Digital Transgender Archive

Cross Dressing and Trans Identity

We recently added two items from the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: Travesty #2: More Musings on Being a Transvestite Metal Head, and the blue floral gusset. Zines are especially interesting publications as they often deal with specialized or unconventional subject matter and present less mainstream design aesthetics.  Both works examine the life of the self-proclaimed “transvestite,” Rizzeria, and their experience of everyday life as a cross-dresser. Rizzeria tackles a number the dilemmas concerning their personal type of gender variance, acknowledging the joy of authenticity as well as their feelings of dislocation within gender normative society and the mainstream transgender community.  Maintaining a male gender identity while presenting femininely certainly puts Rizzeria in conflict with the general public sphere, but also leaves them with more ambiguous ties to trans folks who want to socially/medically transition from their birth assigned gender.  

Reading these pieces, one cannot help but reflect on the vast amount of gender diversity in trans communities and the difficulties that the sometimes expansive yet imprecise identity marker of “trans” poses to cohesion and unity.  On the one hand, the label certainly helps to bring together people with gender expressions that are at odds with normative expectations, but on the other, it can obfuscate the lines between practice and identity, between what we do and who we are.

At the Digital Transgender Archive, we treat “transgender” as a practice in order to bring together a culturally and historically diverse repository of gender variance. These zines are a good reminder for readers that the DTA includes materials with diverse subjectivities, even contemporary ones, that extend far beyond the term “transgender.”