What the Right Gets Wrong About the Ancient History of Gender

The assault on LGBTQ people from right wing Republicans continues unabated. In 2024 alone, 527 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in state legislatures across the U.S. attacking the rights of queer people, and especially transgender people. Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors is one such bill, which has recently been accepted for review by the Supreme Court.

The right claims the mantle of tradition when it comes to sex and gender roles, and all too often, it cloaks messages of exclusion and hate in the language of classical ideals. Conservative politicians, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, portray themselves as fighting back against a sinister new force and upholding the way things have always been. DeSantis has suggested that efforts to let kids know “they can be whatever they want to be” arise from “woke gender ideology.” But the governor is offering a false construction of history. 

In fact, where sexuality is concerned, “woke gender ideology” has a long tradition and history behind it. That’s clear from foundational works by revered thinkers like Plato. A true classical education—which conservatives also claim to venerate—teaches that our origins in gender and sexuality are varied and complex. 

The ancient Greeks were well versed in the spectrum of gender and queerness, often taking up the theme of sexuality with little angst and much wit, insight, and depth. Nowhere is that clearer than in Plato’s Symposium, which was written in the early fourth century BCE in classical Athens.

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In Symposium, the comic playwright Aristophanes tells of a time when there were not just two genders of humans, but three. All people were round like balls and made of two sides: one kind of person was man-man, another was woman-woman and a third was woman-man. They had four legs, four arms and two sets of genitals. They walked via cartwheels, twirling about like acrobats.

These people were happy, but they were also proud and ambitious. They attacked the Olympian gods, seeking to take their place. But Zeus, king of the gods, defeated and then punished them. He cut them in half, creating the two-leggedness we now inhabit. From that point on, each two-legged person sought and longed to find its other half. Desire, or eros, is the name of this longing. 

This is how Aristophanes explains the origin of love. He ends his tale by adding that all people walk through the world wounded and in need of one another—no matter our gender, no matter whom we love. 

The Symposium also portrays Alcibiades, a famous and controversial statesman in Athens, showing how his ardent desire for Socrates gave him a chance (one ultimately squandered) of leading a modest, decent, and virtuous life. 

When Plutarch wrote about Alcibiades several centuries later, he told stories of his many lovers, both men and women, and added that he had a shield made for himself that had not symbols of his high ancestry—as was customary—but rather an image of Eros holding a thunderbolt. This choice revealed that, for Alcibiades, desire was at the core of how he lived, rather than reverence for the heteronormative lines of his family history. The question of whether one desired a man or a woman was immaterial to him, and had Alcibiades managed to stay committed in his erotic feelings toward Socrates, he might have led a less tragic life in the end.

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Plato and Plutarch were not the only thinkers in ancient Greece who explored queer ways of living. Poets, historians, and playwrights often showed different manners of sexuality and identity in their works. Sometimes Greek authors wrote in the mode of pure eroticism, sometimes in terms of profound emotion, and sometimes in the simple sense of lust. The archaic poet Sappho, from the island of Lesbos, showed the vitality of desire for other women, while the playwright Aristophanes (the very one featured in Plato’s Symposium) presented the tragedian Agathon seeking to understand the experience of women by dressing like one.

Ancient Greece was far from being a utopia of tolerance. Its people wrestled with their own biases, strictures, and fears. These included prejudices against women who seemed powerful and against men seen as effeminate. Women who desired men—as opposed to simply being desired themselves—were terrifying, while for a man being an object of desire could mean weakness.

Yet confronting Greek thinking on sexuality reveals that ancient authors grappled with many of the same supposedly “new” forms of being that are so controversial in 2024. They explored a great abundance of forms of love, life, sexuality, and selfhood.

That doesn’t mean that the Ancient Greeks should necessarily guide us in everything when it comes to sexuality and acceptance. It does mean, however, that conservatives are wrong about there being no place in a classical education for discussions of gender, and they’re wrong about “wokeness” being something new and scary. The very period that they often argue ought to guide education exposes that there have long been more than two genders or kinds of people. A widespread sense that desire, curiosity, and openness offered a path to better lives also pervaded Ancient Greek society.

Finally, the history of Ancient Greece offers people in the present the ability to imagine a better, more tolerant future. We can build on the classical tradition to construct a world where anyone can be their truly complex selves. For, if there is one thing the Ancient Greeks can teach us, it is that the erotic and queer are a source of life and a cause for celebration.

Sarah Nooter is the editor and translator of How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality. She is Edward Olson professor of classics at the University of Chicago

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.