The struggle to resist colonization and genocide included resistance to the colonizer's efforts to outlaw, punish, and slaughter the Two-Spirits. Feinberg was fascinated with Joan of Arc . Joan's cross-dressing was rooted in her identity. Two hundred years after Joan, a young Basque, Catalina de Erauso, cross-dressed and accompanied the conquistadors, taking part in the slaughter of many native peoples. De Erauso sought, and won, the pope's blessing to continue cross-dressing.
Class plays a large part in transgender history and how transgendered people are perceived.
Before the rise of patriarchy, historical evidence points not just to tolerance but to reverence for those who were different. Rebecca and Her Daughters were 19th-century peasants in Wales, men dressed as women, who smashed toll gates and barriers collecting money from the poor. At Dijon in 1576, Mere Folle and Her Children, again men dressed as women, humiliated the king's grand master of streams and forests in Burgundy both for beating his wife and for destroying, for profit, the forests he was supposed to protect. This militant peasant tradition resisted and withstood the rise of the church and patriarchal, class-based society. Of course, members of the ruling classes could always expect much less punishment than peasants.