There is nothing new about trans people --- it's just that fewer of them are in hiding now. And "pretending to be the opposite sex" is transphobic, you may want to rethink.

Since the parent has been rightfully flagged, I can’t tell if the author even considered the possibility that Joanna’s wife is a cis woman. Here’s a NY Times article announcing their wedding: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/fashion/weddings/a-spark-...

I mean its like the opposite of a western invention. Lots of places had the concept of someone changing their gender or not being a part of the male/female gender binary, before the west came along and colonised them and said that everyone is a man or a woman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history talks about instances of non-binary and transgender representations going back to the neolithic and bronze age

Doesn't that article you linked make a similar point about trans being a recent concept, and that the validity of retroactive application is disputed?

> The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.

> [...]

> A precise history of the global occurrence of transgender people is difficult to compose because the modern concept of being transgender, and of gender in general as relevant to transgender identity, did not develop until the mid-20th century. Historical understandings are thus inherently filtered through modern principles, and were largely viewed through a medical lens until the late 20th century.

> [...]

> Absence of autobiographical accounts has resulted in historians assigning identities to historical figures, which of course may be inaccurate.

The term may not have existed at the time in all cultures, but the concept of living as a gender different to that when you were born is very old

Times "back then" had the same ambiguity, because the people were the same, but they were much more constrained, due to strictness of culture, and lack of information. Someone who might not be affected by such "ambiguity" would actually encounter it in others all the same, just in a way that would manifest not so directly, but as something like lack of sex drive, constant low mood, incarceration and stigmatization due to culturally inappropriate sex expression, or unexpected violence, either towards self, or others.

Very important to understand that the people didn't change, we just understand more of how humans work more than before. The current understanding is far from perfect too - I'm sure people not 100 years later will look back to the current one as archaic, or missing something very important, that they now understand commonly. The people back then were not any better or worse, or different, than we are today.