"Queering" history is basically twisting it to fit the modern queer agenda. One example is the Sumerian Gala, where transgressive gender roles or behavior are taken as proof of transgenderism (I remember when we were told that gender roles weren't irrevocably linked to gender, and men and women could be free of "stereotypes" by adopting different behavior, and no one claimed they were trans):
"4500-year-old Sumerian records tell us of transgender priests to the goddess Inanna called “gala.” She was said to have the power to change men into women. Records also tell us that many gala had wives and children. Trans identities and queer families are as old as civilization."
The bland assertion that gala were transgendered is nonsensical. Behavior that transgresses gender norms does not make one transsexual. Here're what some real sources say on the issue:
"Whereas nearly all the surviving records that serve to document the galli were produced by outsiders to the cult, the texts relating to their counterparts in ancient Mesopotamia are nearly all internal documents- temple records and ritual scripts thatprovide only indirectevidence of the social and personal characterof the individuals mentioned in them. On their own, they do not offer a coherent ethnographicor historical account of Mesopotamian priesthoods. Instead, we must deduce this information from the natureof the functions assigned to them. Nonetheless, when this data is placed alongside the preceding outline of the galli and the hijra (table 1), I believe that several striking parallels again become apparent.
The oldest of these roles is that of the Sumerian gala priest. Originally a specialist in singing lamentations, gala appearin temple records dating back to the middle of the third millennium, typically with female mourners and wailers. In their hymns, they both praised and pleaded with the gods for their goodwill. The expressed purpose of these liturgies, as was the case with nearly all Mesopotamian temple ritual, was to calm the heart of the deity. According to an Old Babylonian text, Enki created the gala specifically to sing "heart-soothinglaments"for the goddess Inanna. Their social status seems to have been variable. While many are referred to as "inferior" gala, an office of chief gala (gala-mah) existed, whose salary equaled that of the highest officials of the city. There may have been families and guilds of professional gala and even female gala. Some engaged in trades and owned land and slaves; other records refer to the sale of a gala who was a poor man's son. Although performing primarily in the temple, sometimes in choirs, gala also sang at private funerals. They typically accompanied their hymns with harp music, although a secondary type of lament employed drums. Both types were sung in a Sumerian dialect known as eme-sal, whose only other use was to renderthe speech of female gods. Gala also seem to have had a role in supervising some of the female personnel (referredto by modern scholars with that pernicious term, "temple prostitutes").
All this suggests that the gala role involved some form of gender transgression. Whether this entailed an ongoing social role and identity or was merely a matter of ritual convention is not clear. Lamentation and wailing, for example, might have been originally female professions later taken over by men. The result was an institutionalized form of gender difference, for the men who performed as gala maintained the female forms of the profession, adapting their gender identity and sexuality accordingly. Homosexuality certainly seems implied in the Sumerian proverb that reads, "When the gala wiped off his ass [he said], 'I must not arouse that which belongs to my mistress [i.e., Inanna].'" In fact, the word "gala" was written using the signs "penis + anus" (GIS.DUR)."
--- Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion / Will Roscoe in History of Religions
"I will look in detail at the characteristics of the Mesopotamian gala priest, who performed laments in the so-called women's dialect of Sumerian, emesal...
The Sumerian galas were only one particularly prominent category of a variety of professionals, both male and female, who were employed in a number of kinds of ritual displays of grief in the service of temples and were called to perform at high-status funerals. Galas are typically grouped with singers and musicians in lexical lists and temple accounts...
On the one hand, the galas were in charge of lamentation, but on the other, they were grouped with other categories of people of an "irregular sexual nature," including the assinnu, the kurgarru, and temple prostitutes. Although they were mocked as catamites, and willingly assuming the passive role in sexual relations was considered to be transgressing the boundaries of accepted masculine behavior, it seems unlikely that they were always homosexual or (primarily) eunuchs in the modern sense of the word. Transsexuals and transvestites were the province of Inanna, who could change men into women and women into men, and the goddess herself exhibited traits of both sexes; furthermore, as we will see, myths about Inanna connect the transgression of gender boundaries to the ability to mourn and raise the dead...
Men were attempting to harness the powers of a well- established type of female verbal art to conciliate the gods, just as they were known to be proficient in conciliating humans, and they turned it to new purposes, as they did with tragic lament in Athens. By co-opting women's powers to meet the needs of the larger community beyond the family, galas promoted the continuity of the larger social unit, politically rather than biologically defined. Thus, gala priests' performances present a particularly apposite comparandum to the performance of fifth-century Athenian tragedy...
The lament slides between first person and third person, and the first person referent can be either the gala priest performing the lament or a character within the story. It is thus partially mimetic and partially breaks the frame of the story it tells, allowing the male performer to assume a female role, enacting the ritual gestures of grief proper to the lamenting woman. The offer by his sister to bring a garment for Dumuzi may allude to preparing him for burial and would therefore match the obligation felt by Antigone toward her dead brother in Sophocles' tragedy...
Just as the gala-tura and the kurgarru transcend their male gender by imitating the feminine mourning of the queen of the Underworld, Inanna herself is able to transcend genders, an ability that should be associated with her return from the Underworld, for two of the barriers that "cannot be crossed" are that of biologically determined gender and that between living and dead: "Inanna-Ishtar shatters the boundaries that differentiate the species: between divine and human, divine and animal, human and animal." Other scholars have noted the connection between transgendering and the ability to mediate between the mundane world and the world of the divine or the dead with respect to Siberian shamans, to whom kurgarrus and assinnus have been compared, and I contend that galas should be included among the number of feminized men who can communicate with the dead and the divine.
The connection between highly emotional, transgendered, transgressive behavior and communicating with dead, angry, or disappeared gods that is made explicit in the Mesopotamian texts supports the theory that cross-dressing and other behavior usually explained simply as carnivalesque were also considered to make the Dionysia as a whole a more effective invocation and propitiation of Dionysus. I turn briefly now to the Dionysiac evidence for gender-bending and otherwise transgressive behavior, to well- known material that we can now look at in a new light. Athenian men did not impersonate women only on the tragic and comic stage. Male celebrants also appeared on the street in drag even as they hoisted large phalloi or wore phalloi during the City Dionysia, engaging in riotous behavior. Dionysus himself dressed in an outfit that was considered feminine and sported the long curly hair of women. He is accused both of being effeminate and of seducing women in Euripides' Bacchae (225, 455-459, 487), and he tricks Pentheus into dressing like a woman, who is then dismembered by his female family members. It is difficult to avoid comparison between the violent and transgressive behavior alluded to in the Bacchae and engaged in by Cybele's galloi, with a procession described in the Sumerian "Iddin-Dagan A" hymn in which humans cross-dress and slash themselves in honor of Inanna, the goddess in charge of transsexuality. Harris has indeed compared the Dionysiac and Mesopotamian rites, focusing on the carnivalesque function of the two cults.
--- Sumerian gala priests and Eastern Mediterranean returning gods: Tragic lamentation in cross-cultural perspective / Mary Bachvarova in Lament. Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond
This is something the breathtaking exultations of non-Western "queerness" miss - the roles they celebrate tend to be marginal. Even if we ignore the Roman galli, the Hijra face a lot of discrimination.
