Transing the stone: Seeing urself in art when ur a trans woman
trans femme must sees if ur out and about this autumn
** This piece was orginally written to be published by Oestrogeneration magazine but they removed anything that made me sound remotely working class because it didn’t fit with their ‘journalistic style’ so I pulled it and am putting it out here instead **
I used to work in a sculpture gallery (that shall remain nameless!) and would often end up surrounded by chiselled figures with very cis, very normative bodies which would have me stickin out like a sore thumb. Even walkin round galleries and even at (institutional) queer exhibitions *cough* Queer British Art *cough* where cis het older couples also visiting there will give u such funny looks for being the kind of person the exhibition is about 🙃
I got so tired of not seeing myself in art that I started using my skills and knowledge with art history to look up more ancient art that depicts or could be interpreted as trans and will be interpreted as trans cuz if cis ppl can decide what figures are cis then trans ppl can decide which figures are trans cuz why the hell not.
So pop ur sexy secretary specs on hen cuz we’re gonna investigate 7 artworks and artefacts that show that we have existed for a pretty long damn time 🧐
Neolithic Trans Goddess Doll - Somerset Museum
Let’s kick things off with this wonderful Neolithic Trans Goddess.
Image Credit: The Glastonbury Idol at The World of Stonehenge exhibition. Photo by Kit George Art
I dare u to tell me that is a leg! Go on, I dare u! 😂
This awkwardly shaped carving from around 2500BC was found plonked upside down in the Somerset marshes and no one can quite figure out why, but it definitely wasn’t discarded as it looks like it was placed with purpose.
It show us that neolithic people understood being intersex & trans long before most media seems to think we sprung up out of the ground in 2015 and hadn’t existed before. She was likely a goddess of that local area, probably of water & death/dying as the swamp is a ~liminal space~ and if i was living in 2500BC I’d probs think the swamp was a bit deadly too. She could also have been an ancestor and this could be a form of ancestor worship.
She’s made of Ash which is a material often linked to creation of the first humans by the germanic god Wodin. I’m here for a germanic god being the creator of the tgirls, but it could also be a depiction of Wodin and so Wodin could have been a divine tgirl, God could be a trans woman after all!
We really don’t have much info on her so this really is wide open to interpretation of who she is, but her intersexness and transness are undeniable.
The Figure was recently on display at the British Museum for their The World of Stonehenge exhibition, and is on long term loan to The Museum of Somerset.
Hermaphroditus Cameo - British Museum
Here we have a little sculpted, altho worn away, pendant of the intersex trans goddess Hermaphroditus.
Image Credit: The Trustees of the British Museum
There are several versions of this in the British Museums collection (cuz ofc there are) and this one is a bit clearer but is not the one on display.
Image Credit: The Trustees of the British Museum
There are several different ways Hermaphroditus is depicted and this one fits into the Sleeping Hermaphroditus category. She is intended to look sleepy and seductive, almost beckoning u to join her. This most certainly was spank bank material for the discerning chaser. She is surrounded by the Erotes who were little cherub-like beings, including Eros, and they represented love and ~sexual intercourse~ so this could also have been some way of flagging in a similar way that some homosexualist landed gentry would have rooms full of paintings of Saint Sebastian (cuz what screams gay more than a shirtless, muscular, tortured twink)
The worn away version is on display at the British Museum if u want to see a melted intersex trans woman in miniature.
3. The Gallus of Catterick - The Yorkshire Museum
Image Credit: Gallus of Catterick remains - Photo by Luna Morgana
This one is a personal favourite of mine - The Gallus of Catterick. These are the remains of a Gallus - an ancient trans priestess of Cybele.
She was discovered in 1982 in Catterick, North Yorkshire. Through a combination of testing the remains and studying grave goods and what we know of the history we can tell that she was a trans woman who was likely from the south of the UK and was running the temple to Cybele at the fort at Catterick.
She was unearthed wearing a necklace and a bracelet made of Jet, an arm ring made of Shale, a Copper-alloy anklet as well as shards of a blue-green glass vessel. She also had two small pebbles placed in her mouth, which was a way for a trans woman to de-transition if she chose to in the afterlife.
Her remains and grave goods are on display at The Yorkshire Museum in York. If you would like more information on this then you can get a zine here or get in touch with me.
4. Elagabalus Coin - V&A Museum
Comin in hot at number 4 on our list is a coin with the profile of Elagabalus, the only trans woman to rule the Roman Empire.
Image Credit: Aurelius of Elagabalus. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
While we can never truly know what the gender of someone this long dead is (well, not without a ouija board and the Most Haunted team), we can base this off the evidence we have and she was actively offering half the Roman Empire to anyone who could help her medically transition and she was banning people from court who misgendered her. I think that’s pretty trans.
Image Credit: York Museums Trust
Not only did she suffer terrible character assassinations but she was actually assassinated by a member of her own household guard. When she was a child though she would have spent time in York between 208 and 211 when her granduncle (thank u ancestry dot com guides for helpin me work that relationship out lol) Emperor Septimus Severus moved the entire court to York so he could fail at conquering the Scots.
This coin is on display at the V&A Museum in South Kensington, London. Similar coins can be found at The North Hertfordshire Museum and currently part of The Rydale Hoard exhibit at The Yorkshire Museum.
5. Chevaliere D’Eon portrait - National Portrait Gallery
Chevaliere D’Eon was a 18th Century French intersex trans woman who was also a spy, a soldier, a diplomat, a writer and expert swordmistess.
Image Credit: National Portrait Gallery, London.
This portrait of her is by Thomas Stewart which is actually a copy of one that was painted a year before by Jean-Laurent Mosinier and wasn’t identified or known about until 2012. It was painted in 1792, 18 years before her death at the age of 81 and is one of the few colour portraits we have of her that we know she would have sat for. In the portrait she is wearing the clothes she is usually depicted in as a demure older woman. She bears the Cross of St Louis on her breast which she received along with her knighthood (Chevaliere meaning Knightess) for negotiating peace between France and England in the 7 years war. She is also wearing the rosette of the French revolution so she’s hedging her bets here with wearing both, but at this point the medal was the last status symbol she had left so I don’t blame her trying to remind everyone that she is still a decorated Dragoon Captain, especially as at this point in her life she was still participating in exhibition fencing matches against other Knights and nobles for money.
Her life is so wild and genuinely fascinating and if u want to know more u should check out this project that I lead about her life here, the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds for Leeds 2023.
The painting is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
6. April Ashley portrait
Number 6 is this wonderful portrait of April Ashley, a model, actress and writer who was outed by and hounded by the media in 1962.
April Ashley MBE by Tim Walker. Image Credit: National Museums Liverpool
This is such a beautiful portrait. It’s very reserved but also very glamorous. It feels like a portrait of an 18th Century noble, it’s not unlike this portrait of Chevaliere D’Eon or Marie Antoinette.
Being able to see an older trans woman portrayed in that way and not being vilified or made to look ridiculous (cuz ageism and transphobia is a heady mix from the cis) is breath-taking.
She looks directly at the viewer in a similar way that we see Hermaphroditus doing, but this is different. It’s not sexual, but it is inquisitive. The viewer becomes the person being viewed. Cis ppl are staring at the trans woman and she isn’t afraid to stare back.
This regal portrait is on display at the Museum of Liverpool.
7. Roberta Kelly
I’d struggle to suggest a particular work by Roberta Kelly to view as they are all so damn beautiful! From her bold and often inventive use of colours (she would use whatever she could find like blackberries or sachets of ketchup) to her darker charcoal period. Even in some of her more muted paintings she finds a way to make whites pop by taping off sections of the drawing or painting, forcing us to focus on a river or a one of the many cottagecore vibe houses that can be found being gentrified in Cumbria.
Image Credit: An artistic impression of Roberta Kelly by Kit George Art
She was compulsive in her art, even illustrating letters she sent to friends. After socially transitioning in her 70s she began to change her subjects as well as evolving her style to paint more floral arrangements and domestic scenes than industrial sites and flowing landscapes.
Despite having many famous figures of her day and the aristocracy championing her work, she refused to sell her work and rarely exhibited it. Roberta Kelly died in 1993, poor and in relative obscurity, estranged from her children and other family.
Her work has been shown in retrospectives at Tullie House as well as in London, albeit under her old name, but she still remains a little known artist from the north.
Most of her work exists under her old name due to her estranged family and estate. She lived the last decade of her life as a woman and under the name Roberta Penelope Kelly and requested to be remembered as such.
Her work can be seen on the website here (Content Warning: Deadname) and on display at Tullie House at an upcoming exhibition Nature Inspires, opening 7th October 2022.
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