If you listen to modern conservative rhetoric, you would think trans people didn't exist until political parties "created" us. Opponents use clinical-sounding terms like "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" to make it seem like our existence is a recent phenomenon or a social fad. But we have been here since the beginning of history; the proof is written in our languages and buried in our earth.
Our ancestors didn't just tolerate us; they named us. In the Americas, we are the Two-Spirit, the Nádleehí (Navajo), the Winkté (Lakota), the Muxe (Zapotec), and the Machi (Mapuche). In Asia and the Pacific, we are known as the Hijra of India, the Māhū of Hawaii, the Fa'afafine of Samoa, and the Bissu of Indonesia. Across Africa and Europe, history remembers the Sekrata of Madagascar, the Ashtime of Ethiopia, and the Burrnesha of the Balkans. These aren't new labels; they are ancient titles of respect. Then the religious fanatics came!
Science is finally catching up to our stories. From the Code of Hammurabi in Babylon to 7,000-year-old graves where individuals were buried according to their lived identity rather than their biological sex, the "clues" are everywhere. As recent studies of Neolithic cemeteries show, ancient societies were already experiencing the complexity of identities long before the modern world tried to simplify them.
Medium writes that,
Somewhere along the way, we forgot that queer identities were never foreign to us. They were woven into our culture long before anyone imagined the modern world. The Hijra were being written out of history...[...]The rewriting of this acceptance did not originate within India.It arrived with colonialism.In my view, the British brought a strict, Victorian sense of morality to India, uncomfortable with sexuality. I feel some colonial translators let this shape their interpretations of Sanskrit texts, turning nuanced ideas into rigid binaries.This colonial filter turned indigenous acceptance into taboo. It replaced thousands of years of cultural complexity with shame.
This colonial "cleansing" continues today. It is not just conservative Christians in the U.S. using religious rhetoric to target us; we see the same patterns globally, such as the persecution of the Bissu by religious extremists in Indonesia. The draconian laws being passed across the United States today are part of a long, dark history of attempting to eradicate us from public life. But you cannot eradicate a people who have been a part of the human fabric for 7,000 years.
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