Mexico Has Recognized a Third Gender Since Before Colonialism Arrived and the Muxes of Oaxaca Are Living Proof

Long before the language of gender identity entered public discourse, a community in the Zapotec heartland of Oaxaca had already built a social framework that recognized three genders as a matter of cultural fact. The muxes of Juchitán did not emerge from contemporary identity politics or recent Western influence. They represent the living continuation of a tradition that predates the Spanish conquest and survives today in one of the most distinctive communities in all of Mexico, one that preserved something the colonizers tried to erase and that the rest of the world is only beginning to understand.

According to Mexico’s official website, a muxe is a person born male who embraces a feminine role in social and economic life, learning from the women of their community, taking on domestic responsibilities and often becoming the primary caretaker of aging parents. In the Zapotec language, grammatical gender does not exist, a linguistic reality that scholars argue reflects a broader cultural openness to identities that do not fit the binary categories imposed by colonial structures. The muxe is proud of their Zapotec roots, proud of the role they occupy and, in many families, regarded as the most valued child in the household.

An Ancient History That Predates the Word Itself

The roots of the muxe tradition stretch back to pre-Columbian Mexico, and some of the earliest recorded evidence appears in colonial-era codices written by Spanish friars who were documenting indigenous life with a mixture of curiosity and religious alarm. The Codex Tudela, the Florentine Codex and the Codex Borgia all contain references to the temazcal, the traditional steam bath, where men and women gathered together without clothing and where, according to the friars’ accounts, men dressed in women’s clothing also moved through public and domestic life. One passage from the Codex Tudela describes men wearing women’s garments and performing women’s work such as weaving and spinning, with some lords keeping one or two such individuals in their households.

Sociologist David Greenberg argued in his 1990 book “The Construction of Homosexuality” that the Aztec deity Xochipilli may have served as a protective figure for people whose attraction was toward others of the same gender, and that seeking the god’s protection required adopting feminine clothing and roles, a practice that bears a striking resemblance to what the muxe tradition has preserved across centuries. The Spanish friars who documented these practices interpreted them through a Catholic lens that saw nudity and same-sex proximity as moral violations, which means that much of what they recorded was filtered through a framework of condemnation rather than genuine understanding. What they documented as transgression, the Zapotec community had long understood as simply part of how human beings exist.

A Third Gender With Its Own Rules and Its Own Limits

The Zapotec social structure that gave rise to the muxe tradition was organized around the family unit and shaped by a matriarchal system in which women held economic and domestic authority. Men hunted, farmed and performed physically demanding labor, while women made the decisions that governed family and financial life. The muxe occupied the space alongside women in that structure, performing the domestic and economic roles associated with femininity, including cooking, cleaning, childcare, embroidery, weaving and beautification. According to Yale, scholar Marinella Miano Borruso has argued that this structure, while more inclusive than binary Western frameworks, still operates within rigid gender roles. The Zapotec community does not enforce a gender binary in terms of identity, but it does enforce one in terms of labor and social function. The muxe lives freely as a third gender, but that freedom exists within a set of expectations about what a muxe does and how a muxe contributes to the community.

This distinction matters when placing the muxe tradition alongside Western LGBTQ frameworks. A muxe and a queer person in the United States may share certain surface similarities, including being born male and experiencing attraction toward other men, but the social roles they occupy are fundamentally different. A gay man in a Western context can assume any professional or social role regardless of gender coding. A muxe traditionally assumes feminine roles in a society where those roles remain clearly defined and largely separate from male ones. The comparison flattens something important about both communities, and scholars who study the muxe warn against treating Juchitán as a straightforward example of pre-colonial queer acceptance.

What Colonialism Tried to Erase and What Survived Anyway

The Spanish conquest imposed a Catholic moral framework onto indigenous communities across Mexico, and the muxe tradition did not escape that pressure. The binary gender categories embedded in colonial religion and law pushed practices that had existed openly for centuries into the margins of social life, and the recovery of the muxe’s place in Zapotec culture required generations of persistence against a system that had declared their existence illegitimate.

That recovery has been real. In contemporary Juchitán, having a muxe in the family is widely regarded as a source of pride, and cultural celebrations like the Fiesta de las Intrépidas give the community a public platform that extends well past the boundaries of Oaxaca. The muxes who gathered to help families displaced by the devastating September 2017 earthquake, distributing clothing and food to those who had lost their homes, demonstrated that the role of the muxe in Zapotec community life has always extended outward from the family into the broader social fabric.

Outside of Juchitán, however, the picture changes considerably. In Mexican society at large, muxes face discrimination that limits their access to education, employment and political participation. A muxe who dresses in women’s clothing in contexts outside their community can be denied entry to schools and excluded from professional opportunities. The Inter-American Development Bank launched an action plan for LGBT inclusion in 2019, but its effect on the specific economic conditions facing muxes has yet to be fully measured.

A Community Being Reshaped by the Modern World

The influence of the global LGBT rights movement has introduced new dynamics into the muxe community, particularly among younger generations. Visibility through media coverage and social media has encouraged more muxes to present publicly in feminine clothing, and access to information about gender-affirming medical procedures has led some younger muxes to pursue transitions that would technically move them outside the traditional definition of the third gender entirely.

Scholar Miano Borruso has noted that this shift creates a cultural tension within the tradition itself. A muxe who undergoes surgery to become fully female no longer occupies the third gender position that has defined the community’s social role for centuries. The muxe identity has always been built around something distinct from both maleness and femaleness, and the desire to move fully into the female category, driven in part by modern beauty standards and the expectations of male partners, represents a departure from that tradition rather than an extension of it.

The muxe community has survived colonization, religious suppression and cultural erasure. It has adapted to modernization while maintaining the core of what makes it distinct. The question now is whether the identity that endured all of that will continue to define itself on its own terms, or reshape itself in response to frameworks that arrived much more recently and understand it far less well.