Timeline of transgender history

Before the Common Era

• 7,000 BCE 1700 BCEAmong the sexual depictions in Neolithic and Bronze Age drawings and figurines from the Mediterranean are, as one author describes it, a "third sex" human figure having female breasts and male genitals or without distinguishing sex characteristics. In Neolithic Italy, female images are found in a domestic context, while images that combine sexual characteristics appear in burials or religious settings. In Neolithic Greece and Cyprus, figures are often dual-sexed or without identifying sexual characteristics.
• 2900 BCE 2500 BCEA burial of a suburb of Prague, Czech Republic, a male is buried in the outfit usually reserved for women. Archaeologists speculate that the burial corresponds to a transgender person or someone of the third sex.
• 400 BCEAncient Greek physician Hippocrates writes of the enarei, a class of androgynous Scythian priests and healers; "there are many eunuchs among the Scythians, who perform female work, and speak like women". The enarei are also mentioned around the same time in Herodotus' work Histories; "the Scythians who plundered the temple were punished by the goddess with the female sickness, which still attaches to their posterity. They themselves confess that they are afflicted with the disease for this reason, and travellers who visit Scythia can see what sort of a disease it is. Those who suffer from it are called Enarees".

  First millennium (1–1000)

• 1 100Philo of Alexandria and Marcus Manilius provided descriptions of transgender people during the early Roman Empire. Philo stated: "Expending every possible care on their outward adornment, they are not ashamed even to employ every device to change artificially their nature as men into women". He also attested that some members of this group, to that end, had their penises removed.
• 'Nero becomes Emperor of Rome. Nero married two men, Pythagoras and Sporus, in legal ceremonies, with Sporus accorded the regalia worn by the wives of the Caesars.
• ' Tacitus wrote in Germania that priests of the Swabian sub-tribe, the Naharvali or Nahanarvali, "dress as women" to perform their priestly duties.
• 218222Roman emperor Elagabalus's reign begins. According to Cassius Dio, Elagabalus delighted in being called the mistress, wife, and queen of Hierocles, one of Elagabalus's lovers. The emperor wore makeup and wigs, preferred to be called a lady and not a lord, and offered vast sums to any physician who could provide the emperor with a vagina; for this reason, the emperor is seen by some writers as an early transgender figure and one of the first on record as seeking sex reassignment surgery.
• Death of Anastasia the Patrician who left life as a lady-in-waiting in the court of Justinian I in Constantinople to spend twenty-eight years dressed as a male monk in seclusion in Egypt, and has been adopted by today's LGBTQ community as an example of a "transgender" saint.

  1001–1900

• Kalonymus ben Kalonymus composes a poem for Even Boḥan, a Jewish ethical treatise. The poem expresses discontent with having been born male instead of female. The poem, which was traditionally interpreted as a piece of satire, has sometimes been reinterpreted as a genuine expression of gender dysphoria.
• 'Rolandino Roncaglia is tried for sodomy, an event that caused a sensation in Italy. He confessed he "had never had sexual intercourse, neither with his wife nor with any other woman, because he had never felt any carnal appetite, nor could he ever have an erection of his virile member". After his wife died of plague, Rolandino started to prostitute himself, wearing female dresses because "since he has female look, voice and movementsalthough he does not have a female orifice, but has a male member and testiclesmany persons considered him to be a woman because of his appearance".
• 'John Rykener, known also as Johannes Richer and Eleanor, was a transvestite prostitute working mainly in London, but also active in Oxford. He was arrested in 1395 for cross-dressing and interrogated.
• 1498 A Moor in Rome, who was likely a trans woman, was executed for transvestism on 7 April this year, wearing " usual women's clothes … was placed on a bundle of wood and strangled at the column of the gallows" and subsequently burned.
• 1537An unnamed woman was executed for wearing male clothing near Basel.
• 'Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca documents same sex marriages and men "who dress like women and perform the office of women, but use the bow and carry big loads" among a Native American tribe in his publication, The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and His Companions from Florida to the Pacific 1528–1536.
• 'Process of Wojciech z Poznania, who married Sebastian Słodownik, and lived with him for two years in Poznań. Both had female partners. On his return to Kraków, he married Wawrzyniec Włoszek. Wojciech, considered in public opinion as a woman, was burned for 'crimes against nature'.
• 1586Barbara Brunner of Kusnacht, living in Lenzburg, was discovered to "be male under clothes" and is burned at the stake on 28 May that year; a man was also burned for sodomy the same day between Lenzburg and Aarau, but it is unknown if the two executions were related. The executions were recorded in the chronicles of Johann Jakob Wick.
• ' Thomas Hall is ordered by the Quarter Court of Jamestown, Virginia to wear a combination of male and female attire after a series of incidents led to Hall submitting to physical examination and the Court determining Hall to have a "dual nature" gender; it is likely that Hall was intersex as well as non-binary.
• ' After recovering from a fever, a preacher in New England claimed to have died and started calling themselves the "Public Universal Friend" eschewing use of gendered pronouns and identification as either male or female.
• ' The Chevalier d'Éon, an androgynous French courtier and spy of disputed gender identity, agrees with a request by French authorities to live and present as a woman.
• ' Jens Andersson of Norway, assigned female at birth but identifying as male, was imprisoned and put on trial after marrying Anne Kristine Mortensdotter in a Lutheran church. When asked about his gender, the response was "Hand troer at kunde henhøre til begge Deele".
• ' Mary Jones, a transgender African-American sex worker, is placed on trial in New York City after allegedly pickpocketing a client. The case received significant press attention, and she was depicted in a published lithograph entitled "the Man-Monster".
• ' The hijra are defined by the colonial authorities of the British Raj as a "criminal tribe" alongside various other social groups following the enactment of the Criminal Tribes Act, imposing state surveillance and restrictions on free movement.
• ' Frances Thompson, a former African-American slave who had ten years earlier testified before the U.S. Congress on having been raped during the Memphis riots of 1866 amid the Reconstruction era in the former Confederate States of America, is arrested for "being a man dressed in women's clothing".
• ' The Countess, a French transgender courtesan and singer, published her autobiography The Secret Confessions of a Parisian: The Countess, 1850-1871.
• The Cercle Hermaphroditos, the earliest known transgender organization in the United States, was reportedly founded in this year according to Jennie June.

  20th century

First half

• ' Karl M. Baer, in December 1906, becomes the first transgender person to undergo sex reassignment surgery.
• ' The word 'transsexual' is used to mean between or applicable to both men and women.
• ' English sexologist Havelock Ellis coins the term "sexo-aesthetic inversion" to refer to a phenomenon "by which, a person's tastes and impulses are so altered, that if a man, he emphasizes and even exaggerates the feminine characteristics in his own person". He would later use the term "eonism", named for the aforementioned Chevalier d'Éon, to refer to this phenomenon.
• ' In Berlin, Germany, Doctor Magnus Hirschfeld co-founds the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a pioneering private research institute and counseling office. Its library of thousands of books was destroyed by Nazis in May 1933.
• ' Lili Elbe had received emasculation and ovary transplant in June 1930. She changed her legal gender in October 1930.
• ' Hirschfeld introduces the term "Transsexualismus".
• ' In Berlin in 1931, Dora Richter became the first known transgender woman to undergo vaginoplasty.
• 'Lili Elbe received vaginoplasty and uterus transplant. Immune system rejection of the transplanted uterus caused her death.
• 'Toni Ebel and her partner, received vaginoplasty and became first transsexed couple. They were involuntarily separated but lived until other trans women received sexual reassignment surgery and public attention after World War II.
• 'Nazis burn the library of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research, and destroy the institute.
• 'In February 1934, Dora Richter applied for a legal name change, granted by the president of Czechoslovakia in April 1934. She lives until 1966.
• '
• * The first use of the English word transsexuality in print recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary indicates the word is already in use, regarded by that author as a rarer synonym for homosexuality; the first use in print in a modern sense that the dictionary records is in 1950.
• * Barbara Ann Wilcox, a transgender woman, successfully petitions Los Angeles County Superior Court to change her legal name, in one of the earliest known legal cases of its kind.
• Plastic surgeon Harold Gillies carries out female-to-male sex reassignment surgery on Michael Dillon in Britain.