This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
- Kayube: Do we need this? We already have Wholesome Crossdresser and Villainous Crossdresser for good and evil characters respectively who crossdress because they like to, and Bosom Buddies and Sweet Polly Oliver for male and female characters respectively who crossdress as part of a plot. What space does this have left? (And why are the two kinds of crossdressing split up differently?!)
Ellen Hayes: I think they should be split up, because the depictions in western media differ GREATLY from those in Japanese media. The Crying Game (1992) was fairly positive (and dealing with a transsexual), but "transvestites murder women to wear their skins" in Silence Of The Lambs (1991) seems to have stuck more in the popular consciousness.
Also, IMO, it'd be nice to be able to search for a characteristic, like "crossdresser", and then be able to further refine the search based on an index or well-cross-linked page. Or maybe find out that what they were looking for was "transsexual" instead.
Cassy: I removed some entirely inaccurate comments on characters who are transsexual or transgendered. Please folks, do the research when you write about such a sensitive and complex topic, there are many trans people who suffer from the widespread (and totally wrong) assumption that they are cross-dressers.
- Also note that 'Buffalo Bill' in The Silence Of The Lambs is not a crazy cross-dressing guy but is a woman, a male-to-female transsexual. Thomas Harris and the movie present her as a Villainous Crossdresser, but they obviously Did Not Do The Research. As a matter of fact, Hannibal proves that Harris is not only transphobic but also a lesbophobe.
Gemmifer: In my opinion these are crossdressers. Since when can you choose your sex. XX=female, XY=male, pay attention to well known biological facts, please.
Dark Sasami: The above comment displays a vast depth of ignorance, but this isn't the place for the flamewar. If we can shut it down right here that'd be real good-like.
Gemmifer: There's always the option of a civilized discussion. It's words like "ignorance" that spark flame wars, not differences of opinion.
- Mike: Your original statement was not conducive to a civilized discussion. By simply waving aside the entire well-known subject of transsexualism ("Since when can you choose your sex", "pay attention to well known biological facts"), you established a confrontational attitude and did display a great deal of ignorance. Transsexuals do not "choose" their sex, they simply have very intense feelings that they were born with the wrong biological sex. By the way: I believe that "ignorance" is a much kinder word to use than the other word that springs to mind to describe the statement you made, because it implies that you Did Not Do The Research, but it also implies that this can be easily resolved with a bit of reading up. Some terms to get you started: "transsexualism", "transgender", "Gender Identity Disorder" (that's straight out of the DSM). You might also look up intersexuality, as people who were born intersexed and were "normalized" as a doctor can fall into the same boat if the doctor chose wrong. Here's a short version: when somebody actually lives as a person of the opposite sex, and (if they can afford it), gets surgery to give them sexual characteristics in line with their gender identity, it is not crossdressing, it is something far less frivolous. Crossdressing is often part of the life of a transgendered person, but TG people often actually step into those social roles and live that way. Crossdressers may crossdress for any of a variety of reasons, but TS and TG people should not simply be pigeonholed as "crossdressers" without some additional understanding of what is going on.
Nornagest: Haven't seen the movie in years, and haven't ever read the sequels, but I recall the novel version of Silence of the Lambs going to great lengths to explain why Buffalo Bill wasn't a transman. I'm not qualified to say whether the explanation actually holds water, but it did assume the existence of genuine, non-pathological transsexuality.
Citizen: I don't understand how this is different from Wholesome Crossdresser.
Dark Sasami: What this should be is the supertrope. Possibly an index.
Micah: As someone who knows very little about Japanese culture, reading this page doesn't explain to me why this page and Transvestite need to be split from each other. At the moment we have one general statement about gender roles, one specific statement about how Japan and the west have similar stereotypes about crossdressing, and one blanket statement on the discussion page that Japanese depictions differ greatly from Western ones, but nothing even remotely specific about what those differences actually are.
Danel: Yeah, seriously - Crossdresser being an Anime Trope is... non-intuitive, to say the least.
Looney Toons: I suppose you can blame me. I created this page way way back at the dawn of the Wiki, when dinosaurs still walked the edit boxes. I was creating the anime section completely from scratch (there was an anime page that basically said "anime tropes" and nothing else), and I was wracking my brains for every stock anime character type I could think of. I was vaguely thinking along the lines that anime crossdressers were approached differently from transvestites in Western media. Note that at the time this page was created there were no other such topics on the wiki — it is the ultimate ancestor of all the other more specific trope pages.
