@PermanentTemporary
Fetishes are the flaw in pure gender critical thinking (mine included) which says that men wearing women's clothes shouldn't matter at all and that clothes shouldn't be coded m/f. It doesn't take account of what is going on around someone's choice to present unconventionally from a gender point of view. The strength of the different strands of wanting to appear outside convention, and performing an escape from your own life, and getting something sexual from your own appearance, and whether you want someone else to be involved/notice that, and the circumstances which you want that to occur in, seem to really vary. Grayson Perry for example seems to have a strong strand of being outside convention and of performing. But he's also referred to his 'sexy, fetishy thing' of cross dressing.
I believe that if there were no clothes coded masculine or feminine at all, it wouldn't make much difference to women's status in society. I also don't think it would happen. I think about Wild Swans, where the Communist Party mandated identical clothes for men and women, and women stayed up at night crafting the tiniest differences in their clothes in order to signal their femininity. In all this, the staus of women was genuinely better than in previous revolutionary China, but that wasn't saying bloody much, nor were women truly equal.
Yeah, I totally agree with this. There are societies where men and women wear basically the same thing because clothing technology is simple. But they still have ways of differentiating themselves as men and women.
Human beings are naturally very interested in identifying their sex. Even the desire to gender-bend isn't fundamentally about destroying clothing as a cultural marker of sex. It's about using it to create a frisson. The tendency to talk about people who are rock stars or performers as breaking down barriers is on the wrong track completely, they need those things to create their image, to make a little stutter in our awareness, to manipulate our awareness of femaleness and maleness.
Human beings are never going to stop being interested in sex, and representing it in material culture. Trying to create that scenario as a solution is not only a waste of time, it's trying to push people into a way of thinking that is unnatural and requires ignoring reality, which always has unfortunate corollaries.
So yes, for people who have a fetish about cross-dressing, that is about the frisson. It doesn't matter whether the culture says women wear dresses, or paint their hands red, or wear their hair differently. It might be inevitable that some people have this problem of sexual fixation, but we should be trying to minimize it and help them by having clear social boudaries around it.
That being said - my understanding of AGP is that cross dressing in public isn't necessarily directly linked to sexual behavior in every case. What Blanchard describes with his patients is that the experience fetishistic ideation in some begins to create a kind of disassociation with the male body, resulting in some cases in sever body dysphoria based on sex. One potential treatment in hard cases being living as a transexual. It seems like it would be much better for all involved to treat before things get that bad, and there are discussions about what that means for other people in terms of recognizing that, and the current approach to gender makes that all the more unlikely to happen. But I am not convinced that all people who try that approach are actively enacting their fetish.