Be careful with dismissal

Many older transgender people (myself included) may have confused identity with fetish; at least for a time. When you grow up in an era where your desire to be yourself is made taboo to such an excessive point, it can become endowed with the idea that it is something to be hidden while at the same time taking on almost sacred overtones. The stolen moments one got during our formative years made these events so special that they could partly become charged with sexual energy which had been wholly absent during our exploration in early childhood prior to entering puberty.

Vultures like Ray Blanchard (with cultural stigma of their own) smelled blood in the water and swooped in for the kill with these types of tortured patients.

The confusion made some of us feel we needed to be cured when in fact we had simply tried to honor something deeply intrinsic to our nature. The fact that transgender youth are less likely to experience this is because their formation was far more devoid of taboos and they could explore who they were with less stigma thus leading them much sooner towards understanding core identity.

So while there are people who enjoy cross gender expression primarily for the playfulness and perhaps the sexual charge (which there is nothing wrong with), we need to be careful not to dismiss something potentially much deeper in ourselves simply because we have not completed a sufficient amount of introspection to rid ourselves of trauma.