The recurrent practice of dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex, normally for sexual excitement. It usually begins in adolescence.
The term transvestism has undergone several changes of meaning since it was coined in the 1910s, and it is still used in all of these meanings except the very first one.
Origin of the term
Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term transvestism around 1915 in Berlin (from Latin trans-, "across, over" and vestere, "to dress or to wear").
Hirschfeld himself was not particularly happy with the term: he understood that clothing was only an outward symbol chosen on the basis of various internal psychological situations. Hirschfeld's transvestites therefore were, in today's terms, not only transvestites, but people from all over the transgender spectrum.
Hirschfeld operated very much in a three-gender framework: male; There was, therefore, no pressing reason to find different terms for the different shades of Hirschfeld's transvestism.
Hirschfeld also noticed that sexual arousal was often, but not always, associated with transvestite behaviour; he also clearly distinguished between transvestism as an expression of a person's "contra-sexual" (transgender) feelings and fetishistic behaviour, even if the latter involved wearing clothes of the other sex.
Today, Hirschfeld's use of transvestism is extinct, but the modern term transgender is used in a nearly equivalent sense.
Modern usage
The rise of the Nazis to power and the Second World War had brought an end not only to Hirschfeld's work, but to also most European research in the field of sexuality.
In the 1960s Harry Benjamin and others started working with people showing transvestite behaviour again. Unlike Hirschfeld, who had tried to find a social space where third-gendered people could live the way they needed or wanted, people showing other-gendered behaviour now were forced to find a way of living as "proper men" or "proper women".
Since transsexual people had and sometimes still have to "prove" that they are not "just transvestites" to get access to medical treatment, people who see themselves as transsexuals occasionally discriminate against anything they see as "transvestism" even more strongly than the public in general.
Today, some people still associate homosexuality, transvestic fetishism and transsexualism with transvestism both alone and in various combinations.
Divergence from homosexuality
Social changes brought about the next modifications.
The gay and lesbian rights movement after the Stonewall riots weakened tranvestism's association with homosexuality, since more lesbians and gays became visible and most of them did not show transvestite behaviour.
That left transvestism as transvestic fetishism, in which transvestic behavior is coupled with, and often necessary for, sexual arousal. All this led to the term transvestism being applied to men or male-bodied persons only, because there seemed to be no need for a word for transvestic female bodied persons.
Today transvestism is still applied mostly to male bodied persons. However, some researchers never stopped using the term transvestism for female-bodied persons, and recently some groups of female-bodied transvestites have started to use the term to describe themselves, although the term "drag king" is more common.
Other groups distinct from these meanings
After all those changes which took place during the 1970s, a large group was left without a word to describe themselves: heterosexual males (that is, male-bodied, male-identified, gynophilic persons) who wear traditionally feminine clothing. Nor do those self-identified cross-dressers have any fetishistic intentions.
This group did - and sometimes still does - distance themselves strictly from both gay men and transsexual people, and usually also deny any fetishistic intentions.
However, when this group of people achieved public attention, most of the time not the word cross-dressing was used, but transvestism. That led, paradoxically, to yet another usage of transvestitsm: Today transvestism is sometimes used to describe specifically cross-dressing male-bodied, male identified, heterosexual persons.
Echoing the changing history of the term "transvestism", cross-dressing (but not cross-dresser) is now being used to describe the act of wearing clothing of another gender.
Conclusion
There are many different usages and meanings of the term transvestism.
The word transvestism therefore should be explained when used;
Related word: travesty
Although the term transvestism was a modern invention, it has exactly the same two Latin roots as the word travesty, which dates from the 17th century.
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