The words people use to define themselves, their behaviors, and their desires have changed over time. Few topics have witnessed as much linguistic innovation as sex, sexuality, and gender. The word “transgender,” coined in the 1960s, did not circulate in U.S. vernacular speech until the 1990s, but we can find people who expressed a third gender with their community’s endorsement—or who did so in defiance of contemporary social expectations—just about everywhere, in all historical epochs. The words used to name that experience have shifted dramatically, and often very quickly. Terms such as “transgendered” and “transsexual” were widely used by LGBTQ-identified people and their allies in the 1990s and early 2000s, but as I write in 2024, both already sound archaic, displaced by “trans” or “transgender.” I employ “same-sex-desiring” and “queer” as imperfect but more precise ways to indicate nonnormative sex acts and the people engaging in them in eras before “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” “gay,” “lesbian,” and myriad other contemporary terms were coined. Anachronism can obscure the historical events that breathed specific meanings into these words. Readers may also notice that I mention “gay men and lesbians” in chapters about the post–World War II United States; “LGBT” (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people by the 1970s; and “LGBTQ+” (with the addition of queer and acknowledgment of other nonnormative genders and sexualities) in sections on the early twenty-first century. More recent variations of the acronym, such as “LGBTQIA+,” incorporate other letters to represent asexual, intersex, aromantic, and other identities.
Pronouns present a challenge for historical writing about sex and sexuality. Several of the people who figure centrally in the book would possibly place themselves under the umbrella of transgender identity had today’s language and concepts been available to them. Where it is clear that a person saw themselves as either both male and female or neither male nor female, I use they/them pronouns. If the person appears to have identified as a sex different from the one assigned to them at birth, I use the pronoun of the sex they chose. When in doubt, I use they/them. Throughout, I call attention to the complex and fascinating variation in how people have understood gender and sex differences, including the experiences of people who believed that they could change their gender or their sex during their lifetimes. When discussing gender-expansive Indigenous people, I use “two-spirit,” a term created by Indigenous scholars and activists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries for Indigenous people believed to contain the essence of both male and female. I have tried to be transparent about my decisions, all of which the reader is welcome to dispute. I do not advocate a single, “correct” way to describe gender fluidity in the past. Instead, we may choose among several possibilities, aiming in each instance to learn from the people we write about.
Given the geographic scope of this book—the lands that became the United States—I have attempted throughout it to acknowledge the Indigenous nations of North America and to name the regions I discuss without assuming that imperial assertions of territorial control superseded Indigenous presence. For the original inhabitants of North America, I use the terms American Indians and Native Americans interchangeably and also refer to the Indigenous inhabitants of the continent. Whenever possible, I indicate a specific tribe or nation, employing the name preferred by members of that community (such as Diné for the people who have also been known as Navajo). My discussions of slavery attempt to recognize that it was a condition of labor and legal subjugation imposed on certain people, not a status of personhood. For that reason, I use the language of “enslaved people” rather than “slaves” and refer to “enslavers” rather than “owners” or “masters.” These distinctions recognize that slave labor did not emerge organically from ready-made social divisions but was instead a practice that some people chose to enforce.1