Some Testable Hypotheses About Transvestitism

Most people don't know what science is. They seem to think it's about brainy people inventing exotic new technologies or tinkering dangerously with forces they don't understand. In fact science is merely a way of thinking about the world that allows us to interact with it in ways that will increase our understanding of it. Science is based on the belief that everything in the Universe is governed by rules which regulate how it is and how it behaves. There are no exceptions. Everything always obeys the rules. This means that by observing the world, people can work out what some of these rules must be. Sometimes, by observing the world, you can formulate a pretty good guess at what a rule must be but you're not quite sure. In other words, you have a hypothesis. To really be sure, you use your hypothesis to reason about what extra information you need. You say: "If this is really the rule then such and such should happen in these circumstances but if something else happens then it could not have been the right rule. So you need to set up carefully controlled circumstances - an experiment - and observe what happens. Apart from a few bells and whistles, that's all that science is about.

From what I've just said, you can see that in science, understanding a phenomenon is equivalent to being able to state the rules that describe it. The quality of our understanding is a matter of how confident we can be that the rules are right. This is a more complicated notion based on:

1. how good our initial hypotheses were (which normally depends on how accurate and extensive our original observations were)

2. how convincing the reasoning is that connects our observations to our hypothesis

3. how well we have tested our hypothesis (which amounts to how convincing our reasoning was about the efficacy of the test, how rigorously we controlled the circumstances of the test and how carefully we observed the results of the test)

4. how many others can repeat our test and get the same results we did

5. how consistent our hypothesis is with every other rule that we are confident about.

So, a scientific understanding of transvestitism will start with careful observation. By reasoning from what we observe, we can produce hypotheses. Our hypotheses can then be put to the test through more controlled observation or experiments.

On the basis of my own observation of transvestites (including myself) I would therefore like to offer the following hypotheses to anyone who fancies trying to test them.

If transvestitism is a pleasure response to making oneself appear attractive in a way that is a cultural norm for women, several things should follow:

1. the more like a woman a transvestite looks, the happier he should feel

2. the transvestite will dress to match his own model of female attractiveness, so his style of dressing should correllate better with his own preferences for female attractiveness than with people's in general

3. the transvestite, being male, will dress in ways that are more attractive to males in general than to females - it should follow that males would rate him more attractive than females would.

If transvestitism is due to exposure to inappropriate environmental conditions in the womb then:

1. transvestites should show other signs (eg unusual finger length ratios) of the same exposure.

2. the incidence of such conditions should match the incidence of transvestitism.