You feel like you don't fit in sometimes because you like to dress or do things that are associated with the opposite sex. You wonder what your identity is, you have doubts about what it means that you like to wear clothes of the other sex, is it normal? Does it mean that I am transsexual? Does it imply that I am homosexual? Nothing of this. Society has imposed rules on you, a way of being and thinking only because of the genitals with which you were born. And you have had neither voice nor vote in this imposition. Being born a man or being born a woman does not imply that you have to like “man things” or “woman things”.
Keep reading this Psychology-Online article in which we will explain why you might like to wear women's clothes as a man to know more about the subject.
Index
- The concept of gender
- Sex and gender
- Why am I a man but I like to dress as a woman
- Gender identity and Queer theory
The concept of gender.
Before starting to answer the question that occupies the title of this article, it is convenient to review some definitions to understand well and address this topic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines the gender Like the socially constructed roles, the behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women ”. In other words, gender is not something natural, but a social and cultural construction based on sexual differences.
For Judith Butler, gender theorist and forerunner of the theory queer, the gender is constituted through the acts that are socially and culturally associated with one gender or another, an idea that he baptizes as the theory of performativity. Therefore, as gender is formed through a stylized repetition of acts, it is not a stable identity, there is no "essence" that gender expresses or externalizes.
If you are interested in the subject, here you can read A theoretical journey about gender.
Sex and gender.
During the 1950s, American social psychology focused on the analysis of behavior patterns of female and male sex from an essentialist and heterosexist perspective, according to which the biological sex of the individual was what determined her identity.
Within our culture it is not possible (or at least it is very difficult) to separate sex and gender. According to Butler, as the body is inevitably transformed into the body of he or from her, it is only possible to know the body by its gender appearance. This idea becomes evident when, for example, we meet a person whose body does not have a defined gender appearance and we get nervous because we can't classify it within one sex or another. The rule is so internalized that the exception not only confirms it, but also makes us realize the relevance of the body in the construction of the gender, and that we can understand how it becomes the battlefield of those who fight to perpetuate the norm and those who fight to destroy it, such as which they dress in a non-normative way to that which has been established according to their sex.
In the following article you will find Reflections on gender.
Why am I a man but I like to dress as a woman.
It is important to previously clarify two concepts that can often be confused. On the one hand, we have the sexual identity, which corresponds to the personal experience of belong to either sex (male or female) based on sexual characteristics (genitalia). From here two terms are derived:
- Cisexual, if we believe that the body with which we were born is the one that belongs to us.
- Transsexual, if we feel that the body that has touched us does not belong to us.
On the other hand, we have the gender identity, which refers to the identification with the contents of the genre, that is, with the model of male or female person that each individual builds on himself and is part of the personal identity.
Some authors define gender identity as self-classification as male or female on the basis of what is culturally understood by male or female. The process of construction of gender identity is intra-individual, but it develops in interaction with the learning of roles, stereotypes and behaviors. Even so, this does not imply the assumption of gender roles and attitudes, since each one develops their own sense of masculinity and femininity. However, the practices that correspond to each gender are standardized and perfectly identifiable, so that one's sense of masculinity or femininity may differ or adjust more or less to what which is understood by male or female gender, causing the person to feel more or less comfortable with the gender that has touched him (because, as we have already seen, the gender you have to build, by default, based on sex), from where new ways of understanding gender can be proposed and generated, thus emerging a series of new concepts such as queer.
In the case of clothing, "dressing as a man" or "dressing as a woman" are simply ways of dressing that have been associated respectively with the male gender and the female gender, but there is nothing in a man's DNA that implies that he has to like "dressing like a man" or that he has to dislike "dressing like a man." woman". One can like women's clothing the same as going to the beach, the problem is that in the first He has been taught since childhood that he should dress in men's clothing and that he should reject women's clothing. The vast majority internalize these learnings without questioning them as part of "their way of being", or abide by them in order to fit in with the society that surrounds us, but the way you dress is still a matter of taste, so we could start by changing the phrase "I am a man but I like to dress as a woman" to "I am a man and I like to dress as a woman."
Gender identity and Queer theory.
One of the points that the theory deals with queer is the questioning of identity as something fixed, coherent and natural, questioning that opens the path for theorization of other categories such as sexuality and gender as socially built. That is, the theory queer the categories of sex and gender, and identities in general, are questioned.
Queer describes the inconsistency in stable relationships between chromosomal sex, gender, and sexual desire. Institutionally, queer It has been more commonly associated with gay and lesbian issues, but its analytical framework also includes issues such as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, androgyny, etc.
The perspective queer it recognizes the confluence of identities, sometimes with contradictory effects, in the same subject.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to Why do I like to wear women's clothes if I'm a man, we recommend that you enter our category of Social psychology.
Bibliography
- Butler, J. (1990). The gender in dispute. Feminism and identity subversion. Barcelona: Paidós.
- García-Leiva, P. (2005). Gender identity: explanatory models. Psychology writings, 7, 71-81.
- Heir, O. i García, J. (2015). The metrosexual man as contemporary Narcissus: the role of current advertising discourse in the construction of masculinity. Information Science Documentation, 38, 245-263.
- Penedo, S. L. (2016). The Queer Labyrinth: Identity in Times of Neoliberalism. Egales Editorial.
