example, has been considered a socially undesirable pattern in most western societies and practitioners of it have been subjected to harass- ments, sanctions and punishments. Yet, in other cultures and other times the rules of those cultures did not consider this particular human pattern as "wrong" and so it was not a problem to either the individual or his society and did not require control or punishment. The individual was free to indulge or not as he chose.

The behaviour pattern variously termed "transvestism" or "eonism" and referring to the desire of some persons, generally males, to wear clothing of the type generally worn by members of the opposite sex, is one of these endogenous social problems. Envy of the role of the opposite sex is well known to anthropologists and shows itself in various ways in different cultures. Cross dressing as one of these manifestations is found widely distributed in various societies.

It has been only in recent years that psychologists have come to realize that sex and gender are NOT the same thing and to observe that the sexual variance known as homosexuality is not the same thing as the gender variant pattern known as transvestism. Only a small percentage of homosexual males indulge in the wearing of feminine attire—termed “drag” in their parlance. There are considerable numbers of hetero- sexual males, however, who also cross dress. But here the fact that they are heterosexually oriented, with females as their sex objects, means that the behaviour is a gender variance and not a sexual one. Data on over 500 cases of transvestism revealed that 78 percent of them were or had been married and 74 percent of these had children. Thus the pattern is clearly different from that of the homosexual “drag queen” who utilizes the clothing to enhance his sexual attractiveness for his male partner.

Because the term "transvestite” merely means "cross-dresser" in Latin it is a very poor term scientifically, since it in no way distinguishes the motivations, satisfactions and purposes of several quite different types of persons, whose only area of similarity is the fact that for very different reasons they all on occasion adopt feminine attire. A term which has no differential value is about as useful to scientific understanding and communication as would the term "fever disease" be, if it included malaria, smallpox, meningitis and appendicitis simply because all four conditions manifest the common symptom of elevated temperature.

In view of this a new and more descriptive term is in order and this author proposes the words "Femmiphilia" for the condition and

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