Home LifeFamily life in London during the late 2nd millennium consisted of a husband, wife and between three and six children. Domestic tasks such as cleaning, cooking and childcare were exclusively completed by the wife, while hunting and manual labour was the responsibility of the man of the house.
A social order of clans emerged. These clans consisted of multiple family groups, headed by a man. They wore crude, simple squares of fabric with coloured stripes to identify themselves. A common meeting place for clan leaders was known as the “Royal Voxholl Tavirn”, its whereabouts still a mystery to historians today.
ElleAnónime, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Object Title: Clan Symbols C.1972 AD
Replica
The names of these clans are lost to time. Fragments of their patterns remain.
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Illustration of various pride flags.
‘Haunted baby says Trans Rights’
Object Title: Baby BlanketC. 1975 ADPolyester
This small piece of fabric was used as a blanket for children for mum to tuck him in at night, its size and shape perfectly fit for a crib. The climate of the Plastic Age was known for being uncharacteristically warm due to its high population warming the planet with their excessive body heat, so blankets such as these were usually necessarily thin. The blue, pink and white stripes are a symbol of the family’s clan - many other such blankets have been found with a huge variety of coloured stripes denoting different family clans around London.
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This flag was designed by Monica Helms. It’s a flag and probably wouldn’t be comfortable for a baby to wear as a blanket!
This handbook “Trans Britain”, written by engineer Christine Burns, we believe was used by the men of the household as a manual for operating the lighting system in their homes. Using modern translation techniques, it has been discovered that the work includes an introduction to the history of Britain’s National Grid electricity network, with particular focus on the role played by transformers, transistors, and transition metals
Object Title: Electricity Manual C. 1995 AD
Paper
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Christine Burns MBE is an activist, author and internationally recognised health advisor. She is not, nor has ever been, an engineer. Trans Britain is in fact a collection of essays on the landmark events which shaped the trans community.
SonoGrazy, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Object Title: Ritual Fertility Object C. 1950 ADSilicone
As fertility declined, Londoners turned to superstition to increase the birth rate. While it may seem crude and shocking to a civilised society, stylised phallic objects were sometimes used for ritual purposes. This object has the word ‘sh’ engraved on its base, a reminder to the initiate to maintain silence during the solemn ceremonies.
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This is a dildo. We’re sure you know what you do with it
There have been people living outside of the gender binary for thousands of years. Many non-western cultures did not have the gender binary until their land was invaded and colonised by the West. And even in the West, the gender binary is not universal – the earliest record of “they” being used in the English language instead of he or she goes back to the 14th century. Even our modern definitions of gender have been changing and evolving and may not reflect how people in the past viewed gender. The reason few people have heard about trans history is because it has either been ignored by historians or actively obscured.
LGBT+ people were not ‘invented’ only a few years ago despite the discourse you may see.
Cisnormativity is the expectation that all people are cisgender - the same gender they were assigned at birth.
Heteronormativity is a world view assuming that heterosexuality is the norm or preferred sexual orientation.
Cisnormativity and heteronormativity
Merinos the monk
Merinos the Monk was born in modern day Lebanon in the early medieval period, assigned female at birth and named Marina. When Marina’s widowed father decided to join the monastery, Marina asked to join too. Even though it would have been expected for Marina to join a convent which would have similar advantages, Marina instead decided to live as a man and take the name ‘Marinos’ or in some tellings ‘Pelagia’
When Merinos was accused of sexually assaulting an innkeeper’s daughter and impregnating her, Merinos asked for forgiveness and ambiguously said ‘I have sinned as a man’. When Merinos died many years later, the monks prepared the body and discovered that Merinos was assigned female at birth. The monks told the innkeeper and his daughter to repent for their sin of lying.
Merinos is a saint, but with their birth name ‘Marina’ instead of their chosen name ‘Marinos/Pelagia’ and is often described as being ‘disguised as a man’.
Marinos the Monk (on the left behind bars) being accused by the innkeeper’s daughter of impregnating her.
The Bugis people of Sulawesi, Indonesia, have an entirely different gender system to what we have in the West. They recognise three sexes: male, female and intersex; and also five genders, which approximately relate to these translations: makkunrai = cisgender woman, oroané = cisgender man, calabai = transwoman, calalai = trans men, and bissu = androgynous/non-binary/”gender transcendent”.
But even describing these as “sex” and “gender” are not quite accurate as they are seen as multi-faceted aspects of a person rather than singular descriptions. Neither the Buginese language nor Indonesian have gendered third person pronouns (he/she), it is the same pronoun no matter the person’s gender or sex.
The Gender Binary Isn’t Universal
A Bugis couple at their wedding ceremony with two calabai attendants who helped dress and prepare the bride.
Image: Sharyn Davies, https://bit.ly/2WWnQmK
Just Gals Being Pals
Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, born around 630 BCE. Much of her poetry explores her love and desire for women, pretty unambiguously.
“Sweet mother, I cannot weave - slender Aphrodite has overcome me
With sweet longing for a girl.”
Sappho, translated by Diane J. Raynor
The terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘sapphic’, describing women who love women, both derive from Sappho. Despite this, traditional depictions of the poet tended to erase this aspect of her. Sappho and Alcaeus by Lawrence Alma-Tadna depicts the poet mooning over Alcaeus who she may have never even met.
Sappho and Alcaeus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1881