Reclaiming Our Ancestors
We are not the first. To know this is itself a kind of medicine. Across the long arc of human religious life, people whose gender did not fit the binary have repeatedly been recognized as sacred — not in spite of their gender, but because of it.
We must reclaim these ancestors carefully. Their lives were not ours. Their words for themselves were not our words. But the thread is real, and it is ours to pick up.
The work of reclamation is, in part, the work of grief. Much of what was known has been lost — burned in libraries, silenced in confessionals, untranslated in dusty journals, dismissed by generations of scholars who could not see what they were looking at. What survives reaches us through fragments: a hymn, a temple list, a missionary's outraged letter, an archaeological photograph of a grave whose occupant did not fit the categories the diggers expected. We piece these together with care, knowing the picture will always be incomplete.
Reclamation is also the work of resisting two opposite errors. The first is the impulse to project ourselves wholesale onto the past, claiming ancient figures as "trans" in a way that flattens their own cultures and languages. The second is the impulse, often pressed by hostile scholars, to deny that gender variance existed at all before the twentieth century. Both are distortions. The honest middle path is to listen to what the sources actually say, in the terms they actually use, and to recognize the family resemblance without forcing the identification.
Two-Spirit Traditions: Indigenous North American Wisdom
Across more than five hundred Indigenous nations of North America, there have long existed roles that the modern pan-Indigenous term "Two-Spirit" gestures toward — people who carried both masculine and feminine spirits, often serving as healers, ceremonialists, mediators, and visionaries.
These traditions belong to the nations that hold them. Non-Indigenous transgender people may honor them without appropriating them: by learning the specific names and stories from the people who carry them, by supporting Indigenous sovereignty, and by not flattening many distinct traditions into a single decoration.
The term "Two-Spirit" itself is recent — coined in English at a 1990 gathering in Winnipeg as a pan-Indigenous umbrella that nations could adopt or set aside as they chose. It is not a translation of a single Indigenous word and is not a replacement for the specific terms held by particular peoples: the Diné nádleehi, the Lakota winkte, the Zuni lhamana, the Mohave alyha and hwame, and many others. Each of these belongs to its own language, ceremonial life, and political history, and each must be approached on its own terms.
For non-Indigenous readers, the most respectful posture is one of student rather than borrower. Read Indigenous authors — Beatrice Medicine, Will Roscoe, Qwo-Li Driskill, Gregory Smithers — rather than secondhand pagan summaries. Recognize that the suppression of these roles was not an ancient tragedy but an ongoing colonial project, and that Indigenous Two-Spirit communities today are doing the work of revitalization themselves, with their own elders and their own protocols. Solidarity, not extraction, is the appropriate offering.
Priesthoods of Inanna and Ishtar
In ancient Sumer and later Babylon, the temples of Inanna and Ishtar were served by people who lived between or beyond the categories of male and female — the gala, the assinnu, the kurgarru. They sang in a distinctive dialect, performed sacred rites, and were understood to belong to the Goddess in ways ordinary men and women did not.
Hymns describe Inanna's power to "turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man." This was not a curse in Her cult. It was Her signature.
The gala, attested as early as the third millennium BCE, sang lamentations in eme-sal, a dialect of Sumerian otherwise associated with women and goddesses. Some gala bore feminine names; some are described in texts with grammatical forms that resist a tidy male reading. The assinnu and kurgarru of later Akkadian sources performed in Ishtar's processions wielding weapons and distaffs at once, dressed in garments that combined masculine and feminine markers, and were said to have been "transformed" by the Goddess Herself.
Beyond Mesopotamia, similar priesthoods recur across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The Galli of Cybele, castrated in Her rites and dressed as women, served Her temples from Anatolia to Rome. The qedeshim of the Levant, the kalu of Hittite sources, the eunuch priests of the Syrian goddess Atargatis — each tradition is distinct, but together they describe a long ancient pattern: where the great goddesses were worshipped, gender-variant clergy were not anomalies. They were often Her closest servants, the ones whose very bodies were understood as offerings to Her.
The Erasure: Colonialism and Christianity
Much of this history was deliberately destroyed. European colonizers, often with the active partnership of the church, suppressed Indigenous gender-variant traditions through violence, forced conversion, and law. Goddess temples were torn down; their gender-variant priesthoods criminalized or killed.
We inherit the silence this erasure caused. Naming it is part of the work.
The erasure was not accidental and it was not a single event. In the Mediterranean world, late Roman and Christian emperors progressively criminalized the cults of Cybele and Atargatis, banned castration, and razed temples whose priesthoods had served for centuries. In the Americas, Spanish conquistadors set dogs on Indigenous gender-variant people they found in Panama in 1513, and French and English colonizers in subsequent centuries documented — with disgust — the "berdaches" whose existence they then set about destroying through forced schooling, missionary pressure, and law. In South Asia, the British Raj's 1871 Criminal Tribes Act explicitly criminalized hijra communities whose religious roles long predated colonial rule.
This history is not background. It is the reason the archive is so thin, the reason so many traditions had to go underground, the reason today's transphobia so often draws unconsciously on the rhetoric of nineteenth-century colonial administrators and inquisitors. Naming the erasure is not dwelling in grievance; it is refusing to mistake the silence for absence. The Goddess's gender-variant priests did not vanish because they never existed. They were taken from us, and the taking has a name.
Modern Identity and Historical Roles: A Necessary Nuance
It is tempting, and sometimes harmful, to collapse ancient gender-variant figures into modern identity categories. A gala priest was not a "trans woman" in the contemporary sense. A Two-Spirit person is not interchangeable with a non-binary person from a city in 2025.
The honest stance is: these traditions are not us, but they are kin to us. They prove that human cultures have long made sacred room for gender beyond two. That room is older than its erasure.
Modern transgender identity is shaped by things our ancestors did not have: medical transition, civil-rights law, the internet, a global vocabulary of dysphoria and affirmation, the specific pressures of capitalist gender as it is sold and policed today. Ancient and Indigenous gender-variant roles were shaped by their own social orders — kinship obligations, ritual economies, cosmologies in which gender was woven into the structure of the universe itself. A gala singing for Inanna and a non-binary witch in Brooklyn share something real, but they do not share a context, and pretending otherwise does justice to neither.
What we can say honestly is this: the human capacity to live, name, and ritualize gender beyond the binary is not new. It has appeared in many cultures, with many vocabularies, across many centuries. Our particular vocabulary is ours, and we owe it the dignity of its own specificity. Their vocabularies are theirs, and we owe them the same. The kinship between us is not sameness; it is the family resemblance of a long human possibility insisting on itself again and again, wherever it has been allowed to.
What This History Means for Us
It means we are not an aberration. It means the binary is the recent thing, not us. It means when we step toward the altar, we step into a procession that stretches further back than the empires that tried to end it.
It means that when a contemporary politician or pundit calls our existence a "modern invention," the historical record answers them. It means that when we feel alone in our communities of origin, there is a wider community of memory we can lean into. It means the Goddess we are coming to is not a stranger surprised by our arrival. She has been receiving people like us at Her altars for as long as there have been altars.
And it means we have a responsibility. The ancestors we are reclaiming were silenced at terrible cost. The least we can do, in return for the comfort of knowing they existed, is to live our own gender lives with as much honesty and as much sacred seriousness as our circumstances allow — and to leave, for those who come after us, a fuller archive than the one we inherited.