My View of Dating and Sexism

By Romana 05/25/2017

I once thought I had dating and sexism figured out.  I would logically convince a woman to ignore my gender identity for an egalitarian life filled with equality.  I was so wrong.  I want to correct my former erroneous assumptions.

I may make statements that sound wild.  To me, our society is feels like an alien culture, replete with rules that are not natural for me.  I have spent a lifetime trying to figure things out, and I am getting better at it.  I have to filter out tangential ideas that will never go anywhere.  I have a therapist to help me.  He is a gay man, to whom my wife, Carolyn, and I had gone for counseling since December, 1997.  He is a specialist in Asperger, transgender, and geriatric issues.  He has many degrees, one of which is from Naropa University, which teaches Buddhist psychology in Boulder Colorado.  This type of psychology now imbues my entire being, and has led me to a basic, insightful kind of enlightenment.  Naropa University is part of my Shambhala Buddhist Order.

In July 2006, my therapist diagnosed me with Asperger’s syndrome.  This led to a new understanding about my entire psyche, and my wife proclaimed, “Now I finally understand why you are this way.”

I never dated in high school, though I was becoming interested in girls.  I viewed dating as totally illogical, since I had not yet developed a libido; also, I had developed a desire to dress like a girl, but I did not want to be a girl.  After I graduated from high school, I developed a strong libido, which would drive me without mercy to seek a woman in my life.  My therapist has told me that my high libido was quite unusual for an Asperger male.

I am currently writing a book about the years I was married to my late wife, Carolyn.  After eight years of marriage, I decided to take up crossdressing to solve some of my relationship issues, such my fear of emotions that had been very resistant to bring forth.  Some of my reasoning has been lost over time, but my decision to crossdress did shake up my world and my marriage.

Over time, my wife and I agreed on a set of rules.  Here is a summary:

·        So long as I passed well in women’s restrooms, she would accompany me almost anywhere in public.

·        I could no longer have secrets about anything, but I was allowed to freely talk about gender issues without reprisal.

·        I was not to get breast implants or gender-reassignment surgery.  These kinds of surgeries did not interest me anyway.

·        When I dressed up for an event, I was to dress as formally as other women attending the event.

·        I was to take my wife’s advice about my presentation, clothing, and accessories.  She taught me to dress like a modest Mormon woman.  I still maintain this style, which has kept me out of trouble.

·        While we passed well as girlfriends, I was not to deny the basis of our relationship upon scrutiny.  If people needed to know, I was to calmly explain that we were husband and wife.

After my Carolyn died, I learned to use Buddhist psychology to rid myself of anger, anxiety, and fear.  I thought I could get a new love interest by pushing dates harder, which had worked well when I was 35, but was a total bust in my current life.  I thought better social skills would help me, but that was a wrong assumption.  I have also come to believe that my I had an inflated opinion of my personal skills.

For years, I had some luck a dating, even including those dates where I dressed as a woman.  Recently, my success at dating went to zero.  I attribute this to ongoing right-wing attacks on transgender people since the last election season began in 2015.   I have gained an undeserved reputation as a bathroom terrorist.   Once this was very depressing for me, but now I look upon it as a learning experience.

I never grew up with social skills, or dating skills.  Until I met Carolyn, dates never went anywhere.  I even tried self-hypnosis, and never realized that my problem was that I was not ready for dating.

1. The Rule of Conformity

This is the first rule I have uncovered.  This is a rule that favors cis-gender people, where cis- is a prefix that means the same.  In this case, one’s sexual identity matches one’s gender identity.

In simple terms, I think that there are always some restrictions for how men and women can look and interact.  It’s all about forcing people to conform, since people became more packed together in cities since the industrial revolution.  Currently, men are expected to have one mode of dress with shorter hair, and women are expected to have a different mode with longer or styled hair.  There may have been a push by anti-gay forces in the 1950’s. Men are encouraged to have engineering skills, while women have social skills. 

Even after years of cultural erosion, men and when tend to stay in their cultural boxes, as they cautiously experiment with new forms of male-female equality.

I have found that my life works best if I live as a woman.  My social skills have been constantly improving.  I have not become effeminate or emasculated, and no voices are ever raised about how I am supposed to act.  Still, I live totally outside cultural standards.  I have been accused of turning women into lesbians.  Converting a cis-woman to a different orientation is beyond any of my abilities.

There is a lot of talk about equality.  I don’t see a broad-based plan for equality for men and women, especially in love relationships.  In terms of subconscious habitual patterns, people need to change themselves first, before tackling the world.  True changes take a long time.

Equality has been mostly about equal opportunities for pay and privileges for women in the workplace.  Then there are all the annoying ways that male institutions put women down, and blame women for being women or getting raped.  Progress in this area is slow, but I think that a reluctance to train boys in proper manners and social skills has a lot to do with it.  If men exhibit sophomoric attitudes toward women, I see it as a lack of respect for women.  I don’t see any plan to repair both men and women together.

2. The rule of Selection

This dating rule also favors cis-gender people, but it is bad news for me.  Women are the ones who select the men.  They want a man to look like a man, with predictable male skills, bad though they may be.  This has always left me out, regardless how I might be dressed. In dating scripts, women want to evaluate a man as a sex partner by his appearance and demeanor, in relation to roles of conformity that are reinforced in literature, in advertising, and in televisions and movies.  I can’t be judged this way, since my Asperger personality makes it difficult for women to read me, so I’m not in the running.

There is no equality in dating.  Women can go to salons and get thoroughly dolled up.  There are salons that advertise the ability to turn nearly anyone into a beautiful woman, regardless of their sex.  Salon perfection does not seem very real.

I see beauty enhancements as a form of cheating to get a relationship.  Wanting to be attractive is natural, but our cultural promotes this way over-the-top.  Men naturally want to have sex, but they learn to pursue women as sex objects, as if seduction were a social skill.  This seems like a lop-sided pursuit, since women often say they don’t think about sex much, when polled.  However, women do not have to think about sex, because they can charm their choice of a man for sex.  In reality, women are just as interested in sex as men while evaluating a partner.

For much dating, sex is the object for both parties.  It can jump-start a relationship without all the worries about suitability and compatibility.  My Carolyn never made me go through any dating protocols, since she had already picked me.  I was excited about finally having sex, and Carolyn was happy about finally having me in her fold.  However, there was a weakness in this scheme, since now that we were lovers, I could hardly do anything wrong that would end the relationship.  Carolyn had become far more trapped than I.

I was in a Facebook group for a while about life with a narcissist, as I compared my experiences with my stepson, who worked hard to sabotage my marriage.  Women were often trying to end a relationship with a husband who was a narcissist.  Narcissists are good at lying and using people, but the worst decision women could make was to be conned into having sex again, which would lead to a resurgence of all the pain.

In Buddhism, the focus has been on habitual patterns.  One of the goals of my meditation practice has been to modify my obsessive and problematical habitual patterns.  I thought good relationship skills would enable me to bypass rules 1 and 2 above and still attract a partner.  This was an error on my part.  Good male social skills do not make me more attractive.  Perhaps they just make me sound weird.

To be honest, I have not met all women.  I have only met women on online dating sites, where the first two rules are in full force.  My therapist has told me that several kinds of women professionals might find me attractive, but I have no way of meeting such women, since they are not on dating sites.

I have also offered women a life of equality, though my experience with equality has only been what I gave my wife, when I decided to give up being a controlling husband.  I have examined many feminist organizations and found little support for transgender people or men’s rights.  While the original feminists promised that men would be judged on their own merits, this never happened.  I see a lot of feminist women campaign for equal rights in public forums, but they often don’t seem to pick men based on equality.

3. Rule of Territory

Both men and women have territories in their relationships.  People use territories to fit in to the world, but having a territory can limit one’s freedom of expression.  Territory is strongly related to ego, a heightened sense of self importance.  Even though women are often treated as second-class citizens, they can cling to their cultural territories, since these are a means of gaining some power in a world ruled by men.  Couples often argue about the boundaries of their territories.  I think unequal territories can create problems in a relationship.  By equality, I mean a kind of sharing that goes both ways.

I have experienced territorial conflicts from women.  Even though women are fairly free to crossdress as they choose, they are reluctant to extend the same privilege to men.  All sorts of cultural harassments have been devised to shame men who crossdress.  I heard comments that high heels are a special privilege reserved for women.  I took up crossdressing of my own volition, but I have come across many cases where wives encouraged their husbands to experiment with crossdressing, but panicked when the husbands became good at crossdressing.  In many cases, the husbands did not establish tit for tat, so their wives did not gain any more equality, which was probably what the wives wished for.  I am using a newer definition for tit for tat, where it implies reciprocated altruism.  I have personally spent years deleting bad skills and replacing them with improved skills.  This has included deleting anger management, fear, anxiety, and a need to maintain destructive territories in a relationship.

4. Rule of Beauty

I think we live in a society obsessed with beauty.  If the work of a salon is not good enough, there is always cosmetic surgery.  Many cis-gender women, as well as transgender women, have been observed using surgery to better fit a standard image.  For transgender women, such surgeries can include breast implants and reassignment surgery to turn a penis into a vagina. As a Buddhist, I think cosmetic surgeries are materialistic and I avoid them.

Transgender women use cosmetics to help them pass, but cis-gender men, such as politicians, lawyers, and other high profile occupations now regularly use cosmetics too.    

Many transgender women want to have a feminine face, but often cosmetics are not enough.  This is where facial feminization surgery (FFS) can be useful.  Being good-looking can be more advantageous than being plain. As explained by my therapist, FFS surgeons no longer offer minor facial adjustments, because the wives of transgender husbands often have the husbands cancel the surgeries out of fear.

I think male and female beauty are approximately the same.  A handsome man can be made up like a beautiful woman, and vice versa.  Being more handsome can mean better jobs and promotions in the workplace for a man, even if the FFS is intended to enhance passing as a woman.

Women’s beauty is exploited in the media.  Scantily-clad women are exhibited everywhere in advertising.  While women might feel the need for short term cosmetic enhancements and the salon look, I think it is ultimately demeaning.  Terms like airhead or bimbo often serve to treat women like second class citizens.   Men are not usually treated this way, so I think this is pure sexism.

The Geena Davis Institute

Geena Davis founded an institute for improving women’s live. I spoke to her a few years ago.  When I mentioned that I was having problems as a transgender person, all she could say was, “I’m hoping things will improve soon.”  As the head of a feminist organization, her focus was entirely on women¹, exclusive of the many others who are disenfranchised in our society.  In particular, she discussed the 19% rule, which is a measure how women’s participation can be limited to 19%.  This seems to hold in corporate America, as extras in movies, in politics, and so forth.

She also discussed the 700 year² timeline for women to gain total equality.  The website article garbled her presentation.  It is not just about children, but about women everywhere.

I think the 700 year prediction is a valid estimate.  I base this on Buddhist teachings habitual patterns.  The conscious mind is no match for the deeply seated, instinctive patterns of one’s subconscious.  Changing habitual patterns can require years of meditation and contemplation.  People have to change themselves before changing the world.  Partially changing our habits can quickly reduce to no changes at all.

References

1. Geena Davis Institute

https://seejane.org/research-informs-empowers/

2. The 700 year predictions

https://www.looktothestars.org/news/13399-geena-davis-warns-700-years-needed-to-reach-gender-parity-in-kids-media