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Transvestism (also called transvestitism) is the practice of cross-dressing
Cross-dressing

Cross-dressing is the act of wearing Clothes commonly associated with another gender role within a particular society. The usage of the term, the types of cross-dressing both in modern times and throughout history, an analysis of the behaviour, and historical examples are discussed in the article below....
, which is wearing the clothing of the opposite sex. Transvestite refers to a person who cross-dresses; however, the word often has additional connotations.

term transvestism has undergone several changes of meaning since it was coined
Neologism

A neologism is a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language . Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event....
 in the 1910s, and it is still used in a variety of senses.






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Transvestism (also called transvestitism) is the practice of cross-dressing
Cross-dressing

Cross-dressing is the act of wearing Clothes commonly associated with another gender role within a particular society. The usage of the term, the types of cross-dressing both in modern times and throughout history, an analysis of the behaviour, and historical examples are discussed in the article below....
, which is wearing the clothing of the opposite sex. Transvestite refers to a person who cross-dresses; however, the word often has additional connotations.

History

The term transvestism has undergone several changes of meaning since it was coined
Neologism

A neologism is a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language . Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event....
 in the 1910s, and it is still used in a variety of senses. Therefore it is important to find out, whenever the word is encountered, in which particular sense it is used. However, to understand the different meanings of transvestism it is necessary to explain the development of the term and the reasons behind the changes of meaning.

Origin of the term

Magnus Hirschfeld
Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfeld was a gay German-Jewish physician, sexologist, and early gay rights advocate....
 coined the term transvestism (from Latin trans-, "across, over" and vestitus, "dressed") to refer to the sexual interest in cross-dressing. He used it to describe persons who habitually and voluntarily wore clothes of the opposite sex. Hirschfeld's group of transvestites consisted of both males and females, with (physically) heterosexual, (physically) homosexual, bisexual, and asexual orientations.

Hirschfeld himself was not particularly happy with the term: He believed that clothing was only an outward symbol chosen on the basis of various internal psychological situations. In fact, Hirschfeld helped people to achieve the very first name changes (legal given names were and are required to be gender-specific in Germany
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
) and performed the first reported sexual reassignment surgery. Hirschfeld's transvestites therefore were, in today's terms, not only transvestites, but people from all over the transgender
Transgender

Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies that diverge from the normative gender role commonly, but not always, assigned at birth, as well as the role traditionally held by society....
 spectrum.

Hirschfeld also noticed that sexual arousal
Sexual arousal

Sexual arousal is the the arousal of sexual desires in preparation for sexual behavior....
 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
Sexual fetishism

Sexual fetishism, or erotic fetishism, is the sexual attraction to objects or body parts not conventionally viewed as being sexual in nature....
 behaviour, even if the latter involved wearing clothes of the other sex.

Modern usage

The Nazis
Nazism

Nazism, officially National Socialism , refers to the ideology and practices of the National Socialist German Workers? Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945....
' rise to power and World War II
World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
 had brought an end not only to Hirschfeld's work, but to also most European research in the field of sexuality
Human sexuality

Human sexuality is how people experience and express themselves as sexual beings. Human sexuality has many aspects. Biology, sexuality refers to the reproductive mechanism as well as the basic biological drive that exists in all species and can encompass sexual intercourse and sexual contact in all its forms....
. In both Europe
Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
 and North America
North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
 transvestite behaviour (both by male and female bodied persons) was until the 1960s seen as an expression of homosexuality
Homosexuality

Homosexuality refers to human sexual behavior or same-sex attraction between people of the same sex or to homosexual orientation. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "having sexual and romantic attraction primarily or exclusively to members of one?s own sex"; "it also refers to an individual?s sense of personal and social identi...
 or suppressed homosexual impulses. Also, the three-gendered framework of Hirschfeld disappeared, and the two-gender framework became the frame of reference again.

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.

Divergence from homosexuality