Listen to it here!
So, a funny thing happened on the way to our nation becoming a place of insanity. We decided that we could look through literary history and find evidences of Transgenderism everywhere – even where it wasn’t, but that’s another story. Our intellectual elites have been scouring ancient mythologies to find “evidence” that everyone recognized gender fluidity back in the day.
It’s true that there have been people who suffer from gender dysphoria for as long as people have been around – the evidence for that seems pretty clear. And the Trans-Rights movement has been keen to catch on to this logically fallacious line of reasoning that states that since there have always been Trans people that Transgenderism must be inherent and therefore good.
Now, I’m not going to dive into why the above line of reasoning is simply a string of non-sequiturs. It is, and that’s important to notice, but that’s not where I want to focus right now. What I want to focus on is that the Trans-movement’s argument from antiquity is a pretty bad one. It’s bad for a whole host of reasons, the poor logic notwithstanding.
The poor argumentation I want us to critique is the anthropological argument. Because the argument from antiquity presupposes what it’s trying to prove – that embracing gender dysphoria will lead to greater human flourishing. Yet, we have evidence that this isn’t the case. Indeed, one of the best evidences that “Gender Reassignment Surgery” in the ancient world didn’t work is that people in the ancient world knew it didn’t work!
Catullus, the Roman poet tells the story of Attis, a young Phrygian (Modern Day Turkey) who, in a mad frenzy induced by the goddess Cybele castrated himself so that he could serve her in women’s clothes as a “galli” – castrated male dressed in women’s clothing. The poem is full of pathos and pain and sorrow and regret.
It’s worth reading (even in English it is excellent). It’s nearly 100 lines in tight-packed Latin, so I’m not going to post the whole poem, but you can read it here in English and Latin. But when we read this ancient masterpiece, we read of nothing but madness, “abhorrence of love”, regret, and the vindictiveness and cruelty of the goddess. Cybele doesn’t love her Galli. They are slaves – mutilated slaves…mutilated slaves who must serve a goddess for whom they cast aside their identity becoming castrati.
The whole poem is worth reading, because, even in English it is excellent. Here’s an excerpt from Eli Siegel’s translation:
After soft slumber then, and the being freed from strong madness,
As soon as Attis himself in his heart looked at what he had done,
And saw with clear mind what he had lost,
And where he was,
With mind much in motion,
He ran back to the waves.
There, tears running down from his eyes,
She looked upon the empty seas,
And thus piteously spoke to her country,
In a voice having tears.
“O my country, that gave me life!
O my country that gave me birth—
Whom I leave, being a wretch,
As servants who run away leave their masters.
I have taken my foot to the forests of Ida,
There to live with snows and the frozen hiding places of beasts,
And to visit, in my frenzy, all their hidden living places.
Where then, in what part of the world, do I justly see you to be,
O my own land?
These eyeballs of mine, unbidden, long to gaze at you, while, for a time, my mind is without uncontrol and wildness.
Shall I, taken from my own home, be carried far away into these forests?—shall I be away from my country, what I possess, my friends, parents?
Shall I be absent from the market, the place for wrestling, the racecourse, playground?
Heart, sad heart, again, again, you must tell your sadness.
For what way was there a human could be which I could not be?
For me now to be a woman—I who was a lad, then a youth, a boy, the flower of the playground!
I was once the glory of the palaestra;
I knew crowded doorways;
Thresholds were warm for me;
There were flowery garlands for me to adorn my house with when, at sunrise, I left my sleeping place.
What shall I now be called?
A maidservant of the gods,
An attendant of Cybele?
Is it for me to be a Maenad, part of myself, a man in barrenness?
I, shall I live in icy, snowy regions of verdant Ida,
Pass my life beneath Phrygian high peaks,
In the company of the hind whose home is the woods,
Along with the boar who goes up and down the forest?
Now, now what I did makes me sorrowful,
Now, now, I wish that it hadn’t occurred.”
It’s important to remember, by the way, that it’s not as though the Romans were opposed to degrading human nature – nor were they all about human flourishing. Well, to be fair, they cared about flourishing if you were a wealthy citizen, but they didn’t really care much about slaves or non-citizens. The pagan worship of Catallus’ day could be horrific. And Catullus, like many famous Romans in that era, unabashedly engaged in homosexual acts, as well as heterosexual. He was from a world of prostitutes, and slavery, and the rape of young boys, and orgies, and vomitoria, and indulgence and physical degradation of all kinds. So, let’s not think that Catullus is some shrinking violet, or some iteration of the Straight, White, Christian Male. Catullus writes about the madness of self-mutilation in service to a deity because this was a real thing that really happened – and sexual mutilation was not limited to paganism, either. Catullus writes about this hoping to speak to his fellow Romans about the madness and regret and shame and anger and cruelty of such a religion, and also about what is entailed in the worldview of such a religion.
And modern statistics would seem to bear out the sorrows of young Attis. According to one longitudinal study in Sweden, post-op patients/ victims of gender reassignment surgery are so deeply unhappy that their suicide rate is nearly 20 times that of comparable peers. While we may never know ALL the causes of gender dysphoria, we are aware of some. We know that those who suffer from gender dysphoria have a good likelihood to have suffered severe child abuse. My guess is that the vast majority of those suffering from gender dysphoria was severely abused as children, or were bullied and abused and sought a new identity to fit in. Whether there are genetic causes or neurological substrata is unknown. In 2019 an article was published claiming to have identified brain differences in male-to-female transgender people, in autopsies, but the Gliske article was retracted, and so it seems that environment is the only cause for which we can reliably point to some kind of antecedent predictor.
In other words, there may be a “transgender gene”, but it has yet to be found. There may be a brain abnormality that leads to gender dysphoria, but it has yet to be identified. What we can say confidently is that children who are abused, and especially sexually abused, seem to be particularly more susceptible to developing gender dysphoria. Of course, it isn’t ALWAYS sexual abuse that’s a predictor. Consider also the parents cheering on their little boys when they say they are confused or they wish they were a girl, or vice-versa. These parents are not, in any way, helping their children. No, they’re indulging in Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy, gaining Woke-creds at the expense of their children’s psycho-spiritual trauma and ought to have their children taken from them, and then they ought to be put in jail for child abuse.
People suffering from gender dysphoria are really truly suffering. The confusion and the pain that must exist for people who constantly feel like they are in the wrong body must be unbearable. And these people need compassion, and mercy, and therapy, and medication (when appropriate). But most of all they need Christ.
Catullus knew that when young men castrate themselves their experience is born out of a madness and folly that’s followed by regret. These miserable servants of Cybele lived a life of regret. But there is no regret from the goddess. She wishes only to keep her property, or prey if you prefer. Those who seek to escape out of their regret are not permitted to do so…seemingly out of nothing more complex than petulance and spite. In the story of Attis we read how the vindictive goddess looses a lion to drive the mutilated man back to being a Maenad:
Cybele, loosening the tight yoke of her lions,
And urging on that foe of a crowd of living beings, a foe eager to the left,
Spoke in this way:
“Come now,” says she, “come, go fiercely, let madness hunt him from here, make him, by the coming upon him of madness, take himself to the forest again—he who would be too free and get away from my rule.
Come, lash in back with your tail, endure your whipping yourselves, let all about sound with your high, thick roar, shake your bright mane fiercely on your thick neck.”
So speaks Cybele in anger, and, with her hand, makes the yoke easy.
The monster enlivens his courage,
Rouses himself to a fury in himself.
He speeds away, he roars.
With foot swiftly covering the ground, he breaks brushwood.
But when he came to where the water stretched from the shore gleaming in whiteness,
And saw gentle Attis by the flat spaces of the sea,
He rushed at him.
Attis runs with mad energy into the woods.
He was a handmaid in these woods all his life.
Goddess, Cybele, great goddess, lady of Dindymus, let all thy fury be far from where I am, O my queen.
Let it be others you drive into frenzy, others you drive into madness.
The poetry is full of powerful, pathetic imagery. Notice the descriptions, the repetition of madness, the jealous and vindictive nature of Cybele, the cruelty of her and the lion, these are all contrasted with “gentle Attis”. The Latin here is “teneram” which has a wide range of meaning, it means soft, gentle, sensitive, delicate, but also effeminate, feminine, or even youthful and immature. Much of the poem’s Latin genius is built around the use of feminine terms to describe the man Attis. The goddess is cruel, vicious, demanding, imperious, impetuous, and vengeful. Yet she’s a woman. She’s the wild woman, like Artemis, who wanders the woods with a lion at her heels. But she’s also a fertility goddess (I mean, they were all kinda fertility deities, amiright!). But in Cybele we see what I think Lewis would have called the worship of the Infernal Venus.[1]
In one version of the myth (which seems to be what Catullus is drawing from), even more tragically, Attis was on the eve of marriage when Cybele revealed herself to him and drove him into madness. The poem itself doesn’t mention a loved one, but there is certainly the hope of a future as a man that was taken from him. In some versions Attis was made a god, or at least the consort of Cybele. But what Cybele represents, at least in this poem, is the dangerousness and cruelty of the wild-woman who wants to defy gender roles. The Greek pantheon and mythos, which seems to be the basis of Catullus’ conception of Cybele, had no lack of stories about women who defy typical roles, obviously there’s Artemis, but also Athena, we have Atalanta, and the Amazons – and that’s just the “A”s!
But what the poem is driving at here is that Cybele is not content to simply play the boy, she wants boys to play the girl! She could be off, prowling the woods with her lion, living the virginal life of a wood-goddess. But she’s not content to do so. She demands that others cut off their ties to normal sexuality. Perhaps, an undercurrent is that the wood-goddess, rejecting her role as magna mater, must efface all other hints of normal sexuality and fertility. She won’t be the fertility goddess and she won’t have any fertility around her. Cybele, at least in this poem, is rejecting, not just society, but biology, and the basic anthropological impulse to have sex and procreate – to create and cultivate and civilize. Cybele is a Petra Pan, who makes her Neverland a Hellscape for her lost boys.
And things haven’t changed. The gods and goddesses of the Transgender Normalization Cult are cruel, they demand people be what they cannot be, and must mutilate themselves in attempts to be so. The data are clear that “gender reassignment” (a fairy-tale term if ever there was one) doesn’t work. It leads to increased suicide rates.
It is astonishing to me that psychiatrists and doctors who promote these mutilations haven’t had their licenses revoked, as they are clearly in violation of the Hippocratic oath. Let me ask you – let’s say you’re a parent and your child is suffering from thinking he’s a dog. He doesn’t feel like a human, he feels like a dog and insists you call him Fido and wants to eat out of a bowl and be put on a leash – would you do it? Let’s say you take him to a mental health specialist and they suggest he have “species reassignment surgery”. He’ll have hair implants, a caudal prosthesis (he’ll be given a tail), his tongue will be lengthened, and every effort will be made to make him look as much like a biped with a flat face can be made to look like a quadruped with a snout. And the shrink says, oh also there is an increased risk of suicide for post-op patients.
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…no. How much of an increased risk of suicide are you comfortable with? 0%? Cause I’d be at 0%. But you play the game. Just tell me when the increased risk of suicide gets too high: 10%; 20%; 30%; 40%; 50%; 60%; 70%; 80%; 90%; 100%...surely you got there…but apparently there are some people who aren’t there yet, because kids are getting hormone “therapies” (what an obnoxious lie that term is), and the risk of suicide is MUCH higher. How much higher? 200%? 500%? 1,000%?! Nope 2,000%.
No one but a criminal would do anything to anyone that led to a 2,000% increase in suicidality. Yet this is what our gender-specialists are advocating!
Now, I know…I know that I haven’t read all the literature on why gender dysphoria is inherent and why I need to get on the child-mutilation bandwagon. But, I’m not particularly interested in reading it. Sure, some who like to appeal to the Liberal Myth of the Informed Reader are going to dismiss my arguments, out of hand, because I’m not hip to every single piece of psycho-babble printed by these ghouls. But the thing is, you don’t need to be a clinician to know that boys have penes and girls have vaginae, and no amount of cosmetic surgery is going to change every single twist of DNA in your body.
People who suffer from gender dysphoria need psychological and psychiatric help, as well as a large dose of the Word of God, and the New Birth in Christ, which is the only means of human flourishing. The fig leaves of transvestism and the fig-felling of mutilation won’t fix problems – they will only exacerbate them. Finding wholeness, acceptance, purpose, meaning, and healing in Christ will. These people need medication not mutilation; they need compassion not castration.
America needs to reject Cybele; men need to stop saying “yes” to the dress, and we need to return to reality, to Nature, and to Nature’s God.
[1] The Roman worship of Cybele revolved more around her aspect as magna mater, or the great mother. It seems that by the time the Romans adopted her as a patroness (and apparently many patrician families regarded her as such) her image had been scrubbed a bit and the “galli” wiped out of the worship as being particularly unroman. Thus, knowing exactly what source material Catullus was drawing from and what version of the myth he’s using is pretty much impossible. Cybele was an old goddess, which may have been a revamping of an even older one. The oldest Anatolian pantheon seemed to primarily be Cybele herself, often riding on big-cats, standing on two of them. She was the mother goddess, and the nature goddess. The Hittite culture brought in many other deities, but it seems by the time of Greek colonization Cybele was back. The Greeks, especially the Ephesians, syncretized Cybele and Artemis, making them both the wild-virgin huntresses “Artemis Archeress”. The Romans preferred Cybele to be the mother again, the mother even of Jupiter! While the Romans didn’t make her goddess of hearth and home, she was still a fertility deity and the mother of cities (since she was Aeneas’ mommy too, per Virgil). All this to say that the mythology of Cybele was constantly changing and this “mother” was sometimes a virgin, sometimes athwart a big cat, sometimes a huntress – she was what each culture wanted her to be. Catullus draws however, on the earlier idea, perhaps a combination of the Anatolian and Greek image – she’s a wild-woman, who can drive men mad, but who has no interest in men as men. She is, in Catullus’ mind, not simply a wild woman, but a dangerous one.