Notable transgender figures prior to 2000

01

We'wha

We'wha, a Zuni lhamana, spent six months in Washington in 1886 as a cultural ambassador, met President Grover Cleveland, and was celebrated as a weaver and diplomat — a third-gender role the Zuni had honored for generations.

02

Michael Dillon

Michael Dillon, the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty in 1946, later vanished from British society entirely — resurfacing in a Tibetan monastery, ordained as a Buddhist monk, having shed every identity the West assigned him.

03

Christine Jorgensen

Christine Jorgensen's 1952 surgery in Copenhagen ran above the fold on the New York Daily News front page, displacing Korean War coverage — a former Army private from the Bronx who became the face of a possibility millions had never heard named.

04

Charley Parkhurst

Charley Parkhurst drove stagecoaches through the Sierra Nevada for decades — one-eyed, weathered, legendarily skilled — and cast a ballot in California in 1868, fifty-two years before women were legally permitted to vote there.

05

Billy Tipton

Billy Tipton toured American jazz circuits for decades, married three times, and adopted three sons — his birth sex unknown to his family until paramedics arrived at his death in 1989, and the secret he kept became the subject of a biography.

06

Public Universal Friend

After a near-death fever in 1776, the Public Universal Friend declared the person born Jemima Wilkinson had died and only a genderless spiritual vessel remained — then gathered thousands of followers across colonial New England and founded a settlement in upstate New York.

07

Chevalière d'Éon

The Chevalier d'Éon served Louis XV as a spy, a soldier, and a diplomat — then lived thirty-three years as a woman after a royal decree settled a wager about her birth sex, dying in London in 1810 with the question still unresolved.

08

Amelio Robles Ávila

Amelio Robles Ávila rode with Emiliano Zapata's forces through the Mexican Revolution, earning the rank of colonel through combat — then lived openly as a man for eight more decades, receiving veterans' recognition from the Mexican government in his nineties.

09

Jan Morris

Jan Morris filed the dispatch announcing Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's 1953 Everest summit for The Times of London — then, twenty years later, completed her transition, and wrote 'Conundrum,' one of the most celebrated memoirs of the twentieth century.

10

Lili Elbe

Einar Wegener spent years modeling for his wife Gerda's paintings — posed as a woman named Lili — and gradually understood that Lili was not a costume. The story became 'The Danish Girl,' but the real life ended in 1931 in a Dresden hospital, aged forty-eight.