Translations:History of nonbinary gender/18/en


 * Thomas Hall, who apparently had an equal preference for the birth-name Thomasine (c.1603 – after 1629), was an English servant in colonial Virginia. Hall was raised as a girl, and then presented as a man in order to enter the military. After leaving the military, Hall freely alternated between feminine and masculine attire from one day to the next, until Hall was accused of having sex with both men and women. Whether someone was legally a man or a woman would result in different punishments for that. Several physical examinations disagreed on the details of Hall's sex, and concluded that Hall had been born intersex. Previously, common law required that if a court concluded that someone was intersex, this would result in an injunction that they must live the rest of their life as strictly either male or female, whichever their anatomy resembled the most closely. In this case, the court ruled that "hee is a man and a woeman," and gave the injunction that Hall must from then on wear both masculine and feminine clothing at the same time: "goe clothed in man's apparell, only his head to bee attired in a coyfe and croscloth with an apron before him" Intersex is not the same thing as nonbinary, and so an intersex person can identify as a man, woman, or some other gender. Hall was apparently an intersex person who did not identify strictly as a man or woman, preferred a fluid gender expression, and was then given a legal sex that was both.