Hi. To what extent did sex change exist in the ancient world?
I have seen a few sources claim that the goddess Inanna was worshiped by male priests who took female names and possibly took physical steps to change their bodies. Other examples exist, such as the galli priests of Kybele in Phrygia, who castrated themselves. What I would like to know is whether these people, or others, were seen as actually changing their sex from male to female or something else, and if so, to what extent this change too place. If the sex the person changed to is not either male or female, please explain what it was and how it was seen as different from either male or female. I think there are three different spheres in which this change could occur, but please give whatever answer you think is best.
Ritual: A priest may have been physically male and had a normal male social role, but in a sacred context, behaved with a female or non-male role.
Social: A person may have the normal social role of someone of the other gender, or may have a distinct social role, and be permanently seen in society as occupying a different gender role than they were born with.
Physical: They may have practiced castration, or perhaps taken drugs such as horse urine (If ancient people drinking horse urine for the estrogen is real, please confirm this. I hear this occasionally and it's hard to believe).
I picked the priesthood of Inanna as a specific example, but please use any culture or time period before modern medicine if you think it best answers the question. Thanks.
I can’t speak for Sumer, but I can speak for one city in Late Bronze Age Syria, called Emar.
At Emar, we have a number of texts which deal with inheritance, a particularly important part of that community’s social life as there seems to have been a strong tradition of communal governance and involvement (Dan Fleming has been arguing this since 2004, and as far as I know plans to corroborate it in an upcoming publication). Part of this communal involvement involved the maintenance of a domestic cult, which signified the existence of a patriarchal family and ensured its participation in local affairs.
Because of how important inheritance was to participation in local politics, there were a number of legal means through which a person could decide how their “estate” as we would call it would be inherited; if a son was considered a disappointment he could be disinherited, and an adopted son could inherit. Likewise, and more pertinent for your question, it was not unusual for a person who openly displayed feminine characteristics and identified as female to inherit; but to do so, legally, she had to be adopted “as a son,” in order to maintain the family. This is most often done with the phrase, “anumma PERSONAL NAME martiya ana sinništi u zikari aškunši,” which translates to “I announce PERSONAL NAME, my daughter, as both female and male.” What this shows is that gender was fluid in a legal sphere, and the need to uphold family identity took precedence over the gender of those involved, though a male gender was always associated with inheritance. (The texts described here are presented in both van der Toorn 1995 and 2018, as well as Tsukimoto 1991.)
We cannot know whether or not this legal instance represented a socially accepted “gender change,” as we see often today, or if this gender identity change was desired by the people involved. The instinct of most scholars, myself included, seems to be that the practice of adopting a woman as “both male and female” was purely legal and did not then reflect on the person’s social gender identity; legally they were considered male so that the family could continue to thrive and be present in the community, since tradition indicated an individual legally identified as a male was needed in this case. We have to assume that these people did somehow participate in situations where they were needed as representatives of their family, and thus, to a certain extent, people around them had to identify them in some respects as male, but there is no firm evidence saying this.