Criminal by Birth

There’s a peculiar exercise in self-awareness that I find myself returning to occasionally: cataloguing the ways I would have been a criminal — or worse — simply for existing.

I’m not talking about the distant past. I’m talking about my own country, within my own lifetime.

Blasphemy laws weren’t abolished here until 2008 . I was three years old. Gay marriage wasn’t legalised until 2014 — within my own childhood. People I love couldn’t legally marry the person they loved until I was old enough to form memories of it. That’s not ancient history dressed up in a history lesson. That’s childhood. That’s recent enough to feel like a bruise.

I’m queer and Pagan. Both, simultaneously, in a country that spent centuries making both of those things illegal, dangerous, or quietly shameful. The legislation changed. The legislation always changes eventually. What doesn’t evaporate on a specific parliamentary date is the atmosphere that made the legislation feel necessary to those who wrote it. The question I keep returning to — and it sounds almost naive when you say it plainly — is why. Why any of it. Why the laws, why the trials, why the executions, why the centuries of machinery dedicated to policing what consenting adults did in private, or what they believed, or what they were.

Why?

The Monster as Mirror

When I think about how societies have historically handled anyone who didn’t conform — in sexuality, in belief, in behaviour — I keep returning to the witch trials. Not as metaphor. As mechanism.

Take the case of Peter Stumpp , executed in Bedburg in 1589, accused of being a werewolf. The “evidence” was a confession. The confession was extracted under torture so extreme that the accused would have described transforming into a golden teapot if that’s what the interrogators seemed to want. The supposed magic belt — the device that allegedly enabled his transformation — was conveniently never recovered. The details of his crimes escalated throughout the trial not because new evidence emerged but because escalation was what the process required. The worse the monster, the more justified the spectacle of its destruction.

The Stumpp case is not an outlier. It is the template. Accusation, torture, confession, execution. The specific crime — witchcraft, werewolfery, sodomy, heresy — was almost incidental. The function was expulsion. Communities used these trials to eject whoever they needed to eject: the mentally ill, the disabled, the eccentric, the queer, the religiously nonconforming, or simply whoever had made an enemy of the wrong person. The trial gave the expulsion a shape. It made the violence legible, official, righteous.

The monster was always a mirror. It reflected back whatever the community most feared about itself or most needed to externalise.

Scotland was particularly zealous about this . James VI — before he became James I of England — was personally obsessed with witchcraft, contributing directly to the North Berwick trials and later writing Daemonologie , a treatise on the reality of witches and the moral necessity of hunting them. He didn’t preside over those trials reluctantly or at arm’s length. He attended interrogations. He was interested. Pagan, queer, visibly different in any way: any one of those could get you killed in that climate. The combination of all three would have been a death sentence delivered with religious ceremony and a crowd, and the crowd would have felt they were doing something good.

Why? No, Really — Why?

This is the question that sits underneath all of it, and it resists easy answers. Because part of the brain wants to find a logic in it. A misguided logic, certainly — but something. Some coherent worldview that, even if catastrophically wrong, was at least internally consistent. Some fear that, understandable in context, simply found the wrong outlet.

Sometimes you can find it. The werewolf trials, of all things, are probably the most sympathetic case — and I say that with full awareness of how bleak that is. A community in a pre-scientific era, faced with livestock being mutilated or people going missing, reaching for the nearest explanatory framework available. The supernatural was not a fringe belief. It was the dominant epistemology. The fear was real even when the diagnosis was wrong. That’s not good. But it is, at least, legible. It maps onto something recognisably human: the need to name a threat, to give it a face, to do something.

But when you try to apply that same charitable reading to sodomy laws — to the systematic criminalisation of love between people who weren’t hurting anyone — it collapses almost immediately. Why? Not rhetorically. Genuinely: why? What was the fear? What was being protected, and from what? The theological answer is sin, but that just displaces the question: why was this particular configuration of human affection classified as sin in the first place, and why was the appropriate response imprisonment, castration, death? What harm model produces those outcomes? What were they afraid of?

And blasphemy laws.

Why?

The arrogance of it is almost staggering. To believe in the divine — whether you look to the gods of the Greek pantheon or the turning of the seasons — is to understand that the sacred exists entirely outside the jurisdiction of human legislation. A deity does not require parliamentary protection from mockery; the divine doesn't need a politician to defend its honour. The logic evaporates the moment you look directly at it. What the law was actually protecting wasn’t the divine at all. It was the earthly institution that claimed a monopoly on the sacred, and the social power that flowed from that claim. That’s not theology. That’s just politics wearing a mitre.

The cruelty looks like hysteria from the outside. And sometimes it was — genuine moral panic, genuinely contagious fear, communities that had talked themselves into believing the monster was real. But moral panic is rarely spontaneous. Underneath the hysteria there is almost always something colder: the calculated use of fear as a political instrument. Someone benefits from it. It is rarely the person being burned. The peasants lighting the fire may have believed entirely in what they were doing. The authorities who handed them the torch often knew exactly what they were doing, and why.

The Persistence of the Mechanism

What strikes me about the blasphemy law abolition in 2008 is how quiet it was. There was no great cultural reckoning. No national conversation about what it meant that such a law had existed, or what it said about the centuries that preceded its removal. Parliament looked at it, decided it was embarrassing, and removed it — the legislative equivalent of quietly binning something before a guest arrives. The thing itself was gone. The reasoning that had sustained it for so long was never really interrogated.

The underlying architecture that produced the law didn’t go anywhere. The impulse to mandate belief, to treat religious nonconformity as a civic threat, to make the interior lives of citizens subject to the approval of the state — that doesn’t dissolve with a parliamentary vote. It recedes. It waits. It finds new language. The specific target changes but the mechanism remains: identify the deviant, name the threat they pose, perform the elimination. The performance is the point as much as the outcome. It tells everyone watching where the boundary is.

The same is true of every form of state-enforced conformity. It was never framed as cruelty by those enforcing it. It was framed as protection. Protection of the natural order. Of the soul. Of the social fabric. Of the children — always the children, in every era, the children are invoked. The violence was the point, dressed in pastoral care. The cruelty wasn’t incidental to the process. It was load-bearing. Remove the cruelty and the deterrence collapses. Remove the deterrence and you can no longer define the boundary. Remove the boundary and the system loses its ability to tell people what they are and aren’t allowed to be.

That’s what the laws were always actually doing. Not protecting. Defining. Enforcing a shape onto human variety that human variety persistently refuses to hold.

The Body as Evidence

There is another layer to this catalogue that I haven’t addressed yet, and it is perhaps the most viscerally strange to sit with: the question of what would have happened to me not because of what I believed or who I loved, but because of what my body and brain simply are.

I have hydrocephalus, scoliosis, cerebral palsy, and — though I carry no official diagnosis as yet — almost certainly autism. In the present day these are diagnoses, or reasonable working hypotheses: words that unlock support, treatment, accommodation, understanding. In the pre-modern world they were something else entirely. They were evidence. Of what, exactly, depended on the era and the interpreter, but the answers were rarely kind.

Start with the hydrocephalus. The condition was recognised as far back as Hippocrates, who described fluid accumulation around the brain in macrocephalic children , though the term itself wasn’t formalised until the Roman physician Celsus, writing between 25 BC and 50 AD. The ancient world at least recognised it as a physical phenomenon. What followed was centuries of surgical attempts so dangerous they were barely distinguishable from the condition itself. As a historical review published in Neurosurgical Review documents , effective treatment was impossible without aseptic technique and an understanding of cerebrospinal fluid physiology — knowledge unavailable before the late nineteenth century. The earliest documented attempt at draining cranial fluid dates to the tenth century, performed by the Arab physician Al-Zahrawi, but without sterile conditions surgery was a near-certain death sentence rather than a cure. The NHS notes that hydrocephalus, untreated, is fatal . The shunt keeping me alive was not invented until around 1960. In the 1580s, I would not have made it past early childhood. The question of what else they would have done to me is largely moot — the hydrocephalus would have closed the case before the other charges could be brought.

But hypothetically — if I had somehow survived — the scoliosis would have been next. The most instructive English case is Richard III, whose skeleton was excavated from beneath a Leicester car park in 2012 and confirmed by the University of Leicester to show adolescent idiopathic scoliosis with a curvature in the range of 70–90°, causing visible shoulder asymmetry . Research published jointly by the University of Leicester, University of Cambridge, and University Hospitals of Leicester established that his condition, while noticeable, was less disabling than Shakespeare made it — he could fight, ride, and was described by contemporaries as physically capable. That was the ceiling for the most powerful man in England. For everyone else, a curved spine was lived with, or not, depending on severity. There was no surgery worth the name. There was no corrective brace. There was stigma, and there was Shakespeare’s template for what a crooked spine meant about a person’s soul.

The cerebral palsy and the suspected autism present a different, darker problem. Not death — at least not straightforwardly — but interpretation.

The condition we now call cerebral palsy has no name in the pre-modern record because it wasn’t named until the nineteenth century. The English surgeon William John Little — a Londoner, founder of what became the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital — was the first to formally describe the link between difficult birth and spastic motor disability , in a series of lectures delivered at his London hospital beginning in 1843. Before Little’s work, what we now recognise as CP existed in the historical record only as fragments — mentions in chronicles, representations in art, the occasional autopsy note. The Roman Emperor Claudius is among those retrospectively suspected of having had the condition , based on contemporary descriptions of his gait, tremor, and speech. He survived. He became emperor. He was also mocked relentlessly from childhood, excluded from public duties by his own family who found him an embarrassment, and widely assumed to be mentally deficient. That was the historical ceiling available to someone with CP: survival with contempt, provided your family was powerful enough and patient enough to sustain you.

For what I suspect is autism — still unconfirmed for me in formal terms, though the pattern is hard to read any other way — the historical record is bleaker still, because the mechanism of harm was not contempt but classification. Across British, Celtic, Norse, and Germanic traditions, the changeling myth held that a child who developed differently — who failed to respond normally, who was echolaliac, uncommunicative, socially strange, or distressed by sensory input — had been swapped by supernatural beings for the real child. This was not a metaphor. It was an explanatory framework with practical consequences. A paper published in 2005 in the Archives of Disease in Childhood — Evidence for Autism in Folklore? by Leask, Leask, and Silove — proposed that these stories reflected pre-scientific recognition of neurodevelopmental difference; that what the stories called a changeling, we would now call an autistic child. The changeling myth was especially strong in the British Isles, documented across Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In Scottish folklore, children taken by the fairies might be left as substitutes for the tithe to Hell. The implication for the child identified as a changeling was not benign. Martin Luther, who believed in changelings, described such a child as a piece of flesh without a human soul — which made any abuse, including infanticide, theologically permissible. The Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, adopted as canon across both Catholic and Protestant traditions, framed developmentally disabled children as born of witchcraft or demonic intervention . The child was not seen as ill. The child was seen as a punishment, or a replacement, or evidence of the parents’ sin.

So: in the 1580s, my body would have been read as a document. A child with an enlarged head, a curved spine, spastic movements, and behaviour that failed to conform to expected patterns of sociality and communication. The most charitable interpretation would have been that I was cursed, or that my mother had sinned, or that something had gone wrong at birth and I was a pitiable defective. The less charitable interpretations are not worth enumerating at length. What they share is the assumption that the problem was legible — that the body was communicating something, and that something was my unworthiness to exist as I was.

Why? Again: why. What does it cost anyone that my head is the shape it is, or that my spine curves, or that my brain processes movement and social information differently from the statistical norm? What harm? What threat? The answer, of course, is none — but that was never really the question being asked. The question was whether I fit. And the machinery of pre-modern medicine, like the machinery of pre-modern law, was not designed to accommodate difference. It was designed to explain it, and the explanations were almost always punitive.

A Speculative Aside

Here’s a thought I keep turning over: if lycanthropy were real — if it were a genuine biological phenomenon — how would history have treated it?

Probably one of two ways, depending on the mechanism. If it were genetic, distributed throughout the human population at low frequency the way many traits are, the parallel with homosexuality is almost exact. Present in every culture, in every era, impossible to breed out despite centuries of trying. It would have been pathologised, “treated,” subjected to the same cycles of persecution, uneasy tolerance, and periodic moral panic. People would have confessed to it under torture whether or not it was true, because that’s what the process produced. The trait itself is beside the point. What matters is whether you fit the available category of deviant, and in any given era, someone was filling that category whether they deserved it or not.

If it were more like a discrete separate lineage — actual biological others living alongside humans — survival would have demanded isolation. You don’t persist for centuries by integrating into a society that burns what it doesn’t understand. You get folklore either way. But there’s a meaningful difference between being the monster in the story and being the neighbour people have quietly decided to be suspicious of. The former requires you to be spectacular. The latter just requires you to be present and slightly strange.

In either case, Stumpp was almost certainly just a man. Whatever he was — mentally ill, eccentric, a victim of someone’s grudge, simply unlucky — the werewolf was the story built around him after the fact, scaffolded on pain.

And here’s the darkest irony of the speculative angle: if lycanthropy were real, and were demonstrably useful — stronger soldiers, better hunters, whatever military or economic advantage you care to imagine — the church and crown wouldn’t have burned them. They’d have employed them. The same logic that drove persecution drove domestication. You’re only a monster until someone in power decides you’re an asset. Then you’re a weapon with a leash. History is full of this pattern: the stigmatised suddenly becoming valuable when the right context emerges, the threat reclassified as resource without any of the underlying reality changing. The person stays the same. The label does all the work.

What 18 Years Means

The legislation that criminalised parts of my identity was removed before I was old enough to understand what it had meant. I grew up in the gap between the old laws and whatever we’re building now. That gap is not the same as safety, and it’s not the same as acceptance, but it is — measurably, historically — better than what came before. I’m aware enough of history to know that this is not guaranteed to hold. The mechanisms don’t disappear. They wait.

I think about the 1580s sometimes. Queer, Pagan, born prematurely, probably neurodivergent before that was a word anyone used with any precision. I would not have survived infancy. If I had, I would not have survived to adulthood with any of myself intact. The choice would have been conformity or death, and even conformity wasn’t always enough — you could perform orthodoxy perfectly and still be denounced by a neighbour who wanted your land.

The distance between that and now is not nothing. Eighteen years of changed law feels like nothing until you hold it against four hundred years of the alternative. Then it feels like a sprint.

The question I can’t fully answer — the one that sits underneath the whole exercise — is still why. Why did it take so long. Why the specific cruelties. Why the investment in controlling things that caused no harm. I can describe the mechanisms. I can trace the politics. I can identify who benefited. But somewhere underneath the analysis there’s still just a bewildered, angry why that doesn’t fully resolve. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe that’s the appropriate response to finding out that the world spent centuries trying to make people like you impossible.

We are, collectively, still figuring out whether the sprint is still happening or whether we’ve decided to stop.