Ever since I first realised that I was different to the rest of my peer group (or at least I assumed that no one else was in the habit of sneaking into their mother’s bedroom to try on her clothes), guilt has been a more or less constant feature in my life.
I felt guilty about ‘borrowing’ my mother’s clothes. I felt guilty that doing so had such a powerful sexual reaction. I felt guilty about hiding this side of my past from Mrs A for so long. I felt guilty about CDing behind her back. I felt guilty that in a single short confessional sentence – I’ve been bad, I’ve been crossdressing – I blew up her life. I felt guilty that even though I’d given my solemn promise to stop, I could not shake off the urges. I felt guilty that I resumed CDing in secret despite promising to stop. I felt guilty that my feminine activities were mushrooming out of control. I felt guilty that I neglected management of our business, so preoccupied was I with becoming ‘her’. I felt guilty indulging the inner woman with new outfits while Mrs A was making economies with her clothing purchases.
And I feel guilty every time I think about ‘Amanda’ because I know she runs far deeper within me than Mrs A could ever contemplate or want to contemplate.
I guess you could say that guilt goes with the territory here. That certainly seems to be the case as far as I am concerned. And I suspect that I’m far from alone in having these feelings. Naturally, there are any number of people only to happy to give well-rehearsed reassurance: ‘you’ve nothing to feel guilty about, they’re only clothes’, ‘all marriages have secrets’, ‘you should never feel guilty about expressing your true self’, ‘you can’t help being this way so why feel guilt?’, ‘better to keep it from her than blow up your marriage’ and so on.
We shouldn’t really be surprised at this. After all, these and many more like them are ever present in our own minds as we try to justify what we do to ourselves. And is anyone ever going to dare to write ‘and so you should feel guilty, you’re a despicable human being for doing all of this behind your wife’s back. If it’s so harmless, why not just tell her?’?
Now, the point of this post is not to debate the rights and wrongs of covert CDing within a marriage but, rather, to assert that guilt is a completely natural emotional reaction to what we do and, furthermore, is a good thing. I’ve already listed a number of reasons for my own guilt over the years and, believe me, that wasn’t an exhaustive list. The question is whether that guilt was justified.
Let’s look at my early forays into the world of CDing first of all. I honestly don’t know why I experienced those early uncontrollable urges to wear women’s clothing. My parents were both very conservative in outlook, my mother made her disapproval of men wearing women’s clothing very clear and I never played dress up with a female friend & realised that wearing a princess dress felt far better than being the prince. Of course, like every one of us, I can assert that a particular incident or trait was an early indication of what was to come but the truth is that I can think of many times that number of occurrences which emphatically disproved it. I’m almost certain that my mother was prescribed DES while pregnant with me but the linkage between DES and transgenderism remains unproven. Is it in my DNA? Who knows? Was it having girls as friends when I was young but then being separated from them in an all-boys school from age 10 onwards? Perhaps. Or maybe it was just curiosity as puberty arrived that lit the fuse with the rather pleasant reaction that followed when I succumbed that cementing the deal, so to speak.
Whatever it was, I think it’s fairly obvious that I couldn’t help it. But did that then give me the right to indulge my nascent feminine side by trying on my mother’s clothes when the house was empty? It’s very easy to concoct an excuse (as CDers we all get very good at concocting excuses for what we do!) – a parent should always want their child to be happy for example – but there’s a simple question to ask ourselves here; if I had gone to my mother and stated that I wanted her blessing to dress in her clothes whenever I wanted to, what would the answer have been? Let’s just say that I don’t think it would have been a ‘slam dunk’!
I’m not a religious person but what I do know is that you don’t have to get too far into The Bible before Adam & Eve develop a taste for the forbidden fruit and it doesn’t end well! And despite my own (lack of) religious beliefs, I was brought up with a strong sense of morality so it’s hardly surprising that the guilt of borrowing what was not mine without asking first plagued me.
More problematic, though, was the reaction I experienced whenever I indulged. Trying on tights for the first time, it was almost immediate but as time went on, things fortunately took longer to reach a climax. And the feeling of crashing down to earth immediately afterwards not only magnified the guilt of being where I shouldn’t be, I then had to add the guilt of being a deviant into the mix. Whilst there was nothing illegal in what I was doing, the feelings of guilt and disgust were often overwhelming, at least until the next time the urges struck and the whole cycle started over once more.
And then we get to marriage, a true melting pot for my guilt if ever there was one. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and, of course, I should have told Mrs A at the outset that I was fascinated by those who crossed the gender divide and had experimented with it myself in my younger days. But that, I reassured myself, was all in the past and now that I was in love, I was over it. In fact, that’s one of the few things in my feminine life that I’ve not felt guilty about; marriage is about making a life choice for the future and we all have things in our past that are better left behind. I don’t want to know every detail about Mrs A’s activities before we met and she can withhold whatever information she wants with my absolute blessing.
But that said, my respite was short lived. Whether it was a programme on the TV or a newspaper article covering transgenderism I don’t recall but I soon realised two things. The first was that the fascination with the whole idea remained and the second was that the urges to join the party were starting to creep back. I was ‘clean’ for 18 years of marriage before things became overwhelming and I was able to take advantage of periodic working from home to rekindle my feminine side. That was back in 2009 and the ensuing years have been covered in my now extensive back catalogue of posts here so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice to say that I’ve come a long way since then and whilst Mrs A has given her blessing for DADT, I’m almost certain that she has no idea about the extent of my stash, my Kandi’s Land writings or my excursions into the outside world. But even if she did know and gave her blessing, I know that I would still feel guilty about putting her in the position of having to compromise her own beliefs for the sake of the marriage.
Are my persistent feelings of guilt understandable? I would say yes with certainty. Are they rational? That’s probably more debateable but I do sometimes think that I have allowed my feminine side to evolve to the point where it’s not dissimilar to having an affair. I’d certainly want to date Amanda if things were different and I do spend money on indulging her with outfits I like to see her wearing. I’m absent during the times I’m seeing her and I miss her when she’s out of my life for extended periods. The guilt I experience because of that at least underlines that I value my marriage.
And to me, that’s an important point. In the early 1990s, I made vows to Mrs A which I intend to keep ‘for as long as we both shall live’. My marriage isn’t perfect but, there again, no marriage ever is. We’re human beings, we have flaws and often those flaws don’t manifest themselves until long after our commitments are made. Sadly, for too many marriages, those flaws become dealbreakers and I will be eternally thankful that my flaws were not. But what’s particularly important here is the inequality between the compromises that Mrs A had to make and mine. My compromise is only that I have to restrict my feminine activities. Mrs A has had to put all of her own prejudices to one side and accept that something she hates the idea of will go on behind her back. She has had to overcome the feeling that she was deceived for nearly two decades of marriage and understand that her husband needs to cross the gender divide from time to time. She has felt disgust, grief, anger, betrayal and many other negative emotions while I have experienced euphoric happiness. So is it really surprising that I continue to feel guilt about all of this?
In the end, it’s the guilt that keeps my feet on the ground. It reminds me where my priorities really lie. It stops me making rash decisions that could blow up my life. And, to use a metaphor, it reminds me how lucky I am to be able to both have my cake and eat it.
Life is full of ‘what ifs’ and I’m sure that most of us have, at one time or another, wondered how we’d live our lives if we’d realised the extent of our feminine lives sooner or if we lived in a parallel universe where we were free to live however we wanted to. I certainly often have those thoughts, particularly when I compare the euphoric bliss I experience when I can spread my feminine wings against the challenges of my ‘normal’ life at other times. It’s all too easy to chase those highs but I’m well aware that I’m walking on the tightrope of Mrs A’s tolerance; one slip and I’ll come crashing down. And every pang of guilt I feel reminds me that I have far more to lose than to gain from all of this.
As far as the guilt I experienced regarding dressing in my mother’s clothes is concerned, I’m well over it. Maybe she realised and understood, maybe she was oblivious, but she’s long gone and the chapter is closed. And the guilt from the belief that I was a deviant? Again, I was well over it as I soon realised that it was neither the primary driver for my need to cross over to the other side nor, in time, a consequence of it. But as for the guilt I now experience, I embrace it and am thankful it’s ever present. Because more than anything, it reminds me to be thankful for, and fiercely protect, what life has given me. I’ve already seen the catastrophic consequences of bad decisions concerning this side of my life and am now truly thankful for that little voice in my head that constantly reminds me not to make the same mistakes again.
