Gateways:

Eurocentric & Indigenous Knowledge

An Introduction

Eurocentric History

The imposition of Eurocentric history on colonized cultures and societies established a “civilized vs. uncivilized” binary that supported and enforced colonialist, imperialist, and racist hierarchies while simultaneously misrepresenting (and attempting to erase) more ancient and enduring African, Indigenous, and Asian understandings of intercultural trade, science, agriculture, and social development/structure.

Modern Eurocentric (19th-century forward) trans+ history traces the emergence, visibility, and evolving social, medical, and political understandings of gender diversity from the 1850s CE to the present. While gender-diverse people have existed in every culture throughout recorded history, the recent era marks a shift in how Western societies conceptualize, categorize, legalize (or make illegal), and respond to people whose gender identities and expression may not align with the gender role they were assigned at birth.

Impactful developments include anthropological discoveries related to evolution, and emerging science that replaced mythological beliefs about the origins of human sexual and identity variations in the fields of sociology, sexology, genetics, endocrinology, psychology, and psychiatry, all of which contributed to a rise in global human rights movements.

Read below for modern Eurocentric knowledge systems.

Indigenous History

Some Indigenous cultures developed their own writing (textual) systems long before European arrival, others in the 18th–20th centuries, often for political, cultural, or religious mobilization.

Learn More: Written History

A majority of Indigenous cultures throughout history never developed written language, relying instead on non-textual systems for recording events, such as:

Oral Tradition
Memory Specialists,
Mnemonics
Material Symbols
Cosmology, and
Ritual Transmission

Learn More: Non-Textual History

Definitions of Terminology):

Oral Tradition

The collective body of cultural knowledge—stories, histories, songs, teachings, genealogies, rituals, instructions, and explanations—that is preserved and transmitted by speaking, reciting, performing, or singing, often across many generations.

Memory Specialist

A community-designated knowledge keeper responsible for preserving, transmitting, and interpreting the collective memory of a people.

Custodian of Ancestral Knowledge
Practitioner of Mnemonic Systems
Embodied/Performative Transmission

Mnemonics

Memory aids—strategies, techniques, or tools that help people remember information more easily. They work by connecting new information to something more familiar, vivid, or structured, making it easier for the brain to store and recall.

Material Symbols

Physical objects, forms, or visual motifs created, used, or maintained by Indigenous peoples that carry culturally specific meaning, often relating to identity, cosmology, social structure, ancestry, land relationships, or spiritual practices.

Cosmology

The ways Indigenous peoples understand the origins, structure, and ongoing relationships of the universe encompassing the sky, the earth, the living world, the spirit world, and humanity’s place within these interconnected systems. Not a “belief system” in the Western sense; it is a living, relational, land-based framework that shapes ethics, knowledge, identity, and community life.

Indigenous cosmology is not hierarchical in that humans are not placed above nature, but have interwoven relationships with animals, plants, water, land, and non-human entities.

Ritual Transmission

Indigenous ritual transmission is the culturally specific process by which Indigenous communities preserve, teach, adapt, and enact ceremonial knowledge across generations. It involves relational, embodied, and often sacred forms of learning that maintain continuity with ancestral traditions while allowing for culturally guided change. This transmission typically occurs through oral teachings, lived participation, observation, mentorship by elders or ritual specialists, and the fulfillment of family or clan responsibilities.

Indigenous ritual transmission sustains cultural identity, preserves ecological and cosmological knowledge, strengthens community cohesion, and protects traditions from loss, appropriation, or dilution.

Anthropology

Before the 1850s, humans were understood to be individually created by a “Supreme Being”, and part of a “Divine Order”.

In 1858, the discovery in Brixham Cave (England) of paleolithic human bones mixed with bones of animal species which existed before Biblical (Bishop James Ussher) timelines, created conflict between theological and scientific human origin stories.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which remains the best evidence-based explanation that evolution (not “divine intervention”) established the diversity and complexity of life forms.
These discoveries opened the door to further inquiry into human behavior, without the frame of religious morality or ‘divine intent’.

Sociology, Psychology, and Psychiatry

In 1838, Auguste Comte coined the term “sociologie” to describe the study of social structures.
Sociologist Emile Durkheim believed sexual regulation was necessary to the health of society.
In the 1950s, John Money introduced the concept of gender and gender role assignment as aspects of the human experience.
Robert Stoller is credited with coining the term gender identity in 1964. His 1968 book Sex and Gender was highly influential in establishing the pathologizing and gatekeeping model of transsexual/transgender care from the 1970s to the present day.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, psychiatrist and lawyer Richard Green helped professionalize, legitimize, and defend the clinical treatment of gender dysphoria. Green co-wrote Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment with John Hoopes in 1969.

Genetics & Endocrinology

In 1891, Hermann Henking discovered something he called the “X element”, a chromosome that “exists in males but not in females”.
In 1902-1903, C.E. McClung incorrectly argues that Henking’s “X element” is related to maleness. He’s close, but his conclusion is backwards.
In 1905, Nettie Stevens discovered the Y chromosome and the XX/XY system of biological sex differentiation. She is the first to identify that sex is determined genetically correctly.
In 1907, Harry Benjamin met Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin, which started his lifelong interest in the study of gender dysphoria.
In 1923, Edgar Allen and Edward Doisy identified and isolated the estrogenic sex hormone estrone, and later isolated the more potent estradiol.
In 1931, Adolf Butenandt purified androsterone, the first androgen (sex hormone) to be identified.
Progesterone, the hormone essential for preparing the uterus for pregnancy and early gestation, was discovered by Willard Allen and George Corner in 1934.
In 1935, testosterone was isolated and synthesised by Adolf Butenandt, Leopold Ruzicka, and Ernst Laqueur.
Links between prenatal hormone production and absorption and Intersex variations were discovered in the 1920s-1940s.
Estrogen and testosterone hormone therapies were first used to treat Intersex people and transsexuals in the 1930s-1940s.

Sexology

Sexology emerged as a distinct field in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the intersection of medicine, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and later endocrinology and genetics.

In 1864, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published Inclusa, which explored the concept of a “female psyche in a male body”, an early inquiry into gender variance.
In 1867, he became one of the first people to speak publicly in defense of homosexual rights in Germany. He called for recognition that same-sex attraction is both natural and moral.
In 1869, Ulrichs published Prometheus, in which he proposed a structured political movement for the rights of homosexuals, predating LGBTQ+ activism by almost a century.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886, the first major medical classification of sexual behavior.
In 1900, Havelock Ellis published Volume 2 of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which focused on “Sexual Inversion”, and it became the first English medical textbook on homosexuality, a term coined in 1868 by author Karl-Maria Kertbeny. Ellis was one of the first researchers to treat sexuality as natural and non-pathological.
In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the world’s first LGBTQ+ rights organization. In 1919, he established the Institute for Sexual Science, the first sexology research facility.
Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.

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