Variations in Sexual Behavior

Sexual Minorities: 6. Transvestites

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) coined the terms “transvestite” and “transvestism“ (lat. trans: across and vestis: dress). Before him, people had simply equated cross dressing with homosexuality. Hirschfeld, who took a special scientific interest in “sexual intermediate stages”, learned through his extensive studies that this view was mistaken. He therefore introduced the new terms and thus the necessary distinctions.

The term “transvestite” was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910 for a person who habitually dresses in the clothes of the other sex. At that time, researchers did not yet clearly distinguish between gender role and sexual orientation, and thus men who dressed in women’s clothes were simply assumed to be “homosexuals” and grouped together with them. Hirschfeld was forced to realize, however, that this was a mistake. Indeed, many, if not most, of these “cross-dressers” had a heterosexual orientation, and thus a new term was needed to characterize them as a special group. Actually, as it turned out, the transvestites were not a homogenous group either. A closer look revealed that there were not only heterosexual and homosexual, but also male and female transvestites. Moreover, some of them cross-dressed only occasionally, others frequently or regularly, and they did so for different reasons. In short, once researchers began to study transvestism as a phenomenon of its own, they discovered a multidimensional sexual variation requiring further distinctions.