#crossdreamer

Crossdreaming: people who dream about being another gender than the one assigned, regardless of their actual/current gender.

My wife asked me if I thought ‘Why can’t I be you?” by the Cure is a crossdreamer/transgender anthem. 

The song can most certainly be read in that way, with its longing lyrics:

“I'll run around in circles until I run out of breath I'll eat you all up or I'll just hug you to death You're so wonderful, too good to be true You make me, make me, make me, make me hungry for you

Everything you do is simply delicate Everything you do is quite angelicate Why can't I be you? Why can't I be you?”

I haven’t found any documentation on the band leader Robert Smith being transgender (in spite of his gender nonconforming appearance). 

However, one of the  guitarists of the Cure,  Pearl Thompson is a transgender woman (at the time known as Porl Thompson). Maybe she was the inspiration for the lyrics? Anyone who knows?

Photo of Pearl Thompson (The Cure Mexico).

What am I? A trans guy? A demigirl? A crossdreamer?

Anonymous has also sent me the following questions:

I don’t have gender dysphoria but I feel off with my gender. I mean, I think I’m barely connected to my gender identification, sometimes I’m not sure if I even have gender identity. I don’t want to have breasts but I’m comfortable with them. Sometimes I want to have a penis but sometimes not. I think terms graygender or demigirl fits me best. But I still fear that I’m just cis girl trying to be “special snowflake” or something. Sorry for my English.

and

A little correction of my previous ask: I think I can be crossdreamer and demigirl since my connection to female identity and sex is little. But I still fear that I’m just cis girl.

And here’s my answer (to the best of my ability):

I understand perfectly well how you feel. It took me several years to come to that find out who I am, partly because I had repressed my gender variance, refusing to think about it, and – to the extent I did think about it – it scared me. There was a lot of confusion, for sure.

We are all afraid of social exclusion and losing our loved ones, and even if there has been a lot of LGBTQA progress, there are still transphobes out there.

So the first challenge is, as I see it, to embrace the transgender journey. For most transgender people, this journey takes time. And in spite of what the newspapers may tell you, only a minority of nonbinary and transgender people are 100 percent certain about who they are from the age of four. So it is OK to question everything. And there is not one “correct” goal for this journey.

The second challenge is to get beyond the restrictions of human thinking. We use language to understand the world around us. We have to, but there is no one to one relationship between the concepts we use and the world “out there”. 

Our words are, at best, approximations, and people also use words to control what people think and do. This is, for instance,  why transphobes are attacking the word “gender” and would like to force us reduce gender to biological sex. The word “gender” makes it possible for us to think about gender identity as something independent of biological sex or assigned gender. It helps people like us, but offends the kind of people who are scared of diversity, tolerance, compassion and progress.

Unfortunately there are also trans people who would like to use language in this way, insisting – for instance – that you need to have gender dysphoria to be transgender. This is – frankly – nonsense. Transgender is an umbrella term covering all types of gender variance. (Documentation on the meaning of the word trans here,  and the argument for why you do not need gender dysphoria to be trans here.)

The third challenge is to get beyond the binaries. The bigots like binaries, because they can use them to force people into one of two neat boxes, defined by them,  making it  easier to control them. But neither sexual orientation nor gender identity are clear cut binaries. 

We know now that gender identity may vary from clear cut woman to undeniably male. Yet, as far as i understand it, there exist no persons in the world who are exclusively female or exclusively male – if you look at their personalities, abilities, interests,  gender expressions as well as their sexual characteristics.

But even if most people are a mix of pink and blue (to use the colors of the stereotypes) most people feel comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth. They are cisgender, not transgender. 

As soon as you feel uncomfortable about being classified as your assigned gender, you are – as I see it – some shade of transgender. That does not mean that you have to transition, or that you have to take hormones, but it means that you have to reflect carefully on who you are. 

If you fear that you are cis girl (in a world were so many people insists that you have to be cis to be socially acceptable) I would say that you are not a cis girl. 

In spite of what transphobic TERFs and religious extremists may tell you, questioning your own gender is not a modern “snowflake” trend or fashion. We have documentation  of gender variance all the way back to antiquity. Most experts in the field (doctors, psychologists and trans activists) agree that gender variance is a real thing. The feelings are real. The identities are real. The journey is real.

Several of the terms you are referring to reflect the need for a language that captures  the diversity of gender as well as the transgender journey. 

Nonbinary is a word that can be of help to those who are uncertain about their gender, and those who feel that their gender lies between or beyond the two traditional genders. “Demigirl” is but a variant of nonbinary or genderqueer. 

Crossdreamer is a word that refers to the act of dreaming about being another gender, and is not really an alternative identity. Trans people crossdream. Cis people crossdream. You crossdream.

Use the words that feel meaningful to you right now, and change your vocabulary if you find new words that are more on target. Ultimately you are the only one who can know who you truly are. No one else has the right to define your identity for you.

Gender confused?

The members of Crossdream Life will understand you.

There has been written a lot about the dynamics between femme and butch lesbians, and how the expressions of femininity and masculinity may play out in such relationships.

Femme and butch are concepts that clearly reflects something real, needs deeply embedded in the human psyche, but they are notoriously difficult to define. Maybe they are not meant to be defined, but to be enjoyed.

In this article Jonathan AKA male femme, discusses what it means to be femme if you are a straight identifying man. 

Jonathan uses the word “transvestite” to describe a male identifying person who crossdresses in order to express the femme side. I really, really, do not like that term, as it has some really bad connotations historically. But his arguments are interesting, all the same.

Jonathan writes:

Femme provides the best model I've found for explaining who I am, what I'm about, what I'm doing. — Butch and femme have opened up (...) a self-awareness of how I work, and a context in which I make so much more sense.3 Femme fits. As Brenda Barnes put it (for butch): — Butch is the only word I've ever found that describes how I feel. It has been a long process to find and accept it as the right word. But butch is the word.4 Whereas "female" doesn't fit. I'm not female (either cis or trans). And "feminine" comes with all kinds of cultural baggage, not least its incumbency upon being female. Femme offers a way past: a gender (and erotic) identity independent of binary correlations.

More here. 

One of the most destructive tactics used against transgender and nonbinary people is to dismiss them because of their sexuality.

Over at Crossdream Life gender variant people can discuss sex and sexuality without shame or embarrassment.

Visit CrossdreamLife.com right now!

(There is also a chat room for those who would like to talk about such matters.)