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There are a lot of anti-transgender talking points circulating the discourse, but one that’s always stuck out to me was the idea that being transgender is just a new trend, a silly thing that silly kids do. Boys pretend to be girls and girls pretend to be boys, just like they might pretend to be dinosaurs or superheroes or something. But they grow out of this childlike foolishness and become adults, well-adjusted adults with responsibilities and families and pensions. And of course, trans adults are just delusional and out of touch with reality. And nonbinary? Give me a break, all these made up genders are ridiculous. You’re either a man or a woman, it’s just basic biology that there are only two genders!
*deep breath*
I hope it’s clear I don’t believe any of this. Transgender people do exist and have always existed.
But if that’s so, why don’t we hear stories about them?
That’s why I’m here.
I’m Sophie Edwards, though you may also know me as the fiction writer S.B. Edwards. I mostly write science fiction, and now I’m sitting here talking to you about transgender history. Life is full of contradictions, I suppose. I came out as transgender about four years ago, and since then I’ve found myself pretty disappointed at the state of research and exploration into our history, even on an amateur level.
We’ve done a pretty good job of documenting the history of transgender people in the more modern era, from the early twentieth century, onward. Figures like Lily Elbe, Marsha P Johnson, Billy Tipton, and others have become well-known figures in queer circles, but my historical interest has always been the ancient world.
The vast majority of the world’s history has been lost over the millennia. That’s true of general history, so it’s true of transgender history too. And what does survive has been told, re-told, and re-interpreted almost entirely through a cisgender, heterosexual lens. What that means is that the tidbits of transgender history we have aren’t even told as transgender history.
I think back to my undergrad, where I did a degree in classical studies. In my Roman history class, my professor, the absolute stereotype of the old white guy historian – British accent, scholarly beard, tweed suits, the whole shebang – could barely control his condescending snickering as we talked about the Roman emperor Elagabalus, whom in retrospect was clearly transgender – more on them in another video. He acted like they were some sort of bizarre historical curiosity, sort of the way you might think of people looking at an early 20th century circus freak show.
If you look more into scholarly research on Elagabalus, you’ll find scholars humming and hawing about whether they were actually transgender, or just a mentally ill deranged pervert. It’s so controversial! We can’t ever possibly know! I mean they did say “call me not lord, for I am a lady,” but how can we possibly be sure??????
This comes from the same tradition of scholarship – again dominated by cisgender heterosexual men – that questions whether Sappho was into women. Yeah, Sappho.
And Elagabalus, believe it or not, is sort of one of the lucky ones. At least their story is told in the first place. In a lot of other cases, these stories are either briefly glossed over, or full on ignored. We have some really interesting information, but nobody has bothered to dig into it and make it accessible.
We deserve to know, and own, our own history.
And it’s with that idea in mind that I’m introducing this project – We Have Always Existed: A History of Transgender Peoples of the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East. My intention is to take a look at the stories that have either been glossed over or misrepresented or ignored entirely, with the idea of giving modern transgender people a greater perspective into our history.
We have always existed, and I’m going to show you the evidence.
I doubt it will convince too many transphobes of anything, but they may be shocked to learn that I don’t actually care about their big smelly opinions.
Before we get into any actual historical stories, though, we need to get a better understanding of what it means to be transgender in a historical sense.
Were They Actually Trans?
Within the study of history, there’s a concept called presentism, and it’s pretty much universally agreed upon by serious historians that we need to do our best to avoid it.
So what is presentism?
Broadly speaking, presentism is the idea of projecting our own cultural biases and attitudes onto other cultures. That’s true of ancient peoples as well, because those of us in the west might be the cultural inheritors of ancient Greece and Rome, but we’re not them, regardless of how many dudes cosplay as Spartan soldiers.
Why is this such a big deal? When we’re talking about ancient cultures, it tends to pollute our understanding of them as we try to squeeze them into boxes we can understand.
One might think of an ancient soldier, for example, choose your state, as playing a similar role in their society as a modern infantry soldier might in your own country, wherever you’re listening to this from, but they’re so drastically different that to make such an assumption about them is to misunderstand the realities of both.
Which brings us to gender, and gender roles.
Sure, the term cisgender is a modern one. But there have always been men and women who were perfectly comfortable in the gender role they were assigned at birth.
Yes, cis people have always existed too, and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. I’m not cisphobic! I have lots of cis friends. My mom is cis! I would proudly date a cisgender person! I will stand for cisgender rights!
But no matter far back we look, we find people who stepped outside their assigned gender roles as well.
But if we call them transgender, isn’t that just succumbing to the same presentism we’re supposed to avoid?
Well, sort of.
Being transgender is a modern concept, but being gender nonconforming is nothing new. So how do we get around this without being bogged down in a bunch of obnoxious and unnecessary pedantry?
Queer historian and researcher Susan Stryker has a solution.
In her book, Transgender History, she defines transgender people in a historical context using the broadest possible definition, as “people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain their gender.”
If we look at the literal definition of the word “transgender”, she’s on the mark here.
And we are going to look at the literal definition of the word “transgender”
Sorry y’all, we’ve got to go back to grammar school for a moment.
The prefixes trans and cis both come from Latin. Trans means “across from” or “away from”, and cis means “on the same side”. Here’s an easy demonstration of how this worked – In ancient Rome, for example, two of their provinces were called Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul, or Gaul on the same side of the Alps (as the city of Rome), and Gaul across the Alps. And gender, of course, comes from the Latin genus, meaning category or type. So one being trans-gender would be one existing across from the category that was given to them.
So in this series going forward, I’ll be referring to a variety of different figures as transgender, but I’ll be using this definition. It doesn’t make much sense to try to shoehorn people into modern gender identities, but they still moved away from their assigned gender, so they still count as transgender under this definition.
I hope this doesn’t seem too pedantic, but it’s important to understand the history of people like us and how their gender identities would have differed from our own. If you invented a time machine and brought baby Elagabalus to grow up and be raised the modern world, for example, it’s entirely possible they would identify as a trans woman. But that’s not reality. We’re talking about ancient people, so it’s important that we recognize that.
So the TL;DR version of this is that I’ll be referring to ancient people who moved away from their assigned gender roles as transgender. That doesn’t mean they were transgender in the modern sense of the word, though.
Why Is There so Little Information?
If you’re intellectually lazy, or you’re just looking for reasons why it’s okay to treat trans people like dirt, you might just jump to the conclusion that you’ve never heard of trans history because there is no trans history, and it’s a 20th century phenomenon.
You can think that, if you like.
You’d be wrong.
But you can think that.
At the beginning of this, I told three different stories. They were fiction, but they outline three of the reasons why we don’t have a lot of information about ancient transgender people. These reasons aren’t restricted to just ancient transgender history, but they definitely affect it.
Let’s take a closer look at these three main points: transmission, literacy, and prudery.
The Problem of Transmission
There are some major gaps in the evidence we have about the ancient Mediterranean. We know the ancients wrote quite a bit – especially the Greeks and Romans – but only a small part of it survives today.
Take Sophocles, for example. He was a playwright in ancient Athens, and we know he wrote more than 120 different plays during his lifetime. Today, we have seven of them.
Aeschylus was a contemporary of Sophocles who wrote ninety plays, and we have six.
The Roman Menander wrote over a hundred comedies, and we’ve got one of them.
We also know about some pretty important historical figures who wrote as well, including Cleopatra, the Roman dictator Sulla, Pyrrhus of Epirus, and several Roman emperors, but their works survive only in fragments or the occasional literary reference.
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
So why don’t we have these works? Part of it is just the reality that the older something is, the harder it is to preserve it.
That’s true even today with mass production of consumer goods. Wayne Gretzky rookie cards, for example, are so rare now they sell for millions of dollars, even though there were tons of them made. Probably. Likely. I think. I don’t know anything about sports, I should have chosen a better analogy here.
Before the printing press was invented in Europe in the 15th century, the only way you could make a copy of a manuscript was to write it out by hand.
In fact, a lot of the ancient texts we have today come to us through copies made by medieval monks. It’s hard to make a piece of paper survive for 2500 years, after all.
Sometimes things are just lost, and we don’t know the reason. But a lot of it was deliberately destroyed as well.
The Great Library of Alexandria was one of the largest depositories of human knowledge in the ancient world. During its peak in the third and second centuries BCE, it housed the equivalent of about a hundred thousand books. Many of these were either unique, or one of only a few existing copies. It was first burned by Julius Caesar, after which it was repaired and burned again several times. But each time it burned, a large number of texts were destroyed, many forever.
Sadly, we’ll never know the extent of the information lost.
The Problem of Illiterate Cultures
We sometimes think of human progress as a linear process. Cultures reach certain milestones, and leave certain cultural ideas behind, on a very specific timeline, like reality is a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization.
Oh good, we researched mining! That will allow us to research the wheel.
Wait, what’s the wheel?
But reality is a lot messier than that.
Cultures only develop new ideas when they have a need for them. And it may sound surprising, but a whole lot of cultures throughout human history never needed to develop a system of writing.
Why not?
We have some inscriptions of Bronze Age language which we’ve called Linear B, written mostly on clay tablets. Most of the Linear B inscriptions we have were found in palaces in mainland Greece and on the island of Crete. When these palaces were burned down, it baked the tablets, preserving them for the ages.
So, big thanks to whomever destroyed Bronze Age Greece, great job! Historians are grateful.
This script was first rediscovered in the late nineteenth century.
I think about the historical imaginations that must have been running wild as people contemplated the secrets hidden in each of these tablets. What great literary works would they uncover? Could it be a more direct chronicle of the Trojan War, or some other precursor to Homer? Or maybe a historical chronicle older than anything we have from Greece? Could it be an as yet undiscovered work of history?
When we finally did decipher it in the 1950s, though, what we found resembled an Excel document much more than Word.
They used Linear B, so far as we can tell, for keeping track of the amount of grain, wool, and other goods they had stored in the palace, and who they distributed it to. That’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on when we’re trying to piece together a historical narrative.
Imagine, for example, our civilization is destroyed, and somebody from 3000 years in the future digs up our remains. They find some burned out buildings, a little bit of consumer goods, maybe a few pieces of wall art or statues, and your 2013 income tax statement.
Not a lot to go on, right?
So what’s the point here? So far as we can tell, a lot of early forms of writing in the ancient Mediterranean developed as a way to tally stockpiles of goods. And as a result, they tended to develop in cultures that, well, stockpiled goods.
And since nomadic cultures don’t tend to stockpile goods the way more sedentary cultures did, they were less likely to develop writing systems.
The ancient Mediterranean cultures we know the most about are the Egyptians, the Athenians, and the Romans. Why? They wrote the most stuff. The Persians wrote too, but nowhere near as much. The Spartans and Etruscans wrote very little. And as for the Scythians, the Thracians, the Gauls, the Dacians, the Illyrians, the Boii, and a whole bunch of others? Nothing at all.
So how did these cultures pass on their cultural ideas? For some, we don’t know for sure, but a lot of them did so through oral traditions. And when their culture dies out, those oral traditions die with them.
That leaves us with archaeological evidence, or outsider viewpoints when we have them.
So it’s possible many of these cultures had transgender people living among them. But we either don’t know about them, or we have such scant evidence that we have to piece things together in a way that makes it almost impossible to say anything conclusively.
And that sucks.
The Problem of Prudery
Would it shock you if I told you that western culture hasn’t always been kind to transgender people?
There’s a long history of Europeans and their descendants being deeply uncomfortable with the display of any sort of sexuality. And while being trans isn’t inherently sexual any more than being cis is, conservatives certainly seem to think it is, which is I think one of the big disconnects between conservatives getting angry about trans characters in children’s cartoons, for example. But that’s another idea.
There are two things here I think really illustrate this point well: the Loeb Classical Library, and the Gabinetto Segreto.
The Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1912, and it’s still around today. They publish translations of classical literature, and their goal is to make it more accessible to the average person. That’s really cool, since they helped repopularize classical history.
But here’s the thing.
Translations are inherently imperfect. They’re subject to the biases of the person who’s translating them. And if you want to make something popular, you have to make sure it appeals to the masses.
So for early 20th century readers, that meant removing the sexy bits.
In his essay “For The Gentleman And The Scholar: Sexual And Scatological References In The Loeb Classical Library”, Philip Lawton points out some examples of this.
Here’s one, from the Greek comedian Aristophanes’ work Lysistrata:
Euripides: Don’t you know him really?
Mnesilochus: No. (thinks again) No I don’t; at least I don’t remember
Euripides: (severely) I fear there’s much you don’t remember, sir.
So what? That final line was deliberately mistranslated. A much better translation would be:
“Well you must have fucked him, though you might not know it”
There are plenty more examples of this, but this illustrates the point pretty well. Post-Victorian Britain was just not comfortable with men talking about banging other men.
But okay, so where’s the trans part?
For that, let’s take a look at Pompeii.
For those who don’t know, Pompeii was a Roman city close to where Naples is today. In the year 79 CE, nearby Mt. Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum in volcanic ash. It was rediscovered in the 17th century, and to this day only about two thirds of it have been fully excavated.
Over the years, Pompeii has been one of the most incredible sources of stuff from the Roman world. Wall paintings, statues, pottery, jewelry, protective gear gladiators would wear to fight in, tons of graffiti that said things like “Gaius was here” or “Secundus took a dump here”, advertisements, and even perfectly preserved loaves of bread. Okay they’re carbonized loaves of bread you wouldn’t want to eat them, but it’s still cool that in some museum somewhere we have a 2000 year old loaf of bread.
Anyway.
Amid all this stuff, we found a lot of, shall we say, erotic imagery.
Take this statue, for example, of the god Pan banging a goat.
Or this one, of a wind chime depicting a man who’s dong has turned into an animal and he’s ready to cut a *bleep*
Or this one, another wind chime, of an animal with a dick where its head would be, and a dick where its dick would be, and a dick where its tail would be, and wowwee is that ever a lot of dicks.
Or this wall fresco from Herculaneum, depicting the god Hermaphroditus as a woman with a dick.
When these pieces were first discovered, we know that sadly some of them were destroyed where they were found. Others were locked away in the Gabinetto Segreto, or Secret Museum, where only certain male scholars were allowed to access, and they were still looked at strangely if they did access it.
And lest you think this is just an old timey thing and it’s not a big deal anymore, the Gabinetto Segreto was only permanently opened to the public in 2005.
So with this long history of the suppression and destruction of art that displayed any sort of sexual or gender deviation, we’re only now beginning to rediscover some of these suppressed histories. But sadly, we’ll never know what was taken from us.
Moving Forward
I hope this wasn’t too pedantic or dry, but I think it’s important to establish a base level of understanding for what we’re talking about here.
I also wanted to make something I could point to in anticipation of some of the responses I might get in future videos.
WELL ACKSHUALLY, TRANSGENDEREDSED IS A MODERN PHENOMENON BASED ON THE TAXONOMIC NOMENCLATURE ESTABLISHED IN THE 20TH CENTURY–
Next time, we’ll get to some real trans stories, I promise.
I’m starting off this series committing to seven pieces – this one, and then six more proper historical stories. I might end up doing more, but starting with seven feels more manageable to me.
If you want to know more about some of the trans histories I’ve managed to uncover, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing. I know it’s cliché at this point but it really does make a difference.
The next episode in this series is on the Scythians, and it’s being released alongside this one. That means if you’re listening to this one now, the next one is already uploaded. I can’t tell you how excited I am to share that one with you all. It’s actually the reason I started this project in the first place. The things we talk about there, and in future episodes, are going to completely change the way you think about transgender history.
We have always existed.
And I’m going to show you the evidence for it.
Until next time.
