Teiresias, although not a God in Greek or Roman mythology, was a prophet, priest and priestess to the Gods at various points in his/her life. He/she was born a mortal son of a shephard and a nymph. He was struck blind by the Goddess Athena upon seeing her bathing nude. The Goddess Hera changed him fully into a woman for seven years when she caught him killing two copulating snakes.
As a woman, Teiresias was a renowned prostitute, reporting to Zeus and his wife Hera that women experience more pleasure in sex than men, having been able to experience sex as both a man and a woman personally.
He/she served as a prophet in both life and in the underworld after his death, at one point advising Odysseus during his epic sea journey.
His lives as a man and a woman gave him the power both in reality and symbolically, to mediate between various factions including men and women, the dead and the living and the past and the present.
His/her story has been enhanced, borrowed and repeated throughout popular culture including the 2003 film Tiresia by Bertrand Bonello. In this adaptation, a man captures a transgender prostitute who slowly transforms from a woman to a man upon being tied up to the man's bed. Unable to continue taking sex-change hormones, the "man" reverts back to his biological origins.
Teiresias
