It is dangerous to be transgender in the United States right now. In 2024, 48 anti-transgender bills passed and in 2025 that number ballooned well past 100. Of those passed bills, some twenty percent target education, many seeking to censor course curriculums. These bills seek to snuff out transgender people’s presence in the public eye and in the educational sphere especially. They also seek to imply that being transgender is new, even a trend. But a growing body of scholarship has highlighted a wealth of transgender experiences throughout history. My research emphasizes both a long transgender lineage and the complexity of gender expression through time. This work is important because it gives everyone the opportunity to have a richer understanding of their gender and be more aware of how the oppression of queer genders is a precursor to controlling ‘normative’ genders.
In both my scholarly and public-facing articles, I strive to emphasize the importance of these complex gender expressions and their continued relevance in the modern day. Through close reading and historical research, I argue that transgender literature in the medieval period illuminated ‘how to be both,’ as transgender characters created complicated gender expressions through explorations of both masculinity and femininity. My dissertation “Transmasculine Narratives in Medieval Literature” discusses Le Roman de Silence, Life of St. Eugenia, Bisclavret, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and court records across Western Europe. While transmasculine characters 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. These characters are also defined by their whiteness, which impacted the type of masculinity they performed, such as the need to maintain bloodlines, remain unquestioningly loyal to authority, and engage in violence. My dissertation builds on Leah DeVun’s research on hermaphroditic, or intersex, figures by turning toward transgender figures and, similarly, reading figures as transgender that Valerie Hotchkiss previously explored as women. I also build on Rhonda McDaniel’s research, which argues that religious texts created a non-binary third gender. The literature I explore imagines a medieval transgender body that socially transitioned with minor physical alterations. As such, both 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 with limited physical alterations.
In my forthcoming article on Marie de France’s Old French romance Bisclavret, “The Fluid and Female Body of Bisclavret,” I argue that the werewolf Bisclavret’s fluid body mirrors a fluid gender. Bisclavret’s wife fears Bisclavret’s transformation and traps him in his wolf-body, denying him fluidity. She takes on the role of a gender-critical feminist or trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF), justifying her violence against him by assuming that the existence of a trans-body will, inevitably, do violence onto her. When the king, in contrast, brings the wolf into his home and loves him so dearly that they cannot be separated, the king and Bisclavret’s relationship becomes the better marriage in comparison, one defined by acceptance instead of violence.
I have also made my research more widely accessible by publishing two articles with The Conversation, “Christianity has long revered saints who would be called ‘transgender’ today,” and “Trans people affirmed their gender without medical help in medieval Europe – history shows how identity transcends medicine and law.” In these articles, I point to the parallels between recent legislation and medieval history, arguing that medieval people were far more aware of complicated gender expression than they are often given credit for. This research is especially important for providing modern people with medieval transgender lineages and a more complicated understanding of what gender is and has been.
These publications are a sample of the research I will do in the next five years, which will focus on how transgender figures function within medieval rape culture.Very little literature explores the intersection of transgender figures and rape, and even less attempts a systematic comparison across literature. Rape culture was often used to define masculinity. Therefore, rape culture illuminates how masculinity is defined so as to exclude transgender people.
In literature, transgender characters almost always find themselves in compromising sexual situations. In Old French romances, defined by their obsession with lineage and inheritance, transmasculine characters must always understand their gender through their sexual performance. Rape was also a common occurrence in romances and Kathryn Gravdal argues that these stories ignored the violence done to women, instead using those women’s bodies as a site for men to prove their worth. False rape accusations also abound, which Amy Vines argues was used to delegitimize real rape accusations and push the narrative that these accusations ruined the lives or promising, young men.
Romances like Le Roman de Silence highlight how transmasculine characters can be caught in the middle, simultaneously blamed for attracting their would-be rapists and unable to prove their masculinity by having sex with their would-be rapists. Expectations of whiteness are also a key part of masculinity in romances and Geraldine Heng and Nahir Otano Gracia map out key traits of white knighthood. Yde et Olive presents an alternative approach. When Yde reveals to his wife Olive that he was born female, she is unphased. Instead of Yde’s sexuality being defined by violence, his is defined by loving acceptance. To further explore this topic, I will look more broadly at the Old French romance tradition, with a particular focus on romances with false rape accusations like Lanval and Roman d’Eneas and to other Old French romances about transmasculine characters, including Tristan de Nanteuil, Aucassin et Nicolette, the Huon de Bordeaux cycle, Alda, Guillaume de Blois’ prose Tristan, Baudoin de Sebourc (c.1350), and the prose Merlin.