The Sex-Gender War and its Roots in the Ancient World
I hope that by now most of us are well past the cultural arrogance that used to tell us that the modern world is more advanced in every way than the cultures of the past. And that it will be no surprise to learn that some at least of our distant ancestors had a better handle on gender issues and identity than we have now.
It seems certain that cultures of the past recognized more sexual variety than we traditionally do. The earliest written language we know of, Sumerian, distinguishes between animate (human beings and gods) and non-animate (plants, animals, objects, abstract nouns), but makes no distinction based on sex (e.g. he/she). The ancient world thus may have recognized a wider variety of sexual identities—Sumerian has words we have no way to translate, for beings whose nature we just don’t know. Who exactly the kurĝarra, lualedde, and saĝursaĝ were, for example, is unclear. Pilipili may have designated a type of sexual congress clergy, but their physical sex is uncertain.
In the midst of our current challenges with this issue, and as difficult as such study is with so many incomplete texts, we could probably benefit from a closer examination of what past cultures seem to have understood and accepted about our human sexual nature.
Looking at it as objectively as possible, while remaining aware of the likelihood of cultural blind spots one may still be hampered by, it seems we could usefully recognize at least eight different gender identities. Some or all of these may have been recognized in pre-historic and distantly historic times:
Woman’s spirit in woman’s body
· Primary sexual attraction to men
· Primary sexual attraction to women
Woman’s spirit in man’s body
· Primary sexual attraction to men
· Primary sexual attraction to women
Man’s spirit in man’s body
· Primary sexual attraction to women
· Primary sexual attraction to men
Man’s spirit in woman’s body
· Primary sexual attraction to women
· Primary sexual attraction to men
If we include those who feel no sexual attraction to others, add four more.
What is needed here, it seems to me, is a word for each of these identities. And many modern languages simply don’t have the linguistic riches or background to readily produce what is needed. In English, our struggle has so far produced only compound nouns that leave people in all groups feeling resentful. Cis-gendered people resent their new label, and transgender people want to use terms the cis-gendered have traditionally owned. “Two-spirit” is a poetic solution, but still requires to be part of a compound noun: two-spirit woman; two-spirit man. The fact is that English and many other languages have simply developed over time without any concept of an issue that has been the elephant in the room for far too long.
It seems at least possible that if current cultures were able to recognize the variations that exist on the human sexual and gender theme, with a specific and separate word for at least the four main identities suggested above, then those who are born with spirits that don’t match their body gender might have an easier time living with that duality. Part of the psychological torment such people suffer appears to be that their need to be recognized is pitted against society’s refusal to recognize them. In this situation, the human need for recognition being so powerful, it is little wonder if in many cases the solution seems to be chemical and surgical transformation of the physical body.
The main, if not the only, cause of this failure of recognition is of course religion. Christianity, Judaism and Islam have the male-female binary baked into the system, and collectively have had ownership of the microphone for over 2,000 years. “Male and female He created them” is not the simple statement it appears, nor is it truth—it’s an expression of dogma. It’s been the Christian credo for too many centuries. Just as the depiction of woman being birthed from man seems to have been a deliberate repudiation of the reality of the female life-giving power, so this statement may have been developed in direct repudiation of a system that imagined a wider variety in human sexual identity—the Goddess religion.
It’s time we rejected that credo. We need as a culture to unpick the deep prejudice it embodies and find a language capable of defining, recognizing and accepting us all. Let’s start with a new credo to replace the one above.
Personally, I like, “In our infinite variety They created us.”
Clay plaque, Larsa, Iraq, c. 2000 BCE. Used by permission
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