Who was the first transgender person?

Who was the first transgender person? – Dexter, age 11, Las Vegas, Nevada

Imagine you have a time machine, and you can travel back to any civilization in history. Maybe you’d go back to ancient Athens, or to a monastery in the Middle Ages. Or you could mingle with Hittite warriors before battle in Bronze Age Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.

In all of these times and places, you’d see differences between people that you would understand as men and women, generally speaking. You’d see a variety of clothing, hairstyles, body shapes and other indicators of gender in these different cultures.

But if you asked anyone you met in these time periods what is essential to being a man or a woman, or whether a man could become a woman and vice versa, or whether there was any kind of human besides men and women, you’d get different answers depending on whom you asked.

And not only would a medieval monk in the 13th century respond differently from a Hittite warrior from 2,500 years earlier, but even within a single city, people with different jobs, social roles or ways of thinking might answer differently.

The interesting thing is that wherever there is evidence of gender boundaries in ancient societies, there is evidence of people crossing those boundaries. In fact, as long as there have been humans, there have been people whom we would call transgender today.

We are both teachers of classics, the study of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Nick specializes in ancient Greek mathematics and science, and Ky specializes in the history of gender and gender categories in Greece and Rome. So we will focus mainly on ancient Greece and the regions near it as we consider trans people from past civilizations.

Defining the terms

Just because people’s ability to cross, blur or redefine the boundaries of gender has been around since ancient times doesn’t mean ancient people would understand the term “transgender” as people do today. In today’s language, this word refers to someone who was labeled as either a boy or a girl when they were born, but later decided that they were not what they were labeled as.

Along with that definition comes a whole set of ideas about what it means to be a boy or a girl in the first place. The shape of your body, the hormones inside it, which chromosomes you have and how all of that affects how you behave and how other people treat you – these have all become part of people’s notion of “gender” now.

But before hormones were discovered in 1849 and DNA was discovered in 1869, people thought about gender – and therefore being transgender – pretty differently.

Gender in antiquity

Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who wrote in the fourth century B.C.E., distinguished men and women in part by how much heat and moisture they supposedly have in their bodies.

Meanwhile, Isaeus, a Greek lawyer from around that same time, described men and women according to their different privileges under the law.

But there were always groups of people who didn’t easily fit into these categories. Ancient authors used many different words for these people, such as hermaphrodite, eunuch, androgyne, tribad, malthakos and others. Many of these terms were meant as insults and were – and remain today – tremendously rude, but others reflect the bewilderment of trying to categorize people who don’t fit into standard categories easily.

In the fifth century B.C.E., two Greek authors – Herodotus, known as the father of history, and Hippocrates, the father of medicine – wrote about people they call Anarieis from Scythia, a vast ancient territory to the north and west of the Black Sea that today would be part of Ukraine and Russia. Their descriptions of the Anarieis’ gender are similar to the way many people describe trans women today. Their accounts are supported by what we know about Scythia and Anarieis from anthropologists and archaeologists today.

Going back to the Stone Age

And you can find evidence of trans people even further back in history. In March 2026, archaeologists published a study of 125 burials from a Stone Age civilization in modern-day Hungary. Their study shows that even 7,000 years ago, people could cross gender boundaries.

The archaeologists used DNA evidence and the shapes of skeletons to make their best guess as to what gender most of these Stone Age people would have been assigned if they had been born in the modern era. They labeled 64 females and 52 males.

Overall, an examination of the skeletons showed a clear difference between how the skeletons labeled as females and those labeled males lived, worked and were buried. But a few of the skeletons had lived, worked and been buried in a way opposite to the gender that the archaeologists had assigned them. One skeleton that archaeologists had marked female, for example, was buried with stone tools that otherwise went with the skeletons labeled as male, and it showed stress injuries more similar to the “male” skeletons than to the other “female” ones.

So have these archaeologists found a 7,000-year-old trans man? Well, that depends. It’s impossible to say for certain how that Stone Age person understood gender or their own place in society. It’s hard to look back in 2026 and say whether they felt or were treated the same as the men whom they seem to have worked alongside.

But looking at what anthropologists do know of this society, there were normal lifestyles for each gender, and this person didn’t follow the normal route. That’s something that most trans people can recognize and relate to. So even though it’s impossible to know how this person would self-describe, our modern idea of transgender is big enough to include them.

All this is to say that no one will ever know who the first trans person was, because there was never just one. There were people we would now call trans in ancient Egypt, Imperial China and among the Mayans. Trans people were then, as they always have been, part of the human community.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Ky Merkley, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Nick Winters, Northwestern University

Read more:

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• A trans soldier in the ancient Roman army?
• Why do my fingers go wrinkly in the bath?

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.