@NinjaGoemon
...???
I said I understood the negative connotation, desu. Even with that stigma, it’s hardly a slur. A matter of reality is,
if someone was dressed up as the opposite gender convincingly enough, some people will always be fooled, even if deception wasn’t necessarily the person’s intention.
Regardless of race, sex, gender identity, the most perfect of traps, AKA, crossdressers, can’t be detected by eye alone. Until the day people can telepathically identify a person’s gender, or no longer associate clothing such as skirts to women, or long hair as feminine, there will always be the basic, underlying thought that “a mistake or assumption was made”, that the proverbial trap was set off.
That’s not a slur. You hear people say “we don’t like hXmXs here!” or “N0gg0rs are naturally prone to violence.” Or for me, “FOB” or “FLIP”. Those are slurs. “You fell for a trap” might be degrading, it might be embarrassing, but aside from, “lol it’s a trap”, that’s it. It might write you off for less, but it’s a word that describes a person, just like “tsundere”, or “ojou” can describe a princess. How many people have admittedly called a character “the token childhood friend” and written them off like that?
“Trap” just happens to be the most popular term for “cross dresser”. If “trap” had as bad of a stigma as “n0gg0r”, people wouldn’t say trap. For all the ways to describe a person of African descent living in America, from African American, people of color, Afro-American, or black, guess what? Black happens to be the shortest one. It might be demeaning to refer to people by the color of their skin, but damn if a one syllable color isn’t easy, and boy does it get the point across.
Edit: We, humans use words to describe things. You have to defeat the association to defeat the word. For a “round piece of wood with four legs”, dimensions decides if it’s a table or a stool. We use “table” and “stool” to identify those differences. For “a girl/woman” and “cross dresser”, trap just happens to be one that the weeb or internet communities use to describe and differentiate the two.