Explaining Transgenderism, It's Terminology and Categories
Drag kings and queens:
(Usually not considered to be Transgender) although in pass history gay people were indentified as part of the Transgender Umbrella. This was due to the Gay culture being outside the norm of what society considered a normal male or female gender. Today the Gay community is no longer considered Transgender due to their feeling that the label was offensive to them. Drag is a term applied to clothing and make-up worn on special occasions for performing or entertaining. Drag performance includes overall presentation and behavior in addition to clothing and makeup. Drag can be theatrical, comedic, or grotesque. Drag queens have been considered caricatures of women by second-wave feminism. Drag artists have a long tradition in LGBT culture. Generally the terms drag queen covers men doing female drag, drag king covers women doing male drag, and faux queen covers women doing female drag. Nevertheless, there are drag artists of all genders and sexualities who perform for various reasons. There are however Transgender people who do perform in drag shows but do not consicder themselves Drag Queens or Kings.
Cisgender and cissexual: (often abbreviated to simply cis)
This terminology describes individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their physical bodies, and their personal identity. There is a number of derivatives of the terms in use, including cis male for "male with a male gender identity", cis female for "female with a female gender identity", analogically cis man and cis woman, as well as cissexism and cissexual assumption. Cisgender is what society would consider normal male and females ...
The two-spirit (formerly called berdache) was a Native American transgender person who wore the clothing of the "opposite" gender. Two-spirits were highly regarded and respected as artisans, craftspeople, child rearers, couples counselors and tribal arbiters, and yet, one of the reasons they got respect was out of fear, because two-spirits were considered to be touched by the spirits and considered to have powers on the order of a shaman. (In many tribes, a shaman would consult the tribe's two-spirit for advice in spiritual matters!) It has been determined that there were male two-spirits in more than 150 different Native American tribes, but there were female two-spirits, as well. Male to Female two-spirits were considered to be a "third gender," and Female to Male two-spirits were considered to be a "fourth gender" ... (Female to males were also considered to be lesbian). Due to their perceived spiritual gifts and physical strength, male two-spirits were considered to be "super-women" and as such were often prized as mates. A warrior's strength was seen as being augmented if he counted among his wives one or more two-spirits. The term berdache has had a checkered past etymologically, and had various negative connotations, so, in 1991, it was replaced with the word two-spirit by a group of Native American anthropologists. There were a few two-spirits that were intersex, although a great many were androgyne, meaning they had the gender identity of both a man and a woman -- or neither. Berdache had always been a slippery and hard-to-pin-down term for non-Native Americans, and the term two-spirit may well prove to be equally difficult to grasp, for some. And yet, for some groups, the new term has been a spiritual wake-up call. Quite a few non-Native American gays, androgynes and other genderqueers in the United States have taken to the term and its tradition as a way to connect with themselves, their spirits and their adopted homeland. The term's significance has not been lost on Native American youth, either, as there is now a renewed interest in the tradition. Traditionally, "real" two-spirits have been intersex (formerly referred to as hermaphrodites), a trait they share with the hijras of continental India, who consider "real" hijras to be intersex. In this paradigm, intersex people are "automatically" two-spirited and "automatically" hijras because they comprise the cores of both masculinity and femininity physically as well as psychologically. In seeming corroboration, two-spirits and hijras have both been said to describe themselves as "not man, not woman," and this brings to mind the self-conception of androgynes, who can be said to be the psychological counterpart to intersex people.
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