I invite you to consider the following quote:
“He had planned, indeed, to cut off his genitals altogether, but that desire was prompted solely by his effeminacy.” (Dio, 457)
What conclusions might one draw from such a statement? That someone, presumably assigned male at birth and possessing the genitalia that tends to promote that assignment, identified so strongly with femininity that they desired to cut off the part of their body that conflicted with that identification.
To a modern reader, this screams of transness, doesn’t it? What about this one:
“He carried his lewdness to such a point that he asked the physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body by means of an incision, promising them large sums for doing so.” (Dio, 471)
I mean. Insert Will Smith ta-da meme here.
Cassius Dio, the third-century Roman chronicler who wrote the above quotes about the emperor Elagabalus, along with others indicating that Elagabalus saw herself as a woman, might be forgiven for not having a view of sex and gender in line with our modern understandings.
Martijn Icks, though? The author of The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor, does not use the word transgender—or even transvestite or transsexual—in his book once. It was published in 2011.
Ick’s negligence is not the only case; the recentness of it only makes it the most egregious I’ve yet found. Why does it never seem to occur to Icks, or to the countless other people writing books on sex and gender, or biographies of people who “cross-dressed”, that the people featured in their research might have been trans? After having read so much of this obfuscation—from Michael Baker arguing that Radclyffe Hall believed themselves to be a man in a woman’s body in order to justify their sexual orientation toward women, to Rudolf Dekker positing that women who repeatedly dressed as men despite being arrested and run out of towns over and over again where doing so to follow soldier lovers, or for economic security, or because they were lesbians—I’m inclined to agree with Bambi L. Lobdell, the author of the 2012 biography of Joseph Israel Lobdell, A Strange Sort of Being (emphasis mine):
“Lobdell’s attempts to name himself and craft an identity from the concepts and terms available at the time were seized first by nineteenth-century psychiatric authorities, and later by twentieth- and twenty-first century theorists who denied Lobdell’s voice and dismissed his words in various exercises of identity piracy grounded in traditional assumptions of sexed bodies.” (124)
Joseph Lobdell is one of those figures in history who is commonly figured as an early lesbian hero. He fled an abusive marriage as a youth and from that point on, always maintained that he was a man, though it led to him being arrested, threatened, run out of town, and finally incarcerated in an insane asylum for over thirty years, until his death in 1912.
Bambi Lobdell, in her history of this distant relation of hers, frequently expresses the same shock I feel that second-wave feminists so consistently elide all of Joseph’s self-declarations in order to focus on the fact that he was born with a vagina, he married a person born with a vagina, and therefore, he was a female lesbian.
Academia is not immune from the biological essentialism that underpins western society. Martijn Icks is not unsympathetic to Elagabalus, who was placed on the Roman throne at age 14 and assassinated at 18. Icks spends most of his book examining and critiquing the image of the young ruler as a licentious tyrant, in histories, in psychological case studies, and in art and literature. He describes especially the modern shift into viewing Elagabalus as a gay icon, who was deeply in love with the charioteer Hierocles and whose nuances are explored in modern plays and short stories that highlight the homosexual relationship.
But is it a homosexual relationship, if Elagabalus said to a lover, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady” (Dio, 469)?
Even if Icks would have come to the same conclusion, viewing Elagabalus as a queer boy, the fact that in the year of our lord 2011 he didn’t acknowledge the possibility that the emperor was what we would today call transgender, while citing her desire for a surgically created vagina, shows at best an intellectual negligence that undermines his other conclusions, and at worst a deliberate interest in erasing transgender people from history.
In researching for The Life and Times of Trans People, we’ve come across many people whose gender is as obscure to us as it may have been to them, and to their contemporaries. But there are just as many who seem obvious: Elagabalus, yearning for a vagina and asking to be called Lady, queen, empress. Joseph Lobdell, who rioted naked in jail cells for days at a time rather than put on female clothes. James Barry, who lived his entire adult life as a man and expressly prohibited any examination of his body after death.
Yet in the academic literature Elagabalus is a pervert tyrant, Joseph Lobdell at best a persecuted lesbian or at worst an insane woman; and James Barry is either an early feminist—but certainly not a male one—or, as Rachel Holmes posits in Scanty Particulars, an intersex person.
The simplest answer is that Elagabalus, Joseph Lobdell, and James Barry were transgender. They saw themselves as a different gender from the one assigned to them at birth, and they lived according to their truths. It’s a great shame that those truths seem to be invisible.
Books mentioned:
Baker, Michael. Our Three Selves: the Life of Radclyffe Hall. London: GMP Publishers Ltd, 1985.
Cocceianus, Cassius Dio. Dio's Roman History. Translated by Earnest Cary. Vol. 9. London: William Heinemann, 1927.
Dekker, Rudolf M., and Lotte Constance van de. Pol. The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. New York: St. Martins Press, 1997.
Holmes, Rachel Scott Russell. Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Queen Victoria’s Most Eminent Military Doctor. New York: Random House, 2002.
Icks, Martijn. The Crimes of Elagabalus: the Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy Emperor. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2011.
Lobdell, Bambi L. "A Strange Sort of Being": The Transgender Life of Lucy Ann/Joseph Israel Lobdell, 1829-1912. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &, 2012.