Trousers therefore trans
Ho yus, the Vikings were very up to date on their gender identity beliefs as any fule kno.
Transgender warriors were among the Vikings who ransacked Scotland more than 1,000 years ago, a leading historian believes.
Definitely. There were lots of trans women among the ransackers, staying in camp to make soup and knit woolly hats.
Sacha Coward, who specialises in gender and sexuality, said it would be “a mistake” to believe that Viking society subscribed to traditional gender roles, after recent discoveries suggested that some celebrated warriors were female.
“The stories you hear are of fierce hotblooded warrior men, of violence and pillage,” said Coward. “This notion can make it hard for us to look at the 8th to 11th centuries in Scotland without a strong cisgender and heterosexual bias. It can be a challenge to see the roles of gender non-conforming people, to pull apart the understanding of gender, sex and identity as they really were for the people who we now call Vikings.”
What’s a strong cisgender bias? Is it a “bias” to be aware that humans, like all primates, are sexually dimorphic?
“At the very least, men and women in Viking society could break from traditional constructs of male and female roles and it is possible that we are talking about people who would today identify as transgender or nonbinary.”
Ohhh that’s how he got there. How very stupid. There appear to have been women warriors, therefore Vikings didn’t have rules barring women from fighting…therefore the women warriors were “transgender.” By all means translate different customs among people 12 centuries ago into the idiotic jargon of contemporary pretend-activists. Please, draw up the Viking gingerbread person without delay.
“We know that the gender identity of a person in the Norse period was often tied to their role in Viking society, not just the biology they were born with,” said Coward. “Queer theory is an important part of archaeology and can help us understand the complexity and diversity of past societies.”
Having different rules about what the two sexes are allowed to do does not rely on anything called “queer theory.” How the rules did and didn’t vary is a fascinating subject, but the word “queer” doesn’t need to be ritually invoked to make sense of it.
Also, who says Sacha Coward is a “leading” historian? Not anything I can find via Google, that’s for sure. He calls himself a freelance museum professional, which doesn’t sound like leading historian at all.
Again with the deliberate conflation of gender-nonconformity and transgenderism. And yet again with the unintentional recognition that transgender identities depend on societies which enforce rigid gender roles. Even if we granted that there were female warriors in a society in which no warriors could be female, all it tells us is that it’s easier for such people to think of anyone who’s good with weapons as not being a woman than to revise their idea that women aren’t good with weapons.
This combing through ancient history in order to retrofit modern ideas into implausible scenarios which validate them reminds me of religion and pseudo history. We believe there was a Star of Bethlehem; now let’s find a suitable supernova showing us it happened. We believe space aliens have been visiting earth for thousands of years; now let’s find an impressive monument which seems technologically sophisticated for the time as “evidence.”. We believe in miracles; now let’s look back and note how many things had to happen just in one particular way in order to bring about something that pleases us today.
It’s not proof mind you. But it’s there for those who have eyes to see.
GC feminists have fought to have women recognized for the variety of roles they played in history, and to recognize that there are women who fought and died in roles considered male (in their time and/or ours). Now, all that work is being crapped on. We’re told these weren’t women, they were trans. They were, in other words, men.
Not only are women having our existence erased, we’re having our history erased. Anyone who didn’t practice submissive obedience and caring roles, who didn’t stay back home with the kitchen and babies, was by definition a man.
By the standards set by the trans ‘activists’, shouldn’t J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith be trans?
Sastra – seriously.
I do find it very interesting that there appear to have been female Viking warriors, or at least women buried with warrior-type objects. I hope archaeologists can find more and we can all learn more. I find it very interesting that the Greeks wrote such powerful fierce women characters in such an androcentric culture. Dragging “trans” into it makes it less interesting, not more. Feminism is interesting; trans activism is dull as mud.
Well he’s right: “it is possible that we are talking about people who would today identify as transgender or nonbinary”, because our society is so fucked up that it encourages people who don’t literally think of themselves as Barbie or G.I. Joe to “identify” as genderwoo.
Well, it only makes sense that the Vikings would use transgender women to fight the Scots. The Highland Scots used almost exclusively trans women in their fighting forces, as evidenced by those kilts.
iknklast – true. I didn’t lean on that enough. This nitwit is saying the female warriors were trans men, i.e. MEN, YOU BIGOT. Not powerful women, but men. There aren’t enough eyes to roll.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R_7F3nfORvA/TuO-l34OvGI/AAAAAAAAAXg/_DQuALHygT0/s1600/Viking+Gingerbread+Man.png
It certainly puts the Mulan story in a new light. Turns out she was never a woman after all.
Person, PERSON, I said. How very dare you.
Curious if the Trans goofs are all Mormons? They love to retroactively bring them into the cult.
Could be that he’s an after-opening-hours contract cleaner who dabbles in a bit of amateur archaeology. Just sayin’.
Has news of this been conveyed to Ancestry dot com and such? Could have a profound effect on a whole lot of Scots’ and diaspora family trees, particularly from the more Viking-plundered, raped and pillaged coastal regions of Bonny Scotland. In the light of this, they will be seen as far more transBonny than before, and less cisBonny. Och aye. It hardly bears thinkin’ aboot.
I’d better have nother shot of whisky. No make that another bottle.
humans, like all
primatesmammalsvertebrates, are sexually dimorphicI know, but I wanted to keep it simple.
Taking part in activities that are regarded as ‘manly’ makes one a man. Dear fucking god.
Ophelia @ #3
I don’t know whether you know the Saga of Hervör and Heithrek (also called the Hervarar Saga). A translation by Nora Kershaw (better known under her married name of Chadwick) was published in 1921 in her book Stories and Ballads of the Far Past. Hervör is a female Viking warrior, powerful and fierce. Her story begins on page 93.
Has the leading” historian encountred “Beowulf”? What would he make of Grendel’s mother? How could she, a mere woman, have dragged Beowulf almost to his death? As “Beowulf” is often referred to as “the oldest poem in the English language”, then Grendel’s mother must be the original trans woman.
Okay, this one pisses me off to no end.
I’ve read the Eddas. I’m aware that those (the only real written sources we have of viking society) were oral tales that were eventually written down by Christian monks who very likely made adjustments to retrofit aspects of Christian morality into the stories.
I’m aware that those stories still had kick-ass female warriors in them, who were still considered women. They did occasionally have characters who could, with a bit of squinting, be considered trans-women, but….
Those characters were not celebrated. They were mocked. Their society was, indeed, patriarchal, and men who failed to live up to the ideals of manhood were often pushed into a seemingly feminine role, as much out of contempt as about anything else. (Specifically, men who dabbled in seidr, which was an occult practice, were left with the choice of presenting as female or being killed.)
In their mythology, both Loki and Thor are mocked for those times when they cross-dress or (in Loki’s case) actually become female (granted, Loki became a mare, not a woman, but he does give birth as such, so… yeah).
This wasn’t ‘I always knew I was really a woman’, this was posing as a woman to avoid banishment or execution.
Freemage: isn’t that somewhat true as well of the “celebrated” third spirit people in first Peoples cultures?
The archaeologist Neil Price touches on sexuality and gender ambiguity in his ‘Children of Ash & Elm: A History of the Vikings’ with reference to, among others, burials in England (Portway, Andover) & Sweden (Birka); he also touches on Viking homophobia.
All-round Old Norse expert Jackson Crawford has hundreds of videos about Norse language and myth on his YouTube channel; in particular, this long podcast-style meditation upon Norse daily life in the Middle Ages. It is about 90 minutes long, but goes into some detail across many aspects of Norse culture, very much including the expected gender roles as exposed in the laws and customs of the medieval Norse — as opposed to just their myths, which, much like the myths of the Ancient Greeks, almost certainly exaggerated exceptions to the norms or even used the exceptional myths to enforce the norms all the more vociferously.
The long and short of it is that life in medieval Scandinavia was so heavily sex-segregated that a woman could petition for divorce if her husband wore the wrong clothes (and vice-versa), and while it was doubtless not nearly so restrictive as the Greek ideal of a woman only leaving her house for her wedding and her funeral, it was hardly a genderbread utopia. It is easy to see North American prison rules applying, where a man deemed too effeminate and too powerless to otherwise defend himself would be taken advantage of by other, stronger men who saw it as their natural right to exploit an underling in that way without risk of being considered homosexual.
More broadly, this ideology is already infecting anthropology, where skeletons from hunter-gatherer cultures that died out more than ten thousand years ago are being transed because they are found with grave goods associated with the “wrong” sex; often these skeletons were previously identified as possibly homosexual, but of course this is now being recognised as a terrible thoughtcrime motivated by the unforgivable transphobia of previous ages (whether those ages were aware of this transphobia or not). In my opinion, both of these tendencies were mistakes borne of hubris, though the newer tendency of transing skeletons is often presented with far more certainty than the older tendency, with an extra dose of smug self-righteousness.
In reality, we have absolutely no idea how pre-Holocene peoples saw themselves in gendered terms; the very best we can say is that everyone gathered as much flora as they could carry, and those strong enough to hunt hunted — and often this hunting involved a number of people walking a large animal to death over many hours or days, which takes a kind of endurance that would have been readily available to hunter-gatherer females. So even if it was mostly men doing the initial spearing, when indeed there was spearing involved, there is no reason to think women wouldn’t take part in running a beast down.
But drawing conclusions about how an individual operated in one of these societies because of the kind of pottery or weapons they were buried with, or how that society operated in general, is tenuous at best and a fool’s errand most of the time.
Der Durchwanderer, this is a point I make to my biology students when studying early Cro-Magnon history. Behaviors do not fossilize. We tend to draw conclusions based on our own understandings and expectations. A lot of our current archaeological beliefs were created in the 1950s, when male archaeologists simply couldn’t see women in any other role. A lot of current archaeologists are now seeing women everywhere…and the TRAs are transing them.
The reality is, we have things that tell us they had civilization, and some of the activities they almost certainly pursued, but to figure out which gender did which is tricky at best.
Here is a book from a few years ago about the real woman warriors who inspired the Amazon legends. No mention of them being TIW ;^)
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147208/the-amazons
The evidence mostly point to them being on the Eurasian steppe.
Though it is not stated in the book, I wonder if the reason for female fighter being more common there is that, if you (and your opponents) are fighting from the backs of not particularly large horses, being small is an advantage since your horse can run faster. That would be somewhat counterbalanced by greater arm strength allowing for greater arrow range. However, this puts men & women fighters on a more equal level overall.