I ask because I can hear it in the room. There’s a particular sound a rehearsed answer makes — smooth, a little too ready, arriving before the question has finished. You can ask someone why they dress a certain way and get a reply so polished it couldn’t possibly have been assembled that evening. Someone else assembled it on another evening and borrowed it.
While we should move forward as a group in a unified way, we should also each continue exploring our individuality and personal journey. Certainly, many of us share the same evolution from closet dressing as a child, self-denial, our first time out, and some form of acceptance and balance within ourselves. Yet those similarities don’t mean we are motivated by the same factors, or that the balance or acceptance we have found is always grounded in reality.
Here is what finally made me notice it. I started hearing the same sentence — not the same idea, the same SENTENCE — from people who had never met each other. Same clause order. Same emphasis. Three women in three states reciting a line one of them read somewhere in 2009. Shared experience doesn’t produce identical phrasing. Shared scripts do.
I understand the appeal so that I won’t be sanctimonious about it. An unanswered question about yourself is exhausting. It follows you to work. It sits up with you. A finished story — one that explains you, comes with vocabulary, and arrives with people who will nod when you say it — ends that exhaustion in a single evening. You get an answer, AND you get a table to sit at. That’s not weakness. That’s just relief, and anybody who has carried the question knows exactly how much it weighs.
The trouble is you can wear someone else’s story for ten years before you notice it doesn’t fit in the shoulders and you placed yourself in a box.
Transgender seems to be the hot buzzword these days, which encompasses trans variant people of many different interests and behaviors – all grouped in one pot. A few years ago I asked the question: Who are we? My friends had many different answers, and today the question seems just as relevant as it did then. But who are we refers to us individually as much as it does us as a group. I hear the same personal identity being repeated over and over, and it makes me wonder. Is that your story or someone else’s? Does categorization really matter? I think it does, because on a personal level everyone needs to discover who they are, and what may work for one person may not ring true for the next, so to cookie-cut our identity can be misleading.
I have heard many different descriptions of what the various categories mean, and to the best of my ability, it breaks down as follows:
The community at large is called Transgender, which represents the larger circle. Within that larger circle are several smaller circles, which are:
1) Drag Queen: usually a gay man (often a performer) who emulates the glitz and glamour of a woman, usually in an over-the-top caricature of a woman, but does not want to be a woman,
2) Cross-dresser: a person who enjoys wearing the clothes of the opposite gender for emotional and/or sexual (sometimes fetishistic) reasons
3) Transvestite: the term dates back to the 60s and 70s, but has meant gay men who dress as women to attract and engage in sexual relations with men, though the term then evolved to include cross-dressers, and then was phased out of use as more defined terminology has emerged.
4) Transgenderist: a person who falls outside the standard binary man-woman mold and has some of the emotional and/or spiritual elements of the gender opposite their birth gender.
5) Transsexual: a person who feels that they were born in the body of the gender opposite their birth gender, and in most cases pursues all available means to live as the gender they identify as. However, it is not the surgery that makes one transsexual; the surgery is merely an action taken because of the transsexual condition.
6) She-Male: a birth male who presents and portrays everything female, but differs from the transsexual who identifies as female in that the she-male also identifies the male genitalia as a part of their identity; they are the 3rd sex.
A note on that list, written later.
Read that taxonomy again and notice what it is: a snapshot. It’s how we talked when I learned to talk about this, and several of those words have since fallen away or gone bad in the mouth.
“Transvestite” has largely gone, and good riddance — it arrived through a clinical door and was used to pathologize us. “Transgenderist” has aged out; most of what it was reaching for is now carried by non-binary and genderfluid, which are better words because they came from us rather than from a diagnostic manual. And “she-male” I would not write today at all. It was coined in the sixties, and the pornography industry took it and kept it, and whatever it once described, that is what it now means to anyone who hears it. I’ve set out where I’ve landed on all of this more recently in Navigating the Complexities of Gender Identity and its Subcategories.
I’m leaving the list standing anyway, because deleting it would hide the very thing this column is about.
Those categories were SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY too. I didn’t derive them — I collected them from people who sounded like they knew. I wrote them down as though they were a map of the territory, rather than a set of words a particular group found useful in a particular decade. Then the decade ended and the words moved. If a taxonomy I was fairly confident about can go stale in a few years, what exactly makes anyone think the sentence they repeat about themselves is permanent?
That’s not an argument against labels. Labels are useful — they’re how you find the others like you, and finding the others matters enormously. It’s an argument against treating a label as a verdict instead of a tool. A tool you can put down when it stops doing the job.
Whether the classifications and descriptions above are accurate or not doesn’t really change the question. What I hear from people can range from sexual justification, such as, I am straight because I am only with men when I am dressed as a girl, to more internal clarification, such as, I was born in a man’s body, but I am female inside: I was just born that way.
Both of those sentences do a job, and it’s worth clarifying what the job is. They make something complicated hold still. They let you answer a question at a party without the evening turning into an interrogation. Sometimes they’re also true. But a sentence that stops the questioning is doing something different from a sentence that describes you, and it is worth knowing which one you’ve got in your hand.
A test, if you want one
Here’s the only reliable way I know to tell your story from a borrowed one, and it takes about ten seconds.
Say your explanation out loud. Then ask: can I take the next step down? Not repeat it — go further. Why that, and what does it feel like in my chest when it happens, and when did it last change? A story you actually arrived at has basement levels. You can keep descending, and it gets more specific and less tidy the further you go. A borrowed story has a floor. You hit it fast, and underneath there’s nothing but the same sentence again, a little louder. As I wrote in my book, The Last Woman & Me, you can only find the truth when you search without the fear of what you might find. Through the years, I’ve seen crossdressers latch onto the “I’m a woman in a man’s body story, when, in fact, that wasn’t true. And it doesn’t matter: whatever your story is, whatever is true, is OK. One friend told me, with clarity in her eyes, “I have no idea why I cross-dress; I just like it, and no other exploration is needed, for me.” And that is honesty; she felt no obligation to spin the story someone else would accept.
Hitting the floor doesn’t make you a fraud. It means you’ve been using a placeholder, which most of us have at some point, and which beats having no answer at all when your sister asks. It just means the real work is still sitting there waiting, patiently, the way it does.
I went through this myself and wrote about where it took me in From Closet Crossdresser to Clarity, and how often my own motives changed underneath me in Play It Again Sam-antha. The companion to this column, on how opinion hardens into fact in our own forums, is In Search of Truth Among Myths and Misinformation.
Is it possible that the transgender revolution has spawned better justifications of one’s actions, and at the same time caused complacency regarding their continued personal insight?
I think it is. I think visibility handed us a vocabulary before it handed us the time to work out whether the words fit, and a borrowed word in your mouth feels remarkably like an answer. Keep asking anyway. The question is yours; nobody else can do it for you, and the version of you asking it in five years will have different information than the one asking today.
As always, be happy, be safe, and think pretty.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean to be living someone else’s story?
It means repeating an explanation of yourself that you adopted ready-made rather than arrived at. You hear it said well by someone who sounds certain; it fits well enough, and it ends an exhausting question — so it becomes your line. The sign is that it comes out polished and identical every time, often word for word the way you first heard it.
How can I tell whether my explanation is really mine?
Say it out loud, then try to go one level deeper — why that, how does it feel, when did it last change. A story you arrived at yourself has basement levels and gets more specific and messier the further down you go. A borrowed one hits a floor almost immediately, with nothing underneath but the same sentence repeated.
Why does this article use terms like transvestite and she-male?
Because it records how the community talked when it was written, and removing the list would obscure the point the column is making. Those words have since fallen away or become offensive — “she-male” in particular belongs to the pornography industry now — and the fact that a confident taxonomy aged so badly is itself the argument: categories are tools of their moment, not permanent truths.
Are labels and categories a bad thing?
No. Labels are how you find the others, and finding the others matters enormously, particularly early on. The problem is treating a label as a verdict rather than a tool — something that settles the question instead of something you can put down when it stops being useful.