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A lot of folks don’t seem to be aware of this, so, gather round for a fun and relevant history lesson: Rome had a trans emperor, one of the earliest recorded trans people in history. Their name was Elagabalus, and they ruled for four years. (Thread!) 
#LGBT
#LGBT
El (to preserve my character count) was a member of the Severan dynasty, the third imperial dynasty and noteworthy itself for being composed of Africans and Middle Easterners (the Roman throne was held by many people we would today recognize as POC)...
El was raised to be a priest in the cult of the Syrian sun god Elagabal, worshipped in the form of a meteor. At the age of 14 their charismatic performance of religious rites attracted the attention of the Roman army, turning them into a local celebrity...
At the time, the Severan dynasty had been interrupted by the assassination of the brutal Caracalla, El’s cousin. Seeing an opportunity, El’s grandmother Julia capitalized on their fame and encouraged the army to revolt, overthrowing Caracalla’s successor and installing El...
A brief pause- Later propaganda would emphasize El’s alleged hedonism, but look at this realistically. They were a teenager given total control of the known world AND told that they were literally a god. What do you think ANY horny teen would do? Party. And so El partied...
El’s official entry into rome was marked by a parade during which the meteor was pulled into the city by a chariot while El danced around it. People thought this was weird but they went with it; El seemed cool, and lacked the violent streak of their predecessors...
What DID weird Rome out was El’s insistence that they were indeed the EMPRESS of Rome, and their demand to find a doctor who could give them female genitals. Indeed, El would insist for the duration of their reign that they should be female. This was 218AD...
To say that Rome didn’t have a vocabulary for this is an understatement. Still, Julia handled a lot of the day to day administration of the Empire, and El himself was a relatively peaceful ruler who acknowledged the role of women in politics. Again, people went with it...
Back to that “horny teenager” thing. Some of El’s favorite pastimes included dressing up like a prostitute and declaring that they were the Queen Prostitute, summoning Rome’s sex workers and asking them why they weren’t making more money. They had a strange sense of humor...
One of the earliest known whoopie cushions is credited to them. They would use it at dinner parties to embarrass stuffy senators. Over time though people began to question some of El’s policies, like replacing those senators with charioteers chosen for the size of their...
Ahem. Eventually El married one of those charioteers, a guy named Hierocles; El referred to them as “my husband” and declared him a Cesar. Amazingly this didn’t piss a lot of people off; by this time, Rome had come to see El as weird but harmless...
What really got their goat was that damn meteor. El demanded the people of rome worship it over Jupiter . El really loved the meteor. Rome did not. Sensing trouble brewing, Julia began plotting her next move...
The details of what happened next are complicated but essentially Julia arranged for El and their mom to be whacked by the Praetorian guard, and Julia installed her other grandson, the possibly developmentally disabled Alexander on the throne. Julia was a gangster...
By this time Rome had had enough of El and chucked their body in the Tibet river. The meteor was returned to Syria unharmed (they were more tolerant of other people’s gods than you would expect, as long as they didn’t have to worship them)...
And so ends the saga of Elagabalus the trans Emperor. Later writers would defame them as a twisted pervert but looking between the lines reveals a more sympathetic picture of a hormonal kid struggling with their identity in a time that didn’t understand what “trans” meant...
This has all been a huge oversimplification but I encourage everyone to seek out more info for themselves, particularly those interested in LGBT+ history. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
