Misconceptions Archives - Page 4 of 22 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Can Archaeologists Really “Disprove” a Transgender Person’s Gender Using Their Skeleton?

People who oppose the idea that transgender people should be allowed to exist and have rights often promote the claim that archaeologists can determine a person’s “true sex” based solely on their skeleton. They claim that, by examining a trans woman’s skeleton, archaeologists in the future will be able to prove that she was “really” a man and that, by examining a trans man’s skeleton, these archaeologists will be able to prove that he was “really” a woman. They claim that this proves that trans people are delusional and their genders are invalid.

In this post, I will show that the argument I have just described is hopelessly wrong on many levels. First, I will show that sex and gender are two different things and that a person’s skeletal structure says absolutely nothing about their gender. Second, I will show that guessing a person’s sex from their skeleton is actually much more complicated than opponents of trans rights regularly portray it. Third, I will show that, at least in some cases, a transgender person’s skeleton may actually be noticeably different from the skeleton of a cisgender person of the sex the trans person was assigned at birth.

Fourth and finally, I will show that reducing a person’s biological sex to their skeletal structure is extremely reductive and misleading, especially since gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (HRT) can cause drastic, scientifically observable, physical changes to many other aspects of a person’s body, including their brain.

Does the Bible Really Say You Should Beat Your Children?

The Book of Proverbs, a work of wisdom literature that is included in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (i.e., what Christians call the “Old Testament”), contains several verses that explicitly tell parents that they should punish their children for their misbehavior by beating them with a wooden rod. Some amateur hermeneuticists have tried to explain away these verses by inventing some rather ingenious new interpretations for them, but, philologically speaking, these interpretations all fall flat. The Book of Proverbs very clearly supports beating children.

Just because these verses advise parents to beat their children, though, does not mean that Jewish and Christian parents today who regard the Book of Proverbs as scripture should beat their children. It is important to consider the historical and cultural context in which the Book of Proverbs was written and recognize that that context was very different from the context that exists in the world today.

Were the Sophists Really So Bad?

The word sophist comes from the Greek word σοφιστής (sophistḗs), which originally meant “one who is highly skilled or learned in his craft.” In the fifth century BCE, various professional teachers of public speaking began to emerge in the Greek world calling themselves σοφισταί (which is the plural form of σοφιστής).

These teachers would typically come to a city and court wealthy patrons, offering to teach them how to speak persuasively in exchange for a tuition fee. Sometimes they would teach other subjects as well, such as philosophy, music, poetry, or mathematics. They would stay in a given city long enough to teach any wealthy people who were willing to pay them for lessons and then move on to the next city to teach anyone who was willing to pay for lessons there.

The sophists have a bit of a bad reputation nowadays. The very word sophist itself has come to mean a person who uses rhetorical trickery and fallacious arguments to deceive people into believing falsehoods. In this post, I want to peel back the millennia of negative portrayals to explore who the sophists really were and what they really wrote (for most part in their own words). By the end of it, hopefully it will be clear what the real differences were between the sophists and the philosophers like Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) and Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) who vilified them.

No, Xerxes I Was Not an Eight-Foot-Tall Giant

In the 2007 epic fantasy action film 300, cowritten and directed by Zack Snyder and based on the 1998 limited comic book series of the same name by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, Xerxes I, the king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, is portrayed by the Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro as a towering giant god-king who goes around almost completely nude, wearing only a very skimpy gold loincloth and a ton of really ornate gold jewelry, which is held on mostly through body piercings.

I’ve already written an entire post about how 300 is not historically accurate and it blatantly promotes a fascist, white supremacist message. Sadly, though, it has recently come to my attention that there are apparently some people on the internet who earnestly think that Xerxes I was really believed in antiquity to have been an eight-foot-tall giant.

Some have tried to prove this claim using a blatantly misquoted passage from the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) and Achaemenid relief carvings as evidence. In this post, I will show that Xerxes I was not really an eight-foot-tall giant, that Herodotos never claimed that he was an eight-foot-tall giant, and that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone in antiquity ever believed that he was one.

No, Ares Was Not the Patron God of Sparta

Many people have gotten the impression that, in ancient Greece, Ares was the patron god of Sparta in the same way that Athena was the patron goddess of Athens. This impression, however, is not rooted in any kind of solid historical evidence, but rather solely in the fact that modern people popularly associate Ares and Sparta with many of the same general sorts of things, such as warfare, bloodshed, masculinity, unstoppable fighting abilities, et cetera. To modern observers, Ares seems to embody the Spartan ethos so perfectly that people simply assume without concrete evidence that the Spartans must have adored him.

The truth, though, is that Ares was not the patron god of Sparta in any sense. As one of the Twelve Olympians, he was certainly a significant deity in both Athens and Sparta, but, in both poleis, he was still relatively minor compared to other deities who were far more prominent. Indeed, ironically, Athena actually seems to have had a much more developed cult presence in Sparta than Ares.

No, the University of Reading Didn’t “Cancel” the Ancient Greeks

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper that is notorious for promoting wildly sensationalistic headlines, having little-to-no fact-checking, and frequently outright fabricating news stories for the sake of attention. Their unreliability is so notorious that, in 2016, they were sanctioned by the International Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) for not meeting standards of journalistic integrity and, in February 2017, Wikipedia took the unprecedented step of blanket-prohibiting the use of the Daily Mail as a source in their encyclopedia articles, with editors concluding via consensus that the tabloid is “generally unreliable.”

On 1 January 2022, the Daily Mail published an article written by an author named Chris Hastings with the shocking headline “Reading University bosses cancel the Ancient Greeks by removing part of a poem that mentions domestic violence to avoid upsetting students.” The article claims that unnamed “bosses” at the University of Reading (by which they presumably mean an instructor in the classics department) “cut several lines” from a handout bearing the text of the poem “Types of Women,” otherwise known as “Semonides Fragment 7,” composed by the ancient Greek poet Semonides of Amorgos, who lived in around the seventh century BCE. The article claims that the university did this because they feared that the lines might offend students, even though no students had actually complained about the poem.

This article has been widely and uncritically shared on social media, including among classicists. On top of this, the story originating with the Daily Mail has been picked up by over a dozen other media outlets, including The Sun, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph. Even the website Ancient Origins, which regularly publishes wooish nonsense about ancient history, has published a piece on the subject. Information from an inside source, though, hints that the story may be totally fabricated—a prospect which seems especially likely given the Daily Mail‘s well-documented history of fabricating stories. Even if the story is not totally fabricated, it is at the very least heavily misrepresented and blown out of proportion in a manner that is clearly deliberately designed to provoke outrage.

No, Cerberus’s Name Does Not Mean “Spot”

In Greek mythology, Cerberus—or, to use a spelling that is more faithful to the Greek pronunciation, Kerberos—is the ferocious, many-headed watchdog who guards the entrance to the underworld. Ancient Greek sources disagree on exactly how many heads he has. The Theogonia, a long narrative poem in dactylic hexameter composed by the poet Hesiodos of Askre in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, says (in lines 308–312) that Kerberos has fifty heads. The later poet Pindaros of Thebes (lived c. 518 – c. 438 BCE) says in a fragment (F249a/b SM) that he has no less than one hundred heads. In Greek vase paintings, he is usually portrayed with either two or three heads. He is often also depicted with a serpent for a tail. From the fourth century BCE onward, though, three heads seem to have become the standard.

There is a popular meme that has been circulating on the internet for a long time claiming that the name Κέρβερος (Kérberos) actually means “Spot.” This is a cute story. How deliciously ironic it would be for a literal Hellhound to have such a normal dog name like “Spot”! Unfortunately, the story probably isn’t true. Kerberos’s name certainly does not mean “Spot” in Ancient Greek, and it probably doesn’t mean this in any language at all.

Did Ancient People Really Think That Gods People Didn’t Believe in Would “Fade”?

The idea that gods derive their power from people believing in them and worshipping them and that gods whom people stop believing in and worshipping will “fade” or possibly even die out pops up fairly frequently in modern popular culture. Most notably, it forms a major part of the premise for Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods (originally published in 2001 by William Morrow in the United States and Headline the U.K.) and the television series of the same name based on it (originally released on the premium cable network Starz from 2017 through 2021).

Some people have wondered, though: Does this idea have any kind of basis in ancient sources? Did ancient people really believe that their deities drew their powers from people worshipping them? As it turns out, although the version of the idea that is best known today through American Gods and other works is utterly contrary to how ancient people normally thought about their deities, similar ideas about deities being, to some degree, dependent on worship, do crop up in ancient literature.

No, Santa Claus Is Not Inspired by Odin

I’ve spent a lot of time debunking the perennially popular misconception that modern Anglophone Christmas customs are of ancient “pagan” origin. My most thorough article on the subject remains this one I originally posted two years ago. One of the more popular claims associated with this misconception is that Santa Claus is actually somehow inspired by the “pagan” Norse god Óðinn, who is closely associated with wisdom, war, death, and the runic alphabet. I already debunked this claim in this article I posted two years ago about the history of Santa Claus, which I highly recommend reading, but I did so only briefly and I feel that this notion is so common that it deserves a more thorough rebuttal.

Jackson Crawford, who has a PhD in Old Norse studies, spent many years teaching the subject at various universities, and is now a professional public educator on the subject, posted a video on his YouTube channel last year explaining why Óðinn is not Santa Claus. Crawford’s video is excellent, but it is, for the most part, merely a simple comparison of Óðinn and Santa Claus and it does not take into account the history of Santa Claus. In this article, I intend to give this misconception the proper, in-depth refutation it deserves—one that fully takes into account Santa Claus’s complicated history.

The Real Reason Why the Attempted Suicide Rate Among Transgender People Is So High

I know I normally debunk misconceptions related to ancient history, but, in this post, I want to debunk a dangerous misconception that I’ve repeatedly seen floating around about transgender people. I think it is important to address this because it is a misconception that has an enormous, direct, negative impact on millions of real people’s lives in a way that other misconceptions I’ve addressed—like the one about modern Anglophone Christmas traditions being of ancient “pagan” origin, the one about a certain fresco from Pompeii being a portrait of Sappho, or the one about Thoukydides being a totally “objective” and “unbiased” historian—do not.

It is widely known that there is an extremely high rate of lifetime attempted suicide among transgender people. The most commonly cited statistic is that 41% of adult transgender people in the United States have attempted to kill themselves at some point in their life. Many conservatives believe that this statistic proves that being transgender itself is a mental illness that causes people to become depressed and suicidal, and that society therefore needs to do everything it possibly can to prevent people from “becoming” transgender for their own good.

In this post, I intend to present evidence to demonstrate that this view is false and that the high rate of lifetime attempted suicide among transgender people is, in fact, the result of widespread bigotry and stigma against trans people. Please be forewarned that the following post contains discussion of suicide, anxiety, depression, transphobia, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, misogyny, Neo-Nazis, online impersonation, and harassment. Some readers, especially those who have personally struggled with mental health issues, may find this discussion disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.