The following sources discuss the history of cross-dressing practices in the United States, the origins of the criminal laws catalogued here, and their impact on people who fell outside the government-mandated gender binary.
Books
- Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (2011).
- Eli Erlick, Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 (2025).
- William N. Eskridge, Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet (1999).
- Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (2020).
- Clare Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (2014).
- Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (2d ed. 2017) (2008).
Law Review Articles
- Dani O’Donnell, Regulating the Internet to Deregulate Gender Variance, 113 Cal. L. Rev. 851 (2025).
- Jennifer Levi & Redman, Daniel Redman, The Cross-Dressing Case for Bathroom Equality, 34 Seattle Univ. L. Rev. 133-171 (2010).
- Kate Redburn, Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement, 1963–86, 40 L. & Hist. Rev. 1 (2023).
Other
- Jesse Bayker, Before Transsexuality: Transgender Lives and Practices in Nineteenth-Century America (May 2019) (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University) (RUcore).
Additional Catalogues
This website is not the first to catalogue cross-dressing bans in the United States, though it offers many additional examples of local ordinances.
- William Eskridge first compiled a list of local and state laws in his 1999 book Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet. With the use of online archives and search tools, scholars have been able to expand on Eskridge’s list.
- In their book Female Husbands: A Trans History, Dr. Jen Manion identified St. Louis as the site of the first local cross-dressing ordinance, passed in 1843.
- Kate Redburn addresses constitutional challenges to cross-dressing bans in the latter half of the twentieth century in their law review article Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Cross-Dressing Bans and the Transgender Legal Movement. The article also identifies some additional ordinances.
- Dr. Jesse Bayker identified additional ordinances during his research for Regulating Public Gender and the Rise of Cross-Dressing Laws, which will be featured in The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States, edited by Nicholas Syrett and Jen Manion (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Bayker has also published another helpful online catalogue of cross-dressing bans, which can be viewed here.
- Ulysses Swanson has been particularly prolific in mapping out additional bans. His research can be viewed here.
© 2025 Kat Reilley Harlow