To show you how incompetent I am, I lost all my stored pix of Debra when shuffling files from one external hard drive to another. All I had was the few I had uploaded on the new Debra page. Then, joy! I discovered my 'former self' before Flickr intervened entirely by accident when I looked at a pic 'she' had faved before the Flickr catastrophe. There they all were - at least the ones I had uploaded as the other Debs.

For whatever reason, Flickr now stops us downloading our favourites, but I was able to fave them all.

So there I am: the old Debs faved by the new one.

Why did I put this on?

In case anyone else is as stupid as I was and... Probably no one is. End of this episode.

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Recently dumped by Flickr because I had to choose a new password. Miss all my favourites! Now must re-build everything.

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A brief history of Debra (lifted from original page)

Being new to the Wonderful World of Flickr, I had given no thought to preparing a profile before uploading a few photographs. But I can see the point of them, so here goes.

Yes, it began at the age of four. To my memory, that is, but maybe earlier because when I was four years old my mother took me to a neurologist – there were no child psys in Britain then. He gave me an encephalogram and a lecture about growing up to be a soldier and obeying orders swiftly OR ELSE YOU’LL BE IN TROUBLE WITH THE SERGEANT MAJOR!!!!!!!!! Oh, they were subtle in those days. He could not have said worse. Little boys of my age in the middle of WW2 knew what happened to soldiers and I didn’t want to grow up, just to lie down dead in some corner of a foreign field. Although my mother never spoke about that little adventure afterwards, she must have understood something of the gender confusion inside my head, to drag me all the way to that particular neurologist in London in the middle of a major war.

Since then, it has gone on for seventy years. There have been intervals when dressing was not possible and I had to abstain, but my depression cycle always kicked in; the two years in uniform were hell, with some near-suicidal moments. Afterwards, I thought that marriage and regular sex might cure me. You’re supposed to guess the answer to that! Salvation of a sort came with a creative job that left me little time or energy for dressing and exploring my inner self, but I was not a very happy bunny.

Then I met Wife No 2 – the woman who gave both of me a new lease of life. Poking into my psyche on our second or third all-night date, she immediately said, ‘We must get you a proper wardrobe and some wigs.’ Ten words like a key letting you out of a prison. Having been in one, I do not use the simile lightly.

Five-ten in my stockinged feet, with broad shoulders and a thick neck that a dress with roll-over collar disguises quite well, plus a voice that’s too deep, I confess to only going out accompanied by her, and then in very busy places like London’s Oxford Street, cruising the shops, taking in the odd restaurant. But since my professional work is done at home, nobody is going to ask me what I wear when I’m doing it. Actually, I do recommend a corset to anyone who, like me, spends hours each day at a keyboard. No back ache!

But this is all a run-up to a little philosophy on a theme we’ve all pondered.

A little philosophy

Why do we need so desperately to dress in women’s clothes and spend hours or days, not as women, but as close as we can be?

My rationale is this. The perfect form of any mammalian animal is the female. In French, ‘mammal’ is translated as 'mammifère' meaning literally ‘breast-bearing’. The male of any mammalian species, including homo sapiens, is a modified female. The foetus always begins female, but tiny doses of hormones from the mother trigger modifications during development of a future male child. The most obvious are the stitching-up (and it’s so crude, isn’t it?) of the vulva slit from anus to tip of penis. Thus stitched together in the womb, it forms a sac from the labia into which the testicles must descend from the gonad position in the abdomen, where ovaries remain. ‘Scrotum’ just means a purse or pouch in Latin. Cooler suspended therein than at body temperature, testicles fulfill their purpose of making sperm, which is not possible at body temperature.

And what about the penis? You don’t have to be Muslim to be one of millions of men who are so proud they’ve got one, believing it proves they are superior to women. News for them: it’s nothing more than a deformed and overgrown clitoris, extended and pierced by the urethra, not for peeing – women manage perfectly well without one – but to convey sperm as far as possible into a vagina. A real woman has a clitoris for pleasure, a urethra for urinating and a vagina (Latin again – means a sheath) for copulating. We have to make do with one compromised organ for all three purposes.

And the breasts and nipples? We still have them, betraying our female origin. Some of us genetic men have more breast tissue than others, indeed more than some women. I was tormented about this by boys during gym periods at school and sports lessons until I decided at the age of thirteen to forge a medical alibi for never stripping off in front of other boys again. Didn’t help me in the forces where, in conditions of near-zero privacy, I endured the same mockery again.

But the bonus is that I can fill a b cup without prostheses or hormones! Oh, a little help from an under-breast corset from Les Trois Suisses, which pushes them up and a traditional corselette from M and S, which pulls everything together nicely.

Conclusion

Really, we’re not invading a woman’s world, as some have hypothesized here. It is women who have invaded most formerly men’s activities since being drafted into the factories in two world wars, and so much the better. No, reversing the ‘forced feminisation’ fantasies, we’re just getting back to what we originally were: little girls who were forced by family or social convention to be boys for a while. Isn’t it fun?

Oh, I do hope my favourites don't shock. None of them is what I consider porno, but they might be erotic - it all depends on your bent, so to speak. But breasts, beautiful breasts, are my obsession - on nubile girls, older women and those TG sisters who are going further along the road. They don't have to be firm and pert. In fact heavy breasts that flop down without a bra are an especial favourite.

Wherever you are on the journey, I'd like to hear from you. Drop me an e-mail via Flickr. I promise to reply. And lastly, hugs all round, sisters.