Transgender and Intersex People in the Ancient World

It is popularly believed that transgender, intersex, and other gender-nonconforming people only started existing fairly recently and that they are an aberration of modern times. This could not possibly be further from the truth. It is true that the word “transgender” is fairly new, since it was first coined in 1965, but there have been people whom we might consider transgender ever since at least the beginning of recorded history.

In this article, I want to talk about some examples of figures from ancient history, mythology, and literature whom we might consider transgender, intersex, or otherwise gender-nonconforming. Some of these people are fictional; others of them are historical. Not all of them fit perfectly under our modern definition of “transgender,” but all of them are of interest to the discussion of transgender history.

Regarding pronoun use, in the following article, I will mostly be using the English equivalents of the pronouns that are actually used in the ancient sources, which may or may not be the pronouns that the individuals discussed here would have preferred to have been used. Unfortunately, the people I will be discussing in this article who actually existed have all been dead for thousands of years, so it is impossible for us to ask what their preferences are.

Inanna, Queen of Heaven

Some of the earliest surviving records pertaining to people in the ancient world who might be considered transgender come from the ancient Near East. In the third millennium BCE, people in ancient Sumer worshipped the goddess Inanna. She was a very important goddess who was associated with a wide array of domains, including war, erotic attraction, beauty, sex, political power, and retribution, but perhaps her most interesting association was with gender nonconformity.

The poet Enheduanna lived in around the twenty-third century BCE. She was the daughter of Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian Empire, and she worked as a priestess of Inanna in the Sumerian city of Ur. A number of hymns she wrote to Inanna in the Sumerian language have survived, including one titled “Great-Hearted Mistress,” which includes a very interesting passage, which reads as follows, as translated in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL):

“To run, to escape, to quiet and to pacify are yours, Inanna.
To rove around, to rush, to rise up, to fall down and to …… a companion are yours, Inanna.
To open up roads and paths, a place of peace for the journey, a companion for the weak, are yours, Inanna.
To keep paths and ways in good order, to shatter earth and to make it firm are yours, Inanna.
To destroy, to build up, to tear out and to settle are yours, Inanna.
To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.”

Enheduanna is often described as the earliest poet whose name and writings have both survived to the present day. This hymn in which she mentions the goddess Inanna turning men into women and women into men therefore stands at the very beginning of the entire human literary tradition. In fact, this hymn that I have just quoted actually predates the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh by nearly a thousand years.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the “Disk of Enheduanna,” a bas-relief carving bearing a representation of Enheduanna, the ancient Sumerian priestess and poet

Inanna’s priesthoods

As far as we know, Enheduanna was not what we today would consider transgender herself, but it is quite possible that she may have worked with people whom we would consider transgender, since many of the people who were involved in the cult of Inanna seem to have been gender-nonconforming at the very least.

Notably, one order of priests who worked in Inanna’s temples were known as gala. One Old Babylonian text states that Enki, the god associated with water and inventions, created them to sing “heart-soothing laments” for Inanna. Singing laments therefore seems to have been their primary duty.

There is evidence that some gala were cisgender women. A large number of the gala, however, were people who had been assigned male at birth. Hymns meant to be sung by gala were usually composed in the Sumerian eme-sal dialect. As the scholar Piotr Michalowski discusses in this entry for The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, the name eme-sal literally means “thin tongue” and, in literary texts, this dialect is generally exclusively used to render the speech of female characters.

In Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld, a poem in the Sumerian language that was most likely composed during the Third Dynasty of Ur (lasted c. 2112 – c. 2004 BCE), the god Enki creates two beings without gender, one of whom is described as a gala-tura, which means “lowly gala,” and seems to be a mythical counterpart to the real-life gala lamentation singers.

Some surviving Sumerian proverbs seem to suggest that it was popularly believed that many gala engaged in anal intercourse with men. For instance, here is one proverb that has been translated by the mid-twentieth-century scholar Edmund Gordon:

“When the gala wiped off his anus [he said], ‘I must not arouse that which belongs to my mistress [i.e. Inanna].’”

Based on the information available, scholars have speculated that gala might have originated as cisgender women whose job was to sing lamentations. Over time, though, the gala may have developed from merely professional lamenters into an entire priesthood devoted to serving Inanna. As people who had been assigned male at birth began to join the priesthood, they may have adopted the feminine attributes that were associated with it.

Unfortunately, it is ultimately unclear whether the gala were what most twenty-first-century western people would consider transgender, since the only sources about them that are available to modern scholars are vague references in four-thousand-year-old cuneiform tablets that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

There’s no doubt that the order included people who had been assigned male at birth who adopted traditionally feminine gender attributes. It’s not clear, though, whether these people identified as men, women, or some other gender. It’s not possible for us to raise one of them from the dead and ask them, “Do you consider yourself a woman?”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Sumerian statuette of two gala priests dated to c. 2450 BCE, discovered in the temple of the goddess Inanna in the city of Mari in Syria

How the ancient Greeks and Romans generally thought about gender

My area of study, of course, is ancient Greece and Rome, so I’m going to spend the bulk of this article discussing people in the Greek and Roman cultural spheres who might be seen as transgender or gender variant. Before we discuss those people, though, we need to lay some groundwork about how the Greeks and Romans typically thought about gender.

Nearly all the surviving ancient Greek and Roman literary sources were written by elite men, who generally held an extremely narrow view of gender. They believed that the only proper and complete kind of human being was an adult, gender-conforming man with fully intact male reproductive organs. They commonly perceived everyone who was not a masculine adult man with fully intact male reproductive organs (including women, children, intersex people, and adult men who had been castrated) as belonging to the same essential category. They generally regarded such people as inferior and incomplete, defined by their shared lack of masculinity.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE) memorably writes in his treatise On the Generation of Animals 2.3.737a25: “The female is indeed, as it were, a deformed male.” He routinely lumps women, children, and eunuchs together as essentially similar. For instance, this is what he writes in On the Generation of Animals 5.3, as translated by Arthur Platt:

“Women do not go bald because their nature is like that of children, both alike being incapable of producing seminal secretion. Eunuchs do not become bald, because they change into the female condition. And as to the hair that comes later in life, eunuchs either do not grow it at all, or lose it if they happen to have it, with the exception of the pubic hair; for women also grow that though they have not the other, and this mutilation is a change from the male to the female condition.”

Even adult, fully reproductively intact men who were even the slightest bit gender-nonconforming were in danger of being not seen as unmanly and not “truly” men. To give just one example of this, until the late fourth century BCE, free adult Greek men traditionally never shaved their faces and instead always grew long beards. Free adult men who shaved their faces and went clean-shaven were sometimes made fun of for looking like women. The Greek Athenaios of Naukratis, who flourished in around the late second or early third centuries CE, tells the following story about the much earlier Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (lived c. 412 – 323 BCE) in his Wise Men at Dinner 13.18:

“Διογένης δὲ ἰδών τινα οὕτως ἔχοντα τὸ γένειον ἔφησεν : μή τι ἔχεις ἐγκαλεῖν τῇ φύσει ὅτι ἄνδρα σὲ ἐποίησε καὶ οὐ γυναῖκα;”

This means, in my own English translation:

“But Diogenes, seeing a man who had his chin in this manner [i.e., shaved], said: ‘I fear that you have something to accuse against nature, that it made you a man and not a woman.’”

Thus, just for something as simple as shaving his beard, a man’s privileged gender status could come into question.

(For what it’s worth, though, the clean-shaven look did eventually become fashionable among Greek men in the late fourth century BCE, thanks primarily to Alexander the Great, who helped popularize it.)

ABOVE: Diogenes Sitting in His Tub, painted in 1860 by the French Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme

The legend of Teiresias

Despite the misogyny and male chauvinism that were deeply embedded in Greek and Roman cultures, Greek and Roman mythologies include a number of figures who display various forms of sex and gender variance who I think are worth discussing here because their stories tell us a lot of interesting things about how the Greeks and Romans thought about sex and gender.

In Greek mythology, Teiresias is said to have been the son of the mortal shepherd Eueres and the nymph Chariklo. There are several different versions of his backstory, but the most famous version of the story holds that, when he was walking along near Mount Kyllene in the Peloponnesos, he came upon a pair of snakes mating. He struck the female snake on the head and was instantly transformed into a woman.

Teiresias lived as a woman for seven years. Then, when she was walking along near Mount Kyllene again, she discovered the same pair of snakes mating again. This time, she struck the male snake on the head. As a result, she was transformed back into a man.

At some point, Zeus and Hera got into an argument over whether the man or the woman experiences greater pleasure during sex. Hera claimed that the man experiences more sexual pleasure, but Zeus claimed that the woman does. They couldn’t agree, so they decided to ask someone who would be able to settle the dispute for them.

Teiresias was the only person they knew of who had had sex both as a man and as a woman, so they summoned him and asked him whether he had personally experienced greater pleasure during sex as a man or as a woman. Teiresias replied that, if you divide sexual pleasure into ten parts, the woman experiences nine of those parts, while the man only experiences one.

Hera was furious with Teiresias’s answer, so she cursed him with blindness. Zeus, however, was greatly pleased, so he granted Teiresias the gift of prophecy and decreed that he would live seven times the lifetime of a normal person. Teiresias went on to become a renowned prophet and advisor to the kings of Thebes. He is a fascinating and complicated figure, who embodies multiple paradoxes. He is both human and divine, both male and female, and both blind and seeing.

ABOVE: Engraving from c. 1690 by the German illustrator Johann Ulrich Kraus depicting Teiresias being transformed into a woman

The legend of Iphis and Ianthe

The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE) wrote his long narrative poem Metamorphoses in Latin sometime around the year 8 CE. In the poem, he tells several fantastic stories that I think are particularly relevant to the subject of transgender people in ancient times.

Near the end of Book Nine of the poem, he tells the story that, on the Greek island of Krete, there was once a freedman named Ligdus who lived with his wife Telethusa. They were very poor and they knew that if they had a daughter, they would not be able to pay a dowry for her. When Telethusa became pregnant, Ligdus told her that, if she gave birth to a son, they would raise him, but, if she gave birth to a daughter, they would abandon her to die in the wilderness.

Telethusa begged Ligdus to change his mind, but he remained stubborn. Then, one night, Telethusa had a dream in which the Egyptian goddess Isis, the dog-headed god Anubis, the cat-headed goddess Bubastis, the bull god Apis, Isis’s son Harpocrates, Isis’s consort Osiris, and an Egyptian asp all appeared beside her bed. Isis instructed her that she should raise her child—regardless of whether it was a boy or a girl—and promised to assist her in the future. Then the goddess and all her companions disappeared.

ABOVE: Engraving from 1732 by the French illustrator Bernard Picart depicting Isis and the other Egyptian deities appearing at Telethusa’s bedside

In time, Telethusa gave birth to a girl, but she concealed the child’s sex from her husband and instead lied to him, telling him that the child was a boy. Ligdus named the child Iphis after his own father and the couple raised Iphis as a boy.

When Iphis reached maturity, Ligdus, still believing that she was a boy, arranged for her to marry a beautiful young woman named Ianthe, the daughter of Telestes. Iphis and Ianthe fell deeply in love with each other. Iphis wanted to marry Ianthe, but she knew this would be impossible, since she was not really a man, so she prayed to the goddess Iuno to make her a man.

Telethusa, knowing that Ianthe would be disappointed to find her husband was a woman, put off the wedding as long as possible by pretending to be ill and claiming that she had witnessed various ill omens. Finally, on the day before the wedding, Telethusa took Iphis to the temple of Isis and, in an act of desperation, prayed to the goddess for assistance.

All of a sudden, Isis’s cult statue moved. The altar shook and the doors of the temple flew open. A bolt of blue lightning flashed through the door and struck the crescent crown on the cult statue. Sistra resounded in the darkness of the temple around them. Then, in that moment, Iphis was miraculously physically transformed into a man. As a result of the miracle wrought by Isis, Iphis was able to marry Ianthe, the love of his life. He left a dedication thanking Isis for everything she had done.

This story is particularly interesting, because it shows that, apparently, for the ancient Romans, divine intervention to transform a woman into a man was somehow more plausible than a marriage between two women.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis, who, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, transformed Iphis into a man, allowing him to marry the beautiful Ianthe

The legend of Caeneus

In Book Twelve of his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of a Thessalian girl named Caenis, who was the daughter of Elatus. He says that she was extraordinarily beautiful and that she was sought after by many men, but, one day, when she went walking along the seashore, the god Neptunus spotted her and, being mad with lust, leapt out of the sea and brutally raped her right there on the beach.

After he finished raping her, he was so pleased that he promised to grant her one wish. She was so traumatized at having been raped that she told him her only wish was to be a man so that she would never have to have sex with a man ever again. Neptunus granted her wish and she was instantly transformed into a man. From that day onwards, Caenis became known as Caeneus.

Caeneus went on to become a hero of great renown and he fought in the famous battle between the Lapiths and the centaurs. During the battle, one centaur named Latreus mocked Caeneus for having been born a woman, addressing him as “Caenis” and telling him to go back to weaving wool.

Caeneus slew Latreus with his spear without even getting a scratch. The other centaurs tried to kill him to avenge Latreus’s death, but they found that Caeneus’s skin was magically unbreakable and that he could not be killed with weapons, so they buried him under an entire mountain of rocks and logs.

ABOVE: Woodcut illustration from 1563 by the German illustrator Virgil Solis

The legend of Hermaphroditos

Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was usually considered female, but, in the city of Amathos on the island of Kypros, she was worshipped in a male form under the masculine name Aphroditos. In Greek art, Aphroditos is typically portrayed as an androgynous figure; he wears a kind of dress that the Greeks traditionally regarded as feminine, but yet he is lifting up the dress to show everyone his erect penis. In some depictions, he is also shown with a beard to further emphasize his male aspect.

The cult of Aphroditos was apparently introduced to Athens by at least around the late fourth century BCE. The Greek historian Philochoros of Athens (lived c. 340 – c. 261 BCE) wrote a work titled Atthis, in which he apparently described, among many other things, the cult of Aphroditos in Athens at this time. A fragment of the work that has been preserved through quotation by the Roman antiquarian Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, who lived in around the early fifth century CE, in his Saturnalia 3.8.2 records that men made sacrifices to Aphroditos wearing women’s clothing and women made sacrifices to him wearing men’s clothing.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Greek marble herma of Aphroditos, the male form of the goddess Aphrodite, now held in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm

Aphroditos was sometimes known by the name “Hermaphroditos,” which means “Aphroditos in the form of a herma,” since hermai were a kind of statue that was commonly used in ancient Greece to mark boundaries. Eventually, however, Hermaphroditos became seen not as a form of Aphrodite, but rather the son of Aphrodite and the god Hermes.

In Book Four of his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells a story about Hermaphroditos. According to Ovid, Hermaphroditos was raised by naiads in the caves underneath Mount Ida in Phrygia, but, when he turned fifteen, he left Mount Ida to visit the cities of Asia Minor. In the middle of the woods in the land of Karia, he found a beautiful pond filled with the clearest water and was tempted to take a bath in it.

There was, however, a nymph named Salmacis who lived near the pond. She saw him and was instantly overcome with mad lust for him. She went to him and attempted to seduce him, but he spurned her advances, so she pretended to leave. Thinking that she was really gone, Hermaphroditos stripped himself naked and went into the pool to bathe. Then Salmacis sprang out from where she was hiding behind a tree and tried to take him by force, wrapping herself around him, kissing him, and pressing her skin against his.

Hermaphroditos tried to fight back, but Salmacis prayed to the deities that she and him would become one flesh. Her prayer was granted and their bodies blended into one. Hermaphroditos was horrified to discover that he had the body and voice of a woman, but the penis and testicles of a man. Therefore, he prayed to his mother Aphrodite and his father Hermes to curse any man who tried to swim in the pool he had tried to bathe in and to make him effeminate like him.

This myth has had particularly great cultural influence; there are a large number of surviving ancient statues of Aphroditos/Hermaphroditos—some of which are very famous—and the word hermaphrodite was widely used until very recently to refer to the people we now describe as “intersex.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a third-century BCE Hellenistic Greek marble statue of Hermaphroditos from the city of Pergamon in Asia Minor

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a statue of Hermaphroditos on display in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in England

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the backside of the Borghese Hermaphroditos, an ancient Roman statue of Hermaphroditos sleeping that rests on a mattress carved by the Italian Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the front side of the Borghese Hermaphroditos

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Borghese Hermaphroditos from above

The Galli, eunuch priests of the goddess Kybele

Now that we’ve talked a little bit about gender-variant figures in mythology, let’s talk about how these myths tie in with real people who are attested in the historical record.

The natural place to start is with Kybele, an ancient mother goddess who originated in the region of Phrygia in Asia Minor and whose cult spread to the Greek cities of western Asia Minor starting in the sixth century BCE. Kybele had many devotees, but one group of her priests, who are first attested by the Greek lyric poet Semonides of Amorgos (fl. c. seventh century BCE) in his Fragment 36, were known in Greek as Μητραγύρται (Mētragýrtai), which means “beggars of the mother.” As their names suggests, these priests generally lived as mendicants, meaning they travelled around, relying primarily or exclusively on alms for their survival.

From around 300 BCE or thereabouts onward, Greek sources begin to mention a new order of priests of Kybele. These priests are sometimes referenced as Metragyrtai, but they are more commonly known in Greek as Γάλλοι (Gálloi) and in Latin as Galli. This name is of unclear etymology, but it may come from the name of the Gallos River in Phrygia or from the Galatians, a Gaulish people who settled in Phrygia in the third century BCE. In any case, it is clear that they are quite different from the Metragyrtai of earlier eras in a number of respects.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a naïskos, or miniature temple, containing a relief of the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele holding a drum and a bowl, carved from Hymettan marble, dating to the late fourth century BCE, found in the Athenian Agora, now held in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens

Like the earlier Metragyrtai, the Galli typically lived as mendicants. Unlike the Metragyrtai of earlier periods, however, they are reported to have ritually castrated themselves as part of their initiation into Kybele’s cult. They wore traditionally female clothing, including saffron dresses, and they wore their hair long in traditionally feminine hairstyles. They also wore perfume, makeup, and earrings. At festivals in honor of Kybele, they performed ecstatic dances to the music of pipes, cymbals, and tympana.

Because the Galli castrated themselves, the near-universal opinion of ancient Greek and Roman authors was that the Galli were not real men, but rather beings of an inherently inferior nature, closer to women than to non-castrated adult men. The Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios, who lived in around the third century CE, attributes the following memorable saying to the philosopher Arkesilaos of Pitane (lived c. 315 – c. 240 BCE) in his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 4.6.43:

“ἐκ μὲν γὰρ ἀνδρῶν γάλλοι γίνονται, ἐκ δὲ γάλλων ἄνδρες οὐ γίνονται.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Galli can come from men, but men cannot come from Galli.”

One of the earliest authors who is thought to have mentioned the Galli is the Athenian mythographer Timotheos the Eumolpid, who wrote sometime around the year 300 BCE or thereabouts. Sadly, Timotheos’s own account has not survived, but a lengthy summary of it written by the much later Christian North African theologian and apologist Arnobius of Sicca (lived c. 255 – c. 330 CE) in his apologetic treatise Adversus Nationes 5.5-8 has.

ABOVE: Photograph from Lynn E. Roller’s paper “The Ideology of the Eunuch Priest,” published in Gender & History 9, no. 3 (1997), pages 542–559, showing a votive relief from the site of Kyzikos in Asia Minor dating to the year 46 BCE, depicting a Gallus worshipping Kybele while wearing women’s clothing

Several other Greek authors who are known to have lived during the Hellenistic Period also mention the Galli in various surviving fragments. The Hellenistic poet Kallimachos of Kyrene (lived c. 310 – c. 240 BCE) mentions the Galli by name in Fragment 411 (Pfeiffer). In Kallimachos’s Fragment 193.35-6, the speaker is a poet who lusts after an adolescent boy named Euthydemos, who has abandoned the speaker for a wealthier man. Spurned by Euthydemos, the speaker declares that he wishes he had become a Gallus instead of a poet.

Alexandros Aitolos (fl. c. early third century BCE) wrote a somewhat similar poem to the one I just mentioned, which is preserved in the Palatine Anthology 7.709, in which the speaker says that, if he had been raised in the city of Sardis, the “home of [his] fathers,” then he would have become a Gallus rather than a poet.

The poets Dioskourides (fl. c. late third century BCE), Alkaios of Messene (fl. c. late third and early second centuries BCE), Antipatros of Sidon (fl. c. late second century BCE), and Pseudo-Simonides (exact date unknown) all wrote poems, which are preserved in the Palatine Anthology 6.217–220, retelling essentially the same story about a Gallus who encounters a hungry lion and is absolutely terrified of it. Dioskourides’s poem, which is probably the earliest, describes the Gallus’s fear of the lion as follows:

“τοῦ δὲ λέων ὤρουσε κατὰ στίβον, ἀνδράσι δεῖμα
θαρσαλέοις, Γάλλῳ δ᾿ οὐδ᾿ ὀνομαστὸν ἄχος,
ὃς τότ᾿ ἄναυδος ἔμεινε δέους ὕπο. . .”

This means, in my own translation:

“But, a lion darting along his track, a terror to brave men
and an unnamable woe to a Gallus,
he at the time stood speechless out of terror. . .”

Nevertheless, in spite of his fear, the Gallus gives tosses his long hair and beats a tympanum. In every version of the story except Alkaios’s, the lion runs away in terror from the Gallus’s noisemaking. In Alkaios’s version, the lion becomes tame and starts dancing. The Gallus sees this as an extraordinary feat and gives thanks to Kybele.

These poems are obviously meant to mock the Gallus for being effeminate. Nonetheless, the Gallus does successfully drive the lion away (or, in Alkaios’s version, tame it), using the very attributes that the Greek poets regarded as marking him as effeminate. Many traditionally revered, masculine heroes in Greek mythology are said to have slain or overcome lions, including Herakles, Alkathous, Phyllios, and Admetos. The Gallus in this poem can therefore be seen as a comic stand-in for such a hero—one who succeeds in accomplishing the same deed by less conventional means.

This has been an overview of the surviving Hellenistic Greek sources for the Galli. The vast majority of the surviving sources about them, however, come from the Roman Empire. In 205 BCE, during the height of the Second Punic War, the Romans received an oracle telling them that they should adopt Kybele into their own pantheon and that she would aid them in their war against the Carthaginians. The Romans heeded this oracle and, as a result of the introduction of Kybele into the Roman pantheon, the Galli became part of the Roman religious landscape.

In the Roman world, the Galli were known to practice self-flagellation, in which they would whip themselves with whips struck with knucklebones, and self-laceration, in which they would cut themselves with knives. It is likely that they also engaged in these practices to some extent in Asia Minor in earlier periods, but the practices are first reliably attested in the Roman period.

The Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) wrote about the Galli in his poem “Carmen 63.” In the poem, Catullus describes Attis, the mythological founder of the Galli, as cutting off his own testicles in a fit of uncontrollable madness. What is fascinating, though, is the fact that Catullus exclusively refers to Attis using masculine forms up until the moment when Attis cuts off his testicles. Then, from that moment onwards, Catullus exclusively refers to Attis using feminine forms, apparently to drive home the idea that, after Attis has cut off his testicles, he is no longer a man.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a funerary relief of an Archigallus from Lavinium dated to the second century CE on display in the Capitoline Museums in Rome

Another important source of information about the Galli in the Roman Empire is the satirical novel The Golden Ass, which was written in the Latin language by the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE), who was born in the town of Madauros in what is now northern Algeria. The main character in the novel is a man named Lucius who has accidentally been turned into a donkey. In Book Eight of the novel, he is sold to a Gallus and he gets an inside look at how the Galli live.

Apuleius, the author of the novel, was not a Gallus himself. In fact, he seems to have been a supporter of the rival cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. When Apuleius talks about the Galli in his novel, he does so only for the purpose of making fun of them. Therefore, everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt.

In Apuleius’s novel, the Galli are described using masculine grammatical forms and pronouns, but they are portrayed as referring to each other in the feminine. When the Gallus who has bought Lucius brings him back to the other Galli, he addresses them as “puellae,” which means “girls.”

In the novel, the Galli are also portrayed as extremely lustful for sex with handsome young men. Here is Apuleius’s description of the Galli attempting to seduce a young man, as translated by Jack Lindsay:

“When all the preparations were concluded, they went off to the Baths and returned later with a lusty young rustic, obviously chosen for his godly proportions; and before the first course of a few herb-dishes had been fully dispatched, they lewdly fetched out in front of the table all the bawdy apparatus for the perfect perpetration of privy perversions. Gathering round the young fellow, naked and variously supine, they turned upon him a steam of horrid solicitations.”

At least two different scholars in recent publications—namely, H. Christian Blood in his paper “Sed illae puellae: Transgender Studies and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass” (published in 2019 in the academic journal Helios 46, issue 2, pages 163–188) and Evelyn Adkins in her chapter “The Politics of Transgender Representation in Apuleius’ Golden Ass and Loukios, or the Ass” (in the book Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World, edited by Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer, published in 2020 by Edinburgh University Press, on pages 157–168)—have both argued that Apuleius portrays the Galli as what most twenty-first-century readers would call transgender women.

Sadly, it is impossible for anyone today to know how the Galli really thought about themselves, since there are no surviving sources written by people who were actually Galli themselves. Everything we know about the Galli is therefore filtered through the prejudices of the Greek and Roman authors who wrote about them.

This difficulty is further compounded by the fact that individual Galli most likely had various interpretations of their own identity. Some Galli may have seen themselves as women, some may have seen themselves as men, and some may have thought of themselves as neither women nor men.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of another bust of an Archigallus in the Capitoline Museums

Diodoros Sikeliotes’s story of the woman who suddenly turned into a man

The Galli made themselves feminine in the view of Greek and Roman authors because they castrated themselves, but, interestingly, there are supposed historical accounts from ancient authors about people who are said to have spontaneously completely changed sex—genitalia and everything. All of the accounts of this nature that I am currently aware of involve a person assigned female at birth spontaneously transforming into a man. This is not surprising, given the fact that the Greeks and Romans generally viewed men as superior.

The Greek historian Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE) records a story in his Library of History 32.10.2–9 about a young woman who supposedly spontaneously transformed into a man. The story goes that King Alexandros Balas, who briefly ruled the Seleukid Empire from 150 to 145 BCE, consulted an oracle in the land of Kilikia, who told him to beware “the place of the bi-formed one.” At the time, no one knew what to make of this.

Around fifteen years earlier, at a place in Arabia called Abai, a Makedonian man had named Diophantos married an Arabian woman. Together, they had two children: a son, who died at a young age, and a daughter, whom they named Heraïs. When Heraïs arrived at a marriageable age, Diophantos arranged for her to marry a young man named Samiades. They were married, but Samiades had to go on a long journey, so he left his wife with her parents.

While her husband was gone, Heraïs was stricken by a bizarre illness. A strange tumescence emerged from her lower abdomen and, as it grew increasingly swollen, she developed a high fever. The doctors tried to employ various treatments to reduce the inflammation. Then, on the seventh day of her illness, when Heraïs was with only her mother and two of their female slaves, a penis and testicles burst out from the location of the swelling.

Shortly after this, Heraïs recovered. She continued to wear female clothing and live as a woman, despite having a penis and testicles. Samiades came back from his trip and, not knowing that his wife had spontaneously grown male organs, sought to have her back. Heraïs refused to come into his presence, however, because she was too embarrassed and she didn’t want her husband to find out about her male genitalia.

Samiades brought the case to court. Just when the court was about to declare that Heraïs had to return to her husband, she lifted up her dress and showed them all her penis and testicles. She declared that she was a man now and that it was not right for the court to force a man to live with another man. The court therefore ruled in Heraïs’s favor.

The man formerly known as Heraïs adopted the male name Diophantos (after his father). Then he enrolled in the cavalry and fought alongside Alexandros Balas. In August 145 BCE, Alexandros was defeated in battle and forced to retreat to Diophantos’s hometown of Abai. There, the king was murdered by an Arab and the oracle’s prophesy that he should beware “the place of the bi-formed one” was fulfilled.

Samiades, meanwhile, couldn’t bear to live without Diophantos, so he designated him the sole heir to all his property and promptly committed suicide. Diodoros concludes his tale with a sexist remark on the supposed strangeness of the fact that one who had been born a woman was able to display the courage of a man, but one who had been born a man displayed the cowardice of a woman.

This story is obviously a folktale and not a true account. Nonetheless, the classicist William Hanson, author of The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths, suggests that stories like this one about women spontaneously turning into men may be inspired by real-life cases of intersex people who were born with seemingly normal female genitalia, only to experience sexual masculinization as they grew older.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a silver coin bearing the portrait of King Alexandros Balas of the Seleukid Empire, in whose cavalry Diophantos is said to have fought

Favorinus of Arelate

We don’t have to rely on legends to know that there were intersex people in ancient times, though, since there are a few undisputed first-hand ancient accounts of such people’s existence. Probably the most famous known intersex person from antiquity is the Gaulish orator Favorinus of Arelate (lived c. 80 – c. 160 CE). According to multiple contemporary sources, he was born without testicles. As an adult, he couldn’t grow a beard, he had a high-pitched voice like a woman, and his limbs were soft.

Favorinus’s slightly younger rival Polemon of Laodikeia (lived c. 90 – c. 144 CE) gives this detailed description of his appearance in a surviving fragment, as translated by Tamsyn Barton:

“. . . a eunuch born without testicles, rather than castrated. I doubt whether you could find anyone of this type apart from the one who was from the land known as that of the Celts. He was lustful and dissolute beyond all measure, for his eyes were those of the worst type of man . . . he had a puffy forehead, soft cheeks, a wide mouth, a long, thin neck, thick legs and fleshy feet. His voice was just like a woman’s, and all the rest of his limbs and extremities were soft; and he did not walk upright, but with slack joints and limbs. He took great care of his person, [by nourishing] his thick hair, and by rubbing medicaments into his body, in short, using anything to arouse desire for sex and coitus. He had a voice like a woman’s, and thin lips. In the whole human race, I never saw anything like him or his eyes.”

Based on this description, modern medical experts have speculated that Favorinus may have had Reifenstein Syndrome (also known as Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or PAIS), a condition that partially prevents cells from responding to androgens and therefore causes individuals who would otherwise appear male to appear more feminine.

The biographer Philostratos of Athens (lived c. 170 – c. 250 CE) describes Favorinus as an ἀνδρόθηλυς (andróthēlys), which means “hermaphrodite,” but claims that he was nonetheless a notorious womanizer and that he was once put on trial for the crime of having allegedly slept with a consul’s wife.

Megillos in Loukianos of Samosata’s Dialogues of the Courtesans

One of the most explicit surviving ancient accounts of a transgender person comes from the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE), who wrote a work in the Greek language titled The Dialogues of the Courtesans, which consists of a series of conversations between various courtesans in which they discuss various subjects pertaining to their lives and work.

One of the most controversial dialogues in the work is one titled “The Lesbians,” in which a young kithara-player named Leaina tells a man named Klonarion how she was seduced by an individual who she thought was a woman named Megilla. Here is her description of the encounter, as translated by A.L.H.:

“You see, Megilla and Demonassa, the Corinthian, sweating and very hot, pulled off her false hair—I had never suspected her of wearing a wig. And I saw her head was smooth-shaven as that of a young athlete. I was quite scared to see this. But Megilla spoke up and said to me:”

“‘Tell me, O Leaina, have you ever seen a better looking young man?’”

“‘But I see no young man here, Megilla!’ I told her.”

“‘Now, now! Don’t you effeminate me!’ she reproved. ‘You must understand my name is Megillos. Demonassa is my wife.’”

“Her words seemed so funny to me, Klonarion. I started to giggle. And I said:”

“‘Can it be, Megillos, that you are a man and lived among us under the disguise of a woman, just like Achilles, who stayed among the girls hidden by his purple robe? And is it true that you possess a man’s organs, and that you do to Demonassa what any husband does to his wife?’”

“‘That Leaina,’ she replied, ‘is not entirely so. You will soon see how we shall couple up in a fashion that is much more voluptuous.’”

“‘In that case,’ I said, ‘you are not a hermaphrodite. They, I have been told, have both a man’s and woman’s organs.’”

“‘No,’ she said, ‘I am quite like a man.’”

“‘Ismenodora, the Boietian flute player, has told me about a Theban woman who was changed into a man. A certain good soothsayer by the name of Teiresias——Did any accident like that happen to you by chance?’”

“‘No, Leaina,’ she said. ‘I was born with a body entirely like that of all women, but I have the tastes and desires of a man.’”

“‘And do those desires of yours suffice you?’ I asked, smiling.”

“‘Let me have my own way with you, Leaina, if you don’t believe me,’ she answered, ‘and you will soon see that I have nothing to envy men for. I have something that resembles a man’s estate. Come on, let me do what I want to do and you will soon understand.’”

“She pleaded so hard that I let her have her way. And you must understand that she made me a gift of a splendid necklace and several tunics of the finest linen. Then I embraced her and held her in my arms, as if she were a man. And she kissed me all over the body, and she set out to do what she had promised, panting excitedly from the great pleasure and desire that possessed her.”

Loukianos’s Dialogues of the Courtesans is a work of satirical fiction; the characters described in it are not real people. Nonetheless, it is a satire based on real life and the fact that Megillos appears in the dialogue is evidence that people like him probably existed in the Greek-speaking world at the time when Loukianos was alive.

ABOVE: Illustration of Megillos and Demonassa from A.L.H.’s 1928 edition of Loukianos’s Dialogues of the Courtesans

Antoninus: a transgender Roman emperor?

Trans people didn’t just exist in ancient times, though; some ancient sources claim that, only a generation after Loukianos, a person whom we would call a transgender woman actually became emperor of the Roman Empire.

Varius Avitus Bassianus was most likely born either in Rome or in the city of Emesa, Syria. They were assigned male at birth and they are usually referred to in modern secondary sources as “he.” I, however, will be referring to them using the gender-neutral singular pronoun they, which I think is most appropriate in this context given the ambiguity surrounding their historical gender identity.

Avitus was an Arab by ethnicity. They belonged to a long lineage of hereditary priests of the Emesene sun-god Ilāh ha-Gabal, who is known in Latin as Elagabalus. Avitus served as the high priest of Elagabalus at Emesa themself as a young teenager. Their grandmother Iulia Maesa was the sister of Iulia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus, who was the founder of the Severan Dynasty. Iulia Maesa managed to pull some strings with the Roman legions and, on 16 May 218 CE, Avitus was proclaimed emperor of the Roman Empire when they were only around fourteen years old.

Upon being declared emperor, Avitus adopted the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. During their reign, they were most commonly known by the name Antoninus, but they are better known today by the nickname “Elagabalus.” This name was never applied to them while they were alive; instead, people applied it to them posthumously, after the Emesene sun-god of whom they served as high priest.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a silver antoninianus depicting Antoninus’s grandmother Iulia Maesa (left) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a statue depicting Antoninus’s mother Iulia Soemias (right)

Antoninus is widely cited as an example of a transgender historical figure. Unfortunately, all the surviving sources pertaining to their reign were written by people who absolutely despised them and who wanted to portray them as a depraved tyrant. Consequently, as I discuss this article I published in November 2019, the sources are full of all kinds of outlandish claims about their alleged behavior, many of which are totally implausible.

For instance, the Historia Augusta, a collection of imperial biographies written in around the late fourth century CE that most historians today regard as predominantly a work of fiction, claims that, when Antoninus was proclaimed consul, instead of throwing gold and silver coins to the people, they threw live cattle, camels, donkeys, deer, and other large livestock at them. The Historia Augusta also claims that their chariots were sometimes pulled by naked women and that they would frequently get their friends drunk and lock them in rooms with wild animals that had somehow been rendered harmless in order to scare them.

A somewhat more reliable source of information about Antoninus is the Greek historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 CE), who was a Roman Senator and was probably living in Rome during Antoninus’s reign. Dion is still extremely hostile to Antoninus, but he at least generally doesn’t say things about them that are obviously made up.

Dion claims in his Roman History 80.14.3–4 that Antoninus only dressed as a man when they needed to appear respectable in court. He says that they plucked out all their body hair and facial hair, that they often wore feminine makeup and wigs, and that they spoke in a deliberately high-pitched voice to make themself look and sound like as much like a woman as possible. Here is what he says, as translated by Earnest Cary:

“When trying someone in court he really had more or less the appearance of a man, but everywhere else he showed affectation in his actions and in the quality of his voice. For instance, he used to dance, not only in the orchestra, but also, in a way, even while walking, performing sacrifices, receiving salutations, or delivering a speech. And finally,—to go back now to the story which I began,—he was bestowed in marriage and was termed wife, mistress, and queen. He worked with wool, sometimes wore a hairnet, and painted his eyes, daubing them with white lead and alkanet. Once, indeed, he shaved his chin and held a festival to mark the event; but after that he had the hairs plucked out, so as to look more like a woman.”

He says that Antoninus regularly prostituted themself in brothels, in taverns, and even in a special room that they had set aside in the imperial palace. He claims that the emperor had men whom they ordered to pay for their services as a prostitute and that they would often boast to the other prostitutes that they had more lovers and that they brought in more money than any of them.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head of the emperor Antoninus, who is better known today as “Elagabalus”

Dion claims that Antoninus’s only sexual relationship that lasted more than a short amount of time was their relationship with their chariot-driver, a blond-haired Greek slave named Hierokles, who came from the region of Karia in Asia Minor. He says that Antoninus regularly described Hierokles as their “husband” and themself as Hierokles’s “mistress.”

Dion also claims that Antoninus had agents whose job was to scout out the most handsome young men for the emperor to have sex with. He records in his Roman History 80.16.1–6 that, on one occasion, the emperor’s agents reported to them the existence of an extraordinarily handsome Greek athlete named Zotikos, who came from the city of Smyrna in Asia Minor and was rumored to possess an astoundingly large penis.

According to Dion, Antoninus ordered for Zotikos to be escorted to Rome with an enormous retinue. When Zotikos was presented to the emperor, he greeted them by addressing them as “κύριε,” which means “Lord” or “Master” and was the usual term of address for a Roman emperor. Dion, however, relates that the emperor objected to this title and insisted that he call them “κυρία,” which is the feminine form, instead. Dion writes, in Cary’s translation:

“Sardanapalus [i.e., Antoninus], on seeing him, sprang up with rhythmic movements, and then, when Aurelius addressed him with the usual salutation, ‘My Lord Emperor, Hail!’ he bent his neck so as to assume a ravishing feminine pose, and turning his eyes upon him with a melting gaze, answered without any hesitation: ‘Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady.’”

He reports that Antoninus ordered Zotikos to have sex with them, but the athlete was unable to maintain an erection and the emperor was so offended that they had him banished from Italy.

Finally, Dion makes a very brief, one-sentence aside in his Roman History 80.16.7, in which he asserts that Antoninus promised to pay an enormous sum of money to any physician who could give them a vagina by means of an incision. This story is not recorded in any other ancient source and Dion does not seem to make much of it, but it has become perhaps the most famous story about Antoninus in modern times, since the surgery Dion claims that Antoninus requested sounds exactly like modern male-to-female bottom surgery.

ABOVE: Gold aureus minted during Antoninus’s reign bearing their portrait on the obverse and a four-horse chariot pulling the holy stone of Emesa on the reverse

I don’t think anyone can reasonably dispute that Kassios Dion portrays Antoninus as what we today would call a transgender woman. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell if any of the stories Dion tells are true, since it was extremely common for Roman historians to tell stories about the alleged sexual depravities of emperors they didn’t like. (And by “depravities” I mean things that those Roman historians considered “depravities”—not necessarily things we today would consider “depravities.”)

Furthermore, many of the stories Dion tells about Antoninus are clearly cribbed from earlier stories told about other imperial figures. For instance, the biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 CE) claims in his Life of Caligula 41.1 that the emperor Caligula (ruled 37 – 41 CE) converted a portion of the palace into a brothel and the satirist Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, who lived around the same time as Suetonius, claims in his Satires 6.114–141 that the empress Messalina (ruled 41 – 48 CE) competed with prostitutes to see who could have the most lovers. These are both claims that Kassios Dion makes about Antoninus.

The claim about the reward offered to any physician who could give them a vagina is unique to Antoninus. Elite men living in the Roman Empire, however, closely associated effeminacy in rulers with cruelty and lack of self-control. Roman authors almost routinely record stories of gender nonconformity about emperors whom they regarded as depraved and murderous tyrants, while, in telling contrast, they never record any stories of gender nonconformity about emperors whom they didn’t regard as vicious tyrants.

For instance, the Jewish philosopher Philon of Alexandria (lived c. 20 BCE – c.  50 CE) claims in his On the Embassy to Gaius 11–15 that Caligula liked to dress up as various deities, including the goddess Venus. Suetonius claims in his Life of Nero 29 that the emperor Nero (ruled 54 – 68 CE) took the role of a bride in a marriage to a freedman named Doryphorus. The Historia Augusta claims that the emperor Commodus (lived 177 – 192 CE) dressed in female clothing when competing in the gladiatorial arena and that he adopted the title Effeminatus, which means “Effeminate One.”

So, was Antoninus what we would consider transgender? I don’t know. I don’t think it is possible for anyone alive today to say. On the one hand, given the longstanding literary tradition of Roman authors portraying emperors whom they regarded as vicious tyrants as effeminate to show just how thoroughly depraved they supposedly were, all the reports of Antoninus’s gender-nonconforming behavior could be explained away as merely an extreme case of Roman authors trying to vilify the emperor by portraying him as effeminate.

On the other hand, though, the Roman Empire had hundreds of emperors. If trans people make up one percent of the overall population, it is surely not unreasonable to think that, out of all those emperors, the odds are pretty good that at least one of them would be transgender.

ABOVE: The Roses of Heliogabalus, painted in 1888 by the English Academic painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Whatever the case may have been, Antoninus’s reign came to an abrupt end on 11 March 222 CE, when they were brutally murdered in their mother’s arms by members of the Praetorian Guard. They were only eighteen years old. The Praetorians chopped both their and their mother’s heads off. Then they stripped their headless corpses and dragged them through the streets of Rome before finally dumping them into the river Tiber. Many people associated with the emperor, including Hierokles, were reportedly murdered as well.

Historians have relentlessly vilified and condemned Antoninus for thousands of years, often in hyperbolic terms. For instance, the English historian Edward Gibbon (lived 1737 – 1794) wrote that Antoninus, “corrupted by his youth, his country, and his fortune, abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.” (Gibbon is, of course, otherwise known for his theories about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire that basically amount to the whining of a reactionary conservative about supposed moral decline and loss of civic virtues; he would fit in perfectly at the Republican National Convention if he were just a bit less virulently anti-religious.)

Of course, Gibbon isn’t the only modern historian to condemn Antoninus. The German historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr (lived 1776 – 1831) wrote that Antoninus’s name “is branded in history above all others” because of his “unspeakably disgusting life.” Likewise, the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (lived 1854 – 1941) described Antoninus as “the most abandoned reprobate who ever sat upon a throne” and a “crack-brained despot.”

ABOVE: Portrait of the historian and full-time conservative bigot Edward Gibbon, painted sometime around 1779 by Sir Joshua Reynolds

An explicit reference to intersex people in the Gospel of Matthew

Today, Christians are usually seen as being opposed to transgender and intersex rights. Curiously, though, certain seemingly pro-transgender and pro-intersex ideas are embedded in the Christian tradition from the very beginning. Notably, one of the canonical gospels contains what seems to be an affirming reference to intersex people’s existence. In the Gospel of Matthew 19:12, Jesus is portrayed as saying this:

“εἰσὶν γὰρ εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες ἐκ κοιλίας μητρὸς ἐγεννήθησαν οὕτως, καὶ εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες εὐνουχίσθησαν ὑπὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, καὶ εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες εὐνούχισαν ἑαυτοὺς διὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν. ὁ δυνάμενος χωρεῖν χωρείτω.”

Here is how the passage is translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”

When the gospel writer portrays Jesus as saying that there are “eunuchs who have been so from birth,” he is using almost the exact same wording that Greek writers like Polemon and Philostratos use to describe Favorinus. When he uses this phrase, he is therefore most likely talking about intersex people who are literally born with a penis and no testicles, or with otherwise ambiguous genitalia.

ABOVE: Fourth-century CE Christian painting from the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter depicting the woman taking hold of Jesus’s himation

A reference to women becoming men in the Gospel of Thomas

There are no explicit references to transgender people in the canonical New Testament, but there are a lot of other surviving early Christian texts aside from just the ones that are included in the New Testament, including several apocryphal gospels. The apocryphal gospels date later than the canonical gospels, but they still date to a very early period in Christian history.

The Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal early Christian text that was most likely written in Greek in around the early second century CE, only around a hundred years after the death of Jesus, records the following conversation that supposedly took place between Jesus and the apostle Simon Peter, as translated by Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer:

“Simon Peter said to them, ‘Make Mary [Magdalene] leave us, for females don’t deserve life.’

“Jesus said, ‘Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.’”

Modern readers often find this passage deeply puzzling. What does Jesus mean when he says that women must become men in order to the enter Kingdom of Heaven? What if they like being women?

In order to understand this passage, we need to understand the way that most people in the Greco-Roman world—including most early Christians—thought about gender. As I discuss in this article I originally published in June 2019, sexism and misogyny were absolutely rampant throughout the Greco-Roman world. It was widely believed that men were not just physically and intellectually superior to women, but spiritually and morally superior as well.

Thus, some early Christians who came from a Greco-Roman cultural background struggled with the question of how women could possibly attain salvation. The solution they came up with was that, in order to be saved, women would have to become spiritually like men.

The conversation between Jesus and Simon Peter about the salvation of women described in the Gospel of Thomas almost certainly never happened. Instead, this conversation was probably made up by some Christian many years after Jesus’s death. It is nonetheless a reflection of a belief that was prominent among early Christians—a belief that I will talk about some more in a moment.

ABOVE: The Tribute Money, painted by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian between 1543 and 1568, showing Jesus and the apostle Simon Peter in conversation

Early Christians and self-castration

The early Christian conception of masculinity is something of a paradox. On the one hand, they lived in a society that regarded masculinity as the pinnacle of all things. On the other hand, as I discuss in this article from May 2020, early Christians generally held fairly negative attitudes towards sexuality, including male sexuality. Consequently, some early Christians took their rejection of male sexuality to such an extreme that they ended up effectively rejecting maleness itself.

As I discuss in much greater detail in my post about how eunuchs were perceived in the ancient Mediterranean world, there is compelling evidence that some early Christian men literally sought to castrate themselves for their faith. For instance, the early Christian apologist Ioustinos Martys (lived c. 100 – c. 165 CE) in his First Apologia 29.1–2, which he wrote between c. 155 and c. 157 CE, responds to a canard that was apparently in widespread circulation among pagan Greeks and Romans at the time, which claimed that Christians are sexually licentious and that they engage in depraved sex orgies for their religion.

To refute this accusation, Ioustinos cites the story of a young Christian man in Alexandria who he claims begged the Roman governor to let a surgeon castrate him so that he might be free from sexual temptations. He tells the story as follows, as translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith:

“And that you may understand that promiscuous intercourse is not one of our mysteries, one of our number a short time ago presented to Felix the governor in Alexandria a petition, craving that permission might be given to a surgeon to make him an eunuch. For the surgeons there said that they were forbidden to do this without the permission of the governor. And when Felix absolutely refused to sign such a permission, the youth remained single, and was satisfied with his own approving conscience, and the approval of those who thought as he did.”

The later Christian historian Eusebios of Kaisareia (lived c. 260 – c. 340 CE) is known for having written one of the earliest complete histories of the Christian church, titled Ecclesiastical History. He devotes the majority of Book Six of his history to a lengthy biography (or pseudo-biography) of his hero, the Christian scholar and theologian Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 CE).

Eusebios claims in his Ecclesiastical History 6.8 that, when Origenes was a young man, he read the statement about eunuchs attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew 19:12 and naïvely interpreted it as a command that any man who cannot control his sexual desires should literally castrate himself. Thus, Eusebios claims that Origenes followed Jesus’s words and castrated himself.

This story is most likely apocryphal. A large number of Origenes’s own writings have survived and none of them mention anything about him having castrated himself. Moreover, Origenes basically outright says in his own exegesis of gMatthew 19:12 (which can be found in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 15.1-5) that only a complete idiot would interpret the verse as a literal recommendation of self-castration. This lines up well with Origenes’s typical allegorizing approach to scriptural exegesis.

There is something quite interesting, though, about how Eusebios portrays Origenes’s alleged self-castration. On the one hand, he portrays it as act of youthful folly, but, on the other hand, he also presents it as a sign of Origenes’s extraordinary faith and devotion to God. Eusebios seems to have written his story with expectation that his readers would be to some extent impressed (albeit a little horrified) that Origenes loved God so much that he was willing to literally give up his own manhood.

Even though Origenes probably didn’t really castrate himself, early Christian leaders in the fourth century CE evidently believed that self-castration among Christian men was a real and very serious problem. When the First Council of Nikaia was convened in 325 CE, the very first canon they issued was one prohibiting men who had intentionally castrated themselves from serving as priests.

ABOVE: Illustration from a fifteenth-century French manuscript of Origenes of Alexandria emasculating himself. Medieval manuscript illustrators loved showing him in the act of cutting off his own genitals, even though Eusebios actually claimed that he hired a doctor to do it for him.

I don’t mean to suggest that early Christians who castrated themselves for their faith were trans women; there is little doubt that at least most of them still thought of themselves as men in some sense. Most people at the time, though, did not consider eunuchs fully male. In fact, early Christians who opposed self-castration frequently presented their opposition to the practice in terms of opposition to the Galli. For instance, the Christian theologian and apologist Augustine of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 CE) writes in The City of God, book seven, chapter twenty-four, as translated by Marcus Dods:

“Do the mutilated Galli, then, serve this Great Mother [i.e. Kybele] in order to signify that they who are in need of seed should follow the earth, as though it were not rather the case that this very service caused them to want seed? For whether do they, by following this goddess, acquire seed, being in want of it, or, by following her, lose seed when they have it? Is this to interpret or to deprecate?”

“Nor is it considered to what a degree malign demons have gained the upper hand, inasmuch as they have been able to exact such cruel rites without having dared to promise any great things in return for them. Had the earth not been a goddess, men would have, by laboring, laid their hands on it in order to obtain seed through it, and would not have laid violent hands on themselves in order to lose seed on account of it.”

“Had it not been a goddess, it would have become so fertile by the hands of others, that it would not have compelled a man to be rendered barren by his own hands; nor that in the festival of Liber an honorable matron put a wreath on the private parts of a man in the sight of the multitude, where perhaps her husband was standing by blushing and perspiring, if there is any shame left in men; and that in the celebration of marriages the newly-married bride was ordered to sit upon Priapus.”

“These things are bad enough, but they are small and contemptible in comparison with that most cruel abomination, or most abominable cruelty, by which either set is so deluded that neither perishes of its wound. There the enchantment of fields is feared; here the amputation of members is not feared. There the modesty of the bride is outraged, but in such a manner as that neither her fruitfulness nor even her virginity is taken away; here a man is so mutilated that he is neither changed into a woman nor remains a man.”

Thus, Augustine finds self-castration heinous firstly because he associates it with the Galli and secondly because, in his view, it turns a man into something that is neither a man nor a woman. Early Christian men who castrated themselves would have therefore been seen by their contemporaries as decidedly un-masculine and akin to the Galli.

ABOVE: Imaginative portrayal of Augustine of Hippo, painted between c. 1645 and c. 1650 by the French painter Philippe de Champaigne (As I discuss in this article from November 2019, Augustine was born in what is now northern Algeria and was of Berber descent, so, in historical reality, he probably wasn’t quite as pale as he is portrayed here.)

The tale of Saint Marinos the Monk

Ultimately, of course, the Christians who opposed self-castration won out over those who supported it, but some ideas within Christianity that might be considered queer never completely died out. Notably, as result of the sexist belief that men were spiritually superior to women, the Christian tradition is full of stories about saintly women all-but-physically transforming into men. One of the most famous such stories is the tale of Saint Marinos the Monk, which is recorded in a Byzantine Greek text dated to around the early seventh century CE or thereabouts.

The story goes that, in Syria, at some point in around the fifth century CE, there was an old widower named Eugenios who had a young daughter named Marina. Eugenios wanted to join a cenobitic monastery, but women and girls were strictly forbidden from entering monasteries, so he told Marina that he would give her everything he had and that she would have to live on her own from that point onwards.

Understandably, Marina did not want to live without her father, so she convinced him to cut her hair and dress her in male clothing so that she could pretend to be a boy so that she could join the monastery with him. Eugenios agreed. Thus, Eugenios gave away all his possessions to the poor, Marina adopted a male identity (along with the male name “Marinos”), and, together, they joined the monastery.

Marinos grew up in the monastery. Many of the other monks came to believe that he was a eunuch because he had no beard and his voice was feminine. Eventually, Eugenios died, but Marinos remained at the monastery, where he progressed in his faith and lived a life of rigid asceticism. He was so faithful that he gained the ability to heal others and cast out demons.

ABOVE: Fourteenth-century French manuscript illustration of Marinos and his father Eugenios entering the cenobitic monastery

Once every month, the superior of the monastery would send out four monks as apokrisiarioi, or representatives, to minister to the solitaries who lived outside the cenobitic monastery. About halfway along the way, there was an inn where the monks would stay the night.

One month, the superior of the monastery, seeing how devout Marinos was in his faith, selected him to be one of the apokrisiarioi. Marinos went out with the monks, but, while they were staying at the inn, the innkeeper’s daughter had sex with a soldier and became pregnant.

A bit less than a month later, the innkeeper discovered that his daughter was pregnant, so he became furious and interrogated her to find out who had impregnated her. Desperate to protect her lover, the daughter lied and told her father that “the young monk from the monastery, the attractive one called Marinos” had raped her. The innkeeper went to the monastery in a state of rage and complained to the superior.

When Marinos returned to the monastery, the superior condemned him for having supposedly impregnated the innkeeper’s daughter and banished him from the monastery forever. Marinos left the monastery, but he sat down right outside the monastery gate and remained there for months, enduring the scorching heat of summer and the freezing cold of winter. Whenever someone asked him why he was sitting there, he told them it was because he had committed the sin of fornication and had been kicked out of the monastery as a result.

When the innkeeper’s daughter gave birth to a son, the innkeeper brought the child to Marinos and threw it on the ground in front of him, telling him to take it, because it was his. Marinos adopted the child as his own. He procured milk from some nearby shepherds to nurse it, despite continuing to live in the dirt outside the monastery gate. The baby cried almost constantly and peed and pooped on his clothes, but he refused to abandon it.

Three years passed and Marinos continued to live a life of absolute asceticism while still caring for the innkeeper’s daughter’s son. The other monks, seeing his devotion, went to the superior and demanded that Marinos be allowed to return to the monastery because he had already served his punishment. The superior refused, so the monks declared that, if he did not allow Marinos to return, they would leave the monastery. Finally, the superior agreed to let Marinos come back.

The superior assigned Marinos to do all the lowliest chores and the little boy he had adopted followed him around everywhere, saying “Dada, Dada,” demanding food and attention. Marinos devoted himself to his work, doing everything he was told without complaining, no matter how arduous the work was.

Many years passed. The little boy grew up and was accepted into the monastery as a monk. Then Marinos died. The other monks found his corpse in his cell, but, when they stripped his clothes in order to wash him and prepare him for burial, they discovered that, to their great astonishment, he had female genitalia. They reported this to the superior, who reported it to the innkeeper. It became clear to everyone that Marinos had not raped the innkeeper’s daughter and he became revered as a saint.

This story is almost certainly fictional. There probably never was a real-life Marinos the Monk. Nonetheless, it is a story that was popular among Christians during the Middle Ages, especially in the Byzantine Empire. When the French hagiographer Jacobus da Varagine compiled his famous collection of saints’ lives, The Golden Legend, in the mid-thirteenth century, he incorporated the story of Marinos the Monk.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern cult statue of Saint Marinos the Monk with the innkeeper’s daughter’s son at his feet

Conclusion

I’ve covered a lot of topics here, including eunuch priests, sex-changing figures from Greek mythology, an intersex Gaulish orator, literary allusions to people whom we would consider transgender, a Roman emperor who might have been what we would consider a trans woman, and Christian saints who were assigned female at birth but adopted male identities.

My point in all of this is show that gender and sexuality in the ancient world were just as complicated as they are today. Transgender people, intersex people, and other gender-nonconforming people have existed in various forms since at least the beginning of recorded history.

There are lots of cases from the Middle Ages that would be really interesting to talk about, such as the fascinating case of Eleanor Rykener, but I think I’ve written enough for one article. I may write another article covering the Middle Ages at some point in the future.