The Emotional Journey of a Crossdresser

David was 37 when his wife Eloise discovered he liked to cross-dress. Initially Eloise thought she had discovered the clothes of another woman in the small flat they shared together, only for her anger and suspicion to give way to surprise as David told her about his lifelong interest in wearing clothes traditionally thought of as feminine.

It started, he told her, as curiosity when he was young, intuiting early on that clothes were a part of each person’s identity and for children in the late eighties/early nineties also a part of gender identity. 

“I never felt the desire to be female”, he tells me, “I’ve always known I was a heterosexual cis gender male. But dress has never clicked for me in that way, that some outfits, some items of clothing are off limits. That didn’t make sense to me.”

When I asked about how that manifested he told me about being a young boy of maybe five or six years old at a friend’s house seeing a discarded top on the floor and trying it on. Finding that it fit “and made me feel more expressive” he was almost immediately reprimanded by the first adult to see him wearing a sequinned top not marketed for wear by little boys. 

There was anger, confusion, imprinted feelings of shame in the hours that followed and what had started as a few minutes of self-expression, quickly became decades of shame and concealment.

So how did Eloise feel when she discovered a husband who at once insisted that his crossdressing was about nothing more than a desire to reflect his inner self externally, but had never shared this part of himself with her, the person he was closest to. 

“It was very difficult. While some part of me knew David was being honest, another part of me felt betrayed, distrusted. I’ve never felt closer to someone, I love him so much, but to find out that there had been this hidden part of him all along was hard.”

David and Eloise went through months of counseling together, not only to ensure their relationship survived but also to alleviate David’s repressed feelings of shame, guilt and despair. Slowly allowing the feelings forced on him to diminish and allow his true sense of himself to take center stage.

David continues to purchase clothes he likes online, without concern for the categorisation of men or women, and has found in Eloise someone he can talk to about it in a normal way, not as a burdensome confession.

Today, the couple are happy. When I visit them for the last of our interview sessions Eloise tells me “I thought the aim would be to get our relationship back to where it was, but that’s not realistic. This is a change to how we live our lives. We’re taking our relationship somewhere new, incorporating who we both are, who we both want to be, into our journey together”.

As I leave their flat that day they radiate happiness and confidence not, I realise, because they have a shared secret,  but because they have a shared truth.

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