(Part 11, Season 14): Intersex in the Ancient World

Below is the script for Season 14, episode 2 of my Philosophy Fluency podcast. 

You can listen to this episode here.

🎧 

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Fluency, episode 2 of Season 14. Over cinnamon coffees today, I'll be discussing some fascinating parallels between ancient historical sources, and the plot in Cavendish's play, The Convent of Pleasure. I shall flesh out my interpretation by comparing, contrasting and philosophising about these historical sources. It may be worth pointing out that even if an example isn't necessarily verified as historical, stories still can be relevant. They show that people were aware of things in the past even if they had no personal experience of them.

As promised in my previous episode, I'll discuss the god:

-known to the Ancient Romans as Hermaphroditus;

-otherwise known as Hermaphroditos to the Ancient Greeks. 

Ancient Greeks also referred to the god Aphrodite (as a feminine god) or Aphroditus (as a masculine god), who is sometimes depicted as visibly intersex. Sometimes the names Hermaphroditus and Aphroditus are used interchangeably, but should not be confused with other gods, such as Hermaphroditus' parents, Aphrodite and Hermes, whose names were put together to create the name for their child, Hermaphroditos. 

I mentioned in a previous episode last season, that the Medieval Jewish thinker, Maimonides, mentioned that pagans would crossdress to match the gender of the god they were worshipping. Further to this, it's important to be aware of the fact that people cross dressed for worship in the Classical world too, so Cavendish may have based the petticoat scene in The Convent of Pleasure on Classical times as well, since Ancient Greek and Latin sources were highly popular in her era. It's even more plausible that Cavendish could have come across these sources in one way or another, including through academic conversation.

Briefly put, McDaniel tells us that, and I quote:

"the Roman antiquarian Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, who lived in around the early fifth century CE, in his Saturnalia 3.8.2 records that men made sacrifices to Aphroditos wearing women’s clothing and women made sacrifices to him wearing men’s clothing".¹

This was to honour the intersex nature of their hermaphrodite god, and I quote: 

"Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was usually considered female, but, in the city of Amathos on the island of Kypros, she was worshipped in a male form under the masculine name Aphroditos. In Greek art, Aphroditos is typically portrayed as an androgynous figure; he wears a kind of dress that the Greeks traditionally regarded as feminine, but yet he is lifting up the dress to show" his manly features. "In some depictions, he is also shown with a beard to further emphasize his male aspect."²

Moreover, we can be quite sure that Cavendish had heard of Hermaphroditus because she wrote about how much she admired Ovid and wanted to be a famous writer like him. So it's highly likely that she encountered the story about how Hermaphroditus became intersex. 

The stories of sex ambiguity don't stop at the god Hermaphroditus in Ovid's Metamorphosis either. Ovid also includes the Ancient Greek and Roman myth of Iphis and Ianthe, in which Iphis was born a female, but needed to be brought up identifying as a boy so that her father would let her stay in the family. However, on falling in love with a woman she wants to marry, she prays to the god Luno and then Isis, who transforms her into a man in a dramatic, earth shattering temple scene, so Iphis can have a valid wedding ceremony and be betrothed to her fiancée. And indeed they do marry.³ 

For some scholars, this raises the question about Roman attitudes about lesbian marriages compared to heterosexual marriages.⁴

This reminds me of Cavendish scholars who ask whether 17th century audiences would find the happy ending marriage in The Convent of Pleasure more plausible after one of the lesbians in the couple is deemed to be a man. 

I think such plots function as a social commentary and criticism: why is it that, in societies that don't have gay marriage, the same two people who are in love with each other are allowed to marry or not allowed to marry, simply because of their gender identity, nothing to do with how much they love each other. When you see the political and social situation mapped onto the identical couple, it brings out the absurdity of it, for me. It shows people don't value love which could be why today we see so much hate around. Love is not seen as an important basis for marriage, it's merely about social control, especially the control of women.

Worse still, this is so restrictively within the gender binary, it can exclude clearly intersex individuals, such as Barbin, the famous 19th century intersex person that the French Philosopher Michel Foucault discussed and published about. There are many different interesting scholarly interpretations surrounding the life of Barbin,  although I personally agree with Foucault that Barbin's real life story does teach us a great deal about the political and social abuse of power to control even intersex people into false, binary biological sex categories. 

Nevertheless, for my present purposes of analysing Cavendish's play The Convent of Pleasure, I'll briefly highlight the brilliant French film made in 1985 and directed by René Féretin, depicting Barbin's life, titled Mystère Alexina, translated as The Mystery of Alexina in English. 

In that film, the issue is raised whether Barbin had hoped that she could marry the woman she was in love with, Sara, if she could legally change her gender to male, on providing evidence she's a sufficiently physically masculine intersex person. However, although in the fictional plot in The Convent of Pleasure, the Princess and Lady Happy do manage to validly marry on the strength that the Princess is a man, despite opposition from some people such as the Mediator, Barbin was not so lucky in love and changing sex, and her life ends tragically. Unlike intersex people in the medieval times, Barbin wasn't allowed to choose her gender once she fell in love as an adult in 19th century France. She learnt the shocking truth that society still wouldn't accept her as a man in a heterosexual relationship with a woman but would rather eradicate her all together as an intersex person. It's a very emotional and moving film, one I recommend you all watch.

This week I've narrowed my focus  to intersex themes and storylines in Greek and Roman mythology that appear in Ovid's Metamorphosis and highlighted their relevance to Margaret Cavendish's plot and characters in her play, The Convent of Pleasure. 

Nevertheless, there are also further stories in the ancient world that include intersex people⁵, such as the story of Heraïs who was included in the book 'Library of History', 32.10.2–9, written by the Ancient Greek historian Diodoros Sikeliotes. Although it seems fantastical that this woman suddenly, naturally physically metamorphosed into a man after a period of not feeling well, without any medical intervention, this is not as unrealistic as it sounds. There is a part of the world today where something similar to this happens: in a community in the  Dominican Republic, there is a type of intersex people there they call Guevedoces. Their body is considered to look female at birth so they are assigned female and raised as girls. But at puberty, they naturally acquire male anatomy. If you look at the details of the Ancient Greek story of Heraïs and compare it to the Guevedoces, there are some striking similarities. So I agree with William Hanson⁶, an American Classicist who argued that mythology is inspired by real life stories and sex metamorphoses stories are based heavily on real life intersex people. 

Do join me next Friday. This season of Philosophy Fluency will be published on Fridays. I'm also publishing the scripts on my Cavendish blog (I've provided a link in this episode's description) which also has my first book on Cavendish available to read there too.

So until next Friday, enjoy your weekend, take care and spread kindness and love.

References:

¹McDaniel, Spencer. August 21st 2020 'Transgender and Intersex People in the Ancient World', ‘Favorinus of Arelate Archives’. Tales of Times Forgotten 21 August 2020. 

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/tag/favorinus-of-arelate/.

²Ibid

³Ibid

⁴Ibid

⁵Ibid

⁶Ibid

Bibliography: 

🖊️Ovid's Metamorphosis:

📚 Book IV in which the story of Hermaphroditus, especially: 

Bk IV:317-345 Salmacis falls for Hermaphroditus

Bk IV:346-388 Salmacis and Hermaphroditus merge.

‘Metamorphoses (Kline) 4, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center’. Accessed 19 September 2025. https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph4.htm#478205198.

📚 Book IX

Bk IX:666-713 The birth of Iphis

Bk IX:714-763 Iphis and Ianthe

Bk IX:764-797 Isis transforms Iphis

‘Metamorphoses (Kline) 9, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center’. Accessed 19 September 2025. https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph9.htm.

🖊️You can access Margaret Cavendish's play: The Convent of Pleasure that I discuss in my Philosophy Fluency episodes from the following online source:

📚Cavendish, Margaret (1668) ‘The Convent of Pleasure.’ Last accessed 12 September 2025. 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html

🎥Film: 'Mystère Alexina', 1985

Film production company: Cinéastes Associés, Les and TF1 Films Production

René Féret (Restager, Scenarist, Production manager), Jean Gruault (Scenarist), Anne-Marie Deschamps (Musician), Vuillemin (Actor), Valérie Stroh (Actor), Véronique Silver (Actor)