When Willy published Le Troisième sexe in 1927, he used a startling phrase as its title, alluding implicitly to Magnus Hirshfeld’s well-known treatise on sexuality. By sundering the gender binary in favor of a new trinity, the Decadent period was striving to find a place for the Amazonian sex caught between a non-definition (neither … nor) and a compound definition (both … and) or between a neutered state and a mixed state. The fear and fascination that this hybrid creature provoked were intimately connected to changes in women’s lives as they fought for women’s rights, engaged in new activities, and called for dress reform.

The figure of the transvestite or cross-dresser fueled the anxieties as well as the representations inspired by this confusion. Consequently, she was the ultimate incarnation of the bankruptcy of sexual difference, or more precisely, its most decadent expression. On stage, some performers eagerly played at “unisexuality,” but stage wardrobes that blurred sexual identities provoked disputes among critics. The trend for cycling and boating encouraged other women to change their wardrobes and wear trousers.

For the lesbian, dressing in men’s clothes was grounded in a symbolic, or even idealized, virility that implied the annihilation of the male. It also nurtured a dual femininity that underpinned a new form of sexual difference that substituted a hybrid being, the descendant of the myth of the androgyne, for a unisexual one.