The Ancient Art of Gender-Bending

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After more harrowing 19th-century-guy-type adventures (including a stint as a spy and four months in a Confederate prison), Walker took up the causes of temperance, anti-tobacco, woman suffrage and—dress reform. Calling female dress "immodest," she often took to the speaker's platform in full drag, including bow tie and top hat—and got arrested for it more than once.

While Mary Walker may have been equal parts pioneer and prude, Isabelle Eberhardt followed her libido wherever it led. This riot grrrl version of George Sand was born in Switzerland in 1877, converted to Islam at 20 (along with her mother), and hung around Tunisia smoking kif and wrestling (and sleeping) with French soldiers. In 1900 she fell in love with an Algerian soldier named Slimane Ehnni—but not even l'amour could turn her into a girly girl. She adopted men's clothing and, as "Si Mahmoud Essadi," joined an all-male Sufi brotherhood. (Apparently, the Sufis weren't fooled—just impressed by Isabelle's willingness to live like a man.) She married Ehnni in 1901, wrote for an anarchist paper in Algiers, meddled in colonial politics, and was swept to her death in a freak flash flood in 1904. Whew! She was 27.

Eberhardt's willingness to cross the gender divide both reflected and furthered her ravenous appetite for adventure in the big world. The sexual ambiguity of my favorite gender-bender, the great Japanese dancer Kazuo Ohno, connects him quietly with his own past in a perpetual act of homage. Ohno, born in 1908, is one of the pioneers of butoh, the highly theatrical and emotional modern dance form that has influenced dance worldwide since it emerged in the '60s.

The wiry, ethereal Ohno often dances as a woman—an aged coquette or a black-toothed crone who's half witch, half sad ghost. In Admiring La Argentina (1977) he reincarnates the greatest Spanish dancer of the century, Antonia Merce, called "La Argentina,” who was a friend of Federico Garcia Lorca. Seeing La Argentina dance in Tokyo in 1929 turned Ohno from a gymnastics instructor into a dancer; he once called the performance "the creation of the world." As he repeats the dance, and others, like his 1981 homage to his mother, Ohno exercises his enormous capacity for gratitude to the powerful women who created him, as a man and as an artist.

A former man, by the way, is now the ruling artist of European pop music. The 1998 winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, the World Cup of Celine Dion–style Europop, is the fabulously named Dana International, representing Israel. Born Yaron Cohen, Ms. International became a woman in 1993. Her nomination for the honor nearly toppled Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition of secular conservatives and Orthodox religious killjoys. But a Eurovision victory is a Eurovision victory; fans danced in the streets back home, and Netanyahu gingerly passed on his congratulations to diva Dana via his media adviser. The government held, and there was even talk of launching a gender-war peace process.

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