We are not a fad. We are not an invention of the West. We are not bourgeoisie decadence.
The first pride was a riot led by Black Trans Women to combat State violence.
:brick-police:
Queerness is inherently revolutionary in nations affected by, or built with, puritanical dominance and slavery.
It's good, has always been there, and attempts to moralize it are pointless at best and bigoted at worst. Respectability and assimilation politics are a dead end.
also gotta mention that the word 'eunuch' had different connotations during the biblical era. it was seen as a third gender, a state in between genders, or just a 'man' becoming a woman depending on the time period and country. there were people that just became eunuchs and were men like the modern definition, but the biggest connotation was with religious groups at the time. the galli are one example (and many galli referred to themselves as women or with female pronouns), but also syria (a neighbor of judea) maintained a priesthood of eunuchs that dressed in womens clothes, performed complicated genital surgeries of many varieties, and were generally highly esteemed. ISIS even blew up a statue of a eunuch dressed in female attire from that time period. it was the centerpiece in a town square of a major city
scythia would have effeminate 'eunuch' shamans dressed in female raiment that would smoke weed as part of a religious ritual
in general, being trans or a 'eunuch' would be seen as a highly faithful and religious thing back then. and of course, they attracted scorn from many romans for not being masculine, and sometimes was used as a punishment (re:forcing someone into this socially gender variant state where theyd only be accepted by priests and other religious groups). i even remember reading some latin text that basically was word for word a modern transphobic argument about whether the galli should be allowed into bathhouses. there were some emperors that favored the galli over others and even expanded their rights and gave them a mandatory representative to the senate. some emperors even tried to make castration procedures illegal in order to suppress the galli. there are many, many historical analogues here.
in the torah, there is one passage that refers to eunuchs in a jewish king's harem as women which also sort of implies he also had sex with them. this sort of interpretation is why iran funds gender surgeries fyi, so it isnt even a niche thing, an entire very religious abrahamic country issued laws based on similar religious interpretations
pretty much
though the syrians had some pretty complex surgeries described by the romans. they never successfully made a vagina (there were attempts) but they did find out a way to safely castrate someone without infection (getting some smooth flat rocks really hot and smashing some nuts, no incisions made, body would absorb dead testicular tissue automatically). they even had surgeries to make one flat down there (e.g. nulloplasty) and would create forked penises (there is a claim that this was for sexual purposes, you could 'wrap' the two ends of the fork around another penis for the penis to fuck) i find it fascinating that so much thought was put into it even back then
yeah my reading of it was it was a 'make do with what you got' situation since they couldnt make vaginas. all genital surgeries that required incision had pretty high mortalities so they mustve really wanted it to attempt it. generally was only given to younger people (re: ages 14-25) cause the mortality was so high to not be worth it older. main cause of death was kidney infection from swelling around the urethra making it impossible to pee. they did come up with some ways to combat this (re: do not drink or drink sparingly for 4-5 days and keep them in a cool area) which lead to decreases in mortality. the main benefit of the forked penis surgery is if the swelling got too bad they could just make the fork bigger by cutting further down the urethra allowing you to pee, so thats why it was prominent
An amusing cititation where Hippocrates blames the prevalence of the enaree on Scythians wearing pants and riding horseback too much :so-true:
well there's not much record of gay people existing because for a long time it was accepted that sometimes people just found someone of the same gender attractive. There wasn't a label for it
I don't remember where I saw it, but there was a great rebuttal to the anti-trans "it's just science" crowd: human genetic markers associated with sexual characteristics are super varied and exist on a giant spectrum. Pretty cool stuff.
Yeah just, the entirety of intersex people existing refutes all of it. They don’t care though, it’s pure reaction.
Pretty tangential, but I wanna point out that I do see people try to use things from Norse myths like Loki shapeshifting, Odin using "women magic" or Thor crossdressing to get his hammer back as examples of Norse mythology being "queer" in some way, sometimes to try and make weird nazi "pagans" mad. But its not really accurate, all of these are almost explicitly portrayed as shameful and either humorous or as a kind of flaw or contradiction in the gods conduct. Loki bearing children is something he gets mocked for and has his masculinity questioned as a result of, plus it literally directly leads to the death of the two "biggest" gods so thats hardly a good thing.
Also one of the more commonly used insults in the stories is basically a word calling a man cowardly and "womanlike", which also has specific connotations of accusing them of being gay and that being shameful. I do understand why people would wanna "reclaim" it but it kinda falls into the larger trend of pretending that we're some kinda bastion of progress and good over here in scandinavia and it really is pretty much never the case no matter how much we love to pretend it is and portray ourselves as such. I wish it were true that there was explicit acceptance of queer people at some point before modern times over here but that isnt much of the case.
TL;DR: Sometimes Europeans just are like that and its not necessarily Christianity that made us be homophobic.
Edit: Also at least one collection of laws straight up state that its permissible by law to kill someone in retaliation if they accuse you of being "Unmanly/Womanly/Gay"(Argr), and in fact one of these laws explicitly brings up the severity of comparing a man to "a mare", so comparing someone to Loki in the form of a mare is on the same level of severity and demands atonement. There is to some extent evidence of there being a similar idea of male homosexuality to the greeks, in which you are not shamed for being the "top", but as far as I've seen most cases where this is invoked its in the act of explicitly shaming another man by sexually assaulting him.
On a side note, some scholars have theorised that the story of Thor crossdressing to get his hammer back was actually made by early Scandinavian Christians to mock the native gods.
I think that's a really important point. All our knowledge of Norse myths is from after Christianization, so how we can tell how they were understood in their own time?
Yes, but its basically impossible to tell unless we find an earlier collection of texts, since there are essentially two significant large sources that means that at least 50% or more of Nordic mythology that we know of is already theories and speculation, it could be a later christianization but it could also just be an existing story that we dont fully understand the context for.
The whole idea that LGBT issues are a western invention is really just another instance of white people projecting their own moral ideals onto the "noble savages".
Worth noting that the roles most reactionaries think are "traditional western gender norms" are, for the most part, a product of modernity and have only been applied to all of society fairly recently. The idea, for instance, that women shouldn't work outside of the house, has only ever applied to wealthy women in "the West". The fashions and presentational modes of modern "femininity" are a product of mass-production, a change in the nature of labor, and mass-marketing.
We don't need to prove to the reactionaries that we have always existed, because the very structure that they claim is concrete and exists in the material world is nothing more than an ahistorical misunderstanding of the history of gender in the first place. It's ideology. Other societies had far more than just "third genders". they addressed the social role of physical sex and any concept of performed gender in a completely different framework. What we have is a product of an invented "tradition" based on choosing some of the most openly misogynistic cultures in history to create a historiography of sex.
We don’t need to prove to the reactionaries that we have always existed
Agreed. I mostly made the meme as a response to leftists I've run into who need to self-crit. It's a strangely common opinion even in left circles.
It's hilarious how recent (and also fragile) the western concept of the gender binary is.
Ah, you mean the "LGBTQIA+ issues are bourgeois decadence!" crowd
Good, they deserve to be constantly dunked on
Two-spirit is actually a very recent concept, from 1990.
This reads like you're either arguing semantics or implying the exact brain worms this meme is talking about, but okay, let's get into it. Two-Spirit is a modern, Pan-Indian, umbrella term. It was chosen at a queer indigenous international gathering to combat and replace a colonizer slur that was at that point still being repeatedly used in academia.
Since Europeans arrived in the Americas, they’ve documented encounters with Two Spirit people. In many tribes, Two Spirit people were accepted and respected, but that changed with colonization. The colonizers, through forced assimilation efforts, changed acceptance into homophobia in many indigenous communities.
Within most tribes there is a term, in their language, to describe a Two Spirit person. Here is a partial list of the many terms from different Tribal Languages that are included under the Two Spirit umbrella.
So yes, the meme uses the functional and inclusive umbrella term chosen by the people who it applies to.
Yeah, it’s a coined term that encompasses non-Western gender ideas in Native American tribes in general, with many of the concepts under the umbrella differing significantly from each other
The roles of Two Spirit people can vary from tribe to tribe. They can be name givers, match makers, medicine people, holy people, peace-makers, mediators, warriors, adoptive parents, and much more. Here is information on some historical Two Spirit people. The point of the umbrella term is to be inclusive.
the term itself is controversial among natives.
Controversial is a weird way to phrase this. From what I've been told by friends who are indigenous and Two Spirit, most criticism of the term falls into two categories:
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Those who think it either doesn't go far enough or is too broad. - Good faith, ongoing discussion to be had. These folks generally view Two Spirit as an improvement over the slur that was used by white people before.
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Bigots with internalized colonial moral norms attempting to gatekeep. - Bad faith, similar ideology patterns to TERFs, widely denounced and ostracized.
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I met an elder 2 years ago who identified as a two-spirit, and they were at least two decades older than 1990.
1990 was 30 years ago so even that helps put to bed the idea that non-binary gender is just a fad today's youth have come up with.
The Halachic categories of Tumtumim and Androgynim are even contemporaneous with what these assholes call the bible.
Notably in Proverbs and Song of Songs the Biblical narrators assumes both masculine and feminine voices.
