Engels, Karl Marx’s leading collaborator in developing the doctrine of scientific socialism, found that these ancient societies showed no evidence of a state apparatus of repression, large-scale warfare, slavery or the nuclear family. Engels and Marx saw Morgan’s studies as further proof that the modern-day oppression of women was rooted in the cleavage of society into classes based on private ownership of property. The fact that oppression was not a feature of early communal societies lent great weight to their prognosis that overturning private ownership in favor of socialized property would lay the basis for revolutionizing human relations.
Research in this century, particularly by women, has further disproved the view that women have always been considered “inferior.” The extensive research of Marija Gimbutas and Gerda Lerner revealed that prior to 4500 B.C. goddesses, not gods, were worshipped throughout Europe and Western Asia.
As Jacquetta Hawkes concluded in her History of Mankind: “There is every reason to suppose that under the conditions of the primary neolithic way of life, mother-right and the clan system were still dominant, and land would generally have descended through the female line. Indeed, it is tempting to be convinced that the earliest neolithic societies throughout their range in time and space gave woman the highest status she has ever known.” (It’s interesting to note that this progressive woman researcher, writing in 1963, still found it necessary to use the term “mankind” to describe humanity.)
When bigotry began
In the fertile river valleys of Eurasia and Northeast Africa, during the period of about 4500 B.C. to 1200 B.C., human labor became more productive and abundance accumulated as wealth. The old communal systems were gradually and unconsciously transformed.
A tremendous societal change took place. The desire to pass on wealth to male heirs demanded wifely monogamy; the patriarchal family became the new economic unit of society.
But the respect the ancient communal societies accorded transgendered men and women, and same-sex love, endured long after these societies underwent dramatic changes.
An Egyptian sculpture of a bearded Queen Hatshepsut dressed in the garb of a pharaoh (1485 B.C.), for example, shows the persistence of popular folklore about the bearded woman as a sacred symbol of power and wisdom.
A link between transvestism and religious practice is also found in ancient myths associated with Greek gods and heroes. The myth of Achilles notes that he lived and dressed as a woman at the court of Lycomedes in Scyros before he acquired his martial skills.
“Macrobius reports that male priests dressed as women in honor of the Bearded Aphrodite of Cyprus; on the same island, the cult of Ariadne (originally a fertility cult) was marked by a ceremony in which a boy was dressed in female clothes and proceeded to enact all the symptoms of labor and birth.” (Dressing Up)
Herodotus noted that Scythian religious shamans spoke and dressed as women and were highly revered. The priests of Artemis at Ephesus were reported to have worn “women’s clothing.” (Dressing Up)
“Men had to dress up before they could take part in the rites of Hercules at Rome (Hercules himself spent three years dressed as a woman at the court of Omphale, Queen of Lydia). … At the vine growers’ festival, the Athenian Oschophoria, two boys dressed in women’s clothes and carried a vine stock in procession. At the Argive festival of Hybristika, the men adopted female clothing. At the feast of Hera at Samos, the men wore long, white robes and placed their hair in golden nets.” (Dressing Up)
To “justify” the new economic system and break the spirit of people who had lived and worked communally, a systematic downgrading of the status of women and an assault on the transgendered population began.
An early prohibition against transgender was codified in the Mosaic Law of the Hebrews, one of the earliest patriarchal societies: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” (Deuteronomy, 22:5)
The rise of the Greek city-states during the 8th to 6th centuries B.C., is another example of the subjugation of women. The new patriarchal economic system couldn’t co-exist with matrilineage. But in many areas transgender, same-sex love and many of the old religious practices of transvestism continued to flourish, because they didn’t yet threaten the new ruling order.
The slave-owners developed an ideology degrading women in order to justify overturning women's equality in society. Many of the early Greek myths and the numerous depictions in artwork of battles against Amazon warriors symbolized the overthrow of matrilineal communal societies and their replacement with patriarchal slave societies.
Patriarchal gods like the Greek deity Dionysos arose to overpower the pre-class goddesses. Dionysos was one of the Greek gods that replaced goddess worship. But Greek painters and writers portrayed Dionysos as feminine or dressed in women’s apparel. Transvestism also persisted in the rituals of Dionysos, which endured even after Christianity became a state religion of the ruling elite.
The attitude toward women partly accounts for the growing hostility of the ruling classes toward transgendered men. But another aspect of the campaign against “effeminate” men, and Dionysos in particular, might have been to create a Rambo mentality, like the extreme appeal to “manhood” of the Nazi war machine or today’s Pentagon. These were “expand or die” militaristic societies. Unlike the war god Ares, Dionysos was a “make love, not war” god who encouraged soldiers to desert their posts in battle.
The Christian writer Clement of Alexandria authored a book in the third century A.D. called Exhortation that demanded pagan Greeks recognize the error of their beliefs. “If one goes around examining pictures and statues, he will at once identify your gods from their disgraceful depictions, Dionysos from his dress.”
The persistence of transgender
Although ruling attitudes toward cross-gendered expression were changing and becoming repressive, ancient respect for transgender proved difficult to eradicate and transgendered women and men continued to be present in all classes of society.
“The Roman Caesars were reported to show a fondness for wearing women’s clothes and Caligula, according to Seutonius, often adopted female clothing.” (Dressing Up)
But the ruling class repression began to demand increasing conformity — even among the elite. “The most famous example is that of Elagabalus…,” wrote Arthur Evans, “who became emperor of Rome in 218 A.D. As Emperor, he often appeared in public in drag, practiced ritual sex with members of both sexes, and publicly declared one of his male lovers to be his husband. The sentiments of the ruling classes were outraged. He was assassinated by an indignant Praetorian Guard in 222 A.D. His body was mutilated, dragged through the streets of Rome, and thrown in the Tiber River.” (Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture)
In the fourth century A.D., the Bishop of Amasia in Cappadocia denounced the New Year’s Day practice of men cross-dressed “in long robes, girdles, slippers and enormous wigs.” Bishop Isidore of Seville (560—636 AD) railed against New Year’s dancers “womanizing their masculine faces and making female gestures.”