In my first reply to Stephen, I mentioned three specific terms that the ancient Sumerians used for genderless beings. In my second reply to him, I said: “Gender diversity is everywhere in ancient cultures” and that someone’s lack of awareness of transgender people in history “does not mean transgender people never existed anywhere.”

That is logically different than saying "transgender people existed in every society,” which I don’t believe I said here in these comments, nor is it what my original article was about.

The reason I left those replies was that Stephen said that the terms man/woman are nothing more than labels for people with physically male/female bodies, that the terms have been that simple and clear for “maybe millions” of years, and that any statement to the contrary is based only on the motivated reasoning of “trans supporters” who are “trying to find evidence of” gender diversity in the past when probably no such history meaningfully exists, and meanwhile “we all know” what “man” and “woman” really mean. That narrative of his is false. He is saying that no form of gender diversity has ever been a thing until five minutes ago.

I was not trying to say that whatever cultures may have existed in the past, along with their repression/sexism, are necessarily good models for how people should live their gender today.

I have written two books on how eunuchs have been portrayed in fiction and nonfiction in different times and places, and I am a transgender man, and I am aware that trans men and women (20th and 21st century) in my own culture are different from eunuchs (19th-century and earlier) in other cultures.

I have also written an article for Medium about Edward Said's Orientalism. https://tuckerlieberman.medium.com/orientalism-defined-summary-603f4d31b4c4

Here, in these comments, I was just trying to address the basic transphobia of someone saying that "man" and "woman" have only ever meant "male" and "female" on the basis that this is the only meaning he is (or claims to be) personally aware of, and of his drawing the conclusion that any other information to the contrary must be a fiction, myth, or political lie because he doesn't remember being taught it in school. This argument works along the lines of: Trans people don't exist if I've never met one, and if I do meet someone who says they're trans, they can't be trans, because I've never met a trans person before, so trans people don't exist. It is an impenetrable transphobic circle.