Transgender Warriors

Feinberg finds the earliest written record of edicts against gender nonconformity in Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Torah and of the Old Testament. This troubles her; as a Jewish person, she does not want her people to be responsible for bigotry against transgender people. Through her research, she learns that it was not religion but the accumulation of wealth that led to bigotry. As ancient Hebrew societies developed wealth through agriculture, trade, and animal farming, class divisions widened, and their laws began to reflect the interests of the upper class. Laws forbidding cross-dressing created more rigid distinctions between men and women, allowing the wealthy to develop a more structured society and thus protect their wealth. The development of social class changed the ways societies passed on wealth; men now passed inheritances to their sons or male heirs, driving the impetus to strictly define who could be considered “male.” 

Over time, societies moved away from communalism “in which labor was voluntary and collective” and toward “unequal societies in which those who owned wealth forced others to work for them—an enforced social relationship of masters and slaves” (52). As slave classes were created, it became necessary to justify slavery; one of the ways this was done was to dehumanize certain groups of people, usually along racial, national, ethnic, religious, or gendered divides. Once dehumanized, it could be argued that a particular group deserved to be enslaved because they were “less human” than the enslavers. In order for the wealthy to remain wealthy, they relied on the labor or slave classes to produce their wealth. In order to control the labor class, people had to be pitted against one another through bigotry. To Feinberg, the root cause of bigotry against women and gay and transgender people is not Judaism but rather “the rise of patriarchal class divisions” (53).

Feinberg recalls being confused when she learned about the ancient Greeks in school. Ancient Greek democracy was supposedly “the highest expression of ancient civilization” (55), but the Greeks enslaved people. Greek city-states of the eighth to sixth centuries BCE were built on “slave, plunder, and trade” that moved their societies further away from matrilineal communalism and degraded the statuses of women and gay and transgender people (55). Despite this, transgender expression that arose from ancient rituals persisted; Greek mythology is full of examples of sex changes, intersexuality, and cross-dressing. The Amazons, most famously depicted as female warriors, were also depicted as androgynous in some Greek sources. Feinberg is struck by how so much of history is told only from the perspective of men and women, “without taking transgender, bigender, transsexuality, or intersexuality into account” (59).

Feinberg describes herself as a “gender outlaw” (61). She has been arrested many times for her gender expression. Since she is often read as a man, it is safer for her to have a driver’s license where her sex is marked M instead of F. She is frustrated that those are the only two options, as she does not fit neatly into either category. She does not have a passport for this reason. She opposes the inclusion of sex markers on government documents and identification: Forcing people to choose M or F means that those who do not fit into either category are further policed and harassed. Race used to be a required category on legal documents, but through protests and legal battles, it was removed. So too was the separation between “male” and “female” jobs. If these distinctions can be removed, Feinberg argues, so can sex or gender markers on documents. 

Feinberg traces the widening of sex distinctions in Roman society. Women were disenfranchised, and only men who owned property held power. Heterosexual families, headed by a father, became the “correct” family structure, as they ensured that men could pass on wealth to their sons. The boundaries between men and women became rigid; just as an enslaved person could not become free, a woman could not become a man. Gods like Dionysus, who was associated with cross-dressing and gender nonconformity, were suppressed; Dionysus’s ritual, the bacchanalia, was outlawed. Those who still participated in this ritual, most of whom were from the lower classes, were arrested. Fear and hatred of same-sex desire and transgender expression was used as a tool to discredit and attack politicians for political gain. When people protested and fought back, they were often killed. Despite harsh consequences, gender nonconformity persisted in ancient Rome, just as it does today.