Inspiration

Where, in the late 1970s, would you get the idea of cross-dressing from, anyway? Dick Emery, perhaps:

Or there was an orgy scene in I Claudius, where the bra of the fleeing coquette is seen to be stuffed.

Where did I get the idea of cross-dressing from? I just wanted to, so I did. Arousal, compulsion, shame followed almost immediately-  not in my memory of the first time I did it, but ever thereafter. I knew no-one must know I did this awful thing, but then people keep sexual matters private. The people I saw in women’s clothes were women.

Here’s Johan Zoffany, The Last Supper.

Zoffany, like most artists, used real people as models for his Last Supper. St John, leaning on Jesus’ left shoulder, is WC Blackwell, police sergeant of Calcutta, a cross-dresser who would round up criminals while dressed as a woman. Very fetching she looks, too. At different times, there are different levels of acceptance, and sometimes we can be brazen. You hear about other people who do it: I read two articles in the Mensa magazine by Christine-Jane Wilson, and got in touch. Her magazine published my poem, but we never met. But we do it spontaneously, before we get the idea from others.

Rachel the Trans Philosopher wondered how she knows she is trans. She does not have direct knowledge that she is female, contrary to The Script, “I knew I was a girl from the age of five”. She infers she is trans from her desire to transition and her delight in proceeding with it. Either it’s circular: I have the desires, therefore I am trans, therefore the desires are right for me; or it is “I can do what I like”: I need no excuse to follow these desires. I judge them harmless.

I don’t think I would have transitioned without the example of other people.

I read of a man executed by drowning in the Nor’ Loch, where Princes St Gardens are now, for bestiality. It was done at 4am, because he told his trial that he got the idea from a previous execution. It has never appealed to me, but I condemn it less than others might because of my own inexplicable desires.

Explanations tend to be descriptions- I express female because I want to, with no justification for the desire, because it needs none; or rationalisations- I am in some way a woman, which sounds good until someone asks what that could mean. We may tell ourselves stories about it because they are the stories we have heard, or we make up our own, but we start cross-dressing spontaneously, because that is what we want to do.