What’s the difference between a crossdresser and someone who is trans?
So, usually, crossdressers are people who are cisgender and they enjoy dressing up in the clothing of a different gender but they don’t identify with that gender in terms of their internal experience of gender.
So sometimes it’s for like humiliation purposes, like sissification play.
Sometimes it’s for things like drag.
There’s a lot of different reasons that it can happen but usually a crossdresser is someone who enjoys wearing the clothing and playing dress-up but they don’t feel as though they are that gender inside of themselves.
Someone who is trans or transgender is someone whose internal experience of their gender does not align with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Now, again, the reality versus like technical definitions can be a little different.
A lot of people experiment with crossdressing before recognizing that they are trans.
So sometimes people can even be both.
There are some trans people who also do drag or cross-dress as a different gender.
So, it all can get very, very messy.
I think this is one of those things where with a lot of these definitions in the queer world, I get a little nervous sometimes about why people want to know the differences because I think that sometimes it’s used as a validity test or a respectability test and I think that in general, whatever label people is about to apply to themselves is like totally freaking valid.
If someone is a drag queen and they consider themselves to be trans, great, cool, awesome.
If someone is a crossdresser and they decide to do a little bit of hormone therapy to make their crossdressing easier but they don’t consider themselves to be trans, great for them.
Take whatever labels feel right for you.
I don’t think that either is more valid than the other and I don’t think that either necessarily gives the other a bad name in a way that some people can do and they’re similar and different.
Like calling a trans person just a crossdresser is super fucking insulting most of the time.
Most of the time that’s being done by transphobes who don’t believe that being transgender is real and calling someone who is a crossdresser necessarily trans may invalidate their identity.
So again, like listen to the labels people use for themselves.
If you don’t know, you can ask them like, “What is your gender experience like?”
Maybe you don’t even need to know exactly what terms they use because like maybe it doesn’t really matter and so I think that again, in general, crossdressers wear clothing of a gender different than the gender that they identify as and people who are trans have an internal experience of their gender that is different than the gender they were assigned at birth.
There can be overlap.
They can be different.
Who knows?
