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Have transsexual people always existed?
This is an impossible question to answer because of
the concept of a transsexual as a distinct type of
person has had currency only since the latter half
of the 20th Century. Perhaps there have always been
people who, if they lived today, would call
themselves transsexual and would request sex
reassignment. Perhaps there have been people in
other times and place who would have said that they
felt "trapped" in a body of the wrong sex. We can
only speculate on the basis of the very incomplete
historical record available to us today.
The issue becomes especially
difficult when the question is narrowed to focus
specifically on female-to-male (FTM) transsexuals.
The lives of women throughout history have been
less well recorded than those of men. The reasons
for this are myriad and have been well argued by
historians of women. Sexism must be attributed with
the lion's share of responsibility for this
silence, but a long tradition of a lack of regard
for the social history of everyday life must also
be held accountable.1
The few stories which survive from antiquity have
largely been in the form of myth, some of which may
have been embellished from fact. The surviving
accounts of females who lived some parts of their
lives as men in the centuries between the time of
the ancients and now have been recorded largely
because those female were somehow publicly
chastised for living as men. For each person who
was found out, there were no doubt many more whose
gender transformations were never discovered.
I have searched for predecessors of today's
female-to-male transsexuals in historical records
of females who lived their lives as men. Some of
them left behind indications of their motivations.
Others were discovered to be female on the
occasions of their deaths, and so we may only guess
as to the reasons for recasting themselves so
successfully as men. Even so, those who went on
record explaining their reasons for passing as men
usually were doing so as part of some sort of legal
defense. The price of answers unacceptable to the
authorities of their day was often high; sometimes
the accused paid with their lives. Hence even what
we know from those persons who were able to voice
reasons for the transformations may tell us more
about what they thought would be acceptable to the
authorities of their day than about their own
actual motivations.
It is therefore crucial to have some
understanding of what gender meant to players in
their particular time periods. The bifurcated
concept of gender that the Western world holds dear
today and upon which the definition of
transsexualism is based has not always been
ascribed to by the people whom the West claims as
cultural ancestors. This means that although we may
be tempted to retrospectively name behaviours by
today's standards, if we wish to begin to
understand their meanings for those who lived them,
we must peer at them through the lenses of their
times as best we are able.
I have chosen to cite, as the precursors of
today's female-to-male transsexuals, those
female-bodied persons of other times and place who
live at least several years of their lives as men.
I have included in this catchment those who would
today be called heterosexual, lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgendered crossdressers. I have
also included those who, by the standards of their
day, might have been attributed with "slight"
hermaphroditism but who would probably not be so
designated today. I have therefore included female
crossdressers of other cultures who took on many of
the characteristics of the men of their society but
who may or may not have felt the need, as do
transsexuals of today, to be considered to have
become males as well as men. By modern definitions,
probably only some would be classified as
transsexual, while in their own worlds they may
well have been afforded the full social status of
men.
I have, for the most part, restricted my
investigations to people of Western European
extraction and those whom they claim as ancestors.
I have therefore included discussion of the female
cross-gender practices of Greeks and Romans of the
classical period, ancient Hebrews, and early
Christians. This discussion is followed with tales
of early Christian cross-dressing saints who lived
during the classical period. The next section looks
at the medieval period in Western Europe. The
sixteenth and seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth,
and early twentieth centuries are then reviewed. I
have closed my investigation in the 1950s, when the
case of Christine Jorgensen was splashed across the
headlines of newspapers in Europe and North America
and brought transsexualism to the attention of the
general public. I have also noted some of the
female cross-gender practices of the Native peoples
of North America and briefly mentioned those of
some African and Asian cultural groups which have
either influenced or been influenced by Western
European culture.
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Footnotes
1. Gerda Lerner,
"Reconceptualizing Differences among Women," in
Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical
Accounts of the Relations between Women and
Men, 3d ed., ed. Alison M. Jagger and Paula S.
Rothenberg (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), pp. 237 -
248. back
Citation
— Devor, A.H. (1997) FTM: Female-to-Male
Transsexuals in Society,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Have
Female-to-Male Transsexuals always existed? pp
3 - 36.
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