I have seen it argued that having a transvestic fetish is essentially misogynist. The fetishist wishes to express their submissiveness by wearing as feminine clothing as possible - frilly underwear, satin slips, stockings and so on. Femininity is a proxy for disempowerment.

It's a reasonable argument, but it misses something.

In my own experience, my first erotic thoughts were not about sex itself because I was too young to know what it was. I knew that it was pleasurable to masturbate and I fantasised about a woman doing it to me, but I was not going to get near an acutal woman in a sexual context let alone understand what I would do if I did.

The next best things were symbols of femininity. I managed to obtain a silk scarf and, later, some images of women wearing corsets with suspenders. I fantasised about wearing the scarf and probably the corsets too, as this seemed equivalent to feminine contact.

These fantasies went away in young adult life, replaced by the excitement of genuine sexual relationships. I still found excitement in seeing women dress in satin or lace, but had no thoughts about wanting to wear it myself. During times when I was single I gravitated back towards fetish fantasies when the mood took me, reading crossdressing stories on Crystal's Story Site (almost none of which matched my fantasies because they either treated crossdressing as an end in itself or as a precursor to homosexual sex and/or a sex change operation).

I also discovered that there was a name for my fantasies: transvestic fetishism. This, I read, was generally heterosexual men who derived erotic pleasure from women's clothing, as distinct from men who felt more comfortable dressing as women for non-erotic reasons (transvestites) or men who harboured a desire to change sex (transsexuals). 

There is no question that I was fantasising about women's clothing making me submissive, but it is not as simple as feminine = weak. It represented a desire to return to a time in childhood when I was not expected to initiate sex, when I was innocent of what it entailed and not responsible for the consequences. The sequence of my fantasies had a pattern: I would be dressed in women's clothes for some reason (disguise, roleplay, punishment, manipulation, convenience), be seen to be aroused and for a woman to take this as an invitation to bring me to orgasm.

Some fantasies were more baroque than others. Most of the time it was enough merely to be made to wear knickers, but I have written stories about wearing maid's uniforms and bridesmaid dresses. Was this because I regard highly feminine garments as disempowering per se, or because I think that they are disempowering to a man trying to conform to society's expectations of him?

To put it another way, in my fantasies my wearing of women's clothing makes me a passive sex object. But when I see a woman wearing satin and lace I see that as an indicator of being sexually confident. It's a dodgy assumption that sounds worryingly close to the "she was wearing a short skirt so she must have been gagging for it" defence of rapists, but the point I was trying to make was that I perceive the clothes to have a different effect on men than on women.

So is my transvestic fetish misogynist? To some extent yes: I am invested in the idea that men are expected to be masculine and that transgressing that idea can make men sexually passive (unless they actually want to dress as women, in which case it doesn't). But the underlying emotions for that are that femininity is exotic, sexually potent and empowering.