Transgender Roman Emperor /Empress Elagabalus (204-222)
Elagabalus (204-222)
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Elagabalus (204-222)
Rated as the 2nd worst Roman Emperor after Caligula, Elagabalus (204-222) a young successor to Marcus Aurelius was a transvestite.
Historically recorded as hedonistic and regularly cross-dressed.
Elagabalus was dragged away with his mother by soldiers and murdered at the tender age of 18.
It is possible Elagabalus had ‘sex-change’ surgery as Roman doctors at this time became very skilled in cosmetic surgery. This would have made Elagabalus the first and only ever Roman Empress!
The idea that plastic surgery is a new skill for transsexuals is untrue.
Claudius Galen (131-201 AD) was a Greek physician who went to Rome and revived the ideas of Hippocrates and other Greek doctors. He studied at the famous Egyptian medical school of Alexandria.
At the age of 28, Galen became the surgeon to a school of gladiators but in 161 AD he moved to Rome and remained in the city until his death, aged 70.
His contribution to medicine and expert surgical techniques learnt from treating the horrific injuries the gladiators suffered enabled him to possess surgical skills few others could match, it is interesting that this still applies and war offered expertise almost 2000 years later to Sir Harold Gillies, internationally renowned as the father of modern plastic surgery, who played a pioneering wartime role in Britain developing pedicle flap surgery. Gillies later performed surgery on the United Kingdom’s first male-to-female transsexual – Roberta Cowell.