By KiddieDaily Editors · 2026-06-29 · 2 min read · 1 source

Who was the first transgender person?

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If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. 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. We are both teachers of classics, the study of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome.

Nick specializes in ancient Greek mathematics and science, and Ky specializes in the history of gender and gender categories in Greece and Rome. So we will focus mainly on ancient Greece and the regions near it as we consider trans people from past civilizations. Just because people’s ability to cross, blur or redefine the boundaries of gender has been around since ancient times doesn’t mean ancient people would understand the term “transgender” as people do today.

In today’s language, this word refers to someone who was labeled as either a boy or a girl when they were born, but later decided that they were not what they were labeled as.

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