![]() Proportionally, it would have been relatively small-but not insignificant. If approximately 0.6% of adults are trans, and 1/2000 of adults are intersex, that gives us a figure of about 114,000 trans people, and 9,500 intersex people living in 14 th century France. For example, one demographer of medieval Europe estimated that there were 19 million people living in France and the Low Countries (now the Netherlands and Belgium) in 1340. In fact, based on the numbers in the studies above, you can roughly estimate the number of medieval people who may have embodied trans or intersex traits in the Middle Ages. Click for the original article.īut contrary to these retrograde fantasies, transgender people are not going away, and there is no time to retreat to where they did not exist. From: Cesaretti R, Lobo J, Bettencourt LMA, Ortman SG, Smith ME (2016) Population-Area Relationship for Medieval European Cities. A population map of medieval Western European cities in circa 1300. Again, you can easily imagine people waxing nostalgic about a time before punk rock, or people desperately awaiting the time that super-hero fatigue does away with all these annoyingly formulaic movies. This makes it possible to fantasize about going back in time to when “men were men” and “women were women”-or conversely that we might move forward in time to an era in which trans-ness and queerness are eradicated. The tacit hope seems to be that gayness or trans-ness are not an inextricable part of humanity or gender diversity. Similar arguments have been made time and again against investigating queerness (particularly gay men and lesbian women) in the Middle Ages: claiming that looking for queer or trans folk in the past is anachronistic. How could transgender people possibly exist before contemporary innovations to technologies that allow them to transition, such as modern surgery or hormone replace therapy?.How could transgender people possibly exist before they were able to engage with one another publicly?.How could transgender people possibly exist before doctors “discovered” them and diagnosed them?.How could transgender people possibly exist before someone decided to call them transgender?. ![]() How could trans people possibly exist without the specific language, communities, and technologies that exist today?.This may lead to some ill-informed, but maybe understandable questions: Indeed, as society allows for more trans and intersex people to safely identify to the public, these numbers are increasing every day.įor those who consider transgender identity merely to be a lifestyle choice, the claim that trans people existed in the Middle Ages is like saying that punk rock or Star Wars fandom existed in the Middle Ages. While those proportions are rather small, projected over the large numbers that make up the current populations of all those who live today- and all those who have ever lived- transgender and intersex people should be recognized as a significant and valuable part of human history. More and more, we are learning that the human species is not now and has never been limited to two types of genders, two types of cultures, two types of brains, or two types of bodies. Likewise, according to the Intersex Society of North America, 1 in 2,000 people are born with some intersex condition. According to a 2016 Williams Institute study, trans-identified persons make up 0.6% of adults. There is a mountain of evidence-one that is growing every day-that being transgender is not a “lifestyle choice,” as some might have you believe, but simply part of the biodiversity of the human species. Having to ask and answer this question is a bit absurd. You can find the other parts of our series here. This is part 3 of The Public Medievalist‘s special series: Gender, Sexism, and the Middle Ages, by Gabrielle Bychowski.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |