travesty [M17th] Both travesty and transvestite [E20th] go back to Latin trans ‘across’ and vestire ‘to clothe’, and in the theatre a travesty role is still one designed to be played by a cross-dressing performer. The usual modern sense, ‘a false or absurd representation of something’, developed from the word’s application to literary parodies and burlesques. Academic interest in sexuality developed in Germany and Austria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the immediate source of transvestite was German Transvestit. See also invest.