This started as simply posting a link to an article on Facebook and turned into a rant:
What's So Bad About A Boy Who Wants To Wear A Dress?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/magazine/whats-so-bad-about-a-boy-who-wants-to-wear-a-dress.html?pagewanted=all
“No, I don’t want to be a girl,” he said, as he checked himself out in his bedroom mirror and posed, Cosmo-style. “I just want to wear girl stuff.”
“Why do you want to be a boy and not a girl?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I were daft. “Because I want to be who I am!”
...
"My son showed me this is part of core identity, not something people just put on or take off. And it’s not their job to make sure we’re all comfortable.”
My father is a cross-dresser. He is also straight (maybe bi, I dunno, none of his former female partners are aware of any male partners, at any rate). But he is also so ashamed of it and fearful of anyone finding out that he will not even admit to being my father and refuses to let me contact him. He has cut off communication with his crazy religious-nut parents (both my mother & the investigator who located him (both Christian) labeled them as crazy religious-nuts) and the only way they can reach him is by pager, which he then uses to return the call from a payphone and not his phone.
I only know about his cross-dressing because he apparently used to do it even back in high school, and my mother eventually confessed to catching him at it. Then, when I sent out a first-contact letter to everyone with his name in his town's phonebook, his current girlfriend found it stashed away in a desk drawer and choose to respond, where she confirmed that the man I had described was her boyfriend and so was probably my father, that he had never told anyone about having a daughter, and about his crazy religious parents, and about his cross-dressing (which distressed the girlfriend & she didn't know how to deal with it).
It's ironic, since I'm his one relative who would embrace him without regard to his dress preferences. I would neither reject him for it nor put him on a pedestal as some sort of "hero" that he doesn't want to be for wearing women's clothing. Yet I'm the last relative he wants any contact with, and that includes his crazy religious-nut parents who, according to my mother, screamed at him & called him all sorts of ugly names over the mere suspicion that their son might not have been "normal".
As far as I'm concerned, his attire preferences are merely a part of him, and they are always "right" as long as it is what he wants to wear.
Also, I can totally relate. Some people think I am a male when they don't see my physical appearance. Many of my male friends have made comments (some positive, some complaints) about women only to say "oh, but Joreth doesn't count!". And some get confused when I say I identify as "male" because I don't *look* male and even when I wear male clothing, I'm not trying to "pass" - I look like a girl in guy's clothes, and my feminine appearance can often blind people to my "masculine" way of being (thoughts, interests, etc.).
So I really appreciated hearing this perspective - of boys who want to be boys but just wear girl clothes or play with girl toys. I am female-bodied and I intend to stay that way. I am also androphillic in that I am attracted to males. The only reason why I don't identify as female is because of all the other crap that goes along with being "a girl". That stuff doesn't fit. But if I could be "a girl" and still like jeans and guns and trucks and still hate pastels and makeup and doing my hair, then I wouldn't be having this genderqueer identity.
"But girls CAN do all those things!" you say? No, actually, we can't. At least, we can't to the same extent that we can wear frilly dresses and have our nails done and like babies and baking. We might not get burned at the stake for being a witch anymore, but we still have to defend our right to be tomboys. The fact that we have a nickname for it "tomboy" shows it, and the fact that the nickname uses the word "boy" in it furthers my point. And we especially have to defend our right to like both jeans AND frilly dresses.
The fact that women can wear suits but it has to be tailored to be "feminine", that there are tons of books & articles teaching women how to be strong without "losing" their "femininity", and the fact that, when I say I identify as a guy, people point out my ballroom dancing & costuming as contradictory evidence all says that we as a society are still not comfortable with a gender spectrum, with blurring the lines, or with people who step outside of the very narrow gender-dichotomy boxes (which, of course, are not objectively defined anyway - my strict-gender-role parents have a very different definition of what makes a girl than some macho guys I've dated, for example).
"Pink boys", as this article calls them, have it worse, of course, because there are often larger penalties for a boy in a dress than a girl in pants - the women's movement has made some progress, after all. But feminists have not won the sexism wars yet, and the fact that pink boys have it worse is only one more symptom of sexism - that, as the article pointed out, boys being "girls" is going towards the "lesser gender".
Sexism & misogyny hurts everyone. I will identify as a "girl" when being a "girl" doesn't require me to behave in any particular way, like any particular thing, dislike any particular thing, think a particular way, feel a particular way, or be treated a particular way (please don't get me started on chivalry or treating women as "queens").
Or, here's a thought ... how about I just identify as a person and we all treat each other with the same amount of dignity and respect and then tailor the specifics to the individual, not to his or her genitalia or clothing style?