Thanks for your response, Muffin.
It's my understanding that Lawrence King himself identified as gay, though if that's just an assumption, I'm happy to be corrected.
In retrospect, I maybe could have been clearer, but when I described King's behaviour as "an innocent gay teen's attempt to assert his blossoming sexuality," I was describing how the prosecution has portrayed him:
QuoteIt was a crime seemingly motivated by anti-gay hate. But was Larry gay, or was he transgendered?
Both the defense and the prosecutors agree that in 2008, 14-year-old McInerney, now 17, fired two shots into the head of Lawrence King, 15, in an Oxnard, CA, classroom. King died two days later. The prosecution says it was a hate crime, motivated by homophobic prejudice. The defense says it was manslaughter, not murder, an act committed out of "a heat of passion" because of Larry's alleged sexual aggression and harassment of McInerney.
To one side, the unusually effeminate and flamboyant behavior was just an innocent gay teen's attempt to assert his blossoming sexuality. To the other side, it was a flirtatious pursuit enough to drive McInerney to shoot him.
I was setting up those arguments so I could challenge them by asking whether King was gay or actually transgendered.
The reason I wrote the article was precisely because I'd noticed the media has uniformly described Larry as gay, where the way he dressed, the makeup he wore and his request to be called Leticia suggest his emerging identity may have been about his gender, rather than his sexuality. I have myself written other articles about or mentioning Larry King where I didn't question the assumption he was simply gay. So I wrote the article partly to express how my own assumptions had been challenged, too.
As regards the meaning of "transgender" and "cross-dressing" and how those two relate, aren't I right in thinking that your perspective is not a common way of looking at it? I've always understood ->-bleeped-<- to refer to people who believe their gender is other than that assigned at birth, where cross-dressing or transvestism refers to people who dress as the opposite sex but are content in their own sex. I was trying to make a distinction between them, hopefully to be sensitive to how most transgendered men and women perceive themselves. (And I avoided the word "transvestite," as I wasn't sure whether that was a term cross-dressers ever apply to themselves, or simply an outdated term with derisive connotations.)
Anyway, thanks again for sharing your thoughts.
