To experience what it’s like being a girl, a gay male friend of mine used to drape a tea-towel across his young head and flick the ends of it back over his shoulders in a simulation of long girlish hair.
During his childhood he wanted to be a girl, yet as an adult he draws the line at dressing up as a woman, because it’s just too close to the bone.
My partner Gavin Harte, however, is taking the courageous step, and as we near Transformations – the Phibsboro shop that changes men into women – I can sense that he’s getting nervous.
“Oh, won’t he look lovely done up!” exclaim the four friendly ladies who welcome us inside, delighted by Gavin’s large features. Their smart black and white uniforms bestow an old-fashioned professionalism, and Gavin starts to visibly relax.
I stare around in fascination. On sale are large lacy undergarments, skirts, dresses, huge high heel shoes, and other transmogrifying products – including feminine bottom, hip and thigh creams. My God! I suddenly think. This is actually happening! I’ve known lots of men to dress up in drag, but to have my own sexual partner, the large tall man in whose arms I sleep every night, donning a dress and make-up – Jesus Christ! Will I be shocked? Delighted? Dismayed? Turned on?
Upstairs, the decor is soft and pink. Thick wall-to-wall carpeting absorbs any loud noises; there’s an atmosphere of quiet hush as photographer Mick Quinn and I are ushered into a cosy kitchen. Here we’ll sweat it out, until Gavin emerges like a butterfly from his cocoon of feminisation.
HEADMISTRESS
Phase one is complete. From a menu of 20 choices – including “Dressed To Thrill”, “Baywatch Babe” and “Sexy & Yes Very Tarty” – Gavin has chosen “Just For You”, which means that he can pick whatever mix-and-match outfit most catches his eye. My first reaction as I see his 6’3” frame duck under the door in a bright red calf-length skirt and tight black top with boobs is how weird he looks only half done! He looks almost naked without accompanying make-up and hair.
Getting over the initial weirdness, I run my hands across his silicon breasts, amazed at how lifelike they feel. I look down at his feet, triangular-shaped in their black stilettos, and run my eyes up his stockinged ankles and legs. I don’t know what I feel.
I’m standing on shifting ground as an expert beautician starts to work on my lover’s face. Under a layer of “Miracle” foundation his beard shadow completely disappears. Next his cheekbones rise up, rosy in the light, while his eyes, eyebrows and lips get lustrous and coquettish under pencil and brush. Almost tranced by the scent of cosmetics and the beautician’s hypnotic voice, I stare as through a fog at Gavin as the pièce de resistance – a silky brunette wig – gets fitted over his large cranium.
Now the metamorphosis is truly complete. Looking rather ungainly – he’s no Dana International – Gavin stands up and walks around, reminding me of a boarding school headmistress.
For someone who strives for an open mind, I’m surprised that I feel so shocked. I can’t take my eyes off Gavin – I’m seeing someone I know so well in a way that I had never before imagined. Mick the photographer wisely suggests larger breasts (the best in their huge range are £400 a pair). “Come on,” he says coaxingly, “make love to the camera,” and Gavin’s somewhat awkward posture loosens up a bit. My confusion, however, does not. I’m beginning to realise that what I feel has nothing to do with moral outrage, or ridicule, or contempt, or even confusion over what Gavin means to me in this new light. Despite all the work, he doesn’t look like a woman.
Though Gavin doesn’t quite look like a woman, he doesn’t look wholly man anymore either. His identity has been transformed, and yet this whole experience is making me question my own sexual identity much more than his. Transvestites have never phased me before – after all, why should they? – but seeing my own partner dressed as a woman has made me realise how much of my sexual identity is formed by saying, “I am what he is not.”
Some psychologists believe that a baby gets its first and most important sense of self when it knows whether it’s a boy or girl. That may be a myth, but right now, certainly, my deepest and oldest sense of self is being questioned. The defining barriers that are so carefully maintained between the sexes have become flimsy and hollow. The trick, I tell myself, is to embrace this as a liberation: a chance to learn how to deepen my sense of personal security, and not let it be eroded by events that are beyond my control.
I’m no sooner sorted on that particular point, when I realise that Gavin actually looks like he could be my big sister – now that’s really strange . . .
HETEROSEXUAL
In a society where the only men allowed to wear dresses are priests, metamorphosis can be a deep release. It seems that patriarchy’s trade-off for men’s superior economic power is severe curtailment in other areas; after all, most women cross-dress every day, and nobody bats an eyelid (though there was loud indignation when women first began wearing trousers at the end of the last century).
“It’s quite an amazing thing to see,” says Angela Hellewell, Transformation’s manager. “A man enters the shop in his male role, and then this creative, feminine side of his personality evolves before your very eyes. Suddenly he’s looking at himself in the mirror, and it’s like meeting his alter-ego. All these years he’s known that this other person exists in his life, and he’s never seen her before.
“Some of the guys actually say ‘Hi Jackie’, or whatever name they’ve given themselves, because they like to adopt a feminine persona to every degree. And I’ve seen guys almost reduced to tears, because it’s such an emotional experience if this is something they’ve had to repress for years, if they’ve never been able to tell anyone, and never had the privacy and security to express themselves in this discreet way.”
For £85 up, a man can avail of a “changeaway” similar to Gavin’s, including a choice of extras such as “hourglass figure-shaping corsets” or “go braless bouncing breasts”. Then they can hang around the pleasant sitting room reading magazines, watching videos, chatting, or simply savouring a few private hours of femininity. Some guys enjoy metamorphosis for sexual reasons, though for most, according to Angela, the experience is more emotional than sexual.
“They realise that this feeling that they’ve had all these years, it’s not illegal, it’s not immoral; they’re not child-molesters, they’re not perverts, they’re just very ordinary guys. There are thousands of guys like them out there, and that’s very reassuring. We’ve got a very successful chain of shops, and we wouldn’t have that if there wasn’t a need for this in society.
“They reckon that 50 per cent of guys want to do this, but no one will ever know, because lots of guys for whatever reasons will never come forward and admit that they have this inclination.”
Angela believes that a shop like Transformations has a profoundly healing effect on the lives of men who have nowhere else to express an important part of themselves.
“It gets the balance back in their lives,” she says. “They can then function as normal heterosexual men. (According to Angela, gay men only make up 5 per cent of Transformations’ customers.) Most of these guys would not want to live their lives most of the time as women, but they have to have this feeling of release. It makes them feel relaxed and at ease. These guys come in here and it de-stresses them, it gets things into perspective in their lives, and it makes them feel like complete people.”
One of the biggest worries for men who like to cross-dress is that their wives or girlfriends will be judgmental, derisive or upset if they find out.
“But we’ve had guys that have brought their girlfriends and wives in, and they’ve actually helped them choose outfits or breast sizes, and they obviously have very close, loving, caring, understanding relationships. Also, this really transcends every strata of society, every socio-economic group. We have unemployed people, we have captains of industry, we have a lot of professional people. There are so many people out there who would love to do it, if only they had the courage.”

• For information and appointments contact Transformations at (01) 8304747. Their premises are located at 189 Phibsboro Road, Dublin.

“No one would’ve been turned on by me”
“I think it’s a dream-making shop,” says Gavin, who has experienced wearing women’s clothes before as a performer on stage, and one other time, when for a laugh he and a friend went out in drag.
“The clothing was more or less picked for me, because I didn’t really know what to put on. I was looking at classical long dresses, but unfortunately my pot belly was going to show me up, and that’s one of the problems I think when men try to become women – our body shape is completely different! Then you have to put your dick into a little holster and have it elasticised down back between your legs in order to remove – what’s it called? – the ‘male bulge’.
“It wasn’t until the make-up started going on that I got a sense of what could be done. The way my skin colour changed – it was suddenly like wearing a mask.
“I didn’t have any repressed desire to do this for me, it wasn’t like I suddenly considered myself Jackie or Anne or Mary. I was still Gavin, in women’s clothing. And after the photos were taken I was starting to feel a little bit silly – I had no real desire to go swanning around and express a woman’s emotions, or femininity. Once I’d been through the experience, I wanted to change back into my normal clothes again.
“I could understand how a man might want to wear women’s clothing, and perhaps feel that they represent his character better, and get a sense of comfort by actually doing that. Clothes are hilarious things – people make an awful lot of effort with them, and they can define the kind of person you are. And I can understand the feeling of wanting to wear a dress, or to play with that persona by your external accoutrements, so that you can be a different person.
“Everyone knows the feeling of going out to a fancy dress – people experience the sensation of a new personality, and it’s an ability to be and act something different. And that’s as old as time, and I’m sure that the feeling of a cross-dresser must be similar to that, the ability to be somebody else, to act and play and have fun.
“Powerful men who have powerful positions in society wear expensive, powerful-looking suits, but that’s as far as their expression will go. And maybe that is very true as to the whole hiding of men’s emotions; the fact that men can be so flat in their emotional expression could be represented in their flat external dressing of themselves. And perhaps if men were able to free up their emotional self, or their more complex multi-faceted self, then external dressing would reflect that.”
Do you think it might also work the other way? That if men wore a greater variety of clothes, they’d find emotional expression easier?
“Yeah, they are both linked. From the outside in, and the inside out.”
Would you like to have the freedom to go out and buy skirts and dresses?
“I don’t feel any mad desire to, no. So tomorrow, if half the men on O’Connell Street were wearing dresses, maybe just to keep up with fashion I might go out and buy a dress, but not to make a statement.”
What about the lingerie – did you find it a turn on?
“Well Jesus, you should’ve seen me in it. No one would’ve been turned on by me. I wouldn’t go out with myself. The constrained flesh! The whole purpose of the lingerie for cross-dressers as far as I can see is to pack them into some sort of feminine shape, because they’ve let themselves get so badly out of shape, as men tend to do.
What were your lasting impressions?
“I think the one strong feeling I got was when I got back into my own clothes. I’d had enough of it; I wanted to get changed back. I was uncomfortable with people coming in staring at me, because I didn’t really feel that this was part of me. But that was more because I hadn’t had the confidence to pick out what I really wanted – I know that if I was feeling well-dressed up, and really groovy, I wouldn’t have had a problem. Also, the ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’ was a glove that didn’t fit me. So there was a sense of comfort in returning to Gavin.
“One thing I’ve discovered is that I’m not a cross-dresser. But I can also see the fun in it, and I think we should be a little bit less judging on people who just want to do a very harmless thing – dressing up and having a bit of fun. There should be more room for people to do that.”
• Transvestite Helpline: Dublin (01) 671 0939, Thurs. evenings 7 - 10pm.