Here is a potted history of ‘transvestite’ and similar words in mainly English and French. To write this I used the Oxford English Dictionary and the Petit Robert. The Wikipedia article on En Travesti was also consulted.
- The Italian ‘travestire’ from the Latin ‘transvestire’ is recorded in the 16th century. It is first recorded in French as ‘transvestir’ in 1569, and had become ‘travestir’ by 1580. The Italian origin probably accounts for the retained ‘s’ rather than a circumflex, as opposed to ‘větir’ without the prefix. The original meaning is dressing up or disguise rather than gendervesting in particular. The English meaning of ‘travesty’ as ‘ridiculous’ is not used in the French.
- The word ‘travesty’ first became well known in England in 1648 with Scarron’s satire, Le Virgile Travesty en vers burlesque. So the modern English meaning of things done badly or ridiculously was there almost from the start, but so was the meaning of dressing as another.
- However the pseudo-French expression ‘en travesti’, using the past participle of the verb, which is not recorded in French, was used particularly in the theatre with the specific meaning of dressing as the other gender. This usage has continued from the seventeenth century until today.
- The verb form, ‘to travesty’, is not found until after 1700, and was not needed for the sense of Gendervesting, for the verb ‘to transvest’ is recorded from 1652: “How often did she please her fancy with the imagination of transvesting herself, and by the help of Man’s disguise deceiving the eyes of those who watched her deportment”. This usage, particularly applied to female-bodied persons continued into the nineteenth century.
- 'Travestissement' was being used in France by 1692.
- 'Transvestisme' is recorded in French in1845. The Petit Robert lists it as an hapax (only one recorded instance) in this period, but just as Ed Wood used ‘transsexual’ before Harry Benjamin did, people on the street are using words before dictionary compilers catch up with them.
- 'Travestiment' was being used in England by 1832, and 'Travestier' by 1883.
The enduring calumnification of ‘transvestism’ is probably the reason why ‘transvestity’ did not evolve, while ‘transsexuality’ did evolve alongside ‘transsexualism’.
See also La Préfecture de Police, Paris, and permissions de travestissement.
As usual... fascinating Zagria. Thanks for sharing all your research with us.
ReplyDeleteGina_sf
Very interesting, though Hirschfeld intended to use it as a very specific description, of someone who crossdressed to express what we now call gender dysphoria.
ReplyDeleteNot everyone who crossdresses does, after all.
Perhaps you should see my posting on 'gender dysphoria' -- http://zagria.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-is-gender-dysphoria.html.
ReplyDeleteMagnus Hirschfeld published his book "Transvestites" in German in 1910. Before that time, the word "transvestite" had never been seen in German or English or any language to refer to what we know think of as any sort of transgender individual.
ReplyDeleteI think your beef is not with Hirschfeld or his original use of the term, but with the meaning of the term "coined" in English.
Various sources, including m-w.com, use it mostly in connection with a phrase (as opposed to a single word), as in, "refuse to lose"; another source gives "desktop publishing" as an example. In neither case were any of these words unknown before; m-w defines it in sense 2 as 'create, invent; "coin a phrase".
You seem to be interpreting "coin a word" as meaning a sequence of letters that had never been seen before in English, or any other language, in the way, perhaps, that Lewis Carroll coined "chortle" or "frumious". That's a tough bar to pass. Even under those rules, though, 'transvestit' had never been seen before to my knowledge, even in your accounting of French, English, and Italian there is no record of it. If you count the prefix travest* or transvest* as a "word" which thenceforth invalidates every possible word invented later with that as a pattern, then I agree with you, but that's not what most people think of as 'a word'.
Clearly, the sources talking about Hirschfeld's use of the word are not claiming he invented a brand new sequence of letters as a gloss which had never been seen before, in any form, in any language, even as a partial match on a prefix. So yes, Hirschfeld invented the term 'Transvestit' (English: Transvestite) in 1910, or at least, he published it then, he might have used it earlier.
I have never seen any writer say something like: "Hirschfeld took the existing word 'transvestism' and invented the form 'transvestite' ". In fact several other writers of the same period took the existing word 'transvestism' or 'transvestitism' and invented the forms 'transvestist' and 'transvestitist'.
ReplyDelete