History of nonbinary gender: Difference between revisions
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==Wanted events in this time-line== | ==Wanted events in this time-line== | ||
Revision as of 21:51, 25 September 2019
And I oop.
Wanted events in this time-line
Please help fill out this time-line if you can add information of these kinds:
- Events in the movement for keeping the genders of babies undisclosed.
- Events concerning nonbinary celebrities, and historical persons who clearly stated they were neither female nor male, or both, or androgynes, etc.
- Skim nonbinary blogs looking for past and current historical events.
- Events that show that transgender and especially nonbinary gender identities existed long before the twentieth century.
- Changes in the use of gendered versus gender-neutral language.
Antiquity
- 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.[1][2][3]
- In ancient Egypt (Middle Kingdom, 2000-1800 BCE), there were said to be three genders of humans: men, sekhet (sht), and women, in that order. Sekhet is usually translated as "eunuch," but that's probably an oversimplification of what this gender category means, especially because there is no certain record of "eunuchs" having been castrated in ancient Egypt. It may also mean cisgender gay men, in the sense of not having children, and not necessarily someone who was castrated.[4][5][6][7]
- Many cultures and ethnic groups have concepts of traditional gender-variant roles, with a history of them going back to antiquity. For example, Hijra and Two-Spirit. 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.
Eleventh century
- 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."[8][9] Wæpen-wifestre is known to be a synonym for "scrat" (intersex).[10] 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.[11] The related word bæddling was used in eleventh-century laws for men who had sex with men in a receptive role.[9] 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 contemporary to Beowulf.
Seventeenth century
- A blog post by the Merriam Webster dictionary editors says, "In the 17th century, English laws concerning inheritance sometimes referred to people who didn’t fit a gender binary using the pronoun it, which, while deh