Specifically, what I meant, there were provisions to classify someone as not-a-man without having any actual hermaphrodite secondary sexual characteristics (so cross-dressing and accepting the gender roles would have been enough in some cases). It was controversial even then but there are a few cases here and there. Islamic legal rulings have a long and varied history, but the authority to make independent judgments was continuously abridged through history. I do not have anything on me right now but I can probably get some from my old HDD, sorry
What we have today in the worst cases is a classic combination of a hostile religious attitude that only mandates punishment for the act while recognizing the desire, combined with the state enforcing this penalty, with the state often being harsher and used as a cover for the religious underpinnings.
The Middle-Eastern/Central Asian pederasty tradition is not part of the third-sex paradigm but part of the recognizing of the desire, really (though the current norm tends very uncomfortably young, granted, probably more so than the medieval norm). You'll hear the exact same arguments from the Muslims regarding Friendship, Divine Love, etc. when bumping into huge reams of medieval homoerotic poetry and prose. It wasn't serious you see, just a literary standard/transcendental stuff you wouldn't understand/blah etc. Kind of Platonic in the sense of "probably hypocritical given what you wrote before".
The fact that the Catholics have the same arguments but lack the volume of contrary literature is an interesting distinction, and one I brought attention to earlier in the thread, and one that Sun tried to argue as not being evidence of cultural silencing.