any conversations with them and complained about their treatment of us as children, they would simply deny things I brought up had happened.  My father was highly adept at portraying any complaints as unwarranted or he would tell us that we didn’t recall things properly because we were children at the time and children don’t recall things well.

My parents knew I was a CD as a teenager.  They saw me twice when I stayed too long downstairs fully CD and ran up the stairs when they came home from their church choir practice or from shopping.  They said nothing.  I went through the ‘frenzy’ of CD at fifteen when I once sat in our living room with them, wearing my mother’s hairspray and perfume and they sniggered at me but said nothing again.  I honestly believed at the time that they couldn’t smell the scents but in hindsight I must have been in some kind of mania to believe so.  In my marriage, which continues, my CD behaviour existed in reading fiction books when my wife was out – classic CD stories of boys forced to CD by strong women or peculiar circumstances (i.e. being chased by the mob and dressing to avoid capture etc) I threw away the books under the power of the Holy Spirit when convicted about my CD on becoming a Christian.   After a break I reverted to my past behaviour though.  A dog returns to his vomit.  I never used to have my own clothes or wear my wife’s clothes but on several occasions in my life, under the cover of working away from home, I have used CD services provided by women in their own homes.  CD included full make up and wigs and several outfits on these occasions. I justified this to myself by telling myself that it was a compulsion I could not resist and that I was getting older and that I would soon lose sexual desire and stop.  My wife does not know the extent of these CD events and to tell her would damage her impression of me even more.

CD has predominantly been about lust and sexual desire for me rather than self-medication or soothing, stress relief type behaviours.  It’s all been about the sexual excitement of transgressing and seeing myself as a woman and enjoying being with women who will talk to me as a female while doing hair and make-up.  I identify strongly with the personal testimony of the website founder of Healing from Crossdressing.  I had a significant dream in year six when my mother was to bring a fresh white shirt to me for the Christmas Choir.  She was very strict and I knew if I forgot to collect the shirt at the school gate the next day after lunch all hell would break lose, so the night before the Christmas Concert I went to sleep quite stressed and had a highly significant vivid dream.  I dreamt that she arrived at the school gates and instead of giving me a white shirt she put me in a beautiful long white flowing dress.  All the girls from my class chased me in the playground and I and they were laughing.  The dream was extremely exciting for me and I often recalled it in my imagination in later years to make myself happy or to give myself an erection during sex with my wife.  I’ve had several similar dreams as an adult and always experienced great happiness when having the dreams and waking with a strong erection.  I know God loves me.  I admire and love Jesus.  He was the saving of me at age thirty-five and my life has been fundamentally better for his presence.  I know that CD is destructive and wrong, morally and biblically.  Sharing with my wife has been cathartic but painful for her.

My conversion to Christianity came through her.  We were not Christians when we were married in church nor when we had our children Christened.  The vicars who performed these rights did not ask us about faith and took the minimal soundings from us about belief, merely ‘confirming’ with us that we believed in Jesus as our Saviour.  We mumbled agreement but had no beliefs at all.  My wife did though, feel a strong desire to give thanks for the safe birth of our kids.  She was invited to bible study by an evangelical neighbour who gently persisted over several months.  When my wife finally attended the study, she was greatly moved by the kindness of the other women and when she was prayed for at the end she cried.  Months later I suddenly asked what she was getting involved in when she mentioned bible study.  I decided to go to the church one Sunday that my evangelical neighbour attended and so I walked in and sat down knowing no one.  I was nervous but they were friendly and the man preaching actually seemed to believe the bible and spoke authoritatively and knowledgeably from the book.  Once the service was over people spoke to me and welcomed me over coffee.   They were friendly but not pushy.  I plucked up courage a few weeks later and walked into a shop and bought a bible, feeling very embarrassed.  I began to read the bible over several weeks and to my surprise found it interesting, difficult to understand in places (who was this Word, mentioned in John?) and compelling.  I read the bible through the prism of my own job.  I was a police officer and was used to reading statements of crimes witnessed by different people.  As I read each of the gospels, I felt they were like statements that I could piece together and understand as a description by four different people of a crime that had definitely happened.  I was compelled to convert a few months later.  Nothing could prevent me saying the sinner’s prayer.  I had fallen in love with Jesus.  I had found a framework for my life, found a leader, and found a better way to live.

I disposed of my fiction books (as I’ve already said) and lived a different life.  We can fall again though and past behaviours were repeated.  As I have alluded to, I can be triggered into CD thoughts at any time.  My childhood experiences and the sexual imprinting of my family’s behaviour toward me combined with the repetition of CD activities had built powerful paths in my brain.  I am easily triggered even when I am not thinking any CD thoughts.  In Brighton High Street I was walking back to work when my eyes were suddenly attracted to the shop window of Marks & Spencer.  Their display had three beautiful summer dresses and I beamed at them totally without any guardedness or self- consciousness.  I stopped in my tracks and gawped at the dresses.  As I turned from the shop my eyes could not turn away until I suddenly glanced at a young woman walking towards me.  She looked at my expression and saw what I was looking at and completely ‘read’ me.  I was terribly embarrassed and walked quickly off.  As well as the experience in Brighton there have been other similar events; once when collecting my suit from the dry cleaner I was instantly and wholly unexpectedly transfixed by a wedding dress hanging in the shop.  I couldn’t take my eyes off it.  The silk and petticoats set me off and I stood staring at the dress and then suddenly realised that the women behind the counter was smiling at me and looking right into my mind.  She asked me if I liked the dress and I bluffed saying that it reminded me of my wife’s wedding dress but she definitely knew.  The way I was looking she couldn’t have helped not sensing my desire.  Today when reading the newspaper, I turned the page and saw a ballet review of Swan Lake at the London Coliseum.  It was unexpected.  I was not looking for anything but I was instantly triggered by the ballet dancer in her tutu.  Femininity still has a terribly powerful attraction for me but my identity is in Christ.

I have had terrible struggles.  I have had therapy though and in the mid-2000s I found a Christian therapist to confess to.  He was married but had experienced same sex attraction as a young man.  I mentioned in one session that I was so ashamed of being a transvestite and he interjected and told me that first and foremost I was a Christian and belonged to Christ and I was made a heterosexual man by God himself.  The label ‘transvestite’ was from the Enemy.  My counsellor invited me to a men’s day at his church in East London and he gave his testimony of same sex attraction – very brave I thought.  While praying and meditating in a session I had the most vivid and wonderful image of Jesus.  I entered an underground cavern and saw Jesus sitting beneath the rounded roof.  He sat with His disciples along a long wooden table talking to them.  And then He suddenly stopped.  He turned and looked at me and momentarily paused and the disciples looked at me.  Jesus’ face broke into a broad welcoming smile and the disciples took His lead and smiled too and I felt an overwhelming sense of love and acceptance.  Jesus knows me, loves me and confirms me as the man I am.

The things that were said to me as a child had a powerful effect but rather than dwell on my struggles with envy of femininity and jealousy of the supposed easy and wonderful life of pretty women, I try to live in the knowledge of my God given masculinity and the role as a father and husband that He gave me.  I have had a long and largely happy marriage.  We still love each other.   I had a good career for 30 years in which I was successful and in which I was promoted to the top 2% of the police force in London.  I travelled the world on behalf of the police.  None of the success of my career would have been possible without Jesus and I took Him with me wherever I went.  We have two wonderful kids who are teachers and for whom my wife and I worked very hard to give the secure and loving childhoods that we did not have.

My wife and I came to faith around the same time in 1995 and were baptised together and have had very fulfilling lives under Jesus’ loving guidance.   I love my Bible and regard the two best events of my life as meeting my wife when we were twenty-one and becoming a Christian at age thirty-five.  We have held Alpha courses in our home, sung in choirs, given our testimonies at church (not the full awfulness of the whole truth but more of our faith in the Lord), helped others and we still have wonderful relationships with our kids.  Our daughter has two wonderful children we love dearly and our son is to marry a Malaysian girl this year.

Praise God.

Steve
from London