Apuleius’s Book of Trans Formations
On June 1, 2015, Vanity Fair broke the internet when it introduced Caitlyn Jenner — a famous, rich, and beautiful (by cisnormative standards) white woman — to the world with the hashtag #CallMeCaitlyn. Just 368 days earlier, Time declared our moment to be “The Transgender Tipping Point” with a cover featuring Laverne Cox — an equally stunning (again, by cisnormative standards) trans woman of color from markedly humbler beginnings.
The present moment is surely a tipping point — although it is worth noting that countless trans writers, performers, and activists have been doing important work for decades to help get us here. Mainstream television shows, like Orange is the New Black and Transparent, portray transgender men and women with a degree of authenticity and dignity unimaginable just a few years ago. However, my main contention here is that depictions of transgender people—both positive and negative, caricatured and authentic—have a classical pedigree. Apuleius is the most legible exemplar, as his Metamorphoses, or Transformations (c. 150 CE), cannily renders not only ancient trans women, Syrian galli, but also the transphobic violence they suffer at the hands of hostile cisgender Romans.
Public discourse in recent months has finally become attentive to the significant challenges that face members of the transgender community. As Cox wrote in response to Jenner’s coming out:
Most trans folks don’t have the privileges Caitlyn and I have now have [sic]. It is those trans folks we must continue to lift up, get them access to healthcare, jobs, housing, safe streets, safe schools and homes for our young people. We must lift up the stories of those most at risk, statistically trans people of color who are poor and working class.
These risks are real — and few of us can grasp the chasm that separates Caitlyn Jenner from the rest of the trans community. As Samantha Master and Cherno Biko wrote a few days after Jenner’s Vanity Fair debut:
Undoubtedly, Jenner will give some transgender people hope that they can live as their authentic selves — a necessary and affirming message. However, her story — one in which someone can announce that she is trans and less than two months later achieve a feminized aesthetic that reflects who she is on the inside — stands in stark contrast with the realities of trans women of color, who live at the lethal nexus of racism, sexism, cissexism and transphobia.
This is borne out by just about every metric used to measure marginality and oppression. In 2010 Mark Potok, Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, released a special report, “Anti-Gay Hate Crimes: Doing the Math.” The report found that LGBT people in general are “victimized at 8.3 times the expected rate” of violence suffered by the other minority groups evaluated in the report — Jews, African Americans, Muslims, Latinos and Caucasians. The report concludes that “homosexuals are far more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crime.”
However, when looking at data pertaining only to trans people (rather than the umbrella category of “sexual minorities”), rates of violence jump from merely horrible to nightmarishly terrifying. It is difficult to determine exact numbers, but a commonly quoted statistic is that a trans woman has a one-in-twelve chance of being murdered by a cisgender person. For a trans woman of color, the rate rises to one in eight.
Although these two particular statistics are difficult to verify, communis opinio is unambiguous. The violence faced by trans people — fatal and nonfatal, including murder, assault, depression, homelessness, substance abuse, and suicide — is epidemic, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Transgender women and men face astonishing rates of violence, incarceration, suicide, and homicide. Recent data indicate that the average life expectancy for a black trans woman is 35. Jenner’s story is, so far, a happy one, but we should not lose sight of the exceptional nature of her experience.
Watching all of this, I’ve been wondering how the field of Classics can contribute to this important, unfolding cultural conversation. After all, activist classicists have a long history of engaging with latter-day social issues in order to shed better light on both the past and present. This tradition may have started with Sarah B. Pomeroy’s 1975 watershed book, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, a seminal text that basically established the field of classical gender studies. Since then, activist classicists have engaged with gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, critical race theory, and disability studies. In doing so they highlight the complexity of ancient societies and continue a symbiotic dialogue between modern and ancient. Everyone is better off for it. Therefore, bearing this watershed moment in mind, how do we go about bringing together transgender concerns and Classics?
At the outset, it is important to recognize the boundaries of this project. Looking for transgender people in antiquity is not a quest “to re-populate the ancient past with modern trans men and women,” as archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Weismantel argues, since “that would be a blatant distortion of the archaeological record and of the goals of transgender studies” (320). Rather, she asserts, the aim is to “replace the narrow, reductive gaze of previous researchers with a more supple, subtler appreciation of cultural variation” (320).
With this sense of supple subtlety in mind, I wish to offer a place to start: a new look at one episode from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, that of the Phrygian followers of Cybele. Apuleius scholars have long appreciated the episode as a humorous exposé of religious fraudsters. However, I see not only an ancient subculture of gender non-conformists — some of whom are assuredly transgender women — but also a chilling and prescient account of the violence endured by minorities marked along lines of ethnicity, economic status, and gender identity.
While a close reading of the text will reveal compelling parallels, there are certain initial conditions that must be met before such an analysis can take place. The first impediment to a trans reading of Metamorphoses is the general feeling that being transgender is a specifically modern phenomenon, tied up as it is with medical technologies on the one hand — such as hormone replacement and gender confirmation surgery — and an ideology of subjectivity and individuality particular to our specific moment in history on the other.
In trying to address this concern — can trans people exist outside of a post-industrial epistemic context? — anthropological and sociological studies of modern trans populations give us some idea that this commonsense conception may be an incomplete account of the global and historic trans experience. Transnational meta-analyses of existing research on different types of gender in the west and east, in developed and developing worlds, find that percentages are consistent across cultures, hovering at approximately 0.3%. Even with the theoretical apparatus and data collecting tools at our disposal today, coming to that number has been no easy task because researchers have approached the topic with an impoverished understanding of what trans is and how the trans experience makes itself known. Until very recently, the actual number of trans people has been systematically underreported because estimates were arrived at only after considering the segment of the population who sought out the aid of a psychiatrist.
Unsurprisingly, this approach is subject to biases of race, class, education, and accessibility. When we parse out the trans somatic experience from medical gatekeeping and the particular form of narrative it demands, gender confirmation surgery can be seen as just one of many strategies by which trans people can embody their inner experience of gender. Other techniques include removing body hair, sculpting eyebrows, modulating the voice, altering mannerisms and gait, wearing make-up or women’s clothing, and padding to simulate breasts and hips.
If we accept that there is nothing uniquely modern about the trans experience, then we must address the problem of evidence. The material record — always unforgiving to scholars seeking to study sex and gender in antiquity — is particularly cruel to classicists who might hope to find transgender ancestors in the ancient Mediterranean. Pomeroy notes that “in a period when the history of men is obscure, it naturally follows that the documentation for women’s lives is even more fragmented” (xvii). Considering Roman masculinist prejudice, it is hardly shocking that documentation of transgender people would be even more fragmentary.
While it would be conveniently miraculous if, say, the researchers currently using CT technology to read the rolled scrolls at the Villa of the Papyri discovered a Roman trans person’s personal diary hidden among the works of Philodemus of Gàdara, such an occurrence is vanishingly unlikely — and, I think, unnecessary. Instead we must look for the palimpsestic traces of trans people in literary and historic texts — such as Metamorphoses — and, in doing so, read generously and think critically about the inherited assumptions we bring to the text.
In Metamorphoses, Apuleius tells the story of Lucius, a young man who leaves home, driven by a burning curiosity about the magic and witches he has heard are present at the margins of the empire. The novel opens as Lucius arrives in Thessaly where he immediately encounters (and then sleeps with) exactly what he has been looking for: a beautiful young woman who also turns out to be an inept and clumsy witch. In a delightful comedy of errors, this sexual encounter results in Lucius being accidentally transformed into a donkey.
Before the witch can undo her mistake and return him to his human form, a band of robbers steals Lucius, starting him on a journey through the dark underbelly of the Roman empire. Eventually, Lucius-the-donkey is auctioned off to a band of Phrygian followers of Cybele, a Syrian fertility goddess. With obvious humor, Apuleius recounts Lucius’s horror when he realizes that his new owner, Philebus, and his band of fellow galli are cinaedi: apparent eunuchs who engage in all manner of sex and gender deviance, from same-sex fellatio to dressing up in women’s clothing.
The galli eventually push their luck, alienate the locals, and are driven out of town in the dead of night by an angry mob. While the passage gets a lot of mileage out of Lucius’s moral panic — his horror at their effeminate dancing and mincing speech is certainly central to the scene — the scorn expressed is, I think, confined to the perspective of the narrator, while the text as a whole takes a more nuanced stance toward these galli.
Hints of this more sympathetic attitude creep into Apuleius’s account when we compare the assumptions of the narrative’s mainstream cultural representatives — the auctioneer and Lucius — to what actually occurs. First, the auctioneer intimates that Philebus has perverse, bestial intentions for Lucius-the-donkey and his notably substantial endowment (VIII.26). Then, upon arriving at his new home and meeting the rest of the galli, Lucius fears that he will be forced to serve as their sexual slave. However, it turns out that they only need him to carry a statue of Cybele on his back. Instead of indulging in all manner of unspeakable sexual perversions, the galli are depicted with a mixture of tenderness and pity.
Even seen through Lucius’s biased eyes, they appear to be a non-threatening family of misfits governed by their own internal rules and conventions. The galli are not genuinely religious, but they are not hypocrites either. Rather, Apuleius’ galli are a self-selecting group of gender non-conformists and sexual minorities who have entered into an alternate kinship system, in part to deal with limited economic opportunities.
These galli probably share a lot in common culturally with communities of hijra living today in India and Pakistan, xanith in Oman, kathoey in Thailand, or sistagirls in Australia’s Tiwi Island. That the galli constitute a foreign subculture is important especially when we consider what it means for a North African — whose first language was probably Punic — to depict the disgust a mainstream Roman citizen feels toward an exotic eastern cultural import.
Later, when the group of Phrygians is run out of town in the middle of the night by a mob of good, respectable townsfolk, we see the shadow of a darker, regulating violence. The received reading of this scene traffics in humor: these charlatans get what they deserve. But when we distance ourselves from Lucius-the-reporter’s scornful point of view, we see persecuted minorities bullied, attacked, and run out of town by a disapproving and dangerous moral majority.
This brings me to the central difficulty of looking for transgender people in antiquity. What is involved in concluding the galli are trans women, rather than just ancient drag queens?
We cannot, of course, settle the issue definitively. However, when we see the cinaedi using feminine pronouns and wearing makeup, we should be more discerning and recognize that this community probably consisted of two types of people, each with a different etiology. First, there are the cisgender effeminate homosexuals: nancies, sissies, screaming queens and faggots who camp it up, wear women’s clothes, and use feminine pronouns because it is fun and profitable. But alongside them are transgender women who use feminine pronouns and dress in women’s clothes because doing so adheres to an internal alignment that goes far beyond performance.
Identifying trans people in antiquity and naming them are, on their own, powerful and important political acts. But how do we do so in a way that offers an alternative to the hyper-visibility of the privileged class — as exemplified by Caitlyn Jenner and Suetonius’s Sporus (who Michael Fontaine discussed a few weeks ago) — while embracing a more nuanced theory of ancient subjectivity that takes into account how race, class, citizenship, and gender intersect in Roman social systems?
Even today, the criteria by which trans people are judged is their ability to “pass,” to adhere to cisnormative standards of gender expression and beauty. There is no better example of this than Caitlyn Jenner, who was mocked mercilessly in the media until she revealed herself — rouged, primped and corseted — on the cover of Vanity Fair. When scholars take Lucius’s judgments at face value — in his eyes the galli are not much more than their thinning hair and bad make-up — are capitulating to that same regulating force that expects trans people to be one thing or another, to resolve themselves into our definitions and the expectations those definitions demand.
Metamorphoses is vital to the project of transgendering antiquity precisely because the novel itself goes beyond naming and thematizes processes of transition. As readers know, the novel ends not when Lucius regains his human form, but instead after he has undergone another transformation, a conversion into the Roman cult of Isis. This plot twist has been an enduring challenge for Apuleius’s readers, a few going so far as to suggest that it might be a later addition to the text. These days, most scholars feel someone is being duped, either Lucius at the hands of the Isis cult, or the reader, at the hands of Apuleius.
A transgender-inflected understanding of Metamorphoses may offer a potential reading in this situation because there is a parallel between the trans galli and Lucius as a convert: both identity categories embody a narrative tension between the individual’s self-reported internal alignment and how the subject is perceived by others. Chelsea Manning might look to you like a man, Lucius at the end of Book XI might look to his family and many readers like he’s been taken advantage of, and the galli might look to Lucius like men in dresses. Forefronting trans subjectivity and affect allows a subject-centered reading of the Isis Book, potentially affording Lucius’s account more authority.
Lucius wants his internal identity to be visible on the outside in two ways: he wants to return to his human form and he wants his devotion to be credible to the public who views him. Like many trans people, Lucius is craving a physical transformation and a spiritual rebirth. While helping him achieve these two miracles, the Isiac cult relieves Lucius of a great deal of money, but I see that as payment for services rendered on the beach in Cenchreae.
Lucius begins a process of transformation and self-identification by shaving his head, changing his dress and working to integrate into a marginalized subculture. His family, and ultimately the reader, are highly skeptical of these changes. By not presenting conclusive proof — in a presurgical world proof of transition is as impossible as proof of conversion, but even today we must not privilege surgery over other means of trans expression — Apuleius forces the reader to decide whether to take Lucius in Book 11 and the galli in Book 8 at their word: pastophori or puellae, they are what they are only because they say they are.
H. Christian Blood is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature & Classics at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.
