I had asked a friend why she enjoyed dressing as a female nurse. She was growing enthusiastic. What she went on to say about male patients being equipped with their own thermometers is, perhaps, best not repeated in its entirety.
I’m not sure whether my friend had got under a starched uniform, exactly – but he’d certainly got into one. He has a woman friend in the nursing profession who had presented him with a genuine nurse’s dress. I think it was a pattern which had been replaced by newer uniforms. (Certainly they do change the style of nursing uniforms from time to time, as I expect most of us have noticed). It was a little old fashioned but that did not detract from its charms. It was certainly an item a lot of transvestites would treasure.
It must be admitted, through, that the nurse’s outfit is almost certainly not the most popular uniform with transvestites. Clearly, that position must belong to either the schoolgirl uniform or the maid’s. Year after year these two trannie stalwarts are available in the Transformation catalogue and shops. An awful lot of them must have been sold.
Nurses lag somewhere behind, no doubt, but there’s obviously a substantial interest in them. In Uniform Special – TMC’s first magazine devoted to the subject – they were well represented. The cover promised Virgin School girls, Naughty Nurses, Sexy Maids and that is what it provided. All three appear in the photographs – and these are the only three uniforms treated in the fiction.
There was one story about a trannie slipping into each of them.
If nurse’s uniforms are not the most readily available from specifically transvestite suppliers, my experience suggests that they are at least easily found in sex shops. I exchanged some merchandise for a credit note in a branch of a large sex shop chain. What I wanted at the time was not a nurse’s uniform, but a maid’s one – which should have been easy enough. (It certainly would have been easy had I been dealing with Transformation!) However, each time I called at the shop, the maid’s uniform had not yet arrived. I was repeatedly offered the nurse’s outfit, but eventually (giving up on the maid) settled for some lingerie. The choice of lingerie I was offered made it clear that I wasn’t being fobbed off with hard to sell items. I think the sex shop really did sell plenty of their nurse outfits.
However, what my friend said of nurse’s seeming stainless – and the reference to starch – goes some way to show why a sex shop nurse’s outfit would not do for me. (I’d guess that the same goes for many other transvestites with an interest in playing the nurse). The overly-revealing styles, and the wet look or satin fabrics, while attractive in themselves, fly in the face of what draws me to nursing fantasies. Wanting to dress as a nurse is one thing, wanting to dress as a whore pretending to be a nurse is another matter entirely.
It would be interesting to know who buys sex shop nurse’s outfits. While some surely do go to transvestites, my guess is that most are bought by real girls for professional purposes – although the profession in question is surely not nursing. Such garments might, perhaps, be suitable for administering enemas – which are, I understand, very popular with some. Our local free paper certainly carries adverts for such services.
There should, in any case, be no real need to go to a sex shop for a nurse’s uniform. The real thing ought not to be impossible to find. After a baby abduction case last year, the tabloid papers highlighted how easy it was to buy nursing uniforms. If they’ll sell them to transvestites, that is.
There is also the possibility that one may be given a uniform by a nurse. If it happened to my friend, it can surely happen to others. Most people, I suppose, know at least one nurse. Two of my sisters became nurses, not that I’d ask either of them for a spare uniform… or, come to think of it, maybe I should!
Whether or not we care to take the necessary steps towards laying our hands on them, there can be little doubt that genuine nurse’s uniforms are more easily available than the real thing is for either transvestites, maids or school girls. Genuine uniformed maids are beyond my experience.
Possibly, one might find a similar uniform intended for a waitress. However, real waitresses uniforms may not be quite what the average transvestite maid had in mind.
The tabard affected by most hotel chambermaids is of even less interest to the transvestite male, I feel sure..
If anything the real thing is even less obtainable for transvestite school girls. There are plenty of school girls about, and genuine school uniforms are, of course, on sale in every town in the country. The real problem is of size. For obvious reasons, the uniforms are mostly in small sizes.
Most transvestites are large by the standards of adult women, let alone by those of young girls. I’m lucky enough to fit into a size 14, but I know trannies (not enormous by male standards) who need dress sizes in 20’s. Some nurses, on the other hand, are pretty big.
There are large nurses and, of course, male nurses – but there remains something very feminine about being a nurse. A character in a story called “TV Nurse” certainly sees things that way.
“I wish I had a proper nurse to work with,” Anne said.
“What do you mean?” demanded Madge. “John is a proper nurse”
“Go on, men don’t make good nurses. They just get the good jobs because they are men”.
John was standing half-amused by this chat.
“That’s not true,” Madge said. “I bet John would do just as well as a girl”.
“Huh! I bet he couldn’t even put a proper nurse’s uniform on.”
Well, I’m sure we can all guess where the story is heading (And wouldn’t you like to be in John’s shoes? – or at least in the pair he will soon be wearing). However, several points of interest arise in this passage, apart from the idea that men don’t make proper nurses. One is the idea that a proper nurse’s uniform is obviously considered to be a female one. Less obvious is the way Madge defends John: I bet John would do just as well as a girl. The conversation has slipped, with no one apparently noticing, from how well John does as a nurse to how well he would do as a girl.
The two are obviously not the same, but I wonder how many readers noticed the slide in meaning on a first reading.
TV Nurse was included in TVs in Uniform, TMC’s second venture into uniform. In the magazine, maids and school girls outnumber the nurses in the photographs, but (as in Uniform Special) there is a nurse story. Obviously, the editors thought you wanted to read more about transvestite nurses, and they were probably right.
The femininity of the nurse is confirmed by the origins of the word. The original sense is of the wet nurse – and who but a woman is capable of breast feeding? The word comes from the same root as nourish. In Middle English, the language of Chaucer, the word for nurse is norice – which sounds very much like a compromise between nursing and nourishment.
If the nurse is literally a substitute mother – something of the same also applies to the medical nurse. When we are ill as children, who makes our beds, brings us medicine, takes our temperature…? Clearly, a mother’s tasks include a quantity of medical nursing. More, ill in hospital, helpless and vulnerable, there is a sense of return to childhood. Inevitably, nurses appear as mother figures, even if they are younger than their patients (as they often are).
Nurses, however, have not always seemed so maternal. To many Victorians they appeared little better than prostitutes or actresses (much the same thing, most would have said). When nurses went to war (Florence Nightingale and all that) they were regarded as indistinguishable from the other camp followers.
Possibly this had something to do with their work calling upon them to handle men’s private parts – or maybe it was merely their unchaperoned condition. Almost certainly, it is yet another example of the narrow mindedness of too many of Queen Victoria’s subjects.
If a trace of the prostitute image remains, it would act as a turn off for few of us. Many transvestites, of course, enjoy dressing as whores. Perhaps trannie whores outnumber transvestite nurses.
Although the nurses we know today seem so prim and proper (so pure, so stainless) – they also have a certain reputation as ravers. Air hostesses have a similar reputation. Why don’t I know any transvestites who dress as air hostesses? (I’d love an air hostess uniform!) Possibly, contact with human frailty has to do with their being less inhibited than most women, but who knows? Certainly, a lot of people are frightened of flying – as well as frightened by hospitals.
One reason people are frightened of hospitals is surely that a lot of people die there. I am reminded of the great increase in sexual promiscuity in the Second World War. (And we shouldn’t forget, here, fantasies about wounded fighter pilots and their nurses!). There is a curious connection between death and sexuality – and also between fear of death and sexuality. That subject, however, needs a whole book to do it justice.
Turning from death to childhood, somewhere here we are almost certain to be reminded of children’s games of doctors and nurses. These not only represent the first step towards sexual experimentation for many people – but also form a combined fantasy for both genders. As we shall see, women have their own nurse fantasies.
If we return to Florence Nightingale and the origins of modern nursing, the profession seems not only feminine but representing femininity at its best. During the Crimean War the boys mutilated one another while the girls (as represented by Florence Nightingale’s nurses) did what they could to patch them up. Given the choice of these gender roles, which of us would prefer the male?
Indeed, the nurse as fantasy (which is, of course, what we are considering with transvestite nurses) is curiously feminine. Mills and Boon – surely exclusively female fantasy – treat doctor and nurse stories as a sub genre in their own right. Presumably, the readers identify with the nurses rather than the doctors. Mills and Boon certainly do not treat maids or school girls in the same way. Perhaps transvestite nurses represent one of our closest approximations to genuinely female fantasy.
When we come to consider fantasy, a great deal of it has to do with submission and domination. Clearly, this is true of both the ubiquitous maid and the schoolgirl. The maid is there to do the bidding of her master or mistress. The schoolgirl must obey the teachers, and abide by the school rules – otherwise it’s the classic sub/dom situation with the head mistress cast in the role of the dom, a painful situation (but one which many TV’s enjoy).
With nurses things are less clear cut. Certainly, in the doctor and nurse scenario so beloved of Mills and Boon and their readers the nurse is in a subservient position. The doctor is clearly in a position elevated above the nurse. The dominance, however, is more subtle than in either the maid or the schoolgirl fantasies. The doctor may give the nurse orders – but has no obvious disciplinary measures to hand should the orders not be properly carried out.
A more classically dominant figure in nurse fantasies is the matron. (None of the worst for being a dominatrix, perhaps). Hospital administration has changed a great deal in recent years – but we are surely all familiar with the fearsome matron as played by such actresses as Hattie Jacques in the old comedy films. (The likes of Carry on Nurse and all the other doctor films.) According to my sisters who trained as nurses, such awe-inspiring matrons really existed.
Mixed in with the submissiveness of the role, however, the nurse can also dominate. She can give orders to the patients as surely as the doctor (or matron) can give her orders. And what orders she can give!
…Off with your clothes now… come on, you can’t leave those underpants on…
… Time for your injection…. just bend over now…
… Now, now, be brave… it may hurt just a little bit…
Indeed, bending over for the nurse to give one an injection in the bum (I mean an intermuscular injection, of course) is almost certain to remind one of bending over for the headmistress’s cane. The injection may be over more quickly, but there are those who would prefer the cane.
A spanking, if not the cane, is surely available from the nurse’s cousin, the nanny. Strict Nanny Stern appears in more than one TMC publication, wearing something indistinguishable from a nurse’s uniform. (Plenty of starch!).
The adult baby theme, closely connected with the nanny figure, leads us back towards a sense of return to childhood which illness can bring. The nurse’s patients and the nanny’s charges have much in common. Nor should we forget, somewhere between the nanny and the nurse, is the school matron – leading us back in the direction of schoolgirl fantasies.
Nannies and school matrons aside, the nurse is someone with whom to be reckoned with in her own right, Injections, enemas (I’ve already mentioned them as being popular with some) – the nurse certainly has the power to do some remarkable things to her patients. her thermometer won’t necessarily end up in your mouth, either.
Supremely, feminine, simultaneously submissive and dominant, is it any wonder that transvestites with a little imagination feel the urge to slip into the nurse’s starched uniform? So pure, so stainless…. Isn’t that a perfect description of me? Anyone who thinks it isn’t had better watch themselves when I make my rounds tonight! It can be a lot of fun…
