skip to nav

Dear Elizabeth

I am doing something which I have only told one other person about before - I have a taste for wearing women's underwear and now dress regularly in them. I started putting on my mother's clothes and underwear when I was 10 and I have done it in secret at my house ever since.

A year ago, through the internet, I made friends with a woman in my home town and confessed my secret habits. She was sympathetic and I now visit her most weeks and dress as a French maid or a nurse. I do odd jobs for her and mend her car and the arrangement suits us both. But whenever I get back from seeing her (even though she is kind about it and we often laugh about it) I feel terrible shame. I vow I won't dress again but, sure enough, I end up calling round again and buying dresses and high heels on the internet in my spare time.

I know I am weird and a pervert for doing this. Although it is not about sex - I do not want to seduce my woman friend though I do sleep with women. I can't talk to anyone

ELIZABETH STARR on how a little cross-dressing never hurt anyone
about it apart from my friend, who does not take it seriously and says I shouldn't get worked up about it (her mother is lesbian and she is a healer so she is quite unconventional). At the time, my dressing gives me pleasure and excitement and a sense of danger, but afterwards I feel terrible shame and depression. Do you think I should stop? What is wrong with me?

Yours, Ashamed


Dear Ashamed

No, why should you stop? Not if going without makes you feel suffocated and frustrated! What are you doing wrong? You are dressing in women's clothes. Women dress in men's clothes all the time! True, you get a thrill from doing it which is, I sense, for you a kind of 'naughty', dangerous thrill. But people get their kicks in lots of different ways in the sexual arena - if, as you question, it is even sexual.

I wonder when this urge started for you? You say at the age of 10, but what was going on at the time? Were your parents getting