Support crossdressers. They have always been sisters to trans people. They have always been in the movement together with us. They have stood by us for about a century. Shame on you if your 21st century trans movement has no place for crossdressers.
All that shit transmisogyny from drag performers in gay bars or on tv? Crossdressers have no part in that. They did not make that culture. Crossdressing isn’t a performance, it’s a way to express parts of your identity. It is genderexpression. It is for many an essential part of living authentically and happily. Call crossdressers by their pronouns. Their experience of their own life is real regardless of whether it fits your idea of how gender identity works.
Support crossdressers when our oppressive world hurts them. They are abandoned by families, bullied, fired, driven to suicide and beaten up for existing like we are. Intensity of experiences may vary but that has always been true for all of us. Don’t fall for stereotypes that set up crossdressers as rich old white people who somehow have all the privilege. They’re as diverse a population as the rest of us and there is a scared crossdressing teen in every neighbourhood looking for a safe space and dreaming of a supportive community.
Have a place for crossdressers in your parade, they fought for us. Have a place for crossdressers in your community, they’re always called it home. Have a place for crossdressing teens in your youth group, you’ll save lives.
Personally cross dressers make me uncomfortable, and I hate that I feel uncomfortable when I see them. Can someone help with this so I won’t feel uncomfortable?
Our whole culture is full of images that demonize a ‘man in a dress’ and present anyone that seems to be fitting that description as evil, hypersexual, predatory, probably cheating on the wife and maybe a kinky mass murderer? The stereotypes are endless.
Society tries to make us uncomfortable around people of color, around lgbt people, around fat people, around homeless people, around sex workers, and around crossdressers too. This imagery of ‘man in dress = scary predator’ is just one more piece of that puzzle.
If you feel uncomfortable, you probably absorbed a lot of that. Analyze that. Own that. This is your shit and it’s up to you to fix it.
crossdressing and drag have always been huge parts of the queer and especially trans community. The transmysogyny that is associated with drag and crossdressing is from the straight audiences that corrupt it, not the people who are expressing their identities. Crossdressing and drag are types of gender nonconformity and should be respected as such.
Absolutely. In the US and Europe (etc) crossdressing and drag are also two very distinct cultures of gendernonconformity that are marganlized and stigmatized in different ways.
Drag has been stereotyped as a thing white gay men do on stage, and it has been assigned all the stigma associated with performance: superficialness, vanity, a false sense of superiority. Drag performers that cater to these stereotypes get featured and as a result the only drag performers we see on TV and on big stages are drag performers that present femininity as vain and superficial, and often with a heavy dose of transmisogyny in there. Young drag performers copy their tv heroes, leading to sexist drag communities. This leads people to believe that drag is inherently problematic when the truth is that a sexist and transmisogynist audience promoted these specific drag queens to cater to their bigotry.
Crossdressing has been stereotyped as a thing older straight men do in private and it has been assigned the stigma’s I already described above: sexual predatoriness, kink, deception, cheating, violence and ugliness as well. Since most crossdressers do not perform, we generally see these stereotypes portayed by actors in fictional characters. Crossdressers are also pretty much always presented as being ‘really a man’ when the truth is that for every crossdresser who identifies as a man, there is one who identifies in a non-binary way and one that identifies as being on the transfeminine side of the spectrum.
In all cases, stereotypes serve to stop us from relating to and listening to drag queens and crossdressers and to see that they are just people expressing part of their gender, for whom expressing that is an essential part of a life that’s worth living, and who often pay a heavy price for that.
QueerAnarchism 