Over at My Husband Betty, someone posed the question of whether trans people ought to be offended by contests that involve crossdressing.

Having read Marjorie Garber’s “Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety” as well as Vern and Bonnie Bulloughs’ “Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender” — both pretty exhaustive histories of cross-dressing and cross-gendered behavior — I think much of the interest in it by “straight society” is just the fun of social inversion. It’s notable that many of the festival occasions where cross-dressing was historically sanctioned also featured other forms of “the world turned upside down” — for example, the servants being able to lord over their masters for day, etc. Today maybe it’s not strictly about inverting the social hierarchy, but it is usually about setting outside the “normal social order” and/or incongruentity and/or transgressiveness.

Plus, as my friend Erica, points out (to borrow her words), in the context of required behavior for contests, it’s part of the ever-popular sport of public humiliation and degradation. I’m not thrilled that trans behavior is sufficiently stigmatized in our society that it is considered per se a route to humiliation. But the intention here is not to further marginalize trans-ness (though that is an indirect outcome), but rather to denigrate and humiliate an individual for mass-market consumption.

A non-trans guy in a dress for Halloween usually gives pretty clear signals that he’s engaged in burlesque — and the costumes are usually packaged this way. (For example, I remember a French Maid’s outfit whose packaging had a male model with almost comedically exaggerated beard shadow.) Similarly in my experience, the same signals are sent by gay guys who aren’t drag queens who do drag for Pride Parades or other events.

That said, as far as the Halloween crossdressing, it’s no secret that choice in costumes can be indicative of deeper issues that someone is wrestling with, or at least (consciously or not) interested in exploring. I’d say it’s not that different from how some folks use role-playing games to explore. Interestingly, a friend of mine who was RPG designer, said his experience was that most players tended to engage in two types of roles initially: an idealized version of themselves before tiring of that and reinventing themselves as their reverse evil anti-twin (or doing it vice versa). Later on, they tended to play more nuanced characters, but he said that the first two roles were sort of a phase they had to go through.