The Galli and the Question of Gender

Cybele's priesthood at Rome, the galli, were castrated men who lived and dressed in ways that departed sharply from ordinary Roman gender categories, wearing women's clothing and jewellery, letting their hair grow long, and undergoing a rite of self castration understood as an imitation of Attis's own act in the myth central to the goddess's cult. Roman citizens were for a long period of the cult's history legally barred from becoming galli, a restriction that marks how uneasily the role sat within Roman categories even as the goddess herself received full state sponsorship, and the priesthood was instead filled largely by men from the eastern provinces where the cult originated.

Modern scholarship has increasingly discussed the galli as evidence that a category outside the ordinary Roman male or female existed and was religiously institutionalized rather than simply tolerated at the margins, while being careful not to read modern categories of gender identity directly onto an ancient religious role whose own participants left little first person testimony about how they understood themselves. Roman satirical writers, including Juvenal, mocked the galli freely, which is a further reminder that most surviving description of them comes from outsiders looking on with a mixture of fascination and contempt rather than from anything approaching the priesthood's own voice.