,Passing Women’ in the consulting room of Magnus Hirschfeld

On why the term "transvestite" was not employed for cross-dressing women

Abstract

In 1910, Magnus Hirschfeld divided the concept of 'sexual inversion' into homosexuality and 'transvestism'. He included only one wornan in his transvestite case histories. The article is based on the cases of four women whom Hirschfeld knew while writing his book on transvestites. Hirschfeld was mainly interested in the urge to wear the clothes of the opposite sex. This new concept turned out to be not really applicable to women, because for women the main issue was their conflict with authorities, rather than an urge to live as men. While Hirschfeld made a sharp distinction between trasvestism and hornosexuality, this distinction was not applied to 'masculine women'. Hirschfeld continued to regard the 'masculinity' of feminists as the hallmark of their completely inverted sexual identity. This reflects a tacit difference between the sexes which had developed in the 19th century: namely, that men have a sex/sexual function whereas women are a sex/sexual function.