Willie Houston wasn’t gay, but his murderer didn’t know that. He also didn’t know that being gay and cross-dressing, or transvestitism, aren’t the same. He probably couldn’t tell you the differences between transvestitism, transgenderism, and transsexualism. To his hate, everyone—even a straight man holding his fiancée’s purse—looked the same.

But to the GLBT world, they shouldn’t. After thousands of years of association, gays and transpeople were separated during the political mobilization of the 70s and 80s. Now that trans activism has gotten the T reattached to many GLBs, some transpeople are asking what it means to merge these distinct communities, and what it costs. What everyone agrees, though, is that GLBT fates are linked, if by nothing else, then by a common foe.

Something More Extravagant
When Kara walks into Sidekicks at seven o’ clock on a Friday night, the pony-tailed lesbians playing pool nearby scope her unabashedly. She looks like a girl I flirted with in high school, only prettier. She’s 6’1", has a pale baby face with freckles, a soft nubbin nose, and deep brown eyes with subtly smoky lids. She orders a Zima, but settles for a Smirnoff Twist.

Kara has spent $6000 on her body so far, including laser hair removal and hormones. She started cross-dressing in gay clubs when she was 18. "I was living in Edinburg, Texas. There was a gay club in McAllen called 10th Avenue." She smiles. "I was Miss 10th Avenue 1998-99."

After graduation, she moved to Austin. "I started [cross-dressing] more after I moved, because I had the liberty. One day, I dressed up in the afternoon for the first time, because it was Halloween, and they let us dress up [at work.] So I dressed up as a woman in a French maid costume. Most of the customers thought I was a female, just a very tall one. "And I thought, I can do this."

Kara changed her name legally in 2001. Now that she is living full-time as a female, she feels more like an ally of the gay community than a part of it.

"I got introduced to the gay community first, and that’s how I became aware of the transgender lifestyle, or what I call the trashy and glamorous lifestyle, which is something else, more extravagant."

She toys with one hoop earring. "There’s a lot of people in the gay community who want to label me. They want to say, ‘You’re a drag queen, you’re a man. They think that because men are with me, they’re homosexual—even some of my best friends. And I don’t think that way. I think a homosexual is someone who wants to be with a man, not a used-to-be man who looks like a woman."

"There’s a problem with recognizing that it’s not a matter of sexuality," she says. "It’s a matter of personal identity. I think a lot of people don’t understand that, even within the gay community. But whether they’ve accepted me under the ‘correct terms’ or not, they’re still accepting."

Being Reborn
The terms Kara refers to are easy to confuse; transpeople have their own vocabulary. Transgender means that one’s internal gender doesn’t match one’s birth sex, while transsexual means a person has obtained surgery and/or hormones to correct their sex, so that it matches the sex with which they identify. The terms transman and transwoman refer to a transperson’s corrected sex (not their birth sex.) Every transperson likes to be called by a self-chosen pronoun, and most don’t mind being asked what they prefer.

Transpeople differ in other ways, too. Unlike gays and lesbians, who fought to have homosexuality removed from the list of psychological disorders, transpeople must encourage the medical community to recognize their condition, called Gender Dysphoria, so that they can obtain the medical help that they need.

Also, unlike closeted gays, many transsexuals feel that passing, or being received as their chosen sex rather than as a transsexual, is "being who they are." They feel this so strongly that they subject themselves to expensive surgery, undertake the years-long limbo of transition, join a tinier and more discriminated-against minority than the gay community, jeopardize their chances of employment, complicate finding a life-mate, and run the risk that they will be treated badly (or not at all) by a medical community still ignorant about and prejudiced against transpeople—all to correct their sex.

But there’s a good reason they do it. Lance, a 44 year-old transsexual man, says of his first year of transition, "I feel great. I feel better than I’ve ever felt. It’s like being reborn."

Unification Theory
Despite different experiences, the gay and trans communities’ link is more than just historical. Many transpeople who spent decades in the gay community before transitioning remain queer-identified afterwards. Also, a surprising proportion of transsexuals identify as gay or bisexual after transition.

And, to get technical, being gay isn’t just about who you want; it’s about who you are as you want who you want. So questions of gender identity necessarily come up alongside homosexuality. For example, Tiffany, a 21 year-old waitress, fell in love with Jay, a transgendered man, and entered into her first non-straight relationship. While Jay is still technically female, having not started his transition, he doesn’t identify as a woman. So is Tiffany a lesbian?

"Sure I am," she says. "And I will be, even after Jay transitions. Jay doesn’t identify as a lesbian, but I’ve been with men, and I can tell you that it’s not the same. Some people call it being trans-femme, but I just say I’m a femme. Either way, I’m queer, and I love it."

Bois on the Side
Paisley Currah, transactivist and executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York, sees people like Tiffany bringing the two groups together. "If you actually look at the kids in their twenties, these distinctions are...so meaningless to them," says Currah. "Especially in the lesbian community; you’ve got the genderqueer people and the bois." Younger people, he says, "understand that the boundaries of gender and sexuality are so much more fluid than they were for older generations."

Currah also sees concrete reasons why the groups should associate. He recently met with a gay rights group to discuss a bill that would protect students from harassment based on sexual orientation. But Currah says, "When talking about youth, our little adult divisions between sexual orientation and gender nonconformity really don’t hold up. If you want to protect ‘gay’ kids in the school, you need to include a really robust definition of gender, because a lot of the time, they’re going to be picked on because of their gender expression, and not just because of some idea they might have about their sexual orientation."

The Same Difference
Finally, say activists, it is most important to realize that the differences between gays and transpeople don’t matter to their enemies. Queers of all stripes continue to be the victims of hate crimes. Jamison Green, a foremost trans activist, puts it this way: "Whether that violence is homophobic or transphobic, the people who perpetuate [it] don’t know the difference. And that’s why we have to stick together to end that violence, and to reinforce our own right to self-define, whether that self-definition is based on our sexuality or our gender identity. It doesn’t matter to me."

To some individuals, it does matter. There are still many gays and lesbians who aren’t comfortable with transpeople, and their discomfort is understandable; trans integration is no more than a decade old, and transpeople themselves acknowledge that their condition is almost impossible to understand unless it is experienced. There are also transpeople who, feeling straight, harbor suspicion of or even prejudice against gays and lesbians. But ultimately, transpeople and gays are siblings in difference, and the sooner both sides accept what they may not fully understand and defend one another with equal vigor, the sooner both sides will win.