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.

Sure.

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…

If you’ve seen studies that actually say differently, I would actually quite love to see those citations.

Do you want them in the Harvard referencing style?

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?

ah, OK. Thanks.

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.

He was totally not raised in American/Western culture, but still needed to transition.

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.

Yeah, that. And modern people didn’t invent sex-changing body modifications either.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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…