I’m wondering if there is any recorded history of Christian colonizers and missionaries (I guess from 1st - 17th century) encountering cultures where there are gender categories that differ from the Western binary, eg. hijras in India.
Obviously, there is the story in Chapter 8 of Acts that talks about the conversion of an Ethiopian eunuch. But it’s not clear to me whether a eunuch was considered a separate gender category from male and we don’t have records of how eunuchs were treated in early Christian communities (apart from the fact that they are allowed to be baptized).
Google is yielding a lot of modern results about Christian responses to intersex and transgender people in the West, but that’s not what I’m interested in.
Are there any historical documents or studies of this topic?
Although I can't speak about the topic in detail, I can give you a very specific example from Mughal and Colonial India:
Antonio Monserrate, a 16th-century Spanish missionary in the Mughal Emperor Akbar's court described Hijras as "a crowd of worthless profligates." Later, Jesuit missionaries would also petition the emperor to expel Hijras from the region, but these requests were never honored. Simply put, most European travelers greatly disapproved of the Hijra community. Both of these instances are fairly good overall examples of the European perception of Hijras and other Indians that didn't conform to traditional gender stereotypes. While Europeans had relatively little ability to actually do anything about the Hijra communities during the Mughal Era, the situation changed considerably during the late 19th century. By the 1870s, British administrators in the Raj began to pass a plethora of legislation collectively referred to as the Criminal Tribes Act, which designated entire castes and communities as prone to crime and indecency, and accordingly forced them to endure severe surveillance and restriction upon their movements (it is perhaps important to note that some Indian castes and groups genuinely did engage in generational crime, however, this is a rather complicated subject, and the British response was not so much intended to reduce crime as it was to tightly administer the Raj).
Under these laws, Hijras were designated as "eunuchs" (a disparaging term, as Hijras do not actually identify as males), and those caught associating with Hijrah communities could be arrested or fined. Hijras were also villainized for their (highly exaggerated) relationships with children, and the very few orphans that had been adopted by Hijrah communities were removed from their care. Simply put, colonial authorities did not understand the nuances of the Hijrah identity and did not much care to learn, preferring instead to suppress Hijrahs and damage their community structures.
As a final note, I understand that this is a very sensitive topic, and I encourage anyone to correct me if I got anything wrong, and to alert me if anything I wrote could be interpreted as rude or insensitive.
But it’s not clear to me whether a eunuch was considered a separate gender category from male and we don’t have records of how eunuchs were treated in early Christian communities (apart from the fact that they are allowed to be baptized).
Oh, but there are copious records of eunuchs in Christian communities all the way into the 19th century. The Byzantines also maintained the practice.
/u/caffarelli specializes in castrati, eunuchs made to sing higher registers, because the church banned women from singing at times. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1finf8/ama_eunuchs_and_castrati/