oh i’m sorry were you saying something about me being an “artifact of the modern patriarchal medical-industrial complex” cause I was too busy looking at this photo of a 2000 year old classical greek marble statue of three transgender women just sorta chilling and being gorgeous.
Correction
– Intersex.
The story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis is an allegory used to explain
the existence of people with “ambiguous” genitalia; it is believed
that it originates from a cult to Aphrodite that depicts the goddess with both
male and female sexual organs. The term is nowadays considered extremely
offensive to trans and intersex people alike.
The contemporary idea of a trans person was not familiar to the Romans and
Greeks – rather they meant people born with visibly “dual”
reproductive systems when they referred to “hermaphrodites”.
Trans people in the Classical world (in the sense of people that adopt the
roles of the “opposite” gender and/or physically alter their
genitalia) could be considered the priests of the Phrygian
mother-goddess Cybele, who were born male but in order to serve the
goddess submitted themselves to castration. However they were considered a
religious class rather than a social one and their transition was a religious
rather than a personal experience.
It is interesting to note that Dionysus could be considered a patron deity of
trans people, due to the story depicting how he was “raised as a
human girl” in order to be protected from the wrath of Hera. He kept his
feminine demeanour throughout his life.
I am OP of this photoshopped image, created mainly in a sense of fun but also because I have an life-long deep sense of how old-fashioned views of gender divide us; only learned Hermaphrodite was considered a slur in The Intersex community after initial post – I have removed that word since, and included pics of Hermaphrodite statue from the Louvre I am really happy when people say they know it’s fake, but it makes them happy to look at –
oh i’m sorry were you saying something about me being an “artifact of the modern patriarchal medical-industrial complex” cause I was too busy looking at this photo of a 2000 year old classical greek marble statue of three transgender women just sorta chilling and being gorgeous.
oh i’m sorry were you saying something about me being an “artifact of the modern patriarchal medical-industrial complex” cause I was too busy looking at this photo of a 2000 year old classical greek marble statue of three transgender women just sorta chilling and being gorgeous.
Thiiiissssss
Unfortunately, this image has been photoshopped. The original does not feature any genitalia on the figures at all, and is actually from the 19th century.
Representations of sex and gender in antiquity are really interesting, but this isn’t in any way an example from the period. If anyone has any good examples to offer up, I’d love to see them. It’s been awhile since I studied Greco-Roman art. I’m sure some much better samples could be seen in 2-dimensional contexts.
Though this is a photo montage, there were Greek & Roman sculptures in this style of women with penises and/or hermaphrodites – so arguably it’s not entirely dishonest, in that OP was not creating a vision that did not exist previously. If an artist sculpted a marble hermaphrodite in this style, and called it an homage, no one would blink.
lavenduers 