March 2002
The Same Old Same Old
I had to read Amy Bloom’s article "Conservative men in conservative dresses" (Atlantic Monthly, April 2002) several times before I was sure I thought I heard what I think she thought she said. Well, almost.
Was she trying very hard to find something nice to say about people she personally found offensive, or was she trying to employ witty phrases, double entendres and run-on sentences that allowed her to insult people to their faces without their knowledge?
It wasn’t until I gave the article to my wife to read, and heard what she had to say about it, that the light bulb went on.
"That’s not you," was her first comment.
In fact, it’s not a lot of people I know.
The article, when I printed it from the Atlantic Monthly web site, where I first read it, was twelve pages long. It wasn’t until page eleven that I finally understood that the point of this article was to "yank the covers off hypocrites: the fundamentalist-- Christian congressman with his handsome young pages, the old-school feminist who tolerates abusive boyfriends, the priest and his porn." And, of course, crossdressers.
As a journalist. Ms. Bloom attempts to have it both ways. On the one hand, she admits outright that no one knows how prevalent crossdressing is in America. This is because crossdressers are essentially invisible as a demographic group. On the other hand, she has no reservations about declaring what "many", "most" and "all" crossdressers do, think or feel. All of this is based on observations made among a group of 25 crossdressers she met on a Tri-Ess sponsored cruise to Catalina. The statement that crossdressers are "predominately conservative (far more moderate Republicans than liberal Democrats)" cannot be substantiated. It is opinion passed off as fact, but serves Ms. Bloom’s agenda of portraying crossdressers as hypocrites.
In the article, she gains a consensus between her two sources that there are between three and five million crossdressing men in the United States. Tri-Ess claims a membership nationwide of 1,100, a statistically insignificant .003 per cent of the crossdressing population, and an even smaller percentage of the larger transgender population.
Ms. Bloom is guilty of not doing her research. At one point, she quotes a definition of crossdressing from a 1986 Fantasia Fair brochure (that’s almost 10 years before the DSM IV declassified crossdressing as a mental illness). There is no indication when the cruise she was on actually took place, and the only other reference to dates is to Fall Harvest in 2000 and some telephone calls she made in the fall of 2000.
Other than the small group on the cruise, she quotes only one other source: Ray Blanchard, a Canadian doctor and "self-described ‘traditional clinician’". It is obvious that the doctor does not share the model of crossdressing that Tri-Ess has created. There is some insight in his comment "Cross-dressing is an attempt to resolve an internal conflict, and it's not about fabric", but Amy Bloom doesn’t take us to this higher, more meaningful level. She’d rather wallow with the hypocrites.
When she states that "The widespread assumption is that heterosexual cross-- dressers are hypocrites, publicly lambasting deviance of all kinds," I wonder whose assumption she is referring to. I have to feel it is her own, since there is no reference to a study, survey or poll. She tries to gloss over this generalization by adding "the lambasting has died down considerably since 1980".
Since 1980! Talk about holding a grudge. She calls it "unimaginable" that crossdressers are supportive of both the gay/lesbian civil rights movement and second-wave feminists. Unimaginable to Amy Bloom, at any rate.
This article was not about crossdressing. It was about what Amy Bloom considers hypocrisy and what she considers deviate behavior. How else can she demonstrate the hypocrisy of this group of "Christian, conservative Republican men" who are heterosexual (Goddess, is there no end to the stereotyping and labeling she does!) unless she considers crossdressing deviate behavior?
As long as we are on the subject of labeling, Ms. Bloom avoids mentioning that she herself is a lesbian, a member of the same group that "regard [crossdressers] with disdain or affectionate incomprehension, something warmer than tolerance but not much". She has no problem accepting drag queens as "feminine gay men" but can’t conceive of a feminine heterosexual man.
When she writes that "Even in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where cross-dressers hold their annual fall Fantasia Fair, few of the residents, gay or straight, seem to recognize these men as people with whom they have a lot in common" she essentially blames the victim. Is it the fault of the crossdressers there that residents let their biases, prejudices and phobias stand in the way of understanding other people?
If Ms. Bloom were interested in doing a series of stories on hypocrites, I would invite her to spend some time with the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization of gay men who support Republican political candidates (http://www.lcr.org).
Amy Bloom regurgitates the Tri-Ess point of view to the exclusion of all else. She pays lip service to the possibility that there are those of us in the crossdressing community that may not accept the Tri-Ess view of the world, but we never hear from this much larger group of crossdressers. I know for a fact that my web site is not hard to stumble into, if one were looking.
She says her problem with crossdressing is that it is a compulsion but not viewed by crossdressers as a sickness. I guess it is a tribute to the gay and lesbian men and women who came before her that Amy Bloom does not have to be made to feel as though her "compulsion" to have sex with women is no longer viewed as a "sickness" to be cured.
The problem with this article is the problem with Tri-Ess. Both attempt to deal with an extraordinary phenomenon using conventional wisdom and if there’s one thing true about conventional wisdom, it’s conventional. It’s the same old-same old.
Albert Einstein said, "A problem cannot be solved on the level at which it appears." To fully understand gender, crossdressing, transgenderism, transsexualism and sexual orientation, we need to invent new language, new thought patterns, new ways of viewing old problems. We can’t meet twenty-first century challenges using twentieth century catechisms and cliches.
