‘En femme…’: a phenomenological-hermeneutic enquiry into the lived experience of crossdressing for adult male-born subjects in the United Kingdom

Crossdressing means wearing clothing, makeup and/or accessories not traditionally associated with the sex you were assigned at birth (Amnesty International, 2015). This study explores the lived experience of people who engage in crossdressing and how they make sense of it. Eight participants were recruited and interviewed face-to-face and online on Zoom, using a semi-structured, in-depth interview. The participants are adults who were assigned male at birth and are involved in regular crossdressing activities as part of their sexual or gender expression, or both, or they self-identify as crossdressers. The method for the study, which is grounded within an existential hermeneutical and phenomenological epistemology, is Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). In the findings, twelve themes were generated and structured in four super-ordinate themes: From expression to identity through time; Milestones in acceptance and ownership; Tension, anxiety and struggle; Aspects of being-in-the-world. For the participants, crossdressing has been a meaningful and particular way of being: a way of being gendered, a way of being sexual and a way of being with your body, yourself and others. For them, expressing crossdressing has been an existential change in condition, which comes with different levels of freedom, visibility, power, vulnerability, privileges and threats. For each participant, living their lives as crossdressers meant navigating a complex map of temporalities, spaces and people with different degrees of visibility, social acceptance and self-acceptance, which involve different strategies, behaviours and decisions to come out and be out, or to remain closeted. Overall, crossdressing emerged as a concept at the intersection of gender and sexuality, practice and identity, the personal and the political, the social and the private, the internal and the external, the visible and the hidden.