Difference

it would help if republicans, especially conservatives or christians, opposed to anti-discrimination laws for trangender people open their minds to understand that there is a significant difference between cross-dressers, along with drag queens, transvestites, etc., and transgender people, some defined as gender queer, etc.

The difference is that transgender people want to live in the gender they know they are inside, and not the sex they were born with, and cited on their original birth certificate. This requires extensive medical proceedures with therapists, physicians, specialist, surgeons, etc. and extensive legal proceedures to change their name, gender markers on their local, state and federal documents, and eventually their birth certificate.

Other people, the whole array of them (above) don’t identify in the gender opposite their birth sex, and have no interest to live fulltime in the other gender. They don’t go through any medical or legal process because none apply to them. They simply like to play “dressup”, wearing and going out in women’s clothes. It is not defined in the DSM V as a condition, disorder or disease, but just a innocuous fetish.

This means transgender people, mostly transgender women, live as women, of whom the vast majority pass without notice as women. Only a few who don’t readily pass have been used by politicians and people as examples of all transgender women. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people have seen, meet, and even talked to a transgender women without realizing it.

The laws protect the rights of transgender people don’t lnclude cross-dressers and the rest of those who are not medically and legally defined as transgender, meaning with Gender Identity, and thus are illegally trespassing entering private spaces designated for the other sex or gender. They’re committing a crime and are not protected by the law.

The important point is that transgender people are not their birth sex. They’re their gender, so a transgender woman is not a man but a woman and vice versa, so calling transgender women “men” is offensive and wrong. And attacking them is not right, and why their rights need protecting to just live like everyone else.