Hello and welcome to Queer is Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

My name is Eli.

I'm Alice, and I'm Jasmine.

And today we're talking about the cataric skeleton, the excavated remains of a person buried in 4th century CE Roman Britain,

identified by archaeologists and the press as a transvestite.

Music and the press as a transvestite. I'd like to acknowledge the Banerang-Bunwarang people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional

owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay respects to their elders past

and present. We recognize them as the custodians of an oral

history tradition far older than this podcast. We have some content warnings for this episode.

This episode will contain discussions of transphobia, as well as outdated and insensitive

language, slurs and misgendering directed at trans people in quotes. It will also contain

non-graphic discussions of the exclamation and analysis of

human remains and of castration. So if anything in that sounds like something that you don't

want to listen to, please take care of yourself and give this episode a miss. I also wanted to

make a few notes about terminology before we get started. First of all, I gave a content warning

for misgendering, and that's because all of the sources

that we're going to discuss refer to this person as a man and use he-him pronouns.

I do want to acknowledge that we have no idea how this person was referred to in life,

how they wanted to be referred to, or anything like that.

But it's clear that the sources that refer to them in this way are doing that because

they are viewing this person as a man based on their biology with no consideration given

to a possible alternative.

...