Editrix Note: For the sixth year in a row, Kate Thomas was our guest speaker at the September Chi Epsilon Sigma meeting. Dr. Thomas has been a counselor and teacher in sexology for 27 years. This article has been prepared from notes taken during the presentation by Rachel Rene Boyd who is solely responsible for any errors or misinterpretations.
Gender expression and crossdressing behavior is found in a whole range of possibilities. Sometimes crossdressing behavior is described in discrete categories. For example, J. J. Allen describes four types of crossdressers and as many as 12 subtypes distributed within these categories. What I propose is that there are not discrete categories, but a continuum of gender expression. No one is exclusively one type of crossdresser or another, but may have some characteristics of several types, and may move from one part of the continuum to another.
The key questions remain: Why does crossdressing occur, and how do you know where you are on the continuum?
Clearly, there is some link between sexuality and gender. We can look at the relationship as having three related aspects:
These three are not always in alignment. A person can be one sex, and believe they are the opposite gender. Watson and Krick described the sex-related chromosomes XX and XY in 1954, and that become one way of determining sex. But that turned out to be only part of the equation as we learned there are intersexed people (formerly called hermaphrodites).
