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The Third Gender in Antiquity · Lambda: the LGBT in Antiquity Podcast

• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everybody and welcome to Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity podcast, your home for all things LGBT in the ancient world.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Dominica Raven.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I hope everyone's having a good transgender and non-binary awareness month.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to discuss the nature of a third gender present in many documents in antiquity.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle claimed that there are three options for sex and gender.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: He argues that there are male and female sexes, but that beings can transition between them.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Illustratively, he argues that eunuchs cannot become bold because they transition into the female.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: He says castration is a change from the masculine to the feminine condition.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: He goes on to argue that eunuchs, though castrated, depart so much from their original appearance that they can closely approximate the female form.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: For Aristotle, the key was in sexual puberty.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, he asserts that only men go through a full puberty where women and eunuchs are actually subjected to a shorter and imperfect version of puberty.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: This claim allows him to discuss women and eunuchs as occupying comparable sexual statuses in the ancient world.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle is giving us a mechanism to understand these people who live outside the binary.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Most human and animals do reflect the binary, but there are some who do not.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: He habitually uses terms like castration, birth defect, and mutilation, but what he's really describing is the third option for gender in antiquity.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to do a deep dive into this third gender, exploring the possibilities it presents to us in antiquity.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: When scholars, historians, anthropologists, or classicists study the past, they have a tendency to approach it through binary lenses.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes this makes sense.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: There are a few things in the past and present which genuinely do reflect binary oppositions, but there are a lot more binaries created through researchers' own constructs than exist in reality.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: To put it another way, the approaches scholars use to study the past actually create the appearance of binaries where none may have actually been present.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: The academic chooses to ask a yes or no question about something which actually exists in gradation.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Different critical scholars have approached this in different ways.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: During the Enlightenment era, a lot of different scholars placed heavy emphasis on binaries.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: These old powder wig-wearing people tended to assume that the entire universe was naturally organized into sets of mutual oppositions.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: This line of thinking casts a very long shadow over research throughout the centuries to a point where most scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries simply assumed binaries were absolutes.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: They worked in binary paradigms all throughout their lives without actually considering why everything everywhere was always a binary.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Some scholars would occasionally note the attributes that didn't fit into the binaries, but these would accumulate into exceptions to the rule rather than a question on the binary itself.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Another major way to approach the hyperabundance of binaries is in remembering who is actually doing Western scholarship.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Christian men.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Christian theology is completely dominated by opposing binaries, good versus evil, Jesus versus Satan, Christianity versus Islam, Papist versus Protestant.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yet when we actually consider any of these critically, the binaries tend to become a lot more complex.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take that last one for a case in point.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: The only time Catholic and Protestant was actually binary was when the only Protestant group in Europe was Lutherans.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Within a few years, we get a plethora of Protestant groups, anabaptism, Anglicanism, Calvinism, Presbyterianism, the list goes on and on.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Once the door was opened, the binary melted away into a remarkable heterodoxy of ideas.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: The only ones representing this as a binary are Catholics themselves, who tend to lump every not Catholic into a single group.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Despite these empirical facts, the binary construction persists.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: So Christianity imbues binaries into the sciences and scholars use it as a byproduct of their own worldview.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: In any case, binaries continue to be a significant part of how scholarship and academics construct the past, even if it isn't actually present in the historic record.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: There are many scholars who continue to cling to these binaries even as exceptions and the illogicality they represent accumulate.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Most significantly for our purposes, there's a continued reliance on sex as a binary construct.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: An ever-increasing number of scholars are willing to accept that gender is constructed socially, but maintain that sex is constructed biologically for the purposes of reproduction.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, where an increasing number are comfortable with gender being subdivided into any number of possibilities, sex must remain binary, even as exceptions continue to mount.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: I remember struggling to keep quiet as an osteological professor I once had taught it like this.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: He actually laughed at the idea that gender nonconformity is anything but a rebellion against biological sex.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't bring myself to say that from my point of view, neither sex nor gender were absolute binaries.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So scholars are slowly coming around, and academics willingly surrendering reason to absolute binaries is beginning to wane.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: In doing so, academics have actually created new approaches, such as the third gender model we're going to discuss today.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Contrary to the name, the idea of a third gender does not actually create a third option, but rather a space for proliferating options.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, a third gender model consists of a male and a female and a catch-all other category.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: If much of humanity can be divided into the two categories, then we now have a third option for everything else.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are some issues with this, not least of which being that the myriad of gendered options may or may not actually reflect common cultural stimuli or personal goals.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Additionally, the catch-all category may be seen as a way to homogenize and otherise people in this category.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in antiquity, a less than manly man, like a kinaidos, a pathic man who preferred homosexuality, the openly transgender galay priestesses, eunuch slaves, and manly women, all fall into the same third gender option.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: This model also doesn't take into account the fact that there are many types of totally heteronormative men and women in this world as well.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: For example, we might find dominant masculinities, but there's also more subordinate masculinities.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are some complicit masculinities that are a little outside the mold but aren't far enough to be considered beyond the binary, and there are marginalized masculinities who remain firmly part of the masculine sphere.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: This actually reflects a hegemonic masculinity, which is fractured into many different possibilities even within the masculine sphere itself.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the same holds true for femininities as well.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: For as flawed as the third gender model may be, it remains a powerful academic construct to discuss the myriad of options and identities without relying heavily on binaries.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Third gender models allow us to see gender as a subjective lived experience with a lot of ambiguity.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: These models also open interpretive possibilities by allowing us to study queer people outside of the constructs that we live in.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: We are no longer constrained to form our research questions from places of dominance, nonconformity, and rebellion.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, we no longer have to discuss the queer experience only by its relationship to binaries at all.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Far from binary sex and gender, antiquity contained a rich tapestry of possibilities for each.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: In antiquity there were a lot of different people who would fall under the umbrella of a third gender.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some were viewed as failed men and women.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Romans called eunuchs and intersex conditions semiwiri, or half people.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: One way to consider this phenomenon is that in antiquity, masculinity and femininity are considered forces of nature, and both are closely tied to power.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Masculinity is power over others, yes, but it's also power over one's own desires.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Men were expected to use their masculinity appropriately in masculine pursuits like warfare, politics, and oration.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Men were also expected to exercise power in their ability to control their own urges around other people's wives and only engage in sexuality during appropriate times and towards appropriate people.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Contrary to all of this, femininity could be understood as a submission to that power.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Throughout their lives, women were expected to serve their families.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: When women did show power, it was generally in socially acceptable ways like leading and controlling the household women and managing feminine tasks they were expected to carry out.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Women were expected to control their own desires, but also remained submissive to the desires of others.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Taken together, the implication is that masculinity can be eroded, lost, or even taken away if the man in question does not use their masculine power appropriately.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Conversely, femininity is a submission that can be lost or taken away if the woman is too assertive or exerts too much power in the wrong ways.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: For example, there are some authors who considered eunuchs as failed men.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: They were once boys who simply could not develop into men.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: They might be considered effeminate, but eunuchs were to be thought of as half men.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, some authors put eunuchs into a third category entirely.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Illustratively, Augustine wrote that when a man is castrated, neither is he changed into a woman, nor yet does he retain masculinity.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Though Christian views of eunuchs are complicated to say the least, this illustrates the conundrum of eunuchs in antiquity.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: In this light we have the transgender priestesses of Rhea Kaibale.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: They were often seen as a homogenizing of gender, reflecting some traits of masculinity and some of femininity into a single gendered expression.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: They might have clothing and hairstyles that reflected some masculine and some feminine expectations.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: They wore makeup, a discreetly feminine attribute in antiquity, and they covered their faces with veils, expected of all respectable women.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: They generally are described with shrill voices.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Additionally, the few surviving portrait representations actually reflect a mixed hairstyle, including masculine short bangs and feminine long braids.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: They would have soft facial features with potentially masculine titles as well.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Authors like Lucian use the words medium genus or middle gender and tertium sexus or third sex, but none of this really answers the question whether we should see the gale as transgender, non-binary, or wholly agendered.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Our next episode is going to dive deeper into the gale as transgender and non-binary manifestations.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: When intersex conditions were recorded, they tended to occupy an unusual and uncomfortable place in ancient society.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: If their bodies worked well enough to fit into the mold, they might have surprisingly normal looking lives, getting married and raising families.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: If their bodies were too far afield, they might be wholly otherized from ancient society.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Prejudice against intersex conditions went so far as to assume that some god was punishing their child or their parents, leading to many infants being killed by exposure.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: But some eunuchs and intersex people were actually able to carve out a queer niche in antiquity where they were able to thrive.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: The galley represented achieving this in the religious sphere.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Their queerness allowed them to carve out a space in the highly sexualized religious institutions of the ancient world.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Another great example of this is Favorinus, the Roman Orator.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Favorinus was a Roman philosopher who was born about 85 AD and lived until the 150s.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: They were an orator who thrived in a world where they should have been subjugated.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Favorinus was described as having been born without sex, i.e.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: intersex, and having been castrated, i.e., a eunuch.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Favorinus joked that their life represented three great paradoxes.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: They were born in Gaul, modern France, yet were considered to be a Greek philosopher.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: They were a eunuch who had been tried for adultery, and they had quarreled with Hadrian the Emperor, and still kept their head.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: At this point in the Roman Empire, orators were expected to exemplify masculinity.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Everything they wore, every word they chose, every movement of their bodies was carefully choreographed to conform to expectations.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: One of Favorinus' rival orators named Palamon described Favorinus in unflattering terms as if they exemplified the least desirable physical traits possible.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: He describes Favorinus as puffy-eyed with slacked cheeks and a broad mouth.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Their neck was too long and thin, similar to a woman's neck.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Their ankles were thick and all their limbs were lanky and slacked.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Their appearance was generally flaccid and moist.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Everything here is designed to associate Favorinus with a feminine appearance.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Lucian made another jab at Favorinus, saying that because they could not grow a beard, they lacked the proper qualifications of a philosopher.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: The implication that Poleman and Lucian are making is that Favorinus is far from manly, and therefore their arguments should not be taken seriously.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Though Favorinus was about as far from an ideal image of manliness as a Roman could get, they were closely associated with Hadrian, a man who exemplified Roman manliness through his pursuits of warfare, hunting, politics, and philosophy.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is unclear how the two first met or became associated with one another.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: It is entirely possible that Favorinus was the first eunuch ever associated with an emperor who was not a slave of the court.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: They both studied broadly Greek history, language, and philosophy.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Both were extremely enthusiastic about the Greek Renaissance occurring in the Roman Empire during their lifetime.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: In all, they were opposites in terms of gendered presentation, but philosophically like-minded.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: One source even claims Hadrian held Favarenus in the highest regard among his philosophers, artists, and poets that he patronized as emperor.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: We aren't entirely sure what caused the falling out between these two.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Historia Augustus' entry in Hadrian notes a humorous story where the two were quarreling over something pedantic, the meaning of a specific Greek word.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Though Favorinus believed they were correct, they yielded to Hadrian.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Some onlookers also agreed with Favorinus and later asked why they had yielded.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Favorinus joked that they were actually wrong for not regarding the most learned of men, he who commands thirty legions.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: The implication was that even if Favorinus was correct, humiliating the emperor was an unwise course of action.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is entirely possible that several such minor offenses ended with Hadrian becoming fed up with Favorinus, and that was their falling out.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: We simply do not know why Favorenus fell from grace, but we do know whatever the offense was, it was not severe enough to lead to execution or exile.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: We also know that Hadrian did not hold prejudice due to Favorinus' gender presentation.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is likely that Hadrian's own queerness played into this choice.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: So in the character of Favorenus, we have a person who represents a remarkably excellent form of the third gender.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: We have somebody using their gender status to their advantage.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: They did not view their gender as a barrier, but rather owned their gender and used it to facilitate their rise.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: In a world where eunuchs were meant to be submissive, Favorenus debated the emperor.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: In a world where stories about people falling from imperial grace typically end with, and his body was dumped in the Tiber River, Favorinus survived Hadrian by more than a decade.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately in Favorinus we have somebody thriving in a world that should have been catastrophically fatal to them.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: Favorinus is an inspiring story to reflect on as we consider the struggles and victories of transgender and non-binary people in the past.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Our specials for Transgender and Nonbinary Visibility Month will continue with a deep dive into the gale as transgender or non-binary priestesses.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next week.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Notes and comments.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals is an unusual philosophical discourse about the science and biology of reproduction.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: It is an excellent source on how Greek and Roman authors understood inheritance and how physical traits were passed through generations.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Additionally, it's a valuable source on how sex and gender were constructed at Aristotle's time.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: The references cited here include Book 5, section 3, where he equates eunuchs with the female condition, and a quote from Book 4, section 1, about how eunuchs resemble women, and the discussion of puberty, found in Book 2, section 7.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: The quote from St.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Augustine is from The City of God, Book 7, Section 24.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Favorinus reflecting on the three paradoxes in their own life comes from Philistratus Lives of the Sophist.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: Palamon wrote a text called Physiognomics, where he detailed the ideal presentation Ortur's Surge strive for, and attacked his rival Favorinus in section A20.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: The text was preserved in medieval Arabic and translated by S.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Swain in 2007.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Lucian attacks Favorinus in Demonax, sections 12 and 13.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Favorinus was considered conspicuous among Hadrian's cultural entourage in the Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian, section 16.10.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: The story about Favorinus yielding to Hadrian comes from the Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian, section 15, 12 and 13.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: A discussion about the relationship of Hadrian and Favorinus is from Timothy Shannon's Face to Face The Role of Gender in Favorinus Third Paradox.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's all for this week, folks.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next week for our discussion of the Galay.