Trans Britain wasn't built in a day!

How Roman Yorkshire refutes Sunak’s gender normativity

“A man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense” - the poisonous, transphobic drivel of the UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the 2023 Tory Party Conference is yet another depressing marker of the war being waged on one of Britain’s most marginalised minorities. The obstinate assertion, that conformity to a rigid and constructed gender binary is ‘just common sense’, echoes a sentiment widely propagated in 2020s TERF Britain. Notions of gender nonconformity, and the mere existence of trans people entirely, are painted as new, alarming phenomena. They are used as emblems of what the Right dubs 21st century ‘‘wokeness’, to be battled in the 'culture wars’. This is of course historical revisionism - following a constructivist view of gender as performance, gender non-conformance, or transness, is as ancient as gender itself (1). Despite the Right’s attempt to erase the legacy of the past with this normative notion of ‘common sense’, queer people have existed throughout centuries of British History. And for those in any doubt, I direct you first to Catterick, a small village in North Yorkshire.

Roman Cataractonium, now Catterick, North Yorkshire

Catterick is the present-day name of the Roman settlement Cataractonium, the earliest LGBT-related location identified by Pride of Place, Historic England’s LGBT heritage initiative (2). It is pinpointed due to it being the location of the grave of a ‘gallus’, a Roman Briton assigned male at birth, who lived as a female priestess of the goddess Cybele. The Roman Galli were male-born followers of the cult of Cybele in the 3rd century BC, who wore the clothes and jewellery of Roman women, and who often castrated themselves, complicating established Roman ideas of masculinity and gender. English Heritage reports that the skeletal remains of gallus, discovered in 2002 by archeologists at Catterick, appeared to be male, but were accompanied by women's clothing and jet jewellery - a stone worn solely by Roman women due to its associations with childbirth and magic (3).

Galli

Just as mainstream politicians have resorted to malicious attacks on trans people and vapid allusions to the ‘culture wars’ to deflect from the dire economic reality of 2020s Britain, the Galli also faced increased backlash as Rome expanded. With the arrival of new citizens in Rome from the 1st century AD, concerns about identity, including those surrounding gender and masculinity, became more prominent. The Galli became more well known and stigmatised, often used as a tool to insult other men. (3.1)

It would be oversimplified to suggest that the Galli’s identity was completely analogous with what we now know to be transness. It should be noted that the accepted meanings surrounding gender, and gender conformity, have undergone rapid transformations between the Roman era to the modern day. To the Romans, the queering of gender norms was often associated with something of a divine nature, rather than belonging to the human world. As Carla-Uthink argues, ‘Greek and Roman mentality recognised gender boundaries as a central element, constitutive of the human - their transgression was admitted only as part of a ‘posthuman world’, and therefore considered as revealing a divine nature or a divine protection’ (4).

Nevertheless, the existence of the Galli in Yorkshire’s ancient history is a reminder of the way gender has always been queered, and highlights the inherent complexity of gender expression. As with many histories which disprove capitalist and conservative realism, the existence of Trans and queer people in Britain’s past is often omitted from mainstream retellings of our history in order to maintain the hegemony of gender essentialism and normativity. This only makes the work of LGBT Heritage projects, alongside the collaboration of Archeologists and minority groups, all the more important (5). As English Heritage note: ‘Although we cannot know how [the Galli] thought about their own identity, their presence in the historical record hints at a richer and queerer past than we can possibly imagine’ (6).

Bibliography

Carla-Uhink, Filippo.'“Between the human and the divine” Cross-dressing and transgender dynamics in the Graeco-Roman world' TransAntiquity Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World, London, 2017

Historic England (n.d.). Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Histories | Historic England. [online] historicengland.org.uk. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-nonconforming-histories/.

English Heritage (n.d.). The Galli: Breaking Roman Gender Norms. [online] English Heritage. Available at: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/lgbtq-history/the-galli/

Pinto, R. and Pinto, L.C.G. (2013). Transgendered Archaeology: The Galli and the Catterick Transvestite. Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal, 0(2012), p.169. doi:https://doi.org/10.16995/trac2012_169_181.