Musings from my everyday life...

It occurred to me the other day that Joanna is known by at least 50 people if not more. Besides my close acquaintances, there are numerous merchants whose businesses I have been a patron of who know me as a middle aged woman and mother to 2 teens. I am still dumbfounded that this is even possible because, not that long ago, I would never have believed that I could ever be taken for a female in such close quarters and face the scrutiny of genetic females. People smile at me when they see me and ask me about my life. They tell me it’s been a while since they’ve seen me and seem more than happy to spend a few minutes chatting. As certain as I am that I will never transition, I still cherish the fact that I have gotten to such a level of comfort with my female persona; so much so that I would now feel comfortable attending a conference, taking a course or even working part time in a store as a woman. N, the woman that I love, wants no part of this which is fine with me. When we first

I have been to a number of these sites in my life. The sites where the repentant crossdresser has found a way to cure his “addiction” and promises to never do it again. We are not always entirely clear about how and why they began and we understand little about their motivation to stop. They usually state in some fashion that they feel they are doing something wrong. When I was in my teens and as far as my mid thirties I had no fear about conquering this “habit” of mine and felt that I could easily control it if I desired and so when I went to these sites I believed them. I knew that I only indulged my impulses a few times a year and then purged all of my things. Along with that purge came the promise to never do it again. But the urge would always return and, with the passing of time, with increasing intensity. I began to be truly concerned in my early forties when I began to understand that this was something I might be permanently saddled with and needed to address. I needed to fi

If gender is mostly about the way we perceive ourselves, then crossdressing is our way of temporarily aligning that mental image with a physical one. This is why most of us feel so comfortable and peaceful while dressed. The desire for a young boy to want to imitate a girl is not understood. All we know is that for most of us, these feelings predate puberty and that they last a lifetime. Here is a famous quote by Harry Benjamin which illustrates that there can appear to be a blurred line between true transvestism and transsexualism: “A sharp differentiation between a fetishistic and a latent transsexual inception of transvestism is not always possible. The fetishistic can gradually develop into the (basically) transsexual variety, as case histories have repeatedly shown me. The former, however, may well contain elements of the latter from the very beginning. Otherwise the initial morbid interest in one or several articles of female wardrobe would hardly have evolved into the desi