does fantasy!Romans book have
My god it has so much gender. It has more gender than you can possibly imagine. Think of the normal amount of gender that you know about? it's like seven times that much gender.
GENDER FACTS about the Fantasy!Romans book, which are actually just facts about the actual real-life Romans (or """facts""" as much as they count for academics, which is to say that some of these are more my own Scholarly Hot Takes based off of reading other people's articles and going "as a queer person it is killing me that you are saying these words and getting SO CLOSE to the point but missing it by a hair because you aren't nonbinary enough to Grasp It, this is glaringly obvious to me"):
The Romans did not have a gender binary and people need to accept that. Once you dismantle your assumptions about this, a lot of things about the Romans start making a lot more sense.
Gender to the Roman mind is as much a function of social class as it is physiological sex. The word "vir" which is usually translated as "man" DOES NOT MEAN "any male-bodied person". It means specifically "an adult, freeborn male citizen with intact genitalia". A male slave is not a vir, he's a different gender entirely. A freedman is not a vir, that's also a different gender. Someone who has been castrated as punishment for a crime is not a vir, that is quite literally a punitive form of gender reassignment surgery.
"vir" is the word from which we derive words like "virile" (sure, makes sense) but also, tellingly, "virtue". That's not just moral qualities, that is the moral qualities supposedly exhibited by the privileged gender-class. #yikes
The Romans invented Toxic Masculinity, but they were so much weirder about it than we are today. Check this shit out: Behaving in an unmanly way, perhaps by putting on makeup and dancing in public? Gay. Gay to do. Obviously. We are familiar with this kind of toxic masculinity. HOWEVER. Being too shredded and hypermasculine, such as by fucking other men's wives or having too much sex? EQUALLY GAY TO DO. The target they're aiming for is not "be as manly as possible", it's actually "a constantly-shifting goalpost of some impossible Goldilocks zone of manliness which is neither too much nor too little and can't quite be quantified because everybody's hyperventilating with anxiety about it and then worrying whether worrying too much is also gay". This is absolute middle-school shit. Everything is gay.
Many people have said things like "the Romans didn't have homophobia, they didn't care about men fucking each other, they only had bottomphobia" -- it is true that they had bottomphobia (because of sexism and toxic masculinity) but they did in fact have homophobia: A vir cannot go around fucking another vir. A vir can fuck male-bodied people of OTHER GENDERS all he wants. But a vir absolutely cannot fuck a vir. Why? bc Dat's Gay Bro.
The Fantasy!Romans book will teach you all of this hilariously fucked up masculinity calculus in much greater detail. :D These people are CRAZY.
