What an interesting thread! I am very pleased to see this community discussing this issue. I identify as non binary, femme and trans. I am not transitioning. I am not male. I am not female but I am more female than male. The way I dress in public is a reflection of my gender identity. I am not trying to pass as a woman because I am not a woman. I do not dress as a man because I do not see a man when I look in the mirror. I am more feminine than masculine and so I dress in more feminine than masculine clothes. As my wife points out on a regular basis I am also not a cross dresser. I am transgender. My clothes and my presentation reflects my androgyny, and frankly, always have. My mannerisms, my patterns of speech, my gestures and even the way I think are not really masculine. They are more feminine. I am routinely mistaken for a woman on the phone. The house we rent is on the market and we have potential buyers and real estate agents coming through frequently. My wife and I are quite commonly referred to as women by both the agents and their clients, which my wife finds hilarious. I am not wearing a dress when this happens. I don't wear a dress in public because I live in a little town and I feel a lot of compassion for the extreme difficulty people have in understanding the varieties of gender. I will certainly wear a dress in public in a city and I will certainly not be trying to pass as a woman any more than my wearing mostly femme clothes suggests I'm trying to pass now. I hope that the conversation on this thread will help those of you who have difficulty in understanding why some of us are not interested in presenting as a woman or trying to pass as a woman will be enlightened to the fact of gender variability. This is quite the most serious problem I face with interacting on this site, the difficulty some cross dressers have with recognizing that the transgender umbrella includes many shades, including gender fluid, bigender, androgynous, non binary and many, many different modes of presentation, including men with beards in dresses.
I know this website is crossdressers.com but I also read the warnings the moderators loud and precise statements about the absolute importance of including all the gender variants. I really hope that the minority of members who do not understand the reasons that a person defined male at birth (dmab) but who rejects that gender identification and yet does not choose to present fully as a woman will be able educate themselves. I am personally happy any time to explain this in as much detail as anyone would like and the resources on the internet for understanding gender fluidity are just awesome. I certainly understand why men who define themselves as male and heterosexual want to present and pass as women and I know that most people are completely baffled by that wish. This is because they have not been educated to understand the variability of gender identification and gender expression. There are important historical but no longer really relevant social, political and economic reasons for binary genders. For someone like me and an increasing number of people considerably younger than me this binary gender insistence is oppressive and a violation of our human rights. Fortunately the world is changing. Requiring that dmab trans people present fully as female is a form of binary gender oppression that only recently has been partially eliminated as medical and governmental policy in this country and is unfortunately still true in most of the world. I would hope that on this forum we would understand that it comes from the same place of ignorance that has allowed the incredible violence that has often greeted transgender acts as innocuous as cross dressing.
I would also like to counter the charge that asserting our rights deprives others of theirs which is what the statement that people like me are pushing our views on others actually states. I am sorry but this argument, hauled out every time any type of minority or non conforming group asserts their right to exist, has no plausibility whatsoever. I am not telling anyone else how they must dress, live, talk or walk. I am asserting that the same courtesy must be shown towards me. I have the right to express my gender with precisely the same power as any cisgendered male or female. Cisgendered, by the way, is a term that just means that a person is content with the gendered defined for them at birth. It is increasingly being used because of its precision. Thank you in advance from refraining from using the distasteful and oppressive argument that the assertion of a widely recognized human right, the ability to define one's own gender, is somehow depriving others of their rights.
