Don Cheadle and "Protect Trans Kids"

On This Day in History: February 16

“Be a Don Cheadle not a Dave Chappelle” —Imani Gandy. Why? Because Chappelle believes one of the most marginalized groups on the planet should be made fun of. Conversely, on February 16, 2019, Don Cheadle hosted Saturday Night Live wearing a T-shirt that read PROTECT TRANS KIDS.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 16, 2019--

Don didn’t say anything about the issue; he just wore the shirt for a bit. The media said lots the next day, and so did social media. Much of the commentary was positive, but much was . . . not, because some folks love to hate trans people. They even build an identity around it, make it a cornerstone of their “comedy” act or put silly descriptors like “gender critical” in their online bios, because they imagine that what is between a person’s legs is all that matters. Fuck those bigots, and enough about recent history. Let’s look way back, because trans people have existed for as long as people have existed.

The term “transgender” is new, but they are not. Records from ancient Mesopotamia, going back about five thousand years, refer to priests of the goddess Inanna called gala, who may have been trans. Graves from a few thousand years ago in Northern Iraq reveal burial rites that show they considered gender to be a spectrum. Archaeologists discovered different funerary artifacts for men than for women, and also different offerings for a “third gender.”

In 2011 archeologists discovered a 5,000-year-old grave near Prague of a biological male buried with the funerary rites of a woman. In fifth-century Lebanon a person assigned female at birth masculinized their name from Marina to “Marinos” and joined a monastery as a child, living the rest of his life as a man, not even revealing his sex (sex, not gender) after being falsely accused of fathering a child, but rather accepting three years of exile as punishment. His sex was revealed only upon his death. The Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, written in India 2,300 years ago, tells the story of a trans man named Shikhandi.

Elagabalus served as Roman emperor under the name Antoninus from 218 to 222 and was certainly trans. Contemporary Roman historian and statesman Casius Dio referred to Elagabalus with female pronouns. Legally, Hierocles was the wife of Elagabalus, but Dio wrote that the “husband of this woman [meaning Elagabalus] was Hierocles.” Dio wrote that Elagabalus preferred to be referred to as a wife and a queen, not a lord. She dressed and adorned herself as a woman of the time, and reportedly offered a fortune to any surgeon who could give her a vagina.

These stories are barely a sample. Across areas and eras, trans and nonbinary people have lived and loved and been both accepted and maligned. The prevalence of hate is nonsensical. In 2018, Dr. Joshua Safer, executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mt. Sinai Hospital, said, “Being transgender is not a matter of choice. It is not a fad . . . it is generally an overwhelming sense that their gender is not the one on their birth certificate.”

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.