As I wrote in the last Cyrsti's Condo post, there is plenty of room to differentiate cross dressers and transgender women.
An example is one of the professed cross dressers who comes to one of my transgender support group meetings. She is quite attractive and seems to be quite secure in who she is. She says she is satisfied with a life that has her looking like a cis woman part time and living like a guy the rest. Yes, she is married.
Granted, to be able to live like she does, one has to have an understanding spouse.
I wonder too, if the number of trans nazi's who drift through the group, influence her too. Several just aren't pleasant people and don't seem to be secure in their Mtf transition. One is even a total "IQ-45"(Rump) fan, which I can't come close to understanding. She went through SRS several years ago and just has a level of meanness which doesn't lurk so far beneath the surface.
Of course, being trans is not just a trait you somehow acquire, I believe you are born into it...or not.
The cross dressers in the group profess having the freedom to dress or not, but a transgender person doesn't. The difference being, a cross dresser wants to look like a cis woman, while a trans person wants to be a cis woman. Or live the life of one.
Some, like the person at the meeting, are fortunate to have been able to transition well enough to step between the genders. Most just aren't.
Either way, it's OK to exist together. Cross Dressers and transgender women are just as different as drag queens are to us.
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I suppose we must exist together as much as Democrats and Republicans should co-exist. We don't have to agree on our respective motivations for our gender expression, but we can respect each other as individuals. You won't find me, these days, hanging out with cross dressers at LGBT-friendly bars, nor even at drag shows. That doesn't mean I would even think of protesting outside a gay bar or drag show, however. I wouldn't boycott a get-together of Republicans, either. In fact, I don't apply a label to myself at all, so I am neither a stereotypical transgender woman or a Democrat. I am who I am, and as unique a person as is anyone else. We are, after all (and before all), fellow human beings.
For me, being a transgender woman involved cross dressing as a means of survival until I could finally express and present myself completely. It was a combination of luck and a lot of hard work. The middle-ground became less and less an option, although I remained there for many years. I could no longer be disingenuous, however, and I believe that those close to me could sense that, as well. Had I been satisfied with occasional cross dressing, I would not have felt myself to be disingenuous.
As I am a musician and performer, I could easily have been a drag performer, but I never saw myself as one. My wife, in our early conversations, thought it to be acceptable for me to combine my "passion" for cross dressing and my passion for performing as an outlet for my gender expression. While music is a passion of mine, however, cross dressing was (and is) not. I was lucky that she came to understand that, but it took some work on my part to convince her. If someone who may have thought I were a drag performer sat through just one set of one of my shows, I think they would recognize that, too. Having the ability and permission to just be myself is all I ever wanted, and I can accept the accolades, as well as the rejection, because of it.
Yes, it's OK to exist together, but we shouldn't expect that anyone be exactly the same as ourselves in order to be respectful of each other as the unique human beings we all are.
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