In the past in Italia and many other countries they castrated many cis boys pre-puberty, so they couldn't developing any voice change because they would keep the light singing voices for the opera. They also didn't get masculine secondary sex features, they looked often feminine. Women weren't allowed to do theater and singing performance, because they didn't have the same gender equality as we has today. So guys sang and played the women roles too. The castrated singers were called castratos. The castrating process was painful, because they didn't have any anesthesia, it wasn't invented yet. It was a horrible process and family often forced young boys to be castrated. Some emperors castrated their servants too, and the servants/slaves were called "eunuchs".

My point to share this is for comfort FTMs. Most of us know how pain in the ass it is with gender dysphoria and lack of masculine features. But the unlucky-lucky castratos and eunuchs felt the pain too. They wasn't able to get voice change, beard, muscle and hairy etc. They were beardless, had feminine shapes and fat. Some of them looked like women. In Europe and the Middle-East they castrated with removing the testicles. According to Wikipedia, in China they removed the slaves testicles and penis. So the slaves' down stairs worked almost like a vagina; they had to sit for peeing, and they didn't get masculine features. So even some cis-people experienced such thing in the past. Not only us.

In Ancient Rome some performed a complete self genital removal by knife in a public ceremony and became priestesses of the Goddess Cybele, serving the rest of their lives in her temple.  They were called the Gallae.  Although they could not be citizens they were an accepted part of Roman society.  The Church condemned them as perverse and demonic and they ceased to exist sometime in the early 5th century.  St. Augustine wrote of them in his book The City of God.

Use that factoid the next time somebody ignorantly states that transgender is a post modern phenomenon fueled by liberal hatred for America.


Sapere Aude

Quote from: Deborah on January 28, 2016, 03:38:46 PM
In Ancient Rome some performed a complete self genital removal by knife in a public ceremony and became priestesses of the Goddess Cybele, serving the rest of their lives in her temple.  They were called the Gallae.  Although they could not be citizens they were an accepted part of Roman society.  The Church condemned them as perverse and demonic and they ceased to exist sometime in the early 5th century.  St. Augustine wrote of them in his book The City of God.

Use that factoid the next time somebody ignorantly states that transgender is a post modern phenomenon fueled by liberal hatred for America.


Sapere Aude

Will do! Also, though, what about using people such as the Chevalier(e) d'Eon and/or Pauli Murray to help make this very same point?

->-bleeped-<- on a voluntary basis has been with us since time immortal, we all have illustrious ancestors.

Genital mutilation has also been with us for an equal amount of time.  Until very recently in non-Christian societies, soldiers captured in battle were enslaved, and castrated to reduce the urge to revolt or run away.  Full genital removal was usually reserved for those who were destined to be in touch with the women of the slave household.  In Christian societies though the Renaissance, full genital removal was reserved for those caught in, or suspected to have been, engaging in acts of sodomy.

In some royal societies where the big honcho had hundreds of wives and thousands of of children, the glans of the penis was removed in some of the males, to keep them from reproducing but not to reduce their masculine vigor.  This helped keep royal families small, and supposedly less involved in dynastic quarrels.  The world would be a better place if the Saudi royal family had adopted this practice.

The Venetian castrati were a special case.  It was semi-voluntary, in the sense that those castrated before puberty received a good life afterwards.  Those who fell into the category of being eligible for castrato status all came from orphanages.  Each orphanage had a boys choir, and the opera companies would come to performances and select those with the best voices.  It was semi-voluntary because everyone knew that you could easily escape by not singing well.  And as the fate of those orphans not so chosen was to end up rowing in the Venetian galleys, there was some incentive to sing well and accept the consequences.  Some of these might well have seen themselves as trans, but as the survival rate for those being castrated was only about 80 percent, there was some risk involved.

On the female side, the girls' orphanages would have dances so the squires of Venice could select their concubines.  Similar to the Octoroon Balls in New Orleans. Those not chosen for their beauty had little option after puberty than to become prostitutes, following in the footsteps of their purported mothers.

In the Islamic world, removal of the sensate parts of the female genitals was intended to assure the future husband that his wife would not be tempted to stray regardless of his performance, or lack thereof, in the conjugal bed.  They were made into baby-making machines, nothing else.

Slavery in the Americas did not involve genital mutilation.  In the ancient world, slavery was not inherited, the offspring of a slave was free, and it was not a good idea to have a lot of free citizens around who might have a chip on their shoulder about the way their parents had been treated.  In the Americas the children of slaves were also enslaved, so it was in the interest of the owners not to mess with genitals, and have their slaves reproduce at the maximum rate.  Interest on the slave owners investment, so the speak.

People have been doing things to other peoples genitals for a very long time.  For the sake of vocabulary, however, I would only put the volunteers in the category of trans.  And there were more than enough of those.