it's very hard not to notice that in pretty much every other culture in human history that the people we would today call transgender were integrated into society (because some cultures rejected us, but a lot did not) were given names/roles that were grounded within their culture, typically related to religion.

Or to sex work, begging, or to positions where us not being able to start a dynasty after an orchi was seen as politically advantageous. What a lot of these roles share is that gender variant people were relegated to a role that was in some ways removed from society at large. That does not mean we were always relegated to the margins, and being on the margins could mean something like "living on the outskirts of the village as a feared but respected shaman", but that was still a form of othering. Most of the societies that recognized there are more than cis men and cis women still were patriarchal, that is something that just arises very frequently from divisions of reproductive labor and patrilinear transfer of wealth. Western society was just uniquely fucked up in how it treated divergence from such a division by total erasure. Having 3, 5 or more genders still means they can be fit into some sort of restrictive superstructure that facilitates extraction of their labor, and they frequently are.

The third gendering inherent in these categories is also something not all trans people are comfortable with. Serrano has an entire chapter about transmisogyny from terfy cis anthropologists in Whipping Girl. As fitting as it sounds that my orchi would qualify me to be a huge dork advising the political class, i do have a certain problem with that being my only option when that class is the imperial court of pre-revolutionary China and i would also really object to being called a eunuch instead of my friends calling me a hot milf, my neutrals calling me a woman and my enemies calling me a horrible, wretched, man-hating and venom-spewing witch, so i'm with Serrano on that. And there are people in communities in the global south that reject labels like hijra or muxe and prefer trans woman. I get that it's a double edged sword in many ways, i get that we need to keep the constructivism angle in mind and also have to be mindful of the postcolonial and exorsexist pitfalls that can come from projecting our ideas of transness onto other cutures, but i honestly do not think it's up to me to tell an indiginous person not to use the same labels as i do just because there is a traditional label in their own culture. As with medical transitioning, always having the option is just a necessity for many of us even when it has historical baggage attached to it. The way forward is to remove that baggage, keep the parts that work for us and universalize access to them.