Transgender Vikings

Wait for Season 4 of The Last Kingdom when Heston turns out to be a transman.

But the history world was shaken three years ago when it emerged that a burial site that had been assumed to belong to a high-status warrior from the mid-900s housed a female skeleton.

This is such a brazen misrepresentation of what happened. They fucking suspected all along there were female skeletal remains in that grave, and at least since the 70s the assumption that this was a male was openly questioned as incorrect. But until a first modern analysis in 2013 confirmed that these bones were female, they adamantly denied they could be. Because no woman is a warrior. And that's that.

And they kept on fighting over this, until the 2017 analysis proved unequivocally that this was a female skeleton. Immediately after that result, some archaeologists and historians moved from denying the logical conclusion - that this was a female warrior - to making all kinds of outlandish claims to explain away the presence of female remains with male-coded grave goods and the complete absence of male bones and female-coded grave goods.

Most notably active in that was a female professor at the University of Nottingham. She accused the 2017 team of loving the idea of women warriors so much that they were making the evidence fit their claims.

Now scholars are exploring whether this could mean that the Norse people had transgender members

Well of course they are. That is what female erasure means after all. Since we do not exist as a sex class, none of us can ever have achieved extraordinary success as women in a man's world.

The thing is, transgressing local gender norms isn't a new thing.

The labelling of females who transgress at nonwomen, unpeople, lesser, other - this isn't a new thing.

The thing that's new is the insistence that what made these females other is that they were men with a birth defect. In previous generations they were commonly viewed by sexist society as women with a birth defect.

... and don't forget Pope Joan did never exist either, (alongside Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria).
(I was fascinated by the story in my late teens and it is quite astounding how many male scholars put her down as fiction... but ther mustbesometruthin the story. )

No idea about Vikings, but it was fascinating to read that archaeologists had uncovered suggestions that Galli made it to Britain in later Roman times.

www.britannica.com/topic/Galli-ancient-priests

Galli, singular Gallus, priests, often temple attendants or wandering mendicants, of the ancient Asiatic deity, the Great Mother of the Gods, known as Cybele, or Agdistis, in Greek and Latin literature. The Galli were eunuchs attired in female garb, with long hair fragrant with ointment. Together with priestesses, they celebrated the Great Mother’s rites with wild music and dancing until their frenzied excitement found its culmination in self-scourging, self-laceration, or exhaustion. Self-emasculation by candidates for the priesthood sometimes accompanied this delirium of worship.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/1999734.stm

Archaeologists in North Yorkshire have discovered the skeleton of a cross-dressing eunuch dating back to the 4th Century AD.

Btw I only use scare quotes around intersectionality there because the term is being misused. “Women” does not intersect with “men”. Black women are women so the new rule does not include them any better than it did previously.

Instead “women’s studies” is now actually “3/4 men’s studies as long as those men are not white and straight”.

It is such crap historiography to think that one should interpret the past in terms of present ideology.

And enraging that any woman who stepped outside of the socially sanctioned sex-stereotypes her culture offered her must have "really been a man..."

(As an aside - less of the "women were only homemakers" stuff would be good too. In a society where you had to grow your own food, preserve stuff to last your family through the winter without starving, weave and sew the clothes to make sure they didn't freeze - homemaking was a vital and very highly skilled undertaking. Projecting a mid 20th century housewife-undertaking-make-work-while-hubby-does-the-important-stuff gloss onto it doesn't do the women of the past any favours either.)

Bring back Women's Studies.

In my College WS Dept, it was recently decided to change the requirement for a course to count for the WS major/minor From half the content must be for or about women down to 1/4 of the content, in order to make more room for “intersectional” content.

So you can take a course where 3/4 of the content is by men and about men, and it counts towards your major in women’s studies if the prof asks for it to be.

I think there is a drive to ‘trans’ women in history to counter the perception that being ‘transgender’ is a new thing but has been around for ages and is inherent in our society etc.

I was waiting for this to happen. This particular grave was unearthed a hundred years ago. On analysis of the bones, the skeleton was easily identifiable as female. But the high status burial? And all the weapons? Those were only ever known from respected warriors. And warriors are men, coz women belong in the kitchen. Man with a weird pelvis. Definitely a man though.

Had to be a man.

Cue DNA analysis. Oh, it is a woman after all. So they concluded, in their wisdom that somehow - not a clue how, but definitely somehow - the female skeletal bits had ended up in that grave by accident and the corresponding male bones had magically disappeared.

Here lies buried a mighty warrior man. Shush in the back there. It was a man!

The resistance to accepting what we know of many warrior cultures - that there were always some few women fighting alongside their men - is undeniably rooted in the sexist beliefs of these archaeologists.

Now, clearly, given the absence of even the tiniest male bone fragment in that grave, they finally accept a female individual lies buried there.

But she can't be a woman. Oh no. Because women belong in the kitchen. This was an improper, unwomanly woman. An unwoman. Really, if you squint a little and look at it through a warped lens, this had to have been a woman thinking she was a man.

Order restored. This was a female man. All the proper Viking women are back in the kitchen where they belong.

I think it does relate to the general obliteration of women that's inherent to trans ideology

I think that is the nail on the head. Because obliteration; linguistic, literary, historical, political, social, medical, seems to be the explicit aim. It is an assault on meaning, but it is also an ongoing assault on the existence of external reality.

For fuck's sake! Women are so much more (and capable of so much more) than staying home and rearing children (although some of them might not have looked that pretty while they were doing it, I can't imagine women living in dire poverty and struggling to survive would have put that much thought into how they looked when even basic hygiene would have been difficult.)

There have been so many women throughout history who have gone to war, why is that such a hard concept for these muppets to grasp?

The reason this kind of nonsense makes me so angry is because it denies women personhood.

Women didn’t get the vote and suddenly develop ambitions and interests and talents.

As long as there have been people there have been women. So much of the history of ordinary people, and especially of women, has been lost.

But we know, because we are people too, that women have always worked and fought and created. Where circumstances didn’t allow for freedom, they dreamed or hoped or caught the dregs of education or hobbies or professions.

Whatever was happening through history, women were there. Cooking dinners and nursing babies and advising men or making their own voices heard, women were always active participants.

Do we imagine that there have never been men who loved their wives for their intelligence and wise counsel? Or who encouraged the education of a clever daughter? Or who bought his dinner from the widow who ran the bakery because she was an excellent cook?

Whatever we modern women have of talent and capacity and ambition, our ancestresses had the same. They had to use loopholes and strategies and stolen moments, but they were doing things.

And if if the majority of Viking women were housewives; think about keeping house when pretty much everything you ate, drank, wore or used, had to be made or gown or gathered by you or your household. Without the labour of women, people would have been cold, naked and hungry.

This version of history which has women sitting by the fire waiting for the men to come back, is such bullshit.

You could as easily say that the women were involved in constant, skilled and vital work, while the men messed around in boats.

Just sitting here screaming into the void on this one 🤬

This shit enrages me. Fuck. OFF.

I’m trans then.

I'm cheered up by all the comments under the article but am still really upset by this. There is a long review of the book in the culture section which repeats this snippet and also goes out of its way to repeat the ceremonial gang rape and sacrifice of a young slave woman.
Bring back Women's Studies.

I'm getting more annoyed the more I think about this.

Role models matter - the genderists agree - and yet they are systematically stripping women and girls of possible role models.

A girl's brought up shoved into the pretty-and-pink box, escapes into history, finds people who were women doing all sorts of interesting, exciting, fulfilling things, realises that the pink box doesn't have to limit her, that women can be and have been so much more. Realises she's not a lone freak who simply must accept her subordinate lot. Realises she can fight back.

But if she dives into the history books and discovers there's no one like her, and that women have always been looking pretty in the kitchen, that this has always and always will be a woman's lot - she has no hope.

Stripping the label woman from every woman in history who ever did anything of note reinforces the sexist notion that the history books are so lacking in women because women are simply inferior and never did anything useful beyond cooking the tea and reading the next generation of cannon fodder.

I wonder when they'll get around to making Transmen's History Month a thing. But if course they won't, because "transmen are men and men already get their history taught" so any trans specific history month would have to be all about male trans people. And, with no female women left to talk about in Women's History Month, either it'll go under or else be filled with transwomen's history.

How long until women like Joan of Arc are removed from women's history "because it's transphobic to deny their gender identities"? Are we actually going to have any history left by the time they're finished?

Queenie drove a truck in WWII; must have a manly essence.

*that it could be viewed as

Prince Charles wears a kilt sometimes, so is that Princess Charlene sometimes 😁

Jaxhog The writer thinks it's like anti-transwomen propaganda and compares the story to The Transexual Empire.

I doubt that many historians were really that shaken, since they routinely encounter high-status female warriors, monarchs and other leaders.

Don't be silly. They were obviously transmen.

I'm surprised there isn't a call to properly recognise our current Monarch as King Elizabeth (or a more manly name)

Perhaps every woman in history was really just a transwoman

I think it does relate to the general obliteration of women that's inherent to trans ideology.

Any woman who ever achieved anything other than being feminine and doing housework and childrearing drudgery, was really a man.

But men who are really women, are better at womaning than actual women.

But the history world was shaken three years ago when it emerged that a burial site that had been assumed to belong to a high-status warrior from the mid-900s housed a female skeleton.

I doubt that many historians were really that shaken, since they routinely encounter high-status female warriors, monarchs and other leaders.

This is the logical conclusion of defining "women" as "the people who stay at home having babies and cooking the tea."

Any female who doesn't conform to the 21st century genderist's definition of woman as domestic and sexual appliance can't have been what he considers a woman.

Unimaginative, cultural imperialism across history, and decidedly anti-feminist.

There's no evidence that the Vikings subdivided adult human females into real/worthy/valid/appliances and honorary men. And even if there was and they did, all this would mean is that the Vikings, like so many cultures, policed the boundaries of "real" women in order to naturalise the sex hierarchy and indoctrinate females into identifying with their shackles.