In the debut episode of the Wired Masterminds season, Jonna Mendez, former Head of Disguise at the CIA (an epic job title, in fairness), explains how masquerade is used in espionage. To wit:
With women, you have a broader range of what you can do. You also have one extra step: you can turn a woman into a man. I would mention that it’s almost impossible to turn a man into a woman. What we do is always additive — we can make you taller, we can make you heavier, we can make you older — we can’t go the other direction. You want to be the person that gets on the elevator and then gets off and nobody even remembers that you were really there. That is a design goal at the disguise labs at CIA.
