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Joan of Arc

Is it fully correct to refer to Joan of Arc as a crossdresser? Granted she ran around in armor, carrying a sword, but Im not sure if women of the Russian Army, during World War II, were "crossdressing" anymore than Pope Joan was. Pizza Puzzle

The article does not state that Joan of Arc was a cross-dresser. It states that Joan of Arc cross-dressed for reasons unknown (and currently unknowable). There's a BIG difference between those two things!
However, although the article does not say so, Joan of Arc did not just cross-dress for battle, but was ultimately burned because she refused to promise never to wear male clothes again. That points to some problem with gender identity, also an intersexual condition has been assumed by some authors. Again, those theories are unprovable.
And nobody implied that the women of the Russian Army were cross-dressing; as far as I can tell from the pictures they had a female uniform.
Pope Joan om the other hand is an apocryphical figure, nobody knows whether such a person ever existed, much less why she was playing a man's role. If she existed, however, she was cross-dressing; again, though, not necessarily a cross-dresser.
-- AlexR 16:39 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Sexual orientation

The text says: However, most male-bodied cross-dressers prefer female partners. So do most female-bodied.

So everybody who cross-dresses wants a female partner? If true, that implies that female cross-dressers are homosexuals, by and large, and that male cross-dressers are heterosexuals, for the most part. Interesting. In fact, so interesting that it practically demands evidence and explication. It says that the sex of a person has a truly profound influence, in the subset of humans who cross-dress, on whether one is homo- or hetero-sexual.

But.... I suspect that it's just a carelessly constructed sentence. Without knowing the basis for the 2 sentences I wouldn't dare to change them.

Patrick0Moran 06:38, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

"So do most female-bodied. " is unsubstantiated. I'm going to reword it. Dysprosia 06:40, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Actually, my experience confirms that most female bodies CDs prefer female partners. That however may be so only because there is a role model in the lesbian community for people who want to cross dress, while there is none for straight women (or more general, androphiliac female bodied persons). On the other hand, cross-dressing used to be an established part of the gay community, but that has very much changed, and in many parts it is, at least off-stage, frowned upon. So cross-dressing among gay men has declined, while it never quite took of among straight women. So that is merely a cultural matter, albeit a very influencial one. Whether you call that a profound influence is a matter of definition then ;-) --AlexR 11:20, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Regarding female cross dressers in history

Regarding female cross dressers in history. This is a fairly large topic because before womans liberation many male roles were off-limits to females so it was actually very common to see women dressing up as men to gain access. I've searched Wiki and this is the best place I have found on the topic. It has nothing to do with sexuality, or fetish really. For example I posted Dorothy Lawrence and she did it for one reason only: to gain access to the front lines of WWI so she could make money selling her first-hand accounts. Now, one could speculate on her sexuality, but that's not history, that's specultion. In fact, the military in WWI feared a wave of women imposters trying to gain access to the front lines for various reasons. It really has nothing to do with sexual preferance or fetish or anything like that, which the term "crossdresser" seems to imply. Is there another more appropriate article to discuss this? Or do we need to create one? Certainly, there must be a history book on this subject or even entire sub-field (gender studies?) Stbalbach 20:12, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That's two things you mention: One, what the word cross-dresser implies, and the other the problem with historical figures.

• The word cross-dresser itself does not imply any sexual preferences or fetishes, although it is often associated with both. That however would happen with any word describing cross-gender behaviour, as it happened with this word. After all, it has been coined specifically to avoid these associations - transvestitism, which it replaces, acquired so many of them that it has become pretty useless. (And how many people actually know that even Transsexual does not describe a sexual orientation or preference, and the sex-part was not supposed to imply that, either, when the word was coined?)
  I do agree that the article could be somewhat clearer on the subject; while that information is certainly there, the article is obviously the result of many edits, and little attemting to make one smooth piece. I do not think, however, that there is much need of another article; after all, cross-dresser or cross-dressing is the correct term to use. Expanding the articles on particular cross-dressing people of course would be most useful. (And BTW, the term "sexual imposter" is most certainly incorrect; after all, as far as we know, she did not pose in any particular "sexual" way.)
• The other thing is, and I already added a bit about that to the article yesterday, the problem with historical figures and their motives. There are a multitude of motives for cross-dressing, raging from clearly transgender to plain necessity, and about everything in between. Sexual orientation probably played part in some cases, sure, but like all motives is very difficult to detect in hindsight; sexual play and fetishism are even harder to proof, and the later is a 20th century concept, anyway. Not to mention that there is another problem, namely, that we cannot trust even those few documents we have. In times where words and concepts like "transgender" or "transsexual" or even "gender identity" or similar did not exist, and where it is often argued that not even something like a "homosexual identity" (for those cases where sexual orientation might have played a role), and/or where people had to fear persecution simply for cross-dressing, or where the documents we have actually are court documents, we can neither expect that people express themselfes in ways that are sufficiently similar to our own thinking, nor would they have the words to do so. And certainly they had an excellent motive, in cases of persecution, to phrase their explanations in ways that would minimise their punishment. ("I wanted some adventure" would certainly be inappriopriate - but "I am a man inside, no matter what my body says" would in many cases have placed them in mortal danger.)
  So that is a very tricky thing, talking about historical persons who cross-dressed.

So, in conclusion, I'd say this article needs some work, but moving parts of it into another article would need very good reasons, the whole matter does belong here. -- AlexR 23:15, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)