sovay | sive femina sive mas est

So this is me shouting at the internet in reponse to a nauseatingly transphobic and shoddily written article. (I started on Facebook, but thought perhaps I should not eat

strange_selkie's bandwidth alive.)

Dear Mr. Williamson,

Who are you, why is anyone publishing you, and how long do I have to wait for any and/or all the gods mentioned in Frazer's The Golden Bough to vaporize you? I disagree with Frazer all the time and I would pay good money to watch Saturn, Anahita, and Xipe Totec fall out of the sky onto you like a ton of bricks. Failing that, I'll have to call your editors and complain.

Being a person who knows a thing or two about Eros μανίαι τε καὶ κυδοιμοί myself, I could not fail to note the classical references in your didactic and impressively hateful attempt to persuade the readership of the Chicago Sun-Times that biological sex is clear-cut and immutable, gender is automatically cis and binary, and anything else is a twenty-first-century delusion to be cured with medical intervention, although only the kind you approve of, i.e. no transitioning. Allow me to remind you that ancient world actually contained concepts of gender which are not yours. You can bang on all you like about how "sex is a biological reality" which "no hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change," but if you're going to slather classical allusions all over your trans-bashing, surely you're conversant with Catullus 63 in the original Latin, in which all the adjectives describing the protagonist Attis change from male to female (vectus, stimulatus, vagus . . . citata, adorta, tremebunda) the moment she castrates herself in the divine frenzy of Cybele? The Metamorphoses is a pretty basic mythological go-to, so I assume you know about Iphis, born physically female, raised male, who prayed to Juno and Isis to change her body to match her desire? The goddess listened. The boy Iphis was happily married to his beloved Ianthe; Hymenaios himself presided over their union. If you object that myth is not historical attestation, try the fourth-century philosopher Axiothea of Phlios, who studied at Plato's Academy and dressed as a man. You read Frazer, so you must have a smattering of interest in comparative religions; are you familiar with the diverse gender identities of the gala/kalû of Inanna/Ištar, who were sometimes men who took female names and wrote hymns in the exclusively female eme-sal dialect of Sumerian and had sex with men and married women and fathered children and were sometimes women? And that this is a rudimentary and almost certainly misgendering way to discuss this priesthood, because as the above description implies, the gala were not defined on a gender binary? Aṣûšunamir the assinu of Ištar's Descent is another gender-crossing figure of Mesopotamian myth. Often assumed to be a eunuch. Maybe. You can find lots of literature describing the assinû as homosexual cult prostitutes, although since Aṣûšunamir's explicit function is to delight and distract and soften the mood of Ereškigal, Queen of the Underworld . . . The kurgarrû are likewise ambiguous in gender. Shall we return to Frazer? For all his many failings, and they are many, even he doesn't deny the existence of people who live as other than they were assigned at birth. Try Part IV of the third edition, Adonis Attis Osiris. I can do this all night. Perhaps you were not a very close reader. Your reference to "the number of names for the Almighty in one of the old mystery cults" concisely demolishes any vestigial inclination I may have retained to take your screed seriously as a piece of comparative anthropology. If you are the kind of person who genuinely believes that the classical mystery religions were only applying their different monikers to the one true Christian God, I can't say much to you except AH HA HA HA NOPE. For the record, I believe you also misunderstand the theory of sympathetic magic.

I am not actually more incensed by Williamson’s failed attempts at classical scholarship than his raging transphobia, but seriously, if you invoke Cassius Dio to shore up your bigotry, you deserve all the mockery the internet can heap on you. Read up on the galli and then come crying back to me.

In other news, I have always liked those statues of Aphrodite as Aphroditos where the goddess lifts his skirts to show off her cock. Remind me to translate the relevant passage of Macrobius sometime. I'm going to bed.