Amy Bloom - Normal

“I love him,” she tells me later. “I love him, but I don’t want a man who is excited by the idea of being a woman. We have two kids, he’s a great dad, a good provider, but I want a man who’s comfortable with masculinity. I don’t want to be sisters … or lesbians. If I wanted a woman, I would have found one by now. But … there’s all the other things that are good.” And he tells me later, with great sadness, “She is the most supportive person in the world, and this is a terrible thing for her. We work on it, we struggle.” He stops and gathers his defenses; throughout the cruise he will condescend to the men with femme names, the men who insist on hours of makeup, because he sees himself as “evolved,” free of the trappings and compulsions of crossdressing. “All couples struggle, they fight about money, about sex. You can’t tell me they don’t. This is no different.” He looks out at the ocean. “This is different, I know, but I refuse to let it ruin our lives.”

At dinner I am seated at a table anchored by Peggy and Melanie (as Mel calls himself when en femme), in nearly matching vibrant floral prints. To my right are Tory’s aunt and cousin, who speak almost no English, and next to them is a very attractive woman, Lori, a Lee Remick look-alike, husband nowhere in sight. To my left are Felicity and his wife. Felicity is a large, hunched man, made up in a conventional, slightly stiff manner. He looks like a librarian, or perhaps the strong-minded wife of a minister, and he is, in the rest of the world, a Southern Baptist minister from the very buckle of the Bible Belt.

“So, you’re the writer. Well, I’d say you pass pretty well,” Felicity tells me. I smile pleasantly, as if I am not offended, as if I didn’t think he intended to offend me. “Well,” he says heartily, and then he clears his throat twice and stares at my silk pants. “You gals just get to crossdress all the time and no one says boo.” He sounds furious that life is so easy for me and so hard for him, but because he is a minister, and even more because he is dressed as and representing someone named Felicity, he cannot be direct or angry; he has to try to convey a serene and gracious femininity regardless of his feelings and the oddness of the setting, which is as hard for him to do as it would be for me. And his wife is beside herself, tight-lipped, hands clasped; she is a Christian woman doing what she must, and as much as she might wish it otherwise, what she cannot be is pleased.

On the other side of me is a man in his late sixties, recently retired as a senior partner in a white-shoe law firm in the Deep South. He looks great. He looks like a Neiman Marcus matron, right down to his Chanel slingbacks, and although he seems a bit out of place, it is only because the cruise is so downscale and there are twenty-year-old guys clumping around the casino in their NASCAR jackets, baseball caps, and hiking boots, as if a nice shirt and a pair of slacks would be way too much trouble.

At first I thought that the matronly look so common to straight crossdressers reflected some weird attachment to the mother, that the image they wished to present was that of their own first woman — hence the heavy foundation, the blue eyeshadow, the big pearl button earrings. I no longer think so. That same look is common among their wives, and among lots of middle-aged women not much interested in changing fashions.

Most crossdressers, and almost all married crossdressers, live lives in which they are not crossdressed. They don’t take female hormones, they usually don’t have electrolysis even if they would like to (many express the wish to wake up and find themselves without facial, arm, or leg hair, but their wives are opposed), and they are not regular readers of Elle, Vogue , or even Ladies’ Home Journal . They cannot easily put together a natural, believable female appearance. First, you need beard camouflage to flatten and disguise the stubble, then powder over that and foundation over that, and sweating is a big problem. (Jim Bridges, a transformation guide and guru, creator of the Bridges to Beauty 2000 and Hollywood Makeup Secrets videos, which are offered at his boutique in California and through his booming Internet business—“Can’t tell you who in the House of Representatives, can’t tell you who in the NFL,” he says to me while putting false eyelashes on a John Deere salesman at Fall Harvest — counsels a quick swipe of antiperspirant on the upper lip and at the hairline. Crossdressing is not only anxiety-provoking and arousing, it is also warm under the wig, the corset, the padding, the pantyhose.) You need the foundation for smoothness and for color, and by the time you add lipstick and a wig, if you’re a man you get that overdone crossdresser look, and if you’re a woman you get Joan Collins. A pronounced face requires pronounced makeup for balance, and after the false eyelashes and even the most subtle contouring of the wider jaw, the thick brow, one can look beautiful or ridiculous, but one cannot look like most of the women around.

My tablemates look like more attractive versions of the photos I’ve seen in the personals sections at the back of crossdresser magazines. I flipped through thirty issues of Transgender Tapestry and saw a lot of men who looked bad, like every joke and caricature of a crossdresser: the big shoulders, the jagged makeup, the prom dresses or JCPenney crushed-velvet tube dresses. Some looked mentally ill and possibly dangerous. I saw a few beautiful women, very often transsexual, as it turned out, but occasionally just crossdressers blessed with the right shape and the conventional proportions, narrow shoulders, small hands. And then there were always a dozen crossdressers who looked like pleasant, average women: librarians, daycare providers, schoolteachers, not staggering, not intense, not lovely, but perfectly ordinary, pantsuited, sensibly shod middle-aged women. I have met crossdressers whose presentation is just this side of Christina Aguilera, and I have met a fifty-year-old Midwestern engineer and a sixty-year-old born-again Christian CEO and a forty-year-old police captain, all of whom dress exactly as they would if they had been born to the distaff side, in clothes both contemporary and appropriate, whether Gap or Escada or Dress Barn. Anatomy may not be destiny, but it certainly lays a hand on our options.

Age is a great help to crossdressers. It is, for us all, the great androgynizer; the skin softens and sags, the secondary sex characteristics shrink and fade, slacken and thin. I have seen far more convincing crossdressers over sixty than under. Except for the guys whose height and build make it impossible for the world to construe them as female (and this is a problem for very tall and muscular women, as well), by sixty, crossdressing men have undergone the inevitable softening of the face and chest, the diminution of testosterone, and have enough practice and enough confidence to make very passable grandmothers of themselves. Not surprisingly, the amount of time that many crossdressers spend en femme triples after they retire. They can crossdress when they want, and many of them want to a lot.

There are twenty-five crossdressers among the four hundred or so male passengers aboard the Holiday , and this may represent roughly their proportion of the general population, but it’s impossible to say for sure. No one seems to have any reliable statistics about how many heterosexual crossdressers there are. I check with the International Foundation for Gender Education in Waltham, Massachusetts, which acts as switchboard, referral service, news agency, and educational center for both crossdressers and transsexuals, and with GenderPAC (Gender Public Advocacy Coalition), and with Dallas Denny of AEGIS (American Educational Gender Information Service), a longtime activist in the transsexual community, but none of them can tell me. “Too many guys in the closet,” a voice at the IFGE says. “How could anyone presume to count?”