According to one ancient Jewish tradition, the first human being was neither simply male nor female.
Another says Abraham and Sarah began life with indeterminate sexual anatomy. A third describes a fetus changing from male to female in the womb. Hindu scripture tells of a warrior who physically changes sex. Buddhist tradition remembers a man who became a woman, gave birth to children, and then became a man again.
None of these stories used the word transgender. The word itself wouldn't exist for centuries.
But the people, bodies, and transformations now being placed under that umbrella have a much longer religious history.
That history became the subject of a fresh Catholic fight this week after religious scholar Emma Cieslik wrote a guest essay for the National Catholic Reporter celebrating saints who “defied gender norms.” Cieslik drew on recent medieval scholarship to argue that figures traditionally described as women who disguised themselves as men can also be understood as transgender ancestors. The suggestion immediately drew criticism from Catholics who accused her of forcing a modern identity onto people from another age.
The argument is worth having. But Christianity is hardly the only religion where it arises.
Was Adam Both Male and Female?
Genesis 1 says God created humanity “male and female.” Genesis 2 then gives the more familiar story in which Eve is formed from Adam's rib.
An ancient Jewish interpretation found another way to reconcile those passages. Genesis Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic commentary on Genesis, records Rabbi Yirmiyah ben Elazar teaching that God originally created Adam androgynos, possessing both male and female sexual characteristics. Another rabbi imagined Adam as a double-sided being whom God later divided in two.
Adam isn't the only biblical founding father to get this treatment.
The Talmud, one of Judaism's foundational collections of rabbinic law and discussion, records Rabbi Ami saying that Abraham and Sarah were originally tumtumin. A tumtum was a person whose sexual anatomy was concealed or indeterminate. The rabbi interpreted language in the book of Isaiah about Abraham being “hewn” from rock and Sarah being “dug” from a pit as an indication that their unique sexual organs were fashioned later.
Then there is Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah. Leah and her younger sister Rachel were both married to Jacob, and the biblical story famously follows their... complicated... competition to bear his children.
Jewish tradition holds that Leah realized that, if her current pregnancy produced another boy, her sister Rachel would be left with fewer sons and would be humiliated. For Rachel's sake, Leah prayed to God to intervene and (according to the Talmud) “immediately her fetus was transformed into a daughter.” That daughter was Dinah.
Even Joseph has attracted attention from readers interested in gender. His famous ketonet passim, traditionally translated as his "coat of many colors," is described with the exact same Hebrew phrase later used for the garments worn by King David's daughters. Rabbinic tradition also vividly pictures the teenage Joseph styling his hair and touching up his eyes to make himself beautiful in language that is often interpreted as emphasizing Joseph's inherent femininity.
Together, these stories help explain why ancient Judaism developed a surprisingly extensive vocabulary for human bodies that do not, and never did, all fall neatly into male and female classifications. Androgynos and tumtum, among others, were real categories discussed repeatedly by rabbis trying to determine how Jewish law applied to actual people.
Christianity's Gender-Crossing Saints
Christianity would later develop its own cast of gender-nonconforming characters.
The current Catholic controversy centers partly on Saint Marinos the Monk. Tradition holds that Marinos was born a female, but that as a child they cut their hair, took the name Marinos, and entered a male monastery with their father.
Years later, a woman in the town accused Marinos of fathering her child. Rather than reveal their anatomy to clear their name, Marinos accepted the punishment, was expelled from the monastery, and actually raised the child. It was only after Marinos died that the other monks discovered that the accusation had been physically impossible the whole time.
Marinos is not an isolated curiosity. Medieval Christian literature contains an entire group of holy figures sometimes called “cross-dressing saints” or “monk-virgins”: people raised as female who adopted male clothing and names, entered male religious communities, and were regarded by the people around them as men. Scholars disagree sharply over what that behavior meant.
Some read these accounts as a means to an end: a woman might pretend to be a man to escape an unwanted marriage, enter a monastery, and find a safety that she could not have as a woman.
Trans historians offer another possibility: if someone chose a male name, dressed as a man, lived in a community of men, and maintained that identity for decades, should we automatically assume that none of that reflected how the person understood themselves?
Medievalist Blake Gutt summarizes that approach simply: “I'm just taking these people at their word.”
The modern Catholic Church, however, draws a much firmer line. The Vatican's 2024 declaration Dignitas Infinita teaches that biological sex and gender “can be distinguished but not separated” and says sex-change interventions ordinarily conflict with the body's God-given dignity.
That leaves modern Catholicism with an unusual inheritance: a Church that today teaches against separating gender from biological sex also venerates saints whose traditional biographies revolve around living for years as another gender. Catholics can disagree over how those lives should be interpreted, but the gender-crossing stories themselves are part of Christian tradition.
Hinduism's Warrior Who Changed Sex
In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, gender transformation is considerably more explicit.
Shikhandi begins the story as Shikhandini, born female but raised as a son. After a marriage exposes the discrepancy, Shikhandini flees into the forest and encounters a yaksha, a supernatural nature spirit. The two agree to exchange sexes.
The text is not coy about what happens: the yaksha becomes female, while Shikhandini “obtained manhood.” Shikhandi returns home as a man, becomes a warrior, and eventually helps bring down the nearly invincible Bhishma (an opposing warrior) in the epic's great battle.
That story sits within a much wider Hindu history of gender variation. South Asia's hijra communities, often described as a third gender rather than simply male or female, have longstanding religious roles blessing marriages and births. Some connect their spiritual authority to Hindu deities and stories involving transformed or combined genders, even as hijras have also endured severe social discrimination.
Our earlier survey of what the world's major faiths say about transgender people explores more of that modern religious landscape.
Buddhism Gets Stranger Still
A Buddhist story preserved in commentary on the Dhammapada, a famous collection of sayings attributed to the Buddha, tells of a wealthy man named Soreyya.
After Soreyya experiences a sexual thought about a monk, he is suddenly transformed into a woman. Soreyya later marries a man and gives birth to two children, in addition to the two children that he/she had fathered before the transformation.
Eventually Soreyya encounters the monk again, apologizes, and changes back into a man. He then becomes a monk himself.
People naturally had questions.
According to the story, visitors repeatedly ask Soreyya which children he loves more: the two he fathered or the two he gave birth to. The larger Buddhist commentary treats movement between male and female existence with striking matter-of-factness, even remarking that people have lived as both sexes across their many rebirths.
Islam's Complicated Third Space
Islamic history requires another vocabulary lesson.
The Qur'an itself does not identify a named transgender figure. But the hadith, collections of reports about the words and actions of Muhammad that became major sources for Islamic belief and law, mention people called mukhannathun.
A mukhannath was generally a male person regarded as effeminate or gender-atypical. The term does not map neatly onto either “gay man” or “trans woman” as we might use those today.
One named example is Hīt, who appears in a hadith involving Muhammad's wife Umm Salama. Hīt had been allowed around women under the assumption that there wasn't a sexual interest there. After Muhammad overheard Hīt describing a woman's body to a nearby man, he barred Hīt and other non-conforming people from the women's quarters.
Historian Everett Rowson's study of early Medina found that mukhannathun were a recognizable social group and were not automatically presumed to be homosexual.
Islamic treatment of modern transgender identity is similarly less straightforward than many Western readers might expect.
Traditional Muslim scholars have often rejected changing one's sex. Yet two highly influential authorities reached more permissive conclusions in the 20th century: Shiite leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran and Sunni scholar Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi in Egypt both issued rulings allowing gender-transition procedures under particular circumstances.
Iran presents an unusual contrast. Its religious-legal system recognizes medically approved gender transition while continuing to criminalize same-sex relationships. That does not make Iran broadly welcoming to transgender people, who still report discrimination. But it does show that some Islamic jurisprudence has drawn a distinction between changing gender and homosexuality that may seem counterintuitive to some readers.
Sacred Roles Outside the Binary
Indigenous traditions bring an important warning: not every gender system should be translated into Western LGBTQ+ terminology at all.
We'wha, born in 1849 at Zuni Pueblo, was a lhamana, a specifically Zuni gender role falling somewhere outside the male/female binary. We'wha performed jobs that Native Americans of the period associated separately with men and women. They became a gifted weaver and potter, participated in religious societies, and traveled to Washington, D.C., where outsiders who met them, like President Grover Cleveland, generally perceived We'wha as a woman.
Native people did not coin the umbrella term Two-Spirit until 1990, partly as a way to reclaim Indigenous identities after generations of colonial suppression. Different nations had their own names, traditions, and expectations, so Two-Spirit should not be treated as a single ancient pan-Native gender.
Hawaiian tradition preserves another remarkable example. There is a story in which four māhū healers named Kapaemahu, Kapuni, Kinohi, and Kahaloa were remembered as possessing both male and female spirits. According to the tradition, they brought healing arts from Tahiti and transferred their spiritual power into four large stones before leaving Hawaiʻi.
Those stones still sit on Waikīkī Beach.
Bishop Museum says the respected role of māhū was later suppressed and the gender-nonconforming healers' story was largely erased as Christianity took hold, though the physical monument survives to this day.
So Were These People Trans?
Certainly some will be tempted – perhaps even in this comment section – to resolve all of this with a simple "yes" or "no".
Neither answer does the real history much justice.
The word transgender is a modern word which describes a modern way of understanding gender identity. Abraham, Marinos, Shikhandi, Soreyya, Hīt, and We'wha lived, or were imagined, in cultures with entirely different concepts of bodies, souls, sex, clothing, social roles, and religious vocation. Flattening all of them into one contemporary identity would lose much of what makes their stories interesting, and historians are right to be careful.
But declaring that gender diversity is a purely modern invention requires its own selective reading of history.
Humans have been using religion to talk about the reality of people existing outside of "ordinary" male and female expectations long before modern medicine, Pride flags, or gender studies departments existed. They called them androgynos, tumtum, mukhannath, hijra, lhamana, māhū, eunuchs, monks, healers, saints, and sometimes simply miracles.
Some were revered. Some were regulated. Some were mocked or persecuted. Others became warriors, parents, musicians, monks, healers, and sacred figures. One thing is consistent: across the vast span of cultures and centuries, people outside of the male/female binary appear again and again and again.
If sacred traditions have been telling stories about people who crossed, combined, or complicated the boundaries between male and female for thousands of years, what should that history mean for the way religious believers think about gender today?
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