...Regardless, my concerns arise when people in and outside of LGBTQ culture start associating any type of cross-dressing with transgender individuals.
“There’s a difference between being a transgender person and a cross-dresser,” Director of Women’s Studies Laura Levitt said. “They are different kinds of identifications. Cross-dressing can be done by straight people and can be performative, using the performative space as a venue for trying things out.”
Not knowing the difference is mostly a matter of being misinformed, and sadly, that’s the fault of media, society and even individuals within the LGBTQ movement.
As a friend once said, the “B” and the “T” are often left out in the alphabet-soup acronym for queer culture and the battle for equality. I will continually bring this up in succeeding columns, because it’s the truth. When we leave out or neglect people from our community who aren’t fitting in with the mainstream idea of queer, we’re doing them and ourselves a great deal of injustice.
To be a transgender individual as opposed to someone who is cross-dressing as a drag queen or king or transvestite is very different.
“A drag performance is not the same thing as a transgender person working on performitivity of their gender identification in the culture, and the stakes are higher,” Levitt added.
Those stakes include but are not limited to discrimination of various forms, verbal harassment and violence being the more extreme forms....
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