Historians are rarely challenged just for applying words like âwomanâ and âmanâ to the past; it would not inevitably cause a backlash to say that a historical figure wanted power, or grieved, or felt anger. A trans historian, though, is caught in the double-bind of the DSM-5. Our experiences and our desires are quite literally mad. We do not have the social license to see ourselves fractured and reflected in historical figures; we are standing in the wrong place to write. Put simply, if you foreclose trans readings, you foreclose trans writing. When we reflect on the similarities between our lives and those of historical figures, we are accused of spreading our social contagion to the dead. To read our own anamorphoses in a text, to communicate that to a cis academic establishment who have rendered our unqualified subjectivities unimaginable, we are forced to accuse historical figures of transness. And then, of course, we are chastised for pathologising them. For a trans historian, it is not viable to simply universalise our experiences of gender. In order to relate to historical figuresâ gendered experiences in our writing in a way that is legible to cis readers, we have to assert that those figures were trans. There is a gap to be bridged, and the onus to bridge it falls on usâŠ
Transmisogyny and anti-effeminacy were and are integral to the structure of patriarchy and therefore to cisness (or vice-versa). In âMonster Culture (Seven Theses)â, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposed a methodology for reading cultures: âfrom the monsters they engenderâ. In concluding this sketch of Byzantine cisness, I would like to attempt to apply this method. To monster a group or an individual is a violent act, and through examining the way transfemininity was monstered in Byzantium, we can begin to understand the shape of the violent regulation of gendered possibilities that constituted Byzantine cisnessâŠ
Synesius [of Cyrene] did not simply compare the image of the elegantly coiffed effeminate with the shiny dome of the soldierâs helmet; he went one step further, proclaiming that pretty hair was the give-away for hidden effeminacy. He rails against âeffeminate wretchesâ who âmake a cult of their hairâ, who he suggests engage in sex work not out of economic necessity but as an act of sex and gender exhibitionism, to âdisplay fully the effeminacy of their
characterâ. Then, he goes on to say:
And whoever is secretly perverted, even if he should swear the contrary in the marketplace, and should present no other proof of being an acolyte of Cotys save only in a great care of his hair, anointing it and arranging it in ringlets, he might well be denounced to all as one who has celebrated orgies to the Chian goddess and the Ithyphalli.
The implication is clear: long, well kempt, perfumed and curled hair is not just hair, it is a signifier, one that signals total abnegation of manhood, and therefore of cisness. This demonstrates one of the mechanisms by which cisness was maintained and enforced in the Byzantine world. Relatively minor embodied gender transgressions, like too-long or too-pretty hair, could be linked to transfemininity and to sexual receptivity, the two farthest points from patriarchal manhood. That is not to say that this prevented people from committing such gender transgressions; rather that it made them risky, a weapon that could be used against you by anyone who wanted to do you harm. The other thing demonstrated by Synesiusâ invective is the relationship between effeminacy, unmasculine vanity and presumed sexual receptivity. It would be tempting, based on the relationship Synesius draws between long beautiful hair and receptive anal sex, to suggest that the animating force of this antipathy is, if not homophobia, a narrower pre-modern equivalent. There is, however, a fantastically complicating detail in Synesiusâ remark on the reasons such âeffeminatesâ engage in sex work: being sexually available is presented as an instrumental, rather than terminal value. In Synesiusâ imagination, sex work is the means, but social recognition of the feminine gender of the sex worker is the end: to âdisplay fully the effeminacy of their characterâ. The monster Synesius invokes to shore-up his own gender position, to guard his own cisness and his access to hegemonic masculinity, is an unambiguously transmisogynist fantasy. It is here that Byzantine cisness most sharply converges with twenty-first-century cisness.
âSelective Historiansâ: The Construction of Cisness in Byzantine and Byzantinist Texts, Ilya Maude [DOI]
