One of the main transphobic arguments these days is that people become trans because of "gender ideology". And "gender ideology" is apparently something new invented by post-modernists, Marxists and progressive leftists. So what if I told you there were transgender people in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages?
Transgender people in history
I have already documented transgender people in ancient and medieval India, ancient Phrygia and Rome, the Roman Empire, ancient Baghdad and late 19th century Berlin, and I have also written a popular article about William Shakespeare being in love with a transfeminine person.
However, with the exception of the poem on gender dysphoria from Kalonymos ben Kalonymus (1322), none of the original sources I have found have been written by trans people. All of the texts, including the one I present here, will therefore have to be read with an open, but critical, mind.
Getting behind the stereotypes
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| Reconstructed Viking women's clothing. Photo: Battle-Merchant |
Many of the historical texts are written by transphobes or people who do not understand gender variance. Still, even a queer-phobic or transphobic text can be a witness to gender variance, because why would the author imagine cross-gender expressions if the culture had no concepts of gender variance?
Whether the author of the text I am going to present today, namely the 13th century Laxdæla Saga (also written as Laksdøla, Laksdæla or Laxardale), is transphobic remains to be seen.
It clearly refers to negative tropes about both transfeminine and transmasculine gender variance. The story in the saga takes place around 1000 CE, which mean that this may also apply to the Viking age.
Note that I am using the word "transgender" as an umbrella term covering a wide variety of gender variance here. The references found in the saga do not tell us if the people referred to were gender dysphoric or gender incongruent as we use these medical terms today.
The similarities with contemporary gender variance leads me to believe, however, that many of them probably were.
