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‘STRIKING’ PARALLELS: What Can an Ancient Roman Cult Reveal About the Transgender Movement?

LGBT activists and their supporters rally on the steps of New York City Hall, Oct. 24, 2018. The group gathered to speak out against the Trump administration's stance toward transgender people. Last week, The New York Times reported on an unreleased administration memo that proposes a strict biological definition of gender based on a person's genitalia at birth. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Tyler O'Neil / @Tyler2ONeil

Tyler O'Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: "Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center," and "The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government."

Ecclesiastes says there is nothing new under the sun, and while the transgender movement may feel new and modern, it echoes a cult from ancient Rome—during a “culture war” not dissimilar from our own, according to the detransitioner Forrest Smith.

The cult of Cybele or the Magna Mater, an ancient Roman “mystery religion,” highlighted effeminate men and even included the story of a man getting castrated in a religious ritual.

“I learned about this because it was a piece of rhetoric within my former community that trans people have always existed,” Smith—a man who identified as a woman and went under the knife in pursuit of that identity—told The Daily Signal in an interview before Detransition Awareness Day.

Smith recalled reading the Roman poet Catullus, whose 63rd poem tells the story of a man castrating himself for a goddess.

Catullus, writing in the first century before Jesus Christ, described a cult that had existed for several hundred years.

“He imagined this young man who was actually dressing up as the goddess before he castrates himself,” Smith explained. “Catullus imagines him regretting it, and it’s beautifully written.”

The detransitioner noted that Catullus did not make up the phenomenon—he had been “watching a public spectacle of men cross-dressing and castrating themselves,” a cult that is “very similar to what we have going on now.”

“It was a bit of a culture war in the ancient world, just like we have now,” Smith explained. “The parallels are very striking.”

Rome, like ancient Athens, had a very pluralistic culture, with many active cults. Romans would pray to—and sacrifice for—different gods for different things. They condemned early Christians as “atheists” because early Christians refused to worship any idols.

Smith explained that the cult of Cybele traced back to Phrygia, a land in central Turkey that gained a reputation for wealth. The story of King Midas originated in the same area.

“It was an ancient civilization that was on the decline,” the detransitioner noted. He paraphrased the ancient Greek geographer Strabo: “It’s not the water or the air that is making these men effeminate. It’s the wealth, it’s the riches.”

What happened to the cult? When Christianity grew in the Roman Empire, it “shut down a cult that was already on the decline,” Smith recalled.

He noted that many of the early church fathers, such as St. Augustine and St. Justin Martyr, wrote polemics against the cult of Cybele.

Smith also noted that Europe became more feudal as the Roman Empire collapsed, leading to a period often called the “dark ages.”

The prominence of transgenderism suggests cultural rot in America, and a growing feminization often associated with excess wealth.

Smith, like many detransitioners, is struggling to find necessary medical care. Experimental drugs and surgeries to make men appear female and vice versa are themselves new and relatively rare, but a growing number of these patients later go on to reconcile with their biological sex, and wish to reverse the interventions they took in the name of “gender-affirming care.”

Groups like Genspect are asking the Centers for Disease Control to establish new medical codes to help detransitioners like Smith get the help they need.

In the Cybele myth, the man who castrated himself, Attis, dies. Smith, however, spoke about “life beyond transition.”

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