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Transvestism was a medicalized framework primarily used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to classify and explain varied forms of gender-variant expression and behavior. Coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910, the term included a diverse range of phenomena that later came to be understood separately as cross-dressing, aspects of homosexuality, eonism, transsexuality, and transgender identity, but it was not limited to any single one of these concepts.
During the mid-twentieth century, transvestism was classified as a psychiatric disorder in diagnostic manuals. As medical and social understandings of gender variance and gender identity evolved, the term became increasingly outdated, stigmatized, and was largely replaced by other terms. In its place, several more specific terms emerged, including the neutral, non-medicalized term cross-dressing for clothing choice behavior, alongside clinical terms such as transvestic fetishism which were retained for narrowly defined psychiatric diagnoses.
In some cases, the term transvestite is seen as more appropriate for use by members of the trans community instead of by those outside the trans community, and some have Reappropriation.
Moser gives this definition in 2002:
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was a German lawyer and pioneer of sexology and gay rights.Hans-Martin Lohmann: Geschichte der Sexualität – Vom Widerspruch her gedacht (Buchbesprechung: Volkmar Sigusch, Geschichte der Sexualwissenschaft, Campus, 2008), Frankfurter Rundschau Online. In 1862, he came out to friends and family that he was gay, coining the German term Urning to describe himself (English: Uranian). Ulrichs coined various terms to describe different sexual orientations, including Urning for a man who desires men (English "Uranian"), and Dioning for one who desires women. Ulrichs published urning pamphlets under his own name as an apologist for the cause, and is thus unique at that time and for some time thereafter. In 1868, the Austrian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined the word homosexual in a letter to Ulrichs, and from the 1870s the subject of sexual orientation (in modern terms) began to be widely discussed.
Karl Westphal quoted Ulrichs's writings in the first psychiatric paper on 'contrary sexual feeling' and largely used Ulrichs's theoretical framework. Ulrichs also corresponded for many years with psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who later acknowledged his debt to Ulrichs, stating that it was "only the knowledge of your books which motivated me to study this highly important area".Douglas Ogilvy Pretsell (2026). 9783030397623, Springer International Publishing. . ISBN 9783030397623
Richard von Krafft-Ebing was a German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Krafft-Ebing had particular significance for the scientific study of homosexuality. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' theory of the "Urning" (Uranian) as a third sex greatly influenced Krafft-Ebing's thinking on the subject. Being part of the homosexual movement of Weimar Germany in the beginning, a first transvestite movement of its own started to form since the mid-1920s, resulting in founding first organizations and the first transvestite magazine, Das 3. Geschlecht ( ). The rise of National Socialism stopped this movement from 1933 onwards.Rainer Herrn: Die Zeitschrift Das 3. Geschlecht in: Rainer Herrn (ed.): Das 3. Geschlecht – Reprint der 1930 – 1932 erschienenen Zeitschrift für Transvestiten, 2016, ISBN 9783863002176, p. 231 ff.
Hirschfeld also noticed that sexual arousal was often associated with transvestism. In more recent terminology, this is sometimes called transvestic fetishism.American Psychiatric Association (2026). 9780890425558, American Psychiatric Publishing. . ISBN 9780890425558 Hirschfeld also clearly distinguished between transvestism as an expression of a person's "contra-sexual" (transgender) feelings and Sexual fetishism behavior, even if the latter involved wearing clothes of the other sex.
Writing to sexologist Norman Haire in 1925 while writing his book on Eonism, Ellis wrote:
David Oliver Cauldwell introduced the term transexualism to an English-speaking audience in 1949.. See also the neo-Latin term "psychopathia transexualis".
John Money coined gender role in 1955, and Robert J. Stoller introduced gender identity in 1964. During this period, the term transvestism was generally used in medical contexts to describe a disorder and not merely a behavior, and was considered deviant behavior found predominantly among homosexuals.
Prince has been considered a major pioneer of the transgender community. Her long history of literature surrounding issues of crossdressing and transvestism was rooted in her desire to fight against those who disagreed with liberal sexual ideology."The Life and Times of Virginia", Transvestia #100 (1979)Prince, Virginia. "Seventy Years in the Trenches of the Gender Wars." Gender Bending. Eds. V. Bullough, B. Bullough, B. and J. Elias. New York: Prometheus Books, 1997.
By the early 1970s, Prince and her approaches to crossdressing and transvestism were starting to gain criticism from transvestites and transsexuals, as well as sections of the gay and women's movements of the time. Controversy and criticism has arisen based on Prince's support for conventional societal norms, such as marriage and the traditional family model, as well as the portrayal of traditional gender stereotypes. Her attempts to exclude transsexuals, homosexuals, or fetishists from her normalization efforts of the practice of transvestism have also drawn much criticism.
Prior to arriving in the United States in 1914, Benjamin studied at Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin. From about this time onward he began to encounter and treat patients who he would later describe as transsexuals. In the 1930s he studied in Austria with Eugen Steinach. In 1948, in San Francisco, Benjamin was asked by Alfred Kinsey, a fellow sexologist, to see a young patient who was anatomically male but insisted on being female. The Sisterhood: Dr. Harry Benjamin . Kinsey had encountered the child as a result of his interviews for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was published that year. This case rapidly caused Benjamin's interest in what he would come to call transsexualism realizing that there was a different condition to that of transvestism, under which adults who had such needs had been classified to that time.
When cross-dressing occurs for erotic purposes over a period of at least six months and also causes significant distress or impairment, the behavior is considered a mental disorder in the United States Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the psychiatric diagnosis "transvestic fetishism" is applied.
As gender-affirming surgery was only an emerging practice at the time, obtaining a transvestite pass along with an official name change represented the maximum extent to which many trans individuals could transition.
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