This lighthearted epigram printed in 1613 is part of an often fervid set of writings provoked by the London fashion of women wearing masculine attire. Addressed with considerable passion and vitriol in poems, pamphlets, plays and sermons especially (but not exclusively) during the second decade of James' reign, the controversy appears well in excess of the actual threat those few women who cross-dressed might have posed. Such a discrepancy between writing and event suggests at once that cross-dressing women are not specifically the source of the controversy as much as catalytic signs of a set of prior fears and anxieties. A relatively stable sex/gender system would hardly have been disturbed by such an infrequent and obviously theatrical play with gender identification; by contrast, the frequent virulence expressed in the cross-dressing controversy underscores and exposes the instability and agitation of sex and gender-based identity in the early modern period. The central argument of this chapter will be that what lies at the heart of this controversy is an anxiety about ambivalence itself – the perceived confusion of those gender and status boundaries by which individual and collective identities are forged and guaranteed. Similar to Bacon's response to the porosity of status delineations, the prospect that gendered identities are not clearly defined could provoke a variety of compensatory, defensive tactics. Bacon employs the figure of purity; those who attack cross-dressing women evoke natural, God-given or anatomical difference.