TRANSVESTISM: DEFINITION AND DESCRIPTION
Transvestism means cross-dressing, that is, dressing in the clothes of the other sex. On the stage, it may be done as a dramatic device, as in a play by Shakespeare. For Halloween, it may be done as a gag or joke. A professional impersonator may cross-dress for a living, but such a person is likely to have more than a salaried interest in dressing up. He may be a drag queen, or she may be a butch lesbian, or either may be a would-be transsexual. In the case of the male, he may be a clinically diagnosed transvestite; clinical transvestism has not yet been recorded in the female.
As clinically defined, tranvestism is a condition in which a male has a sexual obsession for or addiction to women’s clothes, such that he episodically experiences intolerable psychic stress if he does not dress up. In addition, he is handicapped in getting erotically aroused and performing sexually, regardless of being either heterosexual or homosexual in partnership, unless he is wearing female garments, as though wearing a fetish, or at least imagining himself as doing so. Some transvestites discover their proclivity at puberty by discovering that they can masturbate to orgasm only if wearing or handling some article or articles of female apparel. Many eventually try to find or educate a partner with whom to practice their transvestism. A few, especially as they advance in age, are erotically inert, but cross-dress permanently or as often as expediently possible. They do not request transsexual surgery, but they may take female hormones. The typical transvestite, however, wants no female hormones and no feminizing surgery. He simply dresses and wears makeup episodically as a female, and then returns to his male garb, until irritability, restlessness, and inner agitation demand relief again by impersonating a female and having an orgasm. Almost all transvestites have a female name to go with the female wardrobe. There is also a female personality. Like the male personality, it is in the literal sense unwholesome. The two personalities, if they can be put together, would make a whole. The female personality by itself is a travesty of a conventionally stereotypic woman and likewise the masculine personality.
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