I didn’t watch Eurovision last night, though it was very obvious from my Twitter feed that many of you lot did. I was, of course, very happy to see Conchita Wurst win, given the threats by various countries to black out her performances.

Doubtless there has been a fair amount of nonsense in the media today, though mainly what I have noticed is that mainstream media outlets are perfectly happy to refer to Conchita as “she”, even though Tom Neuwirth makes it clear that she’s a character he plays, but when they cover stories about trans women they insist on mis-gendering us, and make an effort to seek out and use past names even though we have changed them legally.

Then again, Neuwirth’s performance is not just drag. He has been very clear that he’s deliberately playing with perceptions of gender. On Twitter Stella Duffy noted that he doesn’t use padding to give Conchita a more feminine shape, as most drag acts do. Earlier in the day I had been telling the RMT folks that it is much harder for people who identify as male to adopt feminine gendered performance than it is the other way around. Perhaps Conchita’s win is an indication that this is slowly changing.

What has interested me most, however, is the discussion of the use of the word “transgender” in relation to Conchita. When that word was first coined it was intended to indicate someone who was NOT a transsexual. It got used by people such as Virginia Prince who were full or part-time cross-dressers who did not identify as women. There are still people who identify as radical transgenderists who spout TERF propaganda and claim that anyone who has medical treatment for gender issues is transphobic because they are unable to accept themselves as they “really” are.

Over time, “transgender” came to be used as an umbrella term for all sorts of gender variant people. That was in no small part because people came to understand that any word containing the syllable “sex” tended to lead people to assume that you were describing some sort of pervert.

What I noticed in the discussions surrounding Conchita was that people were using “transgender” to specifically mean someone undergoing medical gender transition, not a cross-dresser. That may have Ms. Prince turning in her grave.

As anyone who has seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert should know, the distinction between a drag queen and a trans woman can be a very fine one, and yet it is deeply important to those on either side of the line. Conchita’s new-found fame has probably caused considerable distress to some people undergoing gender transition because friends and family assume that they are just like her. Equally, what she’s doing to destabilize social notions of acceptable gendered behavior is invaluable to all trans people. I do so wish it was possible to explain all that without getting confused by shifting definitions of the word “transgender”.