Cross-dressing by heterosexual males is called transvestic fetishism or transvestitism. The male with this fetish usually has a variety of female clothes that he uses to cross-dress. While some males will wear only one special piece of female apparel, others fully dress as a female and use full facial make-up to achieve a total female appearance. Often this disorder begins in childhood. It tends to be chronic in nature.
Transvestism is the practice of cross-dressing, which is wearing the clothing of the opposite sex. Transvestite refers to a person who cross-dresses; however, the word often as additional connotations
Diagnostic criteria for Transvestism
*Over a period of 6 months, heterosexual male patients have recurrent, intense, sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving cross-dressing.
* The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
* Typically, patients derive sexual gratification from wearing clothes usually worn by the opposite sex, and patients typically are heterosexual married males (not a DSM-IV criterion).
Different usages and meanings of the term transvestism.
Some of them contradict each other; the only thing they have in common is
* They describe a behavior of people dressing in clothes of a gender that is different from the gender they were assigned (usually at birth) or the gender they are living in. It does imply some inner motive for cross-dressing, but does not specify this motive.
* They (usually) exclude transvestic fetishism and they usually do not include transsexualism, or transgender people who completely change their gender role.
A number of phenomena are conflated under the general term of transvestitism. There became in the late twentieth century perhaps a clearer distinction than in earlier times between the transsexual — who believes him or herself to have been born into a body of the wrong gender, and may seek surgical and hormonal gender reassignment — and the transvestite, who cross-dresses but does not desire to change his or her physical body.
For some men wearing female clothes is a form of fetishism: the clothes are experienced as sexually arousing; this form of cross-dressing is a specifically sexual act, either leading to masturbation, or being a requirement for successful intercourse. The converse is seldom the case in women. Other (male) transvestites lead a double life as normal heterosexual males, with an alternative identity dressing and passing as women. There are also homosexual transvestites who cross-dress, but in such cases there is often an element of deliberate impersonation and even caricature (‘drag queens’): this can be deployed as a critique of existing gender norms but can also be an expression of misogynistic hostility.
Possible explanations
The influence of social and cultural factors is more marked: cross-cultural research indicates that discomfort with biological gender is more common in societies with rigid expectations about appropriately gendered behaviour. Thus the inability of the accepted male role to incorporate qualities perceived as ‘feminine’ may lead to various forms of identifying with the appurtenances of femininity.
Boys who later become transvestites or transsexuals may manifest ‘feminine’ behavioural characteristics from early childhood. In a significant minority of cases, being cross-dressed as a child by a parent or other relative seems to play a part. What is not clear is why in some cases this ‘feminization’ leads to the development in the adult male of a homosexual identity, in other cases to transvestitism with heterosexual orientation, and in others to full transsexualism.
As with many categories of sexual behaviour, ‘transvestitism’ as a classification is a lumping together of diverse phenomena, not only in the different sexes, but among members of the same sex obeying different biological, social, or psychic imperatives resulting in phenomena which are only apparently similar.
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