Transgender People in History

In today’s debate about gender, it is frequently argued that “transgender people have always existed” and that modern categories such as “trans woman” or “non-binary” have historical predecessors stretching back centuries. That portrayal is largely a retrospective construction. People who did not fit the gender norms of their time have indeed always existed—but the connection between those historical individuals and modern transgender identity is much looser than is often suggested.

The Problem of Retroactive Labels

The modern concept of “transgender” dates from the second half of the twentieth century and builds on specific medical, legal, and psychological ideas that simply did not exist in earlier eras. The way the word developed from a narrow label into an umbrella term is discussed at letterbrij.nl. When historians or activists retroactively label figures from antiquity, the Middle Ages, or the early modern period as “transgender,” they project a contemporary framework onto people who would never have understood themselves that way. This is a form of anachronism that is historically unsound and turns history into a tool of a contemporary political agenda. One example is the interpretation of Stonewall and the pink triangle, which alfabetbende.nl discusses critically.

Women Who Lived as Men: More Than One Explanation

Throughout the centuries, countless cases have been documented of women who dressed and functioned as men—sometimes for decades. Much of this had practical reasons: access to professions, military service, travel, or safety in a world in which women occupied a legally and economically subordinate position. Women such as Joan of Arc, Catalina de Erauso, or the English soldier Hannah Snell are sometimes claimed as “trans men” by modern activists; in reality, the sources provide a much more reserved and pragmatic picture of how they understood themselves.

For some, there may well have been something we would today call gender dysphoria. But most are better understood as women who circumvented the limitations of their time, rather than as people with an inner cross-gender identity. Good historical scholarship preserves that distinction.

Men Who Lived as Women

Historical cases of men who permanently presented themselves as women are rarer and often occurred in a religious, ceremonial, or theatrical context. The Roman emperor Elagabalus is sometimes claimed as “trans” on the basis of a few sentences by his contemporary Cassius Dio—a problematic source, written with the explicit intention of discrediting the emperor. Inferring a modern identity from this is methodologically problematic.

Non-Western “Third-Gender” Categories

The hijra in South Asia, two-spirit people in Indigenous North American traditions, and the bissu among the Bugis in Indonesia are cited in Western debate as historical evidence of “non-binary” identities. This is misleading for several reasons:

• they are often specific, frequently ritual or marginalized social roles, not freely chosen identities;
• in most cases, they involve biological men taking on a role, not a spectrum that anyone can simply enter;
• the term “two-spirit” itself is a late-twentieth-century pan-Indigenous invention (1990), not an ancient concept;
• the social reality of many of these groups—poverty, prostitution, and marginalization—is romanticized away in Western debate.

See also Two-spirit and Gender in Other Cultures.

The Twentieth Century: The Rise of a Medical Model

It was only in the twentieth century that the medical infrastructure and conceptual categories emerged from which the modern understanding of transgender identity developed. Lili Elbe (in the 1930s) and Christine Jorgensen (1952) were early public cases. Here too, caution is warranted: Lili Elbe died shortly after the experimental operations, and her story was heavily romanticized in later fictionalizations, including the film The Danish Girl. Early medical outcomes were often dramatic. The first American gender clinic opened in 1966; see Harry Benjamin and the First American Gender Clinic.

In the Netherlands, Amsterdam UMC played a central role from the 1970s onward in developing what later became known as the Dutch Protocol—an approach that was long regarded internationally as the standard, but whose methodological and ethical shortcomings are now being critically reassessed.

Recent History and Reassessment

From the 1990s onward, the visibility of transgender people increased. The transgender flag, designed by American Monica Helms in 1999, also dates from this period. At the same time, since 2010 there has been an unprecedented increase in trans identifications among adolescents, particularly girls—a pattern without historical precedent and distinct from the traditional small population of adults with long-standing dysphoria. The current international reorientation (Cass Review, SBU, COHERE) is a correction to a period in which the affirmative model was applied more broadly than the evidence justified.

Source-Critical Historiography

History contains real stories of people who did not fit the gender norms of their time. Those stories deserve serious attention—but with respect for the sources and without retrospective overinterpretation. It is a misconception to equate every historical gender variant with modern transgender identity. Good historiography distinguishes; activism flattens distinctions. That distinction is appropriate here.