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A thread on Viking transpeople as flagged by @glosswitch because nobody reads anything I write.
I find some of the reasons for dismissing this piece uncomfortable. High standard academic work can be produced by non academics. Using modern ideas to understand past people is not wrong, and is probably unavoidable.
Writing the history of groups who are poorly represented in the historical record or who were seen as abnormal and subversive always involves guesswork and assumption making. A lot of criticism of evidence for same-sex attraction in the past used criticisms similar to this.
But there are issues here. By its own definition, being trans or non-binary is a subjective experience (SELF ID). It can't be evidenced by behaviours which do not conform to fixed codes or norms of behaviour or by activities (as same sex attraction can).
To demonstrate the self ID of gender non-conforming Vilings was anything other than 'woman doing thing usually coded masculine' you would need to show either a society so fixed in norms non-conformity was intolerable, or one which habitually changed gender according to role.
The article and the comments don't do this. There is some mention of sumptuary and other law codes, but these were written at a moment in time and can't show rigid division. There is plenty of evidence of fighting women being described as women, or as women being like men.
There is no evidence offered that Vikings had a gwnder system that believed sex was changable. Myths involving gods don't work, religions mediate irreconcilable binaries. We don't accept oursleves as vivifluid just because Christianity breaks this binary.
Then we get on to the other part, which is to ask how far the 'masculine' behaviours cited were seen as solely masculine by 'Vikings'and how much is later. Here we seem to get a picture that Viking women frequently fought, but that this was coded as masculine.
We can think of analogies here to modern behaviours where it is common to see women doing something, but gendered norms impose a higher cost on them for doing so.
So, we are left with evidence that should (a) challenge our assumptions about norms in practice (b) incorporate women more widely within Viking history.
But what we have no evidence for this woman's self ID, nor least because we are not clear who buried her and why.
But what we have no evidence for this woman's self ID, nor least because we are not clear who buried her and why.
The world also has evidence as to why @glosswitch is a brilliant, succinct, snappy tweeter and author and I have never recovered from a PhD-partly on Viking identity (slipping it in there, despite its meaninglessness).
