Gladiator Girls: Transphobia in the Eighteenth Century and Today

Abstract: This article compares eighteenth-century translations of Juvenalian satire about women athletes and the rhetoric surrounding modern female Olympic athletes. Cultural perceptions of women athletes changed dramatically over the eighteenth century as such athletes came to be defined primarily by their femininity, a category that was being made stricter and narrower as gender difference emerged as a coherent ideology in eighteenth-century England. This article posits that eighteenth-century gender ideology is the root of modern transphobia and ends with a call for eighteenth-century studies scholars to examine their own work and sources for unacknowledged biases.