The following letter comes from a wife who discovered, by accident, that her husband was a crossdresser. It's advisable for all crossdressers to voluntarily inform their spouses about it before it's discovered otherwise. This helps to keep the mutual trust intact between the two people involved and demonstrates that the crossdresser himself trusts his wife with his deepest and most carefully guarded secret.

The author of this letter preferred to remain anonymous since she and her husband wanted to maintain their privacy. I can understand this because if they had provided an email address they would have been literally flooded with email from crossdressers and their wives with positive as well as negative comments and they apparently aren't in a position to respond to each and every request. When you read the following letter you will understand what I'm talking about here. I'm just thankful that this wife saw fit to provide this account of her discovery and what happened afterward. This is the best example I've seen to date that demonstrates what CAN happen if the two people involved work together to find a solution. My hat is off to this woman - whoever she is - for keeping a cool head and going above and beyond to put her marriage and her personal relationship with her husband back on track.  May God bless her!

Dixie Darling

A  Wife's  Response

Hello everyone. I'm the wife of a crossdresser and a newcomer to this group and I must tell you that I have found the atmosphere and the people here to be much different than other groups I've seen on the web. It seems that most groups about crossdressers have a lot of sexual content that, to be honest, I just find repulsive, and that doesn't appear to be this group's focus at all.

In hopes that this might be of help to someone else, I'd like to tell you my story and it's pretty long but I'll try to shorten it as much as possible so I won't take up too much of your time and get you bored. First a little background. I'm married to the only man I've ever been married to and we've been together for 28 years now. We've led pretty much of what I guess is a normal life up until about a year ago. We aren't rich by any means, but we've managed to raise three kids who are now grown and married and have started families of their own. Considering the way the world is today, they've turned out to be pretty responsible adults and have level heads on their shoulders so we're pretty proud of them and believe we did a pretty good job in that department. The last one to get married and leave the house did that about 2 years ago so now my husband and I have the whole house to ourselves once again.

My husband has always been a kind and considerate man and would do just about anything in the world to please me and make me happy and I've always been the same way by him. He's sort of a jack-of-all-trades and is the do it yourself type of person would rather fix anything that breaks himself than to hire someone else to do the job. In that respect he's been a godsend over the years and there's no telling how much money we've saved from the stuff he's done himself. He's never been afraid of hard work and I've seen him tackle jobs that most men wouldn't even consider. And the odd thing is that he almost always finishes them successfully. In short, he's always been a good provider, father, husband and friend. He's not a Greek god, but he's not bad looking either and he's always been conscious to try to be sure that he pleased me when it came to intimacy, and this brings me to the point I'm writing about here.

Like I said, we've pretty much led what I guess you would call an average life up until a little over a year ago. He began to seem withdrawn and acted like he was worried about something. I thought he might be mad at me about something so I asked him what was bothering him and he told me that nothing was. 

We've had our differences just like anybody else has but we've always worked things out, but when you've lived with someone as long as we have with each other you get to where you know when there's something wrong someplace. At this same time I noticed a big change in the sexual side of our life. 

Intimacy was less frequent and even when it happened I could tell that he wasn't nearly as charged up as he used to be. It was along about then that I got worried that he might have something physically wrong with him and I made an appointment for him to take a physical. Just like most men he fussed about it and claimed that there wasn't anything wrong with him, but I made him go anyway. The funny thing was that he was right. The doctor gave him a clean bill of health.

So now I was really curious about what was wrong with him. It was really obvious to me that there was something the matter because his whole personality seemed to be changing. He's normally a big cut-up and the "life of the party" kind of person and that had all but come to a complete stop. And I also noticed that we were talking a lot less. Oh, he'd talk to me if I asked him something and sometimes he'd even elaborate like he used to. But for the most part there was a definite lack of the conversations like we used to have. Then I began to wonder if he was having an affair. I'm not a spring chicken any more and I'm not as attractive as I used to be. But then who is at our age? Still, the possibility was really gnawing at my insides and when I asked him about it he told me that he absolutely was not interested an any other women. 

I took him at his word about that and then about a week later while I was washing clothes I found something that made me suspect more than ever that he had lied to me about another woman. Just as everybody does before they put the clothes in the washing machine I was going through the pockets to remove anything that might be in them and out of one of his pockets came a pair of nylon panties. I knew they weren't mine because they didn't look familiar to me and on top of that they weren't my size either. Now I was worried sick and on top of that I was MAD! He'd lied to me and he was going to have some serious questions to answer when he got home from work that night.

When he got home that night I didn't let on like anything was wrong and we had supper together. Afterwards I cleaned up the kitchen and went to the living room where he had dozed off on the couch in front of the television. I shook him a little to wake him up and when he opened his eyes I told him we needed to talk. He asked what was the matter and I threw the panties down in front of him and told him I wanted an explanation and I wanted it right now. His face turned white as a sheet and he sat up and told me that it wasn't what it looked like it was. So I told him that he'd better start explaining cause I was mad as hell about it and I wanted to know just who this other woman was and what had been going on behind my back.

He sat there for a minute or two while I glared at him and he finally cleared his throat and said that he knew what it LOOKED like, but there was no other woman. Then I asked him just how was I supposed to believe that when those panties came straight out of his pants pocket. He looked at me, then down at the floor and told me they were his. Now it was MY turn to turn white as a sheet and I'm pretty sure that I did. The first thing I thought was oh my god, he's gay. By now I was hollering at him and I told him I wanted an explanation and I wanted it right now. He stumbled and stammered around a little bit and finally told me he was a crossdresser.

I started crying and I had visions of the people like you see on Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake. Then I got hold of my senses again and asked him how long this had been going on. He told me that he'd been doing it all his life when he was by himself. That's when I just couldn't stand it any more and I asked him if he was gay. He was real quick to tell me that no, he wasn't gay and he'd never had even so much as a thought in that direction. So the next thing that I asked him was if he was wanting to have a sex-change operation. He was just as quick to tell me that he didn't want that either.

Now I was totally confused and terribly upset. If he wasn't gay, and he didn't want a sex-change operation, then what brought this on? I began to think that somewhere along the line I'd failed him somewhere and that this was a substitute for me so I just outright asked him what was it that I did that turned him against me as a woman. He started in telling me that even that wasn't true and that there was just a lot of stuff I didn't understand about it. I got real smart-assed with him again and told him that I'd just BET that there was! I told him that I wanted it stopped, and I meant I wanted it stopped right then and there. I wasn't ready for what he told me next when he said that it wasn't something that he could stop. That set me off again and I told him that if me and him were going to stay together it damned well BETTER stop.

He's normally a real passive type person and would walk all the way to the next state to keep from arguing with me or anybody else, but there was an unusual strong tone in his voice when he told me that before I said that seriously I needed to do a little studying about crossdressing. That pissed me off even more. It was almost like he was telling me that he was going to do this regardless of what my feelings were about it and that was that. I went to bed crying that night and he slept on the couch.

Over the next few weeks he brought me a few books to read about it and some stuff he'd found in the library and on the internet. I read some of it, but it was all slanted in his favor. The books were written either by someone who was a crossdresser them self, or by some wife who had accepted it and claimed to understand it. I'm not an internet expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I know enough to be able to maneuver myself around and find a few things so since we've got a computer I decided to do some investigating on my own. So one day while I was at home and he was at work I logged on to the net and typed "crossdressing" in Yahoo's search engine. Over a hundred entries came back which really shocked me. There were a lot of businesses listed and a few personal web sites. The more I looked and the more links I followed the more data I found. I lot of it I'd classify as pornography and some as total garbage. But I found quite a few sites that were owned and maintained by crossdressers who SEEMED to be much the same as my own husband. They didn't appear to be the sex crazed people I had figured they all were. And a lot of these had biographies and personal stories about their life long experiences with crossdressing.

I began to see that there WERE a lot of them and that most of them seemed to be rational people who, for some reasons yet to be found out, just liked to wear women's clothes, makeup and such. To shorten it, they wanted to LOOK LIKE women, but most of them let you know up front that they weren't gay and the last thing they wanted to do was have a sex-change operation. The really strange thing to me was how many of them were married and had children. Some of the biographies and personal stories I read really touched my conscience and a few of them nearly ripped my heart out. I began to search for more of some of the serious information about crossdressing and learned to ignore the stuff that those who were nothing more than sensationalists were putting on the internet.

A few things began to emerge as things that were pretty common between most of these people. Most of them crossdressed the first time at real early ages. Most of them learned early on that people would call them names they didn't like if they were discovered so it became very obvious that they needed to keep this a secret. Crossdressing wasn't something that they did as a sexual turn on. Even though it may have at one time served to enhance sexual pleasure, it was by no means a substitute for conventional sex with their wives or girlfriends. I found that no one in the medical fields has found anything that might be the cause of crossdressing and it appears to be something that these people are born with. The one thing they all DO seem to agree on is that the best thing for crossdressers to do about it is to learn to live with it. Some are never be able to accept themselves and live in constant state of misery because of it. The ones who have accepted the fact that they're not going to ever get rid of it and who have wives or girlfriends who are compassionate enough to accept, or at least tolerate it, are considered to be the most fortunate. And those who have accepted it themselves, but have intolerant mates are in between the other two situations.

It took several weeks of reading and researching before I began to see that this wasn't the monster that I had thought it was at first. During this time there was a widening gap emotionally between me and my husband and it was bothering me that we seemed to be losing the love and respect for each other that we'd had for all these years. It was for these very reasons that I decided to try to do something about it even if it meant doing something that I was dead-set against. I just couldn't bear the thoughts of letting 28 good years go down the drain. Besides that, I love my husband and I know he loves me and I wasn't about to let something like this bring the whole thing to a bitter ending. 

So one night when he came home from work we ate another quiet supper together and I told him that we needed to talk again. From the look on his face I could tell that he figured this was going to be bad news so I assured him that it wasn't. After supper we sat down together, no television, no radio, no music in the background, just me and him. I told him I'd had time to do a lot of thinking and some research and I wanted to ask him a few questions about his crossdressing. I knew he wasn't gay, and it's pretty obvious he isn't wanting to be a woman since he enjoys his guy stuff too much so I told him that and started asking some pretty pointed questions. 

We've been married over 28 years and I found out stuff I never knew. It wasn't necessarily bad stuff, just some things that I never knew about before. The more we talked the more relaxed he got about it and about two hours later I was convinced more than ever before that a lot of the things that attracted me to him in the first place were a direct result of the crossdressing side of his personality, I just wasn't aware of it at the time. Inside that head of his, behind all the hardware, electronic gizmos, the fishing, the hunting, the four-wheeling, and all the other stuff he's interested in was a tender and more compassionate person than I'd ever imagined. It was there all the time, but his little secret was keeping it locked in. Oh, he was kind and tender anyway, but not nearly as much as it was possible for him to be.

I found out that he wasn't interested in the 'slutty' look that I'd seen on a lot of the web pages I'd been to. His idea of a feminine look was one of classic beauty and definitely feminine styles, makeup, etc. Then I asked him if he had any pictures of himself. I told him that I wouldn't be mad if he did and I wouldn't ask to see them if he wasn't willing to show them to me. He told me that he did have some pictures and volunteered to show them to me. I had a picture in my mind of what I figured he looked like and it was one typical of what a wife might imagine. I figured he probably looked like a "guy in a dress" with a really bad makeup job. He asked if I wanted to see them now and since I wasn't quite ready to see him in person wearing a dress just yet I told him yes.

He left and went upstairs and came back in a couple of minutes with an small envelope. Before he handed it to me he asked if I was sure I wanted to see these pictures. To be honest I was beginning to feel sick at my stomach because of what I thought I was about to see, but I told him yes and took the envelope from him. I took the pictures out and got the shock of my life. What I'd expected to see wasn't anything like what was actually there. I know a lot of real women know could take a lesson from his choice of clothes and his apparent skill at putting on makeup. If I hadn't known him, I don't think I would have ever recognized from the pictures that he was a man in a dress. 

I had a lot of mixed emotions as I looked at the six pictures he's given me that night. On one hand it was disturbing to me that he could look that good as a woman. On the other, it was evident that he took looking authentically feminine very seriously. I looked at him, then back at the pictures again. Then I asked him what was going through his mind when he was dressed like that. He told me that there was a peace and serenity most of the time that wasn't like anything else he'd ever felt, and that his thoughts were often about how beautiful I looked when I was dressed up to go out somewhere. That sort of struck a nerve in me because I'll have to admit that I had gotten to a point where I seldom fixed myself up and tried to look really feminine.

I had a thousand other questions I wanted to ask, but at that time they were all running together in my mind. I did ask him where he had gotten the dresses he had on in the pictures and when he told me he'd bought them at a thrift store for five or six dollars each and for some reason I felt a little sorry for him for having to do that.

I'd had about all the information and surprises I could stand for one night so we ended the conversation with an agreement to continue it later on. He reached for the pictures, but I asked him to leave them with me for the time being if he didn't mind. So we watched a little television and then finally went to bed. When we lay down I told him that I still loved him no matter what and for the first time in ages we went to sleep snuggled up to each other like we used to do.

In the weeks that followed I did a lot of thinking and soul searching about this. He'd never shown any feminine characteristics since we'd been married and in fact, he'd been pretty much the typical masculine type of person you'd expect a man to be. He had kept his softer side in check for all these years and it got me to thinking about what the big deal was anyway. I mean, after all so he wore a dress. And what was a dress other than material that had been sewn together in a different style? And when you got right down to the basics of it, makeup wasn't anything more than temporary coloration. It didn't matter what he had on, he was still the exact same person underneath it all. Then I thought about how I dressed most of the time. I'd been a stay at home mom all my life and I didn't think anything at all about wearing a pair of blue jeans and a flannel shirt. So why should I condemn him for wearing something that made him feel good about himself? Who was he harming doing that? I was wearing stuff that looked like clothes that any man would wear and yet here I was telling him that he couldn't wear anything that a woman wears. The more I thought about it the more unfair it seemed. And there were even advantages to it. He never had been one to run around and cheat and I'm pretty sure it was at least partially due to crossdressing. He didn't go out and get drunk and hang out in bars with his friends until the wee hours of the morning and I'd ALWAYS been glad about that. So I decided that the next weekend I wanted to meet 'her' in person just to see what it was that I had been so mad about. That very night I told him I wanted to see him dressed up and it shocked the hell out of him. He was against it, claiming that he didn't want to cause a regression back to a few weeks ago, but I promised him that this was something that I felt like I HAD to do. He was reluctant, but he finally agreed and we made plans to do it on that next Saturday. 

If I didn't say that I was somewhat dreading what I'd gotten myself into I'd be lying. But I was determined to carry it through so I stuck to my guns. I think he was more apprehensive about it than I was, but he's good about doing stuff I want to do even if it's something he doesn't want to. He loves me THAT much.

So when Saturday arrived we agreed on a plan. I would go out shopping late that afternoon and he would stay home and be dressed when I got back. He was not to answer the door and his car would be out of sight in the basement. Also, he would only answer the phone if the caller ID showed that it was me on my cellular phone who was calling and the blinds were to be closed at all times. I asked him just how long it would take him to dress and he said at least an hour or hour and a half. He said that he wanted to look as good as possible when I saw him for the first time and it would take that long to do everything. I found it to be a little bit funny because men always complain about how long it takes their wives to get ready to go somewhere and now the shoe was literally on the other foot. 

At 5 PM I left the house and went to the local mall. Normally I enjoy shopping, but that night my mind just wasn't on it and the time was dragging by. I had told him I'd give him until 8 PM and it seemed like forever before I started back to the house. When I was about 15 minutes away I called home from the car and when he answered I asked him if he was ready. I could tell he was nervous when he told me that he was as ready as he'd ever be and I told him I'd be there in about 15 minutes.

I think I was about as nerve wracked as he was about this because I had no idea what I was about to walk in and see and he told me later that he was just about as nervous about me seeing him. I parked in the basement and walked upstairs. He was in the bedroom and he called my name just to make sure it was me. I answered and told him it was and then he asked me if I was ready for this. I almost backed out and told him no, but I figured since we'd come this far we might as well go the rest of the way with it so I told him yes. Through the closed door he told me to close my eyes. So I did and heard the door open and heard him walk out. 

I thought I was shocked when I looked at his pictures, but when he finally told me to open my eyes I wasn't prepared at all for what I saw. Instead of the "guy in a dress" image I had figured I was going to see, what was standing there was someone who looked better than a lot of the women I know after they've left the beauty shop. I was amazed to say the least. He had on a medium length red dress, immaculate makeup, a few tasteful pieces of jewelry, clip-on earrings, a dark brown shoulder length wig, acrylic nails that would have fooled anybody, and a pair of red pumps with about a 2 inch heel. Admittedly he was somewhat larger than an average woman, but the point was that it was uncanny how believable a woman he looked like.

I was amazed to say the least. I must have had a look on my face like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He spoke first and asked me please not to laugh just yet. I told him that I had no intention of laughing and that I was simply amazed at how he looked. I asked him to turn around and let me see him all around and he did. Of course his deep voice would have been a dead giveaway and his walk was still that familiar long gaited male walk, but other than that he looked quite the classic lady. His dress was wrinkled really bad, but other than that he looked pretty believable. I think my amazement had replaced the sickening feeling I had thought I was going to have.

He asked me if I wanted him to go take it all off, but I told him I thought that since we both had gone to all this trouble that he ought to keep it all on for a while longer. I made a pot of coffee and we sat at the kitchen table while we talked. It was really odd to hear a deep voice coming from such a carefully made up face and the lipstick prints on the coffee cup were a strange sight to see too. In fact the whole thing was something very strange but you know what? I didn't feel like I thought I would about it. As we sat there talking it kept running through my mind that this person sitting here with me was still the same person underneath all the clothes and makeup that had always been there. 

We didn't mention much more about crossdressing after that night. I don't know if it was him being afraid to talk about it for fear of my rejecting him, or my own fears about the uncertainty of the future. But after that night I did a lot more thinking. It dawned on me that he'd lived with the stress and everything associated with this secret for most of his 49 years, and I wondered what carrying something like that around with you 24 hours a day must be like. It has to be an awful feeling to fear telling someone about it because you're afraid they won't understand it or that they're going to make fun of you about it. The law of averages is pretty accurate and that means that our lives are well past the half way point now. I wanted for him to be able to live out the rest of his time without all the fears and stresses he's had all his life so I made a commitment to myself to at least give it a chance. So a few weeks later I broke that silence and we made an agreement with each other. I agreed to give him times to dress around the house with the understanding that anything beyond that would have to be something we both agreed on. It was one of the smartest moves I've ever made in my life.

It took some getting accustomed to and I'm still not really used to it. But I've crossed a major hurtle and I'm a better person for it. I've found out that I shouldn't believe everything I hear and that I need to find out stuff for myself rather than letting everybody else in the world do all my thinking for me. My marriage was about to go to pot on account of something that I've found out is so trivial. 

Since the day all this started I've come a long way and so has my husband. I'm not fool enough to tell you that it's been a smooth road to travel. There have been peaks and valleys and I'm sure that there will be some more in the future, Matter of fact I'm anticipating that very thing. But we've handled the problems that came up TOGETHER and that's something we haven't done in years. We're enjoying a closeness now that we thought was long sense gone and we do everything together. He loves to do things with me now that he never liked before. Shopping together is a lot of fun and so are all the other things we do together now. While I've beeen really kind of skeptical about meeting any other crossdressers and their wives, we've met several other couples (of course neither of the males were crossdressed at the time) over a period of time and of those that I've met, I've found that for the most part they're just average people like my husband and me. In fact, some of them are far truer friends than others I've known for years and we've come to thoroughly enjoy each other's company. I would have never believed that these people were the common every-day kind of people like you meet every day, but I've found that it's thrue that you can't judge a book by it's cover.

Like I've said, this is all new to me, I'm still learning every day and I've still got questions about it, but I do know one thing - if things hadn't turned around the way they did I doubt very seriously that my husband and I would still be living together under the same roof. We have each other back now and it's a wonderful feeling. Something else I've noticed is that we seem to be closer now than we've ever been. Now we laugh together, cry together, and work together in the house and yard with a love and respect for each other that I once thought was gone for good.

Why am I telling you all of this? It's simply because I know there are some out there who are, or will be, going through this same set of circumstances. I'm the type of person who believes that if God helped me to get through this, then He expects me to at least try to relate what we've been through to others who can get something out of it and not have to go through some of the stuff we did. So, if you're a wife and you've found yourself thrown into a situation like this I would like to offer you this advice from someone who has been exactly where you are right now. Give it a chance before you condemn your husband. There's nobody who's any more stubborn than I am but it didn't take me long to find out that if you value your marriage you owe it to each other to try to make it work. Knowing what he knows now the chances are he wouldn't have been a crossdresser if he'd had a choice in the matter. The problem is that he wasn't given that choice and he's had to live with it all his life. If you've just found out about it you've only begun to know some of the things he's known and live with all of his life. Be patient with him and expect him to be the same way with you. Learning about this is a constant thing and there's something new to learn every day. And the main thing you can do to help each other is to TALK. If you don't communicate with each other you can almost bet that your future time together will be limited at best. I'll admit that this crossdressing thing is something that both of yo will have to learn to cope with. He needs to know that you love him, but he also needs to know that you expect and deserve to have YOUR rights, wishes, and needs respected also. That means that there will be times when you don't WANT 'her' around and he should honor those times. At the same time there will be times when 'she' should be allowed to dress up. There is a give and take to this whole situation and when you've mastered doing that TOGETHER, you'll be well on your way to recapturing all the love you once felt for each other.

JENNIFER'S Response

Jennifer is a GG (that's Genetic Girl for those of you who who aren't aware) who has always had an admiration for crossdressers. She posted the  following message in one of the goups in August of 2002:

 I have been reading the posts over the last week and I just wanted to speak up for a GG, I know I cannot speak for all GG but I can speak for me and who I am. The first time I found myself drawn to crossdressers was at age 12, but thanks to the ignorant society we live in I was taught then that no one like that would ever be interested in someone like me. I cannot explain why I was drawn them, I can only tell you how I feel now. I think that overall CD's have a better personality. They are more understanding, kinder, more patient, more sensitive, more sensual and more romantic. Not to mention more femme *smile* Its not all about the dress they have on to me its about the person from within first then the clothes are a nice pretty bonus. Not only do I accept CD's, but also I embrace them and try to be as completely understanding as I can. I understand that being a cd/tg/ts is not something you choose its part of you, it's who you are. I understand there are those who are ignorant, but look with anything when there was ignorance of a group of any kind in society, with ignorance stupidity usually is close behind. When I made a choice to tell my friends last year that I liked and accepted crossdressers, their ignorance took over as well and they all went running for the hills. That's ok though, since then I have made "real" friends who accept me for who I am and I accept them for whom they are and not for who they are not. In the Secret Garden group, I have made some very good friends both GG and CD, they are always there when I need them & * wink, wink * even sometimes when I don't think I need them. 

I also made a decision to tell my mother, something I wasn't quite sure on but I thought it had to be done. My mother told me she was proud of me, yes that's what she said "proud". She has never been near CD's in her life but she told me that my acceptance of them proves to her that she raised me right to be understanding, accepting and non judgmental. I recently had a conversation with my mother about a friend of mine and how his ex wife had treated him. I was going to explain how it was a part of him, but before I could do that my mother told me that she understood this is something CD's are born with, its a part of them just as much as a leg or an arm, or the hands I use to type, it cannot be changed, should not be changed. I have gone shopping for some friends of mine and they have been very surprised and happy with the things I helped choose. I adore shopping for my CD friends either with them or for them, well with them is much better *smile*. I myself as a genetic woman adore being as femme as possible. I like being in a skirt or dress as often as I can, ask those who know me, I don't even own a pair of jeans or sweatpants. I have some male looking t-shirts but I hate wearing them. I do think we have a double standard in society though, in movies if a woman comes out of the bathroom with her boyfriends shirt on, its supposed to be sexy or something, so as I see it if a woman can wear men's clothes then I see absolutely nothing wrong with a man wearing women's clothing, I myself am most comfortable in a skirt and blouse and pretty sandals or heels.

Well it looks as though I have written an essay as well. I am aware that not all women think as I do, but I would like other women to know that there are women out there that cherish & adore CD's. CD's truly are the most special and wonderful people I have ever met.

Kisses and Hugs to all,
Jennifer

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