Every known society has had people who did not fit neatly into the gender categories their culture prescribed — and every society has handled this differently, from integration and reverence to policing and erasure. What counts as non-conformity is itself shaped by the norm being conformed to; the categories shift, but the human reality they are responding to does not. To study gender non-conformity across cultures is to find, beneath the enormous variation, a persistent testimony to the inadequacy of any binary to hold the full range of what it is to be human.
Juana