History of nonbinary gender: Difference between revisions

Gender variance has a long history [[gender-variant identities worldwide|all around the world]], from the first known records of written language to modern day. What gender variance means and how it's viewed in society has changed throughout history, and the words used to describe it has changed as well; while the word "nonbinary" itself is a relatively new term, the concept itself has existed since ancient times. This page summarizes the history of gender that doesn't fit the [[gender binary|binary]], irrespective of how it's called.

* In Mesopotamian mythology, among the earliest written records of humanity, there are references to types of people who are neither male nor female. Sumerian and Akkadian tablets from the 2nd millennium BCE and 1700 BCE describe how the gods created these people, their roles in society, and words for different kinds of them. These included eunuchs, women who couldn't or weren't allowed to have children, men who live as women, intersex people, gay people, and others.<ref>Murray, Stephen O., and Roscoe, Will (1997). ''Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature.'' New York: New York University Press.</ref><ref>Nissinen, Martti (1998). ''Homoeroticism in the Biblical World'', Translated by Kirsi Stjedna. Fortress Press (November 1998) p. 30. ISBN|0-8006-2985-X<br>See also: Maul, S. M. (1992). ''Kurgarrû und assinnu und ihr Stand in der babylonischen Gesellschaft.'' Pp. 159–71 in Aussenseiter und Randgruppen. Konstanze Althistorische Vorträge und Forschungern 32. Edited by V. Haas. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag.</ref><ref>Leick, Gwendolyn (1994). ''Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature''. Routledge. New York.</ref></translate>

[[File:Sekhet hieroglyphs.jpg|thumb|<translate><!--T:11--> The word "sekhet" in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.</translate><ref name="Brustman">Mark Brustman. "The Third Gender in Ancient Egypt." ''"Born Eunuchs" Home Page and Library.'' 1999. https://people.well.com/user/aquarius/egypt.htm [https://web.archive.org/web/20230510151854/https://people.well.com/user/aquarius/egypt.htm Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref>]]

* Many cultures and ethnic groups have concepts of [[gender-variant identities worldwide|traditional gender-variant roles]], with a history of them going back to antiquity. These gender identities and roles are often analogous to nonbinary identity, as they don't fit into the Western idea of the [[gender binary]] roles. The [[Hijra]] of South Asian countries including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh date back to 400 BCE or 300 CE, where they were mentioned in the ''Kama Sutra.'' The Hijra are feminine eunuchs who consider themselves neither male nor female. The Scythians, who were Eurasian nomadic horseriders, were well-known to other civilizations for honoring gender-variant people as priests and warriors. The Scythians invented the world's earliest known hormone therapy as far back as the 7th century BCE, using licorice root as an antiandrogen,<ref name="enarees kaldera">Raven Kaldera. "Ergi: The Way of the Third." ''Northern-Tradition Shamanism.'' https://web.archive.org/web/20130501152328/http://www.northernshamanism.org/shamanic-techniques/gender-sexuality/ergi-the-way-of-the-third.html</ref> and mare's urine as an oestrogen, much as is used in the modern oestrogen medication, Premarin.<ref name="enarees savage 74">Helen Savage. (2006) "Changing sex? : transsexuality and Christian theology." Doctoral thesis, Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3364/ [https://web.archive.org/web/20230415224247/http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3364/ Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref> Hundreds of pre-colonial Native American cultures recognized various kinds of gender roles (today called by the umbrella term [[Two-Spirit]]) who did not fit into the Western gender binary. The [[māhū]] of Hawaii and Tahiti were also pre-colonial genders outside male and female. As far back as six centuries ago, the Bugis people of Indonesia have recognized five genders, one of which, called [[Bissu]], is a combination of all the genders, even if they are not physically intersex.<ref name=ABC>{{cite news|publisher=Australian Broadcasting Corporation News|first=Farid M|last=Ibrahim|url=https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-27/indonesia-fifth-gender-might-soon-disappear/10846570|accessdate=27 February 2019|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190227045350/https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-27/indonesia-fifth-gender-might-soon-disappear/10846570|archive-date=27 February 2019|title=Homophobia and rising Islamic intolerance push Indonesia's intersex bissu priests to the brink|date=27 February 2019}}</ref> As far back as the 1st century CE, classical Judaism has recognized six genders/sexes, with distinct prohibitions for each.<ref>Robbie Medwed. "More Than Just Male and Female: The Six Genders in Classical Judaism." ''Sojourn'' (blog). June 01, 2015. Retrieved July 14, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150714011440/http://www.sojourngsd.org/blog/sixgenders</ref>

 

* The Anglo-Saxon word ''wæpen-wifestre'', or ''wæpned-wifestre'' (Anglo-Saxon, ''wæpen'' "sword," "penis," "male" (or ''wæpned'' "weaponed," "with a penis," "male") + ''wif'' woman, + ''estre'' feminine suffix, thus "woman with a weapon," "woman with a penis," or "man woman") was defined in an eleventh-century glossary (Antwerp Plantin-Moretus 32) as meaning "hermaphrodite." The counterpart of this word, ''wæpned-mann,'' simply meant "a person armed with a sword" or "male person."<ref>Dana Oswald, ''Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature.'' Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2010. p. 93.</ref><ref name="ClarkMedieval">David Clark. ''Between medieval men: Male friendship and desire in early medieval English literature.'' Oxford University Press, 2009. P. 63-65.</ref> ''Wæpen-wifestre'' is known to be a synonym for "scrat" (intersex).<ref>''Catholicon Anglicum: An English-Latin Word-book, dated 1483, volume 30.'' Accessed via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=I7wKAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22W%C3%A6pen-wifestre%22&pg=PA325#v=onepage&q=%22W%C3%A6pen-wifestre%22&f=false [https://web.archive.org/web/20221213084019/https://books.google.com/books?id=I7wKAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22W%C3%A6pen-wifestre%22&pg=PA325 Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref> Another synonym given for ''wæpen-wifestre'' is ''bæddel,'' an which also means intersex, but also feminine men, from which the word "bad" is thought to be derived, due to its use as a slur.<ref>"bad (adj.)" ''Online Etymology Dictionary.'' https://www.etymonline.com/word/bad [https://web.archive.org/web/20230320040139/https://www.etymonline.com/word/bad Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref> The related word ''bæddling'' was used in eleventh-century laws for men who had sex with men in a receptive role.<ref name="ClarkMedieval" /> Additional meanings of ''wæpen-wifestre'' are possible. When ''wæpen-wifestre'' is read as "woman with a penis," it could describe a feminine man, a man who has sex with men, or a transgender woman. When read as "woman with a sword," it could refer to a warrior woman. When read as "man woman," it could mean not only an intersex person, but also people who transgressed the gender binary that seems to have been the rule in Anglo-Saxon England, as far as is known from limited literature from that era. From this range of meanings that the word potentially covers, it's possible that ''wæpen-wifestre'' may have been a general category for intersex, queer, and gender-variant people in Britain, during the time that was contemporary to Beowulf.

 

 

 

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas(ine)_Hall 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.<ref>Norton, Mary Beth, "Communal Definitions of Gendered Identity in Colonial America", Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, Fredrika J. Teute (eds) ''Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America'' (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 40ff. </ref> 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"<ref>Floyd, Don (2010). ''The Captain and Thomasine''. Raleigh, NC: Lulu Enterprises. p. 251. ISBN 978-0-557-37676-6.</ref><ref>Reis, Elizabeth (September 2005). "Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America, 1620–1960". ''The Journal of American History'': 411–441.</ref> 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 [[genderfluid|fluid]] [[gender expression]], and was then given a legal sex that was both.

 

* "[[Singular they]]" had already been the standard [[English neutral pronouns|gender-neutral pronoun in English]] for hundreds of years. However, in 1745, prescriptive grammarians began to say that it was no longer acceptable. Their reasoning was that neutral pronouns don't exist in Latin, which was thought to be a better language, so English shouldn't use them, either. They instead began to recommend using "[[English neutral pronouns#He|he]]" as a gender-neutral pronoun.<ref>Maria Bustillos, "Our desperate, 250-year-long search for a gender-neutral pronoun." January 6, 2011. [http://www.theawl.com/2011/01/our-desperate-250-year-long-search-for-a-gender-neutral-pronoun http://www.theawl.com/2011/01/our-desperate-250-year-long-search-for-a-gender-neutral-pronoun] [https://web.archive.org/web/20230603104253/https://www.theawl.com/2011/01/our-desperate-250-year-long-search-for-a-gender-neutral-pronoun/ Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref> This started the dispute over the problem of acceptable gender-neutral pronouns in English, which has carried on for centuries now.

 

 

* The [[Public Universal Friend]] (1752 - 1819) was a genderless evangelist who traveled throughout the eastern United States to preach a theology based on that of the Quakers, which was actively against slavery. The Friend believed that God had reanimated them from a severe illness at age 24 with a new spirit, which was genderless. The Friend refused to be called by the birth name,<ref name="Moyer-12 Winiarski-430 Juster-MacFarlane-27-28">Moyer, p. 12; Winiarski, p. 430; and Susan Juster, Lisa MacFarlane, ''A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism'' (1996), p. 27, and p. 28.</ref> even on legal documents,<ref name="Brekus-85">Catherine A. Brekus, ''Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845'' (2000), p. 85</ref> and insisted on being called by no pronouns. Followers respected these wishes, avoiding gender-specific pronouns even in private diaries, and referring only to "the Public Universal Friend" or short forms such as "the Friend" or "P.U.F."<ref name="Juster-MacFarlane-27-28 Brekus-85 etc">Juster & MacFarlane, ''A Mighty Baptism'', pp. 27-28; Brekus, p. 85</ref> The Friend wore clothing that contemporaries described as androgynous, which were usually black robes. The Friend's followers came to be known as the Society of Universal Friends, and included people who were black, and many unmarried women who took on masculine roles in their communities.<ref name="Lamphier-Welch-331">Peg A. Lamphier, Rosanne Welch, ''Women in American History'' (2017), p. 331.</ref>

 

 

* [[Romaine-la-Prophétesse]] was a leader of a slave uprising in 1791-92, early in the Haitian Revolution, that for a time governed much of southern Haiti, including two major cities. Romaine identified as a prophetess, dressed like a woman, and spoke of being possessed by a female spirit, but also reportedly identified as a godson of the Virgin Mary and used masculine pronouns in self-references in dictated letters; Romaine has therefore been interpreted by modern scholars as perhaps [[genderfluid]]<ref name="R52">Terry Rey, ''The Priest and the Prophetess'' (2017), pp. 52-53</ref> or [[transgender]],<ref name="R52"/><ref name="Albanese">Mary Grace Albanese, "Unraveling the Blood Line: Pauline Hopkins's Haitian Genealogies", in ''J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists'', volume 7, number 2, Fall 2019, p. 234</ref> or might have been [[bigender]].

 

* Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) developed a theory in which men who are attracted to men and women who are attracted to women are thus because they are members of a third sex, a mixture of both male and female, and with the psyche or essence of the "opposite" sex, even though their bodies look like cis-gender male and female bodies. The terms "homosexual," "bisexual," and "heterosexual" didn't exist yet, so he coined terms for them all. The overall phenomenon he called [[Uranismus]] (in the original German, ''Urningtum''), gay men were uranians (German ''urnings''), lesbians were uraniads (German ''urningin'', as ''-in'' is the feminine suffix), whereas heterosexuals were ''Dionings'', so bisexual men were ''uranodionings,'' and so on, all of which were distinct from ''zwitter'' (intersex). Ulrichs based this naming system on "Plato's ''Symposium'', where two different kinds of love [...are] ruled by two different goddesses of love-- Aphrodite, daughter of Uranus, and Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus and Dione. The second Aphrodite rules those who love the opposite sex." <ref>''We are everywhere: A historical sourcebook of gay and lesbian politics.'' P. 61. https://books.google.com/books?id=rDG3xdtDutkC&lpg=PA64&dq=urning&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=urning&f=false [https://web.archive.org/web/20221213084017/https://books.google.com/books?id=rDG3xdtDutkC&lpg=PA64&dq=urning&pg=PA65 Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref> Ulrichs argued that their condition was as natural and healthy as that of what we now call heterosexual people, and he started the movement fighting for their equal legal rights to express their love "between consenting adults, with the free consent of both parties," in his words from 1870, and that they should not be pathologized nor criminalized for doing so.<ref name="UlrichsAraxes">Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, "Araxes: Appeal for the liberation of the urning's nature from penal law." 1870. Excerpt reprinted in: ''We are everywhere: A historical sourcebook of gay and lesbian politics.'' P. 63-65. https://books.google.com/books?id=rDG3xdtDutkC&lpg=PA64&dq=urning&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=urning&f=false [https://web.archive.org/web/20221213084017/https://books.google.com/books?id=rDG3xdtDutkC&lpg=PA64&dq=urning&pg=PA65 Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref>. Although Uranismus was generally addressed in terms of orientation, Ulrichs specifically described various categories of uranians in terms of their gender nonconformity and gender variance. For example, in regard to feminine gay men or queens (who he called ''Weiblings''), Ulrichs wrote in 1879, <blockquote>"The Weibling is a total mixture of male and female, in which the female element is even predominant, a thoroughly hermaphroditically organized being. Despite his male sexual organs, he is more woman than man. He is a woman with male sexual organs. He is a neutral sex. He is a [[neuter]]. He is the hermaphrodite of the ancients."<ref name="UlrichsArrow">Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, "Critical arrow." 1879. Excerpt reprinted in: ''We are everywhere: A historical sourcebook of gay and lesbian politics.'' P. 64-65. https://books.google.com/books?id=rDG3xdtDutkC&lpg=PA64&dq=urning&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=urning&f=false [https://web.archive.org/web/20221213084017/https://books.google.com/books?id=rDG3xdtDutkC&lpg=PA64&dq=urning&pg=PA65 Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref></blockquote>

 

: Ulrichs goes on to say the direct counterpart of the Weibling among those were were assigned female at birth is "the masculine-inspired, woman-loving Mannlingin," who is equally gender-variant.<ref name="UlrichsArrow" /> Ulrichs emphasizes that Uranismus includes gender-variant people, distinct from those who conform from their gender, and also distinct from people born with physical intersex characteristics. As such, Uranismus included people who might today identify as nonbinary.

* The earliest known true [[transsexual]] genital conversion [[surgery]] of any kind was performed in 1882 on a [[Binary genders#Transgender men|trans man]] named Herman Karl.<ref>James Sears, ''Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Issues in Education.'' p. 109. [http://books.google.com/books?id=w7365W7rQKQC&amp;lpg=PA109&amp;ots=gSa98lwR0v&amp;dq=sophia%20hedwig%20transgender%20herman%20karl&amp;pg=PA109#v=onepage&amp;q=sophia%20hedwig%20transgender%20herman%20karl&amp;f=false Google Books link]</ref> However, "earliest transsexual genital conversion surgery" depends on one's definition. [[Eunuch]]s have been around for all of human history, and while many eunuchs consider themselves [[Binary genders#Cisgender men|cisgender men]], many others consider themselves another gender that isn't female or male, such as [[hijra]]. Some sources credit the first trans male genital conversion surgery as, instead, the one performed on a trans man named Michael Dillon in the 1930s, perhaps depending on how one defines that surgery.

=== 1890s === <!--T:34-->

[[File:Autobiography of an Androgyne - The Author—A Modern Living Replica of the Ancient Greek Statue of Hermaphroditos.jpg|thumb|200px|[[Jennie June]] in her autobiography, posing as "A Modern Living Replica of the Ancient Greek Statue of Hermaphroditos." 1918.]]

* During the 1890s, Paresis Hall in New York City was a place with an active nightlife of LGBT people. In 1895, the autobiographer [[Jennie June]] formed an organization called the Cercle Hermaphroditos, along with other [[androgyne]]s like June's self who frequented Paresis Hall. The purpose of the group was to "to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution," and to show that it was natural to be an invert (an LGBT person).<ref>Katz, Jonathan Ned. "Transgender Memoir of 1921 Found". ''Humanities and Social Sciences Online''. N.p., 10 October 2010. Web. Retrieved April 13, 2017.</ref> This is one of the earliest known organizations in the US for LGBT rights.<ref>Gross, Tasha. "LGBTQ History: Cooper Square and Bowery". ''LGBTQ History: Cooper Square and Bowery''. N.p., December 4, 2014. Web. Retrieved April 13, 2017.</ref> <ref name="OutHistory intro">Out History. "Introduction." ''Earl Lind (Raph Werther - Jennie June): The Riddle of the Underworld, 1921.'' October 11, 2010. Retrieved July 2, 2020. https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/earl-lind/intro/intro [https://web.archive.org/web/20230621082140/https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/earl-lind/intro/intro Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref><ref name="Stryker2007">{{Cite web |title=Why the T in LGBT is here to stay |last=Stryker |first=Susan |work=Salon |date=11 October 2007 |access-date=4 July 2020 |url= https://www.salon.com/control/2007/10/11/transgender_2/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221213084016/https://www.salon.com/control/2007/10/11/transgender_2/ |archive-date=17 July 2023 }}</ref>