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https://theconversation.com/who-was-the-first-transgender-person-276482>
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."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics