Dolly Cross-Dressing

To be fair, some people in general really just dislike these things. For example (and totally OT, but it's a valid point!) personally, I'm not attracted to men with rippling muscles in relation to dating. They just simply aren't something I look for in a guy (brains before brawns). Now, this doesn't mean I don't occasionally see a guy built like Lou Farrigno and go 'wow, kinda attractive'.

This applies to dolls as well. I might find myself more attracted to a certain body type, but that doesn't mean there are certain companies out there that have amazing bodies I can't help but oggle at, even though they're not the body type I prefer (ex: EID boys = sexy!). On the facial hair point, not everyone can pull off giving a doll facial hair that looks attractive. If it's done well, people will appreciate it and admire it. If it looks awful, very few people will like it, and it will probably receive constructive criticism to make it better.

Also, as I believe I stated before, BJDs allow you to express things that you as a person may not be able to express. It's all for creativity's sake after all. Everyone has their preferences, likes, dislikes, yadda yadda yadda. Why do we need to go around grouping everyone (dolls and humans alike) together into these really broad categories, when both humans and dolls are very dynamic in their personalities?

 

Yep, some people dislike those things. And others don't dislike them and can't relate. I figure we can all express our opinions without fear of being considered "wrong" or intolerant (in the Debate section especially). And the whole "everyone can do anything with their dolls and we shouldn't judge them" attitude is one I agree with, but it's much more interesting when we share our personal opinions rather than assuring everyone else that their opinions are okay. I think everyone recognizes that each doll and doll owner is unique, but one can't deny that there are trends and that it's interesting to observe them, point them out, and debate about them.

 

I don't think it's unethical for a person to cross dress their doll. But there can be a few predicaments with a situation like this. People often think I'm cross-dressing my boy because he is VERY girly-looking, but my intention is not to cross dress him. So sometimes maybe people aren't intending to do so, but I honestly see nothing wrong with it. It's just a form of expression.

 

I don't see why it's unethical. It's just clothing: it doesn't have to be a sexual thing.

I think it's only unethical if the doll disagrees. Seimei would hate to be crossdressed, because he has a bit of an irrational squick about that sort of thing. So I wouldn't crossdress him, but that's the only reason.

 

This question depends on whether you're a conservative or a liberal. Even then, you have to define all terms.

 

I came across a signature today which proclaimed, 'If you think it looks like a girl, it's probably a boy. ASSUME MALE FIRST. PLEASE!' I find this attitude very annoying. Please remember that while you may like to dress your boy in frills, other people are dressing their girls that way as well. I would be very annoyed to have people refer to my SDC Kurenai (who often wears her Dollheart Fer) as a boy when I have done my damndest to make her appear girly.

Rather than assume one gender or another, you are perfectly able to compliment a doll without referring to one gender or another. Please do that first if you're not sure of the gender, don't assume all dolls in dresses are boys in drag.

I'm even coming at this from the perspective that cross dressing is not wrong, and I do believe that people should do what they want with their own dolls...I just think that the attitude of 'if it's in a dress, assume it's male' is wrong and alienates the large proportion of the hobby who don't cross dress their dolls.

 

That's a rather US-politics-centric way of looking at it. I disagree; it depends far more on the upbringing and culture of the person concerned. And what you term "conservative" and "liberal" has very different meanings in the UK and Australia, where our politics are rather different.

I know the person concerned, and you're taking her signature waaaaayyyy out of context. She is referring only to her own dolls and no-one else's. Her dolls are mostly male, but she has several that are crosssdressers and happen to look very girly, including a Lishe boy. She's simply asking people to assume her dolls are male unless she says otherwise. It's got nothing to do with your, my or anyone else's dolls.

 

Jescissa, if I were to come across a signature like that I would assume the user was referring to their own dolls in drag as opposed to proclaiming that all dolls need be assumed as male first. And to be quite honest I do not see why it is worth getting in a huff over.

I do not cross dress any of my boys, its all long pants, stereotypical male colors (no pinks or pastels yet) and collared tops. However, because they are from a fantasy setting, half of them have longer hair and their clothes can be ruffly. They get called girls all the time (and my guys are of not slight or slender build like some BJDs, they are very thick and wide-chested in comparison to many I have seen at meet-ups). As have about 80% of the users on this forum who have had their boy dolls referred to as girls even when said doll was wearing perfectly legimate male clothing. There is an entire thread in GD which refers to this and it seems to be the majority view to just shrug it off and correct whoever made the wrong assumption. I do not see why it is so upsetting when simply the sex of the doll has been switched.

Perhaps when I acquire my female doll and outfit her in gorgeous gowns and dresses I will understand better as to why I would get so frustrated at her being referred to as a boy. Though I assume by that time I would be so used to incorrect assumptions that it would just be all the easier to simply let it go.

 

My dolls do not cross dress. It doesn't fit their characters at all. Though my Jr. Delf boy is wearing a pair of jeans intended for a girl doll, it is hard to find clothes to fit a Jr. Delf, but they aren't that particularly girly, they are jeans. I don't get bent out of shape when people refer to my male doll as a girl, it happens all of the time. I have a DZ Yuu, and I find the mold anything but girly. He wears masculine clothing but he does have long hair and he is a doll. People seem to see doll and assume girl. I just correct them or simply say "thank you" when they tell me how pretty "she" is. If I got worked up over people misjudging my dolls' genders I wouldn't be able to go out with my son at all. He has been mistaken for a girl since birth. It does not matter what he wears, how his hair is styled, or what he does, everyone sees him and immediately assumes girl. I don't let it get to me and it doesn't bother him either. He just corrects people and goes on. I am well aware that the fact that my son chooses to wear his long hair in pig tails is going to confuse people, but I'm not concerned enough about it to stifle him. With my dolls I concern myself even less. They are my dolls, for my enjoyment, why do I care if some one thinks they are girls?

I don't mind if other people want to cross dress their dolls either. I can understand the desire. It just suits some characters. My best friend cross dressed, I didn't like him any less for it, and it could be a lot of fun going out with him in his female persona. I loved him for everything he was, his gender or choice to dress in the clothes of the opposite gender had nothing to do with it. If I had a character that cross dressed then I would buy him the clothes to do so. I enjoy seeing different people's views of their dolls and their characters. Boys in dresses, girls in jeans and everything else.

 

Wow, my DA sig is FAMOUS! Who knew! I'm touched!

Since you gave it the honour of quoting it in full, I'll return the favour and explain it in full shall I? I have that sig because I got tired of people accusing MY obviously male doll who is often wearing an obviously male suit, with short hair and a square jaw of being a girl. I stress the word MY, because it's MY signature on MY DA page where MY viewers see it. It in no way refers to what the masses should or shouldn't do with their own dolls, it refers to MY dolls because, as I mentioned, it's on MY DA page.

There are only so many times I want to explain on MY DA page that in fact, no, NOT all my dolls are crossdressers (yes, even the girls have been queried on this) and the signature was a humourous approach to tackling this topic. It gets a lot of laughs as it happens, there's been a few people for whom it's now become a running joke to call my female dolls boys. Evidently not everyone sees the joke.

So, in conclusion, the original reasoning behind it was in fact quite the opposite of your swiftly grasped indignance with it because as it happens, I agree with you, people shouldn't make ANY assumptions about either dolls or people but that sort of tolerance appears to be in extremely short supply on both counts.

 

Well.
Curious about this.
How does everyone feel about CrobiDoll's new obviously crossdressing Queen of hearts?
Since it isn't an owner but rather a company doing it?

 

@ARKADY
That's why I said "Even then, you have to define all terms". Perhaps, it's cultural but leave that up to the anthropologist, sociologist, and psychologists to analyze.

 

I'm just curious how doing so is actually alienating other owners. I don't find it offensive if someone calls my boy doll a girl, and that seems to be the consensus for most people that people should just let it go and move on if it happens, so why is it any different if a girl doll is called a boy?

 

Arkady, InkyBear & Lulu, it's not the first signature of that nature that I've seen, just the most recent. The reason I didn't mention where I'd seen it or who wrote it is because my response is a general one, I didn't want or intend it to be a personal criticism because it isn't, it's highly generalised and based off a standalone quote that didn't have any contextual references other than being on the same page as a cross-dressing male doll. A little mild annoyance is by no means indignant or losing a good night's sleep over it. In the grand scheme of life, it's pretty minor, in the whole of the dollery it's minor too...but I still find it annoying and it's a relevant facet of the debate. As cross-dressing appears to grow more and more prevalent, the likelihood of someone commenting on a doll and assigning the wrong gender to it also increases. If we start recommending everyone think of all dolls in girlish clothes as boys, where does that leave the girls?

InkyBear, you don't see why someone with obviously girly-dressed girly dolls might get irritated if their female gets called a boy? And may find it irritating if the prevailing assumption across the hobby is growing into one that 'frills and froufrou = male'?

Kim, I don't know about you, but if I went out of my way to dress my female doll in girly clothing and someone referred to her as a boy I'd be a bit annoyed, just as someone who dresses their male doll in specifically male modes of dress would be annoyed if someone called their doll a girl. I wouldn't get aggressive or upset, but I would explain that my doll is wearing a dress because she's a girl and let the other person know that not every doll in a dress is a boy. It wouldn't be the end of civilisation as we know it for someone to mistake gender, but if someone is telling newbies or people just outside the hobby that all dolls in dresses are boys, then they're spreading around something incorrect, and if that incorrect assumption became 'common knowledge' I'd feel pretty alienated in the hobby. It's annoying enough to have a male doll considered to be a girl (when he is wearing boyish clothes, no less), never mind having to start explaining to people that my girls are not boys in frills.

Cross-dressing isn't a problem, and what someone else wants to do with their own dolls is their own business, but the trend towards thinking all girly-dressed dolls are boys or even instructing people outside the hobby to think that way isn't the right way to go about changing perceptions. Like I said, this signature isn't the first one I've seen and it probably won't be the last either, everyone is entitled to their opinion just as we're all entitled to find other people's opinions annoying

 

It might have been better then if you hadn't quoted Lulu's signature word-for-word then. That's a bit of a sloppy error to make for someone who's a mod; it made it seem very much as though you were singling Lulu out in particular.

And I'm sorry if the thought that people might mistake your girly girls for boys annoys you, but how is that any different to those of us with boys who have had to put up with our boys being assumed to be girls even when we aren't crossdressing them?

 

Jescissa, as many people have stated on other parts of the forum, quite often their very MALE dolls, (ie short hair, a toned down, natural face-up, nontight jeans, masculine shirt or jacket) can still be confused as girls by outsiders. And as I stated, the general agreement is to either correct the audience, laugh it off, or both. I don't see why one needs to get so irritated just because it's a girl doll being mistaken for a boy rather than the other way around (as is much more common it would seem).

I suppose I can understand the annoyances over it, but no, I don't see the point in really allowing it to get to the point where it IS an annoyance. I also do not understand why "frou-frou and frills = male" is so obnoxious either, for many collectors DO like to dress their dolls in historical inspired fashions (including myself), in which real men did in fact wear frilly things. Are you going to get annoyed by history now too?

 

As...girls? Really, what difference does it make to people with female dolls who dress girly when everyone assumes they're girls anyway? A few people sticking a doll in a dress and putting laughably sweeping statements in their sigs as a running joke isn't going to overturn generations of social stereotyping regardless of how much it irks you. It just isn't, if such things were that easy, the world may very well be a much improved place, but alas, human nature is not that easily swayed.

Also, since that is in fact my signature, it also appears on shots of my male dolls who DON'T crossdress, I don't single out the shots of the crossdressers for it to apply to so I don't really see how I'm in any way, shape or form "instructing people outside the hobby to think that way" or indeed "spreading around something incorrect". I, and I'm sure the owners of many other signatures of a similar ilk, are asking their viewers to consider that all may not be as it seems with their dolls, which, given the huge levels of headtilt we as a hobby get from outsiders at the best of times, isn't an unreasonable thing to do.

I'd also like to point out, since you picked my version of that statement to use for your point, that nowhere within that statement does it mention clothing of either gender. It actually applies more to the naturally delicate nature of BJD face sculpts since I shoot my dolls naked rather a lot where clothing would have no sway, and the fact that many people (myself included) tend to swap "female" and "male" head sculpts around a little to get the look we want. I find it quite interesting that you read it as immediately meaning clothing actually.

 

I see nothing wrong with this whatsoever. As has been said, cross-dressing isn't porn, transgendered children exist, and even with actual people crossdressing doesn't hurt anyone, let alone with dolls.

 

I say, lets all flowers to bloom. Only then it will bother me, if its adult contex and there is child charecter and/or yuonger ppl can see it.
I even have clava who propaply will start crossdressing in somepoint, he's going to that way. Just not yet ready to admit it to hiself.

 

I'm so glad that most people are okay with dolls crossdressing. My boy dresses in women's clothing, because that's who he is. So I'm glad that no one's going to hate him for it!