If I may, I'd like to respectfully ask for clarification on a couple of points. I'm interested in learning your personal definitions of the terms "crossdreaming" and "truscum" as I've been seeing both in various places around Tumblr. I had never heard of either before a short time ago, and I've been trying to ask a few people what they mean to them. Thanks.
Crossdreaming is a term I came up with in collaboration with other transgender and transsexual people.
It refers to the phenomenon that transgender people may get aroused by the idea of being their target sex.
The medical establishment has used this phenomenon to invalidate especially trans women by calling them “transvestic fetishists”, "autogynephiliacs" and more, in essence reducing them to perverted heterosexual men.
This has led to a lot of infighting in transgender circles, as some transsexual women have tried desperately to avoid the stigma associated with crossdressing and crossdreaming, presenting as “the classic transsexual” who has no desires of this type.
Denying such feelings have often been a prerequisite for getting past the “gatekeepers” and get access to surgery.
Needless to say, “the perfect trans woman” is a replica of the 1950’s house wife, a woman with a low libido and no “dirty thoughts”. The fact that women assigned women at birth may be as sexually driven as men is of no relevance here. This is about stereotypes, and not about real life.
The reason I coined the term was not to establish a new “identity”. If I am to identify as anything in the LGBT arena, it is as transgender. No, the term was meant to help transgender people discuss these feelings openly.
In my opinion crossdreamer fantasies are natural expressions of a hidden or suppressed sex identity. Sex (as in sexual) is a natural part of sex (as in identity). Read Julia Serano’s book Whipping Girl for a good discussion of this "subconscious sex"!
Truscum is a tribe of transsexual separatist. They are related to the older generation of separatist trans women described above, but has a different history. Truscum is a recent variant, this time dominated by much younger female to male trans men, and found on tumblr mainly.
Truscum is another attempt at creating a distance between the “true transsexuals” and other transgender people. Unlike their predecessors they do not avoid the word “transgender”. They do, in fact, try to occupy the term, by forcing other gender variant people to stop using it. In this way they hope to avoid any association with crossdressers, crossdreamers, genderqueer and other people they call “non-binary” or “gender non-conforming”.
The reason they prefer “transgender” to the medically correct term “transsexual”, is that they associate transsexual with the porn industry. In short: This is a movement driven by a desperate need to avoid embarrassment.
The litmus test for calling yourself “transgender” is, according to them, that you suffer from “gender dysphoria”, a medical term which refers to deep psychological suffering caused by a misalignment between mind and body.
The problem with all of this is that there is no clear border between crossdressers and crossdreamers on the one hand and transsexuals on the other.
Most trans women have been both crossdreamers and crossdressers. How else can they fantasize about having sex as their true selves? A similar movement is found among trans men who originally identified as, for example, masculine butch. They used to be active crossdressers and crossdreamers before transitioning.
A lot of crossdreamers and crossdressers are deeply gender dysphoric (and diagnosed as such), so by forcing crossdressers and crossdreamers out of the transgender family, they are — in fact — expelling gender dysphoric people. They are distancing themselves from the people they define as their own kind.
I believe they are right when they claim that there is a biological core to gender dysphoria. I am gender dysphoric myself and find it very hard to believe that all this suffering is caused by a sexual kink or “social construction”. But that does not mean that we are facing two distinct tribes of gender variance.
As is often the case in life, we are instead facing various shades of grey.
I look at all gender variant people as my family, from the casual crossdresser and crossdreamer on the one hand to the post-op trans man or trans woman at the other. Because we are family!
See also: Truscum and the transgender war of words.
