Transvestism

What is transvestism?

Transvestism (Dutch: travestie) is wearing clothing associated with another gender, for the experience or the eroticism of it. Who someone is, and who they’re drawn to, is separate from that. The common word today is cross-dressing. The English travesty means something else entirely.

What transvestism looks like in practice

Usually as something that starts at home and stays there a long time.

The form you’ll run into most is a man who wears clothing that counts as women’s clothing only at home, with a closet or a box no one else looks in. There’s no audience, no character, and usually no name for that person in the mirror. For some it comes with arousal, for others only calm; for many it shifts from one time to the next.

The second form does have an audience: an evening with a partner, where getting dressed is the scene itself. That’s when transvestism comes close to forced feminization or sissification, and those are different arrangements with different rules. The difference isn’t in the clothing but in who has an opinion about it.

What the Dutch word travestie has meant

Four things, arising in this order, and the clothing meaning isn’t the first.

The Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands gives the sequence with dates. In 1805 travestie means a parody of a lofty literary work: “eene boertige verkleding van sommige schoone dichtwerken”. In 1847 the plain sense “verkleeding, omkleeding” (a change of dress) is added. Only in 1876 does the meaning this page describes turn up, and even then at a ball: “Een bal masqué … De heeren dames, en de dames heeren. Travestie!” And in 1920 the word stands for a distortion, in the Leeuwarder Courant: “Een caricatuur, een parodie, een travestie van zelfregeering”.

All four come from the same Italian travestire, “to disguise oneself”, from tra- (“through, over”) and vestire (“to dress”), by way of the French travestir. English borrowed the same word but kept only one meaning of it. Etymonline dates travesty to the 1670s as “a burlesque treatment of a serious work”, and the Century Dictionary explains the difference from parody there: in a parody the subject changes, in a travesty the subject stays the same and the language turns absurd. So an English speaker who reads “travesty” thinks of a mockery, not a dress.

The clinical words are later and formed differently. Transvestitism appears in Dutch from 1934, borrowed from the German Transvestitismus, coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in his 1910 book Die Transvestiten; transvestie follows in 1938. Etymonline dates the English transvestite to 1922, also from the German Transvestit of 1910.

Why people take up transvestism

Because clothing changes something faster than any conversation.

The pull runs in different directions. For one person it’s in the fabric and the shape, in what a different cut does to a body. For another it’s in shedding a role that has to be held up all week, and that has nothing to do with eroticism. For a third it’s genuinely erotic, with the charge of doing something that isn’t allowed.

• For you transvestism can be a way to see who else is in you, without pinning anything permanent to it.
• For your partner the gain is usually information: something that sat in a box for years becomes something you can talk about together.
• For the two of you it can make for an evening where dressing up is the game instead of the run-up to something else.

Transvestism doesn’t resolve doubt about gender, and it doesn’t create that doubt either. Anyone wondering whether something more is going on won’t find out by putting on a dress. That’s a question for someone who works with it, not for a wardrobe.

What transvestism isn’t

“Transvestism means someone is trans.” No, and that was even written into the diagnosis that once existed for it. The ICD-10 described F64.1 as wearing clothing to experience “the temporary experience of membership of the opposite sex, but without any desire for a more permanent sex change”. It’s about a temporary experience, explicitly without any wish for something lasting.

“Transvestism is drag.” Also no. Drag is stage art with an oversized costume and a character, meant for an audience. Transvestism can be completely private and usually has no character.

“It’s in the manuals as a disorder.” That category was taken out. Geoffrey Reed and the WHO working group preparing the ICD-11 proposed dropping F64.1 dual-role transvestism “due to its lack of public health or clinical relevance”. Their argument was that the ICD-10 contradicted itself on this point: that same manual states that “social deviance or conflict alone, without personal dysfunction, should not be included in mental disorder”.

“Transvestism and cross-dressing are the same word.” In practice they carry different weight. Cross-dressing is the ordinary, current word; transvestism (and the older transvestitism) come from the 1930s clinical vocabulary and still carry the diagnosis with them. That’s why many people reach for cross-dressing instead.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years active in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. What strikes me about this subject is that the chosen word tells you more than the desire does. Someone who says transvestism has usually carried it for twenty years; someone who says cross-dressing usually came to it more recently, and online.

The second thing I see is a question that rarely comes out loud, and it’s never “am I allowed to do this”. It’s: does this mean I’m something other than what I thought. My answer is that clothing doesn’t answer that question, in either direction.

And a practical observation: what holds people back is almost never the clothing itself but the keeping of it. Where the stuff is, who might find it, what happens when someone does the laundry. That’s the conversation it’s really about.

Further reading on transvestism

Within this glossary, forced feminization explains what changes once a power arrangement is built around it.

Beyond it, the overview by Reed and colleagues is freely available and unusually clear on why a classification drops something, and the Etymologiebank gives the Dutch citations with their dates, so you can follow the shift in meaning yourself.

Where this fits on this site

If you’re here because you talk to no one about this, then the conversation is usually the first part and the clothing the second. I don’t do transvestism scenes as a fixed part of what I offer, but the subject is open to talk about the way everything is; the page on the BDSM date shows how that gets set up beforehand.

Sources

• travestie. Etymologiebank, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, accessed 9 August 2026. Collects the Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (Philippa et al., 2003-2009) and Van Veen & Van der Sijs (1997). Supplies the four dated Dutch meanings with their sources: “parody of a lofty literary work” with “eene boertige verkleding van sommige schoone dichtwerken” (1805, WNT), “verkleeding, omkleeding” (1847, Kramers), “dressing as someone of the other sex” with “Een bal masqué … De heeren dames, en de dames heeren. Travestie!” (1876, WNT), and “transformation, distortion” with “Een caricatuur, een parodie, een travestie van zelfregeering” (1920, Leeuwarder Courant). Also supplies the origin by way of French travestir from Italian travestire, from tra- and vestire, and the dated clinical forms transvestitisme (1934) and transvestie (1938), with the note that transvestitisme is borrowed from the German Transvestitismus, coined by M. Hirschfeld in Die Transvestiten (1910).
• Disorders related to sexuality and gender identity in the ICD-11. Geoffrey M. Reed, Jack Drescher, Richard B. Krueger et al., World Psychiatry 15(3), 205-221, 2016 (DOI 10.1002/wps.20354, PMID 27717275, PMCID PMC5032510; full text read via the Europe PMC pdf). Supplies the description of the ICD-10 category F64.1 dual-role transvestism as occasionally wearing clothing typical of another sex to experience “the temporary experience of membership of the opposite sex, but without any desire for a more permanent sex change”, without accompanying sexual arousal; the advice to drop that category from the ICD-11 “due to its lack of public health or clinical relevance”; and the quote with which the working group confronts the ICD-10 with itself, “social deviance or conflict alone, without personal dysfunction, should not be included in mental disorder”. The separate diagnosis F65.1 fetishistic transvestism from the paraphilia list is worked out on the fetish page and not repeated here.
• travesty (n.). Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed 9 August 2026. Supplies the English travesty from the 1670s as “a burlesque treatment of a serious work”, from the adjective “dressed so as to be made ridiculous” (1660s), by way of French travesti and Italian travestire; the distinction from the Century Dictionary that in a parody the subject and characters change while in a travesty the language turns absurd or grotesque; and the dating of transvestite to 1922, from the German Transvestit of 1910.

Related terms

Transvestism is about clothing; the pages below are about the same thing under a different word, and about what can be arranged around it.

• Forced feminization. What changes once a power arrangement is placed around it.
• Sissification. The ongoing variant, where humiliation becomes the tool.
• Sissy. The slur that gets turned into a form of address inside that arrangement.
• Roleplay. What gets added once the clothing also has to carry a character.