Gender-nonconforming people, third-gender categories, and lives lived outside the male-female binary are documented across cultures and throughout recorded history. The specific term 'gender identity' as a psychological construct is newer, developed in clinical literature in the 1960s. The existence of the phenomenon is ancient; the vocabulary we use to describe it is not. Those are different claims, and they are worth keeping separate.
What I said, and where I was imprecise
In a conversation with Kellie-Jay Keen on Trigonometry, I said that trans identity has "always existed." I meant it, and I stand by the core of it, but I said it in a way that blurred two distinct things, and that blurring is worth correcting, not because the underlying point is wrong, but because a precise version of it is stronger and harder to dismiss.
What is ancient is the phenomenon: people who live outside the sex categories assigned to them at birth, who occupy recognised third-gender roles, who are understood by their communities as something other than simply male or female. What is newer is the specific psychological vocabulary: 'gender identity' as a clinical construct, the terminology we now use in medicine and law, the framework developed in Western clinical literature from the 1960s onwards. Conflating those two things gives critics an easy target. Keeping them separate makes the argument more honest, and more robust.
What the historical and anthropological record actually shows
The evidence for gender diversity across history is not thin. It is extensive, and it comes from many independent sources across cultures that had no contact with one another.
In South Asia, the hijra community has been documented for centuries, occupying a recognised social and spiritual role that sits outside the male-female binary. In many Indigenous North American nations, two-spirit people have held specific cultural, ceremonial, and social roles, long predating European colonisation and the vocabulary colonisers brought with them. In ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Akkadian texts describe individuals who fit neither standard gender category and who held particular temple roles. In ancient Rome, the Galli, priests of the goddess Cybele, lived in ways that, by any modern reading, would be described as gender-nonconforming. In Polynesian cultures, the Māhū of Hawaii and Tahiti, recognised for centuries as a third gender, occupied roles in teaching, healing, and spiritual practice.
These are not isolated examples. They appear across continents, across millennia, in cultures with entirely different social structures, religious frameworks, and understandings of the body. The consistency is striking. You do not get this kind of cross-cultural, cross-historical pattern from a modern ideology or a social contagion.
Where the historians' debate actually sits
Historians and anthropologists do debate this territory, and they are right to. The debate is not about whether gender-nonconforming people existed across history: that is not seriously contested. The debate is about something more specific and more interesting: how far can we map our current psychological and social frameworks onto historical practices that developed in entirely different cultural contexts?
When a Roman source describes the Galli, or when a colonial-era account describes a two-spirit person, those accounts come filtered through the biases, assumptions, and categories of whoever wrote them. The people being described would not have had access to the vocabulary we use today, and they would not necessarily have understood themselves in the terms we now apply. That is a real methodological problem, and it deserves honest acknowledgement.
But noticing that problem is different from concluding that gender diversity is therefore a modern invention. The careful historian's position is something like: we can be confident that people who lived outside standard gender categories existed; we should be careful about assuming they would have understood themselves exactly as a trans person today understands themselves. That is a position about the limits of historical interpretation, not a position that casts doubt on whether the people existed.
The vocabulary is new. The phenomenon is not.
Robert Stoller and John Money developed the clinical concept of 'gender identity' in the 1960s. Before that, the specific psychological framework we now use did not exist in clinical literature. This is simply true, and it is worth saying clearly rather than hedging it.
But this is the point that matters: phenomena do not require modern vocabulary in order to exist. People experienced what we now call depression for the whole of human history without the word, or the diagnostic framework, or the neurological understanding. People formed what we now call same-sex relationships in every recorded culture, long before 'homosexuality' was coined as a term in the nineteenth century. The arrival of vocabulary tells us about the history of the disciplines that produced it. It tells us very little about when the human experiences those disciplines eventually described first appeared.
The same is true here. Gender-nonconforming people existed. Third-gender roles existed. Lives lived outside the binary existed. The clinical vocabulary that now describes these realities is about sixty years old. These are compatible facts.
Why the distinction matters politically
It matters because the argument "gender identity is a modern construct" is sometimes deployed to imply that trans people themselves are a modern invention, a product of social media, ideology, or clinical overreach. That implication is what I was pushing back against when I said it has "always existed," and I was right to push back. I was just less precise than I should have been.
The precise version of the pushback is this: the clinical vocabulary is recent; the human reality it describes is not. Pointing to when the term 'gender identity' was coined does not tell you anything reliable about when trans and gender-nonconforming people began to exist, any more than pointing to when the word 'depression' was coined tells you when people first experienced profound sadness.
Critics who want to argue that trans identity is culturally manufactured need to account for the Hijra, the Māhū, the two-spirit traditions, the Galli, the documented third-gender categories in Mesopotamian texts. These are not Western constructs. They did not emerge from Twitter or from the Tavistock. They predate the clinical vocabulary by centuries or millennia.
What this means for how we talk about it
I think the honest, careful position is this: gender-nonconforming people, third-gender categories, and lives lived outside the binary are ancient and cross-cultural. The specific psychological framework we now use to understand and describe these lives is a twentieth-century development. Historians rightly debate the limits of applying modern concepts to historical material. None of that debate touches the basic question of whether the people existed.
When I say it has "always existed," I mean the people. The experience. The reality of lives lived outside the categories that were assigned at birth. That is ancient. The label we now put on it is not, and I should have been clear about that from the start.
Precision here is not a concession. It is the stronger argument.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.
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