Transgender history

And what about individuals today who have the ability to describe themselves as transgender, but choose not to for a variety of reasons, including the perception that it is a White, middle-class Western term and the belief that it implies transitioning from one gender to another?

For example, in 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa killed 40 natives on the Panama Isthmus for being sodomites, as they had been assigned male at birth but were practicing female gender roles.

Overall, they caution not to make generalizations about native practices, since third gender roles were extremely diverse and ranged from exalted positions who were believed to have supernatural power, to denigrated underlings.

[4] In the Tale of Two Brothers (from 3,200 years ago), Bata removes his penis and tells his wife "I am a woman just like you"; one modern scholar called him temporarily (before his body is restored) "transgendered".

[19][20] In Uganda today, transphobia and homophobia is increasing, introduced in the 1800s and 1900s by Christian missionaries[21] and stoked in the 2000s by conservative evangelicals;[22] trans people are now often kicked out by their families and denied work, and face discrimination in accessing healthcare.

[26][27] Various Bantu peoples in southern Africa, including the Zulu, Basotho, Mpondo and Tsonga, had a tradition of young men (inkotshane in Zulu, boukonchana in Sesotho, tinkonkana in Mpondo, and nkhonsthana in Tsonga; called "boy-wives" in English) who married or had intercrural or anal sex with older men, and sometimes dressed as women, wore breast prostheses, did not grow beards, and did women's work;[7][28] these relationships became common among South African miners and continued into the 1950s,[29] and while often interpreted as homosexual, boy-wives are sometimes seen as transgender.

[37] Prior to western contact, some Indigenous peoples in North America had third-gender roles,[39][page needed] like the Diné (Navajo) nádleehi and the Zuni lhamana.

[57] In May 2016, Bill C-16 was introduced aiming to update the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to include gender identity and expression as protected grounds from discrimination, hate publication and advocacy of genocide, and to add targeting of victims on the basis of gender identity and expression to the list of aggravating factors in sentencing,[58] the first time such a bill was put forward by the governing party in the House of Commons.

[58] Since June 2017, all places within Canada explicitly within the Canadian Human Rights Act or equal opportunity or anti-discrimination legislation do prohibit discrimination against gender identity or expression.

[82] During the Mexican Revolution, Amelio Robles Ávila began to dress and demand to be treated as a man[83] and, gaining respect as a capable leader, was promoted to colonel.

[93] After the war, Frances Thompson, a formerly enslaved black trans woman, testified before Congress's investigation of the Memphis Riots of 1866; ten years later, she was arrested for "being a man dressed in women's clothing".

[94][95][96] In the late 1800s, We'wha, a Zuni lhamana fiber artist and potter, became a prominent cultural ambassador, visiting Washington, D.C. in 1896 and meeting President Grover Cleveland.

[100] They included Jennie June (assigned male at birth in 1874), whose The Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) was one of a few first-person accounts in the early years of the 20th century which cast light on what life for a transgender person was like then.

[102] American jazz musician and bandleader Billy Tipton (assigned female at birth in 1914) lived as a man from the 1940s until his death,[103] while socialite and chef Lucy Hicks Anderson insisted as a child that she was a girl and was supported by her parents and doctors and later by the Oxnard, California community in which she was a popular hostess from the 1920s to 1940s.

[130] In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects employees against discrimination because of gender identity (or sexual orientation).

[134] In the 1950s and 60s, gay bars began to open in Rio de Janeiro and travestis gained greater prominence in the theater, having previously been relegated to Carnival and drag balls.

[142][143] This took place just months before the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, and the new dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet began adopting policies which criminalized and marginalized the activities of gay and trans people.

[147] Prior to the 16th century arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Inca Empire and their Moche predecessors revered third-gender persons and organized their society around an Andean cosmovision that made room for masculine and feminine ambiguity based in "complementary dualism."

[185][186] On October 31, 2024, a Chinese transgender woman was approved by Changli county people’s court in Qinhuangdao to receive 60,000 yuan (£6,552) in compensation from a hospital that gave her electroshock conversion treatment against her will.

[189] In 2004 Japan passed a law requiring people who want to change their gender marker to have sex reassignment surgery and be sterilized, be single, and have no children under age 20, which the supreme court upheld in 2019.

[196] In the Rigveda (from roughly 3500 years ago), it is said that before creation the world lacked all distinctions, including of sex and gender, a state ancient poets expressed with images like men with wombs or breasts.

[223][224][225] Historically, cross-gender babaylan shamans were respected and termed bayog or bayoc in Luzon and asog in the Visayan Islands[223] until outlawed in 1625 and suppressed by Spanish colonial authorities.

In Ancient Greece, Phrygia, and the Roman Republic and Empire, Cybele and Attis were worshiped by galli priests (documented from around 200 BCE to around 300 CE)[245] who wore feminine clothes, referred to themselves as women, and often castrated themselves,[246][247] and have therefore been seen as early transgender figures.

[250] Romans also viewed cross-dressing negatively and imposed it as a punishment, as when Charondas of Catane decreed deserters wear female clothes for three days or when, after Crassus' defeat, the Persians hung a lookalike of the dead general clad as a woman.

[256] In the 500s, Anastasia the Patrician fled life in the court of Justinian I in Constantinople to spend twenty-eight years (until death) dressed as a male monk in Egypt,[257] coming to be viewed by some today as a transgender saint.

[258][better source needed][259] Coptic texts from that era (the fifth to ninth centuries), like texts from around Europe, tell of many female-assigned people transitioning to live as men; in one, a monastic named Hilaria (child of Zeno) dresses as a man, brings about a reduction in breast size and cessation of menstruation through asceticism, and comes to be accepted by fellow monks as a male, Hilarion, and by some modern scholars as trans; the story of Marinos (Marina), another Byzantine, who became a monk in Lebanon, is similar.

[272][273] Gregory of Tours in his 6th century History of the Franks, included a story about a castrated man who dressed in women's clothing and was alleged to be living as a nun at the monastery of the Holy Cross in Poitiers.

[331] In 1906, Karl M. Baer became one of the first known trans men to have sex reassignment surgery, and in 1907 gained full legal recognition of his gender with a new birth certificate, married his first wife, and published a semifictionalized autobiography, Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren ("Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years"); in 1938, he emigrated to Palestine.

[364] In 2007, a law took effect allowing trans people to change gender markers in documents such as birth certificates and passports without undergoing sterilization and sex reassignment surgery.

[376] Edward de Lacy Evans (1830-1901) was a servant, blacksmith, and coal miner who publicly identified as male for the majority of his life, was registered as the father of his son, and referred to as "Dadds" and "Uncle" by his family members.