Mick Hartley

Gender ideology can turn your brain to mush – part 63 of a continuing series.

Viking hordes ‘may have been trans’:

Transgender warriors were among the Vikings who ransacked Scotland more than 1,000 years ago, a leading historian believes.

Sacha Coward, who specialises in gender and sexuality, said it would be “a mistake” to believe that Viking society subscribed to traditional gender roles, after recent discoveries suggested that some celebrated warriors were female.

“The stories you hear are of fierce hotblooded warrior men, of violence and pillage,” said Coward. “This notion can make it hard for us to look at the 8th to 11th centuries in Scotland without a strong cisgender and heterosexual bias. It can be a challenge to see the roles of gender non-conforming people, to pull apart the understanding of gender, sex and identity as they really were for the people who we now call Vikings.

“At the very least, men and women in Viking society could break from traditional constructs of male and female roles and it is possible that we are talking about people who would today identify as transgender or nonbinary.”

A 10th-century burial site at Birka in Sweden which was excavated in 1878 had been assumed to belong to a high-status male warrior. In 2017, however, the skeletal remains were confirmed as female.

Neil Price, professor of archaeology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, previously observed that the female Viking may “have been transgender”.

“We know that the gender identity of a person in the Norse period was often tied to their role in Viking society, not just the biology they were born with,” said Coward. “Queer theory is an important part of archaeology and can help us understand the complexity and diversity of past societies.”

Not content with erasing women in the present, they're now erasing women in the past. Any woman who didn't follow the narrow stereotype of staying in the kitchen and the nursery is going to be rebranded as a trans pioneer. Cleopatra? Can there be any doubt? Boadicea (sorry, Boudicca), obviously. Queen Elizabeth…virgin queen indeed! Clearly trans. 

And those writers. It's such an unwomanly thing to do, that kind of intellectual work. We've already had George Eliot and her transgender identification. Why stop there? Scholars have often wondered why Jane Austen never got married. Now, thanks to queer theory, we have our answer.