History of nonbinary gender

This article on the history of nonbinary gender should focus on events directly or indirectly concerning people with nonbinary gender identities. It should not be about LGBT history in general. However, this history will likely need to give dates for a few events about things other than nonbinary gender, such as major events that made more visibility of transgender people in general, gender variant people from early history who may or may not have been what we think of as nonbinary, and laws that concern intersex people that can also have an effect on the legal rights of nonbinary people.

Content warnings: This history may need to talk about some troubling events that could have been traumatic for some readers. Some historical quotes use language that is now seen as offensive.

Tips

Here are some tips for writing respectfully about historical gender variant people whose actual preferred names, pronouns, and gender identities might not be known.

• Dead names. It is disrespectful to call a transgender person by their former name ("dead name") rather than the name that they chose for themself. Some consider their dead name a secret that shouldn't be put in public at all. For living transgender people in particular, this history should show only their chosen names, not their dead names. In this history, some deceased historical transgender persons may have their birth names shown in addition to their chosen names, in cases where it is not known which name they preferred, or where it is otherwise impossible to find information about that person, if one wants to research their history. This should be written in the form of "Chosen Name (née Birth Name)." If history isn't sure which name that person earnestly preferred, write it in the form of "Name, or Other Name."
• Pronouns. It is disrespectful to call a person by pronouns other than those that they ask for. Some historical persons whose preferred pronouns aren't known should be called here by no pronouns. If this isn't possible, they pronouns.
• Words for a person's gender, assigned and otherwise. It is disrespectful to label a person's gender otherwise than they ask for, but it's not always possible to do so. In the case of some historical people, history has recorded how they lived, and what gender they were assigned at birth, but not how they preferred to label their gender identity. For example, it's not known whether certain historical people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) lived as men because they identified as men (were transgender men), or because it was the only way to have a career in that time and place (and were gender non-conforming cisgender women). This should be mentioned in the more respectful form of, for example, "assigned male at birth (AMAB), lived as a woman," rather than "really a man, passed as a woman." For another example, writing "a military doctor discovered Smith was AFAB" is more respectful than saying "a military doctor discovered Smith was really a woman." For people who lived before the word "transgender" was created, it may be more suitable to call them "gender variant" rather than "transgender." On the other hand, if we have enough information about such a person, we may do best by such people by describing them with the terminology that they most likely would have used for their gender identity if they lived in the present day, with our language.

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.
• 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. It may also mean cisgender gay men, in the sense of not having children, and not necessarily someone who was castrated.
• 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.

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 dehumanizing, was conceived of as being the most grammatically fit answer to gendered pronouns around then." This is an example of people being considered legally outside of male and female. Editors at this wiki would appreciate more information and sources about the laws in question, their dates, and what categories of people they referred to. (Unborn children? Intersex people? People who didn't conform to gender norms?)

Eighteenth century

• "Singular they" had already been the standard 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 "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun. This started the dispute over the problem of acceptable gender-neutral pronouns in English, which has carried on for centuries now.
• Jens Andersson was a nonbinary person in Norway, who married a woman in 1781. It was soon discovered that Andersson had a female body, and the marriage was annulled, while Andersson was accused of sodomy. In the trial, Andersson was asked: "Are you a man or a woman?" It was recorded that the answer was that "he thinks he may be both".[1]

Nineteenth century

• The earliest known true transsexual genital conversion surgery of any kind was performed in 1882 on a trans man named Herman Karl. However, "earliest transsexual genital conversion surgery" depends on one's definition. Eunuchs have been around for all of human history, and while many eunuchs consider themselves 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.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), who described "a neutral sex" that was not physically intersex.

• 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 normal 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, and so on. 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." 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.. 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,

  "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."

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. 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.

• Clinical beliefs around the time of the 1890s "conflat[ed] sex, sexual orientation, and gender expression," thinking of (to use modern words for them) gay, lesbian, transgender, and gender non-conforming people as all having some kind of intersex condition. Such people were said to have "sexual inversion," and were called "inverts."
• "In 1895, a group of self-described 'androgynes' in New York organized a 'little club called the Cercle Hermaphroditos, based on their self-perceived need 'to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution.'" This group included people who, in today's words, may have called themselves cross-dressers and transgender people.

Twentieth century

In 1933, Nazis in Berlin burned works by leftists and other authors considered "un-German", including thousands of books looted from the library of Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research.

• During the 1910s, German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld created the word "transvestite," which at the time meant many more kinds of transgender and even transsexual people. Hirschfeld opened the first clinic to regularly serve them. Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research had a library of literature about LGBT people, collected from all over Europe, that couldn't be found anywhere else. This started to bring about a revolution in how society understood and accepted LGBT people, and allowing children to be gender nonconforming. Then, in 1933, the Nazis destroyed it all. This set back LGBT rights for another 40 or so years. The progress wasn't matched again until at least 1990.
• In autobiographical writings from 1918 and 1922, Jennie June (née Earl Lind) described herself as a "fairie" and "androgyne."

1960s

• Although the earliest known recorded mention of the gender-neutral title Mx was in a magazine article in 1977, anecdotes say it was in use as far back as 1965.

1970s

• During the 1970s and 1980s, feminists Casey Miller and Kate Swift were significant influences on encouraging people to take up gender inclusive language, as an alternative to sexist language that excludes or dehumanizes women. Some of their books on this are Words and Women (1976) and The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing (1980). They also said to use gender neutral pronouns."
• In 1979, cisgender woman Janice Raymond wrote the book Transsexual Empire, which told cisgender women to fear trans women. As a result, many feminist and women-only spaces became hostile to trans women. This dividing issue made it difficult for feminism to develop an understanding of transgender issues in general. In response, the movement of transgender studies began with an essay by trans woman Sandy Stone in 1987.

1980s

• In the 1980s, the handbook of psychiatry, the DSM-III, included "Gender Identity Disorder" to diagnose people as transsexual. It frames being trans as a strictly pathological mental condition. Getting this diagnosis becomes a necessary step for many trans people to transition. Psychologists during this time believed that a legitimately trans person needed to conform very closely to the gender binary, and even needed to be heterosexual. The psychologists focused on trans women, and isolated them from one another, so they had little community. Meanwhile, trans men got less help from that system, and so they largely left it and formed their own communities.
• In the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Spivak used a set of gender-neutral "E, Emself" pronouns in his math books, in order to avoid indicating a person's gender. The same or similar pronoun had been coined independently by others in prior years. Due to how Spivak popularized these particular pronouns, these soon became known as "spivak pronouns" when they were built into a place where people talked together on the Internet.

1990s

• In 1990, the Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian conference chooses Two-Spirit as a better English umbrella term for some gender identities unique to Native American cultures, many of which can be considered as outside of the Western gender binary.
• In 1994, Kate Bornstein, who currently identifies as nonbinary, published the book Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, about hir experience as a transgender person identifying outside of the gender binary.
• In 1995, a neutrois person named H. A. Burnham creates the word "neutrois," a name for a nonbinary gender identity.
• The earliest known use of the word "genderqueer" is by Riki Anne Wilchins in the Spring 1995 newsletter of Transexual Menace.
• In the late 1990s, people in Japan who identified as neither male nor female began calling themselves X-gender.

Twenty-first century

A Pakistani hijra at a protest between two hijra groups from Islamabad and Rawalpindi. 2008.

Asia's first gender queer pride parade in Madurai, 2012.

Two-spirited pride marchers at San Francisco Pride 2014.

2000s

• Australian Alex MacFarlane believed to be the first person in Australia to obtain a birth certificate recording sex as indeterminate, and the first Australian passport with an "X" sex marker. Australia began to let people mark their gender as "X" on their birth certificates and passports.

2010s

2013

• A newer version of the handbook of psychiatry, the DSM-5, replaces the "gender identity disorder" diagnosis with "gender dysphoria," to lessen the pathologization of transgender people.

2014

• The social networking site Facebook began to let users to choose from 50 gender options.
• The transgender community on the social networking site Tumblr created hundreds of nounself pronouns.

2015

• Dictionary.com put in the nonbinary gender words agender, bigender, and genderfluid. Meanwhile, the Oxford English Dictionary announced that it might add the title Mx.
• One of Irish broadcaster RTE’s best-known journalists, Jonathan Rachel Clynch, came out as genderfluid.
• Singer, songwriter, and actor Miley Cyrus explained she didn't relate to being a girl or a boy.

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Timeline of LGBT history
• Wikipedia: History of transgenderism in the United States
• Wikipedia: Timeline of intersex history
• Wikipedia: Intersex in history