This article addresses the history of transgender people in the United States from prior to Western contact until the present. There are a few historical accounts of transgender people that have been present in the land now known as the United States at least since the early 1600s. Before Western contact, some Native American tribes had third gender people whose social roles varied from tribe to tribe. People dressing and living differently from the gender roles typical of their sex assigned at birth and contributing to various aspects of American history and culture have been documented from the 17th century to the present day. In the 20th and 21st centuries, advances in gender-affirming surgery as well as transgender activism have influenced transgender life and the popular perception of transgender people in the United States.
Overview
Prior to 1800
Some Native American Nations have longstanding names and roles for gender-variant or third-gender people. The term two-spirit, which is now retroactively used to describe these historical roles, was only created in 1990 at the Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg, and "specifically chosen to distinguish and distance Native American/First Nations people from non-Native peoples". The primary purpose of coining a new term was to encourage the replacement of the outdated and considered offensive, anthropological term, berdache, which appears in anthropological accounts. While this new term has not been universally accepted—it has been criticized by traditional communities who already have their own terms for the people being grouped under this new term, and by those who reject what they call the "western" binary implications, such as implying that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female"—it has generally received more acceptance and use than the anthropological term it replaced.
One of the first documented inhabitants of the American colonies to challenge binary gender roles was Thomas(ine) Hall, a servant who, in the 1620s, alternately dressed in both men's and women's clothing. Hall is likely to have been intersex, and was ordered by the Virginia court to wear both a man's breeches and a woman's apron and cap at the same time.
In 1776, the preacher Public Universal Friend reported experiencing death and returning to life as a genderless being (neither male nor female). After the Friend's purported resurrection, the Friend no longer answered to former birth name and gendered pronouns, dressing androgynously and asking followers they gained while preaching throughout New England over the next four decades to avoid birth name and gendered pronouns. Some scholars have viewed them as outside the gender binary, and as a chapter in trans history "before [the word] 'transgender.
Generally, according to Genny Beemyn in a Transgender History of the United States, the few historical accounts of transgender people that exist in 17th and 18th century America predominantly feature female to male transgender people, possibly because it was more difficult for male to female people to successfully present as women before the advent of hormone treatments and gender-affirming surgery. One example she cites is Mary Henly, a female-assigned individual in Massachusetts who was charged with illegally wearing men's clothing in 1692 because it was "seeming to confound the course of nature".
1800–1950
Joseph Lobdell (born in 1829 as Lucy Ann Lobdell) lived as a man for sixty years and due to this was arrested and incarcerated in an insane asylum. He was, however, able to marry a woman.
Stagecoach driver Charley Parkhurst (born in 1812) ran away from a Lebanon, New Hampshire orphanage at age 12 and lived as a man for the rest of his life. He was a celebrated carriage driver, spending some of his career serving frontier California during the Gold Rush. For at least 15 years he worked as a chicken farmer and lumberjack, and he managed to retire in Watsonville, California. He died from tongue cancer in 1879 while living alone in a cabin. He did not marry, and he was only outed by neighbors after his death.