Scots and Britons Book

What to say about this book?

On one hand, it was really interesting. I mean, sex and Elizabethan (broadly Tudor) England? That's fascinating! I thought that Hayes did a good job presenting things in an interesting fashion. I mean, it's an interesting topic on its own. Then, Hayes covered a lot of ground in under 200 pages. He went from concepts to homosexuality to cross dressing to clandestine romances in court. A lot of things, as you can see. Covering broad topics was what Hayes did well.

However...

I have no clue whether the information he presented was accurate. I didn't count how many citations he had per chapter, but in one of them that was the average length of the chapters, he only had thirteen. In most chapters, there's way more than thirteen for even a ten page stretch. He barely cited anything, man. That doesn't work for me. Some of what he wrote, I just wasn't sure if it was opinion or not. Then, when he did cite things, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Why are you citing a question? Is it your question or one that was posed by another author? It just didn't work. At all. I've been taught: When in doubt, cite. Then, when you review things or have someone review it, then you go ahead and take down the citations. But, at first, just cite if you're not sure.

Not only that, but Hayes grievously misused a term. Berdaches. I ranted about it very slightly in a status update, but I'm going to expand on it now. Berdache is a term that Americans, or Westerns in general, created to describe something they saw in Native American culture. Commonly, these people are known as Two Spirits, or are transgender. In Native American culture, they are revered as very spiritual. In one tribe, their creation story (sorry, can't remember the tribe or I would write which one; I want to say Navajo, but I can't remember) it all focused on Two Spirits bridging the dynamics between men and women. In their culture, transgenders created the world. Back to Hayes, though. Two Spirits are transgender, specifically more transsexual if I wanted to narrow it down to a better term. Hayes said they were cross dressers. That they couldn't fill the masculine, warrior role, so they were allowed to dress as women and do women's chores and such. That is absolutely fucking wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it's highly offensive to say that.

If he misused that -- and very badly misused it at that -- what else did he misuse? Sorry, but I can't take a word he said seriously. I'd suggest you skip this and just go to the sources he used. They'd probably have more fact to it than this.