A number of years ago, I wrote about Nicole, a friend of mine who gave up crossdressing/transitioning despite being the prettiest and most feminine t-girl I had ever met. This person decided that it was all a fraud, and he could satisfy all his needs as a beautifully feminine gay man – almost a yaoi character, if you will. (See my post Yowza Yaoi! for my take on this term, and Wikipedia for a more scholarly description.)

The reasons for his decision that the whole transgender experience for him was not authentic had to do with the way his treatment changed from one moment to the next at the hands of the same people, based solely on his gender presentation. (A wig coming off would be a relationship-changing moment, for example.) It seems their like or dislike, attraction or revulsion for him was based not on his genuine soul and personality but on the way he dressed and groomed himself and the efforts he made to transform his gender or not.

I am sure his own self-perception was similarly affected – and I say this out of personal experience.

It is hard to conceive that you are an entirely different person at different times. Oh, we all wear a bunch of hats in our lives, but that’s not quite the same as becoming a person with a different name, gender and perhaps alternate sexual proclivities.

Out in the world as a woman, I know that guys who hit on me are looking for a female (of a sort). I wonder what they would feel like if they met me in my male role after flirting shamelessly with me.

I also know that when I wore a wig, I simply cringed when I took it off and had to see myself looking like a drag queen getting ready for a show. I accepted myself as female, and I accepted myself as male, but I couldn’t get over the guy in makeup. It is hard for a thinking person to think that plopping a wig on top of that changes anything fundamental.

I had the same conundrum from the other side. I remember noting how attractive some tgirls could be – not just appearance but the whole image they projected – and then seeing them later as their male selves. How incredible to find someone so attractive one day, and then so unattractive the next, based only on their gender presentation!

Of course, we send out messages with the way we present ourselves. It is not unreasonable for others to expect a limited variability in these from one day to the next. In any event, unless and until you have an emotional investment in someone, seeing them in a decidedly different light than the dimly lit bar of the first encounter may be enough to change your feelings of attraction. Changes that are somewhat more fundamental than that will obviously and understandably alter attraction as well.