Bahram Gur Will Ride Again

This week in his inaugural address, our new president declared, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” He implied by his comments that you cannot change one into the other. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is considering a landmark case on whether states can ban transgender operation on children. (Twenty five states have banned them already.)

Many commentators this week said that the remarkable thing was that a president would have to say that. The wonder, they said, is that we are in such a position from the influence of transgenderism that we need a president to clarify male and female.

But the world has not been without this kind of thing before. We should recognize that trans impulses have been present in many times and places. The attempt to master and change gender, as an expression of our power over nature and ourselves, eventually occurs to people where non-Biblical religion prevails.

In the Symposium, for example, Plato systematically downgrades bodily sexuality and sexual distinctions. The true person is the soul. The particular human body divides people rather than relating them to each other. Such a thought, non-Biblical to its core, leads merrily to trans, as it did in some of the Greek myths.

Let’s take another example from far away. If we look to Old Persia, we find this beautiful plate displaying a hunting scene of the Sasanian king Bahram V (who ruled from 420-438AD). This intricately inscribed silver platter from Iran, dated to the fifth century, sits in the collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. It portrays the tale of Bahram Gur and his consort/slave girl, Azadeh, a story surviving in the later Persian epic, Shahnameh.

Azadeh, a favorite of the king and so allowed to accompany him hunting, grows bold and criticizes his vanity. On the silver plate, she is represented in a diminutive (and demeaning) size on the back of his camel. She claimed, if he was really powerful, he wouldn’t just be able to shoot a deer. He could change the animal’s gender. This the powerful Azadeh proceeds to do.

In the above picture, the beautiful plate tells the story from the bottom up around to the right (sorry, the photo I took myself is not professionally lit. You could try enlarging it in a new tab). Azadeh shoots off the antlers from a buck, effectively making it “female.” (Don’t ask me how a bow shot could remove a deer’s antlers, but hey, I wasn’t there.) He then, again using his instrument of choice, shoots arrows into a head of a doe, effectively giving it antlers and so “turning” the doe into a buck. The observer of American culture would be forgiven for recognizing a parallel with today’s gender-imitative surgeries addressed by the new president.

As happens with epics, there are different versions of this tale, some more magical (like, Bahram really does change the sex of the deer or gazelle (looks like the latter on this plate). But they all offer the trans-dream, which is grasping for something.

The trans-dreamers recognize that there must be something or someone beyond the created reality of gender. They are right in that. Gender is a solely creational thing, and a human thing, a consequence of God splaying out His image in space and time. God is above gender, and yet contains its archetype. So He is the only valid gender-fluid One, because He is neither gender and commands them both. Wanting to master gender is a quest to be God.

Such quests do not end well. Christ has made a way for us to be like Him, through our genders. The story of trying to challenge God’s good creation always ends the same way: in destruction. And the Persian tale of Bahram Gur and Azadeh is no exception. After the king performs his marvelous feat, he tramples Azedah to death for questioning his power, that is, power even over gender.

Some stories never get old.