We can see it all so clearly. Thanks to decades of Hollywood films, our image of the

Wild West is pretty defined. Chisel-jawed cowboys riding high on horseback. Maybe a rugged

Teddy Roosevelt trudging across the Yellowstone Valley. Guns and leather and sweaty horses,

you get the idea. But it's not that accurate. In our American mythology, the West was a

rugged place filled with rugged people. It was a place for tough guys and saucy ladies,

but those weren't the only kinds of folks who lived there, of course. During the

pre-contact days of Native America, boundaries blurred and possibilities loomed when it came to gender.

Many Native cultures had expansive views on what it meant to inhabit a body, and over 130 tribes

across North America showcased some type of gender nonconformity in their community.

They were known as two-spirit people, and for many indigenous groups, they were viewed as

sacred. They often served as healers and medicine folks. They had places of reverence in society.

But not all people were so accepting. European colonizers, who came from a very

different culture, sought to eradicate those who didn't conform to their rigid understanding

of what it meant to be male and female and how one should be playing out those roles.

In 1513, for example, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunes de Balboa sentenced around 40 gender-non-conforming

indigenous people to death, and as the late 17th century arrived, French colonizers further denounced

and stigmatized those practices, casting an oppressive pall over those who defied their rigid norms.

The dawn of the 20th century saw Western scientists and their creation of the taxonomic

system. People became obsessed with categories and classifications and figuring out how to place

animals, vegetables, and minerals in little tiny boxes. This led to a lot of people assuming that there

were right ways to be and wrong ways to be with little room for anything else. Like I said

before, we can see the Wild West so clearly. We have specific assumptions, specific images

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