Cross-dressing refers to the practice of
men dressing as women and women dressing as men
—according to the appropriate patterns of clothing
as defined in the various cultures of the planet Earth.

    These books are selected and reviewed by James Park,
existential philosopher.
They are arranged in a general order of quality,
beginning with the best.

     Other bibliographies of related phenomena are listed at the bottom.

1. Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough
Cross Dressing, Sex, & Gender

(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)
(Library of Congress call number: HQ77.B785 1993)

    This is a comprehensive book on cross-dressing
from mythological times into the early 1990's.  
Every kind of cross-dressing is included:
1. transsexualism; 2. homosexuality; 3. heterosexual sex-scripts;
4. theater; 5. stage impersonation of the other sex;
6. lesbians who wanted to 'marry' other women;
7. women who wanted to advantages of living as men;
8. drag queen prostitutes.  

    Once the various reasons for dressing in the clothes of the other sex
are better understood and distinguished from one another,
greater clarity will emerge.  
For this present, this may be the best comprehensive book.
No general theory of cross-dressing is offered.
This book basically reports the history of cross-dressing.

2. Holly Devor 
Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1989)     178 pages

     This book explores the experience of 15 women who often passed as men.
11 of them were lesbians; 3 considered sex-change operations;
and one lived as a man for 3 years.
Some discovered by accident that they could pass for men.
Others decided to cross-dress and behave like men
because it suited their self-concepts and their life-styles.
Most of them reported being "one of the boys" when they were children.
And when it came time to dress and act like girls, they rebelled.
Mostly they had no philosophy of gender blending or cross-dressing.
They were just more comfortable dressing and behaving like men.
When some of them tried to look and behave like women
—wearing women's clothes, make-up, hair-styles, etc.,
they were still not believed.
Other people often thought they were men dressed like women
or that they were male-to-female transsexuals.
And some of the subjects said that when they dressed like women,
they felt that they were "in drag".

     As a study of the reasons or causes behind passing as men,
this study is flawed primarily because it mixes
lesbians and transsexuals in with a few heterosexual women.
There are probably many, complex reasons behind the story of each woman.
And it might have been better to have each story told separately
(rather than mixed indistinguishably together in each chapter)
so that readers could draw their own conclusions.
Nevertheless the book presents much raw data
for pondering the phenomenon
of people presenting themselves in public as one sex or the other.

3. Marjorie Garber 
Vested Interests:
Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety

(New York: Routledge, 1992)       443 pages
(ISBN: 0-415-90072-7; hardcover)
(Library of Congress call number: HQ77.G37 1991)

     A wide-ranging book on the public manifestations
of wearing the clothes and adopting the manners of the other sex,
especially as seen in the mass media—television, movies, magazines.
Cross-dressing for the following reasons:
entertainment in the theatre and movies;
respect in the workplace;
to express the other-gender side of one's personality;
for personal sexual interest, arousal, & orgasm;
as an element of one's homosexual sex-script;
to 'pass' as the other sex;
transsexualism—because one believes one is 'really' the other sex;

     This book explores cross-dressing as a cultural phenomenon,
rather than a psychological phenomenon.

    Please suggest additional books to be included
in this Transvestism Bibliography.
Send all comments to James Park: e-mail:
PARKx032@TC.UMN.EDU .

    This bibliography is related to several others in sexology.
Here is the complete list: