According to my recollection, the first negative word ever hurled at me was “sissy.”
“Sissy,” according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, is “a boy or man regarded as effeminate.”
To illuminate that definition, the dictionary defines “effeminate” as “having qualities or characteristics more often associated with women than men; characterized by weakness and excessive refinement.”
Yes – that’s me. The dictionary could print an image of me next to the printed words to illustrate the definition.
The thing is that the first time I was called a sissy, I had no idea that I was one. All I knew was that I was “me” and I was not intentionally emulating females. I did not go out of my way to be a sissy, rather I was just acting naturally. My personality directed me to do things a certain way. The problem was that that way often did not meet the expectations of how a “man” would do things.
When I realized that something was amiss (yeah, me), I began forcing myself to do things the way a “man” does things in order to be accepted in society and not be shunned for being effeminate.
Often, I felt uncomfortable when I forced myself to be a “man.” As time passed, I learned that being accepted in society as a “man” was not worth the effort. So as I grew older and wiser, I forced myself less often and let my personality act naturally more often.
I also began crossdressing more publicly at that time in my life* and my open crossdressing went hand-in-hand with my decision to stop forcing myself to act like a “man.”
I enjoyed dressing as a woman and my normal personality did not conflict with the way I dressed, i.e., I was not a “man in a dress.” Again, this is not an assumption on my part; I have been told more than once that when I crossdress, my personality is a natural fit for the way I am dressed.
I realized that the natural way for me was often the the feminine way, but so what? Why was I forcing myself to be something that I was not? So, I stopped acting like a “man” and instead, acted like “me,” picking and choosing what I liked from the masculine and feminine aisles in that big department store called “Life.”
But the name-calling continued. But I eventually ignored the taunting, learned to embrace my self, and became my own man or should I say “woman.”
Actually, I am somewhere in between. Circumstances prevent me from being a woman all the time. Some of the time, I am a feminine man and some of the time, I am a feminine woman, so you can call me “sissy” – it’s a good fit.
* FYI, I began crossdressing regularly in my early teens, but I had a keen interest in crossdressing much earlier and probably crossdressed for the first time when I was about 8 years old. I crossdressed in public (Halloween) for the first time in my late teens and I crossdressed in public (not Halloween) for the first time in my mid-30s.
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| Wearing JustFab dress and boots |
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Vo Tan Phat femulated Blackpink on Vietnamese television's Guong Mat Than Quen.
You can view this femulation on YouTube.
And thank you again, Cheryl, for finding it. |
