The little research that has been conducted on female cross-dressers concludes that most feel more comfortable in traditionally male clothing, but are not aroused by the practice. In a study of fifteen women who typically dressed in male-identified clothing and were often mistaken for men, Holly Devor found that the women chose to cross-dress because it gave them a sense of freedom and fit with their way of life. Most identified as lesbians and found acceptance in the lesbian community, where gender expectations are generally less rigid than in the dominant society.

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Perhaps because of this acceptance, female cross-dressers have felt less of a need to organize support groups than some male cross-dressers and, as a result, often continue to be ignored by researchers and the general public. In the last decade, though, female cross-dressers have become more visible with the rise of a drag king culture.

Contemporary Psychiatric Views

The survey research involving members of cross-dressing clubs helped change the medical community's image of transvestites from homosexual to heterosexual men. However, many psychiatrists continue to view cross-dressing as a compulsive fetish.

Since 1987, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the profession's guide to mental disorders, has included the diagnosis "Transvestic Fetishism," which it defines as a heterosexual male who has "recurrent intense sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies involving cross-dressing" and "has acted on these urges or is markedly distressed by them."

The most recent edition of the DSM (1994) acknowledges that some transvestites are attracted to others of the same sex and that the fetishistic aspect may diminish over time, but the clinical definition of transvestism remains a heterosexual male who has a perverse, compelling desire to dress in women's clothing because of the erotic pleasure he derives from doing so.

Because "transvestite" connotes a perversion and excludes female, gay, and bisexual male cross-dressers, as well as heterosexual men who cross-dress for non-sexual reasons, the term is rejected today by many transpeople in favor of "cross-dresser."

Representations of Cross-Dressing in Popular Culture

Cross-dressing by heterosexual men is also often stigmatized in popular culture, as something either to laugh at or to fear. In movies such as Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982), Chris Columbus's Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and Wallace Wolodarsky's Sorority Boys (2002), men who are not cross-dressers are compelled by circumstances to temporarily masquerade as women to great comic effect (Some Like It Hot and Tootsie have been considered the funniest American films of all time).

Actual cross-dressers are rarely represented on the screen, and when they are, as in such films as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991), they are often portrayed as psychopathic serial killers.

Conclusion

Cross-dressing is a common practice with a long history, yet a lack of knowledge and understanding persists, both among doctors and the general public. Until cross-dressers began to organize in the 1960s and 1970s, little accurate research had been conducted on their lives since the groundbreaking work of Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910.

Scientific studies are now beginning to provide more insight into the experiences of cross-dressers, but a sickness model continues to hold sway in the medical profession and is reinforced by stereotypical images in the mainstream media. Clearly, cross-dressers and their allies will need to do much more educating and agitating in order to change the negative image of cross-dressing.

A form of behavior modification that employs unpleasant and sometimes painful stimuli, aversion therapy was one of the more popular treatments for homosexuality and cross-dressing in the 1950s and 1960s.

In literature, the gay male cross-dresser and the lesbian cross-dresser are depicted quite differently.

A recent arrival in the drag arena, drag kings are part of an international drag movement that emerged in London and San Francisco in the mid 1980s.

Female impersonation need say nothing about sexual identity, but it has for a long time been almost an institutionalized aspect of gay male culture.

"Transgender" has become an umbrella term representing a political alliance between all gender variant people who do not conform to social norms for typical men and women and who suffer political oppression as a result.

Too often cinematic drag is reduced to a mere joke, a harmless tease that tacitly reassures us that people can change their clothes but not their sexual identities.

German-born Magnus Hirschfeld deserves recognition as a significant theorist of sexuality and the most prominent advocate of homosexual emancipation of his time.

Preservationist and museum founder Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was admired by many for her bravery in the face of persecution and for her openness as a transgendered public figure in perilous times.

Virginia Charles Prince has been a pioneer in organizing social and support groups for heterosexually-identified male cross-dressers.