Gender identity, beyond the man-woman binomial, has manifested itself openly in various cultures, countries and continents over time. A historical tour, through chronicles, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, clothing and other materials, reveals how many societies have assumed the existence of transsexual people as normal.

We find examples in indigenous societies in which gender transgression has shaped the singularity of the community to which they belonged. And in Western culture itself, where male and female models have been altered and normalized with behaviors or attire of the opposite gender, and the people referred to have been accepted and valued.

The book Trans. Diversity of gender identities and roles, published by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, which includes material from the exhibition of the same name organized by the Museum of America, offers a journey through the cultures and historical moments that have proposed alternatives to "man" and "woman" in people whose genitals, identity, clothing, roles or activities combine features of both.

The delicate border in ancient Greece

Greek culture, and more specifically Athenian culture, revolved around a system of opposites in which the male became a model in front of the animal, the barbarian and the woman. And yet, identity changes, cross-dressing, or effeminacy are more frequent than might be expected.

“The high number of cases of bodies that mutate from the female sex to the male sex or vice versa is striking,” says Margarita Moreno Conde, from the National Archaeological Museum, who lists several of them in the aforementioned work.

Through Hippocrates or Pliny we know of cases of appearance changes or gender transformations in Antiquity

For example, through Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, we know that Faetusa of Abdera was a beard would have been born and her entire body would have become masculinized when her husband Pytheas left, a phenomenon that would be repeated in Nano, wife of Górgipos. Despite this change in their appearance, both would continue to act as women in charge of their house in the absence of their respective husbands, that is, their change in appearance did not affect the construction of their gender.

Pliny, in his Natural History, and the historian Phlegon of Trales collect other transformations of people considered women into men, such as that of Aiteté, whom Phlegon himself would have known, who changed his name to Aitetos and continued living with her husband.

The historian Diodorus of Sicily also wrote how Herais, during her husband's absence, would have seen how male genital organs were growing due to a tumor at the base of the abdomen. After the failure of medical treatments, Ella Herais continued to live as a woman, taking care of the house. When her husband returned, the young woman refused to have sexual relations with him, as it would imply revealing his secret, which gave rise to a dispute that was resolved before the assembly.

Herais stripped naked before the judges, thus revealing the nature of the prodigy. After this exposure, the young woman changed her name to Diophantes and her women's clothing to men's, and she served in the king's cavalry.

Gender change in Greek mythology is present in numerous narrations

“These changes, which are generally associated with physiological problems and which were considered prodigies, did not imply in the Greek world any kind of of judgment or alienation for the individual who experiences them, who continued to evolve in society after their gender change”, affirms Margarita Moreno Conde.

The transit through genres in myth

For its part, the modification of gender in Greek myth is present in numerous narratives. Like that of Tiresias, who one day found two coupled snakes and, when trying to separate them with her stick, injured one of them, immediately transforming into a woman. It took seven years for him to meet the same snakes again and, by repeating the same gesture, he regained his masculine appearance. During her life as a woman she would have conceived her daughter Manto.

The myth also embraces the concept of the androgyne or hermaphrodite in various ways. In the complementary halves of Plato's Banquet, where the existence, at the origin of time, of three types of spherical beings is postulated: masculine, feminine and androgynous. Also with the creation of Hermaphrodites, a being that brings together both sexes. Or with the androgynous image of the god Dionysus, from the 5th century BC. c.

We also find ourselves with gods who use cross-dressing to achieve their erotic ends, as Jupiter did to conquer Callisto. Although those who made varied use of this resource, cross-dressing, were the mortals of ancient Greece, who used it as an instrument of revenge, in initiation rites or as a trick to overcome social impediments.

In North American tribes, a man could decide to assume feminine tasks and a woman masculine tasks

“Hyginus echoes in his Fables the case of the first midwife, the young Hagnodice, who would have disguised herself as a man to be able to study medicine at a time when this discipline was forbidden to women”, says Moreno Conde.

@GirlPowerKid How do I cook it? My book tells me how it stew apples but then how to steam pears but I don't have a steamer!

— Becky Thu May 30 20:11:49 +0000 2019

The berdache or “two-spirits”

In indigenous societies with an egalitarian social organization, such as those of the tribes of the cultural areas of the Great Plains or the Southwest of North America, the division of labor by sex was clearly defined, but the preference to be able to carry out tasks considered feminine or masculine was not established by the sexual identity of the individual, that is, a man could decide to assume feminine tasks and a woman to carry out masculine tasks.

“These societies conceived gender diversity as a part of the natural order. What's more, in most tribes the ability to combine men and women was seen as a talent, not as a disadvantage”, points out Beatriz Robledo, from the Museo de América.

Transgender individuals have been documented in more than 150 Native American tribes in North America. They are known as berdaches, or "two spirits", although the natives have their own denomination.

Its presence began to be described very soon in the chronicles, and it did so with a disapproving bias that was the majority in the Eurocentric thought imposed by the colonial era and which lasted well into the 20th century.

“This rejection of cultural manifestations that were considered “deviations”, contrary to the binary structure of Western society, had disastrous repercussions on the North American indigenous populations, who saw the number of trans people decrease, irremediably erasing from the memory of the elderly their previous existence and even repudiating the appearance of new cases”, says Beatriz Robledo.

The beads

The chronicles of the Spanish conquistadors and subsequent investigations also tell us about the enchaquirados of the Ecuadorian coast, a homosexual harem of young servants destined for religious and sexual tasks.

Pedro Cieza de León collected the story that Friar Domingo de Santo Tomás told him about it: “And that is that each temple or primary shrine has one or two men, or more, depending on the idol. They have been dressed as women since they were little children, and they speak as such; and in their treatment, clothes and in everything else they imitate women. These men participate in carnal unions as a sign of holiness and religion, during their festivals and holy days, especially with lords and other authorities.

Researcher O. Hugo Benavides, from Fordham University in New York, who studies sexual diversity in the pre-Hispanic world, assures that it is a mistake to believe that homosexuality or transgenderism is a phenomenon of the white north, of modernity of technological development and the advance of capitalism.

“It was precisely that civilizing West that was the first to condemn the sexual diversity of the Americas, killing indigenous people not only for being indigenous, but also for practicing nefarious sin,” says Benavides. “"Of course, it gives a lot to think that now it is that same civilizational West that seeks to defend sexual diversity and forces us to practice a transgender identity as they want and define it ”, he concludes.

Examples from the Philippines

In the bosom of Philippine indigenous communities, cases have been documented of men who, in their behavior and clothing, acted like women: they were called asog, bayoguin, bayoc and catalonan, and they exercised the priesthood, which, generally, was in female hands.

Miguel Luque Talaván, from the Complutense University of Madrid, rescues the description made of them in the Boxer Codex: “And all this is managed by a priest dressed in a woman's habit. They call it bayog or bayogrun. Or a woman of her own trade, which they call catalonan [...]. Although these Indians do not have temples, they do have priests and priestesses, who are the principal masters of their ceremonies, rites, and omens, and to whom, in all important businesses, they all entrust themselves, paying them very well for their work. They, ordinarily, enter their womanish way, picky and wiggle. It is so effeminate that whoever does not know them will judge them to be women. Almost all of them are impotent for the act of generation, and so they marry another male and sleep together as husband and wife, and have their carnal acts and are finally sometic."

The tida wena, who the indigenous people of the Orinoco delta say are neither men nor women, or the muxes of Oaxaca in Mexico, sons whose mothers decide to educate them in feminine roles, trans women or daughters of India, the Chibadis or Chibados of Angola or the Mugawe of Kenya are other examples of transgender groups fully integrated into their societies.

And in Europe?

Although there have always been people who have lived as a sex other than the one assigned at birth, history has not been “barely able” to value the lives of people who challenged the gender binary. Researchers Lucas Platero and María Rosón, from the University of Valencia, explain that this is because “only a few exceptional cases are known over the centuries. Especially, there is news, through coercive sources, of those who have failed, ”they say.

Among the best-known cases of transgender people is that of Charles de Beaumont, known as the Chevalier d'Eon, who lived publicly as a woman in 18th-century Europe, "and was even feted and well-regarded." “Assigned male at his birth, also recorded after his death, she spent part of his life dressing interchangeably as male and female, what today would be gender fluid. She acted as a spy for France in Russia and was recognized as one of the best swordsmen of the time. As a diplomat, he also promoted the Peace of Paris in 1763, which put an end to the Seven Years' War”, writes Andrés Gutiérrez Usillos, coordinator of the book Trans. Diversity of gender identities and roles.

Others, such as Ensign Catalina de Erauso, a trans man accepted and recognized by his military environment, the King and the Pope, or Henrietta Faber, a Swiss woman who married Juana de León in Cuba, are equally well-known and documented cases, without forgetting the feminieli of the Spanish neighborhood of Naples or the sworn virgins of Albania, women who take the role of the man in the family.

Finally, in Spain we can cite cases such as that of Elisa and Marcela, Galician women who got married in 1901 after one of them adopted the masculine gender identity – and who inspired novels such as La sed de amar, by Felipe Trigo (1903 ), and the film Elisa y Marcela (2019), by Isabel Coixet–, or like that of the guard Fernando Marquesen Winson, a transgender who even served in the Civil Government of Seville.

Cultures, societies and people that from history invite us to accept gender identity beyond the man-woman, masculine-feminine and nature-culture binomial.

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