Transvestite

What it named was never one thing. Hirschfeld's transvestites were men and women, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual and asexual, and included people who in current terms would be called cross-dressers and people who would be called transgender. The word then spent half a century inside psychiatry, where it described a disorder rather than a behaviour, and it left general use as Cross-dresser replaced it. Both halves of that history are why the term is now handled carefully.

How Hirschfeld coined the word transvestite

Hirschfeld's own position was that clothing is an outward symbol chosen on the basis of an internal situation, which is a wider claim than a word about dress suggests. He helped people obtain changes to their legal first name, which German law required to be gender-specific, and performed the first reported sexual reassignment surgery. His transvestites were therefore a wider group than the word now brings to mind.

He also separated two things the later literature kept merging. Sexual arousal was often present, and that is what later writing calls transvestic fetishism; Hirschfeld distinguished it clearly from transvestism as an expression of what he called contra-sexual feeling, even where the fetishistic behaviour involved the clothes of the other sex. The distinction was available from the beginning and was repeatedly lost.

The vocabulary he was working in had been built over the previous half century. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs came out to his family in 1862 and coined Urning for a man who desires men and Dioning for one who desires women; Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined homosexual in an 1868 letter to him; Karl Westphal quoted Ulrichs in the first psychiatric paper on contrary sexual feeling; and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose Psychopathia Sexualis appeared in 1886, later acknowledged that Ulrichs's books were what set him studying the subject at all.

What transvestism was made to cover

Havelock Ellis knew Hirschfeld's work, agreed that a category separate from homosexuality was needed, and disagreed about the name. He proposed sexo-aesthetic inversion in 1913 and eonism in 1920, the second after the Chevalier d'Éon, the eighteenth-century French diplomat who was anatomically male and lived and dressed as a woman in later life. Writing to Haire in March 1925, Ellis gave his reason plainly: he did not accept that cross-dressing was always the essential feature.

The second half of the twentieth century produced a crowd of such terms, many of which did not survive.

Underneath the terminology sat a distinction that has held. Charles Allen Moser stated it in 2002 in the form most often quoted: wearing the stereotypic articles of clothing of the other sex is crossdressing, and obtaining erotic enjoyment from the process is transvestism. That is a narrower word than Hirschfeld's, and narrower than the one that reached ordinary English.

How transvestites organised in Weimar Germany

A movement formed around the category almost immediately. Out of the homosexual emancipation movement in Germany, a separate transvestite movement began from the mid-1920s, founding its own organisations and its own magazine, Das 3. Geschlecht, The Third Sex. The historian Katie Sutton, writing in German Studies Review in 2012, describes middle-class transvestites drawing on the tactics of the homosexual emancipation campaign and on discourses of bourgeois respectability to demand legal and social recognition, including acknowledgement of transsexual desires. She calls it a critical and forgotten moment in the history of transgender political activism.

The most concrete thing the category produced was a document. Cross-dressing was not in itself illegal in early twentieth-century Germany, but it carried the risk of arrest for public outrage or disturbance, and Hirschfeld helped people obtain a transvestite pass, a Transvestitenschein, from the police. What began as a mitigation became a state-recognised permit, particularly under the Weimar Republic. With surgery barely emerging, a pass and an official name change were as far as transition went for many people.

The rise of National Socialism stopped the movement from 1933.

How Virginia Prince redrew the transvestite category

Virginia Prince published Transvestia from 1960 to 1980 and founded Tri-Ess for heterosexual male cross-dressers, and her definitions shaped what the word meant in English for a generation. She argued consistently that transvestism is a matter of gender rather than of sex or sexuality. She also drew hard boundaries: her true transvestite was exclusively heterosexual, valued his male organs and did not want them removed, which excluded homosexual and Transsexual people from the category as she defined it.

Her coinages did not all take. Femmiphile, lover of the feminine, was offered because she held that transvestite had been corrupted, and it was intended to mark off heterosexual cross-dressers acting out of love of the feminine from homosexual or transsexual people who might also cross-dress. Prince identified with androgyny but preferred gynandrous for herself, on the grounds that the feminine was the more important half. She also helped popularise transgender.

By the early 1970s the criticism was coming from several directions at once: from transvestites and transsexuals, from parts of the gay movement and from parts of the women's movement, and it fastened on her support for conventional marriage, the traditional family and traditional gender presentation, and on her efforts to exclude transsexual, homosexual and fetishistic people from a normalised transvestism.

Emily Cousens and Aino Pihlak, writing in 2025 from the Francine Logandice papers at the GLBT Historical Society, put that period in a different light. The transvestite communities of the 1960s and 1970s, connected by mailing lists, newsletters and magazines across the Anglosphere, produced constant lists of identity categories, blending in-community terms such as gender fuck and female impersonator with clinical ones. Their argument is that the identity category of transvestite was one of the most highly organised and internally differentiated formations of the twentieth century, and that it has been almost entirely unhistoricised.

Why transvestism was classified as a disorder

The classification is dated and it is documented. ICD-10, published in 1994, listed dual-role transvestism for non-sexual cross-dressing and fetishistic transvestism for cross-dressing for sexual pleasure. Both were removed for ICD-11 in 2022. In the United States the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders applies the diagnosis of transvestic fetishism where cross-dressing occurs for erotic purposes over at least six months and also causes significant distress or impairment.

Through the middle of the twentieth century the word in medical use named a disorder, treated as deviance found predominantly among homosexual men. Harry Benjamin, who had studied at Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft before arriving in the United States in 1914, was asked by Alfred Kinsey in San Francisco in 1948 to see a young patient who was anatomically male and insisted on being female. That case is what turned Benjamin towards what he came to call transsexualism, a condition he concluded was different from the transvestism under which such people had until then been classified.

Why cross-dresser displaced transvestite

The replacement is usually explained by who did the naming. Transvestite was used to diagnose, and transvestism was held to be a disorder; cross-dresser came out of the trans community itself, describes the behaviour and carries no clinical history. The term transvestite is now commonly considered outdated and derogatory, and cross-dresser is the standard replacement in English.

That is not the whole of current use. Some people have reclaimed the word, and one position in circulation is that it is more appropriate coming from members of the trans community than from anybody outside it. Nobody has counted how many use it of themselves, and no survey of the word is on record.

The related vocabulary went its own way. French had travesti for a cross-dresser early in the nineteenth century and Portuguese imported it with the same meaning, which is where the South American Travesti category gets its name; the English travesty is the older doublet, mostly figurative, though it carried the literal sense of wearing the clothes of the other sex from at least 1823, with travestiment recorded by 1832. The verb transvest is used in the 1650s of a woman dressing as a man, nearly three centuries before Hirschfeld needed a noun.