There's a revisionist article on Nero in today's Guardian. (linked in the comments.) Some knowledgeable sounding people disagreeing in the comments below it. What are the facts?

Yes, I read it and was unconvinced. The article fails to mention Nero's last wife anywhere and the simple mention of this person lays bare the fact that Nero was and will always be in my opinion a nasty piece of work.

Suetonius and Cassius Dio agree that Sporus was a young boy who Nero grew very unsettlingly attracted to and began to believe his dead wife Sabina had been resurrected in this boy. With this belief he ordered his surgeons to conduct a gender change on the boy to make him his wife. He was called Sporus afterwards, which means "to seed" as in to ejaculate. A joke on the boys castration. Nero paraded his "wife" in front of the jeering crowds of Rome until he lost power and fled.

Sporus abandoned Nero when the emperor demanded Sporus kill themselves along with him. Some people have claimed the existence of this person was further propaganda against Nero, but Sporus continued to interact with several of Nero's successors, marrying 2 as Sabina. The 2nd husband Otho had already been married to the original Sabina before forced to divorce her for Nero, which lends itself to the story of a striking resemblance. Unfortunately Sporus killed themselves in shame before Vitellius could have them executed in an act of public humiliation.

I did come across a theory in Matthew Dennison's Twelve Caesars that proposed Sporus was a relation of the Imperial family and a relative of Neros previous wife Sabina due to their much reported similarities. So this boy may have been in actuality a possible rival for the Imperial throne. This was then theorised to be a tyrannical act of emasculating and dominating a rival.

So the article and historian fails to mention Sporus and their turbulent history with Nero leaving me very sceptical of this revisionism.