Historian Mo Moulton watched with dismay last week as U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the U.S. will only recognize two sexes, male and female, and that they cannot be changed.
“There’s been so much energy expended trying to police people into fitting into just two boxes,” Moulton, a history professor at the University of Birmingham, England, told CBC News.
It “den[ies] the realities that people have bodies and lives and self-understandings that exceed that.”
The executive order, which Trump signed after promising in his inauguration speech that it would be U.S. policy “that there are only two genders,” also ordered trans women into male prisons and a halt in the issuance of passports with an “X” gender marker, sparking fear in trans people across the country about their legal status.
While the administration claims the move is a return to “biological facts,” experts say it ignores both biological and historical reality — that humans have never fit into just two sexes or two genders.
“The terminology could be new, people’s awareness could be new, but the idea or the practice of changing gender is hardly new. It is observed in every time period in U.S. history,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Transgender people in the U.S. say they’re worried about what’s to come after President Donald Trump signed an executive order saying his government only recognizes two sexes that are assigned at birth.
“Gender” refers to how someone identifies and represents themselves in society.
Diversity in sex — which includes biological characteristics, like chromosomes, hormones and reproductive anatomy — is also well-documented. Up to 1.7 per cent of people, researchers estimate, are born with intersex traits, or a combination of male and female traits. The introduction of the “X” gender marker on U.S. passports in 2021 came after an intersex Colorado resident’s years-long legal battle to acquire a gender-neutral passport.
Concerns in Canada
Following the executive order, trans and non-binary Canadians have told CBC they’re concerned about travelling in the U.S. and afraid that this unravelling of trans rights could creep north even more than it already has.
At least 100,000 people in Canada reported being trans or non-binary in the 2021 census. In 2017, Bill C-16 added protections for transgender and gender-diverse people to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code.
When asked about Trump’s executive orders, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he was “only aware of two” genders, adding that he believes the government should let people “make their own personal decisions.”
It’s “ignorant” to claim there are only two genders, said Benny Michaud, director of the Centre for Indigenous Initiatives, an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and a citizen of the Metis Nation.
“There have always been LGBTQIA+ people, and it’s such a disservice to Canadians for that not to be acknowledged by somebody that is vying for the highest position of leadership within the country.”
Gender binary enforced by colonial powers
While Trump’s executive order casts gender diversity as a recent phenomenon, experts say that’s false.
Different Indigenous groups have had their own terms for various sexualities and genders beyond man and woman for generations. In the 1990s, the term two-spirit was coined in Canada to serve as an umbrella term for those queer Indigenous terms.
Michaud uses the term tasta-ee-inw for themselves, which means a person who is “in-between” in Cree.
It was only when European colonizers arrived that the idea of two genders was imposed on Indigenous people, Michaud said.
“They utilized gender as a way to colonize our communities,” Michaud said, first by diminishing the voices of women, and second by “vilifying people whose genders were not man or woman.”
“For hundreds of years in our communities, we were not able to express ourselves in the way that we had been able to before.”
Strict gender roles have often been wielded this way, Moulton said.
In British-controlled India, Moulton said, an established third gender known as hijras were “targeted for eradication” in the mid-1800s “because they felt … allowing people to occupy this social category of a third gender opened up possibilities that they wanted to close down.”
Trans history within the last century
People living outside of the gender or sex expected of them also existed in Europe and North America long before the words transgender or non-binary were used.
On Dec. 1, 1952, the front page of New York Daily News declared ‘Ex-GI becomes blonde beauty,” accompanied by a picture of Christine Jorgensen, the first widely known person to undergo a medical transition through both surgeries and hormone therapy.
“In 1952, the most famous woman in the world was an American trans woman,” Gill-Peterson said.
Although there’s evidence of attempts at medical transition dating back hundreds of years, Gill-Peterson said, the development of what we consider modern medical transition began in 20th century Germany.
The Institute for Sex Research provided early gender-affirming treatments in the 1920s and 1930s before the Nazis targeted it for destruction shortly after seizing power.
Many early figures in modern trans history received care in Germany, such as Ewan Forbes, born in 1912 in Scotland. Forbes was recorded as a daughter at birth, but “expressed an understanding that he was a boy, from a very young age,” Moulton said. His mother allowed him to grow up in the social role of a boy and later received an early form of testosterone therapy in Germany.
He secured a new birth certificate and changed his name to Ewan in the 1950s, going on to live a quiet, married life as a doctor in the town where he grew up.
History would’ve never known he was a trans man at all if it were not for records of an inheritance dispute – a cousin argued, unsuccessfully, that Forbes was actually a woman and thus ineligible to inherit a title.
Forbes’ acceptance in his community shows that even societies “organized around a gender binary … have made space for decades and centuries for people who don’t quite fit in that,” Moulton said.
Another lesser-known trans figure was Louise Lawrence, who transitioned to a woman in the 1940s in San Francisco and obtained a new passport under the name Louise, long before passports had sex markers, Gill-Peterson said.
Lawrence’s transition came to light after she and her partner were investigated for a lesbian relationship. The State Department accused her of identity fraud for “using an inaccurate name.”
“She had to fight that,” Gill-Peterson said. “This is in 1957, 1958, and she won, and she was then issued her passport again.”
Outed at death
There are numerous examples of trans men fighting in the U.S. Revolutionary War and U.S. Civil War in the 1700s and 1800s, Gill-Peterson said.
One is Dr. James Barry, a military surgeon in the 1800s who performed one of the first successful caesareans in which the mother and child survived. He lived as a man for his entire adult life, and reportedly asked to be buried in the bedsheets he died on.
Throughout history, many trans men were only outed upon their death, such as Billy Tipton, a successful jazz musician active in the 1940s and 50s.
“It wasn’t uncommon … for them to have tried to have made plans prior to death to avoid autopsy or medical examination,” Gill-Peterson said.
Other historical figures have served as role models for trans people because of ambiguity around their genders.
Chevalier d’Eon was a soldier, diplomat and spy in the 1700s who lived as a man and as a woman at different stages in their life, once inspiring a betting pool over their gender as it became a source of national interest.
The history of gender variance isn’t straightforward. Some academics contend that early examples of trans men such as Barry may just have been cisgender women crossdressing to access new job opportunities, and that cisgender lesbians and gay men may have played with gender presentation purely to express their sexuality in strictly gendered societies.
This may be true for some of these figures, Gill-Peterson said, but they are still examples of lives affected by previous attempts to police gender and sex.
‘People are scared’
In the U.S., incarcerated trans women are expected to bear the brunt of Trump’s executive order first, if it stands up to legal challenges underway. Being forced into male prisons brings a significantly increased threat of sexual assault, Gill-Peterson said.
On Tuesday, Trump signed another executive order to cut federal support for gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 19, despite medical consensus that it is life-saving and necessary.
The U.S. State Department has reportedly suspended all applications for passport gender changes, with the status of passport renewals for trans people still up in the air.
U.S. officials have not made clear what the executive order means for the 3,600 Canadians with “X” on their passports.
While Gemma Hickey, an activist from Newfoundland and Labrador, told CBC last week that they were able to travel into the U.S. with their “X” marker after the executive order was passed, the Canadian government warns people with gender-neutral passports that “you may face entry restrictions into some countries that do not recognize your gender.”
“All I know is that people are scared,” Hickey said. They’ve heard from other Canadians who are cancelling trips to the U.S. out of fears that their passport could be confiscated.
Just ten years ago, trans scholars were fairly certain that trans people were finally being understood on a wide enough scale that there was no going back, Michaud said.
The regression we’re seeing now is “staggering,” they said.
Moulton fears for the safety of trans people.
“That kind of psychological burden of being told that what you are is impossible – it’s hard to overstate, really.”
