transphobia Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Jesus Had a Vagina (According to Medieval Christian Mysticism)

About a month ago, a whole host of right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, NBC Montana, and Fox News, published a flurry of wildly sensationalist articles claiming that a dean at the University of Cambridge said that Jesus was transgender. As Candida Moss, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity who is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, points out in this article she wrote for The Daily Beast, however, and as I will discuss further in the first section of this post, this claim is entirely false; the dean in question actually said no such thing.

At the center of this controversy, however, stands a very strange and fascinating fact, which is well known to scholars and students of medieval western European art and mysticism, but which is not well known to the general public. As bizarre and improbable as it may sound, medieval western European Christians frequently depicted the wound that Jesus is said to have received in his side on the cross in a manner closely resembling a vulva. Although scholars disagree about what exactly these depictions indicate, most agree that the medieval people who made them and venerated them were conscious of this resemblance. In this post, I will explore the history of these depictions and what they may tell us about late medieval gender and sexuality.

Why Do We Call Certain Prejudices “Phobias”?

The English language has many words that describe different kinds of prejudices. Some names for specific prejudices end in the suffix -phobia, such as: xenophobia (hatred or prejudice against foreigners), Islamophobia (hatred or prejudice against Muslims), homophobia (hatred or prejudice against gay and bisexual people), lesbophobia (hatred or prejudice against lesbians specifically), biphobia (hatred or prejudice against bisexual people specifically), and transphobia (hatred or prejudice against transgender people).

The suffix -phobia comes from a Greek root meaning “fear” and, in English, it is most commonly used in words that describe extreme, irrational, abnormal, or obsessive fears. As a result of this, often, when one person accuses another person of having a -phobia prejudice, the accused person will object to the term by making some variant of the assertion: “I can’t be [insert -phobia prejudice word here] because I’m not afraid of foreigners/Muslims/gay people/lesbians/bi people/trans people.”

This objection is, of course, invariably either extremely ignorant or disingenuous; words like xenophobia, et alii refer primarily to prejudices or hatreds and do not primarily indicate literal fears. This, however, raises the interesting question: Why does our language have so many words for prejudices that end in -phobia? To answer this question, I will explore the history of how the suffix -phobia entered into the English language and how the words with this suffix we know today arose. Surprisingly, the earliest attested English word with this suffix did not indicate a literal fear, but rather an aversion to water in patients with rabies.

Yes, Transgender People Should Be Allowed to Use the Public Restroom of Their Gender Identity

This year, multiple Republican-controlled U.S. states have either passed or considered various bills that would prohibit transgender people from using public restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms that align with our gender identities. Additionally, a YouGov poll released last year indicates that U.S. adults are more likely to say that trans people should be banned from using restrooms and changing rooms that align with our gender identities than they are to say that we should be allowed to use them.

As most of my readers at this point know, I am a trans woman. The main focus of this blog is and will remain ancient history. Nonetheless, when it comes to important issues of civil rights, especially ones like this that have a direct and immediate impact on my own everyday existence, I feel it is necessary to use what platform I have to speak out and hopefully maybe change a few people’s minds. In this post, therefore, I will explain why laws banning trans people from restrooms and changing rooms serve no legitimate purpose, are generally unenforceable, and actively harm trans people.

In Ancient Greece, Children Wearing Drag Was a Religious Obligation!

As I discuss in great detail in this recent post I wrote about the ongoing right-wing attack on LGBTQ+ people in the United States, in the past month, right-wingers have been having a full-on moral panic about the existence of child-friendly drag performances. These rightists perceive drag itself as inherently sexual and therefore inherently inappropriate for children. Many of them are claiming that allowing a child to view any form of drag is somehow “child abuse” or “grooming.” In the heat of this moral panic, neo-fascists have disrupted and even planned violent attacks on drag performances that are billed as child-friendly and Republican lawmakers in multiple red states have proposed bills that would make it a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to view any kind of performance involving drag.

As I have already explained at greater length in my previous post, drag is just a variety of costume; it’s a person dressing up as a different gender. There is nothing inherently sexual about it. Although many drag performances for adult audiences do make use of sexual humor and innuendo and are therefore inappropriate for young children, such innuendo is not integral to drag itself and some drag performances can be genuinely child-friendly. Moreover, laws banning drag performances in the presence of children, if they are vaguely worded enough, could be used to criminally prosecute trans and gender-nonconforming people for wearing clothes associated with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth in any public place where children could conceivably be present.

In this post, I thought I would mention, from an ancient historical angle, that the ancient Greeks would be absolutely baffled by twenty-first-century U.S. right-wingers’ paroxysms over child-friendly drag. All the female roles in Greek drama were originally portrayed by men in drag at religious festivals where at least older children were present, it was a religious custom for men to dress in drag for certain religious festivals and occasions where children could be present, and the ancient Athenians even had a festival at which two adolescent boys were religiously mandated to dress in drag themselves.

The Right Wing’s Ongoing Attack on LGBTQ+ People

This post is going to be a bit of a departure from my usual ancient history content. As some of my readers already know, I am a transgender woman. I am also bi/pansexual. Unfortunately, for roughly the past year and a half, but especially the past month, the political right wing in the United States has been increasingly making queer people, especially transgender people, into a primary target for vilification and attack. I can’t possibly cover everything the right has been doing in the past year and a half to attack us, but I feel it necessary to make my readers aware of just a tiny bit of some of what they have been doing and saying.

In the past month, Republican lawmakers have continued to push increasingly restrictive legislation and policies to take away or drastically curtail the existing rights of queer people, especially transgender people. Right-wing pundits have dedicated much time and attention to propagating a false, bigoted, and dangerous narrative that LGBTQ+ people are “grooming” children for sexual molestation. Meanwhile, neo-fascist and right-wing extremist groups have relentlessly targeted, harassed, and even tried to violently attack events associated with Pride and the LGBTQ+ community all across the United States. Sadly, all signs strongly indicate that things are only going to get much, much worse from here over the next few years, especially for those living in Republican-controlled states.

This post will be a very long one and it will discuss many deeply depressing topics. Nonetheless, I urge you, if you are a straight, cisgender person who genuinely cares about the wellbeing of any queer person, please read this post to the very end, since it will cover some very important information about the ongoing evisceration of queer rights in the U.S.

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.

How Misogyny, Homophobia, and Antisemitism Influence Transphobia

I have developed a very unhealthy habit of deliberately seeking out bigoted and hateful content on the internet and studying it intensely in a mostly vain attempt to understand and analyze it. I really shouldn’t do this, because studying the deplorable things people have written online only intensifies my constant and overwhelming anxiety and makes me lose all faith in humanity. I have, however, learned some things from reading bigotry online about the ways bigoted people think.

Transphobia is a bigotry that has existed for a very long time. It is arguably already present in nascent form in the ancient Greek sources from the third century BCE that talk about the Galli, a group of ancient priests who, as I discuss in this article I published in August 2020, deliberately castrated themselves, wore their hair in feminine styles, dressed in traditionally feminine clothing, and worshipped the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele. Nonetheless, transphobia has only recently begun to develop its own discourse. In this article, I am going to use an example to analyze how contemporary transphobic discourse draws heavily on the older, more established discourses of misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism.

Readers should be forewarned that this article discusses a wide range of the most unpleasant and depressing subjects imaginable, including sexual assault, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, child molestation, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, Nazis, the Holocaust, ritual cannibalism, drug addiction, murder, pogroms, and mass genocide. There will also be some quotes with a lot of profanity, slurs, and extreme insults, which I have partly censored. This is not a piece that I enjoyed writing in the slightest, but I feel that the points I am about to make need to be made.

“Comedy” and “Free Speech” Are Not Moral Justifications for Bigotry

If you’ve paid any attention to the world of stand-up comedy over the past decade, you’re probably already aware that there are a handful of straight, cisgender, male comedians who like to portray themselves as “edgy” who have made many transphobic jokes and statements and have attracted a great deal of controversy as a result. The most prominent of these comedians are Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, and Michael Che.

This subject has come up in the news recently, because, on 5 October 2021, Netflix released a seventy-two minute stand-up comedy special starring Dave Chappelle titled The Closer. In the special, Chappelle devotes large chunks of his time to mocking LGBTQIA+ people and transgender women in particular. He repeats many age-old transphobic talking points and hackneyed jokes that people have made a million times before. Among other things, he says that TERFs (i.e., “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”) see trans women the same way Black people see white people wearing blackface before explicitly saying he agrees with them and calling himself “Team TERF,” he implies that trans women’s genitalia are in some sense “fake” by comparing them to plant-based meat, and he expresses disgust over having been “trapped” into calling a trans woman “beautiful.”

In this article, I don’t intend to go in depth about why the things Chappelle says in the special are inaccurate, bigoted, and harmful to trans people, since his lines are so unoriginal that they have all already been debunked a million times. (In fact, I literally debunked some of his exact claims myself in this article I wrote in November 2020 and this other article I wrote in March 2021.) Instead, I want to talk about Chappelle’s justification for what he said, which is the exact same justification that many other transphobic comedians like to use. Chappelle and his defenders have tried to justify his statements in the special by claiming that he says these things in the name of comedy and free speech. I want to address why “comedy” and “free speech” are not inherently benign and are not adequate moral justifications for saying things that are bigoted.