Is Crossdressing Going the Way of the Dinosaur?

[Editorial]

Is it only the boomers who crossdress?

Think about it: support groups for crossdressers are mainly seniors. Conferences… seniors. Boomers. Where are the other generations? The alphabet generations?

Well, they are in queer groups. Huh? Yeah, you see, there is a lot less stigma attached to crossdressing, so why do they need their own support groups? They are out there with their own generation.

So, will our support groups turn up inside LTC centers?

Senior Center’s Monday Meetings:

The Knitting Circle

Setback

The Crossdresser Club

Bingo

Photography Club

Is this our fate?

Since I earned my “senior” badge by officially playing Bingo at a senior center, I think I qualify to wonder if we will truly see ourselves in “old folks’ homes”… Or will we just have another closet?

[/Editorial]

What Gets Me Is...

... Is that she persecuted us!

I wrote about not criticized or comment on what the Noems' do in private but rather the unending attacks on the trans community.

In Husband’s Photo Scandal, No One Feels Bad for Kristi Noem

New Yorker - Intellenger

By Margaret Hartmann,\

[...]

So perhaps it’s no surprise that few people are expressing sympathy for Kristi Noem after the Daily Mail revealed that her husband, Bryon Noem, is “a secret crossdresser who dons gigantic fake breasts and pink hotpants to chat with online fetish models”:

[...]

Normally, you’d expect some public condemnation of the person whose secret online kink endangered their spouse’s career and maybe even national security. Especially if said spouse was shocked and “devastated” by this behavior. But incredibly, people actually feel sorry for Bryon Noem. And we’re not just talking about coastal elites who totally reject traditional family values (in the MAGA imagination, at least). The New York Times checked in with the Noems’ neighbors back in South Dakota and found that even in this very red state, no one had an unkind word for Bryon Noem.

I also feel sorry for her husband but not for her!

While governor she passed: Gender-Affirming Healthcare Ban, Transgender Athlete Bans, Bathroom and Legal Restrictions!

Love or hate her, Kristi Noem doesn’t deserve humiliation | Opinion

Regardless of what you think of Kristi Noem’s politics – or the job Trump hired her to do – this shouldn’t take away from a notable career.

Ingrid Jacques

USA TODAY

April 2, 2026

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t care: I feel bad for Kristi Noem. And her husband. 

The recently fired Homeland Security secretary was already having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month. 

Then this Daily Mail headline broke the internet ‒ “Secret double life of Kristi Noem’s cross-dressing husband Bryon: The pouting ‘busty bimbo’ photos and trove of explicit messages”

I would have assumed it was an April Fools’ joke, but it was posted on March 31, and the family has not denied its veracity.

Nope! How many trans children have been hurt and the pain and suffering will last a lifetime... all for votes while they had their fun and games!

In South Dakota, neighbors feel sorry for Kristi Noem’s husband

TribLive

Apr 1, 2026

That couldn’t be him, could it?

The cartoonishly large breasts. The pink spandex. The come-hither stare.

“Must be AI,” a burly cattle rancher named Kevin Ruesink said as he inspected pictures of his neighbor Bryon Noem that had been published by The Daily Mail on Tuesday morning. The rancher farmer was playing pinochle in the back of a convenience store with five other men in the tiny town of Castlewood, South Dakota, not far from the Noem family farm.

These men all knew Bryon Noem as the nice, tall insurance salesperson who married Kristi Arnold, the town beauty queen who grew up to be governor. But now there were these pictures.

[...]

In interviews with locals and friends of the couple before and after The Daily Mail published its pictures, the prevailing sense that emerged was this: People can’t help feeling sorry for Bryon Noem.

His marriage had been the talk of the prairie since long before Tuesday.

Castlewood is part of a larger community with Watertown, a more sizable town about a 15-minute drive north. Many who live in these parts have known the Noems since they were high school sweethearts who got engaged on the Fourth of July in 1991, when Bryon proposed while they watched fireworks from aboard his Grandpa Mitchell’s boat out on Lake Kampeska. A lot of people here say they remember her when she was still Kristi Arnold, working in her mother’s coffee shop in Watertown. (It was called Past Times.) People still refer to Kristi Noem (often sarcastically) as “the Snow Queen,” after the state pageant she won when she was young.

While the Noem administration championed "traditional family values" and passed restrictive laws targeting transgender people's clothing and medical choices, her own husband was privately engaging in gender-bending and cross-dressing fetishes. Like I have said, I have not problems with what was done in private but attacking the community while hiding this in the closet is wrong! 

A Lot of High Fives

[Editorial]

There is much glee about Kristi Noem’s husband being outed!

Kristi Noem and Trump have responded to shocking cross-dressing photos tied to him.

But I take the opposite view.

No one should be outed against their will. Period.

I have always said that outing someone can cause harm, and no matter how despicable or how anti-trans they may be, they should not ever be outed.

That has long been one of the tenets of our community: you never out someone without their permission. Some of the lasting effects include higher anxiety and depression, as well as an increased risk of self-harm or suicidal thoughts. As trans people, we know better than most what happens when someone else takes control of our identity.

When I counsel people on coming out, I always tell them to make sure they have a “safety net” in case it goes badly. That option is not available to those who are outed.

If we only defend people’s dignity when it’s easy, then it isn’t a principle at all. No, I will not celebrate a person being outed against their will.

[/Editorial]

History!

They say history repeats itself and it is becoming true. Have you heard of Project 2025?

Project 2025: A blueprint for the oppression of LGBTQ+ Americans
Far-right activists have put together a series of directives for the next conservative president. Here's what it would mean to the LGBTQ+ community.
The Advocate
By Trudy Ring
June 21, 2024

If you’re looking for yet another reason that Donald Trump shouldn’t be elected president again, we have two words for you: Project 2025.

You’ve probably been hearing these words, but you may be sketchy on what they mean. We’re here to fill you in on the details thanks to a report by Accountable.US.
What is Project 2025?

Basically, Project 2025 is a blueprint of what far-right activists want from the next conservative president — and Trump is the conservative who’s running. It includes plans to fire as many as 50,000 career federal employees and replace them with people who have unquestionable loyalty to the president; restrict access to contraception; possibly implement a national abortion ban; cut federal health care programs; and much more, designed to make the U.S. an authoritarian nation. And LGBTQ+ people are directly in its crosshairs.

“Project 2025 couldn’t make its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda any more clear. With far-right extremists at the helm, the project is a power grab by conservatives attempting to turn back the clock on hard-fought progress and fundamental rights,” Accountable.US President Caroline Ciccone said in a statement to The Advocate. “Project 2025 doesn’t just pose an existential threat to our democracy but seriously threatens the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ+ communities across the country.”

The clock has been set back to 1950s, to the land of Father Knows Best, where the wife is barefoot in the kitchen, and pregnant! It was illegal for us to step out the door and the government looked into our bedrooms.

My friend Stana had a comment on her blog about the history in the fifties…

Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963–86
Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2023

Abstract

Scholars are still unsure why American cities passed cross-dressing bans over the closing decades of the nineteenth century. By the 1960s, cities in every region of the United States had cross-dressing regulations, from major metropolitan centers to small cities and towns. They were used to criminalize gender non-conformity in many forms - for feminists, countercultural hippies, cross-dressers (or “transvestites”), and people we would now consider transgender. Starting in the late 1960s, however, criminal defendants began to topple cross-dressing bans.

There were many raids on bars where crossdressers hung out pre-Stonewall. Including the most famous uprising at Compton Cafeteria,

Narratives attached to events in LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual) history like the Stonewall riots and other uprisings often de-emphasize the work of transgender people, particularly transgender people of color, in the fight for LGBTQIA rights. Within California, however, the role of transgender women, particularly those of color have thankfully been acknowledged in one of the watershed events in LGBTQIA history, the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot.

Before Equal Protection goes on to tell of a story of…

In the early afternoon of March 24, 1964, John Miller was approaching his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He had just crossed the intersection of West End Avenue and Ninety-First Street when a police officer stopped him and asked his name. When he replied “Joan Miller,” he was taken into custody. Miller, later described by The New York Times as a “tall, burly man of 58,” was a father with a military record. He was also a transvestite, or cross-dresser, which meant that he enjoyed dressing as a woman. His crime was violation of Section 887(7) of New York State's vagrancy law, by then over a century old, which made it illegal to appear in public with one's “face painted, discolored or concealed, or being otherwise disguised, in a manner calculated to prevent. . . being identified.” While the law did not explicitly reference clothing, police often used it to punish cross-dressing, and courts usually accepted that interpretation. Most of the time, people arrested under such laws did not mount expensive legal defenses, and those who did rarely appealed past the trial court level.

That is what we had to face going out in public so we kept to sleazy bars. Before the Connecticut law you could find crossdressers in bars in Hartford on Maple Ave. and Wethersfield Ave. We didn’t have a law but we had a ruling by the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) GLAD writes...

Attorney Goldberg successfully petitioned the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) to issue the Doe Declaratory Ruling which determined, in 2000, that Connecticut’s non-discrimination laws protect individuals from discrimination based on gender identity and expression.

She had client referred to by another lawyer in the firm and attorney Rachel Goldberg asked the CHRO a simple question: Are trans people covered by existing laws?"

Doe seeks a ruling from the CHRO that the statutory prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of sex encompass discrimination based upon a person’s apparent gender, specifically discrimination against transsexual individuals. Doe requests that the CHRO find such prohibitions in CONN. GEN. STAT. ' '  46a-60(a)(1), 46a-64(a)(1), 46a-64c(a)(1) and 46a-66(a).

And the answer was a lot more than she hoped for. They included not just transsexuals but also all trans people!

In 2011 that ruling was codified in PA11-55 AN ACT CONCERNING DISCRIMINATION.

But that was in 2011 and before that crossdressing was still illegal in Connecticut because as the lawyers from the CHRO like to say… That is only our opinion. It takes a court to crave it in stone (But with the current Supreme Court nothing is carved in stone.)

The Cambridge article goes on to say...

Laws banning cross-dressing were ubiquitous in urban America by the middle of the twentieth century. Most were more explicit than New York's Section 887(7), like the law in Columbus, Ohio, which criminalized any person who “shall appear upon any public street or other public place . . . in a dress not belonging to his or her sex.”Footnote 10 Starting in the late 1960s, however, criminal defendants began to successfully undermine cross-dressing bans in a range of cities, from New York and Los Angeles to Toledo and Champaign-Urbana.Footnote 11 Hoping to challenge their arrests, these defendants argued that anti-cross-dressing laws were facially unconstitutional, or unconstitutional as applied to them. As their successes mounted, gender outlaws began to bring civil lawsuits against cities to enjoin them from enforcing their anti-cross-dressing ordinances, marking a shift from the defensive posture of the criminal defendant to the offensive posture of the civil litigant. By 1980, criminal defendants had successfully challenged cross-dressing arrests in at least sixteen cities, introducing many courts to transvestite and transsexual people in the process.

Jacobin writes about the drag ban in Tennessee,

During the second half of the nineteenth century, multiple cities across the United States passed laws against public cross-dressing. The first appeared in St Louis, Missouri in 1843, followed by Columbus, Ohio in 1848 and Nashville, Tennessee in 1850. Over forty US cities passed similar laws before the end of the nineteenth century, and by the 1920s nineteen additional cities had adopted cross-dressing laws of their own.

Most anti-cross-dressing laws banned public appearance in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex” or “wearing the apparel of the other sex,” although some towns and cities passed laws against “indecent dress” or the wearing of “disguises” instead. Anti-cross-dressing laws were typically passed as part of broader anti-vice campaigns that also targeted prostitution, vagrancy, public drunkenness, and disorderly conduct. San Francisco’s 1863 law was typical of the time, outlawing cross-dressing as one manifestation of the broader offense of indecency, alongside public nudity, indecent exposure, lewd acts, and immoral performances.

[…]

Anti-cross-dressing laws were the exclusive province of local governments, and no state or federal legislature directly outlawed this type of dress. Several states did, however, pass anti-disguise or masquerade laws that encompassed cross-dressing when enforced. In 1845, for example, New York’s state legislature passed an anti-disguise law that made it a crime to appear in public with a painted face or when wearing a disguise designed to prevent identification. Passed in response to rural workers who wore women’s dresses and masks while participating in anti-rent protests, the law was later used to criminalize a wide range of cross-dressing practices.

But you have to realize that a President of the United States defended a crossdresser. What you say? You probably never heard of the court case Gray vs. Pitts, Assault and Battery, it was a little before your time… in 1771 hired lawyer John Quincy Adams, you might know the name he was the sixth president of the US.

In 1771, Lendall Pitts physically assaulted John Gray outside a barbershop in Boston. Pitts had initially been attracted to Gray, mistaking him for a woman due to Gray's appearance and dress. Upon realizing Gray was male, Pitts struck him in the scalp with a walking stick, causing a wound. Gray decided to press charges against Pitts for assault and battery. The case was first heard in the Suffolk Inferior Court in July 1771, where Gray sued Pitts for £300. John Adams served as the attorney for Pitts, while Josiah Quincy Jr. represented Gray

Wait a minute are you telling me that this was the first case of “Trans Bashing”?

So now we are back again with the Republicans wanting to make us illegal again! They want to keep us off the streets, they want to must us criminals.

---

Update: July 4th @ 6:00AM

USA Today wrote about a congressional hearing on Project 2025

Project 2025 head says 'second American Revolution' will be 'bloodless if the left allows'

By Rachel Barber

July 3, 2024

The president of The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, said the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling is encouraging and that the group, known for Project 2025, is already in the process of “taking the country back.”

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts said in an interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court granted former President Donald Trump limited immunity from prosecution for official acts in the ruling that split the justices 6-3 along ideological lines. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling dangerously expands the chief executive’s power and makes presidents “a king above the law.”

I would like to point out that the Supreme Court did not grant total immunity but only for "official acts" as president... staging a coup is not an "official act" of a president. Fudging the company books are not an "official act" of a president.

James Singer, a spokesperson for the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, responded in a statement drawing attention to the Fourth of July.

“248 years ago tomorrow, America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” Singer said. “they are dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America.”

In a statement to USA TODAY Wednesday afternoon, Roberts alleged that it is organized groups on the left that “have the capacity to carry out violent riots.”

“Americans in 2024 are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats,” Roberts said. “These patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box.”

This election is going to hinge on who can "get out the vote" you can't sit this one out!

“I” Is For… Inclusion.

[Editorial]

We cannot leave them behind. There is C in LGBTQ+ and we should make sure they are not left behind.

I remember when we were trying to pass the Connecticut gender inclusive non-discrimination bill. Jerimarie who was the Executive Director of the Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coaltion was insistent that the bill must include everyone! No exceptions.

PA11-55 AN ACT CONCERNING DISCRIMINATION reads in part:

(21) "Gender identity or expression" means a person's gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person's physiology or assigned sex at birth, which gender-related identity can be shown by providing evidence including, but not limited to, medical history, care or treatment of the gender-related identity, consistent and uniform assertion of the gender-related identity or any other evidence that the gender-related identity is sincerely held, part of a person's core identity or not being asserted for an improper purpose.

Notice:
First, that nowhere does it say anything about healthcare providers, you do not need a doctor’s letter or any medical intervention.
Second, that nowhere does it say you had to transition, nor anything changing you documents.
Third, that nowhere does it even say anything that you even have to be trans to be protected.

So what does that all mean? Well it protects a cis-gender person who is mistaken for being trans. And it also amazingly protects a cis-gender person from being discriminated by trans people because of their gender identity.

And that leads me to the topic I want to talk about… the forgotten crossdresser.

The law protects them.

What would happen if you are in a senior living center and they want to crossdress, how would the long term care facility (LTC) deal with them? I’m always writing about LGBTQ people in a nursing homes, I never really mention crossdressers but I include them under the “T” however the question is will the LTC facilities include them.

Under Connecticut law they have to… but do they know that? Or will they have a conniption if a resident only crossdresses occasionally.

I just wanted to say, I have your back. Under my watch I will defend your rights.

[/Editorial]

****** Tonight On PBS… ******

Casa Susanna - Tuesday, June 27, 9-10 p.m. ET

In the 1950s and 60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed - dressed as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalized for their self-expression.

Told through the memories of those whose visits to the house would change their lives, the film provides a moving look back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom, acceptance and, often, the courage to live their lives out of the shadows.

A co-production with ARTE, Casa Susanna is directed by critically acclaimed French filmmaker Sébastien Lifsz (Wild Side, Little Girl, Bambi). The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022 and won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC in November 2022.

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE films will stream simultaneously with broadcast and be available on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS Video app, available on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO. All titles will also be available for streaming with closed captioning in English and Spanish.

Of course you know that I have written about Casa Susanna on my blog, here some of the post that I wrote about Casa Susanna.

• 1960s Trans Get Away
• Packed In A Trunk
• A Collection To Rival Casa Susanna

That must have been something back then, the stigma was much worst back then and they needed a safe place to be themselves. 

It Will Be A Crap Shoot.

Many states are going to be passing laws banning drag queens and they will have a hard time doing it because drag queens are protected by the First Amendment.

‘Unconstitutional’ anti-drag bills would restrict musicals, panto and even Shakespeare
Republican Arizona lawmakers have proposed three anti-drag bills that would define all gender non-conforming performances as “adult content” – including musicals.
Pink News
By Amelia Hansford
January 9, 2023


The three Senate bills were all introduced by Republican senator John Kavanagh after being prefiled on Friday (6 January).

Each relates specifically to drag performances and attempts to restrict public family-friendly drag shows in some capacity.

One of the bills, SB1026, would ban performances in which an individual or group “dress in clothing and makeup opposite of the performer’s or group of performers’ gender at birth” in a show for under-18s.

If passed, this would essentially mean that most pantomime performances, musicals, and even much of Shakespeare’s work would be deemed “adult-only” content.

The other two bills would ban drag performances on public property and third bill defines what is a drag performance, “adult content” with zoning ordinances that would force establishments that host drag shows to apply for “adult-oriented business manager permits”.

Not being a lawyer this is just my opinion that the state will have to show that “crossdressing” is obscene.

LGBTQ+ activists unanimously slammed the three bills as “insane” and “unconstitutional” for essentially imposing strict gendered roles on clothing without pretence as to what those would be.

“How do we even define ‘opposite gender clothes’ at this point? What constitutes exaggerated gender?” one user wrote. “How the heck would you be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that either of these things has happened?”

That is the scary part these laws could make being trans illegal, this harkens back to the 1950s when you could get arrested for wearing clothing of the opposite gender, the History Channel wrote,

“I have been arrested in New York more times than I have fingers and toes,” she told an interviewer from the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project in 1983, “for wearing pants and a shirt.” At that time, she says, “you had to have three pieces of female attire” in order to avoid being arrested for cross-dressing. 

In LGBTQ circles around the country, this was known as the three-article rule—or the three-piece law. It was referenced everywhere—including in reports about arrests in Greenwich Village in the weeks and months leading up to the 1969 Stonewall Riots.

[…]

Laws criminalizing cross-dressing spread like wildfire around the United States in the mid-19th century. New York’s, dating back to 1845, was one of the oldest. It declared it a crime to have your “face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or [be] otherwise disguised… [while] in a road or public highway.”

Are we returning to the 50s?

The Supreme Court has ruled many times that nudity can be regulated but with limits…

In a 5-4 decision announced by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the Supreme Court ruled in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 501 U.S. 560 (1991), that the state of Indiana could regulate totally nude dancing without violating the First Amendment, even though such performance dancing constituted expressive conduct.

The case came before the Court on writ of certiorari after two entertainment establishments and the dancers they employed sought an injunction to stop enforcement of an Indiana public indecency statute that made nudity in a public place a misdemeanor. The statute defined "nudity" in a way that required female dancers to wear G-strings and pasties.

In 1972 in the case of California v. LaRue the court ruled…

The Court first hinted that nude dancing might be entitled to First Amendment protection in California v. LaRue (1972). In this case, the Court upheld the power of state government officials to regulate the sale of alcoholic beverages at bars offering nude dancing, but Justice William H. Rehnquist’s opinion for the Court observed that “at least some of the performances to which these regulations address themselves are within the limits of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression.”

Three years later, in Doran v. Salem Inn (1975), the Court again alluded to constitutional protection for nude dancing. Rehnquist wrote, “Although the customary ‘barroom’ type of nude dancing may involve only the barest minimum of protected expression, ... this form of entertainment might be entitled to First and Fourteenth Amendment protection under some circumstances.”

In Schad v. Mount Ephraim (1981), the Court struck down a local ordinance banning all live entertainment in a New Jersey borough. The operators of an adult bookstore that offered nude dancers in booths for patron viewing successfully challenged the ordinance. Justice Byron R. White wrote for the Court that “nude dancing is not without its First Amendment protections from official regulation.”

The states will have hard time banning us but with this Supreme Court it is a crap shoot, because they haven't been following court precedent and it is a Christian court so how they will rule is anyone's guess. 

"Sherman, set the Wayback machine to …"

1980 and to Tri-Ess.

Tri-Ess was officially know as Society for the Second Self it was a group for heterosexual crossdressers. No others need to apply, no transsexuals, no drag queens, no gay men, just happily married crossdressers.

It was founded in 1976 by Virginia Prince, it had member organizations around the country including one in New Hampshire with very strict rules. Virginia was a somewhat homophobe and transphobic.

So… going to the Transgender Archives I dug up one of their newsletter from the Chi-Delta-Mu chapter (They gave their chapter names like sororities.) their membership flyer begins with,

THE SOCIETY - A SORORITY WITHOUT WOMEN

Say the word "Sorority" and the last thing that most people think of is an all-male club! The Society For The Second Self exists to help the heterosexual male transvestite (TV) Straight men who have a recurring de·sire to dress in woman’s clothing. Tvs are probably the most misunderstood minority group in the world. As with other minorities, ignorance fosters prejudice and prejudice fosters intolerance and hostility toward T s by society-at-large.

In such a climate, many of us live in fear of discovery by a scornful public. We've kept our Tvism a secret from our closest loved ones. While in the closet many of us think that we are the only ones in the world with these rather off-beat desires.

In our isolation, we may even come to believe the popular sterotypes "Maybe I'm really gay. Maybe I'm headed towards a sex change operation. I must be sick to want to wear these clothes and to go out in the street wearing them, no less.

It’s not surprising that many of us feel or think these things. But we of the Society believe - and know from experience - that this mind-set is neither inevitable or irreversible. We believe that the fundamental problem for Tvs is not personal but actually social. We believe that our guilt, shame, confusion and fear are the products of a non-accepting and ignorant society. s! And even if I'm not sick, I must be wrong to want things to be this way. 

We of the Society firmly believe that Tv's con - and indeed many do - live happy, well-adjusted lives, and we dedicate ourselves to this end. We believe that the best treatment for Tv's is self-acceptance and the creation of a more knowledgable and understanding society. We firmly REJECT the notion that Tv's should -- or even can -- be "cured" of their desire to "crossdress ". 

We invite you to read on and - consider joining with us. Or, if you 're not a T v, we hope that you can make use of this information. Pass it on to a needy friend. Perhaps you might even re-examine your own attitudes towards Tvism and think of how you can be more supportive. Or, if you 're some other kind of crossdresser – and there are many other kinds – why not join one of those groups that have a more open membership policy. 

Now remember this was from 1980 so some of the words are antiqued but you get the gist of the group, they cis gendered, heterosexual crossdressers, period. Virginia Prince was very anti-trans which borders on transphobic, I meet her once at Fantasia Fair at a workshop on planning your transition and he put his two cents in about transitioning. The presenter replied, “Yes Virginia we know your views.” later at the conference she got the pioneer award that was later named after her.

In another article in their membership flyer.

Crossdressing is common to a number of behavior patterns - a fact that confuses Tv's and non-Tv's alike. Tv's, drag queens, pre-operative transsexuals, fetishists, female impersonators, and sado-masochists approach crossdressing with different motivations and derive different satisfactions from it. Tv's can achieve greater self-understanding -- and hence self-acceptance – by considering how our own motivations and satisfactions compare with these different personality types.

Now get a hold of this...

Drag queens and female impersonators are the most visible types of crossdressers. Drag Queens are gay - or at least bi-sexual -- males who typically don women's clothes and manners to mock society's sterotype of gay men. Or they do it to attract a sex partner, helping to ease the guilt that some gay men feel over their "abnormal" sexual preference. 

I think that there is still that fear of many crossdressers that they will be thought to be gay and that is the origins of their homophobia and internalized transphobia.

OTHER OPTIONS

Perhaps you are gay or bi-sexual or another type of Tv that really doesn't fit in with our organization. Or you could possibly be a Tv who is looking for a more sexually-oriented group. If you don't fit our organization, we hope that you will screen yourself out of consideration for membership. In that case you might like to contact one of the more "open" organizations susuch as the ''Alliance" located in Pa. 

Translated, we don’t want GAYS!

This is their membership application:

MEMBERSHIP PLEDGE AND AGREEMENT

I understand the purpose of The Society For The Second Self to be the assistance of its members in developing understanding, acceptance and psychological growth in the realm of my expression of the feminine side of my personality. I pledge to assist, when possible, in the dissemination

of information about crossdressing to the public so as to increase general awareness of this subject. I further agree:

1. To do my part in passing on what knowledge and understanding I can to those not so fortunate or as developed as myself.

2. To assist my Sorority sisters in handling their crossdressing related problems and to devote my energy to such problems when requested.

3. To take part in programs, when possible, and to actively contribute my talents towards making the Sorority a successful organization -- psychologically, socially, and therapuetically.

4. To recognize that information about Sorority sisters (real names and addresses) is theirs to give voluntarily. If such information is given to me, I will keep it most confidential.

5. To keep National Headquarters informed of behavior and activities which are against the best interests of the organization. I understand that my membership will be revoked if found guilty of conduct unbecoming of a sister in the Sorority.

6. It is further understood that the personal information revealed in order to gain membership into the Sorority will not be revealed to any other than the officers of the organization and only then when needed for Sorority business.

In seeking membership I acknowledge that I believe In the full expression of my personality, both masculine AND feminine.

Understanding and agreeing to the above I am: 

They expect you to turn in any gays.

Most of the members were married and lived in fear of being called “Gay”

This is a newsletter cover from the chapter

Then we have this for the guys… a shoe chart to convert women sizes to men sizes in a FTM newsletter;

I hope that you enjoyed today’s blast from the past! More of our history can be found at Transgender Archives.