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At the origins of peoples
Around the Mediterranean basin, 4000 before our era, while the mother goddess Ishtar reigns under different figures, the ancient populations created the first legal status of Man based on the observation of differences, that is to say "the competence to penetrate ". The legal status of the Woman is based on "her competence to give birth". But there are still people who do not meet the "skills" of these two statuses, either by disability or by inclination. As described by the jurist Ulpian, the statute of Eunuch will make it possible to recognize the differences of these transgender people and give them legal rights such as marriage, adoption, property and inheritance. "The Natural Eunuchs", Women and Men coexisted for at least 4000 years before our era, as much in the Arab world as that of the West.
a popular myth
The presence of eunuchs in China is attested as early as the 12th century BC. From 900 BC to around 600 BC. J.-C, there are historical traces of mass castrations. These mass mutilations were practiced during wars or conquests in order to seize the resources of the losers who were sold as slaves. Castration made it possible to destroy opposing clans and prevent the arrival of a generation demanding its rights or revenge. It also undoubtedly made it easier to obtain the adhesion of women to the victorious tribe. We find writings of a slave trade in white and black eunuchs from Europe to the Maghreb until the eighteenth century to which France largely contributed. The study of the first peoples of the Mediterranean basin shows that there were also desired individual castrations, to gain access to a more enviable social status as a servant, servant or priest, for example. But castration also lasted until the 14th century as a legal punishment. These castration practices gradually made the legal classification of "natural eunuchs" obsolete, ultimately only to take into account "artificial eunuchs", the origin of the popular myth.
"There are those who find the effeminate eunuch delicious and his soft caresses, delighted that they have neither a beard to fear nor an abortion to prepare." satirical poet Juvénal (1st-2nd centuries)
True homosexuality
There was indeed a basic law which aimed to prohibit "the sexual act between two active men" if one of them "had desire for women". On the other hand, it prohibited neither the existence of eunuchs, nor sexual relations with eunuchs. Two "homosexuals", women or men, were not affected by the law since they had no attraction for the opposite sex. In the same way, an active man and a eunuch were not more concerned by this law since the eunuch does not correspond to the statute of Man. And finally, a woman and a eunuch are still not concerned by this law since neither of them has the status of Man. We understand that in reality this law certainly made it possible not to subscribe to a forced marriage between a heterosexual and a homosexual. We can also suspect that this law was intended to protect male adolescents from unwanted sex with active heterosexual men, but also to protect the vanquished from rape in war, just like the law on the mutilation of bodies, first of all. in the Maghreb then in the West, was intended to prohibit an imposed castration.
Political causes
in the IV century after JC, Certain "homosexuals" and "transgender" occupied important posts of religious, political, military and economic advisers in the imperial courts Ottoman, Roman and Byzantine (the Chamberlain Eusébius or the general Narsès under Justinien, the Empress Roman Heliogabalus, Empress Sporus, the Saqaliba soldiers of Al Andalus, etc.), but also in the Maghreb and the Middle East. They had enviable positions with the nobility and recognized social and religious skills in their respective peoples. They could marry, adopt, own property and inherit according to the Justinian code. The various religious currents wanted to seize these positions to develop their power and their hold on the populations. The "transgender" and "the homosexual", that is to say the eunuchs, were assimilated to the religious current of Arianism (contests the divine filiation of Jesus) to make of them opponents to the Abrahamic religions and to the Christian dogmas more particularly .
The historical pivot
In 313, Emperor Constantine I legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire and began a purge of other beliefs. On May 14, 390 in Rome, an imperial decree was displayed in the Salle Minerva, a gathering place for artists. It was for the very first time criminalizing the sexual practices of those we call "homosexuals". The prescribed penalty was death by burning. This law was promulgated by Theodosius 1st, an emperor subjected to a long penance fixed by Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan. The latter certainly suggested it to him in the context of a persecution of heresies prohibiting any contradiction of Christian dogmas. Contrary to popular belief, the Western world and the Arab world already influence each other through their commercial contacts which convey goods and ideologies, in one direction or the other. And it is along the trade routes that homophobia and transphobia will take root, to then spread throughout the world.
The creation of crime
From this time, religious leaders will use their new powers to commission from thinkers, philosophers and artists works denigrating and demonizing homosexuals and transgender people. They will influence Roman imperial law to legally re-categorize the Eunuchs into Men or Women. The conditions "active man" and "if he also feels an attraction for the female gender" are removed from the law in order to prosecute them for the crime of sexual abomination. Their status dissolved, religions make them creatures of God corrupted by the Devil; they use the law to prosecute its identified opponents. A year before the "anti-eunuchs" decree, the emperor under ecclesiastical pressure suppressed the right of eunuchs to make wills or to take advantage of them. With this ordinance, it is their rights of filiation and their descendants that disappear.
The societal ban
The Visigothic code in the 7th century will strengthen the law by imposing a systematic castration of male homosexuals which will last until the 13th century, thus fueling the market for white and black slaves. In the 9th century, the category of "natural eunuchs" was completely withdrawn from Roman law, in the Christian world by the Byzantine emperor Leon VI on the one hand, and on the other hand almost simultaneously in the Muslim world by the religious of the schools. Hanbali and Shafi'i rights. Yet the Koran did not prohibit any more than Christianity from using natural or castrated eunuchs as passive sexual partners, who by their nature lacked desire for women and did not meet the criteria for belonging to the status of Man or woman. The various religious currents will ask scholars acquired to their causes to make these people tempting sexual demons, so that they are banished from human societies. The newspapers of the eighteenth and nineteenth fabricated the popular image of "homosexual perversity", of the "cowardly and vile" "homosexual traitor" that psychoanalysis conceptualized.
Global genocide
Mark Brustman's research demonstrates the non-binarity of genres. They highlight the legal status of eunuchs, which did not only concern the rights of castrated slaves, but included all transidentities including homosexuals and intersex, in the West, the Middle East and the Maghreb for at least 5,000 years. Legal history shows how homophobia and transphobia were built on amalgamations between identity and sexuality to serve the economic interests of religious and political representatives at certain times. According to these interests, history repeats itself. In this, Maghreb and Western history is no different from that experienced by other indigenous populations, who lived in harmony with transgender people until the arrival of monotheist religious.
The morbid rejection that homosexuality or transgender people arouse in certain individuals (including religious) testifies to the confusion of male and female identity with the male and female genital organ to which "divine creation cannot be reduced" according to the law. Genesis. By her violence, she hopes to destroy temptation, the object of a sexual drive that would lead to their fall into hell. Homophobia and transphobia are social illustrations of the psychological horror of male rape. Feminization through insult renders the ability to penetrate, the status of Man, null and void. This aversion refers to the fear of being defeated, of being enslaved and of losing the rights conferred on them by their genitals. By refusing to apply the same rights to homosexual and transgender people, we are only justifying this ancestral and archaic terror. What we want to perpetuate is the right to monopolize their resources and their goods through social and economic excision, by justifying it by obsolete religious law.
But whatever god you believe in, he has nothing to do with it. It is really about power and human jealousy, instrumentalizing the Faith to serve its purposes. These laws or hadiths were written by religious humans certainly, but only human beings. For 1500 years millions of people have taken the right to terrorize homosexual or transgender people, to insult them, to assault them and to murder them. We devalue and mistreat transgender people only to give us more values, to take over the roles of God's chosen one. No sacred text empowers humans to physically or orally attack a transgender or / and homosexual person. but is not this the real sin of the people of Lot: refusing to welcome and treat properly the stranger, the one who comes with his difference? We understand better why it is written in the texts that prostitutes, homosexuals and transgender people will gain access to paradise before others.
text resulting from the research work of Mark Brustman in "Nés Eunuques" and LLan Peled in "Masculinities and third gender", Brian Whitaker in "Transgender issues in the Middle East"
https://people.well.com/user/aquarius/
Notes
[1] At the origins of religions, the goddess of love and war is celebrated everywhere as the divinity of dualities: Ishtar (Eshtar, Esther, Issar, etc.) in the Sumerian empire, Inanna in the Mesopotamian empire, Isis in the empire of Egypt, Cybele in Phrygia, Artemis in Ephesus, Europa in the Greek empire. Sometimes represented with a beard, breasts and arms, sometimes accompanied by a goat or a bull, it is given the power to give the masculine and feminine gender or to reverse it. The priests who worshiped him had the reputation of mutilating their genitals, or even removing them, which caused countless deaths. The monotheistic religions will use all their powers to demonize her in popular culture by designating her as prince of demons, the origin of the dual confusion where the Abrahamic religions intend to separate the principles into a distinct opposable category. In the Sumerian code hammurabi we also find a legal status of salzikrum which translates as "male girl" and which gave the right to people to dispose of their inheritance at their sole convenience, to found families, etc ... But transidentities will be assimilated to this iconography by the dual nature of their genre. Indeed, Saint Augustine will impose the ideology according to which the external image is the reflection of the internal reality making of the genital organ the representation of the gender of the identity, and thereby creating the confusion between sexuality and gender identity. . We are also entitled to wonder if feminine "inferiority" and the desire to submit women might not be rooted in the myth of this divinity. learn more: Why are transgender people evil?[2] The term homosexual dating from the nineteenth century, they could not actually be used in sacred and religious texts. These words have been used by modern translators under moral and religious influence, without taking into account the historical meaning, to refer to the term "eunuch", a legal caste which made homosexuals a transidentity whether or not they were castrated. The term sodomite actually dates from the thirteenth century and designates people indulging in lust, sexuality for pleasure, a sin that was opposed to religious prostitution. Now the crime of Sodom is known to true believers: Ezekiel 16:49 “This was the crime of Sodom your sister: she and her daughters were proud because they lived in abundance and in quiet recklessness. They did not help the poor and the unfortunate ”.
. The Christian religions were built until the third century on the idea of an androgynous human being created by God who was man and woman at the same time. The Bible mentions the presence of transgender people but does not impose any action: "For there are eunuchs who are eunuchs from their mother's womb; there are some who have become so through men; and there are some who are are made such themselves, because of the kingdom of heaven. Let him who can understand understand. " [The Bible, Matthew 19; 12]
. Le Levétique 18.22 condemns the relationship between two men by virtue of their status, not the relationship between homosexual eunuchs or transgender eunuchs any more than the relationship of a man or a woman with a eunuch, otherwise the word eunuch would be used instead of 'man. "You will not sleep with a man like sleeping with a woman. It is an abomination." The prohibition here comes from the desire to feminize a man by making him the passive object of his sexuality. what is condemned is the rape of a man as is the rape of a woman, that is to say a sexual act without consent.
In the Act of the Apostles 8-26 to 40, Philip converts an Ethiopian eunuch: "As they were going along the way, they came to some water, and the eunuch said:" Here is water, what is it? who prevents me from being baptized? ” 38 And he gave orders to stop the chariot, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. "
[3] FTM and lesbians are poorly represented in this text because transphobia and homophobia are apparently organized on the legal amalgamation around the male identity and its sexuality. And if we find several references to Sapphism, lesbianism is purely and simply "ignored", just like the relationship between women and eunuchs. But we can believe that lesbians were themselves incorporated into the status of eunuchs. We also find in women the status of Mulier Fortis or Mater Fortis which was obtained by the courage and strength of some women by participating in so-called masculine activities such as battles. The story offers several examples of people born female (Thècle, Matrona / Babylas, Marguerite / Pélage, Eugenia / Eugenios, Euphrosyne d'Alexandrie / Smaragdus, Theodora / Theodoros, Hildegonde / Joseph, etc.) who obtained the status of 'Man without being able to really define whether wearing the male dress was an identity necessity or was the means of accessing knowledge reserved for men. But this does allow us to suppose that transgender and feminist struggles have the same causes, since lesbians and MTF people are made almost invisible in history. The prohibition of Deuteronomy, a text of the Old Testament which formally prohibited the inversion of gendered clothes, actually applied to people who disguised themselves to access places reserved for men or women with hidden intentions. More specifically, it takes its source within the framework of the priesthood at a time when women were excluded and to prevent them from accessing it by wearing the male habit. Yet Jesus said: "Behold, I will guide her so that I may make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit like you males, for every woman who becomes male will enter the kingdom of heaven. »[Gospel according to Thomas, NH II, 2]
[4] One can only wonder when Pope Francis calls "not to hinder the creativity of God" but decides on his own to exclude transgender people. He also affirms on the transgender question that “Man wants to create himself, and decide always and exclusively for his own subject and for what concerns him. », Demonstrating on his part his own will to impose on others what they are, a certain confusion between choice and necessity but also between identity and sexuality, denying the physiological scientific discoveries which contradict the arbitrary visibility. The ecumenical ideology on which the Pope relies finds its origin not only in the speech of Paul of Tarsus and in the obligation for Christians to suffer frustration in their flesh and soul in order to obtain redemption and 'access the kingdom of God. People refusing to do so are then recognized as rejecting the Grace of God and not recognizing God as their savior. It will also be used to dismiss transgender priests on the grounds that their abstinence would be natural and would not require any effort to contain. Gregory of Nazianzos advises natural eunuchs not to be proud of their abstinence, because a natural virtue is not worthy of praise like that which is acquired by an effort of will (Oration 37.16-17)
[5] In the Hebrew texts, we find the word malakos or sârîs (סריס) to designate transgender and homosexuals. But theological linguists today claim that the term malakos can mean "precious" or means "one who wears the precious habit", which does not specifically concern transgender and homosexuals.
. "The rabbis wonder why Vashti, whom they believe to be immodest and sinful, would refuse her husband's order to" entertain "his companions with his beauty. The answer which is recorded in the Talmud is:" Rabbi Yosei bar Ḥanina said: This teaches that she broke out in leprosy, and therefore she was embarrassed to expose herself publicly. Another reason for his embarrassment was taught in a baraita: The angel Gabriel came and shaped a tail for him. "(Megillah 12b: 5)
. Yet Hebrew mysticism refers to a woman's body inhabited by a man and a man's body inhabited by a woman. The Mishnah (Zavim, 2, 1) says that Tumtum and Androgynos are both men and women, which means that when the law is stricter towards men than towards women, they are treated like men, but when the law is stricter with regard to women, they are treated like women.
. In Isaiah 56, God promises the eunuchs who keep the Sabbath and who keep their commitment that He will build a monument in heaven for them, especially good.
[6] The Coran only mentions sexual rape perpetrated by heterosexual men against other heterosexual men which is "unjust" there. The prophet, moreover, will prohibit his combatants from using the vanquished as eunuchs. But eunuchs (transgender and homosexual) are listed there as people who are "aqim" or "ineffective": Coran 42: 49-50. French: "It is to Allah that belongs the kingdom of the heavens and the earth . He creates what he wants. He prepares women for whomever he wants and he prepares men for whomever he wants. Or he marries men and women together and makes those he wants to be ineffective. is he who knows, he who is powerful. " Although this verse is considered to evoke descent, children very rarely arriving together, one can reasonably believe that it evokes the variety of genres that only Allah creates at will beyond human desire, human will. There is nothing here to impose that marriages are men with women and there again it can reflect the possible diversity of couples and families. The fact that he asserts that creation depends on him alone, enjoins Muslims not to judge his creations.
. The Coran condemns lust and deception, that is, pretending to be someone else with hidden desire. More explicitly, the Coran refers to the one who impersonates a woman or a eunuch in order to covetly approach the woman or women because he deceives the women of his intentions, but also their husbands, which does not particularly concern women. transgender or homosexual people.
. The prophet may even recommend that a person take responsibility for what he really is rather than deceiving those around him. Abu Huraira confessing his torment at not being attracted to women receives the following response from the prophet: "O Abu Huraira, the feather is very dry for what you are living. So be a eunuch for this reason or leave him alone. . " [Bukhari, Authentic Traditions, Book LXII (Marriage), Chapter 08, Chapter 114 - Bukhari, Authentic Traditions, Book LXXII (Robe), Chapter 61, Chapter 62]
. The most common term for MTF transgender people in the Coran is Khanith or mukhannath مُخَنَّ ث which translates as effeminate, to be taken in the sense of who is not in the nature of man. "The mukhannath is one of those who have no interest in women who have been allowed to look like women." [Matan Al Muqni, al Sharh al Kabeer, p347–348]
In Islam, female combatants could obtain a legal status of "mustergil" which gave them the same rights as a man until their marriage. [Brian Whitaker- arab without god]
. The specialists of the Coranic doctrine recognize that the hadidhs condemning homosexuality or transidentity are not authentic and were imposed a posteriori according to moral interpretations and political opportunism. [ibn Hajar al-Asqalani - Mohammed Mezziane, Sodomy and masculinity among Muslim jurists]
[7] The term "Man" in ancient writings relates only to the notable of the city, an active bisexual male. The common people are male or female slaves just like cattle, but they certainly do not have elitist citizen rights. Anyone who usurped the status of Man according to Greek law was castrated and sold. Coming from the plebs, he had to fight for his masters in order to be recognized by the city as a man and to obtain perhaps the rights.
