See french original text
Several transgender people report having received insults associating them with the devil, Lucifer or demons, and note the disgust that their presence arouses in their attackers. This usually results in religious injunctions or exhortations, intimidation, death threats and physical violence. They feel dehumanized by the dubious associations of bestiality, pedophilia and religion on which their attacks are based. But does history validate these arguments or is it an instrumentalisation of the aggressors?
The Goddess of Dualities
At the origins of religions, the goddess of love and war is celebrated for nearly 4,000 years as the divinity of dualities: Ishtar in Mesopotamia, Inanna in the Sumerian empire, Isis in the empire of Egypt, Cybele in Phrygia, Artemis in Ephesus, Europa in the Greek Empire, Aphrodite in the Roman Empire. His cult seems to begin in the fourth millennium BC and continues among the Judeans, then will be denounced by the prophet Jeremiah. Its cult seems to die out in the second century of our era. Daughter of the primordial God Enki, sometimes represented with a beard, breasts and arms, sometimes accompanied by 2 lions, a goat or a bull, she is also given the power to give the masculine and feminine gender or l 'reverse as desired.
The worship of the goddess
Tablets attest to the participation of transgender priests, natural eunuchs or hermaphrodites called assinnu (m) and kurgarrû (m), who performed ritual songs and dances. They also sometimes participated in sacred prostitution with Kezertu women to finance worship and temples. During special events, bulls were most often sacrificed there. Although nothing currently allows to affirm the existence of mutilation or castration in the cult of origin, the evolution of this one in time makes appear priests who flagellate and mutilate the genitals, which caused countless deaths among new recruits.
The nature of the genre
The transidentities will therefore be assimilated to the iconography of Ishtar by the dual nature of their gender and will make them enemies of the Abrahamic religions. Indeed, the philosopher Augustine of Hippo, one of the fathers of the Christian church with Ambrose of Milan, will impose in the fourth century the ideology according to which "the external image is the reflection of the internal reality where God sits" . The successive interpretations and translations of his thought will create confusion and bring about the popular “naturalist” belief that human beings cannot be self-determined, any bodily modification leading to separation from God. Cross-dressing consequently becomes a lie and its practitioners heretics.
Gender duality
By drawing ideas from Plato and Aristotle, the new religious theologians will oppose the ideology of Ishtar which considers the duality of principles equal, indivisible and timeless. But in the confusion, the populations will reduce human existence to an opportunist Manichaeism, thinking they respect the finalist morality of Thomas Aquinas. They will impose the injunction to make a final choice for all dualities, on a religious morality of good and evil, and to assume the frustration which results from it as a form of redemptive catharsis of the passions to which the human being is subjected. The man loses his feminine part and the woman her masculine part. Gender becomes a house arrest that some believers give themselves the right to impose on everyone as an "act of submission to God, so that his reign comes."
The Apocalypse According to Mary
Monotheistic religions will use all their powers to demonize this deity in popular culture by separating the dualities. They will make Ishtar a masculine rather than a feminine principle, rather animal than human, causing conflict rather than love, inciting all-consuming passions rather than loving wholeness, arousing carnal vices rather than sexual desires. The goddess Ishtar will be invested with negative principles while a new antagonistic deity will be assigned its positive principles: the Virgin Mary. And while the latter will in turn become the mother of the gods, the followers of the Abrahamic religions will make Ishtar the prince of demons, the prince of darkness.
The fallen angel
Celestial goddess Ishtar is represented by the planet Venus, the morning star which announces the dawn, a star that the Romans called Lucifer, and her symbol is a star in a circle. It owes its fall and its forfeiture to the sunrise which then masks the diabolical planet, but also to an erroneous translation of Jérôme de Stridon, one of the 4 fathers of the Christian church, who will enter it in the bible in 408 AD The demonization of Ishtar will be all the easier as the origin of "The Descent into Hell" is in the mythology of the goddess. Human dualism being prohibited, transgender people become beings possessed by the devil who would make them believe that they are another person than the visible one, that they inhabit a body that is not their own. The transgender people who participate in his cult could then be associated with the "assinums", servile creatures of the Queen of the Underworld, neither Male nor Female, and not quite human, being able to rub shoulders with the world of the dead and the world of the living, entering and get out of the Underworld without danger.
The sacrificial rite
I have heard for centuries that the dehumanization of homosexual and transgender people rests on a religious amalgamation maintained with Lucifer, symbol of the planet Venus. For decades I have seen citizens denying rights to gay and transgender people because of a mythological tale of a goddess, rewritten many times by men, relating the astral procession. I affirm that in the 21st century still human beings give themselves the right to psychologically, socially, and physically abuse homosexual and transgender people, in order to reappear a star eclipsed by the sun, Venus.
The aim of associations with bestiality and pedophilia is to discredit the words of human beings and to dehumanize them. We try to reduce them to the state of illegality at home, in their bodies, in their families, in society, in administrations, businesses, but also in their lives. This verbal violence insinuates a right to treat transgender people like animals, even to eliminate them without this being the object of murder or violence. But in reality, this type of argument instrumentalizes religion and aims to rebuild the aggressor's ego by verbally and then physically demeaning the victim. They are built on the perverse fantasies that haunt the minds of aggressors convinced of their impunity and their religious, social and political legitimacy. They kill to be the chosen ones.
texte issu des travaux de recherches de Mark Brustman dans "Nés Eunuques", LLan Peled dans "Masculinités et troisieme genre", Brian Whitaker dans "Transgender issues in the Middle East"
List of bibliographic references
Notes:
The cult of Ishtar is not strictly speaking a monotheistic religion. From the primitive magna mater cults, deities will appear embodying the complex principles observed in the environment. These will multiply or disappear around the female figure of Ishtar who absorbs their capacities depending on the times and places. This is why her abilities and symbols evolve over time, just as the name varies according to the territories where she is summoned. And while the figure of Ishtar crosses the millennia, a myriad of religions and cults are made and unmade over the same period.
Political systems have always invented new deities to weaken or strengthen the powers of a particular cult or to vary its name. And if it is recognized that there was an influence of religion on politics, it is much less admitted that certain religious received private subsidies which could have guided their reflection. Through the cult of Ishtar, it is common to associate it with that of Cybele, a little less that of Gaia, Europa, Venus, Rhea, or Diana who will be gradually replaced by male deities. Yet their respective mythology, at the base of Western symbols, remains very similar: seduced by a bull, they will prevent their respective husbands from destroying their children to keep their power, by having him castrated by one of them. Ishtar meanwhile wanted to use the celestial bull to kill Gilgamesh who had refused to her. It should be noted that in the feminine cults of Magna Mater, Auroch skulls have been found nearby. Some theologians also link her to Lilith, Adam's first wife before Eve, who could prey on newborns without the divine presence of angels.
For Régis Burnet, the misunderstanding about the body goes back to Tertullian, the first commentator on Saint Paul and his letter to the Corinthians - “Don't you know that you are the temple of God? Wanting to encourage a quest for purity in oneself, he sanctifies the apparent body; the successive interpretations in the Middle Ages, under Hellenistic influences, make the body the place of all impurities, vices, sins and punishments, diabolical temptations. The body becomes the place of all the weaknesses whereas it is necessary to seek Grace in the spirit which becomes holy. Any use or carnal modification becomes prohibited outside of procreation. However, according to ancient texts, Jesus "does not hold any discourse on sexuality or, more generally, on the body and its uses". It only mentions on the occasion of physical suffering or illness. It is also interesting to note that in the XXI century, the scientific, political, industrial and religious corpus places the bioethical limit on the genital organ while it claims to authorize the transplant of all the other organs. We have the right to wonder on what exactly this limit is based: reproduction and its regulation or the distribution of powers by competence to penetrate and give birth?
So if "God does not make mistakes", humans in their interpretations do not cease to make them. What is "divine creation" belongs only to him and that is why he urges humans not to judge what they do not understand: 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 have made themselves such, because of the kingdom of heaven . Let anyone who can understand understand. " [The Bible, Matthew 19; 12]
