Transgender history that was never taught in school
Trans people have been kings and queens, fought in wars, and led the fight for LGBTQ+ rights, thriving despite widespread social oppression.
Being transgender is not a choice and I know this intimately well. Some of my earliest memories as a child involve expressions of gender dysphoria and rejection of the “male” gender label that I was assigned at birth. Most transgender people often report the same experience and the “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” theory has largely been disproven.
Gender dysphoria is defined in the DSM-V as “clinically significant distress or impairment related to gender incongruence, which may include desire to change primary and/or secondary sex characteristics”, and the only known treatment for it is gender transition.
Like sexual identity, gender identity is simply another expression of being human, however it has been only in recent years that Western society has become aware of gender identities that differ from the binary norm.
Recent Conservative backlash specifically against the transgender community paints trans people as being “confused”, since to the Right transgender people didn’t exist until recently when a number of high-profile people came out, namely Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner. These same forces demonize trans people as “groomers” who are out to force children to medically transition.
But they are, of course, completely wrong.
The history of transgender identity
Transgender history isn’t taught in most schools and colleges, but the history of transgender people is vast. That’s because trans people have existed worldwide since the beginning of human history, even popping up in ancient religions and cultures.
Although the term “transgender” wasn’t coined until the 1960s, transgender history includes numerous people whose gender identities and expressions differed from the genders they were assigned at birth. These individuals may not have identified as trans, but modern historians see them as early fore-bearers in the transgender community.
While Conservatives seek to shame and shun trans people from the public sphere, the truth is that trans people have been kings and queens, fought in wars, and led the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. As such, trans history demonstrates the many ways the transgender community has persisted and transformed the world despite widespread social oppression.
But here’s the thing they don’t want you to know: trans people have existed since the dawn of human civilization. In fact many indigenous cultures worldwide recognize the existence of multiple gender expressions and it seems as though the strict gender binary is a product of Eurocentric culture.
Trans identity in ancient times
Archaeologists have recognized transgender identities going as far back as 5000 BCE to the first human civilization, the Ancient Sumerians, located in the Tigris-Euphrates valley of Mesopotamia (now present-day Iraq). The Gala were priests of the Sumerian goddess of fertility, desire, and war known as Inanna.
Though these priests were male, they spoke in Eme-sal, a feminine dialect associated with goddesses. Inanna also oversaw a ceremony referred to as “the head-overturning,” by which a man was transformed into a woman and a woman transformed into a man and it’s believed that queer sexuality also played a role in their religious practices.
In ancient Rome the Galli were priests of Cybele, a Pagan earth mother goddess associated with wine, music, and ecstatic rites. The Galli priests would castrate themselves in an ecstatic ritual known as the “Day of Blood” on March 24 to show their devotion to Cybele. Afterward, they dressed in yellow women’s clothing — wearing pendants, earrings, heavy makeup, and long bleached hair — and would wander the streets while carrying instruments, flagellating themselves bloody with whips made of knuckle bones, telling fortunes, and offering themselves as receptive sexual partners for money. The cult of Cybele later died off as Christianity swept the region, and all her temples were destroyed.
The Roman emperor Elagabalus (d. 222 AD) preferred to be called a lady (rather than a lord) and sought sex reassignment surgery, and in the modern day has been seen as a transgender figure. Unfortunately he was assassinated at age 18 and his body thrown into the Tiber river.
Trans identity in Asia and Africa
Early Middle Eastern Muslim texts refer to the “mukhannathun,” MTF individuals with innate femininity and relationships with either men or women. Only mukhannathun who had been castrated or were exclusively attracted to men were allowed into women’s spaces. Later, all mukhannathun were required to undergo castration.
The Hijras are found in South Asia and are individuals who are intersex or assigned male at birth. Hijras wear makeup, dress in traditionally female clothing, and many are castrated. Some identify as trans and others as “third gender.” They’re revered for performing good luck rituals at Hindu weddings and births, though they continue to fight for legal recognition in modern-day India.
Early Indonesian societies had transgender religious figures known as basaja. In ancient China, the shih-niang wore mixed-gender ceremonial clothing. In Okinawa, Japan, some shamans underwent winagu nati, a process of “becoming female.” In Korea, the mudang was a shaman or sorceress who was quite often MTF, Allen notes.
The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara is the embodiment of the virtue of compassion and became the most important deity in Buddhism around the sixth century C.E. Represented in different manifestations and throughout Asia, Avalokiteshvara is often depicted in his female form known as Kuanyin, or Guanyin in China.
Meanwhile, numerous African tribes had intersex deities and spiritual beliefs in gender transformation. Several African rulers also may have been trans, including seventh-century BC monarch King Ashurbanipal (Sardanapalus) of Assyria whose wearing of women’s clothes was later used to justify overthrowing him, and also 1503 BC Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut and her daughter Neferure who both wore male clothing, false beards, and a male phallus.
Trans saints in early Christianity
Shockingly there are even transgender saints in early Christianity. Roland Betancourt, a professor of art history at the University of California in Irvine, wrote that “from the fifth to the ninth century, a number of saints’ lives composed across the Greek-speaking Mediterranean detail the lives of individuals assigned female at birth who for a host of different reasons chose to live out their adult lives as men in monasteries.”
These included Saint Perpetua, who dreamt of becoming a man the night before her execution; Saints Hilarion, Marinos, and Smaragdus, who all lived as male monks; and Saint Athanasia, who married the male Saint Andronicus and lived as a male monk with him in a monastery until their deaths, mere days apart from one another.
Trans people in the early United States
Trans people fought in the US Civil War on both Union and Confederate sides. Franklin Thompson was assigned female at birth, but reportedly dressed as a boy and later traveled under a male gender identity to travel more easily. In his memoir, he said he disguised himself as a Black man and a Black laundress to infiltrate the Confederacy as a Union spy.
Another man named Albert Cashier lived as a man for 53 years, including before and after enlisting in the Union army. He fought in over 40 battles in the war, and his trans identity was discovered near the end of his life during his time in a mental institution. There, workers forced him to wear women’s clothing until his death. After he was outed, the military pension board investigated him for fraud, but it ultimately decided to let him keep his lifelong pension.
In 1876, a book entitled The Woman in Battle followed the exploits of a person who was assigned female at birth but nonetheless served as a Confederate Lieutenant named Harry T. Buford during the war. It’s unclear whether Buford lived in a male gender identity outside of the war.
In his book, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, historian Peter Boag said he discovered “hundreds of individuals living their lives as the opposite gender” in the United States and US Territories from the early 1800s to the early 1900s. Many of these were individuals assigned a female gender at birth, but dressed and lived as men to escape criminal charges they’d faced as women or to enjoy the same social rights as men.
This group included Sammy Williams, a Montana lumberjack whose trans identity wasn’t discovered until his death at age 80; Charley Parkhurst, a renowned stagecoach driver who voted in the 1868 election (long before women were legally allowed to vote); Mrs. Nash, a trans tamale cook in Montana who married three different military men; and Harry Allen, a bartender and ladies man who was repeatedly thrown in jail for his gender-nonconformity.
The fight for trans civil rights in the 20th Century
While Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy are two notable trans women who participated in the Stonewall uprising, trans people led two uprisings in California that occurred years before Stonewall. At the time, California had a law against cross-dressing which police used as a pretext for raiding gay venues. Police would check to see if patrons’ IDs matched their gender presentation and singled out gender nonconformists for special harassment and abuse. These police raids led venues to start rejecting trans patrons.
One night in May 1959, two police officers entered Cooper’s Donuts, a Los Angeles cafe that was one of the few places where drag queens, trans people, and other outsiders could safely congregate. The cops began checking IDs and tried placing “two hustlers, two queens, and a young man” into a crowded patrol car, one account states. The arrestees scattered out of the car, and a crowd exited the shop, “hurling donuts, coffee cups, and trash at the police” The police fled in their car and called for backup as angry queers moved into the streets, dancing on cars, lighting fires, and generally wreaking havoc until the police returned to beat and arrest several of them.
In August 1966, queer people opposed a police raid at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night diner in San Francisco. When a cop tried to arrest one trans woman, she threw a cup of hot coffee in his face. Within moments dishes were broken, furniture was thrown, the restaurant’s windows were smashed, and a nearby newsstand was burned down. An organized protest occurred the following night, with picketers coming from militant queer groups like the Street Orphans and Vanguard. The uprising was recounted in the 2005 film, Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.
History of the world’s first gender clinic
In the early 1900’s Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish doctor, was haunted by a young soldier he had met that was so distraught by anti-LGBTQ+ laws in Germany that he shot himself. Hirschfeld soon left his medical practice and began a crusade to de-stigmatize homosexual and transgender identity in post WW1 Germany.
Hirschfeld sought to specialize in sexual health, an area of growing interest. Many of his predecessors and colleagues believed that homosexuality was pathological, using new theories from psychology to suggest it was a sign of mental ill health. Hirschfeld, in contrast, argued that a person may be born with characteristics that did not fit into heterosexual or binary categories and supported the idea that a “third sex” (or Geschlecht) existed naturally. Hirschfeld proposed the term “sexual intermediaries” for nonconforming individuals (and he includes Socrates, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo in this designation).
Most important for Hirschfeld, these people were acting “in accordance with their nature,” not against it.
Hirschfeld’s study of sexual intermediaries was no trend or fad; instead it was a recognition that people may be born with a nature contrary to their assigned gender. And in cases where the desire to live as the opposite sex was strong, he thought science ought to provide a means of transition. He purchased a Berlin villa in early 1919 and opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Research) on July 6. By 1930 it would perform the first modern gender-affirmation surgeries in the world.
Its stated purpose was to be a place of “research, teaching, healing, and refuge” that could “free the individual from physical ailments, psychological afflictions, and social deprivation.” Hirschfeld’s institute would also be a place of education. While in medical school, he had experienced the trauma of watching as a gay man was paraded naked before the class, to be verbally abused as a degenerate.
Hirschfeld would instead provide sex education and health clinics, advice on contraception, and research on gender and sexuality, both anthropological and psychological. The institute would ultimately house an immense library on sexuality, gathered over many years and including rare books and diagrams and protocols for male-to-female (MTF) surgical transition. In addition to psychiatrists for therapy, he had hired Ludwig Levy-Lenz, a gynecologist. Together, with surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt, they performed male-to-female surgery called Genitalumwandlung—literally, “transformation of genitals.” Patients would also be prescribed hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to feminize their features.
Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens—and homosexuals and transgender people.
The Nazis came for the clinic in 1933 and soon a towering bonfire of 20,000 books was seen on newsreels around Germany and the world. Few people realize that the largest Nazi book burning in history contained the most extensive collection of books relating to queer history and medical care, all erased thanks to the hatred and bigotry of the Nazi Party. Even that iconic image has been decontextualized, a nameless tragedy.
Hirschfeld was forced to flee Germany with his partner and staff, and he died in 1935 from a stroke while on the run in France.
Today Conservatives seem to be hell-bent on erasing the transgender identity, writing and passing a slate of laws banning life-saving care from trans youth, banning trans people from using public bathrooms, and banning trans athletes from competing. Their accusations that trans people are “unnatural” and a “fad” are blatantly unscientific and we are truly hearing echoes of Nazi Germany here in America.
The story of the Institute for Sexual Research serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when authoritarians obsessed with a heteronormative ideology are allowed to take over and bend society to their will.
Because trans lives really do matter.
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