Transvestism Reexamined

Vern Bullough, Ph.D.

Transvestism was first described, clinically, by Magnus Hirschfeld Germany(1910). It should tee noted that pre-WW II Germany was quite liberal about human sexuality. It was Hirschfeld who coined the term to describe the behavior he observed in 16 men and one woman. His research in this area of behavior led to a new category of sexual behavior. His interest was peaked by the fact that not all the crossdressers were homosexual. He recognized the majority were heterosexual and this intrigued him.

It was Havelock Ellis in 1936 who tried to intro duce the term "Eonism" after the Chevalier D'Eon, one of history's most famous crossdressers. The term never really caught on, however. Ellis initially described transvestism as an "aesthetic inversion" but dropped that definition later because of the suggestion of homosexuality. [An early, clinical, definition of homosexuality was "sexual inversion."]

Other researchers, mostly psychoanalysts, took an interest in transvestism, although Sigmund Freud paid little attention to it. Karl Abraham described a man who day-dreamed he was changed into a woman although the man did not crossdress. Today, we might recognize this person as a transsexual. However, Abraham attributed the man's problems [erroneously] to homosexual impulses.

This view was shared by many other analysts, especially Wilhelm Stekel who wrote many books on the subject. Stekel argued that transvestites were latent homosexuals. Stekel also believed that transvestites suffered from an ugliness-complex and used clothing as a flight of fantasy into the other sex. It is probably Stekel's influence that led to the association of eroticism with crossdressing and, ultimately, to the inclusion of Transvestic Fetishism in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, Third Edition, Revised (DSM III-R). Transvestic Fetishism is defined as behavior existing over a period of six months or more, where the person experiences intense and recurrent sexually arousing fantasies and sexual urges tied to crossdressing and has either acted upon these urges or is distressed by them.

Crossdressing and impersonation of the opposite sex occurs in every cultural and historical study of sexual behavior. One's sexual organs have never been a universal, definitive, essential insignia of gender. In some societies, gender is an achieved characteristic not one that is automatically ascribed to a person and has more to do with tasks performed and costume than anatomy. Historically and culturally, there is a wide variation of feminine and masculine behavior. The only invariant being childbearing and nursing

While crossdressing plays a role in many pre Christian religions, it is Christianity that emphasizes the importance of putting men and women into different categories and setting appropriate gender behavior for each. Theoretically, the basis for these rigid definition is Deuteronomy 22:5 which says, "A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall amen put on a woman's garment, for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God." [It is pretty much accepted now that these proscriptions were not specifically directed at cross dressing but at keeping women out of the temple and men out of the women's quarters. The sense of the passage was changed sometime in the homo phobic-sixteenth century when the King James version of the Bible was created.] While the proscription has been strongly enforced against men, it has almost never been enforced against women. In fact, women have always been encouraged to become more masculine. This is, in part, because women were regarded as biologically, intellectually and spiritually inferior to men. [The ancient Greeks believed that women were "inverted" Ñthere's that term againÑ men. As such, however, they were treated with the same respect as ~normal" men. It was with the growing certainty that women were, in fact, a completely different sex, that the denigration of women reached its peak.]

Women who acted like men were much admired within the early Christian church. There are more than 30 female saints who, while they were alive, were thought to be men. The fact that they "passed" so successfully is one of the major reason they were made saints. Conversely, there are no male saints who lived as women. And, of course, western history is peppered with accounts of women who passed themselves off successfully as soldiers, sailors, businessmen, politicians, physicians and many other "male" pursuits.

What is evident is that the box created for women by the Biblical injunction has never completely confined women and in our modern society is even less confining than ever before.

What is now most interesting to observe from a historical perspective is that male crossdressing in the past never existed on the same scale as female crossdressing Transgender men are almost nonexistent in western society before 1800. This does not include the crossdressing associated with the early theater. But, that too, was frowned upon by many. Puritan critic, William Pryne, writing in the seventeenth century, held that a man "doing: what a woman does leads to "being" what a woman is. He was convinced that "locked away" within each man was a woman only waiting for the appropriate attire to announce and show herself. This loss of masculinity underscores the status loss of crossdressing but also hints at the fear that men are not all they are cracked up to be. For example, emerging groups of homosexual men in the eighteenth century formed "molly" clubs and proclaimed their sexuality by crossdressing as women. Crossdressing or Drag is still associated with homosexuality today.

During the nineteenth century, Romanticism discarded intellectual rationality for passion and emotion. In spite of the Victorian standards of public modesty, Romanticism was pro-sex and encouraged the violation of social norms. What was taking place was an appreciation of female qualities, a raising of woman's place to a higher value, an "effeminism" if you will.

The counter-reaction to this growing effeminism was a rigorous athleticism, which we still see today. This athleticism was embodied in the United States by Theodore Roosevelt and the result was a whole series of institutions devoted to develop and encourage masculinity, e.g. the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. What was happening, then, was the Romanticists, who adored the feminine qualities of women, were being driven underground, giving expression to their needs by crossdressing This phenomena becomes more and more evident in the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. By then, Hirschfeld had recognized and classified it as transvestism. In his scheme of human sexuality, transvestites were gender-intermediates as homosexuals were sexual-intermediates.

Just how pervasive crossdressing was at this time cannot be known since only a few ever came to the attention of analysts. There is evidence, however, from biographies, autobiographies,fiction end press coverage. Interestingly enough, female crossdressers were dealt with much more even handedly in the newspapers than discovered male crossdressers. The numbers of male crossdressers seems to increase steadily during the twentieth century and even more rapidly post WW II.

Because all the evidence points toward an increase in transvestism a social interaction perspective might be helpful in understanding what is taking place. Since society doesn't seem overly concerned about crossdressing for women, the significance of the act is determined by the woman herself. This in not the case for male crossdressers. The significance of transvestism is defined not only by the crossdresser, but also by what society, and in a large part, the helping professionals make of it. Another factor in the current social construct of transvestism is the rapidly growing number of peer support groups.

In summary, there are a great variety of historical, cultural and social factors that merge into the phenomenon called transvestism. The urge to explore the condition of the other sex is almost universal. Western culture has tried to restrict the boundaries of appropriate masculine and feminine behavior by separating the men and women into separate sex and gender boxes. Men who find these boxes overly confining them to an escape into women's roles for relief. The problem may not be a matter of individual pathology as suggested by the DSM-IIIR, but a sign of social pathology. Society needs new ways to allow those who do not fit neatly into the boxes to explore the alternatives. If we can remove the stigma from homosexuality that earlier versions of the DSM piled upon it, then we ought to be able to rethink just how much transvestism, today, is a social construction designed to meet a real need in society. We long ago removed the stigma from women who crossdress, and it is a society's double standard, more than anything else, that prevents us from reexamining the male transvestite in the same way.

Note: Dr. Bullough is the Dean, Faculty of Natural & Social Sciences at the State University College of NY at Buffalo. This article was abstracted from a previously published paper with the author's permission.

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