: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification.

Herodotus's enigmatic Scythian and its Hippocratic interpretation interested many early modern authors. Its seeming dimension of transgender identification invited various medico-psychological and psychiatric reflections, culminating in nosologist de Sauvages' tentative 1731 term, . This article identifies pertinent discussions and what turn out to have been entangled, tentative psychologizations in late-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth-century mental medicine: of 'effeminacy of manners' ( such as observed in London's Beaux and mollies) and male homosexuality (); of the mental masculinity of some women (, ); of ubiquitous attributions of impotence to sorcery (); and lastly, of transfeminine persons encountered throughout the New World and increasingly beyond.