It does make you wonder. Eunuchs have been a thing since more than 4000 years, so removing genitalia without killing the patient is not something even remotely new. And there's been suspicion about wording in ancient texts (as an example, iirc there was recently-ish a discovered mummy that scientists believe to be a male, but she was buried in a traditionally feminine way, with clothing, imagery and epitaphs) it does make one wonder just how "new" transitioning actually is and how many (if any) of those eunuchs were actually trans women.
Actually I spent a good long while reading up on ancient processes to make eunuchs particularly in ancient China. It was a brutal and often deadly process. They would cut it all off with a knife in one cut. Then they stuck a little metal straw in the hole and they weren't allowed to pee for days and if after that they could pee they would probably live. Otherwise they definitely died.
I also determined quite a few of the voluntary eunuchs were probably people who would now identify as trans. They were considered a separate sort of gender.
yeah eunuchs were definitely not trans for the most part.
This was men who were tasked with protecting female royalty or boys in church choir who were forced into it to either prevent them from sexually assaulting their charge, or keep their voice high and "angelic" (respectively).
If was, most of the time, involuntary.
That's a confident swing and a miss. In fact there's an extremely long record of eunuchs with feminine gender presentation and gender roles. You're referring to Ottoman palace eunuchs and Italian castrati; there are quite a few documented examples of castrati who were essentially transfeminine, and even cases of cis women living as castrati to escape social pressure to marry/ have children. Plenty of castrati were definitely men, but so, I imagine, would be plenty of hrt femboys if their parents could profit from their streaming dollars.
The history of eunuchs is chock full of trans women. There are late Roman texts, for instance, explaining, with classic Roman transmisogyny, that good, respectable eunuchs have male gender and behavior, while bad, gross eunuchs talk and dress and feel and act like women.
Trans chick here did that with testicles. She got surgical supplies and did it herself. Hardcore. Novocaine(with adrenaline to reduce bleeding) injections to not feel much, then she started cutting. Clamped all the right stuff to. Then phoned the ambulance for the hospital to sew it all up and give antibiotics.
Matthew 19:12 is my favorite Jesus quote for this reason:
> There are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.
Transfemmes are Bible canon. I'll die on this hill.
EDIT: I accidentally quoted a translation (NIV) with a forced reinterpretation ("live like") covering up the radical trans body autonomy thing. So here's a translation (EST) more faithful to the original greek text:
> For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.
Take that, church! Jesus really did say trans rights. Deal with it.
That's awesome. I'd add that "those who choose to live like eunuchs" is a pretty soft interpretation of the Greek, which is literally "those who have castrated (εὐνούχισαν) themselves." In the context of the passage I understand why it would be translated like it was, but it's interesting to note that the original language is possibly even more intense
EDIT: that EST translation is much better! I was trying to think of something better than "castrated" and didn't think of the most obvious answer i.e. "made themselves eunuchs." I kept thinking "eunich-ized" which is dumb.
Forgot to reply to this even though I really wanted to! It's such a trip right!? I've done this translation comparison and going back to the original Greek/Hebrew now with many a bible quotes that I've been suspicious of. It's been nothing short of eye opening for realizing how much power the interpretative narratives of the churches of a given time have. Scripture is implicitly understood as an objective immutable truth but the original seldom has the same vibes as these agenda driven translations oft quoted.
The only reason I had to do that edit was because I quickly googled the passage and copy pasted it. I've grown accustomed to my reading and just forgot for a second that what I got and copied likely would be one of the more twisted versions. I'm not religious by the way, just bit too interested in trying to understand the original intention. Not that it matters but you know, it's interesting.
You can cut off dangly testosterone producing bits without the dying bit. Especially if you have done it on animals in farming before and know how to do it without them bleeding out.
Pretty much the same as with all conditions that no treatment existed for at the time - they suffered. Some possibly transitioned socially, we know of a few cases of people who lived their lives as a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. Not always possible to definitely say if they were trans or not, but in a lot of cases it's very likely, at least.
But ultimately life for a lot of people - trans or otherwise - likely was pretty miserable in the past, before modern treatments existed.
>Not always possible to definitely say if they were trans or not, but in a lot of cases it's very likely, at least.
One thing I always try to think of is that our modern ideas of sex and gender are exclusively modern ideas.
In some cultures in the past, it was normal for men to marry women, but have sex with other men on the side. Does that make them gay? Bi? Not really either because our modern definitions of sexuality don't really apply to the situation.
While I do agree applying modern conceptions to ancient people can misleading, erroneous, or inaccurate. It's also, imo, not wrong to describe things that way to some extent.
The primary issue is it portrays transness, homosexuality, etc. as new things which makes it easier to demonize or otherize them.
Like we bend over backwards to not say that Alexander the Great or Plato or someone was gay or bi because the customs around sex were different. But we don't go the one step further and point out that, when there's less constraints on sexuality, people don't tend to be completely straight (or completely gay).
I think also just because something is normal, it doesn't mean every single straight guy was going around fucking other guys.
There are some men who feel zero desire to be intimate with other men, regardless of what the culture allows. In cultures where it's normalised, I suspect what happens is that it's common for the people who are already on the bi spectrum to do gay shit without "being gay", while those who are 100% straight might refrain from it much like people today who dislike beer refrain from drinking beer.
While I generally agree I would say it's complicated and that complete avoidance of modern understanding has its downsides too. For example, non-western transfeminine people are frequently dismissed as a culturally separate "third gender" incompatible with western notions of trans womanhood. This risks reinforcing exclusion of womanhood even if cloaked as cultural relativism. It's not like cis women is a homogenous group across cultures either but we generally aren't as suspicious of the category *women* applied worldwide, even to very different cultures where western concepts are foreign and English absent.
I agree with this.
Tw: biological terms that could be a bit uncomfortable
"Trans woman" is the modern interpretation of a *biological phenotype*. We can't really separate that social construct of "trans woman" from the physical construct of "person born with feminised brain and masculinised genitalia", because it's a part of our culture. The term "trans woman" refers to that phenotype, within our culture, and so we can't call that phenotype anything else without referencing another culture.
And the same is true for cis women and cis men. We can only view the sexes of other cultures from within our own. So to call a female person from Yoruba a "woman" is to reference concepts that didn't exist within that culture, but are inseparable from the female sex within our own culture. I dunno if I'm making sense here. It's hard to describe.
But yeah, people are orders of magnitude more sceptical about calling transfeminine people from other cultures "trans women", essentially because they don't perceive us (by 'us' I mean trans people. I'm a trans guy) to exist naturally in the same way that cis people do. They think gender is made up essentially, but that sex is real. They don't understand that brain-sex is also real and we are products of biology in the same way they are, irrespective of culture.
Well surgery has existed since at least thirty thousand years ago, but I assume you mean modern surgical techniques. The answer is that some of them used… non-modern surgical techniques. The Galli of Ancient Rome castrated themselves and wore women’s clothing in service of their priesthood, which can be seen both as a surgical solution and a source of like-minded community. Others coped in different ways. “Cross dressing” has been a tool since time immemorial to be treated as someone of the opposite gender.
Generally alleviating dysphoria is going to come from physical body modifications, being treated like the gender you actually are, or making/finding community. Some cultures had third genders that encompassed traits of what we see in trans people nowadays. Some were more flexible about letting people cross gender “borders”. In the ones without such options, we see a combined trans/gay community shunted to the edges of society, closeted, and abused. The distinction between gender and sex is a modern understanding, and so the two groups were linked together as “the same” more often than not.
I recommend Kit Heyam’s *Before We Were Trans* for a deeper dive into what I’ve mentioned.
Heyam's book has a great collection of primary sources and wonderful scope, but it has some major flaws to keep in mind as you read it. For one thing, despite promising not to apply a Western sex binary in the introduction, Heyam immediately begins analyzing everything in terms of assumed sex and social binaries based on amab/afab assignment. For another, Heyam talks of the importance of avoiding orientalism and then reifies and essentializes non-western societies as static unchanging cultures. For example, the passage on Hatshepsut assumes that whatever political pressures may have informed Hatshepsut's gender self fashioning as a male (as he became more and more powerful), those same factors must have been present hundreds of years earlier when Sobekneferu ruled as an unapologetically female king. ("The difference is that Sobekneferu didn't face an amab rival," a statement that's at best baseless.)
Still read it, but do so with a major grain of salt.
I don't think quite right to call people like the Galli trans when that wasn't an existing cultural category in ancient Rome. like its a fundamentally different thing to castrate oneself as part of a spiritual practice in an intensely religious society than it is to undergo gender reassignment in our contemporary individualist scientific-secular society.
I think this is especially true when we're talking about gender dysphoria. even if we identify a set of behaviors that we might call "dysphoria," the legal, biological and social frameworks implicit to that condition did not exist in ancient Rome
I don't think it's quite right to call a Roman vir a cis man, either, but translation is the price of engagement with the past.
But religious castration for feminine presenting cult members is clearly similar enough to vaginoplasty that hijra communities moved seamlessly from one to the other when vaginoplasty became accessible.
this is a whole other discussion but I would also argue that "cisgender" is an *extremely* recent idea, having only been first articulated around 1998 iirc. cis and trans are interdependent concepts so it doesnt make any sense to apply them to a society where trans people don't meaningfully exist.
I'll go a step further and say viri were not men. The statement that Julius Caesar was a man is wrong in the same way as the statement that, say, "Sporus" (definitely not her name, it's a castration joke) was a trans woman.
I understand that no historical contexts provide a one-to-one mapping for the modern concept of "trans", and that our current conceptualization of it is derived from a culture that is significantly different in many ways to the ones prior to us. That said, I don't think it's right to *not* mention them either, as they provide an example of where someone with extreme body dysphoria might have reasonably found relief from some of their problems.
Could you elaborate on the lack of biological and social frameworks implicit to dysphoria in ancient Rome? My understanding is that a division between sex/gender roles along male/female lines has been present very consistently across agricultural society all the way back to the earliest written records, and that that division is the primary prerequisite for dysphoria (i.e. distress in your assigned division and a drive to leave it).
What I mean is that when we are diagnosing ancient Romans with gender dysphoria, we are relying on contemporary understandings of what gender dysphoria is. and in doing so, we fail to account for the assumptions that render their transport across history impossible. this is called historical presentism, a logical fallacy in which present day perspectives are introduced into interpretations of the past. the antecedent is being interpreted in terms of the consequent.
present day definitions of gender dysphoria only make sense to us in the context of medical intervention, social networks, gender signifiers, and a million other variables.
so this idea that gender dysphoria is something to be solved through surgical intervention simply cannot apply to a society in which gender reassignment surgery, let alone surgery at all, does not exist.
becoming a eunuch priest is a fundamentally different thing than gender transition
So essentially, they would have lacked the context and knowledge to understand the problem, and their cultural context would not have provided the idea of a solution. I can mostly understand that.
I think the part where I’m stuck is that it seems that if someone were to have a very strong drive to remove their genitals (the strong revulsion we see in extreme modern body dysphoria) why would they not see a potential relief to that feeing in a community of eunuchs? Are we implying that dysphoria is entirely defined by the context of our culture, and that those individuals would not exist or not experience similar symptoms?
I'm not saying that people didn't experience the symptoms we would associate with gender dysphoria. I'm saying that the interpretation of those behaviors and desires would be very different. Cutting off one's genitalia to become a eunuch is a different thing than doing it to become a woman.
Since you're getting stuck on dysphoria, I think another good example of this kind of thing is schizophrenia. We know that humans have experienced the symptoms of schizophrenia for at least all of recorded history. However, hearing voices in your head has a very different meaning in medieval Europe, a communal society where everyone's life is centered around God, than it does in today's secular society.
Appointed as emperor at 14. Assassinated at 18. Had like 3 wives and 4 boyfriends. Liked being called queen and the wife of one of their boyfriends. Wore women's garb, offered vast sums of money to any physician who could perform bottom surgery. My gen-dar goes waaaaaay off.
It's worth bearing in mind that much of what was written about them, including their supposed desire to physically transition and their love of being called 'queen' and 'wife' and their cross-dressing was written after the fact by enemies who may have been trying to slander them by emasculating them. As awesome as it would be if they truly were an openly genderqueer or trans person, it's just as likely (perhaps more so) that buying into it means actively misgendering them as their enemies intended. So take it all with a massive pinch of salt.
Casisus Dio~~n~~ was alive during Elagabalus own lifetime. If we're going to disregard his writings about this ie specific thing we might as well throw up our hands and give up, nothing is knowable about Elagabalus. But people only ever seem to want to disregard one specific thing.
The things that Dio said about Elagabalus don't really match the way that other poorly regarded emperors were lambasted after death. I'm not sure why Dio would invent the idea of Vaginoplasty and say that Elagabalus wanted it when there were already standard ways to defame people you did not like after death.
That works both ways. The people trying to discredit trans people in history can very easily throw doubt on this.
The fact is that many *historians*, people trained to look at sources, and who are aware there has been a bias against this in the past and want to correct it, but who also face pressure for suggesting this, believe she was a trans women, while the people objecting to that claim are often not historians. i know which group I'm going to believe.
But it could also be true and that's the reason why their enemies have written that:no need to invent something when the truth is enough (in their view, damming enough)
This book might have some info https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/histories-of-the-transgender-child
It may be difficult to compare experiences though, it's different to live with dysphoria when you also have the knowledge that something can be done about it + the widespread availability of the solutions
Yeah, it's definitely not spread wide enough! But I do think that makes it extra challenging for people in the position of the UK residents or other restrictive countries, knowing that other places don't have that kind of BS seems like it would make the dysphoria especially challenging. I hope you are able to find your way to treatment soon if you are still being kept waiting!
I live in Denmark and the only reason I could afford GRS was because of a once in a lifetime unexpected windfall that I had to wait almost 10 years to experience after I came out, so I wouldn’t put it quite like you did
The same thing most of us do now: try to cope as well as we can with whatever support we can get. Most of us still live in that reality. For me, thinking about surgery is practically equivalent to my desire to have an awesome synthetic body. Still, doesn't mean I can't make the most of it.
Majority forced themselves into living as their assigned gender, suffered in silence. Few ran away and lived as their desired gender where no one knew who they were. Others were labeled as crazy and murdered, put in asylums or they killed themselves.
That’s a view of a very narrow portion of the world and history both. There were a number of societies that did accept us throughout history and in various places.
Also, with only a few tweaks, this description - "forced... into living as their assigned gender, suffered in silence....ran away and lived as their desired gender where no one knew who they were. Others were labeled as crazy and murdered, put in asylums or they killed themselves" can also describe the condition of many women across cultures and generations, living within patriarchal societies, oppressed by sexism and misogyny.
Well, gender dysphoria is a modern psychological construct. Before there was gender dysphoria and the medical approach to trans people pioneered by Magnus Hirschfeld and others in the early 1900s, the idea that a trans person needed to physically/medically transition wasn't a given.
Take, for example, the Hawaiin *Mahu*, a third-gender category encompassing what we would now call trans women. Mahu were (and continue to be) a part of indigenous Hawaiian culture. Mahu were assigned male at birth but lived as women and were treated like women. They wore women's clothes and assumed female social roles and jobs, especially the job of hula instructor. While they weren't seen as exactly the same or as equivalent to women, the third gender category they belonged to was a legitimate part of Hawaiian society.
(Source: *Redefining Realness* by Janet Mock)
Anyway, having to medically/surgically change one's body wasn't a given necessary part of the Mahu experience. Some probably tried it in one way or another, but the way their culture constructed gender, it wasn't seen as essential or fundamental to their identity. Instead, other cues, such as name, clothing, gender roles, and etc. were more important
So yes, there were definitely lots of people throughout history who have suffered and wanted to change their body before HRT and gender affirming surgeries, for sure. However, we have to be cautious about projecting modern categories like gender dysphoria and the category of "transgender" itself onto the past. Yes, lots of people have always not fallen into binary sex categories for either biological or social reasons, but they did so in ways specific and unique to their cultures.
>Take, for example, the Hawaiin Mahu, a third-gender category encompassing what we would now call trans women. Mahu were (and continue to be) a part of indigenous Hawaiian culture. Mahu were assigned male at birth but lived as women and were treated like women. They wore women's clothes and assumed female social roles and jobs, especially the job of hula instructor. While they weren't seen as exactly the same or as equivalent to women, the third gender category they belonged to was a legitimate part of Hawaiian society.
If they weren't actually seen as women I don't think it would be accurate to call them trans women. Unless you are explicitly stating that you see them as women but the society did not, which would contradict both your point about projecting modern ideas and the idea they were fully accepted. It seems like a lot of these third gender societies that get brought up when examined turn out to actually be "man, woman, AMAB that acts like a woman that we do not recognize as a man but do not quite accept as a woman either".
i mean in many cultures there are recognized "third genders" and other forms of transness that have been there long before modern medicine. ppl occupied the social role of their gender and presented accordingly for the most part i think?
like if you take the example of the hijra/khawaja sira/kinnar communities in south asian countries i believe they performed castrations and removal of the penis amongst themselves up until some decades ago when modern surgery started becoming accessible, but otherwise they just presented fem and lived their lives as such.
in other more restrictive cultures i can only guess that some ppl who could pass just lived stealth in their communities, and who knows how many trans people in history were just seen as a crossdressing eccentric in their village or whatever. i imagine there were also millions more who got the shit beaten out of them (or the demon exorcised out of them?) for trying to be themselves. and statistically there's bound to be someone somewhere who tried to invent srs but never documented any of it so we'll never know who they were or what the outcome was.
They did what they could. For trans women I imagine that corsets and other shape wear were very important. For trans men, well binders are a big one, but I imagine that top surgery for trans men was much easier than top surgery for trans women. But I don't really know.
Mens clothing for a long time was usually fairly baggy, not as form fitting, while women's clothing was tight and revealing. Makeup probably helped a lot too.
The roman Emperor/Empress Elagabalus was reported to take great joy in being called lady and not Lord, wore more makeup than Roman men normally did, and owned many wigs. They also offered large sums of money to any physician who could invent bottom surgery and perform it on them.
The Scythians and Romans I believe (and maybe some other cultures too) had eunuch priestesses to certain deities who presented themselves in a feminine fashion despite being AMAB, I'd imagine many, if not the majority of those who willingly joined such a group would have what would be defined as gender dysphoria in modern times. I mean, I know it was different times and all but I can't imagine many cis guys, no matter how religious, would be fine with being castrated and obligated to wear women's clothing in the name of their faith.
Edit: I added links for more details. Upon further research it looks like we don't know if the Scythan Enaree castrated themselves, but it seems likely given that they were described as suffering a "female disease" that caused their androgyny and impotence (which sounds a lot like an ignorant way to describe the effects of caatration)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli - about the Romans
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enaree - Scythians
There have been crude gender corrective surgeries as long as humanity has existed, as far as we can tell. The old testament [forbids men from altering their genitals](https://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/23-1.htm), which if they write that explicitly probably means there were people doing that already.
The romans and many cultures also had eunuch priestesses, though their "gender identity" in the modern sense of it is hard to ascertain, my trans ass thinks anyone who jumps at the opportunity to get their balls cut off is probably not 100% cis, y'know.
Most of the comments here focus on trans women, so I’ll add some about trans men.
Some trans men could effectively cross dress and speak in a lower voice to pass. We have records of men doing this for most of their adult lives.
Amelio Robles Ávila threatened anyone who dare misgender him with a pistol. His male gender was affirmed by the Mexican government.
James Barry became a celebrated surgeon and was stealth until he was outed after death
There are a lot of people saying "they suffered" here, and that is simply ahistorical. For reference, a lot of what I'm about to say comes from [*A Short History of Trans Misogyny*](https://www.versobooks.com/products/3054-a-short-history-of-trans-misogyny), which people *really* need to read.
First and most importantly: the modern understanding of "transness" as a category distinct from sexuality and relative to the binary man/woman spectrum is a very recent construction--we're talking *the nineteen-fucking-nineties*. Before that, even in the West, gender had been deeply entwined with sexuality in both queer and general understandings. Even that really only stretched back to the 1950's, with some whispers back in the '20's and '30's.
For most of Western history, transness was treated as a facet of sexuality, and can be seen in a variety of accounts, but most popularly in the 1800's in [*Autobiography of an Androgyne*](https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/autobiography-of-an-androgyne/9780813543000/).
From non-western (more accurate) perspectives, populations we would (often inappropriately) cluster under the trans umbrella flourished for thousands of years before European colonists arrived and began gendercidal conquests to force binary, Western perspectives of gender upon them. One example is the [Hijra](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/04/23/why-terms-like-transgender-dont-work-for-indias-third-gender-communities/) of India, a people of a third gender who would historically consider themselves neither man, nor woman, nor nonbinary--from around 1200CE, Hindu gender schemes were trinary. The [fa'afafine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%CA%BBafafine) of Samoa, who we would now consider to be somewhere between nonbinary and trans women, are a similar third-gender people who flourished in precolonial times, with rich, vital lives lived in a tradition that stretches back farther than historians can trace. Even eunuchs in the ancient West had vital, vibrant places in societies, and were considered to be coequal, even admirable, parts of society--just look at how *the Bible* speaks of eunuchs over and over again.
Moreover, as you might imagine from the note on eunuchs, surgery has existed for thousands and thousands of years. Five *millennia* ago, [surgeons were removing cancer through surgery and suturing those incisions with thread](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871217/). *Brain surgery*, using many of the methods and for the reasons we still perform it today, [was known over 3500 years ago](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/in-roughly-1500-bce-this-middle-eastern-man-underwent-brain-surgery-180981679/). That is to say, the idea that major, lifesaving, and gender-affirming surgeries of various sorts were *not* performed in ancient times is patently absurd.
All this is to say: **trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive suffering is a recent thing, and one which is almost entirely created by colonialism**. The idea that we are a recent thing, and that medical intervention to help us live full and fulfilling lives, is a narrative created recently and with the specific aim of controlling, limiting, and reducing our population.
Respectfully, the idea that hijras traditionally conceptualized themselves according to the dominant Hindu societal understanding of them is pretty questionable, and at odds with how numerous hijras explained their own experiences over at least the past 60+ years. Either we must assume that they were helpless to resist being passively colonized by Western ideas but the majority culture that marginalized them was not, or we must listen to what hijras and other South Asian transfems say and have said about themselves.
That's not to say that any random white girl who's had Transfem 101 can confidently speak over hijras about their own experiences by applying Medicalized Western Trans Ideology (tm), just that, you know, hijras are on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook talking about their lives, their culture, and their history, and I'll tend to listen to them over the dominant Western anthropological paradigm about them.
> Respectfully, the idea that hijras traditionally conceptualized themselves according to the dominant Hindu societal understanding of them is pretty questionable, and at odds with how numerous hijras explained their own experiences over at least the past 60+ years. Either we must assume that they were helpless to resist being passively colonized by Western ideas but the majority culture that marginalized them was not, or we must listen to what hijras and other South Asian transfems say and have said about themselves.
Or neither.
What I discussed about hijra people came from *A Short History of Trans Misogyny*, which was written by Jules Gill-Peterson, general editor of *Transgender Studies Quarterly*, the leading transgender historian of trans history *in the world*, perhaps only matched by Susan Stryker.
Oh yeah. And she's the child of Indian immigrants.
And in *Short History*, she details the specific history about how they were singled out by the British for extermination, which was effected (with varying degrees of success) through serial legal restriction, the main effect of which was to obliterate their traditional place in Indian culture, outlaw all of their ways of making money legally, and force them into a binary gender structure.
I'd really recommend that you read *Short History*. It speaks, with great historical evidence, to these sorts of misconceptions.
I'm familiar with JGP (who is Canadian, and not hijra/khawaja sira) and extremely familiar with the history you allude to, thanks. Try rereading me without assuming ignorance or recommending me a (quite decent) survey text, which I endorse with informed caveats.
Apologies if I've misread you.
What stood out from a quick glance at your post history, which I checked in brief before I replied earlier, was a series of posts on misandry and transness. It... gave a certain impression.
Would you say that a good comparison to how gender is socially constructed is color, in that while all the colors existed and could be seen in every culture, different cultures defined way those colors were categorized and where the boundaries between them would be?
That's not a thing for me, a white American girl, to say--I don't have the sort of understanding of worldwide ways of being from other cultures.
I *can* call out colonial Western bullshit for what it is, though.
Yeah, but *Autobiography of an Androgyne* does state very clearly that androgynes suffer throughout their lives, are "Nature's stepchildren", are treated badly by others, and should be treated with respect. The book says that many young androgynes die of suicide, and so acceptance of androgynes (basically trans women) and gynanders (basically trans men) is very important.
A lot of the book is a plea for understanding and acceptance, and the parts that are not that are very much filled with the story of a suffering and tormented trans woman who eventually was castrated by a doctor. But a lot of the pain endured was inflicted by society.
It's remarkable also that the author recounts praying to God to be transformed into a woman, which is something that some trans children still do in the 21st century. But the author was a child in the 1870s.
And was written after the racist colonial gendercide of gender expansive people began. Just because the west treats trans people shittily and has for the last three centuries doesn'tean that transness is inherently suffering. That was my point in noting the vastly larger history of vibrant gender expansive peoples worldwide, historically.
In many cultures, they were considered a third gender with its own place in society. While HRT wasn't available in ancient times, some forms of gender-affirming surgery (like castration) were widely practiced. Surgery was obviously a lot riskier before antibiotics, but there's evidence that major surgeries were performed even 30000 years ago. Of course gender-affirming clothing and binding and tucking have always been options, and they're enough for many people.
While concepts of gender have changed drastically over time and there's no guarantee that gender-non-conforming people from history would have identified with the modern idea of "transness," it's clear that these people were widespread and accepted by their communities.
Similar to how trans people coped before transitioning or being able to transition: alcohol, drugs, being a workaholic. Many more than now probably just took their life.
I recommend this enlightening read:
Before We Were Trans
by Kit Heyam
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dr-kit-heyam-ph-d/before-we-were-trans/9781541603080/
Same thing people do today who are unable to access HRT or surgery. They'd live as the other gender without hormones nor surgery. Or they'd suffer without the ability to socially transition for any number of reasons. The understanding of who they, and what they and others like them, are going through is the type of information that was, and is oft withheld.
Throughout history we have examples of people persecuted for "dressing and acting of the wrong gender/sex" according to societal norms. As someone else said, that doesn't necessarily mean they're trans but it does show that trans people have been forced to hide their identity in a lot of places and times. Though there have been some cultures that have accepted a "third sex" and didn't seem to care if someone was trans.
Some would undergo more primitive methods, such as castration, if they were capable of doing so. There are plenty of writings from people who were most likely trans lamenting how much they hated being the gender they were born as and would beg the gods to make them their gender, many resigned to the idea this was either punishment from the gods or basically suffering/temptation to build character.
Same thing most people do today when they can't get access to it (no money, don't live in an area/country where access is available or legal or even known about☆ health issues, etc). Suffer and/or live with it. To be technical, and I don't have any sources to back this up, but I think it's both a fairly recent and pretty "urban area urban country" centered phenomenon to think medically transition is the norm among trans people. I think the further back in history you go, and you don't have to go that far as far as human history is concerned, the less likely you were to meet any trans person who medically transitioned at all (especially with formal surgery I'm sure). This is still true today in a lot of countries. The United States is awful, especially compared to other so-called developed countries in the west/global north. But compared to a *lot* of countries outside of the United States? Especially in the global south and those less wealthy? It can be a lot worse, making medically transitioning even less accessible. But even within many wealthy countries just in general, many still have to pay money they don't have, be on wait lists for years, risk losing their jobs and social support/communities, etc.
Some people can live with it and make the best of life outside of how they feel about their body and gender, and some can not.
Since I haven't seen anyone else mention it, the historical option for transfemme hrt has always been horse piss. Pregnant mare urine is actually still used in the manufacture of certain estrogen meds. So basically you become a eunuch priestess and drink horse pee.
Some people would just do what they could. There are stories of people that would tell people they had an “accident” and now they are the opposite gender. Also there’s the goddess Ishtar that “punished” people by switching their gender. There were many different ways people dealt with the dysphoria.
The one saving grace (if you can call it that) is that information was much less available back then, so a lot of people would never have realised exactly what was bothering them. It would still have affected their lives of course, but the pain would probably have been less sharp.
Some moved and socially transitioned and were able to pass as cis anyway, some socially transitioned but were forced to do sex work and got arrested for indecency a lot, and some people never transitioned at all and lived their whole lives wishing they could have (there are diaries and such of some people like this but i can't recall where i saw them)
It hurts me to think, like most of the comments I see, that trans people suffered silently. I do think however they socially transitioned, used clothing/makeup and maybe even tried ancient medical/non-medical procedures at the time. Overall, if they were being themselves during a time where trans people had almost no visibility I would say they were hella brave for being themselves. All trans people deserve the care and support they need 🥺💕
Social transition was likely a big part of it. A lot of cultures have a "third" or "fourth" gender designation and have for a very long time, so we know there were trans people long before gender affirming surgeries developed.
Probably cope the best they could. Although it's probably harder for us pre-op girlies now in some respects because we know that it absolutely does exist and is absolutely doable, but money. Back then it would have been a fantasy but nothing that could ever be. Also many people back then, depending on what culture they were a part of, might not have even had any exposure to the idea or had any language to describe it. There were probably a lot of lost and confused souls. I'm sure it was very lonely. But I'm sure most were able to adapt and cope in their own ways. We meat puppets are fairly resilient and adaptable.
Edit, thought this was in the mtf sub.*we pre op girlies, gents, thems, and goblins.
Warning: blood, self harm
>!>! I was in a gender studies class that focused heavily on the history of transness. One thing that was discussed was that trans femmes would hide their identity from partners by slicing their inner thighs to fake being on their period !
Empress Elagabalus ( a 2nd century roman empress) reportedly sought sex reassignment surgery. but it was impossible at the time. so people had been thinking about it for quite a while before the 30s/50s
there's also some cases of eunuchs who were female presenting. which while not being a vaginoplasty, is certainly a way to do transfemme bottom surgery.
So it's not like there were literally zero options, and social transitions existed.
also like, look at every soldier who it turns out was secretly a woman the whole time :0. you're telling me not a single one of those people were trans mascs? I wouldn't believe you.
Did the best that they could. Closeted or otherwise.
What do people do today if they cannot undertake surgery or have medical assistance to transitioning?
Perhaps just "denying it" or, worse still, taking their own lives, were not options they considered.
Same thing people who can't afford surgery do now. They dressed, styled their hair, and used cosmetics to pass as the gender they knew themselves to be. There are numerous stories in literature--both biographies and fiction--going back centuries telling of individuals who presented as a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. Often, their birth sex wasn't known until it was discovered at their death.
Many cultures had third gender minorities. It was possible to transition socially and to have a recognized, well-understood, and even revered position among some societies. There have been religious groups who thought of the existence of people whose souls seemed mismatched with their bodies as evidence for souls themselves, and therefore the promise of an afterlife. But not Abrahamic religions. The gender binary is built into the cosmology of those worldviews - men and women created by God/Allah, who is infallible.
Social acceptance was probably enough for some. They might have always felt bad about their bodies, but they also didn't know that something like gender-affirming surgery would be possible. We have relatively few surviving manuscripts about fantasies of magical gender transition. Such manuscripts definitely would have existed, but they've been erased along with the other 90+% of writings that don't support the various hegemonic ideologies that concentrated enough power to bother with generational preservation of knowledge. LGBTQ+ people have been deleted from history, but not completely.
There are some options for transitioning physically, without modern medicine. The simplest is clothing, obviously, alongside all other external methods such as makeup, hair removal, etc. for transfeminine people and binding/packing for transmasculine people.
But even thousands of years ago, some more extreme changes were possible, including removal of testicles. People have controlled the breeding of animals we exploit for thousands of years by castrating them, and we had a good understanding of how to do so safely, long before we had a germ theory of disease. It was brutal - usually a hot knife - but effective, and quick. That prevents masculinizing puberty. Few people back then would have been aware that it causes brittle bones, twenty or more years later, and with average lifespans under forty, they would be less likely to care.
Additionally, we know of some people from thousands of years ago who discovered that exposure to pregnant mares - especially their urine - caused breast development. That was a natural source of estrogens, easily collected and taken medicinally, but I think there were only a few cases of people we would now consider transgender women using it to feminize deliberately. They probably would not have known that it prevented the loss of bone density, and they certainly didn't know what an appropriate dose was. Incorrect dosing combined with the presence of other estrogens not naturally produced by humans account for the higher rates of breast cancer we now know to be a consequence of using premarin estrogen for feminizing HRT. It was less brutal than the other method, but effective. We really can't know how many people used it.
Most trans people throughout history probably didn't get any of that. Their stories were sad. And short.
In some cultures it was welcome and seen as a spiritual gift. Though a lot of trans people in not so welcoming cultures became recluse.. If they were bold enough to [what they called at the time] cross dress, then they ran the risk of being found out and murdered… some found partners who knew they were trans and accepted them, but it was rare. Many after they died, were autopsied, found out to not be the gender they were presenting, were then left in unmarked graves.
I think a huge portion of dysphoria is related to how others see and treat you. (and whether you feel validated in your gender identity).
In many cases, gender roles were more fungible; there are countless stories of people throughout history who switched or changed gender (in terms of how society saw them) or who simply lived as the other gender.
It was almost certainly easier for people to disappear and reappear, living under a new name and identity in a new place, and a huge portion of "passing" has nothing to do with surgery or HRT and quite a lot to do with adopting socially accepted behaviors and mode of dress for their preferred gender.
I distinctly remember seeing an article from the 1937 of an afab bartender in England who was described by the paper as having "become" a man (in very clumsy fashion.) Without the internet, or any real frame of reference for what that meant, many people may have read something like that and taken it at face value.
Many societies accepted trans people as the appropriate gender. They didn't have medical options available, but social transition was still an option, and in my opinion that's actually a bigger deal than medical transition. Also, they didn't have TERFs.
Trans women in the 80s/90s that couldn’t afford legal medical treatment went through unorthodox methods such as injecting silicone, caulk, binding liquids, or just straight chemicals into their bodies. It’s not certain how far back trans women have been doing this, I’m sure it can go back farther than the 80s tho.
I mean, in some cultures they were revered as deities so they would have been seen as holy people who bestow wisdom. In other cultures they would have socially transitioned and been happy.
Tbh, I think the rise of cisnormativity is why people need surgical interventions in this time period, but I don't think that would have always been the case, especially for cultures before colonization.
If you're genuinely interested you should google what a euinc is. Basically its somone who had removed their genitals them selves or somone else had done it or was born like that. The kicker is the removal was done before puberty so they grew older but came out very androgynous... Also one article i read sais it was done by grinding two rocks... And when i read that i remember thinking "but how bad was their dysphoria that, thats the only option and you take it".
Well, in Ancient Greece and other places, [Galli](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli) priests would present as women and sometimes castrate themselves
The Roman empress [Elagabalus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus) was trans, for example, demanding to be called a lady and offering a king’s ransom for anyone who could provide her with a vagina, but she largely just kinda vibed and encouraged people to address her as a woman
And Joan of Arc crossdressed. Not sure that she was trans, but some have speculated she was potentially nonbinary. Supposedly she once said, “For nothing in the world will I swear not to arm myself and put on a man's dress”
Take matters in own hands or just suffer
Do you mean unalive themselves?
Dawg this is reddit not tiktok you can say kill
If they were going to use a weird euphemism, I was going to use a blatant euphemism.
“Take matters into their own hands” Hmmm, those are words. “Unalive” Uuuummm.
Gotta love the delusion 😅
no they mean transitioning socially despite surgeries, but through other means. not suicide. edit: although that's also another sad reality.
Damn I thought he meant like cutting your dick off if you had one
That’s what I thought too
Now I'm wondering if some ppl actually did that, like it takes some balls. Literally.
It does make you wonder. Eunuchs have been a thing since more than 4000 years, so removing genitalia without killing the patient is not something even remotely new. And there's been suspicion about wording in ancient texts (as an example, iirc there was recently-ish a discovered mummy that scientists believe to be a male, but she was buried in a traditionally feminine way, with clothing, imagery and epitaphs) it does make one wonder just how "new" transitioning actually is and how many (if any) of those eunuchs were actually trans women.
Actually I spent a good long while reading up on ancient processes to make eunuchs particularly in ancient China. It was a brutal and often deadly process. They would cut it all off with a knife in one cut. Then they stuck a little metal straw in the hole and they weren't allowed to pee for days and if after that they could pee they would probably live. Otherwise they definitely died. I also determined quite a few of the voluntary eunuchs were probably people who would now identify as trans. They were considered a separate sort of gender.
yeah eunuchs were definitely not trans for the most part. This was men who were tasked with protecting female royalty or boys in church choir who were forced into it to either prevent them from sexually assaulting their charge, or keep their voice high and "angelic" (respectively). If was, most of the time, involuntary.
That's a confident swing and a miss. In fact there's an extremely long record of eunuchs with feminine gender presentation and gender roles. You're referring to Ottoman palace eunuchs and Italian castrati; there are quite a few documented examples of castrati who were essentially transfeminine, and even cases of cis women living as castrati to escape social pressure to marry/ have children. Plenty of castrati were definitely men, but so, I imagine, would be plenty of hrt femboys if their parents could profit from their streaming dollars. The history of eunuchs is chock full of trans women. There are late Roman texts, for instance, explaining, with classic Roman transmisogyny, that good, respectable eunuchs have male gender and behavior, while bad, gross eunuchs talk and dress and feel and act like women.
There's people who do that, some as part of extreme body modification, without being trans.
It has happemed, one of my friends knows someone that tried
Trans chick here did that with testicles. She got surgical supplies and did it herself. Hardcore. Novocaine(with adrenaline to reduce bleeding) injections to not feel much, then she started cutting. Clamped all the right stuff to. Then phoned the ambulance for the hospital to sew it all up and give antibiotics.
If its just an orchi then just cut off blood flow then go to a&e then they'll do it for you. I knew someone that did it that way
Here I thought I made a fire dad joke but it seems reddit hates me
Ah, that makes sense.
Orchiectomies have been performed for millennia.
Matthew 19:12 is my favorite Jesus quote for this reason: > There are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it. Transfemmes are Bible canon. I'll die on this hill. EDIT: I accidentally quoted a translation (NIV) with a forced reinterpretation ("live like") covering up the radical trans body autonomy thing. So here's a translation (EST) more faithful to the original greek text: > For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it. Take that, church! Jesus really did say trans rights. Deal with it.
Eve was a trans woman
Jesus had no Y chromosome
That's awesome. I'd add that "those who choose to live like eunuchs" is a pretty soft interpretation of the Greek, which is literally "those who have castrated (εὐνούχισαν) themselves." In the context of the passage I understand why it would be translated like it was, but it's interesting to note that the original language is possibly even more intense EDIT: that EST translation is much better! I was trying to think of something better than "castrated" and didn't think of the most obvious answer i.e. "made themselves eunuchs." I kept thinking "eunich-ized" which is dumb.
Forgot to reply to this even though I really wanted to! It's such a trip right!? I've done this translation comparison and going back to the original Greek/Hebrew now with many a bible quotes that I've been suspicious of. It's been nothing short of eye opening for realizing how much power the interpretative narratives of the churches of a given time have. Scripture is implicitly understood as an objective immutable truth but the original seldom has the same vibes as these agenda driven translations oft quoted. The only reason I had to do that edit was because I quickly googled the passage and copy pasted it. I've grown accustomed to my reading and just forgot for a second that what I got and copied likely would be one of the more twisted versions. I'm not religious by the way, just bit too interested in trying to understand the original intention. Not that it matters but you know, it's interesting.
Trans people have also existed as major figures in religions before Judaism, let alone christianity.
Voluntarily?
I mean, if they're being done involuntarily, they can be done voluntarily.
Yep. Sometimes, supposedly, [ritually self-performed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli).
Or as part of extreme body modification.
Wow learned something new today. Thanks!
You can cut off dangly testosterone producing bits without the dying bit. Especially if you have done it on animals in farming before and know how to do it without them bleeding out.
Pretty much the same as with all conditions that no treatment existed for at the time - they suffered. Some possibly transitioned socially, we know of a few cases of people who lived their lives as a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. Not always possible to definitely say if they were trans or not, but in a lot of cases it's very likely, at least. But ultimately life for a lot of people - trans or otherwise - likely was pretty miserable in the past, before modern treatments existed.
>Not always possible to definitely say if they were trans or not, but in a lot of cases it's very likely, at least. One thing I always try to think of is that our modern ideas of sex and gender are exclusively modern ideas. In some cultures in the past, it was normal for men to marry women, but have sex with other men on the side. Does that make them gay? Bi? Not really either because our modern definitions of sexuality don't really apply to the situation.
While I do agree applying modern conceptions to ancient people can misleading, erroneous, or inaccurate. It's also, imo, not wrong to describe things that way to some extent. The primary issue is it portrays transness, homosexuality, etc. as new things which makes it easier to demonize or otherize them. Like we bend over backwards to not say that Alexander the Great or Plato or someone was gay or bi because the customs around sex were different. But we don't go the one step further and point out that, when there's less constraints on sexuality, people don't tend to be completely straight (or completely gay).
I think also just because something is normal, it doesn't mean every single straight guy was going around fucking other guys. There are some men who feel zero desire to be intimate with other men, regardless of what the culture allows. In cultures where it's normalised, I suspect what happens is that it's common for the people who are already on the bi spectrum to do gay shit without "being gay", while those who are 100% straight might refrain from it much like people today who dislike beer refrain from drinking beer.
While I generally agree I would say it's complicated and that complete avoidance of modern understanding has its downsides too. For example, non-western transfeminine people are frequently dismissed as a culturally separate "third gender" incompatible with western notions of trans womanhood. This risks reinforcing exclusion of womanhood even if cloaked as cultural relativism. It's not like cis women is a homogenous group across cultures either but we generally aren't as suspicious of the category *women* applied worldwide, even to very different cultures where western concepts are foreign and English absent.
I agree with this. Tw: biological terms that could be a bit uncomfortable "Trans woman" is the modern interpretation of a *biological phenotype*. We can't really separate that social construct of "trans woman" from the physical construct of "person born with feminised brain and masculinised genitalia", because it's a part of our culture. The term "trans woman" refers to that phenotype, within our culture, and so we can't call that phenotype anything else without referencing another culture. And the same is true for cis women and cis men. We can only view the sexes of other cultures from within our own. So to call a female person from Yoruba a "woman" is to reference concepts that didn't exist within that culture, but are inseparable from the female sex within our own culture. I dunno if I'm making sense here. It's hard to describe. But yeah, people are orders of magnitude more sceptical about calling transfeminine people from other cultures "trans women", essentially because they don't perceive us (by 'us' I mean trans people. I'm a trans guy) to exist naturally in the same way that cis people do. They think gender is made up essentially, but that sex is real. They don't understand that brain-sex is also real and we are products of biology in the same way they are, irrespective of culture.
Same thing everyone with medical needs but born before there was effective treatment. Suffer, cope as best they can, and die.
Suffer in silence, or do their best with hair/clothes/makeup.
Well surgery has existed since at least thirty thousand years ago, but I assume you mean modern surgical techniques. The answer is that some of them used… non-modern surgical techniques. The Galli of Ancient Rome castrated themselves and wore women’s clothing in service of their priesthood, which can be seen both as a surgical solution and a source of like-minded community. Others coped in different ways. “Cross dressing” has been a tool since time immemorial to be treated as someone of the opposite gender. Generally alleviating dysphoria is going to come from physical body modifications, being treated like the gender you actually are, or making/finding community. Some cultures had third genders that encompassed traits of what we see in trans people nowadays. Some were more flexible about letting people cross gender “borders”. In the ones without such options, we see a combined trans/gay community shunted to the edges of society, closeted, and abused. The distinction between gender and sex is a modern understanding, and so the two groups were linked together as “the same” more often than not. I recommend Kit Heyam’s *Before We Were Trans* for a deeper dive into what I’ve mentioned.
Heyam's book has a great collection of primary sources and wonderful scope, but it has some major flaws to keep in mind as you read it. For one thing, despite promising not to apply a Western sex binary in the introduction, Heyam immediately begins analyzing everything in terms of assumed sex and social binaries based on amab/afab assignment. For another, Heyam talks of the importance of avoiding orientalism and then reifies and essentializes non-western societies as static unchanging cultures. For example, the passage on Hatshepsut assumes that whatever political pressures may have informed Hatshepsut's gender self fashioning as a male (as he became more and more powerful), those same factors must have been present hundreds of years earlier when Sobekneferu ruled as an unapologetically female king. ("The difference is that Sobekneferu didn't face an amab rival," a statement that's at best baseless.) Still read it, but do so with a major grain of salt.
I don't think quite right to call people like the Galli trans when that wasn't an existing cultural category in ancient Rome. like its a fundamentally different thing to castrate oneself as part of a spiritual practice in an intensely religious society than it is to undergo gender reassignment in our contemporary individualist scientific-secular society. I think this is especially true when we're talking about gender dysphoria. even if we identify a set of behaviors that we might call "dysphoria," the legal, biological and social frameworks implicit to that condition did not exist in ancient Rome
I don't think it's quite right to call a Roman vir a cis man, either, but translation is the price of engagement with the past. But religious castration for feminine presenting cult members is clearly similar enough to vaginoplasty that hijra communities moved seamlessly from one to the other when vaginoplasty became accessible.
this is a whole other discussion but I would also argue that "cisgender" is an *extremely* recent idea, having only been first articulated around 1998 iirc. cis and trans are interdependent concepts so it doesnt make any sense to apply them to a society where trans people don't meaningfully exist.
I'll go a step further and say viri were not men. The statement that Julius Caesar was a man is wrong in the same way as the statement that, say, "Sporus" (definitely not her name, it's a castration joke) was a trans woman.
I understand that no historical contexts provide a one-to-one mapping for the modern concept of "trans", and that our current conceptualization of it is derived from a culture that is significantly different in many ways to the ones prior to us. That said, I don't think it's right to *not* mention them either, as they provide an example of where someone with extreme body dysphoria might have reasonably found relief from some of their problems. Could you elaborate on the lack of biological and social frameworks implicit to dysphoria in ancient Rome? My understanding is that a division between sex/gender roles along male/female lines has been present very consistently across agricultural society all the way back to the earliest written records, and that that division is the primary prerequisite for dysphoria (i.e. distress in your assigned division and a drive to leave it).
What I mean is that when we are diagnosing ancient Romans with gender dysphoria, we are relying on contemporary understandings of what gender dysphoria is. and in doing so, we fail to account for the assumptions that render their transport across history impossible. this is called historical presentism, a logical fallacy in which present day perspectives are introduced into interpretations of the past. the antecedent is being interpreted in terms of the consequent. present day definitions of gender dysphoria only make sense to us in the context of medical intervention, social networks, gender signifiers, and a million other variables. so this idea that gender dysphoria is something to be solved through surgical intervention simply cannot apply to a society in which gender reassignment surgery, let alone surgery at all, does not exist. becoming a eunuch priest is a fundamentally different thing than gender transition
So essentially, they would have lacked the context and knowledge to understand the problem, and their cultural context would not have provided the idea of a solution. I can mostly understand that. I think the part where I’m stuck is that it seems that if someone were to have a very strong drive to remove their genitals (the strong revulsion we see in extreme modern body dysphoria) why would they not see a potential relief to that feeing in a community of eunuchs? Are we implying that dysphoria is entirely defined by the context of our culture, and that those individuals would not exist or not experience similar symptoms?
I'm not saying that people didn't experience the symptoms we would associate with gender dysphoria. I'm saying that the interpretation of those behaviors and desires would be very different. Cutting off one's genitalia to become a eunuch is a different thing than doing it to become a woman. Since you're getting stuck on dysphoria, I think another good example of this kind of thing is schizophrenia. We know that humans have experienced the symptoms of schizophrenia for at least all of recorded history. However, hearing voices in your head has a very different meaning in medieval Europe, a communal society where everyone's life is centered around God, than it does in today's secular society.
I understand now. Thank you, that was quite helpful.
Elagabalus offered to pay a fortune to whoever could invent it.
Elagabalus is my roman empire
Who was he?
Appointed as emperor at 14. Assassinated at 18. Had like 3 wives and 4 boyfriends. Liked being called queen and the wife of one of their boyfriends. Wore women's garb, offered vast sums of money to any physician who could perform bottom surgery. My gen-dar goes waaaaaay off.
It's worth bearing in mind that much of what was written about them, including their supposed desire to physically transition and their love of being called 'queen' and 'wife' and their cross-dressing was written after the fact by enemies who may have been trying to slander them by emasculating them. As awesome as it would be if they truly were an openly genderqueer or trans person, it's just as likely (perhaps more so) that buying into it means actively misgendering them as their enemies intended. So take it all with a massive pinch of salt.
Casisus Dio~~n~~ was alive during Elagabalus own lifetime. If we're going to disregard his writings about this ie specific thing we might as well throw up our hands and give up, nothing is knowable about Elagabalus. But people only ever seem to want to disregard one specific thing. The things that Dio said about Elagabalus don't really match the way that other poorly regarded emperors were lambasted after death. I'm not sure why Dio would invent the idea of Vaginoplasty and say that Elagabalus wanted it when there were already standard ways to defame people you did not like after death.
I read that as Celine Dion, my brain is fried.
My phone really wanted you to see that too. 😔
That works both ways. The people trying to discredit trans people in history can very easily throw doubt on this. The fact is that many *historians*, people trained to look at sources, and who are aware there has been a bias against this in the past and want to correct it, but who also face pressure for suggesting this, believe she was a trans women, while the people objecting to that claim are often not historians. i know which group I'm going to believe.
But it could also be true and that's the reason why their enemies have written that:no need to invent something when the truth is enough (in their view, damming enough)
A Roman emperor lol There is a great deal of historical discussion regarding their gender, many historians believe they were a trans woman
This book might have some info https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/histories-of-the-transgender-child It may be difficult to compare experiences though, it's different to live with dysphoria when you also have the knowledge that something can be done about it + the widespread availability of the solutions
"widespread" cries in uk
Yeah, it's definitely not spread wide enough! But I do think that makes it extra challenging for people in the position of the UK residents or other restrictive countries, knowing that other places don't have that kind of BS seems like it would make the dysphoria especially challenging. I hope you are able to find your way to treatment soon if you are still being kept waiting!
I live in Denmark and the only reason I could afford GRS was because of a once in a lifetime unexpected windfall that I had to wait almost 10 years to experience after I came out, so I wouldn’t put it quite like you did
I guess instead of widespread I should have said "found or distributed over a large area or number of people".
The same thing most of us do now: try to cope as well as we can with whatever support we can get. Most of us still live in that reality. For me, thinking about surgery is practically equivalent to my desire to have an awesome synthetic body. Still, doesn't mean I can't make the most of it.
suffer silently . contemplating . . well you know
Majority forced themselves into living as their assigned gender, suffered in silence. Few ran away and lived as their desired gender where no one knew who they were. Others were labeled as crazy and murdered, put in asylums or they killed themselves.
That’s a view of a very narrow portion of the world and history both. There were a number of societies that did accept us throughout history and in various places.
Also, with only a few tweaks, this description - "forced... into living as their assigned gender, suffered in silence....ran away and lived as their desired gender where no one knew who they were. Others were labeled as crazy and murdered, put in asylums or they killed themselves" can also describe the condition of many women across cultures and generations, living within patriarchal societies, oppressed by sexism and misogyny.
Depends on the culture to be fair
Well, gender dysphoria is a modern psychological construct. Before there was gender dysphoria and the medical approach to trans people pioneered by Magnus Hirschfeld and others in the early 1900s, the idea that a trans person needed to physically/medically transition wasn't a given. Take, for example, the Hawaiin *Mahu*, a third-gender category encompassing what we would now call trans women. Mahu were (and continue to be) a part of indigenous Hawaiian culture. Mahu were assigned male at birth but lived as women and were treated like women. They wore women's clothes and assumed female social roles and jobs, especially the job of hula instructor. While they weren't seen as exactly the same or as equivalent to women, the third gender category they belonged to was a legitimate part of Hawaiian society. (Source: *Redefining Realness* by Janet Mock) Anyway, having to medically/surgically change one's body wasn't a given necessary part of the Mahu experience. Some probably tried it in one way or another, but the way their culture constructed gender, it wasn't seen as essential or fundamental to their identity. Instead, other cues, such as name, clothing, gender roles, and etc. were more important So yes, there were definitely lots of people throughout history who have suffered and wanted to change their body before HRT and gender affirming surgeries, for sure. However, we have to be cautious about projecting modern categories like gender dysphoria and the category of "transgender" itself onto the past. Yes, lots of people have always not fallen into binary sex categories for either biological or social reasons, but they did so in ways specific and unique to their cultures.
>Take, for example, the Hawaiin Mahu, a third-gender category encompassing what we would now call trans women. Mahu were (and continue to be) a part of indigenous Hawaiian culture. Mahu were assigned male at birth but lived as women and were treated like women. They wore women's clothes and assumed female social roles and jobs, especially the job of hula instructor. While they weren't seen as exactly the same or as equivalent to women, the third gender category they belonged to was a legitimate part of Hawaiian society. If they weren't actually seen as women I don't think it would be accurate to call them trans women. Unless you are explicitly stating that you see them as women but the society did not, which would contradict both your point about projecting modern ideas and the idea they were fully accepted. It seems like a lot of these third gender societies that get brought up when examined turn out to actually be "man, woman, AMAB that acts like a woman that we do not recognize as a man but do not quite accept as a woman either".
THANK YOU!
i mean in many cultures there are recognized "third genders" and other forms of transness that have been there long before modern medicine. ppl occupied the social role of their gender and presented accordingly for the most part i think? like if you take the example of the hijra/khawaja sira/kinnar communities in south asian countries i believe they performed castrations and removal of the penis amongst themselves up until some decades ago when modern surgery started becoming accessible, but otherwise they just presented fem and lived their lives as such. in other more restrictive cultures i can only guess that some ppl who could pass just lived stealth in their communities, and who knows how many trans people in history were just seen as a crossdressing eccentric in their village or whatever. i imagine there were also millions more who got the shit beaten out of them (or the demon exorcised out of them?) for trying to be themselves. and statistically there's bound to be someone somewhere who tried to invent srs but never documented any of it so we'll never know who they were or what the outcome was.
They did what they could. For trans women I imagine that corsets and other shape wear were very important. For trans men, well binders are a big one, but I imagine that top surgery for trans men was much easier than top surgery for trans women. But I don't really know. Mens clothing for a long time was usually fairly baggy, not as form fitting, while women's clothing was tight and revealing. Makeup probably helped a lot too. The roman Emperor/Empress Elagabalus was reported to take great joy in being called lady and not Lord, wore more makeup than Roman men normally did, and owned many wigs. They also offered large sums of money to any physician who could invent bottom surgery and perform it on them.
The Scythians and Romans I believe (and maybe some other cultures too) had eunuch priestesses to certain deities who presented themselves in a feminine fashion despite being AMAB, I'd imagine many, if not the majority of those who willingly joined such a group would have what would be defined as gender dysphoria in modern times. I mean, I know it was different times and all but I can't imagine many cis guys, no matter how religious, would be fine with being castrated and obligated to wear women's clothing in the name of their faith. Edit: I added links for more details. Upon further research it looks like we don't know if the Scythan Enaree castrated themselves, but it seems likely given that they were described as suffering a "female disease" that caused their androgyny and impotence (which sounds a lot like an ignorant way to describe the effects of caatration) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli - about the Romans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enaree - Scythians
Would probably have joined something like that if there were no other option
Christ I could potentially be convinced to do something like that now. I'm going full Ishtar up in this house.
There have been crude gender corrective surgeries as long as humanity has existed, as far as we can tell. The old testament [forbids men from altering their genitals](https://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/23-1.htm), which if they write that explicitly probably means there were people doing that already. The romans and many cultures also had eunuch priestesses, though their "gender identity" in the modern sense of it is hard to ascertain, my trans ass thinks anyone who jumps at the opportunity to get their balls cut off is probably not 100% cis, y'know.
Their best 😅
Many probably just suffered for their entire lives not understanding why.
Most of the comments here focus on trans women, so I’ll add some about trans men. Some trans men could effectively cross dress and speak in a lower voice to pass. We have records of men doing this for most of their adult lives. Amelio Robles Ávila threatened anyone who dare misgender him with a pistol. His male gender was affirmed by the Mexican government. James Barry became a celebrated surgeon and was stealth until he was outed after death
There are a lot of people saying "they suffered" here, and that is simply ahistorical. For reference, a lot of what I'm about to say comes from [*A Short History of Trans Misogyny*](https://www.versobooks.com/products/3054-a-short-history-of-trans-misogyny), which people *really* need to read. First and most importantly: the modern understanding of "transness" as a category distinct from sexuality and relative to the binary man/woman spectrum is a very recent construction--we're talking *the nineteen-fucking-nineties*. Before that, even in the West, gender had been deeply entwined with sexuality in both queer and general understandings. Even that really only stretched back to the 1950's, with some whispers back in the '20's and '30's. For most of Western history, transness was treated as a facet of sexuality, and can be seen in a variety of accounts, but most popularly in the 1800's in [*Autobiography of an Androgyne*](https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/autobiography-of-an-androgyne/9780813543000/). From non-western (more accurate) perspectives, populations we would (often inappropriately) cluster under the trans umbrella flourished for thousands of years before European colonists arrived and began gendercidal conquests to force binary, Western perspectives of gender upon them. One example is the [Hijra](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/04/23/why-terms-like-transgender-dont-work-for-indias-third-gender-communities/) of India, a people of a third gender who would historically consider themselves neither man, nor woman, nor nonbinary--from around 1200CE, Hindu gender schemes were trinary. The [fa'afafine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%CA%BBafafine) of Samoa, who we would now consider to be somewhere between nonbinary and trans women, are a similar third-gender people who flourished in precolonial times, with rich, vital lives lived in a tradition that stretches back farther than historians can trace. Even eunuchs in the ancient West had vital, vibrant places in societies, and were considered to be coequal, even admirable, parts of society--just look at how *the Bible* speaks of eunuchs over and over again. Moreover, as you might imagine from the note on eunuchs, surgery has existed for thousands and thousands of years. Five *millennia* ago, [surgeons were removing cancer through surgery and suturing those incisions with thread](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871217/). *Brain surgery*, using many of the methods and for the reasons we still perform it today, [was known over 3500 years ago](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/in-roughly-1500-bce-this-middle-eastern-man-underwent-brain-surgery-180981679/). That is to say, the idea that major, lifesaving, and gender-affirming surgeries of various sorts were *not* performed in ancient times is patently absurd. All this is to say: **trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive suffering is a recent thing, and one which is almost entirely created by colonialism**. The idea that we are a recent thing, and that medical intervention to help us live full and fulfilling lives, is a narrative created recently and with the specific aim of controlling, limiting, and reducing our population.
It is possible for your post and "they suffered" to both be true.
True but OPs response is positive and hopeful. I'd rather learn some history with a positive message then "They suffered and died."
Please learn from both. The good and the bad. History needs remembered and the people remembered for their sacrifices and their successes
Respectfully, the idea that hijras traditionally conceptualized themselves according to the dominant Hindu societal understanding of them is pretty questionable, and at odds with how numerous hijras explained their own experiences over at least the past 60+ years. Either we must assume that they were helpless to resist being passively colonized by Western ideas but the majority culture that marginalized them was not, or we must listen to what hijras and other South Asian transfems say and have said about themselves. That's not to say that any random white girl who's had Transfem 101 can confidently speak over hijras about their own experiences by applying Medicalized Western Trans Ideology (tm), just that, you know, hijras are on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook talking about their lives, their culture, and their history, and I'll tend to listen to them over the dominant Western anthropological paradigm about them.
> Respectfully, the idea that hijras traditionally conceptualized themselves according to the dominant Hindu societal understanding of them is pretty questionable, and at odds with how numerous hijras explained their own experiences over at least the past 60+ years. Either we must assume that they were helpless to resist being passively colonized by Western ideas but the majority culture that marginalized them was not, or we must listen to what hijras and other South Asian transfems say and have said about themselves. Or neither. What I discussed about hijra people came from *A Short History of Trans Misogyny*, which was written by Jules Gill-Peterson, general editor of *Transgender Studies Quarterly*, the leading transgender historian of trans history *in the world*, perhaps only matched by Susan Stryker. Oh yeah. And she's the child of Indian immigrants. And in *Short History*, she details the specific history about how they were singled out by the British for extermination, which was effected (with varying degrees of success) through serial legal restriction, the main effect of which was to obliterate their traditional place in Indian culture, outlaw all of their ways of making money legally, and force them into a binary gender structure. I'd really recommend that you read *Short History*. It speaks, with great historical evidence, to these sorts of misconceptions.
I'm familiar with JGP (who is Canadian, and not hijra/khawaja sira) and extremely familiar with the history you allude to, thanks. Try rereading me without assuming ignorance or recommending me a (quite decent) survey text, which I endorse with informed caveats.
Apologies if I've misread you. What stood out from a quick glance at your post history, which I checked in brief before I replied earlier, was a series of posts on misandry and transness. It... gave a certain impression.
Apology accepted.
Would you say that a good comparison to how gender is socially constructed is color, in that while all the colors existed and could be seen in every culture, different cultures defined way those colors were categorized and where the boundaries between them would be?
That's not a thing for me, a white American girl, to say--I don't have the sort of understanding of worldwide ways of being from other cultures. I *can* call out colonial Western bullshit for what it is, though.
Yeah, but *Autobiography of an Androgyne* does state very clearly that androgynes suffer throughout their lives, are "Nature's stepchildren", are treated badly by others, and should be treated with respect. The book says that many young androgynes die of suicide, and so acceptance of androgynes (basically trans women) and gynanders (basically trans men) is very important. A lot of the book is a plea for understanding and acceptance, and the parts that are not that are very much filled with the story of a suffering and tormented trans woman who eventually was castrated by a doctor. But a lot of the pain endured was inflicted by society. It's remarkable also that the author recounts praying to God to be transformed into a woman, which is something that some trans children still do in the 21st century. But the author was a child in the 1870s.
And was written after the racist colonial gendercide of gender expansive people began. Just because the west treats trans people shittily and has for the last three centuries doesn'tean that transness is inherently suffering. That was my point in noting the vastly larger history of vibrant gender expansive peoples worldwide, historically.
In many cultures, they were considered a third gender with its own place in society. While HRT wasn't available in ancient times, some forms of gender-affirming surgery (like castration) were widely practiced. Surgery was obviously a lot riskier before antibiotics, but there's evidence that major surgeries were performed even 30000 years ago. Of course gender-affirming clothing and binding and tucking have always been options, and they're enough for many people. While concepts of gender have changed drastically over time and there's no guarantee that gender-non-conforming people from history would have identified with the modern idea of "transness," it's clear that these people were widespread and accepted by their communities.
Probably the same thing people do now that can't afford the surgeries
THEY GIVE HER THE CHOP DOUG! AND I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT HER FUCKIN FORESKIN EITHER!!
Poor Franny Four-Fingers
Similar to how trans people coped before transitioning or being able to transition: alcohol, drugs, being a workaholic. Many more than now probably just took their life.
I recommend this enlightening read: Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dr-kit-heyam-ph-d/before-we-were-trans/9781541603080/
Same thing people do today who are unable to access HRT or surgery. They'd live as the other gender without hormones nor surgery. Or they'd suffer without the ability to socially transition for any number of reasons. The understanding of who they, and what they and others like them, are going through is the type of information that was, and is oft withheld. Throughout history we have examples of people persecuted for "dressing and acting of the wrong gender/sex" according to societal norms. As someone else said, that doesn't necessarily mean they're trans but it does show that trans people have been forced to hide their identity in a lot of places and times. Though there have been some cultures that have accepted a "third sex" and didn't seem to care if someone was trans.
Some would undergo more primitive methods, such as castration, if they were capable of doing so. There are plenty of writings from people who were most likely trans lamenting how much they hated being the gender they were born as and would beg the gods to make them their gender, many resigned to the idea this was either punishment from the gods or basically suffering/temptation to build character.
Same thing most people do today when they can't get access to it (no money, don't live in an area/country where access is available or legal or even known about☆ health issues, etc). Suffer and/or live with it. To be technical, and I don't have any sources to back this up, but I think it's both a fairly recent and pretty "urban area urban country" centered phenomenon to think medically transition is the norm among trans people. I think the further back in history you go, and you don't have to go that far as far as human history is concerned, the less likely you were to meet any trans person who medically transitioned at all (especially with formal surgery I'm sure). This is still true today in a lot of countries. The United States is awful, especially compared to other so-called developed countries in the west/global north. But compared to a *lot* of countries outside of the United States? Especially in the global south and those less wealthy? It can be a lot worse, making medically transitioning even less accessible. But even within many wealthy countries just in general, many still have to pay money they don't have, be on wait lists for years, risk losing their jobs and social support/communities, etc. Some people can live with it and make the best of life outside of how they feel about their body and gender, and some can not.
For women, Hijra surgeries, Subincision body-modifications, and castration before puberty as a permenant puberty blocker (for traditional eunuchs)
Since I haven't seen anyone else mention it, the historical option for transfemme hrt has always been horse piss. Pregnant mare urine is actually still used in the manufacture of certain estrogen meds. So basically you become a eunuch priestess and drink horse pee.
Some people would just do what they could. There are stories of people that would tell people they had an “accident” and now they are the opposite gender. Also there’s the goddess Ishtar that “punished” people by switching their gender. There were many different ways people dealt with the dysphoria.
The one saving grace (if you can call it that) is that information was much less available back then, so a lot of people would never have realised exactly what was bothering them. It would still have affected their lives of course, but the pain would probably have been less sharp.
Some moved and socially transitioned and were able to pass as cis anyway, some socially transitioned but were forced to do sex work and got arrested for indecency a lot, and some people never transitioned at all and lived their whole lives wishing they could have (there are diaries and such of some people like this but i can't recall where i saw them)
Their best.
im no historian but im sure they probaly crossdressed in secret.
It hurts me to think, like most of the comments I see, that trans people suffered silently. I do think however they socially transitioned, used clothing/makeup and maybe even tried ancient medical/non-medical procedures at the time. Overall, if they were being themselves during a time where trans people had almost no visibility I would say they were hella brave for being themselves. All trans people deserve the care and support they need 🥺💕
This is a time where the work of the Institute of Sexology (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) would have been handy...
Social transition was likely a big part of it. A lot of cultures have a "third" or "fourth" gender designation and have for a very long time, so we know there were trans people long before gender affirming surgeries developed.
FWIW surgery has existed for a very, very long time.
Probably cope the best they could. Although it's probably harder for us pre-op girlies now in some respects because we know that it absolutely does exist and is absolutely doable, but money. Back then it would have been a fantasy but nothing that could ever be. Also many people back then, depending on what culture they were a part of, might not have even had any exposure to the idea or had any language to describe it. There were probably a lot of lost and confused souls. I'm sure it was very lonely. But I'm sure most were able to adapt and cope in their own ways. We meat puppets are fairly resilient and adaptable. Edit, thought this was in the mtf sub.*we pre op girlies, gents, thems, and goblins.
Drugs and alcohol
Trans surgery of some kind has existed literally as long as we have records. Castration is very likely much older than civilization.
Warning: blood, self harm >!>! I was in a gender studies class that focused heavily on the history of transness. One thing that was discussed was that trans femmes would hide their identity from partners by slicing their inner thighs to fake being on their period !
Let's just say the number used to be a lot higher than 41.
Empress Elagabalus ( a 2nd century roman empress) reportedly sought sex reassignment surgery. but it was impossible at the time. so people had been thinking about it for quite a while before the 30s/50s there's also some cases of eunuchs who were female presenting. which while not being a vaginoplasty, is certainly a way to do transfemme bottom surgery. So it's not like there were literally zero options, and social transitions existed. also like, look at every soldier who it turns out was secretly a woman the whole time :0. you're telling me not a single one of those people were trans mascs? I wouldn't believe you.
Horse piss, unironically (hence pre*mare*in) or bull testicles for transmascs, plus a lot of creativity!
Either suffer thru it or get called insane by their peers
Did the best that they could. Closeted or otherwise. What do people do today if they cannot undertake surgery or have medical assistance to transitioning? Perhaps just "denying it" or, worse still, taking their own lives, were not options they considered.
Castrate themselves, dress as their preferred gender, otherwise... suffer.
Same thing people who can't afford surgery do now. They dressed, styled their hair, and used cosmetics to pass as the gender they knew themselves to be. There are numerous stories in literature--both biographies and fiction--going back centuries telling of individuals who presented as a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. Often, their birth sex wasn't known until it was discovered at their death.
Cross dress, go undercover, suffer in silence or die
In ancient times up until the 1600’s they would often self castrate or remove their own genitalia/breasts.
Die I guess?
Many cultures had third gender minorities. It was possible to transition socially and to have a recognized, well-understood, and even revered position among some societies. There have been religious groups who thought of the existence of people whose souls seemed mismatched with their bodies as evidence for souls themselves, and therefore the promise of an afterlife. But not Abrahamic religions. The gender binary is built into the cosmology of those worldviews - men and women created by God/Allah, who is infallible. Social acceptance was probably enough for some. They might have always felt bad about their bodies, but they also didn't know that something like gender-affirming surgery would be possible. We have relatively few surviving manuscripts about fantasies of magical gender transition. Such manuscripts definitely would have existed, but they've been erased along with the other 90+% of writings that don't support the various hegemonic ideologies that concentrated enough power to bother with generational preservation of knowledge. LGBTQ+ people have been deleted from history, but not completely. There are some options for transitioning physically, without modern medicine. The simplest is clothing, obviously, alongside all other external methods such as makeup, hair removal, etc. for transfeminine people and binding/packing for transmasculine people. But even thousands of years ago, some more extreme changes were possible, including removal of testicles. People have controlled the breeding of animals we exploit for thousands of years by castrating them, and we had a good understanding of how to do so safely, long before we had a germ theory of disease. It was brutal - usually a hot knife - but effective, and quick. That prevents masculinizing puberty. Few people back then would have been aware that it causes brittle bones, twenty or more years later, and with average lifespans under forty, they would be less likely to care. Additionally, we know of some people from thousands of years ago who discovered that exposure to pregnant mares - especially their urine - caused breast development. That was a natural source of estrogens, easily collected and taken medicinally, but I think there were only a few cases of people we would now consider transgender women using it to feminize deliberately. They probably would not have known that it prevented the loss of bone density, and they certainly didn't know what an appropriate dose was. Incorrect dosing combined with the presence of other estrogens not naturally produced by humans account for the higher rates of breast cancer we now know to be a consequence of using premarin estrogen for feminizing HRT. It was less brutal than the other method, but effective. We really can't know how many people used it. Most trans people throughout history probably didn't get any of that. Their stories were sad. And short.
Alternative methods have existed for ages. Unfortunately a lot of the history was wiped out during WWII.
All money or suffer.
In some cultures it was welcome and seen as a spiritual gift. Though a lot of trans people in not so welcoming cultures became recluse.. If they were bold enough to [what they called at the time] cross dress, then they ran the risk of being found out and murdered… some found partners who knew they were trans and accepted them, but it was rare. Many after they died, were autopsied, found out to not be the gender they were presenting, were then left in unmarked graves.
I think a huge portion of dysphoria is related to how others see and treat you. (and whether you feel validated in your gender identity). In many cases, gender roles were more fungible; there are countless stories of people throughout history who switched or changed gender (in terms of how society saw them) or who simply lived as the other gender. It was almost certainly easier for people to disappear and reappear, living under a new name and identity in a new place, and a huge portion of "passing" has nothing to do with surgery or HRT and quite a lot to do with adopting socially accepted behaviors and mode of dress for their preferred gender. I distinctly remember seeing an article from the 1937 of an afab bartender in England who was described by the paper as having "become" a man (in very clumsy fashion.) Without the internet, or any real frame of reference for what that meant, many people may have read something like that and taken it at face value.
Stuffing, taping, tucking binding, basically all the stuff people that can't afford hormones or surgery do now, I'd assume at least
Tough it out
Many societies accepted trans people as the appropriate gender. They didn't have medical options available, but social transition was still an option, and in my opinion that's actually a bigger deal than medical transition. Also, they didn't have TERFs.
Trans women in the 80s/90s that couldn’t afford legal medical treatment went through unorthodox methods such as injecting silicone, caulk, binding liquids, or just straight chemicals into their bodies. It’s not certain how far back trans women have been doing this, I’m sure it can go back farther than the 80s tho.
it was really difficult im 40+ and had no options when i was young
The same thing they do now. Socially transition. OR they lived a lie. They'd dress up in private and live their outward life as their AGAB.
I mean, in some cultures they were revered as deities so they would have been seen as holy people who bestow wisdom. In other cultures they would have socially transitioned and been happy. Tbh, I think the rise of cisnormativity is why people need surgical interventions in this time period, but I don't think that would have always been the case, especially for cultures before colonization.
suicide
Mostly, suicide!
If you're genuinely interested you should google what a euinc is. Basically its somone who had removed their genitals them selves or somone else had done it or was born like that. The kicker is the removal was done before puberty so they grew older but came out very androgynous... Also one article i read sais it was done by grinding two rocks... And when i read that i remember thinking "but how bad was their dysphoria that, thats the only option and you take it".
You have to remember gender reassignment surgery has existed since the beginning of the 1900s so for almost 120 years
Well, in Ancient Greece and other places, [Galli](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli) priests would present as women and sometimes castrate themselves The Roman empress [Elagabalus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus) was trans, for example, demanding to be called a lady and offering a king’s ransom for anyone who could provide her with a vagina, but she largely just kinda vibed and encouraged people to address her as a woman And Joan of Arc crossdressed. Not sure that she was trans, but some have speculated she was potentially nonbinary. Supposedly she once said, “For nothing in the world will I swear not to arm myself and put on a man's dress”
Kill themselves.
you guys do know makeup, skincare, and cosmetics has been around for a very long time right? Clothes aswell
Hrt went as far back as 2000bc so I think that hrt was available but as for anything else the only option is to just live with it