Cross-dresser

The practice is far older than any of the vocabulary for it. Wikipedia's article traces it as far back as ancient Sumer and finds it in Greek, Norse and Hindu mythology, in kabuki, Noh and Korean shamanism, in British pantomime, and in disguise, comfort, self-expression, ritual and performance. What changes across the record is who is describing it and why.

How the dictionaries date cross-dressing

The two most-consulted sources on the point do not agree, and the gap is large enough to matter. The Oxford English Dictionary's own entry gives the earliest known use of the noun cross-dresser as 1922, credited to the writing of R. Werther, and its list of neighbouring headwords dates the verb cross-dress to 1847, the noun cross-dressing to 1856 and the adjective to 1972. The Wikipedia article, citing the same dictionary, reports 1911 for cross-dressing, in Edward Carpenter's remark that it must be taken as a general indication of homosexuality, and gives 1966 and 1976 for cross-dress and cross-dresser.

Neither set of dates is obviously wrong, and the likeliest explanation is that they are answering different questions: a first appearance of the string against a first appearance in the modern sense. On the 1922 attribution, the same Wikipedia article records the activist Jennie June using the term in The Female Impersonators, published in 1922, to describe certain androgynes, a word then covering gay and bisexual men together with people who would now be called trans women. Neither source says whether that is the citation the dictionary is quoting.

Nobody has counted cross-dressers, and the only frequency figure available is a figure about the word. The dictionary puts it at roughly 0.09 occurrences per million words in modern written English, moving from 0.072 in 2017 to 0.1 in 2025. That measures how often the term is printed and nothing about how many people it fits.

Why cross-dresser replaced transvestite in print

The two words describe overlapping behaviour and carry opposite histories. Transvestite was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910 and spent decades in psychiatry as the name of a disorder; cross-dresser, on the account given in the Wikipedia article, was coined by the trans community and names the behaviour without the diagnosis. Provenance is the difference, not definition.

That account sits awkwardly with the dictionary's dating, which has the compound in English by 1922 and formed inside English rather than borrowed. Merriam-Webster's entry carries no such history at all, defining cross-dressing flatly as the wearing of clothes designed for the opposite sex and listing the verb and the agent noun beneath it. Where the community claim holds up better is in usage: the word displaced the clinical one in general English through the later twentieth century, and transvestite is now generally treated as outdated.

Havelock Ellis was already using cross-dressing and transvestism interchangeably in 1928, and the split between them was made later and deliberately. Before the terms separated, Hirschfeld's studies grouped cross-dressers and Transgender people together under the one word, and the distinction only became clear as sexology developed and as transsexual was coined and then marked off from transvestite in the 1920s.

What en femme means to a cross-dresser

The community that uses the word has its own vocabulary, borrowed from French. En femme means dressing in feminine clothing or expressing a stereotypically feminine personality, and en homme is its counterpart. Most cross-dressers take a feminine name while en femme, called a femme name, and the persona a man adopts when dressing as a woman is known as his femme self.

Those terms do a particular kind of work. They name a mode a person moves into and out of rather than a condition they are in, and they let somebody talk about the practice without making a claim about their gender at all. That is the same job the word cross-dresser does, one level up.

Where cross-dressing turns up in the record

The historical examples are miscellaneous on purpose, because the motives are. Moses Isserles, writing in Ashkenaz between 1520 and 1572, records as ordinary custom that on Purim men wear women's clothing and women wear men's. British and European playing companies were all male, with the female parts taken by boy players. In kabuki during the Edo period, gender switching on stage sat easily with a wider fashion traffic between men's wear and geisha dress, and Noh made the same substitution simpler still behind masks and heavy robes. In Korean shamanism, the chaesu-gut requires the shaman, usually a woman, to dress as both male and female spirits, since either may occupy her.

The Korean case is the most precisely described. The chaesu-gut is a rite in which a shaman offers sacrifice to the spirits on somebody's behalf, and the account in the article has her holding a cross-sex position for three quarters of the ritual. Cross-dressing there is a condition of the work.

Disguise accounts for a second class of cases. Margaret King is thought to have dressed as a man in the early nineteenth century to attend a medical school that took only male students; a century later Vita Sackville-West dressed as a young soldier to walk out with Violet Keppel and avoid the harassment two women would have met. The Rebecca Riots in West and Mid Wales between 1839 and 1843 were carried out largely by men dressed as women, attacking the toll gates that stood for the taxes they were protesting, and they subsided before 1844 as troop levels rose and criminal groups began using the same guise.

Rules against it followed the practice everywhere. Cross-dressing laws were used to enforce gender norms and to target transgender and gender-nonconforming people, and the older prohibition on women wearing men's clothing still echoes in dress codes that require skirts.

Why historians find the frontier sources difficult

Peter Boag's account of writing Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past, published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly in 2011, is the clearest account of what the record does to the subject. His difficulties were methodological, linguistic and historiographical at once, and his central finding is about erasure: journalists, dime novelists, historians and scientists alike expunged the gender and sexual transgressiveness associated with cross-dressing from the story of the Old West, in the course of building a myth of a wholly heterosexual American frontier at the turn of the twentieth century.

A word that means only what somebody wore leaves no trace of who they were, so the same source may record a woman disguised for work, a person living as a man, and a performer, in identical language. That is why the Gender-nonconforming and Transsexual entries carry histories that overlap with this one without duplicating it, and why nineteenth-century cases are almost never safely assignable to any modern term.