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Education is the key to knowledge and power, it is a process that involves both research and time. Part of this process involves historical research a time where the origins of crossdressing began.
Crossdressing and impersonation of the opposite sex occurs in every cultural and historical study of sexual behavior. One's sexual organs have never been a universal, definitive, essential insignia of gender. In some societies, gender is an achieved characteristic not one that is automatically ascribed to a person and has more to do with tasks performed and costume than anatomy.
Historically and culturally, there is a wide variation of feminine and masculine behavior. The only invariant being childbearing and nursing
While crossdressing plays a role in many pre Christian religions, it is Christianity that emphasizes the importance of putting men and women into different categories and setting appropriate gender behavior for each.
Theoretically, the basis for these rigid definition is Deuteronomy 22:5 which says, "A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall amen put on a woman's garment, for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God." [It is pretty much accepted now that these proscriptions were not specifically directed at cross dressing but at keeping women out of the temple and men out of the women's quarters.
The sense of the passage was changed sometime in the homo phobic-sixteenth century when the King James version of the Bible was created.] While the proscription has been strongly enforced against men, it has almost never been enforced against women. In fact, women have always been encouraged to become more masculine. This is, in part, because women were regarded as biologically, intellectually and spiritually inferior to men. [The ancient Greeks believed that women were "inverted" ?there's that term again? men. As such, however, they were treated with the same respect as ~normal" men. It was with the growing certainty that women were, in fact, a completely different sex, that the denigration of women reached its peak.]
Women who acted like men were much admired within the early Christian church. There are more than 30 female saints who, while they were alive, were thought to be men. The fact that they "passed" so successfully is one of the major reason they were made saints. Conversely, there are no male saints who lived as women. And, of course, western history is peppered with accounts of women who passed themselves off successfully as soldiers, sailors, businessmen, politicians, physicians and many other "male" pursuits.
What is evident is that the box created for women by the Biblical injunction has never completely confined women and in our modern society is even less confining than ever before.
What is now most interesting to observe from a historical perspective is that male crossdressing in the past never existed on the same scale as female crossdressing Transgender men are almost nonexistent in western society before 1800. This does not include the crossdressing associated with the early theater. But, that too, was frowned upon by many. Puritan critic, William Pryne, writing in the seventeenth century, held that a man "doing: what a woman does leads to "being" what a woman is. He was convinced that "locked away" within each man was a woman only waiting for the appropriate attire to announce and show herself.
This loss of masculinity underscores the status loss of crossdressing but also hints at the fear that men are not all they are cracked up to be. For example, emerging groups of homosexual men in the eighteenth century formed "molly" clubs and proclaimed their sexuality by crossdressing as women. Crossdressing or Drag is still associated with homosexuality today.
During the nineteenth century, Romanticism discarded intellectual rationality for passion and emotion. In spite of the Victorian standards of public modesty, Romanticism was pro-sex and encouraged the violation of social norms. What was taking place was an appreciation of female qualities, a raising of woman's place to a higher value, an "effeminism" if you will.
The counter-reaction to this growing effeminism was a rigorous athleticism, which we still see today. This athleticism was embodied in the United States by Theodore Roosevelt and the result was a whole series of institutions devoted to develop and encourage masculinity, e.g. the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. What was happening, then, was the Romanticists, who adored the feminine qualities of women, were being driven underground, giving expression to their needs by crossdressing
This phenomena becomes more and more evident in the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. By then, Hirschfeld had recognized and classified it as transvestism. In his scheme of human sexuality, transvestites were gender-intermediates as homosexuals were sexual-intermediates.
Just how pervasive crossdressing was at this time cannot be known since only a few ever came to the attention of analysts. There is evidence, however, from biographies, autobiographies,fiction end press coverage. Interestingly enough, female crossdressers were dealt with much more even handedly in the newspapers than discovered male crossdressers.
The numbers of male crossdressers seems to increase steadily during the twentieth century and even more rapidly post WW II.
Love
VickiCD
Well said Vicki! 
