In the middle of a recent thread about the term transvestite, Betty and I were both challenged as to our use of it. A lot of people are offended by the word and its connotations of mental illness and perversity. As I mention in the glossary entry in my book, however, Betty and I never saw it that way, for several reasons: 1) because without transvestite you couldn’t have transsexuals or transgenders – because it was the first of the three coined, and the others were coined from it; 2) because the rest of the world uses the term; 3) because the man who coined it had no such judgments of perversity or mental illness in mind when he coined it – all that came later, and 4) for Betty there was always a sexual aspect to crossdressing, and taking that out was the equivalent of white-washing the sexual aspect.
Someone even mentioned that they think first of Glen or Glenda when they hear the word “transvestite” – and I wondered, are we ashamed of Ed Wood?
Transvestites scratch the itch of gender dysphoria through crossdressing, and that’s all. Transvestites are not in the DSM (only fetishistic transvestites are, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who fits that description). As Donna, one of our MHB board faithful clarified, “…the word “transvestite” was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld circa 1910, was used as a broad, entirely non-judgmental term that would encompass what today would really be considered the entire tg spectrum, and was *not* invented by the psychiatric profession to pathologize or perversify people.” It just wasn’t Hirschfield’s style.
So in a sense, the word transvestite is a link to the whole of the T community’s history. That it’s become a word with negative connotations is due to the lack of education, the silence surrounding the word, our own willingness to disown people like Ed Wood and maybe even Eddie Izzard for not being exactly as we’d like them to be. But if there’s anything the queer community has taught me, it’s that discovering your history as a community is vital and important work. Do gays disown Rock Hudson because he was closeted or because he died of AIDS? Joe Orton because his lover killed him, or because he was famous for having anonymous sex in bathrooms? Of course they don’t. Because when you’re out there, trying to show people you exist – and that you always have existed – you need to find the figures from history that provide proof.
The Chevalier D’Eon, Ed Wood, Virginia Prince, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf: none of them are perfect examples. I’ve been asked a few times how it is I can like Virginia Prince for some things and excoriate her for others, and the answer is easy: she’s human. But what she did for herself, for all trans people everywhere, is more than mind-blowing. Did Charlotte von Mahlsdorf inform for the Communist Party? Only she knows, and she’s taken that secret to the grave. Ed Wood looked on the 60s, as an old man, with envy in his heart, for a decade where sexuality might be freer, gender a little more blurred. He made some of the best bad movies ever. But all of them, in their own way, made transvestites a little more visible; they gave people the idea of it, at least.
I understand that older crossdressers cringe when they hear it; they found that word in adult bookstores, in pulp erotica, and on the covers of sensationalist magazines. Betty found the word in the dictionary at a library growing up, and thought, ‘I guess that makes me a freak, but I know I’m not the only one now.’ Tri-Ess introduced “crossdresser” instead, to get rid of the negative connotations. The only problem is, I don’t see how the use of ‘crossdresser’ over transvestite really changes people’s minds; I can’t imagine any word that would describe a man dressing as a woman that wouldn’t be offensive to someone – especially to people who don’t like any kind of boundary-crossing, much less crossing the boundaries of sex or gender.
I’ve been in crowds shouting we’re here / we’re queer/ get used to it and I know what it does. It takes a word that was used to hurt – a word more full of negative connotations even than transvestite – and turns it around.
Now it’s in the title of a popular TV show. Believe me, no one would have imagined that even ten years ago, much less 20 or 50 years ago. But it happened. And it didn’t happen because queer people made themselves less queer. It happened because queer people made themselves visible, and got angry, and got organized, and demanded that even perverts are people, too.
Because today, in America, a show for kids gets taken off the air because a rabbit went to visit a little girl in Vermont whose parents happen to be lesbians. The show was funded in order to provide diversity education, if you can believe that, but as we well know, lesbians are still a little too diverse for some people. They’ve got their civil unions; they’ve changed the language to make themselves more palatable, and you know what? They still can’t be shown on a children’s television show about diversity.
Either people are going to respect you for who and what you are or they won’t. Cleansing ourselves of negative connotations is not as simple as word choice. If only it were that easy! But Tri-Ess started using “crossdresser” instead of transvestite a few decades ago, and I don’t see that it’s opened the doors of mainstream acceptance. Instead I saw Sam Walls go down in flames when he ran for office in Texas once it was shown he was a crossdresser. No one even called him a transvestite, mind you: all they needed were pictures of him en femme. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.
And once they have that picture, it doesn’t matter what thousand words you use to try to explain it. Not saying the “L” word didn’t save Buster from getting bumped. Calling Sam Walls a “crossdresser” didn’t make him more palatable to voters (neither did explaining that he wasn’t a homosexual). Had he stood up and said “Yes, I’m a transvestite” could that have harmed him any more?