Yeah I just looked it up to refresh my memory, but we think the ancient Scythians were also using estrogen derived from horse pee and also smoking mad weed, which is pretty neat.
Never heard about the estrogen claim, but I definitely knew about them smoking weed. They hotboxed in their tents, lmao
After the burial the Scythians cleanse themselves as follows: they anoint and wash their heads and, for their bodies, set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover these over with wool mats; then, in the space so enclosed to the best of their ability, they make a pit in the center beneath the poles and the mats and throw red-hot stones into it. . . . the Scythians then take the seed of this (kannabis) and, crawling into the tents, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath."
Dayum trans ppl must rlly start worshipping Inanna now. Like she gets impressed by ur devotion, snaps her fingers n pop- u r now ur preferred gender! This, versus years of expensive HRT, surgeries (in case of some ppl) n all that.
I once ran up against a guy who claimed trans people had their minds rotten by the porn industry. Motherfucker, there are really well documented non-cishet-normative social classes in Norse Scandinavia, in pre-Modern Albania, in pre-Muslim Arabia, in several places of Indonesia - what porn industry did exist there!? He couldn't come up with anything, but wouldn't budge either. Some people get stuck in a prejudice and will behave like raving conspiracy theorists the moment they're offered some bullshit explanation that makes no sense but agrees with them.
bigots' "reasons" to be bigots aren't really reasons, they're smoke screens. Against my better judgment I argued with many in the past, with one particular person I managed to take the conversation to a logical conclusion, after hours of disassembling their baseless arguments there was just one left - "i don't like them they disgust me". Facts over feelings my ass. I believe this is at the core of all bigoted ideas - fear that then transforms into resentment and disgust, that then gets dressed up in all manner of reasons and arguments so they can feel justified in feeling that way
Other people claim trans people were invented by John Money, except he's only being pushed by bigots due to his name could invoke some antisemitic tropes in people's heads.
wikipedia has a surprisingly thorough page on transgender history, organized into sections by country. tldr; historically and globally humans have always been queer.
Inanna is awesome, there's some other lgbtqia aspects to her worship
From The wiki;
Individuals who went against the gender binary were heavily involved in the cult of Inanna. During Sumerian times, a set of priests known as gala worked in Inanna's temples, where they performed elegies and lamentations. Men who became gala sometimes adopted female names, and their songs were composed in the Sumerian eme-sal dialect, which, in literary texts, is normally reserved for the speech of female characters. Some Sumerian proverbs seem to suggest that gala had a reputation for engaging in anal sex with men. During the Akkadian Period, kurgarrū and assinnu were servants of Ishtar who dressed in female clothing and performed war dances in Ishtar's temples. Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also had homosexual proclivities. Gwendolyn Leick, an anthropologist known for her writings on Mesopotamia, has compared these individuals to the contemporary Indian hijra. In one Akkadian hymn, Ishtar is described as transforming men into women.
Obviously trans has almost always existed but isn't the idea of queer more if a societal thing that likely didn't exist in that exact form in the past? Either way never heard of them cool post