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Gender-variant identities worldwide: Difference between revisions

Added context and sources about oestrogen medication.
imported>Sekhet
(Added a section about Enarees in Scythian culture.)
imported>Sekhet
(Added context and sources about oestrogen medication.)
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In her PhD thesis about trans history and spirituality, trans woman Helen Savage noted another way that the importance of horses in Scythian culture may have led to the Enarees' discovery of another method of gender transition: "The Roman poet Ovid, who was exiled to the borders of the Scythian steppe in the first century BC, provides a tantalising hint of the practice there of drinking mare's urine, a substance so high in oestrogens that it is still used as the source of a proprietary drug, 'premarin', widely used still for hormone replacement therapy -- and to feminise male-to-female transsexuals."<ref name="enarees savage 74">Helen Savage. (2006) "Changing sex? : transsexuality and Christian theology." Doctoral thesis, Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3364/</ref> The Enarees may have practiced the world's earliest-known hormone therapy for trans-feminine people. They may also have used ancient herbal knowledge for transition. Present-day intersex trans man and shaman Raven Kaldera notes that the Enarees "ate a lot of licorice root - so popular among them that the Greeks to whom they exported it referred to it as 'the Scythian root' - which is also an anti-androgen."<ref name="enarees kaldera">Raven Kaldera. "Ergi: The Way of the Third." ''Northern-Tradition Shamanism.'' https://web.archive.org/web/20130501152328/http://www.northernshamanism.org/shamanic-techniques/gender-sexuality/ergi-the-way-of-the-third.html</ref>  
In her PhD thesis about trans history and spirituality, trans woman Helen Savage noted another way that the importance of horses in Scythian culture may have led to the Enarees' discovery of another method of gender transition: "The Roman poet Ovid, who was exiled to the borders of the Scythian steppe in the first century BC, provides a tantalising hint of the practice there of drinking mare's urine, a substance so high in oestrogens that it is still used as the source of a proprietary drug, 'premarin', widely used still for hormone replacement therapy -- and to feminise male-to-female transsexuals."<ref name="enarees savage 74">Helen Savage. (2006) "Changing sex? : transsexuality and Christian theology." Doctoral thesis, Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3364/</ref> The Enarees may have practiced the world's earliest-known hormone therapy for trans-feminine people. The practice of using mare's urine for oestrogen therapy was lost for hundreds of years, until being independently discovered by scientists in the 1930s CE.<ref name="SchachterMarrian1938">{{cite journal|last1=Schachter|first1=B.|last2=Marrian|first2=G. F.|title=The isolation of estrone sulfate from the urine of pregnant mares|journal=Journal of Biological Chemistry|volume=126|year=1938|pages=663–669}}</ref> This discovery was developed into Premarin in the 1940s, the first commercial oestrogen replacement drug in Western medicine,<ref name=MDD>Jim Kling  October 2000 [http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/mdd/v03/i08/html/kling.html The Strange Case of Premarin] Modern Drug Discovery (3):8 46–52</ref> and still one of the most widely used today. The Enarees may also have used their herbal knowledge to influence their hormone balance. Present-day intersex trans man and shaman Raven Kaldera notes that the Enarees "ate a lot of licorice root - so popular among them that the Greeks to whom they exported it referred to it as 'the Scythian root' - which is also an anti-androgen."<ref name="enarees kaldera">Raven Kaldera. "Ergi: The Way of the Third." ''Northern-Tradition Shamanism.'' https://web.archive.org/web/20130501152328/http://www.northernshamanism.org/shamanic-techniques/gender-sexuality/ergi-the-way-of-the-third.html</ref> Between all these treatments, the Enarees could have had the most medically advanced physical transition in the ancient world.


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==See also== <!--T:149-->
==See also== <!--T:149-->
*[[Nonbinary gender outside of the transgender community]]
*[[Nonbinary gender outside of the transgender community]]
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