Eunuch

Eunuch names a castrated man. In several societies it named considerably more than that: a distinct position with its own dress, its own career ladder, its own legal standing, and — on the reading most influential in the scholarship — its own gender.

One fact separates this entry from every other in the index and should be stated before anything else. Almost every historical eunuch was made, not self-described. Boys were bought, captured or handed over by their families and castrated for the roles they would fill. This is a category of gender in the descriptive sense that societies treated eunuchs as neither men nor women and organised their lives accordingly; it is not an identity anyone claimed. The small contemporary group who do claim it are a separate phenomenon, treated below.

Definition & scope

The strongest scholarly case for reading eunuchs as a gender rather than as damaged men is Kathryn Ringrose's. In The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, she treats Byzantine eunuchs between roughly 600 and 1100 as a distinct gender, arguing that their position outside procreation and inheritance was precisely what qualified them to mediate across social and spiritual boundaries that ordinary men and women could not cross.

Two confusions are worth clearing at once. Eunuchs are not intersex people: intersex names variation in sex characteristics present from birth, while castration is a surgical event imposed afterwards. And eunuchs are not hijra. Eunuch was the English word used for hijra in colonial Indian administration and law, and it stuck for a century, but most hijra are not castrated and hijra is a living identity with its own community structures; the translation was an error with legal consequences.

History & origins

• Antiquity onward, China: eunuchs serve at court for some three thousand years, becoming regular civil servants by the Qin dynasty and, in several periods, more powerful than the emperors they served.
• 6th century, Byzantium: eunuchs are organised as a separate administrative hierarchy; the general Narses is the most conspicuous example, and eunuchs hold the patriarchate of Constantinople repeatedly.
• 1574: the Ottoman office of kizlar ağası, chief black eunuch, is created under Murad III with Habeshi Mehmed Agha as its first holder. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the holder ranks third in the state, behind only the grand vizier and the shaykh al-Islām, and controls the endowments of Mecca and Medina.
• 1878: Pope Leo XIII ends the Italian practice of employing castrati; Alessandro Moreschi, the last of the Sistine Chapel choir, died in 1922.
• 1908: the Ottoman office is abolished after the Young Turk Revolution.
• 1912: the Chinese imperial system ends. Sun Yaoting, castrated at eight in 1911 and later an attendant to the Empress Wanrong, died in Beijing on 17 December 1996 at the age of 93 — the last imperial eunuch of a line reaching back two millennia.

In practice

The institutional logic was consistent across empires that had no contact with one another. A eunuch could not found a dynasty, could not divert an inheritance to sons, and had no kin network with a competing claim on his loyalty, which made him the ideal holder of positions close to a ruler's person, treasury or household. The same logic explains why eunuchs so often accumulated the very power the arrangement was meant to contain: proximity to the ruler was itself the resource.

Castration was also imposed for other ends. The Russian Skoptsy, an eighteenth-century sect, practised it as a renunciation of the flesh, and European choirs produced castrati by castrating boys for their voices — the one use of the practice that was purely aesthetic, and the last to be abandoned.

Psychology

The contemporary literature concerns a different population entirely: men who seek castration voluntarily, in the absence of any medical indication. The principal study is Johnson, Brett, Roberts and Wassersug's 2007 survey in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which recruited 135 voluntarily castrated men through an online archive and reported that most identify as male rather than as trans women, while many describe themselves as occupying an alternate, non-male and non-female gender space. The authors proposed "male-to-eunuch" as a transgender identity in its own right — a proposal that remains contested in the same literature.

No diagnostic category covers the identity as such. The DSM-5 addresses distress rather than identity, and the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019.

Prevalence & culture

How common is eunuch identity?

As an institution it is extinct, and the date is unusually precise: the death of Sun Yaoting in December 1996 closed the last living link to imperial service.

As a contemporary identity it is very rare and has never been counted. The Johnson et al. study recruited 135 respondents from a self-selected online population, which establishes that the group exists and something about its composition, but nothing about its size. Deriving a figure means bounding it from above: the Williams Institute estimates 2.1 million transgender adults in the United States, about 0.8%, and self-identified eunuchs are a small fraction of one percent of that group by every indication in the literature. That places the figure near 0.001% of adults — roughly one person in a hundred thousand — with low confidence and a wide margin.

Culturally the word has outlived the institution by a wide margin, mostly as a metaphor for powerlessness — which is close to the opposite of what eunuchs were for. The Ottoman chief eunuch outranked all but two men in the empire, and Chinese court eunuchs repeatedly governed in fact if not in name.