To me it feels quite closely related, that could be colored by the fact that in German"Travestieshow" is a drag performance. Might be false friends, might be kissing cousins.
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I think it's a case of the same language crossing over multiple times. The French 'travesti' did cross into English (and perhaps German) to mean cross dressed theatre roles, but had already earlier crossed as 'travesty', an absurd retelling of a serious work. A 'disguised' retelling, if you will.
jul 16, 2025, 3:56 pm • 0 0 • view
So the first crossing - travesty - quickly left its initial literary meaning and came to mean an absurd or grossly distorted version of something; that's today's definition. But the second crossing - travesti, spelling maintained - stayed as faux-french and kept its specific theatrical meaning.
jul 16, 2025, 3:57 pm • 0 0 • view
Then we hit the 20th century, Hirschfeld forms the word 'transvestite' directly from Latin to mean the sort of person he was treating, and now there's three words with the same root. Transvestite gets translated to English as crossdresser, but to French, Italian, Spanish as... Travesti again.
jul 16, 2025, 3:59 pm • 0 0 • view
We pass upwards through the 20th century, the people Hirschfeld treated become known instead as transsexuals, then as transgender, but transvestite hang around. By the modern day we have all these terms, but travesty, transvestite, travesti, despite shared roots, don't share *original meanings*.
jul 16, 2025, 4:01 pm • 0 0 • view