Reading: Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Chapters 7-9 related tags: #HNvPtS
I’ve heard some gay men and lesbians exclaim that, out of all of human history, ancient Greek society was the most accepting of same-sex lovers. But I wonder, how happy were the gay slaves? The word democracy has a pleasant ring, but democracy for whom? The political reality is that Greek democracy was a form of state based on the authoritarian rule of the slave-owning patricians over the enslaved majority.
This isn't inherently... incorrect as a passage. I've also heard people routinely discuss, even 30 years after this book was published, how ancient Greece was so very friendly to queer people... Except there are layers to that that people need to engage in, and they rarely want to.
But whatever homage trans expression still enjoyed was a holdover from the communal past.
I'm not overly a fan of this communal (“collectivist”) and individual (“individualist”) structure that's being employed. It's something that I've always found annoying about Western historians looking to glorify a past that isn't real or assumptions about a culture that aren't. (It's also a way of neglecting the communal/collective aspects of our own societies, even if we have hierarchies forcing us into individualism. Not to mention that it neglects how individualism plays out in collective societies, too. It's a mess all around.)
As I began to write this chapter, I thought about how the past has been interpreted only from the standpoint of women and men, without taking transgender, bigender, transsexuality, or intersexuality into account.
Or agender! Interestingly, we also exist throughout history, which is part of why I'm so hesitant to apply modern titles to people who I do not have enough context for.
But it is true that a lot of history is done through the eyes of binary cis gender, and that means we lose a lot of knowledge and understanding.
And then there’s the problem of my passport. I don’t feel safe traveling with a passport that reads Female. However, if I apply for a passport as Male, I am subject to even more serious felony charges. Therefore, I don’t have a passport, which restricts my freedom to travel. I could have my birth certificate changed to read Male in order to circumvent these problems, but I don’t see why I should have to legally align my sex with my gender expression, especially when this policy needs to be fought.
Why am I forced to check off an For an M on these documents in the first place? For identification? Both a driver’s license and a passport include photographs! Most cops and passport agents would feel insulted to think they needed an M or an F to determine if a person is a man or a woman.
This is the exact view that people should be taking with regards to policies that require we list irrelevant information. We should be challenging the continued collection of data about us rather than pushing for the changes to policy to allow us to officially change it. No more collection. Full stop.
Males who were viewed as “womanly” were an affront to the men in power.
Now let's apply this to acts of homosexuality in Ancient Rome (as chapter 8 discusses)... and also Greece.... and then also consider the ways in which cis men treat effeminate men in modern times.
The Catholic Church, a powerful ally of the ruling class, played a pivotal role in suppressing this resistance.
Weird way of phrasing this because the Catholic Church is the ruling class. It's not an ally; it has always been part of the ruling class.
I think the Church fathers may have canonized a constellation of female-to-male trans saints because they were forced to compete with the old religion still popularly embraced by the peasants. The Church hierarchy must have had a tough time trying to convert peasants from their joyous, pro-sexual, cross-gendered religious rites to the gloom and doom of medieval Catholicism.
While I don't think this is impossible, I do think that there is more to it than this. Were the peasants truly converted from “joyous, pro-sexual, cross-gendered religious rites?” I'm not seeing evidence of what their religious celebrations were or whether they were joyous or even pro-sexual (or even which ones might have been).
This reads more like a nostalgic desire for a past that may not have been.
Plus, Feinberg keeps stating (without clear evidence) that the peasants revered the transgender expression of Joan of Arc. Do we know this? Is this explicitly stated somewhere? Again, without people saying so, I can think of many reasons why people would “worship” Joan of Arc's “masculine armour,” and sme of those reasons aren't related to gender expression of any kind.
In cooperative societies, transgender, transsexual, and intersexual people lived openly, with honor. But in a class-divided society like medieval Western Europe, the Church’s legends of the female-to-male saints introduced the concept of “passing” – being forced to hide a trans identity.
Again: Do we know this to be true? Do we know that all cooperative societies functioned like this? This would be a huge undertaking, and I don't like these kinds of arguments for why we should just let trans people exist.
We should just let trans people exist because they already do. Who cares what historical societies tell us?
I also hesitate because much of this is reading like “peasants were more progressive,” and that's... It's weird because under classes still have views aligning with the ruling classes. Feinberg even points this out in hirself, and it's partly because of the learning that the ruling classes coerce us through (a point of this book, in fact). Yet, ze does hirself. Are the under classes more likely to empathise with each other? Maybe, but those of us who grew up in poor rural areas know this isn't entirely true, either.
While the Church denounced male-to-female trans expression as witchcraft, they co-opted it for their theatrical productions.
Okay, but who's to say it wasn't for the same patriarchal reasons as why things like Top Gun seem super homoerotic because the lone female character is as interesting as cardboard and the relationship between the male protagonist and his side kick or male antagonist... ends up feeling like more chemistry, therefore more homoerotic?
Plus, this is also potentially adding values onto multiple theatre structures (first Japanese Noh drama, Chinese opera, and Greek Athenian drama) without having evidence of those values (even implied evidence). I don't think we need to add values without having references to them, even if it's from our own analytical perspective.
In the fifteenth century, for example, the Church put a rooster on trial at Basel. The cock was charged with having laid an egg. The rooster’s lawyer argued that the act was involuntary, and that animals were not capable of making pacts with the devil. The court found the cock innocent, but attributed the act of laying the egg to a sorcerer masquerading as a cock. As a result, the rooster and the egg in question were burned at the stake.
This example has a citation, but the citation doesn't have one. So I started looking up where this came from, and I can't check the veracity of the source. It apparently comes from Felix Hemmerlin's Tractatus de Exorcismis, which I was only able to find via volume 7 of The Green Bag (“A Legal Aviary” by R Vashon Rogers). My Latin is too rusty to get through Hemmerlin's writing, and I'm not going to say that these things didn't happen (animal trials, that is)... But I don't know that I would use things where I can't tell how true or common it is as evidence of something.
Hemmerlin was apparently known for wanting to somewhat reform the Church, and it's not beyond my imagination that these would be things that people could exaggerate in the instance that they wanted to make people look worse than they were. (It's also just the kind of story that people hook onto later in time to be like “We're not as backwards as they used to be!”)
This is also part of why I think the history is a little dodgy, and it would've been better marketed as a memoir of hir own exploration of hirself through historical reading.
One night, as I stayed up late reading a popularly written book about “drag” history, I was startled to read a paragraph about an uprising of farmers in which the leaders cross-dressed. To my great frustration, there was no source cited for this information. However, that brief paragraph proved to be all I needed.
Ironically, some of the secondary sources that Leslie cites for zir claims also contain no citations. My perpetual war, I guess.