The honest answer to this question disappoints people who want a name and a date. There was no first transgender person, in the same way that there was no first left-handed person. What changed over time was the words available, the medical possibilities, and how visible those lives were allowed to be.
Before the word existed
Records from many periods and places describe people who lived in a gender other than the one assigned to them, or in roles that did not fit a two-gender system. Some cultures had recognised social roles for them. Others punished them. Historians are careful about applying modern words such as transgender to people who never used them, and it is right to be careful: we cannot know how someone who lived centuries ago would have described themselves.
What we can say is that the experience the word describes is not new, even if the word is.
The first medical transitions
Modern medical transition has a clearer starting point. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin supported some of the first patients to undergo gender-affirming surgery. Dora Richter, who worked at the institute, and the Danish painter Lili Elbe are among the best documented.
In May 1933 the institute was attacked and its library burned by the Nazis. A great deal of that early record was lost, which is one reason the history is patchier than it should be.
The first famous one
In 1952 the American Christine Jorgensen became the first person whose transition was a worldwide news story. She was not the first, but for many people she was the first they had heard of. Her story shows how quickly attention can become a burden and a tool at the same time.
Why the question keeps being asked
Sometimes it is plain curiosity. Sometimes it carries a suggestion that being trans is a recent invention, and the history does not support that. And for trans people, finding out that others came before is often a relief in its own right: a reminder that you are part of a long line rather than an exception.
If you want to go further, the stories of Lili Elbe, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson each cover a different part of that line.
Wren · Editor
Wren is the name the T4TSpace blog is published under. The posts are written by the small team that builds the app, and signed with one name so the voice stays the same from one piece to the next.