Now that Christmas is around the corner and New Year’s Eve is breathing down its neck, it is time for a recap of the last 12 months of crossdressing. It has been an eventful year, in which new chapters have been opened and others have been closed, never to be looked at again.

For the sake of whoever decides to read this, I decided to divide this story into the three parts that, I think, best portray the different aspects of crossdressing: the physical aspect, the clothing aspect and the mental aspect.

The Physical Aspect

Whether it be dresses, skirts, skinny-jeans or blazers, all women’s clothing has a symbiotic relationship with a feminine body: well-fitting clothes accentuate the female body shape and a feminine shape makes the most of that cute dress you own. There are, of course, countless overall female body shapes, which plays into the hands of a crossdresser. As there will always be women you share some physical characteristics with, there will always be clothes that suit your body type.

The vast variety of male and female body shapes however, doesn’t mean that you can’t differentiate between the two, which, for me, made crossdressing hard: if I wear women’s clothes, I want them to cover up a feminine body, which meant that, in the past year, I started experimenting with ways to make my body look more feminine. My experiments were mainly focused on two area’s: the hourglass figure and breasts.

The Hourglass Figure

Let’s start off with the hard one: the hourglass figure. To me, nothing says ‘feminine’ more than having hips that are -significantly- wider than your waist. This positive hip:waist ratio can be achieved by a crossdresser in two ways: making your waist narrower or making your hips wider. I experimented with both.

Making my waist narrower seemed to be the obvious first choice, as there are products on the market whose sole purpose is creating -the illusion of- a tiny waist: the corset. I bought one and started experimenting with it, which lead to mixed results.

As you can see, my corset has quite a profound effect on my body shape: my waist is narrower and even my entire stance changed, so that my proportions look to be more feminine. Sounds pretty good, right? Wrong, because wearing a corset is not comfortable in any way. Looking feminine is nice, but being able to sit down outweighs the visual advantages of wearing a corset.

So, onto my next experiment: making my hips wider, so that I still have the positive hips:waist-ratio I am looking for. A bit of internet research learned me that looking for products that achieve this goal doesn’t take much effort either: there is plenty of padded underwear around and the rich folks among us can go totally berserk and order silicone hip padding that costs a small fortune. I don’t own a small fortune, so I decided to try to make my own hip padding:

I was reasonably pleased with the result. I now had some hips ánd I was able to sit down. What more can you wish for? Well, something that doesn’t involve the hassle of putting on my own hip pads.

So if neither corsets nor hip pads are the solution to creating an hourglass figure, then what is? The answer is pretty simple: screw that hourglass figure. During my experiments, I realised that having an hourglass figure doesn’t add anything to my crossdressing experience. When I crossdress, I am not after trying to ‘pass’ (‘passing’ means being mistaken for a biological female) and I don’t spend my time staring at myself in the mirror, so why even bother?

My biggest realisation involved the term ‘femininity’ though. As I said before, I do like to look somewhat feminine when I crossdress. During my experiments however, it daunted on me that femininity isn’t something that is related to your body shape. If women of all shapes and sizes can look feminine, than why can’t I look feminine without altering my body’s proportions? I can, and that is exactly what I started doing. I stopped trying to chase what I perceived to be a feminine body and started to let the amount of femininity I portray when crossdressing depend on the clothes I wear:

Breasts (beware: if talking about breasts is taboo for you, you might want to skip this)

If my body shape doesn’t add anything to my crossdressing experience, then surely breasts don’t either, right? Nah, that would be too easy, and where’s the fun in that? For some reason, having breasts while crossdressing feels better than not having breasts. Why? I don’t know, I guess I just like boobs.

Like my hip pads, my breasts used to be homemade contraptions. I experimented with nylons filled with birdseed (a method a lot of crossdressers use), balloons and water balloons until I found out what worked best: condoms filled with hairgel. Condoms, because, unlike water balloons, they are designed not to pop and hairgel, because it sloshes around less than water.

Condoms aren’t shaped like breasts though, which meant I could only wear heavily padded bra’s to squish them into shape. To make matters worse, I found out the hard way that hairgel seems to slowly dissolve condoms until, inevitably, they pop. All in all not exactly ideal, which is why I started looking for other ways to fake having breasts.

Thanks to the wonderful world of the interwebs, it soon became clear that what I was looking for was readily available: silicone breast forms. I gathered all my courage and went to a shop selling fetish-related paraphernalia, because breast forms are quite expensive and I wanted to see them in real life before paying top dollar for them. I was sold on them immediately, and bought a pair:

Now that I didn’t have to worry about creating my own breasts, I could start thinking about them less. I started realising that, by thinking and reading about breasts a lot in order to create the perfect pair myself, I had developed a bit of an obsession for them. This, perhaps, was the reason that I bought breast forms of which I now think that they are a tad too large. Shopping became somewhat more difficult in the sense that the cute flowery dress I showed you above, is too tight when I wear my breast forms. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, because crossdresser have one huge advantage over biological women: our breasts are detachable. If I feel like having big breasts, I wear my breast forms, if I dont, I just wear a padded bra with a small cup size:

The clothing aspect

Entering the world of women’s clothes as a man is a hard thing to do. All colors have names you didn’t even know existed, sizes seem to depend on what store you go to and when you think you ordered a dress with a nice pattern, you receive something that looks like a 1960’s curtain, made by a one-armed blind guy into a shape that is best described as ‘it-could-be-a-dress-but-it-could-as-well-be-a-giant-oven mitt’.

What do you do when you don’t even know where to start? You cheat, and so did I. I opened my eyes to the world around me and started paying attention to what women actually wear. You can see my progress in the pictures I showed you above (note that ‘early 2014’ and ‘late 2014’ in the descriptions).

My realisation of what femininity is (or what it means to me at least) also caused a shift in my clothing change. Where I used to pick out clothes that where as feminine as possible in my eyes, I gradually started to develop a taste for what women actually wear. This is perhaps best illustrated by my choice in shoes:

Another major change in the clothing aspect, is the fact that I started shopping in brick and mortar stores. It enables me to buy clothes that actually fit properly.

The mental aspect

I actually described the mental aspect and the changes that occurred therein in the previous parts of this story. Perhaps a recap of the mental aspects in the rest of my not-so-short recap isn’t a bad idea though:

I stopped altering my body shape when I crossdress

I no longer see my body shape as a vital part of the femininity that I’m after when I crossdress

I still use breast forms, because I have accepted that, for whatever reason that may be, I like them

I started opening my eyes and looking around for fashion tips

I made a huge step by working up the courage to start shopping in real stores

There is, however, a mental aspect I havent touched upon in this story before and that is what crossdressing means to me. A year ago, I already knew that crossdressing once or twice a week made me feel better overall, even though I had no idea why that was. Back then however, I pretty much hated the fact that I was a crossdresser and I felt embarrassed by it. Nobody I knew in real life knew about my crossdressing and the people online that knew about my crossdressing, didn’t know who I was in real life.

That has since changed. There are several people that know both who I am in day-to-day life and about my crossdressing. Granted, I never met this people face to face, which is why it is a good thing that 2015 is right around the corner:)