Transness as a Metaphor for Corruption

This is an adapted and expanded version of a talk delivered at an academic conference earlier this year. As such, you may notice some changes in tone or formality from my usual article tone. I paid to travel to the conference out of my own pocket (plane ticket + hotel + food), so please consider contributing to continue supporting my work.

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Lili Elbe by Gerda Wegener (1928)

In the contemporary American zeitgeist, transgender people are once again being framed as bad for the state of the nation. Francis Ford Coppola’s recent film Megalopolis draws direct comparisons between the fall of Rome and contemporary American politics, and chooses as its villain Clodio Plucher, a cross-dressing populist demagogue. Mildly more grounded, President Trump announced he would be stopping wasteful government spending, such as the supposed “$8 million for making mice transgender.” The new White House Anti-Terrorism Strategy has included in its list of terrorist groups the “radically pro-transgender”.[1] As Sebastian Barr points out, the new OMB rules conflate “transness with a rejection of ‘basic American values’.” The new OMB rules state that “Ending government-sponsored promotion of divisive gender ideology is critical to […] trust in government”. There appears to be a direct attempt to symbolically link the existence of trans people, and/or their increased access to human rights with the woes of the American nation state. These are not isolated comparisons, nor are they new to the second Trump administration. These comparisons have been a central argument of the now mainstream alt-right for at least a decade. They are so established that explanation is no longer needed. As far back as 2022 Charlie Kirk was able to claim that “there’s a direct connection to inflation and the trans issue” without any clear connection between the topics.[2]

I would suggest to you that an underlying rhetoric exists which frames transness as a transmissible moral sickness which produces or is produced by corruption. In contemporary rhetorics previous iterations of these rhetorics are evoked to further the impact of the contemporary one. For instance, pundits like Dennis Prager and Tucker Carlson frequently make the claim that perceived gender defying decadence, not brutal economic war reparations, was what caused the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the resulting rise of the Nazi state. These claims are so well understood by their audience that Carlson can simply open a segment about drag queens with the phrase “Another day in the Weimar Republic”.[3] This is hardly new. As early as 1987, in The Closing of the American Mind, the closeted homosexual[4] Straussian[5], Allan Bloom argued that “the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.”[6] Bloom made the connection to gender-traversing abundantly clear, “And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music.”[7] Bloom believed that America had accidently ‘imported’ German ideas, and that these ideas were leading to the destruction of American life. In this right-wing fantasy, America is both Nazi Germany and the Weimar Republic concurrently.[8] As leading conservative figures, this rhetorically functions to justify fascist-adjacent policies ironically while also positioning them as necessary to prevent fascism. Because of this self-awareness and mobilization of past rhetorics it is worthwhile to undertake a detailed tracing of these metaphors via close readings and archival research.

This article is then part of an ongoing project[9] in which I am examining three distinct eras of political and philosophic discourse regarding transgender women’s metaphorical relationship to the health of the state. These three areas are the ancient Mediterranean world, early 20^th century France and Germany, and the present-day American state. Today, I am going to try and provide a quick theoretical overview, followed by examples from Ancient Rome and Nazi Germany. I am only interested in works that mobilize accounts of transsexual embodiment towards arguments about the health of the state.

I want to be clear, I am not claiming that trans people are more common or even more permitted during these periods. To do so would be to lend the right-wing claim that I am trying dispel some level of credence. It would also be false. There have been people who crossed gender boundaries throughout history, and for the majority of that history, they have either been regarded as oddities, or the societies in which they emerged found roles and terms for them that allowed them to be rendered as legible and therefore legitimate members of that society. Throughout the ancient world we find examples of religious positions which were only open to those who were willing to break gender norms (sometimes undergoing surgery to do so). We also have plenty of examples of societies in which the desire for sex variant roles surpassed the actual supply of people who longed to traverse sex. For instance, we cannot assume that many, if any, of the castrati had what we would recognize as trans desire. Likewise, the bureaucratic eunuchs of early-modern China had little say in their castration. These societies wanted sex-traversing individuals to fulfill what to them were socially necessary roles. Thus, it is preposterous to claim that the existence of people who traverse sex and gender roles is indicative of societal failure. However, it is worth noting that when societies that do not have a pre-established role for gender traversing people are in ill health (so to speak), transness is often used as a metaphor for that failure.

By metaphor, I am invoking Susan Sontag’s meaning of the term, “saying a thing is or is like something-it-is-not”.[10] Sontag argued that comparing a polity “to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable”.[11] She also claimed in her study of disease metaphors that the “classical formulations which analogize a political disorder to an illness […] presuppose the classical […] idea of balance. Illness comes from imbalance. Treatment is aimed at restoring the right balance—in political terms, the right hierarchy.”[12] Mary Douglas similarly held that “many ideas about sexual dangers” are best “interpreted as symbols of the relation between parts of society, as mirroring designs of hierarchy or symmetry which apply in the larger social system” often with “two sexes” serving “as a model for the collaboration and distinctiveness of social units.”[13] She went on to claim that “ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.”[14] For Douglas the “body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.”[15] Yet Neither Sontag nor Douglas looked at examples of transness.

In her monograph Trans/Rad/Fem Talia Bhatt applies the thought of the radical feminist movement to transgender issues from a transgender perspective. In doing so she approaches heterosexuality as a regime intertwined with economic and state structure, recalling Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic In Women”. Bhatt argues that transmisogyny (the unique form of transphobia aimed at trans women) is justified because trans women are viewed by said regime as treasonous, as former men with “actual and legitimate identification with the occupied, the exploited” female class.[16] This treason then is viewed as an “existential threat” to the regime.[17] I do not intend to follow this avenue of inquiry, however, I believe Bhatt is correct in her impulse to examine the view of those within the state or possessing a vested interest in it towards transgender women.

In Robert Sparling’s Political Corruption, he argues that corruption discourse is a form of political morality, indeed, a “political teleology” that “hangs on the presupposition that there is a type of healthy regime and officeholder.”[18] He later expands this to include good citizens, at least within republics and democracies.[19] The book argues that “a political metaphor of sickness, dissolution, and dirtiness orders the political imaginary”.[20] It concludes that “political corruption is fundamentally a moral question about the healthiest and most integral manners for human beings to structure their shared lives” appears most commonly during “moments of blurred boundaries”.[21] However, Sparling never integrates discussions of homosexuality, gender, or what we today somewhat anachronistically would call transgender desire. This connection is also shockingly missing from Foucault’s work, who certainly touches on these subjects. However, Foucault’s interest in transparency and illegalism does not extend to the rhetoric of transness. Eli Erlick’s dissertation, “Disrespectability Politics,” examines the policing of contemporary trans activists through a Foucauldian lens but does not approach the question of transness as corruption.[22] Additionally, Tai Davidson Bajandas, has begun work looking at the cotemporary pseudoscience of the social contagion theory of transness as a metaphor of sickness. However, this work does not examine political corruption, nor does it have a historical focus.[23]

Despite this lack of existing scholarship, there appears to be close ties between rhetorics of transness and political corruption. For instance, Cassius Dio’s account of Emperor Elagabalus is widely identified as an account of what we today would call trans femininity. Dio first introduces the topic in relation to marriage, writing that “he both married and was bestowed in marriage; for he appeared both as man and as woman, and in both relations conducted himself in most licentious fashion”.[24] A few pages later, in relation to Elagabalus’ adult circumcision brought about by his following of a new god, Dio informs us that “He had planned, indeed, to cut off his genitals altogether, but that desire was prompted solely by his effeminacy”.[25] In relation to his relationships with women we are told that “he had not any need for them himself, but simply that he wanted to imitate their actions when he should lie with his lovers.”[26] Additionally, Dio claims that “He would go to the taverns by night, wearing a wig, and there ply the trade of a female huckster.”[27] Supposedly, upon meeting a new lover named Aurelius Zoticus, Elagabalus cried out “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady”.[28] Lastly, We are told that “he asked the physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body by means of an incision”.[29]

However, there’s a problem with this account. It might be fake or exaggerated. As Zachary Herz puts it, “Traditional paradigms of imperial legitimacy were collapsing in Elagabalus’ period, but those of normative and polluted manhood were not, and they allowed Rome’s senatorial elite to preserve their position within a changing world.”[30] As consequence, the “idea of a harmonious relationship between genders” became very important during this period.[31] Indeed in “the visual arts the harmony between men and women [became] of particular interest, putting emphasis on the proper gender roles”.[32] Dio, a conservative senator, highly concerned with Elagabalus’ religious reforms and taboo breaking (such as marrying a vestal virgin) may have been adding or exaggerating Elagabalus’s trans femininity as a metaphor for the corruption of the body politic he represented to Dio. Indeed, a central reading of Dio’s history is that it carries an “implicit argument that emperors should follow meritocratic appointment norms”.[33] In a competing history, the Historia Augusta, Elagabalus is still feminine, but the transness is less clear cut. There he is recorded as mutilating “his penis,” keeping himself hairless like a woman, “putting on “lewd pantomimes in which he is anally penetrated” and sending “agents to scour Rome for well-hung sexual partners.[34] This is all to reinforce the idea that the senate should have listened to Marcrinus’ letter warning them that Elagabalus “was mad”.[35]

Thankfully, it is not up to us to determine the truth of the matter. What is important is that both the Historia Augusta and Cassius Dio are interested in using Elagabalus’s relative gender transgressions as proofs of madness, as sickness, and thus as arguments against his broader reforms, such as the religious changes, that rendered Elagabalus an Eastern cultist corrupting the political structure and norms of Rome. Dio Charges him with having “drifted into all the most shameful, lawless, and cruel practices, with the result that some of them, never before known in Rome, came to have the authority of tradition”.[36]

Let us look now at Nazi Germany. Here we have the problem that the Nazi regime made little to no distinction between homosexuality and transness. Indeed, in 1935 they revised the penal code so that homosexuality was legally “Any act of sexual indecency” instead of merely “acts resembling intercourse”.[37] It is then difficult in most cases to tell what is being pictured. Yet we can perhaps get by this by looking purely at clear-cut instances or when the act is sufficient in the eyes of the Nazi to render the person trans. It is then telling that SS-Untersturmführer professor Eckhardt in his article “Sexually Indecent Abominations against Nature Are Punishable by Death” relies on the Roman historian Tacitus to tell us that “effeminacy and pollution must be buried”.[38] Eckhardt tells us that sacrifices of men were allowed to the goddess Freya as long as they were “effeminate men” who “allowed themselves to be sexually used as women”.[39] It is worth noting Eckhardt suggests that “The degenerates are offered as sacrifices so as not to provoke the anger of the gods in response to racial treason.”[40] Here homosexual effeminacy is portrayed as a sickness, something that must be buried, and also that this burying might have a purifying purpose. In a speech to SS Group Leaders about homosexuality, Himmler evokes plague imagery, insisting that “our volk will fall to ruin as the result of this scourge”. Eckhardt echoes this language when he warns of “the scourge of racial annihilation presented by the degenerate profile of the homosexual”.[41] Hermann Ferdinand Voss argued in his 1938 book Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus that trans people were disabled with an asocial mind that caused them to be poor citizens, so prone to criminality that draconian treatment was justified to prevent their existence and reproduction.[42] Indeed during this period trans people were excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft, that is, they were not considered good citizens, part of the nation. Effeminacy and transness were signs that the German volk were sick, that the nation needed healing. Indeed, Herman Goring held up exposure to German art, culture, and land as a means to heal homosexuality.[43] The idea was to heal the volk via the volk. Male effeminacy was a sign of a sick volk, but one that could be cured via good volk. This was the more tolerant view. As Eckhardt has already made clear, the other option was to purify through murder.

The point I’ve been attempting to make here is that the current American interest in trans lives during the Roman and Nazi periods has far less to do with any actual upsurge in the appearance of trans people in history, than it does with those being memories of culturally significant political collapse. Likewise, it is worth noting that the Nazi period was attentive to the Roman period. These case studies have referenced their previous iterations, but these references have been selective. Instead of looking at instances of high levels of transness or sex-traversing in history (which have been plentiful and rarely concurrent with political collapse) they have looked at instances of political collapse and read into them a social collapse. This itself is a dangerous conflation of the social with the political. It is to view social and personal norms as centrally indicative of the ‘health’ of politics. Other than for the sake of metaphor, there is no reason to make this leap. There have been thousands of different social structures over the millenniums. Some have centered trans lives, some have denied them. Some, like Sparta, have centered homosexuality. Others, like the Americans, have deemphasized it and focused on creating and stabilizing the nuclear family. Yet, within the chain of history that conservative Americans feel most connected to, that coming from Ancient Greece through Ancient Rome, through Christendom to Modern Europe, the moments of societal fracture have been moments of patriarchal paranoia, in which effeminacy, sex and gender traversing have come to play metaphorically central roles. These people have viewed what we today call transness as a sickness or madness indicative of a greater sickness of the nation. These views have emerged at moments of political unrest. And they have attempted to justify murder as purification. We must be careful to separate the emergences of these rhetorics during times of political crisis from their own rhetorical claim that transness increases in commonality during these periods.

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[1] Jacob Ogles, “White House puts trans rights groups in counterterrorism crosshairs,” The Advocate, May 7, 2026, https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/transgender-activists-terrorism-threat.

[2] Patricia McKnight, “Charlie Kirk Connects Transgender Issues with Inflation,” Newsweek, April 14, 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-nationwide-trans-issues-are-connected-high-inflation-1698165.

[3] “Tucker Carlson Praises Self-Described “Christian Fascist” Mob for Harassing Gay People,” The Humanist Report, June 10, 2022, video, 12:38,

.

[4] And AIDS victim.

[5] As in a student and devote of Leo Strauss, the mid-century philosophic father of the neo-conservative movement, and arguably a cult leader. For a deeper read on him, I highly highly recommend reading Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire by Anne Norton.

[6] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Touchstone: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 147.

[7] Ibid, 75.

[8] Bloom believed that the hippies and other midcentury progressives were secretly under the sway of Nazi thought patterns: “The radical students of the sixties called themselves “the movement,” unaware that this was also the language used by young Nazis in the thirties and was the name of a Nazi journal. Die Bewegung.” Ibid, 221.

[9] This is essentially what I intend to study if I decide to do a post-doc, which, if you’ve been following my issues in academia over this past year, looks increasingly unlikely.

[10] Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and its Metaphors (Picador, 2025), 93.

[11] Ibid, 94.

[12] Ibid, 76.

[13] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (Routledge, 2002), 4.

[14] Ibid, 5.

[15] Ibid, 142.

[16] Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem: Essays on Transfeminism (self-published, 2025), 47.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Robert Sparling, Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), xii.

[19] Ibid, 44-45.

[20] Ibid, xi.

[21] Ibid, 191.

[22] Eli Erlick, “Disrespectability Politics,” (dissertation, UC Santa Cruz, 2025), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sm617xx.

[23] Tai Davidson Bajandas, “White Womanhood Must Be Defended” (presentation, Lesbian Lives, New York City, October 24, 2025).

[24] Cassius Dio, Roman History Books 71-80, trans. Earnest Cary, (Loeb Classical Library, 1927), 449-451.

[25] Ibid, 457.

[26] Ibid, 463.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid, 469.

[29] Ibid, 471.

[30] Zachary Herz, “How to Do the History of Elagabalus,” in The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory, eds. Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim and Kirk Ormand (Routledge 2023), 410.

[31] Jussi Rantala, “‘Call Me not Lord for I am a Lady’ – Emperor Elagabalus and the Problem of Gender for Cassius Dio,” in Language and the Scientific Imagination: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), 28 July - 2 August 2008, eds. Giacomo Bottà and Marja Härmänmaa (University of Helsinki, 2010), 7.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Herz, 416.

[34] Ibid, 412.

[35] Dio, 421.

[36] Ibid, 443.

[37] Heinrich Himmler, “On Homosexuality and Abortion,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman (University of California Press, 2017), 375.

[38] Karl August Eckhardt, “Sexually Indecent Abominations against Nature are Punishable by Death,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman (University of California Press, 2017), 377.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid, 380.

[42] Laurie Marhoefer, “Transgender Life and Persecution Under the Nazi State: Gutachten on the Vollbrecht Case,” Central European History 56, no. 1 (2023): 598.

[43] Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman, “The German Soul and Psyche,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman (University of California Press, 2017), 382.