Fairfax, VA, USA. Every three or four weeks I visit a salon at Harpers Ferry in Jefferson County, West Virginia, to have the fills refreshed on my nails. It’s a nice drive on an otherwise unencumbered weekend. [N1]

Sometimes, when there is an earthquake and then a hurricane perhaps, five weeks may pass between visits. The seasonal floods that Harpers Ferry is prone to might postpone my nails for six.


My own nails are thin and weak and tend to break off if they extend beyond the cuticle. Prior to using fills on my fingertips, my nails always looked like I habitually bit them. Despite the maintenance effort, I consider fills a necessity to maintain a professional appearance at work. A cost of doing business, more or less.

A beauty salon, despite a handful of men having haircuts on any given day, is still a woman’s world. The air fills with the smell of multiple hair products and OPI nail polish. Contralto and Soprano conversations punctuated by the scattered voices of a few male hairdressers echo off the walls. Friends and boyfriends, movie stars, work, family and fashions form the basis of conversations. If sports are discussed, it is because of a daughter or son’s soccer or softball practice or to announce that someone has tickets to a weekend’s baseball or football game. Mostly we talk about people and our problems therein.

The feeling inside on Saturday mornings is definitely female. Brides and Maids-of-Honor preparing for an afternoon wedding, Mothers-of-the-Bride serving as first line managers to ensure calmness is maintained and all scheduled activities proceed as planned. Mothers with their monthly appointment, their daughters waiting to be next styled.

I have been going to the same nail technician for well over a decade now. Let’s call her Gina. Let’s pretend for the moment that she is a Sicilian girl still working her way through college to escape her Mafia Princess destiny. [N2] Our relationship is somewhere between casual acquaintance and good friends. Except for the occasional support staff passing by sweeping hair from the floor, we are virtually alone in our world and talk about many things over nails we might not otherwise.

We simultaneously are close friends and not close friends. But after ten years, we trust and respect each other. We have learned to recognize each other’s physical emotional ups and downs. Even so I was surprised one Saturday where our discussion led us.

Gina, a str8 girl, knows I am a bi-sexual lesbian in a long term relationship with Sharon, my wife. Gina knows that I have been in and out of gay and lesbian bars and am familiar with many of the varieties of queerdom. (Familiar with many, expert in none: the world continues to amaze me.) We have some secrets from each other but not all that many. I ask her questions, she asks me, and generally we answer.

We have been talking to each other close to three hundred hours now. I know her religion, she knows my lack of one. We know details of each other’s past. Neither of us knows how many lovers the other has had. She said she had a woman friend who is in love with a divorced father, a co-worker of Gina’s, who likes to dress in women’s clothes. The cross-dressing (and the man’s denial of the same) was a prime cause of the divorce. [N3]

Cross-dressing occurs in heterosexual (or bisexual) as a common variant of male sexuality. Other than cross-dressing, most individuals with a history of cross-dressing do not have a history of childhood cross-gender behaviors. The vast majority are heterosexual, non-transsexual male-identified males who lead relatively normal social roles.

Cross-dressers are not transsexual. They may or may not identify as transgendered.

• Cross-dressing only becomes a problem when cross-dressed role playing, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (e.g., marriage and fatherhood). If there is no significant distress or impairment, cross-dressing remains a private matter.
  
  
• Cross-dressing only becomes a cultural issue in the public arena when the behavior impacts others. Established relationships may be stressed, new ones may be ended before they begin. A hidden behavior once discovered my become a major obstacle if friends, co-workers, and significant others believe that they were deceived by a cross-dresser who deliberately and purposefully hid the fact he is a cross-dresser.

Deception, perceived or deliberate, is seldom well received. These are the facts as Gina told them to me:

• Ethnic cultural and religious expectations (parents, family, and friends) are socially conservative. Men are expected to be head of the family, a good father and a good provider, and act like men.
  
  
• The man is question is divorced and has several children.
  
  
• The ex-wife has indicated that the prime reason she divorced him is that he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) stop cross-dressing. Despite eyewitnesses, he denied he was a cross-dresser.
  
  
• The man in question has been seen wearing women’s blouses to work. No one was raised objections at this point since the blouses do not affect the man’s work output. Gina believes the source of this information is reliable.
  
  
• When asked directly, the man continues to deny he has ever dressed in women’s clothing.
  
  
• The woman, Gina’s friend, says she is deeply in love with the man but, because of religious and cultural beliefs, she cannot ever marry a crossdresser.

Gina asked me what I thought her friend should do. Should she extract a promise from the man she loves that he will never cross-dress again, a behavior he denies ever occurs? What would I, with my vast expertise in the gay and lesbian milieu, recommend? [N4]

I told Gina the cold, dispassionate facts. Cross-dressers seldom, if ever, stop crossdressing. They may promises to stop but it is like promising to stop eating chocolate. Eventually the moment will arise when the desire to eat chocolate again overwhelms the most resolute promise. Habitual behaviors require monumental and continuous personal effort if they are to be avoided.

Most likely, the man in question, no matter what he tells Gina’s friend, will continue to cross-dress. He has been seen cross-dressed in public outside of work. That he denies he has ever cross-dressed despite what eyewitnesses say renders any such actual commitment unlikely in any event.

If the woman’s love for the man cannot accommodate a husband who is a cross-dresser, if her grandparents, her parents, her brothers and sisters would be unable to accept such a man into the family, if he lies about his cross-dressing, then the best course available to woman is to — at that point Gina interrupted and said

Walk away from him

And I nodded my head and said yes.

There are no easy answers. No magical bullets. No feel good solutions where everyone wins. No liberal panaceas with everyone ending up happy at the end like some Lifetime Viewer’s Choice movie. Life is hard. Life is messy. You cannot change what you cannot change. If you cannot live with someone’s behavior, you must walk away despite how much you may love him.

You cannot go through life with your eyes wide shut. That way leads only to misery, emotional destruction, and the eventual death of the soul.

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