History-hating Britain is the wokest country in the West
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Who knew that Elagabalus, the 3rd century Roman Emperor, was transgender? This remarkable detail was somehow missed by generations of historians over thousands of years. Yet this week, the North Hertfordshire Museum in north London has brought it to the attention of many.
Keith Hoskins, an executive member for Enterprise and Arts at North Herts Council, claims that it’s clear the Roman ruler “identified as a woman” and it’s therefore only “polite and respectful” to use she/her pronouns in the museum’s display.
If only Elagabalus had been quite so “polite” towards his guests whom he killed in cruel and unusual ways at his parties, tying some to a waterwheel and watching them slowly drown, or quite so “respectful” to Colosseum goers when he set poisonous snakes into the crowd. In any case, the theory of Elagabalus’s transgenderism is equus cacas, to use the Latin term.
The chronicler Cassius Dio said that Elagabalus was “termed wife, mistress and queen,” and insisted he said, “call me not Lord, for I am a Lady.” According to a blog post on the North Hertfordshire museum’s website, Elagabalus also asked “whether a surgical procedure could make him female.”
Dio, it turns out, is not always the most reliable narrator. Elsewhere Dio says (through the mouth of Boudicca) that Nero was a woman. Was he also trans? Or might the LGBT advisers at Stonewall, who were consulted on the project, be confusing ancient Roman slurs denigrating a ruler’s masculinity with modern-day gender ideology?
Ancient Rome was a sexually permissive culture in which prostitution was widespread and sex between men was common practice. However, the Romans prized masculinity and frowned upon “effeminacy” and poor self-control. As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, a Cambridge classics professor, explained to The Telegraph: “The Romans didn’t have our idea of ‘trans’ as a category, but they used accusations of sexual behavior ‘as a woman’ as one of the worst insults against men.”
This isn’t the first time the LGBT crowd has gotten carried away. Last year, Shakespeare’s Globe put on “I, Joan,” a play by Charlie Josephine who identifies as nonbinary and saw in Joan a kindred spirit. Really, St. Joan’s medieval Catholicism is about as far as one can get from modern-day gender ideology. And the teenage saint’s radically unusual life as a woman in her time remains critical to her story.
The madness continued further this week: new research at the Museum of London, examining the gravesites of 145 individuals, reported that Londoners of African descent were disproportionately affected by the Black Death and concluded that this is one of the “devastating effects” of “premodern structural racism.” The BBC, Britain’s state news broadcaster, decided to promote such a nakedly propagandistic piece of research on its website. The United Kingdom is in the grips of a destructive cultural revolution – and no historic fact is safe.
We’ve seen similar derangement in the United States, with the New York Times’ 1619 project, a highly selective history furthering the unserious argument that the era of historical slavery, not the American founding, led to everything that “truly made America exceptional.” As Allen C. Guezlo has written, the project’s narrative is one “in which black leaders who preached reconciliation and seized hold of the American promise for themselves all but disappear from view,” “white abolitionists vanish, and in which 360,000 Union soldiers die in vain.”
It is a gross distortion of history to treat its figures and events as empty vessels for what we want to say about ourselves. And yet we keep seeing new feats of this vapid and anachronistic narcissism. While we’re at it, why not cut out Mona Lisa’s face and insert a mirror instead.
