I traveled a lot in the 80s, and the only time I realized the "women" were actually men was on a street in Italy where the local male whores, the ones dressed as women, were selling their wares because the local guy, who was taking a few of us tourists to a small restaurant that was reputed to have the best pizzas in the city near there, told us that all those whores we saw were actually men, and this was their street. Heard a few of them talking and the voices were pretty clearly male, and a couple didn't look at all feminine, they just looked like men in drag. First time I learned that such a thing as male whores in drag was a thing, and that there was, or had to be, enough customers for them to make sense for such a thing to exist.

The pizzas, by the way, were actually damn good.

Otherwise, well, trans, or mostly men who dressed as women and pretended to be women were mentioned in novels sometimes, and of course there were some movies, but in those movies back then the deal was usually, well, almost always, that the guy who pretended to be a woman did it not because he wanted to be a woman, but because for some reason it was something that he needed to do to get a job or something, like in "Tootsie", 1982, or in the older ones like "Some Like it Hot" 1959, where the guys are running from gangsters, or "I Was a Male War Bride", 1949, in which Gary Grant played a French officer who marries an American nurse and in their efforts to get him to America also has to dress as a woman at one point. But in those older movies it was always played for laughs, and the men in drag were usually pretty masculine guys who did it just because they had to for whatever reason.

First movies where I remember seeing characters who were men who actually seemingly wanted to be women was probably "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" 1995, with Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo playing three drag queens, except they stay in character the whole time, not just when performing, and a year earlier, "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp, in which it's two drag queens and one actual transwoman.

Hm. They chose actors who usually played pretty masculine characters for those two movies. I suppose I can get why those actors went for those roles, they might have seen them as interesting challenges exactly because they all usually played pretty masculine characters.

But yep, apart from that one street and its male whores, all I knew about drag performers and especially trans was from a few novels and a few movies, and I just assumed that it was something fairly rare. Plus I was pretty willing to accept them, as far as I was concerned it didn't bother me what adults might do or how they might want to live their lives as long as their choices didn't affect my personal life. And back then, it was presumably rare enough that mostly it didn't affect the lives of most normal people much, if at all.

You are spot on MW! I've been down that rabbit hole. I was born in 1960 and KNEW things weren't "right".

In the second video it's both of them. Biggest clue? Take what they are saying, "I Am Woman" and flip it. Been right in our faces this whole time.

And all the male "actors" I admired..... inverted. 😳