And the acknowledgement that transsexualism exists was also appreciated. (I know how ridiculously hard it is to separate orientation and gender identity when they were conflated for so long. I just always dislike it when I read historical works that don't even acknowledge the transsexual angle, but you did a good job of handling that.
Thanks for the feedback that it came across well. Trying to map modern gender/sex/orientation concepts onto historic people and events is tricky, but I don't fall into the camp that says "there's no such thing as [insert category here] before the modern era because they hadn't invented the concept yet". I see it as packaging an associated cluster of concepts in different subsets. The concepts in the cluster are still
real, even in a different package.
Here's a weird analogy. Prepositions rarely translate exactly one-for-one between languages, even closely related languages. But that doesn't mean that the people speaking the languages live in worlds with entirely different types of spatial relationships -- only that they may find it easier to bundle certain sets of spatial characteristics together than other sets. A language doesn't need a one-word preposition to be able to describe one object as being "spread out and in close continuous contact with a vertical flat surface", but if the language does have a single word describing that relationship, then speakers are likely to be more aware of objects with that relationship.
Similarly, the cluster of characteristics that I'm exploring in these research papers may only intersect as a unified prototype in certain specific times and cultures, but that doesn't mean that a person of a different time and place couldn't have experienced that same cluster -- without viewing it as some sort of holistic concept.
I'm kind of getting away from a simple "thank you". Sorry.
(Posting the sex essay has prompted me to work on the expanded version of the cross-dressing essay.)