Recently, I’ve made a few posts about Bryan Noem’s recent controversy, where it was revealed that he was paying sex workers a pretty penny to engage in his bimbofication crossdressing fetish. To many people, this seemed like a contradiction, but as a trans woman and former sex worker, it was pretty predictable. Through my life, I’ve known many men like him, and in my videos, and in this post and others, I’ve openly discussed my interactions with conservative men who crossdress and the way that misogyny often intersects with their fetish and their bigotry. To many people, these things feel like a contradiction, but to me, it feels like a continuation of the same thread. Oftentimes, I’ve come online to speak about an underground that many people seem unaware of: the commonality of crossdressing among men who identify as heterosexual and conservative. However, I’m not always great at reiterating certain points about crossdressing, which is largely why I’m making this post.

I have occasionally been accused of being bigoted towards crossdressers, and I will admit that I do indeed have a bit of a bias. Crossdressing on its own is rather inoffensive to me. Many of the men who do it just want to find a space for them to do so freely. I have been a BDSM community organizer in the Los Angeles area for many years now. I’ve known many crossdressers and called many my friends. Not all crossdressers live in shame or get a sexual kick from the idea of degrading themselves through feminine dress.

Crossdressing has many nuances for those who consider wearing women’s clothing “cross-dressing.” The term itself can be rather controversial. How does one crossdress if clothing isn’t gendered? For those of us who are less invested in the gender binary, the idea of crossdressing may be offensive on its face. However, for all of the queer theory debate we have around the use of these terms, “crossdressing” is still the term many men will use when they have a special interest in wearing women’s clothing, as a man. Crossdressing isn’t something I’m personally interested in, but I’m also not personally interested in pet play or tickling. That doesn’t mean the people who engage in those things are uniquely bad, and I don’t want to really give people the impression that this is how I feel. Many men enjoy crossdressing and, frankly, that is something I don’t have any emotions about. Where something like race play, for me, has a particularly universally upsetting impact on me, crossdressing doesn’t remotely inspire the same emotions within me. That said, my bias comes from the fact that being a black trans woman navigating the online dating space within mostly white conservative towns has put me in direct contact with many men like Bryan Noem. Men who are deeply conservative, deeply bigoted, often anti-black, and almost explicitly getting off on being dishonest. Men who are deeply steeped in misogyny.

Society is very wrapped up in the idea of policing gender, and that is sometimes twisted into a kink by the people who have the most to benefit from that policing. When you look at Bryan and Kristi Noem, they have an idyllic family. They’ve been married for 34 years and have three children together. They even had a dog at some point, but… never mind that. They’re Evangelical Christians attending the Foursquare Family Worship Center, which outlines its attitudes towards the LGBT community here. Those familiar with Kristi Noem’s politics will be unsurprised by the church’s ideology’s bigotry. Former DHS leader, Kristi Noem, has been an outspoken opponent of gender affirming care and has signed quite a few pieces of legislation limiting the rights and freedoms of transgender individuals. So when it was revealed that her husband had a crossdressing kink, many people called Bryon Noem a hypocrite. The point being, of course, that Bryon Noem may have something in common with a transgender woman.

There has been a lot of discourse about whether or not Bryon Noem is transgender, but here’s what we know:

Bryon Noem contacted several sex workers under a false name, looking for bimbofication services. Bimbofication is essentially a type of roleplay where a person is turned into a hyperfeminine, hypersexualized version of themselves. Roleplay is often escapism. It’s you retreating into a role that may not exactly reflect your daily life, but may give you a sense of relief. Like most of BDSM, it’s meant to be play and not taken seriously. For many, it is an escape. Men like Bryon Noem enjoy the idea of a woman feminizing them because that is so unlike most of their lives, where they are distinctly the ones giving orders and defining what’s what. Ask any sex worker, and they’ll tell you that sometimes the men who want this the most are the men whom society would deem as successful. For a powerful CEO, going to a glamorous woman, who can make him into a glamorous woman, is like a brief vacation from the reality of their life.

Quite often, this kink is empowering, and it’s not terribly uncommon for men to go to a Domme for an experience or service like this. And yes, for some of them, this is how their egg cracks and some of them may very well recognize that they aren’t cis men at all. Crossdressing is often many men’s first foray into gender exploration. There is a bit of a correlation between this and many of these men being in more conservative communities, where they could probably never be out and gainfully employed. In fact, for some crossdressers, similar to trans women, they may desire the relative safety that comes with being read as a cis woman, as opposed to a trans woman when they are out in public. It’s not terribly uncommon for crossdressers to advise each other on looking more “convincing”. This isn’t always sexual; in fact, it often isn’t at all. For many pre-transition trans women, crossdressing fetish culture may allow them to be, at least temporarily, who they really want to be. In Los Angeles, there are several sex parties for crossdressers and trans women, and from my observation, these events often serve as a space for many of them to socialize, build community, and make friends. Sure, there may be a sexual element, but some people will come to those parties because it’s the only place they’re able to “dress”. For years, Hamburger Mary’s in Long Beach has been a haven not just for trans women and drag performers, but also crossdressers who often just wanted a night out on the town with other crossdressers. In my youth, speaking to some of these CDs, I got the sense that while some of them would be transgender if the circumstances were different, many of them simply enjoyed being men who wore women’s clothing, even if they would have made very beautiful trans women. Many of the crossdressers I’ve known have been objectively gorgeous, and even the ones who aren’t are still often kind and well-meaning. However, there is certainly a large percentage of crossdressers who are like Bryan Noem, conservative and patriarchal men who were often crossdressing behind their wives’ backs.

I think crossdressing on its own is pretty neutral, but it becomes pretty hard to ignore the trend of misogyny and bigotry among many crossdressers. The baseline of this is that many crossdressers will explicitly get off on hiding their habit from their wives, and they will often include articles of their clothing in their kink without their consent. You easily get the impression from these crossdressers that they feel a sense of ownership over their wives that is quite misogynistic. Oftentimes, they will degrade them in their online posts and criticize their femininity. When I’d talk to some of these crossdressers at various events, you can tell that part of the thrill for them is sneaking away wearing the clothing of their unaware partner and feeling degraded for being feminine. From what I’ve gathered, for some of the trans women who find themselves through crossdressing, this shame element will often shift as they dress more and more. Eventually, it becomes an empowering externalization of their particular unique interest in feminine clothing. However, there’s an element of shame that is ever-present among misogynistic crossdressers. A shame that is closely related to how they view women.

I think it’s hard for most people to accept that most men who crossdress aren’t gay men, but straight men. We’re used to thinking of crossdressing in the realm of drag, where at least a large portion of drag performers are indeed gay men. But Drag is a performance art, whereas crossdressing is closer to a hobby, which becomes a fetish for some. Most men who crossdress actually do it because of their attraction to women, and often it’s an externalization of how they’ve processed that attraction. It’s one that’s often informed by the male gaze, and in conversation with misogynistic cross-dressers, you will often hear an anti-feminist slant.

Many of the misogynistic, conservative men I’ve known who crossdress have a particular fixation on how women have become less feminine as they’ve gained more rights. These men are often married, and they have particular ideas about how their wives have let themselves go and allowed time, children, and worst of all, their work, to get in the way of performing their feminine duties. Knowing that, I unfortunately started to think about Kristi Noem and how her face has changed over the years. It would not shock me if he had some part in that. These men often want their wives to be surgically enhanced, and they want them to maintain a high-femme image that’s meant to complement their curated masculinity. For some of these men, it’s clear that their crossdressing is, in some way, a cultivation of what they personally find attractive, and they will occasionally imagine themselves to be better at performing feminine gender expression than cis women. While I disagree with the concept of Autogynephelia, I think this is the closest we really get to seeing this. There is actually quite a large culture of straight men who crossdress and create intricate photoshoots often styled as their favorite porn models, and usually for an audience of other crossdressers who enjoy doing the same. And frankly, there’s really nothing wrong with that. Who cares if men get dressed as women and it turns those men on? It’s something I have a hard time caring about. The line, however, that I will draw is when this conflation is made about me, as a trans woman.

I think what makes most of these conversations complicated is the fact that most people will literally never be privy to the interactions someone like me has with these men, but they are often quite bigoted towards trans women, especially black trans women. My main interaction with the Bryan Noem type comes from a time in my life where I lived in more conservative communities, where gender performance was on a whole new level. What I’d experience as a trans woman who is very open about only being attracted to men and explicitly being interested in masculinity is that time and time again, I’d connect with a guy who presented himself as a paragon of masculinity, only for him to reveal to me at a certain point that he crossdressed. Frequently, this would be revealed to me through a photo similar to those that went viral. Sent to me almost always completely unprompted, with an assumption that I’d be accepting towards them because I am transgender. However, the moment I communicate that it’s not something I’m interested in is when the bigotry comes out. That’s when they misgender me and throw racial slurs at me because I’m not attracted to their crossdressing. It’s been a common enough experience for me to basically assume that men with conservative politics and highly curated masculinity may be crossdressers. I’ve been alive too long to pretend it isn’t a unique trend I see among certain types of crossdressers.

That said, I gather most of what I do about Bryon Noem from the photos that were shared, how they were taken, and the fact that they were taken at all. Bryan Noem knows the position he’s in, given that he’s with a woman who is so closely tied to this administration. Yet he was boldly interacting with women in chat rooms and taking photos of himself in pink hot pants, balloons under his shirt, with his full face in view. These are photos that could easily be used against him and his wife, but he took and sent them out regardless. The only way an undocumented sex worker was able to figure out who he was is because used his business phone number. It’s almost intentionally sloppy. Oftentimes, these men rely on the taboo of sex work to maintain silence. However, apparently, this undocumented sex worker couldn’t stomach the fact that the husband of a woman who’s been terrorizing the immigrant community reached out to her for services. That’s what led to all of this coming out. However, this degree of boldness is something I’ve seen many times among crossdressers, and it still fascinates me. Some of these men get off on the idea of being caught. They get off on the idea of being found out, but it usually never happens. It’s the risk that it might be exciting.

My observation is that many of these men have deep anxieties about being a man in this society and the pressure that comes with it. Oftentimes, that morphs into a humiliation fetish where the most embarrassing and erotic thing you can be is a woman or a feminine person. A lot of times, this will go hand in hand with cuckoldry that sometimes takes on a racist bend. I promise you, the guys who spend their days advocating against immigration and the idea of foreign men raping white women do indeed get off to cuck porn where a white woman cheats on her boyfriend with a man of color. It’s hard not to think about how this may relate to Kristi Noem’s affair. It’s not terribly uncommon for wives to become aware of their husband’s crossdressing habit and perhaps adjust to a mentality of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” where he’s able to continue seeing sex workers and she’s able to find a sexually capable man to fill in for him. Some people are willing to do that to maintain the pristine image of their marriage and all the benefits that come with it. Bryon Noem doesn’t seem very discreet about his activities.

Truly, Bryon Noem’s crossdressing habit doesn’t deserve shame or hate, but there’s a lot to be gathered from understanding that he has a sexual kink that entertains the idea of him being feminized as a sexual and inherently degrading thing, and him being married to a very surgically enhanced woman who opposes access to gender affirming care. What bothers me about this isn’t so much that he crossdresses, but it’s how his politics create a situation where trans people have fewer options. Many trans women have to engage in survival sex work to support themselves. At one point, that’s what I did to survive during a time when it was legal to discriminate against transgender people. And it’s not too uncommon that those who patronize impoverished trans women are the same conservative men who vote against their rights. So in his daily life, his politics create the circumstances that put trans women on the street. Then at nighttime, he goes to sex workers so that he can get off on how shameful it is that he transgresses gender within a society that stigmatizes transgender people. And on both sides is a flex of patriarchal power. These men are often bold because they can afford to be. They live in a society that protects them, and these men are often very invested in protecting that notion. They need patriarchal rule to be the standard of culture, or else subverting it wouldn’t be so titillatingly taboo.

It has been quite frustrating to have so much debate about whether or not Bryon Noem belongs in the queer community somehow because he is into Bimbofication and was outed for it. While it’s true that many trans women were at some point self-loathing, self-hating conservatives, there’s literally no reason at all to entertain the premise that this is the case here. What’s frustrating to me is these dudes are way more common than trans women, but they are often conflated with us by people who I don’t think are themselves able to understand that being transgender isn’t a fetish. As a kinky trans woman, I do occasionally find myself having to make it clear that my transness and my gender identity have nothing to do with each other. That I am not submissive because I’m a woman, but because I’m a submissive. That just because people fetishize me doesn’t mean I have a fetish for being myself. It’s an uphill battle in a social climate intent on misunderstanding us. Bryon Noem’s biggest crime isn’t stuffing balloons under his shirt; it’s supporting a culture that facilitates the hate and erasure of transgender people.