On "Transvestite"

I recently came across someone mentioning online that the word 'transvestite' has fallen out of favor. At first, I was a little confused. I can understand it being largely inappropriate- after all, it can be easily incorrectly used to identify a transgender person, implying they are merely dressing as the opposite gender but aren't truly that gender. But it seemed to me it still had value as a word- after all, Eddie Izzard. A man, firmly identifying as a man, wearing women's clothes and makeup.

Kitty image irrelevant to post.

But it occurs to me that if Eddie is a man, wearing his own clothes, aren't they men's clothes? They belong to a man. They're not worn by anyone other than a man. How are they possibly women's clothes? And if they're not women's clothes, he's just a man with a particular style, like pretty much every other man.

Of course, I'm not actually saying Eddie isn't allowed to have his own identification as an executive transvestite. It's just not something I'd ever really sat down and thought too much about before. It just became bizarre to me that things can belong to a gender. If you don't sew up the middle of those lower body garments, that's a woman's skirt. What if a man owns it and wears it? Nope, it still belongs to some mysterious theoretical woman who might come claim it someday. You've been warned, damn you! So maybe there's no real value to the word 'transvestite' after all- it describes a person who, ideally, doesn't need to be described at all.