Curate, connect, and discover
I've noticed something in the discussion around Gerard Way and trans identity that I am officially fed the fuck up with. While talking about Gerard's outfits from the second leg of the tour, people love to use use the line "clothes ≠ gender" as a gotcha for those of us who are keen to the fact that they aren't cis. This pisses me off for three main reason plus a fourth mini reason that's more of a history blurb than anything else.
Before we start anything, Gerard has been out as not cis for the better part of 8(!) years now. To not acknowledge that is doing them a disservice. Some of you have purposely chosen to ignore that fact. Right out the gate that's fucked up. Ok now we can proceed.
First off, you're right. Clothes do not, in fact, equal gender. I know this, and it sounds like you'd like me to believe that you know this. So forgive me for being a little confused when you go on anon after they're photographed wearing what you dub to be "masculine clothing" (i.e. anything that's not a skirt/dress with heels) and tell me I'm an idiot for implying that they aren't a cisgender man.
Secondly, the concept that clothes don't equal gender in only true to us very recently. If you think that Gerard Way, a 45 year old ex-Catholic Gen-X'er who grew up in an wildly conservative suburb of north New Jersey doesn't have a different relationship between clothing and gender than you, a 14-to-20-something year old who hasn't closed tiktok in three days and averages 0.3 minutes of critical thinking per week, then you're extremely delusional and self-centered. People are socialized in entirely different ways. As humans, our experiences are not in any way universal. What doesn't mean anything to you means everything to someone else. Maybe you don't equate femininity with skirts and dresses, but I guarantee you a 45 year old who has openly struggled with gender identity their entire life does in some capacity. This is not a bad thing.
Thirdly is that in your attempt to sound as woke and morally upright as possible, you're unintentionally (or intentionally, seeing as a considerable number of you are terfs,) discrediting and invalidating the way someone experiences gender euphoria because you personally don't get it. Gerard Way has only ever said "I don't use labels" in response to people implying that they're cishet. If your first reaction to seeing someone who could even potentially identify under the transfem umbrella experiencing visible gender euphoria in a dress is to say "oh well clothes don't equal gender, so I'm going to assume that he's a man in a dress until he explicitly outs himself", then congratulations! You're transphobic. Because that's the thing. When you use the rhetoric of clothes ≠ gender in that context, it becomes crystal clear you don't actually care about trans people. You just want to sound like the smartest person in the room. And you're willing to throw GNC trans people under the bus in order to achieve that goal.
I think people have forgotten big time that "don't assume my gender" originally meant "don't assume I'm cis", because now the way people interpret the rhetoric (don't assume my gender, clothes ≠ gender, I don't use labels, etc.,) and use it to prove a point only use it as if to say "it's inherently wrong and creepy to identify and acknowledge when people aren't cis. Cis is the default and the only safe assumption. Anything else is offensive and crossing a major boundary" and you can tell it's because they view transness as an insult to someone's character. We have to, collectively, stop viewing transness as an allegation you either have to beat or bear with. Alongside that, we have to stop assuming cisness.