...and we’re on. Starts with a safety warning that there are TERFs in the (virtual) audience and they’ve been refused permission to kick them out :-/

Erasure of trans people in history is specifically being weaponised by historians against the “new” field of trans studies - either outright denial or claims that the evidence isn’t good. Neither of these are true.

(Sounds like a generation gap thing - not uncommon in academia.)

Recommendation for Morgan Page’s trans history podcasts - One From the Vaults.

Page - large institutions are warehousing archival material in ways that make it impossible for trans people to access their own history.

“Our histories are becoming museum pieces but they’re not even being put on museum shelves.”

Trans priestesses of Inanna in ancient Sumeria, apparently. Interesting.

Here we go - Gala. Some cis- and straight- washing going on in this Wikipedia version, I think, but it’s a start:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gala_(priests)

Susan Stryker - history is often unwilling to engage with the histories of the identity categories it studies. Can’t just deny trans people existed before the modern labels.

Public storytelling can change the cultural narrative. Important when the struggle is to assert our presence and continued existence.

Struggle over trans identities are effectively a struggle over what’s “real” and who gets to define it. Dangerous to reactionaries and essentialists because they reveal their rigid categories as arbitrary constructs.

“To believe in a consensus reality that we have lost and have now regained is to believe in a fiction.”

Q: How to write trans history as a cis person?

Stryker: Don’t see yourself as an authority talking about, but as a voice in conversation with.

Morgan: Don’t be too quick to assign categories of any kind - gay, straight, cis, trans - to historical figures. Describe behaviours, not identities.

Stryker: Queer theory has a kind of centrism within it, that reduces everything to shades of homosexuality. Needs to be critiqued.

Q: Why is the U.K. so regressive on trans rights?

Stryker: the meaning of bodily difference in the U.K. and U.S. is a legacy of slavery.

Morgan: GICs have historically pressured trans people to “vanish into the woodwork” and avoid other trans people. Less community; less visibility. [Could talk about whiteness there too]

Morgan: less support and more state violence in the States created community which produced professional trans advocates. In the U.K., the transphobic backlash is currently replicating that process.

@ghost_bird

.... why...?

@celesteh This, basically - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-55995979

@ghost_bird

Jesus. So much for unis being spaces for freedom of though instead of coddling safe spaces for fascists.

@ghost_bird @celesteh govt criticises censorship by doing a censorship of people's rights to make their own events.

@kawaiipunk @celesteh I mean, it’s not like they’re unaware of the contradiction. They understand exactly what they’re doing.

@ghost_bird did you get the name of the UK ones?

@nikita Galli - Roman cult of Cybele. A bit better known (at least by me) and present throughout the empire.

@ghost_bird oh those were the Gali I thought about. There was also multiple groups of what was described briefly as lesbian priestesses where christian Church took the fish symbol from

@ghost_bird this is such excellent advice.

@ghost_bird Illustrated:

https://comicsbyxan.com/comic/grave-concern/

@porsupah All the more so for contemporary archives, too, which might be a generation or less removed from the trans people around now.

@ghost_bird Very good point. Even now, a lot of 20th Century trans history is only collected in a smattering of books, let alone the UK's recent media-led descent into becoming TERF Island.

@ghost_bird @porsupah one horrible fact I recently watched someone say in a video: archeology is often limited by politics, and more so country politics where they are from and where they go to, to write and say "the right thing" even when they know it's factually different to be allowed to have future expeditions in those countries.

@ghost_bird @porsupah implication: male archeologists weren't all in the dark about women's couples and female warriors, but it just wasn't the right time or political climate or funding to even record it. messed up. -.-

@nikita Same here. Either a delay or they got the time zones wrong maybe?

@ghost_bird odd. they wrote London TZ on the page. hm

@nikita Yeah, I checked the email and everything seems right. I’ll keep waiting while I do other stuff and see if they go live eventually.

@ghost_bird I asked on twitter, maybe I get a reply

@nikita Just got an apology for the delay in chat - say they should start soon.

@ghost_bird thanks