Elle's Tenacious Library 🧬🔬

🚨”trans people have existed since the dawn of time” Everything about this argument is wrong. First of all, millennium plural is, millennia* and not millenniums* (This really irks me) Secondly; no, we have no evidence that cross-sex identities as we conceive of them today, were cross-culturally apparent for millennia. Cross-sexed behaviors in some males and females, have been noted and backed up by evidence, as a cross-time and cross-cultural phenomenon. We know that there have always been a micro minority of males and females who for various reasons either cross dressed or engaged in enough sex-atypical behaviors for their time/place/culture that they stood out. We know that there are several human cultures which castrated certain males, for religious reasons, for class reasons and for retaining a high singing voice post the age of 12 reasons. There were some males who have castrated themselves. There were other males who drank horse urine because they realized it would feminize their appearance. We don’t know whether any of these males thought of themselves as women. We do know that either they, or their society, decided that for whatever reason, these males should be castrated. We know there are times in history in which some women presented themselves as men in order to attain the rights of men that women did not have. Sometimes this was related to employment or even military deployment. Others presented themselves as men because they wished to partner with other women, and could not do that in a socially acceptable way while presenting themselves as the women they were. Whether any of these women did this because they had a cross-sex identity, or thought of themselves as men, cannot be determined in most or all of these cases. One could argue that “trans” as a series of actions, in its most primitive forms, has existed for a while. But then we’d need to decouple trans actions from cross-sexed identities, since we cannot deduce whether this co-occurred with the cross-sexed behaviors. Perhaps some of those ancient people did have an identity confusion or a wish to be the other sex. Perhaps others did not, and just didn’t conform to social expectations placed upon them as sexed beings of either sex. But we cannot assume that our modern notions of identity (which is by definition, highly socially mediated and constructed) could be applied to the motivations of those ancient people. “Trans/-gender/-sexual” is a modern descriptive label that is at most, 100 years old. “Trans” as an identity label that someone adopts a priori and then acts upon, is a phenomenon which hasn’t been around for more than a few decades at most. We should not assign our present-day identity labels to the behaviors of people who have been dead for more than 100 years, who lived in a different time, and who cannot tell us whether we are accurately representing their experiences with our modern words.