The Goddess
This isn’t a rigorous piece of scholarship, just a personal piece I’ve wanted to write. I was at least partially inspired by little light’s The Seam of Skin and Scales, which I can in no way equal. This is also sort of a counterbalance to Fear, in that I find strength here when dealing with said fear.
I have an interesting relationship with goddesses. I gravitate to those who are a bit odd, a bit scary, a bit unknown and frightening. I look to those like Hekate, who carries more than a bit of dangerous mystery and otherness. Hekate is also the goddess of witchcraft, magic, ghosts, the night, and other less savory things. I am not into all of these things (although I prefer night to day), but like most of the goddesses I prefer, she’s a bit other, a bit strange, a bit alien. I can identify with that.
Some of Cybele’s gallae were probably what we’d call “trans women” today.
Cybele’s gallae were male-bodied priestesses who castrated themselves and lived as women forever after. Of course, they were limited by the technology of the times – no hormones or vaginoplasty for them, but they also didn’t have to deal with the Standards of Care.
Kali Ma is another goddess I identify with. She has many faces, from the nurturing and benevolent, to the dangerous and lethal. She’s not a safe goddess. She represents death, destruction, fear, the shattering of illusions, the ending of lies. She kills demons, and yet is seen as the kindest and most loving of all Hindu goddesses. She protects as well as destroys.
The above has been labeled as both Inanna and Lilith, and since I am fond of both, I’ll go ahead. Lilith is the mother of monsters, and in the apocrypha was not acceptable as a woman – something I’m intimately familiar with. Sometimes, when I am treated as an outsider, I think of myself as being one of Lilith’s daughters, a monster who must claim what is rightfully mine, since few are willing to grant it to me.
Inanna walked into the underworld, died, and was restored to life. I can identify with that – I had to to walk through my own underworld, leave behind the trappings of a life I admittedly didn’t really want, end that old life, and begin anew. When I returned from this metaphorical underworld, I carried only that which belonged to me now, and left that which I abandoned in the dust.
Unlike Inanna, however, I did not sacrifice anything of value.
I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Bast. I’ve loved cats since I was old enough to recognize them for what they are, and I’ve always been able to get along with them in a way that I don’t get along with anyone else – not humans, not dogs, not horses. But Bast is more than just about cats. She was originally a lioness and a war goddess, a protector. She’s been both the sun and the moon.
I originally connected to goddesses as a way to process my own femininity, to reveal it and celebrate it. To accept who I am and who I was meant to become. They were (and still are) a significant part of my life as a woman. Through them I understand that womanhood transcends pure biology.
Also, just for the questioning transphobia element, I’d like to point to Sandy Stone’s The Empire Strikes Back: A Postmodern Transsexual Manifesto. It’s a response to Janice Raymond’s hate screed, The Transsexual Empire.
great stuff. I didn’t know that Attis was supposed to have been reincarnated as Cybele’s daughter (oh, those wacky gods and their incest!…) I knew she had (ancient world version of) transgendered priests.
why do you say that figure -isn’t- Lilith? I thought the webbed feet marked her as a demon in the Jewish tradition (see Isaac Bashevis Singer); and the owl is her symbol, no? I mean, I’ve no idea really, just wondering.
The Inanna/Ereshkigal is a great story. I like it so much better than the Persephone story (roughly similar themes, but the focus gets changed to Guess What).
belledame222
November 21, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I should have said there’s controversy over whether that’s Lilith or Inanna, but the picture has been described as both. I had a source that explicitly said it was Inanna-not-Lilith, but my machine crashed and I’ll have to dig it up again.
And yeah, I first read about Cybele and Attis 20 years ago, and I only just learned that Attis was reborn a girl. The sources I’d read just made her the “dying-resurrected lover/son” and never acknowledged this other aspect.
There’s a version of the Inanna story which features an intersex/transgendered (vague/unclear on this point) person who was created specifically to rescue Inanna, and because of this, Inanna granted special blessings, and Ereshkigal cursed them. I do not know if this version is legitimate, though.
Lisa Harney
November 21, 2007 at 10:25 pm
lovely – and with pictures! (if you were my student you would get extra marks for prettiness, for i am shallow)
i was not impressed with the reportage of the archaeological discovery of a gallus a few years back. this is one of the less obnoxious articles, too.
nix
November 22, 2007 at 4:13 am
I think the singular of “gallae” would be “galla” – “gallus”, IIRC, means “chicken”… :p
All the above are pretty awesome goddesses, i’m familiar with Kali, Hekate and Cybele, less so with the others, but they sound pretty cool and worth checking out more info on.
Two goddess figures i am interested in, but have found little info on:
1) Tlazolteotl (sp?) – an Aztec goddess whose name apparently translated to “Eater of Filth”, who seems to play a very similar role of purification-through-destruction and/or revenge-of-the-underdog as Kali, and who Frida Kahlo apparently identified herself with. I’ve seen two references, one in the comic series “The Invisibles” by Grant Morrison (in a story arc featuring a trans* character who invokes her), and the other in a book about Kahlo’s paintings. She doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia article…
2) Ariadne (?) – according to a friend of mine who is very into Cybele/Attis and “heretical” Christian gnosticism (centred around Sophia as the feminine aspect of the Creator), she is worshipped by Gypsy/Romany peoples and regarded as Cybele/Gaia/Sophia “reincarnated” as her own daughter from her rape and enslavement by Baal/Satan/Lucifer (which has close parallels with some versions of Kali’s origin story), and again a vengeful/revolutionary deity. However, i’m not sure if she had the name right, as the only Ariadne i can find any info on is the sorceress/demigoddess from the Theseus story…
As for Persephone, i think all those of us with SAD and/or cold intolerance have a right to curse her…
shiva
November 22, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Oh, anthropologists try to ungender the gallae all the time.
I know about Tlazolteotl, although not much. A third reference for her is in the rpg by White Wolf called Scion. I’ve not heard of Ariadne, at least by that name. I’ve read some stories that might relate, but I really couldn’t say for sure.
Anyway, yeah, Persephone’s not on my list at all. She’s just not the goddess for me.
I could have listed others I like; Isis, Athena, Freya, and I forgot one that fits: The Morrigan. Maybe another article. :)
Lisa Harney
November 22, 2007 at 2:05 pm
I’ll edit to add this later, but I did forget to mention one big reason I love Cybele: The gallae indicate that transsexualism is not something that modern medicine invented, and that we didn’t come into being just to satisfy the medical profession’s “need” to turn “men into women” or “women into men.”
I’ve seen that argument made by both cis and trans feminists.
Lisa Harney
November 22, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Also, Nix: If I were your student, I would’ve written like 10x as much, I think. :)
Anyway, yeah, my blog doesn’t have much in the way of pretty pictures. I could dig them up, but I tend to prefer the text.
Lisa Harney
November 22, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Right, here we go again… Cybele, the goddess of transexsuals and Attis her prophetess… oh, will you people give up already?
I’m Greek and I like our mythology very much so I’ve read a lot of it and in the original too thank you. In my language, nouns are gendered. Attis’s name has a male termination and he’s always mentioned as a male, in sources as old as Hesiod (the father of mythology). I’m still waiting to see those older, more informed sources.
Greek mythology has plenty of unambiguous and well-accepted examples of gender bending, like the myth of Hermaprhoditos and the story of Teiresias and Herme’s caduceus. So,what gives?
History has seen plenty of self-castration cults, but they’re not synonymous with transexualism. Case in point, the Skoptsi. As about the cult of Cybelle, when I first read about the Galli, they were that: Galli (singularia, Gallus) a male noun again. They did live “like women” but they were addressed as males. And exactly what’s wrong with that, pray?
If the transexual community wants to draw on a good historical analogy for its modern fate, maybe it should look at the sex-slavery experienced by castrated boys since the times of at least the Persian Empire and definitely up to the last years of the Ottoman Empire. That’s a tale much more fit to describe the lives of the vast majority of modern transexuals and would make much more sense than misinterpreting what is, after all, just the religious superstitions of ancient people.
Stassa
November 22, 2007 at 7:23 pm
What kind of male-bodied person would live as a woman? Oh, right. What kind of person would refer to a male-bodied person who lives as a woman with masculine pronouns? I can find those all over the place. Pointing this out doesn’t mean anything.
I didn’t claim that all self-castration cults were synonymous with transsexualism, but I am rightfully suspicious of those that involve male-bodied people who castrate themselves and live as women as being just a matter of “eunuchs,” and nothing else.
Also, I don’t want to look for historical analogies, I want to look for historical examples.
Lisa Harney
November 22, 2007 at 7:44 pm
“What kind of male-bodied person would live as a woman? Oh, right. What kind of person would refer to a male-bodied person who lives as a woman with masculine pronouns? I can find those all over the place.”
Yeah, that. Just because someone is pronouned a certain way does not mean the person is not transgendered or transsexual. And if we’re finding parallels between transgendered lives in history and transseexual lives today, there are surely going to be mismatches — “transsexual” is a modern term with modern connotations. Different societies will have different ways of handling gender-variant people and people who live as a different gender than the one they’re expected to claim.
Trin
November 22, 2007 at 8:27 pm
None of which means we’re not talking about people who are importantly similar fundamentally.
Trin
November 22, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Transsexual is a modern term, but I have no doubts that people who had the same gender dissonance have existed all along, but have been accommodated in various ways in different places and times. Not arguing, though.
Stassa, you might not be wrong about some people appropriating the Attis myth, and I may have taken them at their word a bit too quickly, and I will look into that. I find it unlikely that there were no “transsexuals” among the gallae, though.
Lisa Harney
November 22, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Yes, please do. All we know about the Galli is that they castrated themselves and dressed in drag. We don’t know how they, themselves spoke about it and there’s every chance their “feminisation” was a symbolic sacrifice of their manhood to their goddess for mystical reasons rather than an expression of a female gender identity. For some, yes, it could have been the case and some people might have flocked to the cult as a result of their desire to be castrated and “live like women” but all of them? In any case, a Gallus wouldn’t have been “living as a woman” to the effect that their greengrocer would be addressing them as “ma’am” or that they would marry men and so on. You’re just assuming too much.
And, no, we’re not talking about people who are “importantly similar fundamentally”, but people who look the same on the surface. Modern-day experience of just as fundamental differences between groups of such people mean we can’t take anything for granted. I can go and ask a Thai ladyboy or a Latin American travesti about her identity, but how do I know what people thought and felt who lived centuries ago? I’d be incorrect to assume that, for example, a transvestite and a transexual were the same, if they lived next door to each other. So how is it so clear that people who are separated by such a wide cultural, geographical and chronological gap are identical?
You’re suspicious… I’m suspicious too, of Western, English-speaking, modern-day transexuals digging all over the place to find examples of people “like us”. I sympathise with your need to find justification for your very existence in your *phobic cultures and I’ll help you if I can. But you have to stop nicking everybody else’s traditions, twisting them until they fit your arguments and then declaring that they’ve always been that way and everything else is a bigot conspiracy. If you really understand the right to self-identification then you will please listen to me when I’m talking about my history. Otherwise- how can we be allies?
Stassa
November 23, 2007 at 5:52 am
Friday Blogwhoring
by matttbastard
Happy holidays to our Southerly neighbours, two of whom kindly presented holiday themed posts yesterday. Hope you’re having a halfway-decent BND/Black Friday, y’all. Love and runaway consumerism forever.
(All Hail The Que…
bastard.logic
November 23, 2007 at 8:45 am
“We don’t know how they, themselves spoke about it and there’s every chance their “feminisation” was a symbolic sacrifice of their manhood to their goddess for mystical reasons rather than an expression of a female gender identity. For some, yes, it could have been the case and some people might have flocked to the cult as a result of their desire to be castrated and “live like women” but all of them?”
Stassa,
Personally I don’t doubt that there were some people who probably did just what you describe — felt a religious calling despite a male gender ID and made great sacrifices for their goddess. But I suspect that such people would be rarer than people who would feel the religious calling *because* of the rites. I know many modern transfolk (not all TS, some TG) who serve or feel a kinship with deities who genderbend or have gender-variant followers. I don’t think it’s a horrible stretch to assume that the Cybele cult had a lot of MTF-vectored people of some kind.
WHether they’d be analogous more to transsexuals or to transvestites or to genderqueers or to some other modern subcategory of transgender I don’t know, but I really don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say they were trans in some way, or for modern trans people to think of them as kin.
Trin
November 23, 2007 at 11:25 am
“Transsexual is a modern term, but I have no doubts that people who had the same gender dissonance have existed all along, but have been accommodated in various ways in different places and times.”
Lisa,
I’m not arguing with this at all. :) I’m just saying I think that there are cultures that make space for trans lives in different ways, and that that might count as a reason for not saying these people are “transsexual” specifically. Not that I don’t think the same gender dissonance is there. I strongly suspect it *is*. I mean, we do have evidence for a theory that biology and hormones matter and may be what makes someone transsexual. If that’s so — or even if that’s a large part of why some people are transsexual — then it stands to reason that similar people with similar internal senses of identity existed back then too, even if their social role was different.
Trin
November 23, 2007 at 11:41 am
oh, and Stassa: “a Gallus wouldn’t have been “living as a woman” to the effect that their greengrocer would be addressing them as “ma’am” or that they would marry men”
I really hope you’re saying this just because women of the time were expected to marry men. As written it sounds like you’re saying lesbians (or only trans lesbians?) are less of women than straight (trans?) women are.
Trin
November 23, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I didn’t intend for it to sound as if I was saying it was all of them. Rather, I was saying it was a social option for people who would be called “transsexual” today. I’m sure there were others. I don’t think that they would necessarily be outnumbered by those who choose castration from religious ecstasy.
I can point to quite a few cultures that have gender-variant people who don’t see them as being of the gender they live in, or as completely of that gender. I don’t see why that would be different here. I’m not sure why you’d think I was saying they’d marry men and telling me I’m assuming too much.
I’m not looking for justification for our existence. The fact that we exist is justification enough. Apparently, though, we’re not supposed to have history…
I never insisted that there is a bigot conspiracy. I think you’re misunderstanding my point where I said that people tend to marginalize gender-variant people in anthropology, and this is something that actually happens. Not the mythology, but the actual people.
It is not cultural appropriation to point at a group of gender-variant people who do certain things and say “you know, there were probably actual transsexuals involved here.” I don’t see why the idea that there were actual transsexuals, historically, in situations like this, should be off-limits. It’s not as if being gender variant is somehow a modern, western, English-speaking phenomenon. It’s not confined to any particular ethnicity or culture.
And, er, I am listening, which is why I’m actually trying to find out where the whole Attis-as-girl story came from, and whether it was invented just ’cause.
Lisa Harney
November 23, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I guess I’m saying that what “transsexualism” is, isn’t so much something I’d define as a social role as it is what you are, and that it’s not likely to be different whether you’re born 2,000 years ago or yesterday. How society accommodates you varies, obviously.
Lisa Harney
November 23, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Trin. Do I think that “real” women should marry men and have babies? Hmm… no, I think I’ll let you guess. More fun that way.
I too want people like me to have existed since forever and of course I’ve dwelt on the stories about Cybele (and Hermaphroditos and Teiresias and, and, and). I took power from them and it was part of that revelation that “No, no, you’re not alone”.
On the other hand, I insist that we can’t know anything about how the people who made those stories up felt and thought about them. I too find it hard to resist the obvious conclusion: that people who castrated themselves to live “like women” were in fact transexuals like me. The problem with that though, is that it is just common sense- or, at least, my (and your) common sense: in other words, cultural bias or the argument from “well, duh”.
One example of this is how we all assume that becoming a Gallus would have been the only way to live as a woman, in the historical circumstances. Again, this is just one reading of history. Still, anyone who has the guts to mutilate themselves with a bit of broken crokery, sure has the balls to live as a woman outside a cult- in any society. Today’s ones aren’t such nice places for transwomen to live in either, yet scores do it and suffer for it, as this blog is keen to point out. If there were women like them back then, you bet they would have left an entirely different mark on history.
In the end, what you say Lisa, that being gender-variant is not a modern, English-speaking phenomenon, you’re right but being a transexual, in the sense that you are one and (I assume) Trin is and the people who claim the Galli were transexuals are, is. It is how you experience your gender-variance, which must be a universal human trait, in the confines of your culture, which isn’t. Again I invoke my ancestry, but my experience of gender-variance is a world apart from the one of the Western, English-speaking Transexuals (er- WESTs!) So, I’m saying you assume too much and take too many things for granted- based on your entirely valid experience, but trying to take it places it just can’t go.
Stassa
November 23, 2007 at 7:17 pm
I guess I’m saying that what “transsexualism” is, isn’t so much something I’d define as a social role as it is what you are, and that it’s not likely to be different whether you’re born 2,000 years ago or yesterday. How society accommodates you varies, obviously.
No, I think that transexuality is something that depends on your socialisation. Insofar as we can only explain ourselves as members of a society and only by using its own interpretation of reality. I’m not convinced that transexuality is “in the brain”. I think it’s in the mind and that the mind is a primarily social construct. At the very least, as the studies of “feral children” suggest, I think that society enables the mind and a human personality needs a social environment in order to develop at all.
It follows that individuals living in a society that has no words to describe a gender-variant experience as the one we modern people can communicate to each other, would not give rise to individuals who would understand themselves in the terms that we understand ours- and misunderstand them.
Stassa
November 23, 2007 at 7:24 pm
erm. quote tags don’t work, eh?
Stassa
November 23, 2007 at 7:24 pm
:I guess I’m saying that what “transsexualism” is, isn’t so much something I’d define as a social role as it is what you are, and that it’s not likely to be different whether you’re born 2,000 years ago or yesterday. How society accommodates you varies, obviously.”
*nods* I think it depends which word means what. If we take “transsexual” to mean “person with gender dysphoria,” then I agree. If we take it to mean “person who goes through *this* set of social hoops and goes through *this* real life test and gets *these* hormones and possibly has *this* surgery,” then no — and that’s what I was using it to mean.
Trin
November 23, 2007 at 8:32 pm
“At the very least, as the studies of “feral children” suggest, I think that society enables the mind and a human personality needs a social environment in order to develop at all.”
Actually Stassa, I was just watching a show on feral children, and it suggested that the children deemed “feral” were actually retarded and had suffered abuse at the hands of their caregivers, and that a modern child deemed “feral” actually did learn once removed from an environment in which he was treated like a beast/curio. I’m not sure if it’s true, but it certainly seemed plausible.to me. If you’ve seen studies that actually say differently, I would actually quite love to see those citations.
“In the end, what you say Lisa, that being gender-variant is not a modern, English-speaking phenomenon, you’re right but being a transexual, in the sense that you are one and (I assume) Trin is”
You know what they say about when you assume…
Trin
November 23, 2007 at 8:46 pm
More to the point, I’m just saying that I don’t believe the need to change one’s physical sex came into being with modern gender roles or the technology to change one’s physical sex, and I believe that people like this probably served Cybele. I don’t believe that the need to change physical sex is at all a cultural thing, I believe that a large number of cultures have adapted to the existence of gender-variant people in ways that may or may not have included body modification, but that doesn’t imply to me that body modification wasn’t something that wouldn’t have been sought if it were available.
I mean, Thai women who would be kathoey (not all of them, though) seek surgery, not all trans women in America want surgery, and hijra are going for hormones at the very least, and probably some are seeking surgery as well. I’m not saying that all of these people are transsexual by the strict definition of someone wanting to physically change sex, but I do believe that each of these populations has people who want to physically change sex. I don’t think exposure to the West instilled these feelings, I do think that some of them have always been this way. There are still people who identify as bi-gendered or two-spirit even while being raised in the West.
I don’t think all gender-variant people are transsexual, though.
I don’t know. My earliest sense of myself was as a girl, and my mother tells me that I tried to assert my girlhood even before those particular memories occurred. I know not all trans people experience this the same way I do, and don’t have such a strong early sense, but it seems counterintuitive to me that I socialized as a girl so profoundly by the time I was 3 years old. I’m not even sure how that would happen.
I guess you can put me firmly in the primarily nature camp, rather than the primarily nurture camp.
Oh, on who is or is not trans – I’d say the commenters are about 50/50 trans and cis. I’m trans, Trin isn’t.
Also, the tags for quoting are blockquote and /blockquote. :)
Lisa Harney
November 23, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Yeah, that. And modern people didn’t invent sex-changing body modifications either.
Trin
November 23, 2007 at 10:30 pm
A trans man who came from Tanzania to America to transition.
He was totally not raised in American/Western culture, but still needed to transition.
Lisa Harney
November 24, 2007 at 1:38 pm
You say some of the Galli were transexuals in the modern sense. I say, maybe. Maybe not. The thing is, from what we know they were not a cult of transexuals; they were followers of Cybele who was a goddess of fertility, not of gender bending or sexual transformation. The myth of Attis is about the symbolic death and rebirth of nature during the cycle of winter and spring, not about crossing from one gender to the other. The, at least nominal, reason why the Galli castrated themselves was to honour Attis’ sacrifice and in commemoration of the original bi-gendered nature of Cybele (according to some tellings of her tale at least, when she was born she had both sexes and the other gods cut off and threw away her penis and testicles, to “make her a woman”) In antiquity, nobody would have thought of Cybele as the “Goddess of Transexuals” and Attis as her “Transwoman Consort”. I mean, duh. Those are all modern interpretations, expressed in modern language and (therefore) coloured by cultural bias.
So what about the un-biased interpetation? What is known about the Galli? Were did they come from and what kind of man chose to become one? Where they all slaves or all freemen or a mix of the two? If they were slaves, could there be another explanation of their self-castration, since it came with the priviliege of becoming a priest? It is certainly reported that homosexuals in Iran undergo sex-surgery to avoid per- and prosecution, so could there be something similar happenning here? If they were freemen, could there be some other reason why they’d give up all the privileges of freemanhood to become eunuch priests, and can we establish with certainty that other options were not open to them?
Finally, were they just religious nutters, or maybe, was their castration and “feminisation” a rite of passage? We know that they castrated themselves during the culmination of a religious ceremony- so it is entierly possible that they viewed it just like that: they had to go through it to become priests of Cybele. Nothing more or less than that.
And how did the “official” cult see and present itself? What if a man, who was gender-dysphoric in the modern sense, turned up at the Galli’s doorstep and told them “I’ve always wanted to be a girl?” Would they take him in and soothe him and tell him he’d found his place in the world? Or would they shoo him away, turn their noses up and say “we’re servants of the goddess, not some sexual perverts?” Do you really know those things? Because I don’t think I or anyone else does, with any certainty. So I insist you take too many things for granted and assume that “looks like” is the same as “is like”.
Which is, eh, OK, but it opens you up to the propaganda (that’s what it is) of whomever it is that circulates the stuff about the “transwoman Attis” on the ‘net. Whatever else you may think about Cybele, you must understand that those people are cooks and their version of Cybele is not the original one.
Stassa
November 25, 2007 at 5:30 am
I can give you an example of how I mean that transexuality is a social thing and I think it will actually show we agree on that part. So in Greece, most of the travesti I know begin as effeminate gay boys. They do say they’ve always felt like women, or from a young age in any case, but they consider their attraction to men as a fundamental part of that femininity. An older travesti, put it this way to me: “I like boys, boys like girls, therefore I become a girl”. When once I mentioned a friend of mine who had had the operation and identified as a lesbian, it became a running joke; nobody could fathom why someone would “cut it off to become a lesbian”. In short, the dichotomy of gender identity and sexuality is completely alien to our culture. Even to the point that men who would like to live like women, but are attracted to women, will usually stay in a male role because they will think that “those things are not for me”. On the contrary, that dichotomy seems to be fundamental in the self-identification of the people I call WESTs (it’s not derisive, I assure you.)
Of course, both the travesti and the WESTs are both very much alike, at least in appearance. Crucially, they both have the same kind of problems, because in the end, they are all “men who want to be women” or something like that- to outsiders at least. So obviously I’m not saying we shouldn’t all stick together, or that we should look for some exclusive definitions of transexuality (or womanhood). My original point was about Cybele. I did try to keep myself from digressing into the political, but, like, that would be the day…
Trin: Yes, I am familiar with the colourful play on words. Er, I shouldn’t apologise, should I?
Stassa
November 25, 2007 at 5:54 am
Do you want them in the Harvard referencing style?
Stassa
November 25, 2007 at 5:56 am
There seem to e two main types of feral kids, the ones that were actually raised by animals and the ones that were neglected and/or abused so badly they were often left alone for long periods of time. Human children need to be around other humans so they can learn language. If I remember correctly (it’s been a couple years since I researched this), if a kid doesn’t learn language and/or have been exposed to it by a certain time, puberty, they may never learn language as fully as most people do. It will take a long time to realize that words mean something, and then learning vocabulary and getting beyond simple sentences will be difficult if not impossible for some.
And it is a very definite brain thing; they have such a hard time because their brain doesn’t develop normally. It is much easier to learn things when you’re a child.
feralchildren.com
It makes more sense that some forms of trans*ism are biological (for instance, that brain-sex theory fits my transsexuality perfectly, yet it does nothing for others) and how we interpret them is based on culture and socialization. It would make sense that at least some of the priestesses of Cybele (and other goddesses whose followers/priests were male-assigned people who castrated themselves) suffered from what we now call gender dissonance. The pain of having your body not shaped the way you expect it to be is biological. It may not have been as common then (as increased synthesized estrogens in the environment does seem to affect development; see how many of the descendants of the women who took DES are trans*, DES Sons eventually formed a companion group, DES Transgender, for all the male-assigned people who didn’t identify as male), but it is most likely that there were people in other times and other cultures who felt a very similar pain to what myself and some other trans* people feel. We don’t know how they felt about this, what steps they saw as viable options, how others treated them, etc., but that core pain is probably similar or the same for some of us.
The Riddle of Gender has a lot on how hormones and DES may directly or indirectly cause some forms of trans*ism; and that reminds me, I’ve been meaning to do a review of it…
drakyn
November 25, 2007 at 9:25 am
“Do you want them in the Harvard referencing style?”
Sure.
Trin
November 25, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Stassa, I think the point here is that the West (and especially America) has no place for anyone but men and women. America had laws against cross-dressing until the 70s, and same-sex attraction was seen as a mental illness. You had to be a man or a woman, there was no acknowledgement or room for bigendered, two-spirits, travesti, genderqueer, transgender, transsexual, kathoey, hijra, etc., etc., etc.
I don’t think that these people failed to exist because we didn’t have words or a social role for them. I do think that cultures that have room for this make it easier on everyone who falls into these categories because it gives them some breathing room to live as themselves, rather than in an enforced role. It’s not that America has no one who would be a travesti, or kathoey, etc., it’s that when America did make room for gender variance, they made room for transsexual people, and that’s it. And it was very narrowly defined, and people who didn’t fit into that category had to use it to get what they needed. No trans* woman could go through the process without insisting she wanted surgery and hated her anatomy, even if she didn’t really want to have any surgery at all.
In other words, the medical profession and social awareness privileges transsexual narratives over others, but those other narratives do exist in the West, just as transsexual narratives exist outside the West.
We do have room for men who like to wear women’s clothing (drag queens, female illusionists, transvestites) as well, and there’s also crossover (some trans women live as drag queens, just as some trans men lives as butch lesbians, some spend years being transvestites, etc).
Also, I edited the article a bit.
Lisa Harney
November 25, 2007 at 10:13 pm
I like the original post! ^_^ I was looking for Inanna(Lilith, too, I guess.) pictures to doodle and yours was the first I came upon. ^_^ I also very much liked the text that went along with the pics. I didn’t know about Kali Ma and now I think I’ll do some reasearch on her.
Eve
February 10, 2009 at 6:07 pm
I think that western and American culture is sick in the way that we try shove every one into one of 2 little gender boxes and assume that every other culture does the same thing. There are many cultures around the world both current and past that have acknowledged more than just 2 genders and one I saw on the Discovery channel a while back that currently acknowledges 8 distinct genders. Who’s to say that gender variant individuals throughout the past were even thought of as Male or Female? They could have been acknowledged as their own gender based on different criteria and behaviors. When we look at the past we need to be mindful of our own cultural filters and biases and try to move past them to see what that culture was really like.
Jennifer T.
March 3, 2009 at 7:48 pm