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“Understanding naturally gender diverse history inocculates us from being deceived by neo-fascist, genocidal theocrats and authoritarians.”
Jenn Burleton
Human history, which of course includes Indigenous history, is far older, richer, and more globally diverse than most contemporary narratives suggest. Long before modern medicine, psychology, or identity language existed, cultures around the world recognized and made space for gender-diverse people, often embedding them in leadership positions, spiritual, social, and artistic life.
The last 150 years have been uniquely transformative: with rising sexological, endocrinological, psychological, and surgical innovation reshaping how Westernized societies understand gender; new legal and political frameworks emerged; and trans+ people themselves built communities, clinics, advocacy networks, and cultural movements that redefined public awareness.
This deeper dive examines these independent and intertwined histories—cultural, medical, intellectual, and political—to show how gender identities. expressions and experiences have evolved across time. It highlights the continuity of gender diversity throughout all human history, and the profound changes brought by modern science, activism, and social movements.
Ancient history is the study of human societies from the invention of writing and the emergence of early states (around c. 3000 BCE) to the fall or transformation of major classical civilizations (commonly placed between c. 500–800 CE, depending on the region).
Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have long and complex relationships with scientific thought. Much of the time, they coexist or even reinforce each other, but certain points of conflict emerge due to differences in method, authority, and worldview.
Non-textual history refers to the ways human societies record, preserve, and transmit their past without relying on written documents. Instead of written texts, these cultures use a wide range of expressive, material, and performative methods to carry historical knowledge across generations.
These Indigenous forms of record-keeping are not “primitive” or “less historical”; they are alternative historical technologies that have shaped complex civilizations worldwide.
For cultures and societies that (eventually) adopted written language, the term pre-textual history refers to all periods before the existence of their written records.
For those same cultures and societies, post-textual history begins the moment they produce written documentation—inscriptions, chronicles, letters, legal codes, medical texts, diaries, or bureaucratic records.
A Eurocentric (or Colonizing) framing of history is a way of interpreting the past that places Europe—its people, cultures, values, institutions, and historical experiences—at the center of human history. It prioritizes Euro-Middle Eastern pre-textual cultures and those that later developed written language over Indigenous cultures that did not develop written language, and treats European developments as the norm, the standard, or the most important story, while portraying the rest of the world as peripheral, derivative, or “waiting” to encounter Europe.