Reassessing the trans past

 A lot of discussion has been whipped up in the press this week after the North Hertfordshire Museum in England decided that Roman Emperor Elabalaus was likely trans and they would refer to this person as 'she'. [See my last paragraph for an update on this, 28/11.]

I wrote about Elagabalus in 2021 and, to save you clicking a link, here's that biography and my comments:

Born with the name Varius Avitus Bassianus in Syria around 204 AD, he was related to Rome's ruling Severan dynasty. He was hereditary priest of Elagabal (one of the local Baal gods of those regions so often condemned in the Bible) and on being acclaimed emperor in 218, aged about 14, he brought his cult to Rome and adopted the typically sonorous imperial name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. He was nicknamed Elagabalus after his god. After a short reign that provoked scandal, he was assassinated in 222.

Roman sources (Herodian, Cassius Dio, Lampridius) suggest he was LGBTQI+ and then some! Dio (Roman History, book 80, chapter 16, section 7) mentions his seeking a surgeon for vaginoplasty and Lampridius (Augustan History, Heliogabalus, chapter 7, section 2) says he joined the worshippers of the Eastern goddess Cybele in their frenetic dances and duly castrated himself and bound his penis, as was required of her priests. 

These sources say he wore makeup, women's (or at least feminine) clothes, dressed up as Venus, slept with lots of men, was the bride in a marriage to a man, acted the female prostitute in brothels ...

One should treat all this with great scepticism. It's intended by the authors to be disgusting. Very briefly, this arises as it would seem he treated traditional Roman religion, protocols, culture and customs with some contempt, or maybe just with teenage and foreign gaucheness, and the Romans, being a virile culture, slated him with their long-standing prejudice against Eastern cultures and cults which they regarded as effeminate. Dio calls him a Sardanapalus, the name of the semi-legendary king of Assyria who allegedly preferred living in the women's quarters of the palace and doing women's work when foreign enemies were at the gates, and who has been used so often in political history as the epitome of an effeminate failure. 

So Elagabalus's alleged transsexualism is not intended as a compliment, or even a statement of fact. We have little idea of who this young person really was; his image and reputation have been destroyed by so much contemporary and later prejudice or offended pride. Politics is a dirty business at the best of times. Therefore, it is not clear whether Elagabalus really was a historic transgender person. 

I should add that the Augustan History I mentioned is a shockingly bad work, supposedly penned by six authors each writing a handful of imperial biographies, as a sequel to Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars, which by contrast is a competent and fascinating work by the man who was principal secretary of the imperial correspondence and who therefore had unique access to documents at the very heart of Roman power. No such access for the Augustan History that modern researchers are increasingly concluding (from stylistic similarities and internal clues) was probably written not by six authors but by one person using six pseudonyms for reasons best known to himself. A lot of the Augustan History is known to be fiction, such as the chapter on the "Thirty Tyrants". So such sources as we have are of doubtful value. To be honest, even a more reliable biographer like Suetonius has his faults: his lengthy descriptions of the aging emperor Tiberius's sexual interests - particularly in trans women - almost certainly derive from a poisoned source, possibly the memoirs in exile of Agrippina, mother of Nero, and we all know about him and his mother! These are similar in tone to the Augustan History's shock prose.

This portrait bust of Elagabalus in Rome shows a young man with a fluff of beard. We'd call him a teenager, although Romans were deemed to have reached adulthood shortly after puberty.

One of the issues around the whole Severan Dynasty (193-238 AD) is that they were the first non-Italian Emperors. The founder of the dynasty, Septimius Severus, came from what is now Libya, Elagabalus from Syria, his successor Alexander from Lebanon. The 3rd Century saw other emperors from all over, from Philip the Arab to several born in what is now Serbia. Naturally, the Romans themselves didn't like being ruled by what had previously been lesser peoples. Couple that feeling of lost hegemony with millennial suspicions about the East, its cultures and its motives and you have a situation ripe for xenophobia of all sorts. That East/West suspicion is still alive today, of course (see the plucky, manly, outnumbered Europeans fight the effeminate, bizarre Xerxes and his weird Persian hordes in 300 or listen to Western populists rant about "muslims"). 

The past is a different country. We shouldn't apply our modern culture and standards to previous cultures and civilizations. After all, they would have a lot to criticise about our day and place. 

So I wonder if this move by the museum is helpful. It's nice to hear that someone is thinking about trans matters and showing allyship ... but it's doubtful this person was trans, and was not exactly a role model. We're rather trying to get away from the crossdressing eccentric, excessive or serial killer, so beloved of, say, older plays or movies like Caligula, Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill... With poor sources and little but negative propaganda to go on, we just don't know if Elagabalus was really trans at all. I'd not go so far as to opt for "she/her" pronouns in this case.

[Add November 28th 2023: I notice that the museum is not using "she/her" pronouns, in fact, but "they/them" (North Herts Museum page), but considers Elagabalus to have been trans. My information when writing this post came from reputable journalistic sources such as The Guardian newspaper, the BBC website and Time magazine. This rather illustrates my point, that if quality contemporary sources get the facts wrong, what hope have we with old sources written by people with an agenda? Many thanks to Clare Flourish for her take on this, and for noting the action the museum itself has taken. Go to the real source, a good journalistic principle that I didn't follow! Clare feels the emperor was trans. I'd say we don't know. As a linguist, I'm not keen on using "they/them" pronouns in the singular, but it seems a reasonable compromise here.]

Sue x