I enthusiastically approve. Missing out right now, in fact. Not mad about it.
And I get that that is your lens. Understandably.
And my WAG is that the vast majority of graves found with biologically females buried with weapons as warriors were women gendered in their lifetimes. “Some” is no doubt true to some value of “some”. Trans people having always existed is highly probably true.
It goes back to the ding on evolutionary psychology: men also gathered; women hunted. And always have. Bronze and even Iron Age cultures included ones with women of great power, owning the property with men moving to them.
I personally find a conflation of role (warrior hunter gatherer cook, whatever) with gender identity as problematic and that as happening here. I think it also biases the interpretation of findings.
Well, I think your lens is biased in a way that could lead to erasure of trans people in the wrong hands. There’s nothing to privilege your lens over mine.
You mean “awesome”?
Say you’re a transman in a prehistoric society. How would you express it? Use male pronouns? Pronouns haven’t been invented yet. Dress like a man? Everybody dresses the same anyway. How would your tribe tell the difference between someone who was assigned female at birth and thinks of himself as a man, and someone who was assigned female at birth, thinks of herself as a woman, but prefers to engage in male pastimes like hunting and fighting?
How could we possibly get inside the heads of people living 50,000 years ago?
You don’t have to think, you just have to read (my last link, that is). Here is the relevant bit (my emphases):
About 20% of the warrior graves on the lower Don and lower Volga contained women dressed for battle similar to how men dress. Armed women accounted for up to 25% of Sarmatian military burials.
Neither of those are a “really tiny” proportion.
Are you being serious? Some of the earliest written languages (Akkadian, Egyptian)had gendered pronouns, so it’s clear they predate that writing (literally prehistoric) unless you want to postulate that they added the pronouns in just to go with the writing.
This is definitely not the case.
Am I being whooshed here?
I return to this post as it both illustrates the side conversation, and potentially returns to the thread theme.
Interesting entry that wiki bit. And the scholarly interpretations of that social construct are telling of the scholars’ biases in the possibility left out.
It existed in a very patriarchal society. Motivation for individuals AFAB to become this specific accepted at male identity listed include: avoiding being separated from a parent; avoiding an unwanted arranged marriage; being able inherit wealth; achieving the freedoms of male identity in a woman oppressive culture; and being able to continue a blood feud as a male. It is noted that as the society became less severely patriarchal the practice has mostly died out.
The notably missing motivation in that list? That some number of these AFAB individuals would have identified as male in their senses of themselves in any case, whether or not the culture allowed expression of that identity.
To me not even including the possibility of some number of those individuals being trans in that sense, as a brain wiring sense of true gender identity independent of role, is mostly an example of being unable to see that which you are not looking for and not considering. OTOH seeing these AFAB individuals living as men as an example of trans man acceptance, in that latter sense of intrinsic identity, also seems to be without any evidence, and the fact that the practice nearly disappeared as the culture became less severely patriarchal argues against it.
Which is how this returns to the thread theme - what do cis-gender individuals do when the roles available to them in their current society aren’t meeting what they have internalized as “traditional” versions of their gender or what they otherwise want to or feel must do?
I have repeatedly pointed out in this thread that “the male inequality” problem of the OP is mostly experienced by men who are being left behind educationally and socioeconomically (with women in the same educational and socioeconomical place being just as stressed and unhappy). These are men who are having a hard time meeting their internalized standards of “being a man”, and who are most likely to be clinging on to standards that current society makes difficult for them to achieve.
Nonsense. If they had language, they had pronouns.
And yet we try so very hard to get inside their heads in an effort to better understand our past and perhaps our present as well. It’s hard enough to get in someone’s head when we have written records and far more difficult when all we have are artifacts and remains to examine. I suspect a lot of the labels we attach to help us make sense of the past wouldn’t make a lick of sense to those people if we could share our thoughts with them.
Maybe. Maybe their pronouns were “hunter” and “gatherer”. We have no way of knowing.
These are the same arguments used by those who want to get rid of and erase trans people. They think we have no business existing in the first place. Our existence makes cis people uneasy. When we stand up and assert our existence loud and proud, that makes them really uneasy. You can see that happening right here.
I am definitely not trying to do that and I don’t really understand how one could think I am. All I’m saying is that human sexuality is highly complex, with both biological and cultural components, and that we can’t judge the cultural aspects of a culture that is utterly alien to us. That’s all.
Were there trans people 50,000 years ago? Absolutely. Did they think of themselves in the same manner as trans people do today, and did their society think of them the same way as modern society thinks of trans people? Absolutely not.
And you know this how? Serious question. Not intended as a gotcha.
Well, it depends how you define “trans people”.
Take homosexuality. Through out the world, and throughout history and prehistory, there have been men who desire sex with other men, and women who desire sex with other women. But how that plays out varies a lot by culture. In some places, it’s considered ordinary for a man to top anything, women, men, animals, melons… And the only men who are remarked on are those who enjoy bottoming. In some societies, “sex” is defined as a thing that involves a penis, and a woman who is willing to marry and spit out a few kids can have as much wild sex with women as she wants without anyone caring, and it’s only women who refuse to have sex with men at all who are remarked on.
I’m pretty certain that all human societies have had some concept of gender, and they have all included some people who weren’t comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth. But I’m also sure that’s played out in a lot of different ways. And in some societies it was remarkable, in others it was routine, and others repressed or even killed off those disobedient teens.
So what counts as trans? If you define it based on the internal perceptions of individuals, I’m sure it has always been fairly common. If you define it based on “the existence of people who are addressed by different pronouns than would have been expected at their birth”, that would be fewer societies. If you only count people who have made physical changes to their bodies to better match their gender, it would be even rarer, and would be heavily weighted towards societies with more advanced surgical practices.
What has surgery got to do with it? That’s modern. That was added in the 20th century. That right there is an example of projecting modern ideas onto the past.
Yes, it is modern. It was an example of how a modern Saudi might define “trans”. I was trying to describe a variety of viewpoints.
Everybody - us included - sees the world through a filter of culture, customs and language. This is not a controversial thing to say.
Saudi? …What?! I’ll take that as a signal to quit this tangent. We now return you to your regularly scheduled great debate.
That’s the meaning that I think of and since I am convinced by the science that that intrinsic internal sense of gender identity is constitutional, I complete agree that it has been present in some numbers throughout history.
I also agree that societies that broadly allowed those individuals to live their lives congruent with their internal have been fewer. I am not clear how many there have been that meet that “broadly” standard (vs a few high status individuals being allowed or even revered). Of course it is hard for anyone to really know that. (The Balkan sworn virgins do not seem to be that for the most part.)
Some number definitely, given that some trans men at least are accepted in some variety of hunter gatherer societies:
But this hunter gatherer example is a specific subset of transgender individuals and common only in “certain ancestral sociocultural conditions …”
So my WAG is that through history these individuals whose internal gender identity sense of self was incongruent with gender assigned at birth mostly either lived unhappily as the gender assigned, or managed to live as their sense of true identity in fear of being found out.
I don’t think any of us can know but I’d guess most have been in the former, living unhappily incongruently, group.
That latter group? No reason I can think of for them to especially take on roles like “warrior” where hiding your incongruent parts might be more challenging.
OTOH “warrior” like “hunter” may not have been as exclusively a “masculine” role domain through the long view of history as is commonly believed. And “gatherer” and “nurturer” was not exclusively “women’s work.”
Nitpick: Castration has been used for centuries or millennia in some cultures among communities of male-assigned but not male-identifying people, such as the hijras of India and AIUI the “galli” priests of Cybele in ancient Rome.