Maiden’s Journey

Best Shapewear for cross dressing  I have tried a lot of shapewear over the years. Partly out of curiosity if we’re being honest (which I always am here!). But also in an effort to feminise my body shape. If you’ve not read my other blogs, that’s because I’m a natural male who dreams of being female. I’m not (yet) brave enough to transition or be a proper MTF transgender, if I ever will be, so I suppose for now you’d call me a cross dresser. Whatever I am, I’m not the shape I wish to be, so is shapewear a solution to that? Obviously a padded bra has a very feminising effect on my top half. What works for hips and waist? In no particular order, I’ve had shaping knickers, a shapewear thong, control tights, a bodysuit, another one which is wear your own bra and has thigh slimmer legs, and lastly a control slip (wyob). So what shapewear works? Well, most importantly perhaps, they’re all the pretty good at flattening the groin area and hiding my unfortunate maleness. But enough ...

If you read my post First Steps, I was really experimenting with female dressing and had a collection of lingerie, skirts, leggings, a dress, even a swimsuit. Not that I had ever dared wear them in public or let anyone else see. It was my secret life. Maybe in a parallel universe, I would have taken the next steps, come out to someone and who knows, might be living as myself now. But that didn’t happen. I was moving to a new town and new job and I decided it was a new start. And one in which, I was going to be fully male. To “man up” as it were. So I threw everything away. All my pretty girl’s clothes. For a while, I did “being a man”. I had a girlfriend. She was a dancer. I started to wonder what it would be like to wear her leotard and leggings combos that she wore for classes. I wondered how I could broach the subject. As it turned out, we split up before I managed to find a way, for other reasons. I continued being “manly” Until one day I figured there wouldn’t be any...

Obviously not. But actually is it obvious? There are a lot of misconceptions about people like us Maidens. And truthfully, seeing as we’re amongst friends here, it’s something I struggled with myself for a long time. I wasn’t too sure who or what I was (as if I am now!?) and I grew up in an era where anything unconventional was “gay” and this was seen as a decidedly “Bad Thing”. Which it isn’t.  In fact, I should explain: it is not that I was worried about being gay, it’s that I feared being found out, stigmatised and bullied. Mind you, everyone thought I was anyway and I got plenty of stick at school. It continued in adult life too. In my first graduate job, I had been there a year or so and after a few (many!) drinks got together with one of the girls from the admin team who said to me “I’m really surprised we’re doing this, we all thought you were gay”. Which was an odd interruption to proceedings. Eventually, I realised that it didn’t matter anyway, and that the defi...

If you’ve read “In the beginning”, you’ll have an idea of my early realisations that my number one dream was to be a girl, but that I wasn’t one. Sad times 😢 And at the time, there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it anyway. By the time I was in my early twenties though, I had my own place and freedom to experiment. I still couldn’t “be a girl”, but I could at least dabble with “being like a girl”. The best way Of being like a girl that I could think of, was dressing like a girl. The first thing you do when getting dressed is underwear, so why not start there? Also, it’s the most different and purely feminine and intimate and I was (and still am) fascinated by lingerie. And, one can secretly wear it under male clothes and no one will know. I had tried out bras and knickers and tights and skirts and dresses in secret when I lived at home (sorry Mother!). Now it was my time to have my own things. Buying lingerie for the first time  And I wanted something special ...