Just days before an 8-day cruise with Carnival Cruise Line - which had been planned with an LGBT travel agent and was to feature nearly 40 "Drag Stars at Sea" from RuPaul’s Drag Race - Carnival sent out a panicked letter to people who had booked:

As different as transsexuality and drag performance are, sometimes it takes a moment like this to remember the attitudes that are directed toward both.

Transsexual women and drag queens have increasingly come into conflict over button-pushing aspects of each group’s self-definition and self-expression, each increasingly stepping on the toes of the other (it happens, but not as frequently in transmasculine communities).  At the same time the Carnival Cruise letter happened, trans people were outraged at Australian performer Trevor Ashley for his spoof of the Broadway musical Annie, titled "TrAnnie" (and since re-named "Little Orphan TrAshley").  Meanwhile, RuPaul’s joking comment that the difference between a drag queen and a transsexual is "about twenty-five thousand dollars and a good surgeon" ignited a boycott and a letter-writing campaign.

The interplay of the trans and drag communities (that is to say, the motley collections of vastly different people who simply happen to share those things) has become rocky in recent years, for a few reasons.

The tendency of media and society to view the two groups as interchangeable has tended to confuse the discussion about both.  News stories about trans activism are often illustrated with photos of flamboyant queens at Pride events, and even in LGBT circles, being trans inclusive is often interpreted to mean hosting a drag show.  This has often posed a problem on both sides when trying to communicate who we are and what we need.

Additionally, for transsexuals, who we are has never been a costume or a performance.  The conflation of trans and drag reinforces the idea that trans people are ingenuine or even fraudulent.  And this is why the divide growing between us can be so tempered and volatile: the existence of each risks invalidating the other for as long as we’re seen as a same, amorphous group.

And then there’s the word "tranny."  In the world of drag, "tranny" is a rallying point of pride and a defiant middle finger to the world.  As a result, people dismiss the "fuss" over that word as being silly and unwarranted.

For transsexual women, though, it was often contextualized by unrepresentative porn, defined by non-trans people, and at the centre of it usually was characterization of a trans woman as "really a man."  Although both groups have worn the word, the invalidation and implication of deception has made it uniquely minimizing, dismissive and denigrating to trans women in ways not often felt (or at least not as strongly) in the world of drag.

And then, there’s the question of misogyny.  Drag has faced accusations of parodying women for as long as drag performance has been around.  Queens often answer that accusation with a belief that what they do is homage.

Trans women have faced the accusation of misogyny and mimicry too, though, and for years that claim was used to exclude them from womens’ spaces - and to not only invalidate, but also to cast serious aspersions.  For many years, the 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male defined the conversation about trans women, with its signature argument that "all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves..."

With the wounds of that still in our memory, the uneasy relationship between trans women and queens is often fraught with the fear (warranted or unwarranted) that drag might validate the perception of misogyny.

It wasn’t always that way.

Although I speak as someone who never became deeply involved with drag culture, I have a deep respect for the drag community and those I’ve known who perform within it.  Despite all of the points of possible conflict, drag personalities were often the first people to challenge boldly the preconceptions and expectations of gender.

When trans people were still scattered to the wind, drag questioned the stereotypes and took the backlashes.  Queens often made the first "safe spaces" (where trans women have been welcomed and came out), and passed on the first bits of information on transitioning and getting by in society.  For a transient community as transsexualism often can be, drag personae have also often been an enduring presence - maybe not always ready to help with questions of identity, but usually helpful with practical day-to-day resources: where to find clothes, LGBT-friendly shelter, allies.

And when drag became an entertainment industry, very often that industry benefited charity the most.  That, on its own, should be enough to command respect.

The conflicts aren’t one-sided either, although they might be different in scale.  I imagine there can be a lot of resentment over how the rich history of drag is increasingly treated like it’s an embarrassment or offense, as trans activism continually lays claim over, dismantles and sucks the life out of all the things that once made drag culture rich.

And many of our worst lows were ones that we bore together, whether we felt like we were a mutual part of anything or not.  When we meet each year in November to remember those who have died as a result of anti-trans hatred, drag queens are disproportionately represented among the victims.  Visibility has had its price for all of us.

The thing that struck me about Carnival’s last minute panic and defining dressing in drag as "inappropriate conduct" for a "family friendly atmosphere," was that I couldn’t help but hear Diane Watts’ fevered rant.  The rant where "researcher" from R.E.A.L. Women of Canada (an anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-abortion, neo-conservative womens’ organization) testified before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights spoke about Private Member’s Bill C-279, which proposes to include gender identity and gender expression in federal human rights legislation.  Without even bothering to figure out what the terms meant, Watts simply started from the assumption that trans people were pedophiles, and delivered a caustic diatribe about child predation.  When she was finally cut off and the meeting was returned to the Committee for questions, Committee member and Member of Parliament Robert Goguen bade her to continue in that vein for another five minutes.  As jaw-dropping and angering as that is, it served as a reminder of the depth of the prejudices that we face as trans people.

And although the language was wrapped in careful spin about appropriateness and "family-friendly" jargon, Carnival’s panic provides the reminder that we face those prejudices together.