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 picks up functions with almost nothing in common: courtier, domestic servant, spy, castrato singer, concubine, religious specialist, soldier, royal guard, government official, 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 and a prolific inventor of compound words, describing a lover of fine food who had consumed his estate dining every day on tuna and garlic-honey cheese paté "like a Lampsacene eunoukhos". No source used for this entry fixes a year for the fragment.

The oldest surviving attempt at an etymology is the Etymologicon of Orion of Thebes, from the fifth century of the common era, and it offers a choice rather than an answer. Either to tēn eunēn ekhein, guarding the bed, inferred from the bedchamber duties eunuchs held in the imperial palace, or to eu tou nou ekhein, being good with respect to the mind, which Orion explains by their being deprived of intercourse, the sort of thing older writers called mindless. Liddell and Scott lists the second as a well-established Greek idiom and does not list the first under eunē at all, which is the standing objection to the reading that eventually won.

The argument then runs for more than a thousand years, and each participant reads the word to fit the case he is making. The Byzantine emperor Leo VI cited the bed derivation in the constitution by which he banned eunuchs from marrying, holding that the word itself attested to their reputation as trustworthy guardians of the marriage bed. The eleventh-century monk Nikon of the Black Mountain took the other option, from eunoein, well-minded, putting it down to the trust suspicious foreign rulers placed in eunuchized servants. Eustathius of Thessalonica, late in the twelfth century, proposed eunis and okheuein, deprived of mating. The seventeenth-century theologian Gerardus Vossius argued that the word had named an office rather than a condition, and had come to mean a castrated man because castrated men were the usual holders of that office. Ernst Maass closed the modern argument in an influential 1925 essay, setting Eustathius aside and endorsing guardian of the bed.

That thousand-year uncertainty is visible in the Bible in translation. Where the Latin Vulgate has eunuchs, the Luther and King James versions generally give officer, official or chamberlain, and modern religious scholars have been reluctant to assume that the courts of Israel and Judah held 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 private dynasty to build and no faction to serve, which made him trustworthy. Because his condition lowered his social standing, he could also be replaced or killed without repercussion. The tasks were menial and the position was not: making a bed, cutting a ruler's hair or carrying his litter all meant proximity, and proximity to a ruler converts into power.

Wikipedia puts eunuchs in China from about four thousand years ago, as imperial servants by three thousand years ago and as common civil servants by the Qin dynasty, and records that Chinese castration removed the penis along with the testicles, both cut off with a knife at once. The Thai court thought well enough of Chinese eunuchs to invite them to advise on court ritual.

Why the castrati are a separate story

Two strands sit beside the courts and neither is administrative. The Italian practice of castrating boys to keep a soprano voice into adult life produced the castrati, and Pope Leo XIII ended it in 1878. Britannica keeps it apart from the court eunuch because the purpose was musical, though the coercion is the same.

The other strand is the only part of the record that is reliably chosen. Voluntary castration to avoid sexual sin appears in several Christian periods on the authority of Matthew 19:12 and 5:28 to 30, and the theologian Origen, who lived from about AD 185 to about 254, is the example always cited. The third-century Valesii, a Christian sect of eunuchs, castrated themselves and their guests in the belief that they were serving God.

How the word is used without castration

The figurative reach is old. Hippocrates called the Scythians the most eunuchoid of all nations on account of their rates of impotence, and Latin used spado for impotent men and sometimes for eunuchs as well. Merriam-Webster's third sense of the noun, one that lacks virility or power, keeps that going, with political eunuchs as its illustration, and the dictionary also carries the derived noun eunuchism.

There were impostures, too. The Chinese eunuch Lao Ai falsified his status to get into the palace, became the lover of the mother of Qin Shi Huang and fathered two sons by her, before all three were executed for joining a rebellion against her son.

Merriam-Webster's example bank shows what the word does in ordinary modern prose, and it is mostly history and mostly television. Cai Lun, a second-century eunuch of the Eastern Han court, appears in it as the developer of paper, and the Mughal courts appear with the note that these eunuchs were enslaved and were key members of the court all the same. Two sentences concern hijras: the boundaries between eunuchs and hijras were porous at times, and hijras presented themselves as female or third gender and were more marginal than eunuchs in Mughal society. A third records that ancient authors used many words for such people, among them hermaphrodite, eunuch, Androgyne, tribad and malthakos.

Why WPATH added a chapter on eunuchs

In September 2022 the International Journal of Transgender Health published the eighth edition of the Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, compiled for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an organisation formed in the 1970s. Chapter nine, the shortest of the new sections, 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. It closes by recommending that providers consider intervention where withholding treatment carries a high risk of self-surgery or surgery by unqualified practitioners.

The reaction in Britain was immediate. NHS Scotland posted an advance draft in June 2022, before formal publication, and withdrew it after a backlash, saying it had been posted in error. Susan Smith of For Women Scotland objected to the health service aligning with an organisation pushing eunuch identity, calling castration "a barbaric practice which, for centuries, was used to demean and abuse young men and boys". LBC ran the episode under the headline that the NHS had apologised for claiming eunuch is a gender identity, and in September the Daily Mail headlined it as a claim that eunuch is a gender.

An essay in Compact calls the chapter vague and self-contradictory, on the grounds that it reasons by analogy from transgender care. The chapter says eunuchs may seek castration to align their bodies with their gender identity, and says in the next paragraph that eunuch individuals identify their gender in various ways. The essay's counter-evidence is the Eunuch Archive forum, launched in 1998 and carrying more than 200,000 posts across 23,000 threads from over 130,000 registered users, whose members describe wanting the operation first and constructing an account of themselves afterwards. It 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, and it records that a long 2018 thread on the forum found no consistency at all in how eunuchs place themselves in a gender scheme.

How the historical record differs from the modern claim

The distance between the two senses is why Transgender and Third gender both sit awkwardly against this word. A Byzantine chamberlain or a Ming palace official held a recognised social position defined by an operation done to him, generally in childhood and generally by somebody with power over him. The men in the recent literature are adults seeking a procedure, and the documents describing them disagree about whether an identity precedes it.