Transvestite, Transsexual, Transgender: Chronology of concepts
XIX
Contemporary concepts of the transvestite appear in the 19th century but it is a reality as old as civilization.
Magnus Hirschfeld (Kolberg, Germany, 1868-1935) created the concept transvestite. Hirschfeld developed Third Sex Theory, a person between man and woman. He was interested in the variety of sexual and erotic needs when the taxonomy of sexual identity was still under construction. Hirschfeld used transvestite to name a person that has an obsession with wearing clothes of the other sex, and he showed the differences between transvestites and homosexuals. The term transsexual was used to name what today is known by three different words: transsexual, transvestite and homosexual.
Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) said that the problem was not the dress because it is only one element of what he called eonism and also sex-aesthetic inversion, in which a person feels as the other sex and wants to adopt their habits, while still retaining his original sexual impulse.
In 1897 Hirschfeld found a Scientific Committee to protect homosexual rights and reject paragraph 175 of the German Law. The slogan of this Committee was "Justice through science", and it shows the belief of Hirschfeld that a better understanding of homosexuality will avoid hostility against them.
Harry Benjamin (Berlin, Germany, 1885-1986) is well known as the father of transsexuality. He believed that differences between transvestites and transsexuals are that transvestites have pleasure from their sexual organs, but in contrast this gives transsexuals displeasure. There are three types of transsexuals: without surgery, medium surgery and complete surgery. Transsexual is defined in terms of surgery because his problem is one of gender; transvestite has a social problem and homosexual a sexual one. Sex is located under the belt and gender over it. Benjamin supported the existence of trans people, he said it is impossible to adapt the mind to the body but easy to adapt the body to the mind.
XX
At the beginning of 20th century the first scientific effort was made to study sexuality and creat the first speculations about homosexuality, intersexuality, hermaphroditism and transvestism.
When gender concepts appeared around the middle of the 20th century, it was used to explain some sexual disorders as tranvestism.
Robert Stoller (New York, USA 1925-1991) conceived transsexuality as a disorder of gender identity. A transsexual was a person that had developed a wrong identity. That is how the sexual disorder appeared, even though the trans community had to fight to be labeled as a sick person, this concept is still in medical use.
From anthropology, transvestism is presented as a third sex or third gender that has a biological relation with intersex. Both refer to people that experience confusion in their gender. In practice they go and return from one sex to another, but there are some people who refer to themselves as belonging only to one of the two sexes. There is a consensus about the constructive model that makes gender and sex inseparable. For some people, transvestites are beyond all binarism (sex/gender, gay/ not gay, masculine/feminine).
Judith Butler (USA,1956) said that it is useful to locate the sexually diverse community outside gender because it is necessary to deconstruct the gender concept. In many cases, the use of a third gender was a consequence of thinking that transvestites and homosexuals are the same.
XXI
Transsexualism was part of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. In 1994 it was replace by sexual identity disorder. Transsexuality is considered a disorder of mental health because they are related with ways of behaviour that make a person suffer. GLTB community is against this conception.
Trans organizations have recently appeared in the social sphere, now they can give their testimony of what is means for them to be a transvestite, transsexual, transgender or other different identities.
