The Beginning of Intolerance

 

The beginnings of anything have always fascinated me!.

This certainly is a major contributor.

 

It is rare to be able to trace a sociological/cultural attitude to its beginning. The attitude of intolerance toward gender variant people can probably be traced to one book Physologus. This was probably based in part on the Epistle of Barnabas (now considered aprociphal)

This was a collection of anecdotes about animals, some more or less accurate others wildly fanciful-in which a Christian moral was extracted from various aspects of animal behavior.

Physologus, known as the Bestiary, was first published in about the first century AD in Greek and quickly translated into Latin. The popularity of this work gave rise to dozens of different versions differing widely. In the Middle Ages it made it made it into almost every medieval language from Icelandic to Arabic and virtually every romance language. This work was onthe top 10 of all time, its influence extending in to the present time.

I am going to include two Quotes one from Barnabas one from Physologus.  

The Epistle of Barnabas

[Moses Said] You shall not eat the hare [Lev. 11:6] The rabbit, though it chews the cud, does not have a split hoof; it is unclean for you. Why So that, he said you may not become child molesters or be made like these. For the hare grows a new anal opening each year, so that however many years he has lived, he has that many anuses?

Nor should you eat the hyena, he said, so that you may not become an adulterer or a seducer, or like them. Why? Because this animal changes its gender annually and is one year a male and the next a female, And he also rightly despised the weasel [cf. Lev.  I: 29]. "`Of the animals that move about on the ground, these are unclean for you: the weasel, the rat, any kind of great lizard, You shall not, he said, become as these, who we hear commit uncleanness with their mouths, nor shall you be joined to those women who have committed illicit acts orally with the unclean. For this animal conceives through its mouth.  

Moses did not, of course, attribute these bizarre characteristics to the animals in question, nor did he in fact even prohibit the eating of the hyena, but few early Christians knew the text of Leviticus well enough to recognize the distortion!  

  The hyena is not specifically mentioned in Leviticus. In Deut. 14:8 the word used in the Septuagint to express the prohibition against eating pork resembles the word for "hyena", and the two are etymologically related. The hyena is somewhat hard to sex, the genitalia being similar between male and female.  

Whether or not they were partly derived from Barnabas or Clement, early Greek and Latin versions of the Physiologus made exactly the same fanciful connection between the colorful legends about animal sexuality and Mosaic Law.  

The law says, "You shall not eat the weasel or anything like it."  The Physiologus has written of it that it has this trait: the female  receives from the male in her mouth, becomes pregnant, and gives birth  Through her ears.  The law says, "You shall not eat the hyena or  anything like it." The Physiologus has written of it that it is male- female;  that is, at one time male and at another female. It is therefore  an unclean animal, because of this sex change. This is why Jeremiah says;

 "Never will the den of the hyena be my inheritance." You must not, therefore, become like the hyena, taking first the male and then the female nature; these, he says, the holy Apostle reproached when he spoke of "men with men doing that which is unseemly."  

Prior to the Christian era generally there was great tolerance for gender variant people. And in other cultures tolerance was the rule e.g. The Berdache in the New World.

I am aware of attributing such a vast change in attitude to one source, but this was at least a major contributor to a change. This work was so ubiquitous that it, like advertising told people something so many times that even though it was not true, was believed. In the interest of space I will not quote much later sources and their references to the "Bestiary".Suffice it to say this work had a huge impact and we are still suffering

from it!