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For most people, the image of a cross-dresser is that of a drag queen. Tall and glamorous, dressed to kill and heavily made up, with impossibly long eyelashes and spangly, revealing outfits, the stereotypical drag-queen image is powerfully stamped on the popular imagination.

But the history of cross-dressing stretches back a long way, to origins far removed from gay night clubs. In medieval Europe, women cross-dressed to overcome the gender hierarchy. Historical accounts reveal that abandoned wives often donned male disguise in order to live independent lives. The literature of the time reveals a fascination with cross-dressing. Some have speculated that Joan of Arc was a transvestite — and there is even a legend of a female Pope.

Theatre and film

In the Elizabethan period, men dressed as women to play female roles in the theatre. Shakespeare often used cross-dressing as a comic device, and this led to convoluted situations in which a man would dress as a woman who would dress as a man. In Twelfth Night, for example, a male actor would dress as a woman to play Viola, then Viola would dress as a man in order to infiltrate the court of Count Orsino.

Shakespeare used cross-dressing for a good reason. It allows for disguise and deceit, seductions and mistaken identities. For this reason, cross-dressers have always been loved by the entertainment industry. From the 'sweet transvestite from Transylvania' in the Rocky Horror Picture Show to Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria, cross-dressers never fail to amuse and intrigue us.

However, gender bending in cinema serves a deeper purpose than simple comedy. In Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman cross-dresses because it is the only way he can get an acting job. In Mrs Doubtfire, Robin Williams dresses up as a woman to gain access to his children. Both films explore and illuminate the relationship between power and gender at the time the films were made.

Politics and science

Gender politics have always been a minefield, but in the 20th century they became still more complex. Transvestites — men who dress as women or women who dress as men — are just one group in the transgender community. There are also transsexuals, who have undergone operations in order to change their sex.

The first sex change operation was carried out in 1952. Private George Jorgenson, a soldier in the US army, was convinced he was a woman in a man's body. After leaving the army, he persuaded a Danish doctor, Professor Christian Hamburger, to perform a sex change operation and returned to the United States as Christine Jorgenson.

Since George became Christine, medical advances have made sex reassignment surgery, as well as hormone treatments, widely available in the West. Charing Cross Hospital, which has the largest sex-change clinic in Europe, carries out approximately one sex change operation a week. However, if funding increases, that number could rise to three a week: the demand is there.

In addition to transvestites and transsexuals, there are 'gender transients', those who reject the idea of strict gender boundaries. They believe that throughout our lives we are bombarded with gender propaganda which enforces a repressive — and unrealistic — dual gender system.

Oppression

But those who challenge that system often find themselves the victims of violence by those who believe gender boundaries should be respected. In Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, Riki Ann Wilchins, herself a transsexual, argues that there is a system of oppression against the transgendered. She recounts tales of trans-people beaten to death, stabbed and strangled, mutilated and raped.

One of the most famous cases of violence against a transgendered person was that of Teena Brandon, the subject of the 2000 film Boys Don't Cry. Brandon, a teenage girl who dressed as a boy, was raped and murdered when boys in the town in which she lived discovered her true identity. A comedian on Saturday Night Live, a mainstream American comedy programme, passed a chilling comment on the tragedy: 'In Nebraska, a man was sentenced for killing a female cross-dresser who had accused him of rape, along with two of her friends. Excuse me if this sounds harsh, but in my mind they all deserved to die.'