My Husband Betty: Love, Sex, and Life with a Crossdresser

I'm giving this four stars rather than three, because Boyd (her nom de plume) really does think her way through crossdressing unlike any other author on the subject. The only one who comes close is Julia Serano, whose first book is really not about the same subject, despite having one excellent chapter on crossdressers.

The long answer to why I give it four stars: Boyd 'gets' that MtF crossdressers are transgendered, but also that they're not transsexuals or fetishists (for the most part).

I'm giving this four stars rather than three, because Boyd (her nom de plume) really does think her way through crossdressing unlike any other author on the subject. The only one who comes close is Julia Serano, whose first book is really not about the same subject, despite having one excellent chapter on crossdressers.

The long answer to why I give it four stars: Boyd 'gets' that MtF crossdressers are transgendered, but also that they're not transsexuals or fetishists (for the most part). Crossdressers tend to experience gender dysphoria at a lower pitch, let's say, than most transsexuals. This difference would seem like something to celebrate, since it represents relatively less suffering. The only problem is that there's really nothing to ~do~ about it for crossdressers; "presenting as female" for the sake of congruity with one's gender i.d. is nowhere near accepted for a male-bodied person who claims, in fact, to ~be~ male. This, I believe, is why crossdressers are often so closeted, miserable, and lacking in self-confidence.

That brings me to my next point. This one explains why I hesitated to give the book four stars. Boyd goes all out to provide comprehensive factual reporting on crossdressers, and even offers some highly compelling theoretical speculations on the causal history of crossdressing. Her account of masculinity, when she describes the male person a crossdresser is, does not get to the core of the problem. Boyd presents herself as a somewhat masculine woman, compared to her more feminine husband, at least. So why doesn't she watch football and shout at the t.v. and make lewd jokes about women? That's what she seems to take as the essence of a crossdressing man's masculinity. Masculinity is plural. And I think that for some CDs, it's arbitrary to call it the core of their personality, just because they are male.

I finished this book thinking "My masculinity, such as it is, resembles Helen's more than Betty's! And I'm not sure that I have the same attraction to traditional femininity as Betty does." In other words, there are indeed male tomboys, whose masculinity is different than that of most male-bodied people. Maybe it's because I've socialized mostly with women; women socialized me, in other words. I have a hunch that many self-identified crossdressers piss off women and especially feminists because as men, they are more likely to have been socialized by men in their adolescence. *Whether their everyday masculine persona is their core personality or not, it can't 'play nice' with their femininity because the two have not grown to meet each other half-way, so to speak.* This is ~not~ to say that gender dysphoric people just have imbalances between masculinity and femininity. We are not all the same, and we ought not to be androgynous clones. Having identified as one for a long time, I just can't help but think that crossdressers' suffering is exacerbated by keeping their gender i.d. within two relatively autonomous "departments." I'll end by throwing out the wild idea (possibly offensive) that this departmentalization of gender may lead to problems in one's personal life similar to the problems that bureaucracy creates in, say, a state. Another angle on it: I'll wager that crossdressing is an ~insight~ had only by some, into a form of alienation of a human being from what is constructed as his "femininity," brought about by the process of socialization in an advanced industrial, bureaucratic, and patriarchal society.