Ugh, seriously: if you bash crossdressers, transvestites, part-time women and so on, DON’T COME FUCKING NEAR ME.
If you:
- Label them all cis by default
- Think they all identify as male 100% of the time
- Think they reinforce the gender binary
- Think they don’t suffer from transphobia and transmisogyny
- Think they have no place in trans spaces
- Think crossdressing is just ‘fun’ or ‘performance’
Then you are clueless as fuck and have probably never actually listened to crossdressers themselves.Crossdressing is not just a performance, it is often an essential part of being ones true self. Hatred and fear is literally killing transvestites, pushing them back in closets and driving them to suicide. Smashing traditional gender roles and the genderbinary is as essential to their survival as it is to the survival of everyone else under the transgender umbrella. And if you had ever taken the time to listen to the stories of crossdressers you would realize that.
Transvestites have always been and always will be part of the trans movement. But a lot of people are undermining that. See, when we explain gender we often devide it into genderidentity and genderexpression and that’s a useful devision to better understand gender. But then what people do is they start presenting identity as inherent, valid and lifelong, while they present expression as performative, invalid and elective. Which is just bullshit.
And then there’s stereotyping going on. People who bash crossdressing associate it with being male, white, older, married, rich and into fetish stuff. And then they use that association to present transvestites as the opposite of queer and to mix a cocktail of hate and exclusion, ignoring that people of all skin colours, ages and sexualities crossdress and get pushed to the margins of society for it.
And last but not least, there’s usually a big scoop of transmisogyny stirred into every anti-transvestite story.I see young people who carry their androgyny and non-binary gender identities as a badge of pride but then exclude crossdressers from trans spaces, pushing out the people who were smashing the binary long before the word genderqueer existed. And it makes me want to scream “Are you fucking kidding me? Do you realize what genderdiversity means?”
If you think dressing in a dress one day and in a suit the next while identifying as non-binary is awesome, but dressing in a dress one day and in a suit the next while identifying as transvestite is not, your basic problem is that you care more about language than about lived experiences.
Ugh, just. So. Done. With. That. Shit.