The Weight of America: Transgender People Under Siege

American society is like the inside of this monstrous mall, where people move like “sentient corpses". Photo: estherpoon

America has truly lost its soul, Kai McKenzie argues. Trans people find themselves under siege.

Guest article by Kai McKenzie 

As I sit in my Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada rental home, looking out at the quiet and cold snow-covered porch and yard outside, the ice crystals on the window glowing magically in the morning sunlight, and the little flecks of snow drifting upward on the breeze outside and catching the light like fireflies, I feel the weight of America. 

It’s inescapable. It follows and haunts me. I feel a fierce anger at the country where I was born, at the citizens who have thrown me and my children away, who barely bat an eye as our fellow trans citizens are erased from monuments, histories, medical records, and public life. America has truly lost its soul. 

The faces of the US

Born in Boulder, Colorado in 1964, growing up in Berkeley, California during the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, living in Boulder again for three decades before moving to Saskatchewan, Canada in 2018 for school, I’ve seen the many faces of the US: the liberal college town of Berkeley with its diversity and pride, colourful protests and street performers, passionate desire to stand up for human rights and fairness; the sleepy town of 29 Palms, California in the Mojave Desert, near the 29 Palms Marine Corp Base, where being American means being faithful and proud, ready to invade and stand strong at the behest of a Commander in Chief; Nashville, Tennessee, where my parents moved for a distinguished professorship in mathematics, a mix of southern tradition and new immigrants. 

Were There Transgender Vikings? The Laxdæla Saga Says So.

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

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.