"Gender Reversals & Gender Cultures"

The mid-1990’s were either a golden age for Gender Studies or just a time when I acquired a lot of books. Either way volumes like this arrived in good time to stretch our self-awarenesses and those of people interested in trans. This collection of essays takes the “Anthropological and Historical Perspectives” to look at how gender has affected earlier and other civilizations, which may seem a bit abstract for our heady trans existences, but actually the results are really interesting and can give us a good steer to why certain social forces are for or against us at the moment. Two chapters stood out for me. One looks at “Gender-crossing in early Christianity”. (By the way gender-transitioning in this book sometimes sounds backward (“reversals”) and sometimes neutral (“crossing”) but really is just versions of what we would call “transitioning”). In this chapter we meet the idea of shame as a female complement to the male quality of honour, and how martyrdom, strict religious observance and cosmic perspectives have been ways that in early times radical views of the female gave women a special status in the world. In these ways gender divisions are dissolved – “in Christ there is neither male or female”. It is all quite complicated and dependent on religious ideas, but underlying it all is a conviction that gender is only one dimension of existence, and there are ways of travelling into other dimensions. Similarly when we digest a good summary of the structures of Buddhism and Hinduism in “Gender Modification in Hinduism and Buddhism” we start to realize how societies and cultures move through history altering their gender categories as they alter, eg, their farming and their settlements. History is everything and our current upheavals are only part of a very large pattern indeed. Understanding that can help us to endure and progress. It is all far more rich and spiritual than current orthodoxies on all sides would suggest. Here you can get perspectives from ancient Sumeria, the Renaissance, Chinese Theatre, Siberia and Papua New Guinea amongst other times and places. Some of the writing is a bit academic but mostly it isn’t. And you come out of it all feeling that we are a crucial part of a world of wonderful strangeness.