Male Crossdressers: How many are there? Where are they?

Crossdressing is considered a part of the transgender spectrum by most, but not all transgender-aware people. Some disagree, as most crossdressers have no intention of transitioning from one gender to the other.

How Many Are There?

Due to the closeted nature of crossdressing it has been difficult to find out how many men do it. Depending on the local culture, the way the study is conducted and the threshold used, figures from surveys tend to range from about 1% to 15%.

In a Swedish survey conducted in 1996 and published by Langstrom & Zucker, in 2005, 2.8% of men who agreed to be interviewed said that cross-dressing had sexually aroused them. This figure does not take into account the number who did not want to expose their crossdressing in a face to face interview, despite assured anonymity and those who cross-dressed but were not sexually aroused by it. But even a conservative figure of 2.8% would equate to almost 20,000 potential crossdressers in a city the size of Brisbane, Australia and nearly 100,000,000 world wide.

Where are they?

The huge majority are living normal male lives and only crossdress occasionally, in secret. A smaller number will express themselves in the virtual world of the internet. An even smaller number will crossdress to go out in public in the real world.

I estimate based on personal experience that in typical western cultures like Australia, less than 1% of crossdressers actively crossdress in public, and then for less than 10% of their public time. This means that based on my estimation, only about 1 in 35,000 of the men you see in public will be cross-dressed.

Also consider that crossdressers may tend to cluster in safe zones such as queer friendly spaces at night and less in public spaces during the day. If they are out on the street in the day, this may be because they have the confidence of passing as female so you may not recognise them as male. If you do think you spot one it may be that they are not crossdressers but male to female transsexuals who are living as female as a lifestyle choice, or they may be true genetic women with enough masculine features to make you question their biological sex.

So to the average observer, crossdressers are almost invisible. And this invisibility makes them appear to most people as unusual, interesting, abnormal or deviant on the rare occasion that they are seen. In realty they are almost as common as red heads.

Reference

Långström, Niklas and Zucker, Kenneth J. (2005) 'Transvestic Fetishism in the General Population', Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 31:2, 87 - 95