Homosexual transsexualism, or HSTS, has a recorded history as long as writing itself, from 6,000 years ago and before. It is the natural end point of a developmental scale of human homosexuality. It can be described as ‘transgender homosexuality’ because those who display it are completely cross-sex identified, that is, they understand themselves as being of the opposite sex, from early childhood.
Such individuals may experience severe discomfort because of the mismatch between their sense of self and their social role and appearance, if they attempt to present in a normative manner for their sex. This is called Homosexual Gender Dysphoria and in severe cases the subject may fully transition and live as a member of the opposite sex, where he or she will attempt, usually successfully, to conform to the gender standards for that culture. These are Homosexual Transsexuals.
As a rule then, Homosexual Transsexuals are cross-sex identified from childhood sometimes as early as thirty months and completely same-sex oriented, although this will develop and manifest more slowly — exactly as it does in other children. The crux comes at puberty, when they will increasingly desire to transition if their fear of the social consequences of doing so impacts less on them than their feelings of Gender Dysphoria. Unfortunately, historically these individuals have been subjected to enormous pressure to make them conform to social expectations for their sex, which in the West means as ‘gay boys’.
How exactly this Homosexual Gender Dysphoria might be expressed we’ll discuss elsewhere but in brief it amounts to an indefinable but powerful sense of ‘not being like boys and being like girls instead’; strong preferences for female-typical toys and games; strong dislike of male-typical play; crushing on boys and especially older men and fantasising about submitting to these men, at first romantically and later sexually. As adolescents they will typically begin anal play and may attempt to form relationships with masculine males, often older ones. Physically they are likely to be slight, fined-boned and pretty.
Today, we recognise that homosexuality, and therefore transsexualism is an innate sexuality, that is, it’s not learned or ‘socialised’.
If it is innate, we should expect to find expressions of it across all human cultures at all times and this we do. It is mentioned — often negatively — in many ancient texts like the Bible, the Hindu texts, the Koran and so on. There are numerous reports of it throughout history. Sometimes, as in Europe or where the writers were European, especially from the Judeo-Christian traditions, this has been negative. Elsewhere, records are more balanced in tone.
The close link between Homosexual Transsexualism and more sex-typical homosexuality, together with the copious records, suggest that it too is a fundamental and intrinsic aspect of human nature. Indeed, since both have a common cause, Sexual Inversion, we should look at these phenomena as sitting on a scale of development or aetiology such that Homosexual Transsexuals are the most affected form and true bisexuals are at the other end. This is not to say that all feminine homosexuals should complete as transsexuals, but it is certainly true that this is a path they should consider.
Intolerance
Despite often extreme social intolerance, then, Homosexual Transsexualism has lived on throughout the ages of human culture. The attention it has garnered in the West in recent decades should be seen not as a new phenomenon but as the continuation of a natural part of the human condition that had been suppressed, for centuries, by brutal, often lethal violence, frequently promoted by religion but also, paradoxically perhaps, by sex-conforming homosexuals, pederasts and even feminists.
The History of Transsexualism Part One
This article aims to provide an overview of the history of transsexualism as we understand it today.
Prehistory
Writing was not invented until around 4,000 BC and prior to that, any evidence of transsexualism or, for that matter, any human sexual behaviour, remains conjectural.
There is significant prehistoric evidence that transsexualism was present before the establishment of sedentary cultures and the invention of writing. This is consistent with models found more recently in tribal societies. Some of the evidence comes from multiple burial sites across Europe. It is tempting to include it here but, because we cannot absolutely be sure of the nature of the culture that the deceased lived in or the context of the burials, we will dedicate another article to this. However, I am personally confident that, if ever we were able to definitively analyse this evidence it would confirm the presence of transsexuals in prehistory.
While great care must be taken in studying the written, historical evidence, because of the cultural differences between us and the writers, here we are on much more solid ground.
The written history
Writing was a product of the first settled, agrarian cultures and probably originated as a way of tallying crop produce and of making contracts. As far as we know, the very first writing was invented in Mesopotamia, which lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and is now Iraq, in a culture called Sumer or Sumeria.
The city which gave us the first recorded writing was called Uruk. This is the Biblical Erech. The people used a form of writing called ‘cuneiform’ which might have been invented by women. They wrote on clay tablets, which were fragile. This presents us with a problem deciphering Sumerian texts, because, after 6000 years, many of the tablets have been destroyed or are buried in the ruins of the city, which remain, abandoned, in the desert of modern Iraq. This means that for much of the time we have to ‘fill in the gaps’ either with later material or evidence from several different cities. Despite this, we have a great deal of information.
Uruk
Each of the Sumerian cities that developed in the fourth millennium BC was a cult centre dedicated to a particular deity. Although some of these were actually male, the culture itself was strongly feminine. Uruk was very much a Goddess city and its deity was called Inanna. She was the epitome of a girl who has just experienced her first menstruation: beautiful, seductive, wild, carefree and wilful.
The people of the Uruk believed that Inanna was an invisible but incredibly powerful being who really lived in her dedicated temple, at the heart of the city itself, which was called the Eanna Temple. She was a form — in India this would be called an ‘avatar’ — of the Great Goddess herself. Inanna was anthropomorphic, which means that even though she was invisible to humans, she actually looked, to those who could see her, like an astonishingly perfect young woman, albeit much larger, with wings.
Naturally, Inanna, being a goddess, was served by women, but not all of these were born so: she was served by transwomen too.2
The transsexual servants of Inanna self-castrated out of devotion to the Goddess, specifically in order to make themselves complete as women; this was documented not just by the Sumerians but by successor cultures down to Rome and is carried on today in India. The Sumerians used the complete form of emasculation, removing scrotum, testicles and penis. This was usually carried out at or soon after puberty. As a result they would have stopped masculinising at that point and so would appear passable as women.3
They were the world’s first recorded transsexuals.
Religion, prostitution and transsexualism
Within Sumerian and later Mesopotamian cultures was the tradition of ‘Temple Prostitution’. This existed in many other cultures and we have numerous contemporary accounts of the practice.
Religious prostitution is not, even today, well understood, partly because of centuries of scholarship that sought to erase it and partly because of the generally sex-negative attitude of Anglo-Saxon culture. Women in Sumer did not see the act of sex with a stranger, for money, as demeaning but rather as a religious act that confirmed them as part of the sisterhood of the goddess Inanna.
Professor Morris Silver has written extensively about this, debunking attempts to suggest that the prostitution was merely symbolic.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
In one of the most famous Mesopotamian texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Gilgamesh himself, who is the king, is approached by a hunter who is frustrated because a wild man by the name of Enkidu, who lives with the animals on the steppe, has been spoiling his traps. It was the King’s duty to resolve matters like this, so Gilgamesh seeks help from the High Priestess of Inanna. She sends a harimsu, or temple prostitute, to seduce Enkidu and bring him back to the city. This she is to accomplish by finding where he sleeps and lying down naked beside him. When Enkidu awakes, he will be so inflamed with lust that he will have sex with her. So he does and is thereby tamed and brought to the life of the city, where he becomes Gilgamesh’ best friend.
Herodotus, in his description of life in Babylon, a successor culture to Sumer, wrote, of his observations at a Goddess temple:
Many women who are rich and proud and disdain to mingle with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages drawn by teams, and stand there with a great retinue of attendants. But most sit down in the sacred plot of Aphrodite, with crowns of cord on their heads; there is a great multitude of women coming and going; passages marked by line run every way through the crowd, by which the men pass and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, “I invite you in the name of Mylitta”. It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one.4
Did transwomen also perform this sacred duty? It’s almost inconceivable that they did not, as it was a requirement for all women. In addition, we have references directly from Sumerian texts that confirm it.
One, from the ‘Hymns to Inanna’ (Kramer & Wolkstein) is:
‘”Hail!” to Inanna, First Daughter of the Moon!
The male prostitutes comb their hair before you.
They decorate the napes of their necks with colored scarfs’5
This is clearly referring to transwomen beautifying themselves before performing their religious duties. It suggests that transwomen were accepted in Sumer and were expected to behave as other women did.6
The modern Indian version of the Sumerian transwomen priestesses are sometimes called hijra and amongst them are considerable numbers of Homosexual Transsexuals. They too, practise religious prostitution. There is no persuasive argument to suggest that something similar was not also the case in Sumer.
India
The earliest human civilisations appeared in Sumer, making the fact that transsexualism is described there important. However, the tradition that proceeds through the Middle East and then west and north to Europe and beyond was not the only line of cultural development. At about the same time as the Sumerian cities appeared, further east in the Indus valley, similar events were taking place.
Through time, these led to the great Hindu culture of India, which spread south and east across the region. At the core of this culture are texts called the Vedas, which were written between 3000 to 1500 BCE, although the source material might be even older. The Vedas consist of four volumes and have a huge advantage over the Sumerian texts: they are complete. Despite the vagaries of history that India has had to endure, the culture of the Vedas still lives on, in more-or-less unchanged form.
As the culture spread, so did the records of transsexualism.
Amara Das Wilhelm
In his book Tritiya Pakriti, scholar Amara Das Wilhelm has concentrated a huge resource of information which we unashamedly make use of here.
The word kliba or klibaka is the most common third-gender term found in Vedic literature.7 It … often specifically describes those who are effeminate or homosexual by nature. Kliba is frequently used to disparage men considered weak, cowardly, unmanly, effete, of questionable manhood and so on.
In one category of kliba, exist ‘Shandha—he has the qualities and behavior of a woman’.
Clearly, the writers Amara Das Wilhelm is discussing understood that Shandha referred to a sub-category of Kliba, rather than a separate one. The terms can be seen like this: Kliba refers to all feminine males, while Shandha are a subset. It is reasonable to infer that this subset was more complete in its expression of femininity than others, but still derives from the same root.
Similarly, today, we can easily understand Transsexuals to be a subset of homosexuals. In order to be a Homosexual Transsexual, one must first be homosexual. Note again, that this absolutely does not apply to non-homosexual transvestites or Autogynephilic men. These are discussed on our sister site Autogynephilia Truth.
The Sushruta Samhita is an ancient Vedic medical text put into writing sometime around 600 B.C. (It) describes a type of female shandha with the qualities of a man (3.2.43).
Shandha—he has the qualities and behaviour of a woman.
The term shandha or shandhaka is also commonly found in Vedic literature. It…often specifically describes male-to-female transgenders. Both the Sushruta Samhita (3.2.42) and Smriti-ratnavali state that the shandha talks, walks, laughs and otherwise behaves like a woman.
Under the category ‘Panda’, he notes: ‘ Sevyaka—he is sexually enjoyed by other men’. Clearly, this refers to a homosexual male, though it does not specify his presentation.
Women who are impotent with men are mentioned less frequently in Vedic literature. Nevertheless, several types of nastriya or third-gender women can be found:
1) Svairini—she engages in lovemaking with other women. (lesbian)
2) Kamini—she engages in lovemaking with both men and women. (bisexual)
3) Stripumsa—she is masculine in behavior and form. (HSTS)
4) Shandhi—she is averse to men and has no menstruation or breasts.
The word tritiya-prakriti refers to third-gender men and women with various combinations of the two natures described above. It is especially used in the Kama Sutra to describe men and women who are homosexual or transgender by nature. Such people appear as male or female and assume masculine or feminine identities (They have no sexual interest in the opposite sex.)8
Amara Das notes that:
Because the Dharma Shastra considers the third sex to be an inborn nature rather than an acquired vice, no verses punish third-gender citizens for their characteristic behavior. No laws penalize third-gender men for refusing to marry women or conceive children (quite the contrary) and no laws punish crossdressing, male prostitution, private homosexual behavior, etc.
As you can see, a comprehensive set of what the author calls ‘third gender’ types are here described. Note especially the way that the texts explicitly conflate gender-conforming homosexuality and transsexualism as two forms of the same thing. This was the universal understanding until the 20th century and remains the standard one throughout all of the world except the West.
