The Eunuch as Infrastructure

(or: what societies kept building instead of fixing themselves)

When we talk about eunuchs, we usually talk about meaning.
Symbol. Trauma. Otherness. Gender disruption. Sexual absence.

What we talk about far less is function.

Historically, eunuchs were not created because societies were philosophically curious about gender. They were created because something in the system was broken, and rather than redesign the system, societies redesigned people.

Eunuchs were not identities.
They were solutions.

A recurring civilisational problem

Across cultures that never meaningfully spoke to one another – imperial China, Byzantium, the Abbasid Caliphate, Mughal India, the Ottoman court – we see the same pattern re-emerge:

a ruler with too much power
dynastic succession based on blood
women treated as property or vessels
men assumed to be sexually predatory
and trust treated as a scarce resource

The question these societies faced was brutally simple:

Who can be trusted with proximity to power?

The answer, over and over again, was: someone who cannot reproduce.

Eunuchs weren’t introduced to challenge patriarchy.
They were introduced to work around it.

Trust, solved the wrong way

A eunuch could:

guard the ruler’s wives without “risk”
manage private finances without founding a rival dynasty
hear secrets without passing them on to sons
remain close without becoming a threat

Notice what’s happening here.
Instead of questioning inheritance, male entitlement, or the concentration of power, societies said:

What if we remove the future from a man’s body?

This is not progressive.
It’s a form of biological risk management.

Eunuchs are what you get when you refuse to change:

property law
gender norms
or succession systems

and instead choose irreversible human modification as a workaround.

Eunuchs as a design pattern

Seen this way, eunuchs stop being exotic and start being familiar.

They’re an early version of things we now take for granted:

background checks
non-compete clauses
security clearances
conflict-of-interest rules
zero-trust architectures

All of these exist for the same reason eunuchs did:

because power is paranoid.

The difference is that modern systems externalise risk into paperwork and policy.
Earlier societies internalised it into flesh.

That should unsettle us.

Why eunuchs made power nervous anyway

Here’s the irony: even after neutralisation, eunuchs were still feared.

Why?

Because removing reproduction did not remove ambition, intelligence, loyalty, resentment, creativity, or agency.

So eunuchs became:

scapegoats when courts turned sour,
objects of rumour,
figures of grotesque exaggeration.

They were blamed for corruption not because they caused it, but because they made visible a truth rulers preferred to ignore:

Power that depends on bodily mutilation to function is already unstable.

Eunuchs didn’t break systems: they revealed them.

The modern echo

We like to imagine this is all safely historical.
It isn’t.

We still treat certain bodies as safer, cleaner, or more trustworthy when they are:

desexualised
non-reproductive
emotionally contained
or politically toothless

We still reward people for being non-threatening rather than just being.

We no longer castrate, we instead neutralise with:

precarity
surveillance
“professionalism”
medical gatekeeping
or social erasure

Same logic. Nicer language.

What this reframing costs us

When we insist on reading eunuchs only as symbols – tragic, transgressive, or titillating – we miss the uncomfortable lesson:

Eunuchs were never the problem: they were the evidence.

Evidence that societies would rather alter bodies than confront power.
Evidence that trust was built on fear.
Evidence that gender was engineered to stabilise hierarchy, not express truth.

And evidence that when systems fail, the bill is often paid in human lives – not by those at the top, but by those closest to them.

A final, blunt thought

If a civilisation needs eunuchs to function, the problem is not the eunuchs.

It never was.