Joan of Arc, born around 1412, is a French folk hero and Catholic saint, known for her role as a leader and military strategist as France fought England in the Hundred Years’ War. For centuries she was viewed worldwide as an iconic woman warrior who dressed as a man. She wore men’s clothes, it was argued, in order to move through enemy territory and because armor was necessary in battle. Since the 1970s, historians have researched the lives of LGBTQ+ people throughout time. Some, such as trans writer and activist Leslie Feinberg, have argued that Joan of Arc, among others, was an early gay or transgender pioneer.
Across cultures and throughout history, many people have defied gender stereotypes or taken on roles typically associated with another sex. A number of ancient societies, from Asia to the Middle East to Greece and Rome, included eunuchs, people assigned male at birth who were castrated and served specific social functions, often as servants, but sometimes as high-ranking officials. Eunuchs also worked as priests in temples devoted to goddesses. The hijras of South Asia have also existed for many centuries. Prior to European invasion, many North American native tribes included Two Spirits, gender-nonconforming people who often took on positions in their cultures that blended male and female roles. Since at least the fifteenth century, some Balkan families included Sworn Virgins, who were assigned female at birth but, after an oath of celibacy, took on the roles of a man.
While past societies have allowed or, in some cases, encouraged varied gender expressions, it is difficult to determine how closely aligned each might have been with today’s understanding of transgender identity. Complicating things even more, a number of LGBTQ+ historians have argued that in some of these cultures, gender-bending served a primary purpose of allowing people to express same-sex desires and was not about gender itself.
It can be impossible to know how to categorize many individual historical figures. Often there are no written records that detail their inner lives or explain how they wished to be viewed. For others, it is clearer. Sarah Emma Edmonds and Albert Cashier were both assigned female at birth and fought for the Union army during the Civil War, but their stories reveal that their gender identities were likely significantly different. Edmonds enlisted as a man, but after near discovery, she deserted, later publishing a memoir called Female Spy of the Union Army, marrying a man, and having three children. Cashier, on the other hand, served until the end of the war, then returned home to Illinois, where he lived and worked as a man, collected his military pension, and even voted in elections. He was not discovered to have been assigned female until he developed dementia and entered a state hospital, where he was forced to wear a dress.
Researchers have discovered a number of other people in history believed to have lived similarly to transgender people today. Chevalier d’Eon was assigned male at birth in 1728 and worked as a French ambassador, soldier, spy, and expert swordsperson, sometimes dressing as a woman to infiltrate and gather information. In her fifties, d’Eon began to dress full time as a woman and petitioned the French government to recognize her as female. Willmer “Little Axe” Broadnax was a well-known gospel singer active in the 1940s to the 1960s. Until his death in 1992, his brother, fellow gospel singer Willie “Big Axe” Broadnax, was the only person who knew Willmer had been assigned female at birth.
Broadnax lived in an era when he and others might be aware of the idea that there were those who identified as transsexual or transvestites—some of the words of the time. Cashier and d’Eon, on the other hand, were much less likely to have had concepts of themselves that match our current thinking about gender identity, because the ideas we have today are relatively new. Would they have called themselves “transgender” if they were alive today? What about Native Americans like We’wha, who was born in 1849 into the Zuni tribe in New Mexico and was known as an Ihamana—someone who was assigned male at birth, dressed in both male and female clothing, and engaged in women’s work as well as serving as a tribe mediator? We have no way of knowing how these people would have defined themselves through a modern lens, and it would be unfair to apply to them a label they did not use for themselves.
What we do know is that our terminology and understanding of gender identity in the Western world have shifted significantly over the last 150 years. The well-known transgender activist Sylvia Rivera (1951–2002) identified as transgender later in life, but earlier on she used a variety of terms to refer to herself, including “gay,” “queen,” “half-sister,” and “transvestite.”
How did today’s understanding of transgender identity develop? Its history is intricately linked to the history of gay and lesbian identities. The gay historian John D’Emilio suggests that the rise of capitalism in the 1800s, accompanied by the shift from countryside family living to individual wage work in cities, was the catalyst for the eventual formation of the modern gay identity category. Before then, argued French philosopher Michel Foucault, though many people engaged in same-sex sexual activity, there was no category of people labeled “homosexual,” either as a collective group or an identity. There was also no widespread concept of transgender identity or its precursors.
Early on in the development of gay and transgender identities as categories, the concepts of gender identity and sexuality as we understand them today were not clearly delineated. In 1868, for example, Karl Ulrichs published pamphlets that referred to men who were attracted to other men as “urnings.” “The Urning,” Ulrichs wrote, “is not a man, but rather a kind of feminine being,” stressing that such men were “mentally” feminine.
Ulrichs was not alone in viewing sexual orientation as connected to ideas about gender. Nineteenth-century German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing saw homosexuality and transgender identity as falling along a continuum from “only homosexual feeling and instinct, but limited to the sexual life,” to “the whole psychical personality, and even the bodily sensations.” At the turn of the twentieth century, the terms “invert” and “inversion” were commonly used as synonyms for homosexuality, but they were also used to describe a range of other behaviors, most often those that challenged gender norms. For many of these thinkers, gender identity and sexuality were initially viewed on a spectrum rather than as separate concepts.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, some people were beginning to distinguish between gay and transgender identities. British physician Havelock Ellis wrote of two “inverts” he saw for treatment that “one of them is of somewhat feminine nature generally; the other remains masculine in his non-sexual habits.” In 1910, sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld published Transvestites, in which he wrote that “not all homosexuals are effeminate” and “not all effeminate men are homosexual.” Most importantly, people who themselves identified as gender nonconforming were beginning to speak out. In 1918, Ralph Werther, writing as Earl Lind, and also known as Jennie June, published Autobiography of an Androgyne, in which she described a club she attended with other “androgynes” known as the Cercle Hermaphroditos.
The evolution of language is complicated, especially when it relates to identity. Until at least the 1940s, the term “transvestite” was used to refer to gender-nonconforming people who might today identify as transgender, as well as to cisgender people who cross-dressed for personal pleasure or as entertainers. Today we refer to those who cross-dress for entertainment as drag queens or kings; most, but not all, drag artists identify as cisgender.
In 1949, American sexologist David Cauldwell published an article titled “Psychopathia Transsexualis” and is credited with inventing the term “transsexual,” which came to replace “transvestite” in the second half of the twentieth century. Since then, “transvestite” began to be understood solely as describing someone who enjoyed dressing in the clothing of another gender, but did not identify with that gender. (Today, such a person would be known as a cross-dresser.) “Transsexual” referred to someone whose gender identity differed from the one assigned at birth. Well into the 1970s, many people who would likely see themselves as transgender today called themselves transvestites. The term continues to be used pejoratively against transgender people.
The language we use today, including “transgender,” “gender nonconforming,” and “genderqueer,” developed over the last few decades. The origin of the term “transgender” is debated. Some say that activist Virginia Prince first coined a variant on transgender—“transgenderist”—to describe people such as herself who identified with another gender but did not have surgical interventions. In the early 1990s, Holly Boswell and others began to use the term “transgender” to describe those who pushed the boundaries of gender and who refused to accept the binary gender system. Around the same time, “transgender” was first used as an umbrella term that included many people of varying identities, and because “transsexual” was increasingly viewed as a medicalized, stigmatizing term. Today, “transgender” is often used this way, although some people would instead use “gender nonconforming” for this purpose.
It is evident that, throughout history, gender-nonconforming people have been part of many societies, and that their gender identities and the ways they understood gender in general reflected their cultures and times. Placing a modern lens on their lives is not always possible or even helpful or appropriate. Language and ideas related to gender are constantly evolving and will continue to evolve. Conceptualizations of gender we hold as truths today will be seen as differently through the lens of future generations as those of our predecessors are to us.