'the oldest recognized gender outside the binary'

[ArabellaScott]

Buckle up.

It's the Eunuch symposium from the recent WPATH conference.

That is the WPATH organisation that has at least 89 members in the UK, including NHS doctors who are senior in the organisation.

wesleyyang.substack.com/p/of-eunuchs-and-wannabes

The new Standards of Care from the WPATH include a whole chapter on 'Eunuchs'. This is now being described as a 'gender identity'.

A couple of quotes:

''having this in the SOC is so huge, because it's now in the official guidelines. And a lot of doctors and surgeons, you know, they don't want to be seen as, you know, being rogue, and doing things that are—may get them into trouble, or that they may get their licenses pulled on. So now that there's a chapter in the SOC8 saying, here's this population, here are the services that they're looking for, this is an appropriate, you know, management— it helps alleviate some of their concerns, I think. And it also will lead to, I think, more education. '
...
'when you first see somebody who's a eunuch, you know, you've never encountered this. The initial reaction is oh, this is outside of my comfort zone. Oh, this is strange. This person is crazy. But now that we realize that, you know, there's this whole community out there, then we get more and more comfortable with this.''

It must only be a matter of time now until trans-ableism is taken seriously and they start removing people's arms and legs. Also children who say they don't want to go through puberty and just want their puberty blocked indefinitely without taking cross-sex hormones.

They do, in passing, mention this as a type of BIDD. But only a few times has anyone suggested that amputating limbs is a sensible treatment for BIDD.

Re BIDD and people who want to remove healthy body parts, this is a bloody good read

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

Interestingly this is from 2000 and you don't really hear too much about this any more. I wonder if the people who would have been having their arms and legs amputated have instead hopped on the trans train instead because it has become the socially acceptable way of having extreme body modifications / surgeries and you can get all your treatments done on the NHS or insurance (if in the US)?

How is eunuch a gender identity? Aren't there men and boys who are eunuchs due to accidents or assault? It isn't something they have chosen.

Or am I expecting too much logical cohesion here?

Or am I expecting too much logical cohesion here?

I think we all know the answer to this one!

This pride flay may be a joke.... hard to tell

I think this one might be real. But yes, hard to tell.

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sekhet_(Eunuch)_Pride-Flag.png

How is eunuch a gender identity? Aren't there men and boys who are eunuchs due to accidents or assault? It isn't something they have chosen.

Someone raises this in the Q&A:

Speaker 3: I'm so sorry to say that I'm horrified. We have medical language for those that are desiring the removal of their genitals, and it's orchiectomy, [inaudible] or penectomy. And I feel that it's very stigmatizing to say, oh, these folks are so stigmatized, but then use the language of castration that we literally use for animals. Enslaved people being treated as animals is a terrible introduction to this chapter– that was genital mutilation. That was not a choice. Please don't use that for an example.

It isn't really addressed except for the assertion that some castrati did it voluntarily.

Gender identity ?
The black eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire were taken as slaves from Africa, often as children, forcibly castrated, and most died during that torture.

These mutilated men were victims of a horror almost beyond imagining.

I'm so sick of TRAs looking at history like this. Shame on them.

www.hurriyetdailynews.com/opinion/william-armstrong/the-black-eunuchs-of-the-ottoman-empire-105388

It's disgusting. The info in your post Kat is exactly why it's has become a fetish. To say it's an identity is an appalling way to normalise this.

But there's a reason why they want to normalise this.

hangonsnoopy · Today 14:54
How is eunuch a gender identity? Aren't there men and boys who are eunuchs due to accidents or assault? It isn't something they have chosen.

Or am I expecting too much logical cohesion here?

The person speaking differentiates between men who are eunuchs for the reasons you suggest, but who nevertheless, he says, still think of themselves as men, and men who want to be eunuchs for a variety of reasons. (I have copied this below.)

I don’t see how this can be a ‘gender identity’ either as it isn’t about gender but about wanting a non-male hormonal/physical state but nothing to do with wanting to be the other sex. The speaker explains these men remain male in appearance. I think though eunuch as a ‘gender identity’ is being used loosely just to mean a wish to change from what you were born to be.

I was interested he said a large number of these men had been threatened with castration as children. What an awful thing.

Tom Johnson:
Men today are also castrated for medical reasons. At least a half-million men in North America are currently castrated, whether chemically or surgically, as treatment for prostate cancer. Some small number of men lose their testicles for other medical reasons, or because of accidents of various sort. And men are castrated for all kinds of other reasons. But those who are castrated for medical reasons very seldom identify as eunuchs. In Standards of Care Version 8, eunuch refers only to those who identify as eunuchs. So we're not including the prostate cancer patients, we're not including those who do not wish to have that identity.