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It’s not every day we get a news story about a Roman emperor, but here we are.
The North Hertfordshire Museum, in uh, North Hertfordshire, has decided to reclassify Elagabalus as a historical trans woman.
This is really exciting, right?
After all, this is a channel about transgender history, and I made an hour long video about the (maybe) transgender Roman Emperor Elagabalus, and I used she/her pronouns the whole time, so it must be true that she’s trans, right? And now she’s finally getting the recognition she deserves, right??
RIGHT????
Ehhhhhh.
Look, context is everything. Sometimes there’s more nuance to what you see on the surface when you dig deeper.
Just because the sources say Elagabalus identified as a lady doesn’t mean she identified as a lady. And not in the sort of way where you read some very very very very gay stuff from 18th century sapphics and historians declare them to be “good friends” and “roommates”. Elagabalus didn’t write anything, as far as we know, so we have to rely on what others said.
In case this is your first time joining us, welcome. I’m Sophie, and this is We Have Always Existed. It’s a channel where we explore the wealth of trans related histories from the ancient Mediterranean. Like, comment, subscribe, Patreon, yadda yadda yadda.
A while back, I did a video on Elagabalus. It was actually one of the first scripts I started working on, back when this channel was just a twinkle in my eye. I finished writing it, but hadn’t finished filming it, when Mia Mulder released her Elagabalus video, and I’m always gonna be a little salty about that.
But anyway, my video was a deep dive into the primary sources and the scholarship around Elagabalus. And if you haven’t seen it, you might want to watch it before this one, because it provides a lot of context for what we’re talking about here.
Anyway, spoiler alert, my conclusion was that we don’t know if she was actually trans, and barring some incredible new discovery of primary sources further illuminating this, we probably won’t ever know.
But that hasn’t stopped the WOKE MOB
BREAKING NEWS: THE WOKE NORTH HERTFORSHIRE MUSEUM HAS DECIDED TO REWRITE HISTORY. Will they stop at nothing in their depraved pursuit of forcing their fetishes onto everyone else??? Now we can’t even look to the golden age of human virtue and purity, the Roman empire, without dealing with PRONOUNS! Is nothing sacred? The ancient world was austere, honourable, temperate, measured. And now it’s just gays and sex everywhere you look!
It’s very silly.
Reporting on history sometimes feels like reporting on science – nobody seems to know how to do it effectively. Myself included sometimes, I’m far from perfect. But WOW is this ever embarrassing. And I’m not just talking about right wing sources.
Look, Elagabalus might have been a historical transgender person.
A responsible historical approach is to leave the topic thoroughly in the “maybe” bin.
But despite the parade of news articles on this, there’s very little in the way of genuine information.
Either it’s right wingers frothing at the mouth to rile up their base about PRONOUNS and WOKENESS, or it’s LGBTQ2IA+ sources itching for any news about trans people that isn’t depressing, or it’s people with no background in history doing their best to figure things out with what I’m sure is a tight deadline, or it’s clickbait writers writing clickbait articles with clickbait headlines.
What are these pisseurs de copie missing?
Context.
First, as usual, there’s a media frenzy around a trans topic, and as usual it’s a very minor thing blown way out of proportion. In this case, all the North Hertfordshire Museum has is a single Elagabalus coin, in a tiny little queer display. That’s not really that big a deal. My whole house is a queer display, and I have a single Elagabalus coin too, check it out. You can find this stuff at precious metals shops or on Ebay, and they’re not usually very expensive. This was was only $30.
They’ve included the coin in LGBT themed displays, which I’m fine with. Elagabalus was reported to have married both men and women, so whether she was trans or not, that still works. But if we’re going in that direction, there are other figures they could include as well, including the emperor Hadrian. Do they do the same? To be fair, I don’t know. They boast a fairly large numismatics collection on their website, but there isn’t much information about what that includes, and they haven’t responded to my attempts to speak with them about it.
As usual, it’s the politicians causing trouble.
The local council, it seems, is involved with the museum’s operations. And Keith Hoskins, Councillor and executive member for enterprise and arts, decided to pipe up and give his opinion on things. He told The Telegraph:
Elagabalus most definitely preferred the she pronoun, and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times. We try to be sensitive to identifying pronouns for people in the past, as we are for people in the present. It is only polite and respectful. We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing.
Pronouns are not a new thing, this is true.
People using pronouns for themselves is also not a new thing.
They didn’t exactly work that way in Latin though.
This is a massive oversimplification, but a person’s gender is determined by the ending of the words used to refer to them – dominus for lord, domina for lady, rex for king, regina for queen, etc. Coins for Queen Elizabeth, rest in piss, say “regina” on them, and coins for this moron say “rex,” because these utter clowns have been engaged in a millennia-long cosplay of Roman emperors and just can’t let go of it no matter how pathetic they look. The DG part, by the way, means “dei gratia” – by the grace of God.
Not really pronouns, but whatever, close enough.
It is polite and respectful to do your best to use the correct pronouns for people, that’s also true. And it’s especially nice to see a UK politician say that. So, good on you Keith.
But to say “we know” that Elagabalus identified as a woman? And that she was explicit about what pronouns to use?
No. That’s simply not true.
We have three different sources on Elagabalus, and each is unreliable for their own reasons – watch the original video for more details. So while they do describe her in pretty transy terms, they’re also not reliable sources on her life.
So why did I use she/her pronouns when referring to Elagabalus in that video? Why am I still using them now? Because it’s no more or less correct than he/him. There’s no conclusive proof that she was trans, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t trans – it means we don’t know. There are plenty of sources that use he/him, and I wanted to offer a counterbalance in the off chance she actually was trans, but don’t misinterpret – I’m not leaning toward one conclusion or another. I wasn’t claiming her as trans, because the sources didn’t provide enough evidence to do so, despite the fact that the video thumbnail had a scuplture of Elagabalus against a trans flag.
I really don’t think it’s a big deal for people to refer to Elagabalus with she/her pronouns. And I don’t think it’s a big deal to include Elagabalus in an exhibit geared toward LGBTQ2IA+ people in general.
But at the risk of sounding like a creationist here, teach the controversy.
We can’t be out here telling people Elagabalus was definitively trans, because definitive evidence doesn’t exist. And look, the reality is that if we just take the sources at face value, we also have to take at face value the fact that Elagabalus was a truly horrible, awful, wretched, monstrous, mind blowingly evil person. And quite frankly, we transes get enough bad press as it is.
The North Hertfordshire Museum isn’t exactly The Met, but it still seems to be a reputable museum led by well meaning people with academic credentials. The museum’s curator is a guy named Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, who’s got a handful of publications in his name, related to archaeology of ancient sites near North Hertfordshire. He’s also got this wonderful web 1.0 homepage out there with some conversations around archaeology, atheism, socialism, life as a gay man growing up in 90’s Manchester, and an adorable page of fawning praise about his partner. These sort of vintage personal homepages are such a wonderful piece of internet archaeology themselves. The wonderful electronic music pioneer and trans woman Wendy Carlos also has an amazing web 1.0 site. I just love websites like these, absolute treasures. Maybe this is 90s kid nostalgia, or maybe it’s just reminding me of how things were before billionaires gentrified the internet and we all used the same five sites over and over.
Anyway, the North Herts museum seems like a swell place run by swell people. I think they ought to put a lid on their councillor yakking about things he doesn’t understand, though.
I wasn’t even going to do a video on this, but people keep bringing it to my attention, so here we are. I guess I’ve got a bit of a reputation now, whoops.
So, there. Ya happy? Now let me get back to the other videos I’ve been working on.
News articles referenced:
►https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/20/trans-roman-emperor-hitchin-museum-claim-pronouns-woke/
►https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12772931/Roman-Emperor-Elagabalus-transgender-referred-museum.html
►https://nypost.com/2023/11/21/news/uk-museum-says-roman-emperor-was-a-trans-woman/
►https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/11/21/museum-roman-emperor-transgender-woman/
►https://metro.co.uk/2023/11/22/roman-emperor-reclassified-transgender-british-museum-19860029/
For a more thorough bibliography on Elagabalus, see the previous video on the subject, linked above.
