Text
(Possible English pronunciation: Caeneus = “kye-nyoos”)
From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 12, trans. McCarter
⁂
Caeneus was once a person named Caenis
who was walking down the beach
and was raped by Poseidon.
Afterward Poseidon said,
You may have one boon,
what do you wish?
Replied the person formerly known as Caenis,
what you have done is so horrible
I never want it to be possible again
And,
make me a man.
And maybe those two things were related
and maybe they weren’t.
But Poseidon did so,
and threw in invulnerable skin for free too.
Caenis changed his name to Caeneus
and at first he was happy because
fuck yeah,
he’d been trying to save up for surgery,
but it felt impossible.
Plus, ancient Greek doctors
hadn’t quite perfected anesthesia,
so it would’ve been fucking agony.
And now here he was,
a man
no biweekly shots or scars or anything.
But it also fucking sucked because, yeah,
he’d been raped.
And he really hadn’t processed that yet
and was in fact trying
very hard not to.
Also, the invulnerable skin,
which he hadn’t even asked for,
turned out to be a fucking bummer too.
Because to have,
like,
a good relationship with your own brand new body,
or meaningful relationships with anyone else
and their body,
you’ve got to be—surprise!—
vulnerable!
And feeling vulnerable in an invulnerable body
felt
like
shit.
It felt like his insides were trying to turn inside out
any time anyone touched him.
Even people he really cared about.
People he wanted to touch him.
It felt like his thigh muscles had been replaced with
overtight lyre strings
and every touch just made them want to snap.
It felt like bugs crawling up and down his insides
that he could never let out.
He felt like a fucking alien.
Who even has these problems?
Why can't he just, like, be chill about it?
The rape happened fucking years ago
and the impenetrable skin thing could be cool, right?
He could, I don’t know,
go fight for the greater good or something.
Do something cool and productive instead of
moping around.
Anyway so he went around like this
having kind of a bad time
but also having kind of a good time,
because being trans is cool
and now he had a dick and no tits and stuff.
So he went around having kind of a good time/
kind of a bad time
or maybe just having a regular time
and then suddenly there he was
at a battle against the centaurs.
How’d he even get there? Who knows,
but he’s there
and he’s killed a bunch of centaurs already.
Originally this was someone’s wedding,
but now everyone’s fighting.
A centaur tried to rape the bride,
and then a bunch of other centaurs saw that
and just started snatching women up left and right.
Caeneus is trying not to think too hard about that.
Or maybe he is thinking too hard about it
and that's why he's been on such a killing spree.
Anyway, then one centaur named Laetreus
who somehow knows his deadname
comes up to him and says,
Caenis! You’re a fucking woman
and you always will be!
The only reason you’re this half-man now
is because you got raped!
Get back in the kitchen where you belong
and leave war to men!
While Laetreus is busy ranting,
Caeneus throws a spear at him,
gouges the centaur right below his belly button,
along the seam where human and horse combine.
It’s a very cool shot
but it just pisses off Laetreus even more.
Laetreus tries to stab Caeneus with his spear
but nothing happens.
The blow rebounds off Caeneus’ impenetrable skin
like hail off a rooftop–
so Ovid says.
So Laetreus tries a different tack
and instead slashes at Caeneus’ groin.
But his sword slams into Caeneus’ marble cock
and shatters.
At this point,
maybe if Caeneus was a different person
he’d think about how
centaurs are seen as half-men
like he is seen as half a man:
community lost before it even got started—
but he doesn’t think about that.
Caeneus says something snide like
suck it transphobe
and just fucking guts him.
The end of the story is this:
Eventually the rest of the transphobic centaurs
realize Caeneus is invulnerable to weapons,
and decide to bury him under trees
until he can’t move.
This strategy works dismayingly well;
at first Caeneus is gasping and wriggling to get out
but eventually he goes still
under a mountain of uprooted trees.
Some people think he was pushed all the way to Tartarus.
Virgil, that prick, says that in Tartarus
Caeneus got transformed back into a woman
probably by a weird terf.
But Mopsus, who was actually at the battle,
says he saw a gold bird fly out of the pile of trees,
circle once,
and then fly away. He greeted it,
Hail Caeneus! The greatest man once
—now a matchless bird!
The End