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He plays a woman impersonator, not a transvestite.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word travesty originally meant "to disguise by changing costume", then "to dress ridiculously", but soon came to mean "a parody or burlesque" and finally added to that its modern meaning of "disgraceful imitation".
In both Europe and North America transvestite behaviour (both by male and female bodied persons) was until the 1960s seen as an expression of homosexuality or suppressed androgynous impulses. In fact, Hirschfeld helped people to achieve the very first name changes (legal given names were and are required to be gender-specific in Germany) and to get the very first sexual reassignment surgery. In the 1960s Harry Benjamin and others started working with people showing transvestite behaviour again.
The rise of the Nazis to power and the Second World War had brought an end not only to Hirschfeld's function, but to also most European research in the field of sexuality.
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