Originally a comment by John Horstman on We’re not trying to draw bright line boundaries at all.
I identify as gender indifferent (as a subset of genderqueer) for exactly the reasons outlined in the post, and in my experience – both personally and academically – I’ve come to realize that a LOT of supposedly-cisgendered people are actually more like me, what I would call gender indifferent. And when I say “indifferent”, I mean insofar as it relates to identity; much like AJ Milne, I’m outright hostile to the concept and normative construction of gender at certain times/in certain contexts.
I should also note that trans people fall into the same two categories, though the overwhelming majority of people who decide to transition fall into the first group. The likely reason is that given the social – and often financial – cost of transitioning, someone who doesn’t care much one way or the other will find it easiest to go with the normative default (at least in terms of name/pronouns, legal identification, social identity category, etc.), even if the normative gender category overall doesn’t really fit that well either. Kate Bornstein is perhaps one of the better-known trans people who falls into the second category (she’s addressed this directly in several books and in the lecture she gave at my university, and quite possibly others), and she is frequently assailed with the same charges of (internalized) transphobia from a small, vocal contingent of gender-essentialist trans activists as a result. Someone like RuPaul may also qualify – the question of whether drag performers qualify as trans, perhaps contextually when in their drag personae, runs headlong into this very issue (in my experience, gender-essentialist trans people usually do not consider the drag personae of drag performers “legitimate” in the same way as their own gender identities – the Glasgow Free Pride ban on drag performers is an excellent recent example).
I think that the reason that gender-essentialist trans activists get so much pushback from otherwise-friendly/-allied people, some of whom identify and live as genderqueer and even trans people who are ourselves marginalized by many of the same social structures that marginalize trans people generally in cases like this ongoing kerfuffle, has to do with the tendency of people to exaggerate for effect. Instead of sticking to specific, personal cases, if one starts insisting on making universal assertions about gender being essential, like, say, demanding a one-word answer to the question “Are trans women women?” (that is a demand for a universal proclamation about all trans women and the nature of gender), that erases the existence of people like us, like Jenora Feuer and all of the commenters in this thread who are saying we feel the same way.
Yes, yes, yes. Exactly.
I also agree 100%. I don’t want to be a TERF though. Can’t I just support trans activists while experiencing (or not) gender as I do?
I’ve read that even if you think you’re indifferent to your sex/gender, it’s just your cis privilege making you think that.
So work out your issues with the gender binary by fighting cisnormative society, not a tiny and disempowered minority? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I identify as agender and have had similar experiences. It was always fun when a binary-identified trans partner refused to use the pronouns I’d asked her to use, but it’s okay, ‘cuz I’m really cis and it’s just my privilege talking. Lauded gender-essentialist trans activist Julia Serrano uses the supposed non existence of people like me and John as a standard talking point.
I’ve reached a sufficient level of confusion that I can no longer tell whether I agree or disagree. I’m not sure whether I agree with the OP here. Or rather, I can agree only after splitting some hairs.
TERFs are really hateful individuals. They clearly subscribe to gender essentialism. Their brand of feminism embraces only “real” women–the ones imbued with the ineffable womanly essence. They read as “man-haters” to me, with the level of vitriol I see in their rhetoric, and their transmisogyny reads like splash damage: they seem to define “man” in the very broadest way, to include trans women, and then hate them extra hard for daring to claim they’re women. The Facebook group in question lately does seem pretty rife with some pretty powerful hate. It boils just under the surface, the way a fundie group seems pretty tame and loving until they get a gay person in their crosshairs.
The other extreme would be to reject the existence of sex differences at all. I’ve never heard any feminist writer actually do that; it’s a common slander of Gloria Steinem, when she actually said, “No one is trying to say that there is no difference between men and women, only as I will discuss more in my statement that the differences between, the differences within the groups, male and female, are much, much greater than the differences between the two groups.” If someone rejected any difference between the sexes, that person would also be a TERF: by their theory, gender dysphoria couldn’t be a real thing, and they would be forced to erase and pathologize trans people.
It’s clear that reality is somewhere in the middle. Gender essentialism is false, but there is something undeniably real about gender. Except that gender is also not a binary–just about every permutation of chromosomes, external genitalia, internal genitalia, hormones, secondary sex characteristics, personality traits, gender psychology, etc., can be found in nature. Binary classification only “works” because a majority of people feel adequately described, most of the rest are (with greater or lesser success) forced to assume one or the other identification, and the remainder are erased (from discourse, but often from society and life itself).
Which leaves me not really sure what the hell gender even means. I say that not to obfuscate, so as to avoid recognizing others’ equal worth and humanity, but merely to state the fact that on the intellectual level, gender is too complicated for me to get my head around.
On the human level, the only way to be decent and non-shitty to fellow people is to accept their self-identification, whether it be male, female, both, neither, or other. I don’t need to double-check or police their self-identification: the state of someone else’s genitalia are none of my fucking business, not to mention their chromosomes, psychology, or anything else.
So if you ask me, “Do you accept trans women as women?” then the answer is yes, without hesitation. Trans people are of equal worth and dignity to anyone else, and I accept their self-identification unquestioningly. I hate any form of harassment or mistreatment directed at them. I’d like to be a good ally, though I’m pretty ignorant still so I don’t necessarily know how.
If my confession of ignorance on the larger topic of gender is seen as unacceptable, and the question “are trans women women?” is posed in order to get me to affirm that gender is binary and that trans women are essential members of the “female” side of the binary, then I’d think that a bit unfair–and that’s where I might agree with the OP, that demanding such a strong statement of me would force me to erase non-binary people in order to prove the strength of my support for trans women.
More generally, as I’ve been saying like a broken record, I don’t take kindly to tests of orthodoxy. When I was on the path out of fundie-dom, a fellow fundie reacted to my supporting common descent by asking, “Do you believe that bestiality is not a sin? Yes or no?” I rejected his question, and it became widely reported that I endorsed bestiality. (If you’re curious: evolution means that at some point a monkey had a human baby. But the human baby must have married a monkey, which is bestiality. QED.) For that reason, even though my answer to the question “Are trans women women? Yes or no?” would be an immediate and unqualified yes, I would probably refuse to answer at all if I felt I was being subjected to a purity test. And it’s for that reason that I supported Ophelia’s reaction to the question.
This is the wrong time, because Ophelia is still under fire and still understandably defensive, but I do think it’s reasonable to observe that the analogy to Rachel Dolezal was troubling, as was the impression given by the exchanges on the oft-mentioned Facebook group. I too would be interested in understanding that better, and I recognize that it’s possible that the troubling impressions may be warranted. I.e., it’s possible that there’s a learning experience here for Ophelia. I do give her the benefit of the doubt, personally, that she harbors no transmisogyny.
Conversely, I’m not a trans person. If I were, I might prefer to “play it safe” by steering clear of anyone who even interacts with known transmisogynists. I can’t and don’t wish to tell anyone where to draw their boundaries or what should make them feel [un]safe.
I do humbly submit that it would be better to clear up this misunderstanding and have one more ally using her platform to help.
About cis-privilege blindness: Every description of the trans umbrella I’ve seen explicitly includes the identities agender, genderqueer, and genderfuck. I decline those labels because I don’t think about myself as gendered, in any sense. But they fit me far better than cisgendered, which I also decline because it’s not how experience myself either. Obviously other people do experience a gender identity, and it’s very important to some people, and I wouldn’t think of questioning that – it’s their experience. Another dimension along which humans vary wildly!
…and that’s another tension I’m very conscious of. The need to feel safe, to decide what to share with whom and when, is pretty absolute. This stands in tension with the fact that we need society, social support networks, etc., and we can’t simply cut off everyone and go it alone.
Another thing I recognize from my fundie days, in addition to self-righteous inquisition of others, is schism: cutting off others who aren’t worth. They’re sides of a coin. There’s no point testing someone’s orthodoxy, if you’re not going to declare them a heretic and excommunicate them.
It’s become a proverb that some “deep rifts” are desirable. I agree. This stands in tension with the fact that if we set our mutual tolerance low enough, we end up dividing over and over until each of us is standing alone, none being worthy to stand in our presence.
TERFs combat some hate (garden variety sexism) while promulgating other forms of hate (transmisogyny). It’s pretty hard not to have a rift between yourself and those who hate you. There’s also no obvious benefit, and lots of potential harm, in trying to ingratiate yourself with those that hate you. The best you could hope for is a Faustian bargain, like the one accepted by “Honey Badgers” and “Chill Girls.”
Ultimately it’s not for me to judge in this situation. I merely point out that the tension exists. Rifts can be a necessary evil, but they are still an evil.
I’ll also raise my hand to say that I am gender-indifferent for myself, while strongly supporting the rights of those who do feel a strong sense of gender to be treated in accordance with the gender that matches their sense of who they are.
@xyz #4: So work out your issues with the gender binary by fighting cisnormative society, not a tiny and disempowered minority?
My issues are that I don’t want people to ask me to identify as a particular gender, and I don’t want people to make assumptions about me based on my gender identity. Many people who have a strong sense of their gender, whether cis or trans, seem to have a problem with this idea. As far as I am concerned, knowing the gender under which I operate should tell people exactly nothing (except as a statistical prediction*) about who I am, my profession, my hobbies, my favourite foods and drinks, etc. I do not want to be treated as a woman, I want to be treated as a person
*which one might reasonably call a “prejudice”, in the technical sense
I am. But it appears that in doing so, I’m pissing off trans folk.
Mostly understand the points you’re making, but am confused about:
Why would cis men be considered trans when doing drag performances? I assume here that by “drag performance” you refer specifically to performance art, such as what Glasgow Free Pride didn’t have and considering you mention this as an example, and not to people otherwise dressing in drag for self expression.
If the character a cis man play is a woman, why would it make the cis man trans, or anything else? It’s not performing an identity, it’s performing a character in an act. (Actually I don’t even think the performed personae would necessarily be trans, if a cis man does a performance as a cis woman than the personae is a cis woman, not a trans woman. Acted characters are what they are written/acted to be).
And I also don’t quite get the related problem you have with not considering a performed personae as “legitimate” as the real person doing the performance. For this specific purpose (is a performed character done explicitly in an act/show “legitimate” and should their attributes be considered as “legitimately” existing for the real person playing them while the performance is happening) how is that different from any other aspect of performed character?
You don’t see anyone suggesting that the cops have to be called in whenever there’s murder happening on a theater stage, even though there a murderous personae standing right there in front of witnesses. Most people won’t consider someone cos-playing, say, Marvel’s Loki or Thor (or even Tom Hiddleston or Chris Hemsworth performing them professionally) to be a “legitimate” showing of a real active gods, even though the Loki and Thor personaes are gods and deeply have their being gods tied to their identity.
Characters are only “legitimate” in the context of being acted but aren’t generally involved in discussions about real people, beyond issues of representation in the specific type of media.
Again, this is absolutely not comparable (and horrible counter-examples) for people actually trying to express their gender identity, but I don’t see how it isn’t for professional acting drag performances.
@A Masked Avenger: Regarding the question “Is bestiality sin?”, my answer would be “I don’t believe in sin, so the question is meaningless to me.”
@Martin Cohen,
That’s where my broken-recordness about “inquisitorial” people/questions/behavior comes in. My interrogator was not interested in discussing the finer points of sin. He was asking, in inquisitorial dog-whistle code, “Is it true what I hear that you fuck chickens?” The surface meaning of the question is NOT the meaning of the question.
@Erica #3:
I’ve come across this theory myself, and I do think in some cases it’s true. What’s telling for me is how someone responds to being ‘misgendered’, in quotes because gender-indifferent people are basically always misgendered – I’m talking about when someone is gendered in a way other than the assumed cisgendered identity. As a male-bodied person, I’m most familiar with masculinity-policing: think of “fag” getting thrown around to reinforce normative masculine behavior, sports coaches referring to male players as “ladies” to try to motivate them to prove their masculinity, the status-posturing usage of “bitch” as a pejorative for men/males, the frequent usage of “man up” or “be a man” to encourage cis-normative behavior. People who are indifferent to gender identity won’t even process these as slurs (though of course we can recognize the contextual intent), as attempts to motivate normative performativity becasue being gendered as the opposite of the normative category based on embodiment is no more or less alienating than being gendered in alignment with the normative categorization. People who do respond to such attempts are most likely attached to their normative gender identity to some degree – they clearly care about being ‘properly’ gendered. An example that has received some recent commentary comes to mind: female athletes who want to avoid too-visible musculature becasue it’s coded as masculine. Such people are quite clearly not indifferent to how their gender presentation is interpreted; and while it is doubtless the case that some women who don’t care about that are still cisgendered, some who don’t care are likely largely indifferent.
Anybody who thinks gender is invisible to cisgendered people and never challenged becasue cis-gendering is the normative default has a rather narrow, limited set of experiences; indeed, becasue gender is such a fragile construct, it needs near-constant reinforcement, and the legitimacy of cisgendered people’s gendered identities is almost constantly questioned as a means of motivating normative performativity, sometimes in the very same ways as transgendered people’s identities, sometimes in very different ways. There is a great need for trans-specific activism and criticism of social norms that do a great deal of structural violence to trans people; I only start to take issue when such activism attempts to reinforce structures that are harming other marginalized groups.
That.
(Damn, I should just hand the blog over to you at this point.)
It often amazes me how relentless the “man up” stuff is – it seems to betray such frantic anxiety.
On that particular scale, being a man is vastly worse than being a woman.
@xyz #4: Indeed, that is what I attempt to do. I’m not going around to trans groups picking fights, I’m not crashing trans-only spaces, I’m not intentionally misgendering people, and most of my commentary on the constructed nature of gender identity has to do with how cisgender norms are constructed and operate; indeed, I frequently work in concert with trans activists to oppose cis-normativity. In my experience, these fights arise from gender-essentialist trans activists doing the very thing you suggest I avoid, directing hostility at members of another marginalized minority instead of working together to oppose cis-normative society. We don’t have to agree on gender theory to think people should be able to pee in peace or change their names without undue cost or not be targeted for violence at fantastically disproportionate rates.
And to be clear, I don’t have problems with most trans people or activists, since we are generally pursuing the same goals; in my experience, it’s a small subset that insists that anyone who doesn’t agree to essentialize social gender identity is a transphobic enemy (I know the conversation has shifted to look at some particular comments/responses of Ophelia’s; the context in which those comments were solicited was Ophelia questioning feminine gender norms, specifically as enacted and replicated in the media frenzy around Caitlyn Jenner’s transition, and to my eye this context is of ongoing relevance – some of the disagreement may be resulting from groups of people attempting to have different conversations from each other).
That. Absolutely.
@Yaron Davidson #11:
Why would people assigned female/male at birth who are, in this particular context, presenting as, identifying as, using names and pronouns consistent with, etc. the ‘opposite’ social gender NOT be considered trans? How is art and performance NOT a form of self-expression?
Because I reject gender essentialism, I consider all gender to be a performative act, whether on a stage or in our day-to-day lives. How strongly we internalize gender as an aspect of identity doesn’t change the nature of the act, though it definitely alters how we perceive its meaning. I think “identity” is a social construct, a set of internalized values and norms that we adopt through a progressive process on the basis of our total life experience. We don’t have or form identities in a social vacuum, and our understandings of ourselves are predicated on the social structures that teach us what our biology or experiences mean. In another comment, I used color perception as an analogy – we’re interpreting a physical thing that does exist irrespective of any human meaning-making on the basis of our biological abilities to perceive light of various wavelengths (whether we’re blind or not, colorblind or not), and then additionally categorizing our physical perceptions on the basis of socially-determined organizational systems. See this article for the color perception stuff; gender categorization operates in a similar way.
If I’m reading you correctly, I think that ultimately what’s causing this disagreement and confusion is that you essentialize the concept of identity, while I see it as a socially-constructed, performative set of repeated acts. I consider essentialist concepts of identity to be much like the soul: it’s a normative model of how humans work that many, many people internalize and strongly feel, but it is nonetheless not a particularly good model for how reality works as it doesn’t match the sum total of evidence and the multitude of experiences people report.
@A Masked Avenger #6:
I would answer, “In most cases.” I find the problem with decontextualized statements like this is that “woman” can mean very different things to different people in different contexts, and my understanding is that this is the issue Ophelia was having with giving a direct answer. In terms of self-reported social identity? Yup, I absolutely accept trans woman as women, to the same degree that I accept anyone as a woman – the standard for self-identity can really only be self-reporting, becasue we can’t read minds. I also accept feminine drag performers as women if that’s how they self-identify, even if that’s not how they always self-identify, just like I accept gender-fluid people who sometimes identify as women, sometimes as men, perhaps sometimes as something else as women when they wish to identify as such.
If we’re talking about “women” in a context where we’re conflating social gender and female embodiment, like “women’s reproductive health care”, I may not accept trans women as women, as they do not possess uteruses or ovaries; I may also not accept cis women who do not possess ovaries or uteruses as women in that context. If we’re talking about degree of conformity to social gender norms, as in “real women are like X”, there are both trans and cis women I would consider to be women becasue they largely conform to gendered norms, and there are both cis and trans women I would not consider to be women becasue they deviate significantly from gendered norms. If we’re talking about how one is treated by others, I would consider myself to be a woman in certain contexts: for example, I’ve experienced a fair amount of woman-directed street harassment becasue I’ve been read as a woman on the street when I have long hair and am clean-shaved. People who don’t identify as women and who experience intimate partner violence are considered “women” for the sake of the Violence Against Women Act (the actual text of which is gender-neutral). Context matters, so decontextualized, absolute statements are nearly always a problem in some edge cases at the very least. If you ask me, “Do you think trans women should be able to self-identify and be addressed as women, without having that identification questioned and policed?” I’ll answer with an unequivocal, “Yes!” To me that’s a very different question than, “Do you accept trans women as women?” which is a very different question than, “Is a trans woman a woman?”
You might have noticed that women are not considered or treated as of equal worth and dignity to anyone else, so that doesn’t necessarily follow from recognizing someone as a woman. Recognizing someone as a woman means, to many people, that they’re of lesser worth and dignity.
@Josh Hortman #18:
Exactly because they’re not necessarily trying to express themselves, but rather an unrelated character. Self-expression requires someone to express… themselves. If they’re expressing a fake character then it wouldn’t be self expression.
The relevance of their assigned at birth sex is only an issue as far as that it matches their self-identity. The main issue isn’t that this is what they were assigned at birth, it is that this is how they think of themselves. So if it does matches their self identity (as with cis men) your question essentially becomes “Why would people who identify themselves as one gender not be considered trans just because their job involves them presenting as, acting as a character that identifyi
nges as, using names and pronouns consistent with, etc. the ‘opposite’ social gender?”Why would any performance automatically be self-expression and require the performer to identify with all aspects of it?
If someone that thinks of themselves as a cis man performs as a character that consider herself a cis woman, are they for you then a trans man, a trans woman, or just a trans person of unspecified gender? Or something else given that you still say there are trans? How is any of these not problematic to trans people that actually self-identify as trans __ , when someone that doesn’t and just works pretending to be __ is suddenly lumped in with them?
Possibly, but then for you if someone has a sense of identity that they don’t perform then it’s not their identity? Identity is just the performative acts and so requires performing it to be real? So a non heterosexual person that never shows it because they live in a restrictive environment is heterosexual because what they think of as their identity is insignificant compared to how they act? A person feeling gender dysphoria that keeps performing only their gender assigned at birth because they live in a restrictive environment is cis gender, and won’t be trans gender until they perform as other than their assigned at birth gender, regardless of what they feel and think and want?
I can sort of see that this view is plausible and self-consistent, but I have a very hard time accepting such a definition of identity. It will certainly be the identity that other people would assign you and consider you to have, but I don’t think that identity is only relevant for society and that self-identity is meaningless except as society’s perception of it.
I similarly find it odd to talk about self-expression as related to identity while considering only the expression part of it to have meaning regardless of context or intent of sense of self of the person making the expression. “You did it, so it was you expressing your self and your identity, never mind what you think about your own self or your own identity or what were your reasons for doing it” ??
^^THIS^^
@Yaron Davidson #21:
You are declaring that someone’s drag persona is “fake” and not “themsel[f]”. I’m saying there is no legitimate basis to assume that this is the case. It may be the case for some people, and for others it may be the case that drag performance is a way that they express an aspect of themselves.
Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean by “self-expression”? In terms of how I present myself on the street, at work, at home, with one group of friends, with another group of friends – all of that is choices that I am making in response to certain contextual social expectations and constraints. I have some freedom, but it’s always bounded by what I want out of that situation and the ways I can attempt to achieve that outcome given the expectations and constraints of the context. I can lounge around my house naked, but I can’t show up to work naked if I don’t want to be fired. Certain topics of conversation might be acceptable with one group of friends, but not another if I want to maintain those friendships. I might yell obscenities at drivers who cut me off, while that isn’t something I would do to friends or family. I think that identity, personality, selfhood, whatever we want to call it is always socially determined to some degree (an extensive degree at that). That one’s behavior and presentation are happening in a professional or performance-based context doesn’t make that not somehow self-expression as far as I’m concerned: the performer is opting to perform drag, the performer is selecting the character ze will perform, the character is selecting the particular ways ze will perform that character. What I see there is an individual making choices about how to behave in a particular context based on the expectations and constraints of that context, to achieve a particular outcome, which is exactly what I do at work, at home, while biking, while on stage singing karaoke, while playing soccer, while camping with my family, whenever. It isn’t only gender that I don’t see as an essential part of identity – I don’t believe in an essential identity or selfhood removed from the social contexts in which we find ourselves.
If we’re talking about self-identification, that person is however ze self-identifies in that context. Going off the first part of that statement, if that person always considers himself a cis man, including when performing a character who considers herself a cis woman, then his self-identity is still a cis man when performing that character. But I also can’t read minds, so I have no idea what people consider themselves to be; the only thing I know is how they ask to be addressed. If an AMAB drag performer asks me to address her as a woman, she has just identified herself as a woman to me, and that is how I will refer to her, and as that is at odds with her gender assumed and assigned at birth, I would consider her to be a trans woman. If that same person asks to be referred to as a man several hours later outside of the performance venue, then he is identifying himself as a man to me in that context, and I will refer to him as such, and as that is congruent with his birth assignation, I would consider him a cis man.
The only way I can see it actually being problematic in the first place is if the trans people in question are assuming that the performer doesn’t “actually self-identify as trans __ … and just works pretending to be __”, which they can’t possibly know because they can’t read minds. If it’s problematic to them, that is a problem of their own creation, based on their own internalized-and-projected assumptions about the person in question. What gives them the right to determine and police the gender identity of the drag performer in question? Particularly as people demanding that others take their declared gender identities seriously when those others may question the legitimacy of those identities on the basis of their own biological-essentialist perspective, it seems incredibly hypocritical for them to then turn around and refuse to take someone else’s declared gender identity seriously on the basis of their own social-essentialism simply becasue that identity is explicitly acknowledged to be context-dependent. Would you, or your hypothetical trans interlocutors, consider the varying identities of gender-fluid people who present/identify differently day-to-day/week-to-week/etc. to be invalid? Are such people always trans, never trans, trans only when identifying not as their assigned-at-birth gender? Do you believe such people even exist or do you presume to know they’re lying about how they really feel on any given day? Essentializing social identity in that way presupposes that everyone has an essential, continuous, persistent core identity, which we know to not be true (to the degree that we can possibly know that, which is the same as the degree to which we know that anyone who DOES feel that persistent, essential sense of identity truly feels that way, as all of this is based on self-reporting).
@John Horstman #23:
I’m differentiating between drag performance as a person going around wearing drag (not what I’m referring to, and not what I assumed you were referring to due to the reference to the Glasgow Free Pride mess), and drag art performances.
For those performances the reason to assume performers are not being themselves is exactly the same as with any other type of show.
When I see an actor on a theater stage playing a rich character that donates all their money and time to help the poor there is no reason the assume the actor is showing any genuine compassion or generosity or self sacrifice, it doesn’t matter how important the character on stage exclaims that these things are to them.
When I see someone playing a serial killer on TV there is no reason to assume the actor is showing any genuine desire to murder to people and identifies with the joy of seeing the dead bodies, it doesn’t matter how much the character glories in those things on screen.
We know these things about the characters, and we can refer to the characters like that, but the characters aren’t real, the actors are real.
So by seeing someone in a drag art performance we don’t learn anything about them. We know that the performed character presents as a women. But if the actor is trans then they’re trans regardless of whether it’s when they’re performing or not, and if the actor is cis then they’re cis regardless of whether they’re performing at the moment or not.
The (if they are) curmudgeonly theater actor donating the money isn’t expressing their inner generosity while donating millions on stage. They’re still a curmudgeonly person, playing a generous character.
True.
But just as you wouldn’t assume an actor is a megalomaniac because they ask (or in this case demand) to be addressed with ridiculous deference when playing a god or a monarch, you shouldn’t assume they’re trans because they ask to addressed as a woman when playing a woman.
They are what they say they are when they’re not playing a character on stage. What they act shouldn’t matter unless they indicate it does when they’re not acting.
So when you say:
You are talking about qualifying the performer as trans for the duration. While you wouldn’t (I assume… ?) qualify the performer as generous/murderous/megalomaniac for the duration, when in millionaire/murderer/monarch personae, just their character.
A trans person that performs drag is trans.
But if they are not trans outside of the performance (otherwise no need for the “perhaps contextually when…” ) then the basic assumption (without reading their mind) should similarly be that they are not trans.
AFAIK most drag performers identify as cis men. But even if not, for anyone that otherwise identify as trans I of course fully acknowledge that they are trans.
The issue is regarding those that don’t but you claim should be thought of as trans “perhaps contextually when…” . Otherwise, again, the whole “does performing drag mean they are trans?” discussion isn’t relevant, anyone that started off identifying as trans when not performing drag is obviously still trans.
Mind reading is required in order to assume something changes (is the person that previously identified as cis is now trans?), not in order to assume something didn’t change (is the person that previously identified as cis is now cis?). Something didn’t change is the default unless there is a reason to assume otherwise. And your reason to assume otherwise was performing a drag act, which isn’t different in terms of playing a character than any other act and performed characters.
Why would the gender of the performed character tell on the performer, while other parts of the performed character’s identity won’t tell on the performer?