Community Profile

This community is for all transpeople who are not interested in permanent body modification regardless of whether they identify as transvestites, drag monarchs, cross-dressers, transgendered, or any number of other identity labels.

While I try to practice non-exclusionary attitudes, I do feel that there are many communites, groups, online clubs that already cater to transvestites who like to express themselves in ways that may not necessarily be agreeable to everyone else. So I simply ask that you exercise a bit of restraint and gracious consideration when posting.

I also like to take this opportunity to welcome any f-t-m transvestites, as I feel they are even more invisible in the community than the mtf transvestite. There are many genderqueer and bois groups that I'm sure they feel welcomed in, but let this be another additional place for them. Though there are people who feel the asymmetrical connotations of moving from female-to-male hold less taboo - and thereby meets less resistance - in our society, I think there's a different set of problems that arises as well. Feel free to share that with us!

And of course, share your happiness and successes with us as well. Because every success story opens many new doors to possibilities.

(PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU JUST WANT TO POST PICTURES OF YOURSELF, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO JOIN AND POST IN ANOTHER LJ COMMUNITY I HAVE SET UP: transvestites. DO READ THE INFO PAGE FIRST TO SEE HOW YOU CAN GET THE MOST FROM IT.)

(A little about me: I was put in charge of this community in June 2005. I have been dressing since seven. It's been doing it for a while. I am out, involved in real-time trans and gay communities. Not excessively political but understand the issues. My website is at The Solitary Arc where mtf transvestism is inspected.)

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The following are bits and pieces from the original moderator queerbychoice's transvestism info page:

Why This Community Exists
When I was in college, I became fascinated by transpeople and started hanging out with them online and asking questions about how to pass, making plans about how after I moved out of my parents' house and had a little privacy, I wanted to live as a male half the time and a female the other half. But all of the trans communities I found online were overwhelmingly dominated by transsexuals, not cross-dressers or drag monarchs, and certainly not FTM cross-dressers or drag kings, and when I asked questions about how to pass, I was told over and over again, "The first thing you definitely have to do is get on T." From there, the conversations over and over again proceeded like this:

—"But I don't want to get on T."
—"Well, you'll never achieve anything believeable unless you use T. It's not hard to get, you can get on it quicker than you think."
—"But I don't want anything to do with T! I'm only interested in easily reversible effects! Come on, I just want some easy passing tips for changing my voice and such."
—"Then you'll have to take T. It'll make your voice just perfect in no time at all. What's wrong with you, why wouldn't you want to take T? It's obviously exactly what you need. All you have to do is get over this silly hangup about not wanting to take the very thing which is exactly what you need."

After a few too many of these conversations with people trying to tempt me into the use of T as a magical solution to all my problems, even when I knew it was a far more permanent body-alteration than I wanted to go for, I became so afraid that all this pressure to take T might eventually tempt me into doing something I'd later regret that I started to distance myself from the trans communities in order to avoid the pressure—besides which, I was getting absolutely no new useful passing tips that would work for me anyway, so there wasn't a lot of value for me in continuing to wait around hoping for some.

In mixed "transgender" communities, and especially in FTM ones, transsexuals will always outnumber transvestites and so those of us who don't want to resort to irreversible body alteration don't tend to have as easy a time getting our issues heard or understood or addressed. I've created this transvestism community to be different: a place where those of us who are interested only in temporary, reversible methods of genderswitching, genderbending, and genderbreaking (regardless of gender identity or whether we intend to change genders full time or just once or twice) can have a community of our own all to ourselves.

There's also a related community called crossdressing that you may be interested in as well.

Recommended links:

• Gaining a Daughter: A Father's Transgendered Tale by Lennard J. Davis
• 'Female Camp'? Drag and the Politics of Parody and 'Queer' Performance by Vicki Cooper
• Transvestism Through the Ages Has Served Cross Purposes by Barry Paris
• Review of The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe by Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol reviewed by William A. Henkin

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