Eunuch

The earliest records of castration carried out deliberately to produce eunuchs come from the Sumerian city of Lagash in the second millennium before the common era. From there the role spreads very widely and takes on functions that have little in common: courtier, domestic servant, spy, singer, concubine, priest, soldier, royal guard, minister and guardian of a harem.

Where the word eunuch comes from

The Greek eunoûkhos is first attested in a fragment of Hipponax, a sixth-century comic poet with a habit of inventing compounds, describing a glutton who has eaten through his estate on tuna and garlic-honey cheese like a Lampsacene eunuch. The earliest surviving attempt at an etymology is Orion of Thebes' fifth-century Etymologicon, which offers a choice: guarding the bed, from eunē and ekhein, which fits the bedchamber duties eunuchs actually held in the imperial palace, or being good with respect to the mind.

The argument then runs for a thousand years. The emperor Leo VI cited the bed derivation in the constitution by which he banned eunuchs from marrying, on the grounds that the word itself attested to their reputation as guardians of the marriage bed. Nikon of the Black Mountain preferred the well-minded reading and attributed it to the trust foreign rulers placed in eunuchized servants. Theophylact of Ohrid, in a dialogue defending eunuchs, derived it from being well disposed towards the master who held them. Eustathius of Thessalonica proposed deprived of mating. Gerardus Vossius argued in the seventeenth century that the word originally named an office rather than a condition, and came to mean a castrated man because castrated men usually held that office. Ernst Maass settled the modern consensus in a 1925 essay on the side of guardian of the bed.

That history is visible in the Bible in translation. The Vulgate's eunuchs is generally rendered in the Luther and King James versions as officer, official or chamberlain, and modern religious scholars have been reluctant to assume that the courts of Israel and Judah contained castrated men, even though the Greek translation used eunoukhos.

What eunuchs did in the courts

The institutional logic is stated the same way in every account. A eunuch had no offspring and no in-laws, so he was assumed to have no dynasty to build and no faction to serve, which made him trustworthy; and because his condition lowered his standing, he could also be replaced or killed without consequence. The tasks were menial and the position was not: making a bed, carrying a litter, cutting hair or passing on a message meant proximity, and proximity to a ruler is power.

Britannica traces political eunuchs among the advisers of Chinese emperors from the Chou period onwards and through the Han, Tang, Sung and Ming dynasties, with palace eunuchs at times more powerful than the emperor. Persia used them under the Achaemenids, and Claudius, Nero, Vitellius and Titus employed them at Rome, as did most later Byzantine emperors; many patriarchs of Constantinople were eunuchs. In Siam, Indian Muslims from the Coromandel Coast served in the palace, and the Thai court invited Chinese eunuchs to advise on ritual. As a class of political officials, eunuchs disappeared with the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century.

Two further strands sit beside the courts. The Italian practice of castrating boys to keep a soprano voice produced the castrati, and Pope Leo XIII ended it in 1878. Voluntary castration for religious reasons appears in several Christian periods on the authority of a verse in Matthew, the theologian Origen being the case always cited, and the third-century Valesii castrated themselves and their guests in the belief that this served God.

How the word is used without castration

The term has always had a figurative reach. Hippocrates called the Scythians the most eunuchoid of nations on account of their rates of impotence. Latin used spado for impotent men and sometimes for eunuchs as well. There were also impostures: the Chinese eunuch Lao Ai falsified his status to enter the palace, became the lover of the mother of Qin Shi Huang and fathered two sons by her before being executed for rebellion.

Why WPATH added a chapter on eunuchs

In September 2022 the World Professional Association for Transgender Health published the eighth edition of its Standards of Care in the International Journal of Transgender Health, and chapter nine covers eunuchs. It defines eunuch individuals as people assigned male at birth who wish to eliminate masculine physical features, masculine genitals or genital functioning, together with those whose testicles have already been removed or disabled for medical reasons and who identify as eunuch, and it recommends that clinicians consider intervention where withholding it risks self-surgery or surgery by unqualified practitioners.

The reaction in Britain was immediate. NHS Scotland posted a draft on its website in June 2022, before formal publication, and withdrew it after a backlash; Susan Smith of For Women Scotland objected to the health service aligning with an organisation pushing what she called eunuch identity, describing castration as "a barbaric practice which, for centuries, was used to demean and abuse young men and boys". The NHS said the document had been posted in error. LBC reported the episode under the headline that the NHS had apologised for claiming eunuch is a gender identity, and in September the Daily Mail ran the story as a claim by a pro-trans advocacy group that eunuch is a gender.

An essay in Compact argues that the chapter is self-contradictory: the assumption behind transgender care is that a person holds an identity and then seeks treatment to match it, whereas the men on the long-running Eunuch Archive forum, launched in 1998 and carrying more than 200,000 posts across 23,000 threads from over 130,000 registered users, generally describe the reverse, seeking the operation first and constructing an account of themselves afterwards. The essay notes that a 2015 case report in Sexual Medicine filed a self-castration under the heading of male-to-eunuch gender dysphoria although the patient was never reported using either word. The chapter and the objections to it are both a decade newer than the rest of this entry, and neither has settled the question of what the word now names.

How the historical record differs from the modern claim

The distance between the two senses is the reason Transgender and Third gender both sit awkwardly here. A Byzantine chamberlain or a Ming palace official occupied a recognised social position defined by an operation performed on him, generally in childhood and generally by somebody with power over him. The men described in the recent literature are adults seeking a procedure for reasons they are frequently unable to name. What connects the two is the surgery and not the meaning attached to it, and where the older word does survive inside a living category, as in the South Asian Hijra communities that colonial writers assumed were all eunuchs, the fit is inexact there too.