Catalina de Erauso (–1650)

(eng) Probably the reason her gender is contested, is because for much of her life Catalina de Erauso dressed as a man and lived as a man. But biologically specking she was a woman, who, because of the restricted role of women in the sixteenth century, decided to live as a cross-dresser. In her foreword to 'Lieutenant Nun, transvestite in the new world', Marjorie Garber writes: 'As she tells it, hers is the story of a loner who enjoys camaraderie with men, an adventurer who spends most of her peripatetic career in the New World, yet whose proudest claim to identity is not as a man or a woman but rather as a Spaniard.''