I have tried to detail—here and elsewhere (137, 147) —the nature of this specific trauma (attempted feminization by older, powerful females) by reporting case material showing the contributions made by mothers
(and their substitutes) and fathers in helping create a transvestite. These data suggest that in fetishistic crossdressing the denied threat of castration and the phallic women imagined are based on historical reality. In these patients, it really did happen that the boy was threatened with loss of masculinity and humiliated by females more powerful than he, not just in some general way, but very precisely by being put into women’s clothes. (Although without evidence to prove it, I suspect that the cross-dressing of a little boy is deeply traumatic only if he was already damaged in the years of development before the first overt humiliation. There must also be little boys who, after being cross-dressed by a girl or woman, simply are not susceptible enough to that sort of victimization to take it seriously.)
Just where are we to find the supposed triumph that preserves the transvestite’s potency? It cannot come simply from reliving a trauma. How, if the trauma is recapitulated in the perversion, does pleasure replace anguish? I presume, as with other episodes of mastery, that it comes from such sources as finding that one has actually, over and over, survived the trauma, or from the infinite uses to which repression and denial can be put. More specifically, however, the following are suggested: (1) Conversion of a sense of being damaged and inferior into exhibitionistic fantasies (“See what a lovely woman I make”). (2) “Self-realization,” the gradual self-conscious creation of a fully evolved “feminine” role: some transvestites learn to act so much like women that they can pass as such undetected publicly.
More important: (3) Fantasies (conscious, preconscious, and unconscious) of revenge against women, which create an exultant sense of redressing the balance. (4) Identifying in the pornography and other fantasy life not only with the humiliated male but with the masterful aggressor, the phallic woman.
The victim becomes victor. The little boy was humbled, but there—now—presides the adult pervert, dressed in the women’s clothes. These garments, formerly the agent of trauma, now delight him—strong, full of anticipation, powerfully potent, intact, penis and self gathered up in full strength, competent for orgasm. How better to prove he is triumphant than to be potent in the presence of the original trauma? He has his revenge. The women, so mysteriously powerful in childhood, while not reduced in strength, are not able to overpower him; he proves it every time he puts on their clothes. On each occasion his penis demonstrates that they have failed: he has successfully defended himself and thus frustrated them.
But unfortunately, he has to repeat endlessly, for somehow he knows the perversion is only a construction, a fantasy; it can never truly prove that he has won. It does so only for the moment, and each time in his life that circumstances arise to echo the original traumatic situation, he can placate his anxiety only in repeating the perverse act whose function is to tell him again that he is intact and a victor.
An essential quality in pornography (and perversion) is sadism—revenge for a passively experienced trauma. I am not only referring to well-known revenge fantasies and sexual acts found also in nontransvestite men, such as those of poisoning or humiliating one's partner with ejaculate or of physical damage to someone by one’s phallic onslaught. I suppose these are at times present in transvestites, but, additionally and more important, the transvestite revenges himself just by being able to get an erection. That is, he succeeds with a woman when he was supposed to have failed. Even more triumphantly, he succeeds at exactly that moment that should be the moment of greatest failure, when he is dressed as a woman and should be humiliated. Of course, one crucial fact sustains him when he is so dressed: his constant awareness that he has a penis under the woman’s clothes, which makes him, too, a phallic woman. Freud and most analysts since believe the fantasy of a woman with a phallus is always an invention a boy (man) finds necessary to deny that the awfulness that is castration could happen to him. In this theory, females are fundamentally— anatomically—inferior unless given a prosthesis. I think this is not always or only the case. When men in fantasy give women a phallus, they may do so to deny not women’s inferiority but female superiority; it replaces for males a fear of the mystery of female generative capacity—inner hidden power, as in procreation or life-and-death omnipotence over their infant—with the familiar, a penis. Later (chaps. 6 and 8) we shall return to this subject.
In the pornography, the moment of greatest anticipation of pleasure—the come-on illustration on the cover of the booklet—is just when the story describes how the victim is told by the powerful women that he must put on or has just been placed in women’s clothes. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the fantasy picks out the moment of greatest trauma for what is now its moment of greatest thrill. There is no more perfect triumph than to succeed after running the precise risks that had undone one in childhood. (There are similarities between this and other counterphobic triumphs, such as automobile racing, stage acting, parachute jumping, competition in sports, and so many other acutely anxiety-provoking situations of potential victory.)
Who is the victim in this transvestite fantasy? In the manifest daydream, it is the pictured transvestite-in-the-making with whom the observing transvestite consciously identifies. But additionally and unconsciously the victim is the pictured cruel phallic woman, for the transvestite, in the reality of his masturbation, is having the final victory over such a woman. Despite all she did to him in his childhood to ruin his masculinity, he has escaped her—though barely, and at the price of a severely compromised potency that can succeed only by means of perversion.
Yet he does win; he has survived. His penis is not only preserved; now, as he celebrates his sacrament, he feels himself no longer split but concentratedly unified in his sexual excitement.
He identifies with the aggressor and then (as may often be the case with the use of this mechanism) he believes (tries to believe) he is better than the aggressor: a better woman than any woman, for he possesses the best of both sexes. He is always aware of his masculinity (an essential part of transvestism), and he is aware of his femininity. He feels that, having been a man and living intermittently as a man, he has a keen eye for what is most to be appreciated in women, and being a “woman” permits him to put this into action. At a deeper level, he believes himself (is constantly working to make himself believe he is) a better woman than any woman because he is the only woman who surely has a penis. And now, identified with the powerful women, he is no longer the humiliated little boy; he no longer consciously experiences that part of him during the act of perversion. It exists overtly only in the script. He has found a way to be the sadist, expressing that satisfaction by saying he is not the depicted frightened boy-man of the story. In splitting his identification into victim and victor, he is able to satisfy, as it were, two different people inside himself.
Yet transvestites are, in the great majority, overtly heterosexual and yearn for heterosexuality, having to work against an unconscious pull toward identification with women. Considering intimacy with a living woman to be desirable but dangerous, they substitute her inert clothes for her living skin. Note these descriptions of women’s clothes taken from the booklet: “The straps were milky-way white; the sheer fabric was bewitching”; “pure silk”; “pure satin”; “panties virginal white in color”; “skin tight”; “transparent green, like sea foam”; “cool, silky-soft, sensuously intimate”; “filmy”; “smoothly formed”; “blushing pink”; “delicately molded”; “transparent net-like soft silk,” and so forth for many pages.