One term

I know I've said this before but the more I thought about it over the years, the more I began to find the term "crossdressing" to be both confusing and objectionable. Crossing into what? And was it just about clothing or was there more? Was it about the thrill of fooling others? Honoring a desire for feminine expression? Outlet for suppressed identity? A fetish? Were women "crossdressing" when they first began to wear pants? 

The motivations could be multi-faceted and extensive and yet one awkward expression for males breaking convention covered it all because society was so hung up about rules governing gender expression of the sexes. Go back and look at 20th century photos and the lack of sartorial diversity hints unquestionably at the obedient sheep we were. 

However if you go further back and examine historical gender norms, what was acceptable for each sex morphed only to slowly fall in or out of vogue.

Fast forward to today and it's harder than ever to legitimize the use of any one term. We see a rainbow spectrum of behaviour that rebels against the idea that any item of clothing belongs exclusively to one sex. 

Hence we have expanded our language to cover for the variety of expression we see everyday in the wild. 

Yesterday in the metro I saw a tall self-assured GenZ man wearing what years ago would have been most certainly considered "crossdressing" except that no one bothered to even bat an eyelash because it's 2025. 

You could see he wasn't trying to hide his maleness but simply being himself.