page_title: History of transgender people in the United States
section_title: Prior to 1800
hierarchical_section_title: History of transgender people in the United States / Overview / Prior to 1800
caption_attribution_description: English: A Lithogram of Mary Jones, a transgender prostitute charged with stealing wallets of men she engaged in sexual acts with, drawn by H.R. Johnson
context_page_description: European transgender people have been present in the land now known as the United States at least since the early 1600s. Before Western contact, some Native American tribes had third gender people whose social roles varied from tribe to tribe. People dressing and living differently from their sex assignment at birth and contributing to various aspects of American history and culture have been documented from the 17th century to the present day. In the 20th and 21st centuries, advances in sex reassignment surgery as well as transgender activism have influenced transgender life and the popular perception of transgender people in the United States.
context_section_description: Some Native American Nations have longstanding names and roles for gender-variant or third-gender people. These roles only tend to exist in cultures that have rigid gender roles, which is usually only seen in patriachal communities. The term two-spirit, which is now retroactively used to describe these historical roles, was only created in 1990 at the Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg, and "specifically chosen to distinguish and distance Native American/First Nations people from non-Native peoples." The primary purpose of coining a new term was to encourage the replacement of the outdated and considered offensive, anthropological term, berdache, which appears in anthropological accounts. While this new term has not been universally accepted—it has been criticized by traditional communities who already have their own terms for the people being grouped under this new term, and by those who reject what they call the "western" binary implications, such as implying that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female"—it has generally received more acceptance and use than the anthropological term it replaced.
  One of the first documented inhabitants of the American colonies to challenge binary gender roles was Thomas(ine) Hall, a servant who, in the 1620s, alternately dressed in both men's and women's clothing. Hall is likely to have been intersex, and was ordered by the Virginia court to wear both a man's breeches and a woman's apron and cap at the same time.
  In 1776, the Public Universal Friend reported being genderless (neither male nor female), dressed androgynously, and asked the followers they gained while preaching throughout New England over the next four decades not to refer to them by their birth name or gendered pronouns. Some scholars have viewed them as outside the gender binary, and as a chapter in trans history "before [the word] 'transgender'".
  Generally, according to Genny Beemyn in a Transgender History of the United States, the few historical accounts of transgender people that exist in early American history are of female to male transgender people, possibly because it was more difficult for male to female people to successfully present as women before the advent of sex-reassignment surgery and hormone treatments. One example she cites is Mary Henly, a female-assigned individual in Massachusetts who was charged with illegally wearing men's clothing in 1692 because it was "seeming to confound the course of nature."
caption: Lithogram of Mary Jones drawn by H.R. Robinson in 1836.
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