Hey, im 20M. I have only dated and thought abt dating women. I only get turned on by women. However, I like dressing up like a girl, sometimes. Sometimes, ill throw on thigh highs and wear an oversized sweater when im home alone. Im just so confused about this. I have never felt an urge to date men… so why exactly do I do these things? I feel so confused, and I have been this way for years. Up until last year I never dressed or experimented being more “girly”. I do this all in the privacy of my bedroom, never outside of it.
Thanks for reading
I think @southsamurai@sh.itjust.works pretty much hit the nail on the head, but just to sort of reiterate
Wearing “women’s” clothes (I always liked the Suzy/Eddie Izzard quote “They’re not women’s clothes, they’re my clothes. I bought them”) doesn’t necessarily make you gay or trans or anything, it just means you’re wearing women’s clothes.
If you’re comfortable identifying as a man, and you’re attracted to women, all that means is you’re a straight male cross-dresser or “transvestite” (I believe some people find the term transvestite offensive, others have no problem at all with it. I’m not a cross-dresser myself so I won’t weigh in on that debate) or perhaps a femboy. It could be that you just like wearing women’s clothing and there’s not much more to it than that. It could be some sort of kink/fetish thing, it could just be that you find it comfortable or feel cute, or maybe you just think it’s fun and silly.
And you could probably go down some pretty deep rabbit holes trying to unpack why you like it. There’s probably as many reasons for it as there are people who enjoy cross-dressing. But unless it’s really causing you severe emotional distress not knowing, you can always just take a page from Popeye the Sailor and say “I yam what I yam an’ that’s all that I yam”
Or it could be that you have some sort of gender dysphoria, and this is your way of working it out and coming to terms with that. In which case you might figure out at some point that you identify as a woman or some flavor of non-binary.
But at the end of the day, clothes are just clothes, and the person wearing them is just a person. I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung-up about putting labels on things, go ahead and try some different labels out for yourself, maybe you’ll find something that sticks, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.