History of nonbinary gender
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Gender variance has a long history 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 binary, irrespective of how it's called.
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]
The word "sekhet" in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.[4]
- Writings from ancient Egypt (Middle Kingdom, 2000-1800 BCE) said there were three genders of humans: male (tie), sekhet (sht), and female (hemet), in that order. Sekhet is usually translated as "eunuch," but that's probably an oversimplification of what this gender category means. Since it was given that level of importance, it could potentially be an entire category of gender/sex variance that doesn't fit into male or female. The hieroglyphs for sekhet include a sitting figure that usually mean a man, but the word doesn't include hieroglyphs that refer to genitals in any way. The word for male did include a hieroglyph explicitly showing a penis. At the very least, sekhet is likely to mean cisgender gay men, in the sense of not having children, and not necessarily someone who was castrated. Archaeologists question whether ancient Egyptians castrated humans, because the evidence for it is lacking.[5][6][7][8]
- Many cultures and ethnic groups have concepts of 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,[9] and mare's urine as an oestrogen, much as is used in the modern oestrogen medication, Premarin.[10] 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.[11] As far back as the 1st century CE, classical Judaism has recognized six genders/sexes, with distinct prohibitions for each.[12]
Eleventh century
- 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."[13][14] Wæpen-wifestre is known to be a synonym for "scrat" (inter