The story behind a "10 Things" story - Transgender Mummy

shanaeden was suggesting that we write the stories behind a couple of the 10 Things we listed. I'm going to write the story of one that I should have listed (probably in place of the TA one, which is relatively boring.)

So...

I have seen a mummy's face. A transgender mummy's face, even.

Where I grew up, there is a museum. I didn't know at the time how unusual it was to have a town museum, much less a fairly comprehensive one. And this was pretty damned impressively comprehensive for a small museum. The upper floor was an art gallery, the right lower floor was anthropology with artifacts from all over time and the world, and the left lower floor covered natural history from dinosaurs on up.

In the anthro part, there was an Egyptian room. Flanked by a pair of black stone lionesses that I named when I was very little (I don't remember their "names" now) it had a reproduction of the Rosetta Stone, a reproduction of King Tut's chair, cases of assorted minor artifacts (including a mummified cat).

And, in the center of the floor, a mummy. The mummy was still in the lower half of its sarcophagus (the lid was held up over it on props) and its feet and face were unwrapped. It took a brave kid to go look at it; I had a couple of friends who wouldn't even go in that room.

I looked at it all the time. Gross but cool. On the other hand, one of the first letters I learned was "s" because the S volume of our home encyclopedias was where I could see the picture of the skeleton. (I was a pretty forensic kinda kid. I would have been a goth, except that there were no such things as goths in suburban Pennsylvania in the 70s. Closest I could get was announcing that I'd only write in black ink and reading a lot of Hans Holzer. But I digress.)

Anyway, in that town there is also a hospital, and in fairly close proximity to the museum. Every time the hospital got a new medical toy - an X-ray, a cat scanner, an MRI machine, etc., the mummy would get shipped off for another look.

As a consequence, the explanation card for said mummy changed three times during my youth. I think it's back to being female now; in its interesting posthumous career it has been a housewife, a policeman, and a scribe of dubious gender.

So, I have seen the face of the amazing transgender mummy.

Latest Reviews

Two new reviews up at Reviewing the Evidence (link to the right) - Total Silence and Now You See Her.