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For the book, see The Female Eunuch.

Female eunuchs (sometimes called eunuchata) are women who have had their ovaries removed or destroyed in their youth and have not had suplementary hormones, similar to a male eunuch who has had his testicles removed or destroyed. Female eunuchs are by far more rare than male ones due to the extremely greater risk of removing the female gonads that are situated inside the body, as opossed to male gonads who are located outside of it within the scrotum. Therefore the existense of female eunuchs before the advent of modern medicine is controversial, but reports of them have existed scantly trought history. Trans men or women who have had complete oophorectomies due to medial reasons in adulthood are not generally considered female eunuchs, and are expected to have further medical treatment to handle any issues related to hormone.

History

There is some debate regarding if the creation of female eunuch would have been something that could have been successful before or even attempted before modern medicine. Since there is not much clarity what exactly is meant when ancient sources mention to female eunuchs much confusion has arisen. One possibility is that it refers to female genital mutilation but there are different interpretations.

Internal surgeries on female patients have on occasion been recorded from ancient times, for example an early example of a hysterectomy is noted from 2000 BC in Egypt to cure uterine prolapse, and the Roman Soranus is credited with being the first known person to perform a vaginal hysterectomy in the 2nd century. None the less the survival rate for hysterectomies before the 20th century were astronomically low, and an intra-abdominal hysterectomy was regarded as near impossible. On the other hand there is evidence to suggest that Jews in ancient Rome successfully practiced Caesarean sections on living mothers who were not in danger of dying. Recollections of these procedures are found in several collections of ancient Roman rabbis. Greeks and Egyptians did not perform C-sections (neither post-mortem or on living mothers), however, the ancient Greeks would have had at least some knowledge of the Caesarian operation and the procedure involved. What implications this has for whether ancient people were more than rarely willing to risk performing gonadectomies on prepubescent females is unknown as Caesarian sections would have all been performed on pubecent females. Cutting up a girls stomack would have likely almost exclusively been done as a last resort effort to save her life if she had some form of aillment located there. Therefore it is widely believed among medical professionals and historians that female eunuchs were only (if ever) created accidentally. It is possible that many women who were designated as "female eunuchs" had been born with

Bornou

India

"The fact of the hedjeras, or castrated females, who have been particularly referred to because their dreadful mutilation"

Medical impact

"This is an operation on women identical with spaying in animals and is a horrible mutilation."

"Why should female eunuchs be less repugnant to our sensibilities than those of the other sex. Let not the noble profession of surgery be dishonored by a mania for using the knife. Let not the itching desire for a little notoriety lead us into the"

"Complete removal of the ovaries (oophorectomy) before puberty causes girls to remain in the neutral or sexually undifferentiated state; i.e., the female secondary sex characteristics fail to develop."

See also

• Female genital mutilation in India
• Eunuchs and LGBT
• History of surgery
• Skoptsy

Further reading

• http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/amcdouga/Hist494_2014/readings/nast_ch2.pdf

Category:Eunuchs Category:Women Category:Mutilation Category:Castration