I’ve been thinking about the central question here for a while. And it really does seem like the category of “trans” is a cultural Other constructed relative to western patriarchy. There seem to be myriad examples of people from other cultures and time periods who we would undoubtably identify as trans by our modern culture’s standards, but would not categorize themselves the same way relative to their own. It’s also become increasingly clear to me that there are also people in modern western society who identify as cis but would be less gender-conforming if not for the societal repression of non-patriarchal gender roles.

As far as I know, there isn’t good terminology to differentiate all of these categories, so talking about genders across cultures becomes messy quickly. As noted in the video, many trans icons even just several decades ago did not call themselves “transgender” but are still identified as such today.