politics

It's not a boy who wants to be perceived as a girl but a girl who wants to stop being perceived as a boy.

Whereas crossdressing is basically playing with societal perceptions of gender roles and what clothing and traits are associated with different genders. Crossdressing isn't wanting to be the other gender, it's more like playing dress up or defying cultural expectations about what it means to be a man or a woman. Like role-playing for various reasons.

I'm gonna assume you're a dude. If you want to understand what being trans is like, instead of trying to imagine what it would be like to want to be a woman, imagine if the world treated you as a woman. Everywhere you went, you got "ma'am"ed and people held doors open for you and told you that you'd be much prettier if you smiled more. People frowned at you when you talked sports or cars or whatever because that's not the kind of stuff a woman should be interested in. They asked you when you were going to get married and have a kid when you talked about your career. You were expected to wear skirts and do your makeup every day and all the other little things that are expected of women but not men. And that's just the cultural part. Now imagine looking in the mirror and seeing somebody else's face staring back at you. Look at your hand and see how the fingers are wrong. They're too skinny and your skin feels too smooth and thin to be right. Even the way your body smells is weird. No matter how hard you try, you can just never seem to build any real muscle, and there's this literal weight in your chest that is constantly pulling on you, like a pair of tumors that you can always feel, shifting around and pulling on your spine.

Now imagine being a kid and watching this happen to your body against your will, like something out of a body horror movie. Your skeleton shifting and changing into a bizarre and foreign new form as strange new features start sprouting out of your skin and underneath your flesh. That's what being a trans kid is like, going through the wrong puberty.

There's a difference between finding enjoyment in transgressing lines of expectation in outfits, and finding the experience of your body and social place as wrong, and wanting to change it to better fit with who you are. Yes, for people young enough, gender affirmation largely lies in changing clothes, names, pronouns, but over a lifetime it usually doesn't stop there. Having your body start shifting on you, in ways that aren't congruent with your experienced gender, is godawful and horrifying. Imagine your experience of puberty, but instead of the hormone you had dominant in yours, you got the other one.

You can go ahead and ask me anything about the experience; I was one of those kids, before affirming care was a thing for kids, and my goddess did it suck, and I suffer fallout from it still.

Transvestitism is a name for cross dressing, it is unclear how much of that is related to gender identity, and how much is sexuality, as well as how big the overlap is when you weren't allowed to be transsexual.

What we're talking about here is transsexuality, which roughly means not being of the gender you were assigned at birth. The name came before we had a widespread discourse that sex and gender are fundamentally different things.