A museum in Britain has decided that a Roman Emperor was actually transgender and has decided to change his pronouns in their displays.
I’m not sure this was the wisest move on their part, not only because the idea is rather silly, but because the emperor in question is widely regarded as one of the very worst that Rome ever had, and that is saying something.
đź”´ Roman Emperor was trans, Hertfordshire museum declares
The ill-fated Elagabalus will now be referred to as ‘she’, although experts say a transgender category did not exist in ancient Rome ⬇ https://t.co/b1S8KFYTcP
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) November 20, 2023
The decision is a bit perplexing, until you realize that the move was sparked by Stonewall, a radical alphabet ideology group in Great Britain that regularly pushes the boundaries of reality beyond recognition.
The Emperor in question is Elagabalus, who ruled Rome from 218AD until his assassination, aged 18, in 222AD. He was installed by the corrupt Praetorian guard, which by that time was the real power behind the throne, and assassinated when he proved too bizarre a person to be useful to them.
A Roman emperor has been declared transgender by a UK museum, The Telegraph can reveal.
The North Hertfordshire Museum has said it will be “sensitive” to the purported pronoun preferences of the third century AD ruler Elagabalus. The emperor will be treated as a transgender woman and referred to as she.
Elagabalus has been given female pronouns on the basis of classical texts that claim the emperor asked to be called “lady”, but some historians believe these accounts may simply have been a Roman attempt at character assassination.
Information on museum policy states that pronouns used in displays will be those “the individual in question might have used themselves” or whatever pronoun “in retrospect, is appropriate”.
This is quite the retcon–exporting contemporary standards and attitudes to a time almost 2000 years in the past in order to satisfy the ideological whims of modern extremists.
Very on brand, actually.
So who was Elagabalus? Is this museum finding a sympathetic figure to represent transgender people?
Chances are you have never heard of him because he wasn’t exactly Augustus. More like a cut-rate Caligula without even the historical impact or ancestry of his similarly crazy fellow emperor.
Elagabalus was a Syrian Arab teen, elevated to the throne after a revolt displaced his predecessor. Known primarily for his incompetence and sexual deviancy, he also violated Roman religious traditions, displacing Jupiter (the King of the Roman Gods) with his own chosen God for whom he was a priest.
Elagabalus (his name derives from the God he worshipped) was sexually omnivorous, although his tendencies were primarily heterosexual. He was married six times, including to one Vestal Virgin (a big no-no). He was utterly uninterested in governing.
His behavior estranged the Praetorian Guard, the Senate and the common people alike. Amidst growing opposition, at just 18 years of age he was assassinated and replaced by his cousin Severus Alexander in March 222. The assassination plot against Elagabalus was devised by Julia Maesa and carried out by disaffected members of the Praetorian Guard.
Elagabalus developed a reputation among his contemporaries for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry and sexual promiscuity. This tradition has persisted; among writers of the early modern age he endured one of the worst reputations among Roman emperors. Edward Gibbon, notably, wrote that Elagabalus “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury”. According to Barthold Georg Niebuhr, “the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others” because of his “unspeakably disgusting life”. An example of a modern historian’s assessment is Adrian Goldsworthy’s: “Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but he was an incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had.”
All this begs the question: Why, if you want to generate positive interest in the idea that transgender people as a feature of history and as able to be examples for us all, would you choose such a disgusting and incompetent fool to represent transgender people in history?
After all, it’s not like they couldn’t choose just about anybody to retcon–until yesterday nobody thought to label Elagabalus transgender, and nobody even cared about him in the least. If you wanted to talk about perverted Roman emperors you had Caligula, in great emperors you had Augustus or Marcus Aurelius. Why choose a complete nonentity?
My guess? They knew nobody would bother to check, and if people did they could show that Elagabalus could be portrayed as a victim of trans-genocide. The third option may be the most plausible: the people of Stonewall actually admire the sexual and moral deviancy of the man. After all, these people don’t mind being associated with furries.
Whatever the reason, the absurdity of this exercise is emblematic of the ridiculous extremes to which alphabet ideologists will go in order to elevate their own insanity.
Westerners embraced homosexuals once they realized that most simply wanted to be included in our own cultural traditions. What the alphabet ideologists took away from this is that literally anything goes. Gay people becoming bourgeoise is hardly the same thing as a movement dedicated to destroying bourgeoise values.
One is a positive development, the other simply reminds us that the Roman Empire sealed its doom by abandoning traditional Roman virtues.
Read the full article here
