Translations:Gender-variant identities worldwide/87/en

The Enarees were gender-variant priests of the ancient Scythian people. The 5th century Greek medical anthology, "Hippocratic Corpus," said that the Enarees wore women's styles of clothing, used feminine mannerisms in their speech, and did women's work. Pseudo-Hippocrates said the Scythians believe the cause of their femininity is divine, but he theorized that they became so due to injuring their genitals from continous horse riding, and from wearing trousers (which was seen as an odd foreign custom to the toga-wearing Greeks). Archaeologist Ellis Minns (1874 - 1953) said Ovid may be partly right, because bareback horse riding has been known to cause damage to the testicles resulting in loss of the ability to have an erection or ejaculate, even for modern-day riders. Riding injures alone do not account for the femininity of Enarees, which seem to be part of the cross-cultural tradition of cross-dressing shamans.