My thanks to Caroline Mullan for pointing me to this article on the BBC website. It is reporting on the results of a DNA study by the Museum of London on human remains dating back to the founding of the city by the Romans some 2000 years ago.

By the time of the Roman conquest of Britain, the Roman Empire already stretched all the way around the Mediterranean. It included Egypt, Carthage and other African countries. The racial make-up of the soldiery, and of the slave community, was highly diverse. The people who built London, therefore, were anything but monochrome white.

And that’s not all. One of the skeletons studied, the so-called Harper Road Woman, was very unusual indeed. She was a native Briton, but although her bone structure clearly showed a female body she had a Y chromosome. This suggests that she had an intersex condition, probably Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Given the time in which she lived, she would not have known this. She would just have wondered why the gods had cursed her with infertility.

There’s another great story for my history of gender variant people.