No, those shamans probably dressed as women all the time and were considered women because very few Indians had a conception of homosexuals. If you were a man attracted to men and liked it up the ass, you were considered a woman. That's in line with every other instance of crossdressing shamans and subgroups among Native Americans, and you can't even blame troon activism since there's a citation to a 17th century Spanish explorer noticing there were men dressed as women. Doesn't say what page, and I don't feel like fixing Wikipedia's mistake by actually going through that book and finding it, but I pulled up that book on Google Books and searched "sodomía" (sodomy) and got some results so it's probably true.
Most of the rest of that text is an interpretation by a single activist, the other parts by another activist. It probably reflects whatever Chile's "I'm 1/16 Indian" types believe their supposed ancestors believed, so either garbled nonsense read out of an old anthropology book or straight up invented shit.
This is somewhat found cross culturally. Transgenderism (I use that term loosely) has appeared in many cultures all over the world throughout history, for many different reasons which homosexuality is one of, and as far as I know each one either men becoming women, or men becoming a third gender that has feminine aspects, which is specifically found in NA indigenous populations (two spirit, although that is another broad term) and India (third gender im not typing the Sanskrit name), but also in the Ancient near east, mesoamerica, and more.
That being said, none of these are exactly like transgenderism as we have today, or were treated as such contemporarily. Sometimes intersex was included with that, sometimes not. Sometimes they were treated as a “third” all together, sometimes not. It is very difficult to relate these concepts to transgenderism today beyond the surface level.
My expertise is philology, and while I would take this with some salt, some ancient Sanskrit grammars claim that the third neuter gender in Sanskrit is based off an actual third gender, and this is further backed up by mentions of this in society in contemporary Hindu literature.
I find this fascinating as Sanskrit clearly gets its neuter gender from Proto Indo European, which only had animate (later split into M/F) and inanimate (neuter). In all other IE languages to my knowledge, none treat neuter as referring to an actual living gender except in these few cases with Sanskrit (barring current language evolution that does in response to transgenderism)
It’s quite possible this where India got its third gender in the first place, as they are othered (although not stigmatized) in society today much like the same way in ancient literature.
