eonism means the pretence of being the opposite sex, especially that by a man of being a woman; transvestism. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 87 out of 100.
Why this word is great
EONISM — [Noun] The adoption of the dress and manner of the opposite sex, especially by a man; transvestism. Coined in the early 20th century by Havelock Ellis from the name of the Chevalier d'Éon, a French diplomat who lived as both a man and a woman, combined with the English suffix -ism, denoting a practice or system. Unlike "transgender," which speaks to a core identity, or "drag," which implies a staged performance, eonism is a brittle, clinical artifact, a word that sought to cage a lived reality in a diagnostic frame. It is the whisper of taffeta in a strictly woolen world, the precise drape of a silk stocking, and the careful performance of a self before a solitary mirror—a poignant taxonomy of desire that confesses the psyche’s capacity to be a stranger to the body it inhabits.
noun
- The pretence of being the opposite sex, especially that by a man of being a woman; transvestism.“The chief of these intermediate sexual anomalies are: (1) physical hermaphroditism in its various stages; (2) gynandromorphism, or eunuchoidism, in which men possess characters resembling those of males who have been early castrated and women possess similarly masculine characters; (3) sexo-esthetic inversion, or Eonism (Hirschfeld's transvestism or cross-dressing), in which, outside the specifica”