It is dangerous to be transgender in the United States right now. Twenty-six states have passed laws or policies banning gender-affirming care, twenty-five have passed laws banning transgender individuals from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, and sixteen have restricted transgender people’s access to bathrooms. In 2024, 48 bills restricting transgender rights passed, and Project 2025 promises to pass many more. The attempt to delegitimize transgender people by snuffing out their presence in the public eye relies on the belief that being transgender is new, even a trend. However, a growing body of scholarship finds this is hardly the case. Through historical research and close reading, I argue that transgender people found a surprising amount of acceptance in the medieval period. Literature about transmasculine figures enabled everyone to imagine their gender as encompassing both masculine and feminine elements.
My research on the Old French romance Le Roman de Silence, the Old English Life of St. Eugenia, and the Middle English fabliaux Life of St. Marinos reveals first and foremost that transitioning in the medieval period was neither unimaginable nor impossible. My dissertation, “Narratives of Gender and Sex in Medieval Transmasculine Literature” points to trends in literature about transmasculine figure spanning three centuries, signaling that medieval audiences have long questioned the gender binary.
My dissertation builds on the research of Leah DeVun, Valerie Hotchkiss, and Rhonda McDaniel. DeVun illuminates the historical perception of hermaphroditic, or intersex, figures, and I apply her historical framework to the perception of transmasculine figures. Hotchkiss covers a number of the same texts as I do, but reads her subjects as women. I build on her research about the body and its relationship with masculinity to read these characters as transmasculine. Finally, McDaniel argues that religious texts created a non-binary third gender. Working from her thesis that religious spaces remove gender from the body, I argue that literature also depicts a third gender that is both male and female. In paint a bigger picture in future research, I will include additional examples from Aucassin et Nicollet, Tristan de Nanteuil, the Huon de Bordeaux chanson de geste cycle, and multiple editions of the Life of St. Euphrosyne.
Transmasculine characters understood their bodies as both masculine and feminine. While they externally presented as masculine in their clothes, hair, and skin, and responded to their community’s expectations of masculinity, they maintained an awareness of their feminine body. The literature imagines a medieval transgender body that socially transitioned, but with minor physical alterations. As such, those who transitioned and those who desired to imagine themselves outside of a strictly binary male-female context could imagine a body as both masculine and feminine.
This is not to claim the medieval period as a transgender utopia. Powerful institutions like the Church and the medical field enforced a gender binary. Both literary sources and historical records indicate confusion and anxiety about the sexual activity of transgender people. In the future, I will do additional research on sex and sexual violence in the medieval period to explore the sexual lives of transgender individuals more thoroughly. The expectations of race and class also weighed heavily on transgender characters. White, aristocratic characters remain loyal to corrupt monarchs, enforce violence in the name of the monarchy, and rely on the belief that their social position makes them superior. White, religious characters trumpet a strict chastity, fail to question sexual corruption in the church, and rely on the metaphor of blackness as sinful.
Nonetheless, historic transgender figures offer the opportunity to contemplate a long transgender history and look to the past for gender expressions that bely the idea that gender is ‘natural.’ Exploring a long and complex transgender history expands trans possibilities in the present, creates a more accepting future, and emphasizes the timelessness of transitioning.