Gender confusion was part of Ancient Paganism. It should be understood in that context today. In other words, where you find gender confusion there you find a “new” old pagan religion with pagan gods steering the ship. Gender confusion is a religious phenomenon.
“On the same ground rested the law, which enjoined, that;
‘the woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a
man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment.’
Maimonides§ found it commanded in the books of the idolaters, that men in the worship of Venus, the Astarte or Ashteroth of the Phenicians should wear the dress of women, and that women, in the worship of Mars, the Moloch of the east should put on the armor of men. Macrobius cites the old Greek author Philocorus, as saying, concerning the Asiatics, that, when they sacrificed to their Venus, the men were dressed in women’s apparel, and the women in men’s, to denote that she was esteemed by them both male and female. It was a common practice of idolatry to confound the sexes of the gods, making the same deity sometimes a god, and sometimes a goddess.
The Cyprians represented their Venus with a beard and scepter, and of masculine proportions, but dressed as a woman. The Syrians worshipped her under the form of a woman, attired as a man. At Rome, they had both a male and female Fortune; also, as Servius and Lactantius tell us, an armed Venus. This doctrine of a community of sexes in their gods led the idolaters to confound, as far as possible, their own sex, in their worship of them. Hence the custom, so widely diffused, of men and women wearing a habit different from that of their sex, in performing religious rites. Julius Firmicus describes this manner of worship as common among the Assyrians and Africans. From them, it passed into Europe. It was practiced in Cyprus, at Coos, at Argos, at Athens, and other places in Greece.* At Rome, it does not appear ever to have become a common practice, but we read of Clodius dressing himself as a woman, and mingling with the Roman ladies in the feast of the Bona Dealt.
Rev. E. C. Vines
The Roots of the American Republic — p. 78
Vines has a wonderful section here describing how many of God’s laws we take as archaic and strange were, in their original context, given so as to keep God’s people from the idolatry of the nations.