'Transgender' lives in medieval Christendom

[Vouthon]

In book 10 chapter 15 of his sixth century Historia Francorum (History of the Franks) - which chronicles the emergence of the Merovingian kingdom of Francia from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire - St. Gregory of Tours narrates his first-hand account of a rebellion staged by two Frankish princesses, Basina and Clotilda.

The princesses of the House of Clovis had been forced into a nunnery and decided to lead their sisters in an armed uprising against the abbess of Holy Cross in Poitiers. Clotilda was thought to have announced her uprising at the convent with the declaration: "I am going to my royal kin so they will know of our indignity, for here we are abased. I am treated not as the daughter of a king but as the spawn of filthy slave girls."

Whilst this story is tantalizing enough in itself to make an episode of Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon look positively tame, my interest in this thread is on one very specific incident that occured in the final stages of the revolt, when the two princesses were tried before an ecclesiastical court in which Gregory of Tours, as a bishop, himself presided. During their trial, the rebel princesses claimed that their abbess, Leubovera, had allowed strange men to enter the abbey and knock up their fellow nuns, and that the abbess had herself castrated a man and kept him in the convent under a female identity, as a sexual companion. This eunuch had thus lived much of her life as a woman.

Gregory writes:

Internet History Sourcebooks

Then the bishops who were present sat on the tribunal of the church, and Chrodield appeared and gave vent to much abuse of the abbess and many charges, asserting that she had a man in the monastery who wore woman's clothes and was treated as a woman although he had been very clearly shown to be a man, and that he was in constant attendance on the abbess herself, and she pointed her finger at him and said: "There he is himself."

And when this man had taken the stand before all in woman's clothes, as I have stated, he said that he was impotent and therefore had put these clothes on; but he did not know the abbess except by name and he asserted that had never seen her or spoken with her, as he lived more than forty miles from the city of Poitiers.

Then as she had not proved the abbess guilty of this crime, she added: "What holiness is there in this abbess who makes men eunuchs and orders them to live with her as if she were an empress." The abbess, being questioned, replied that she knew nothing of this matter.

Meantime when Chrodield had given the name of the man who was a eunuch, Reoval, the chief physician, appeared and said: "This man when he was a child was diseased in the thigh and was so ill that his life was despaired of ; his mother went to the holy Radegunda to request that he should have some attention. But she called me and bade me give what assistance I could. Then I castrated him in the way I had once seen physicians do in Constantinople, and restored the boy in good health to his sorrowing mother; I am sure the abbess knows nothing of this matter."

Now when Chrodield had failed to prove the abbess guilty on this charge also, she began fiercely to make others
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This account is a fascinating insight into the life of a 'transwoman' (as we would call her, if anachronistically, today) living in late antiquity, in Merovingian France. Its interesting because St. Gregory describes a person assigned male at birth, who is castrated for medical reasons by a physician trained in Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire, and then chooses to live her life as a woman. As one historian has noted: "The story of this figure is exceptional, appearing without challenge or judgment, given that the eunuch’s revelation serves to vindicate a falsely accused religious figure".

The church tribunal led by St. Gregory proves the innocence of the abbess and vindicates this transwoman/eunuch's testimony that she did not personally know the abbess and lived many miles from Poitiers by bringing forward the corroborating expert evidence of the physician who castrated her when she was a male child, before assuming her new gender identity.

The transwoman eunuch then disappears from the narrative. Her castration and decision to live the rest of her life dressed as, and identifying as, a woman is not judged, condemned or even commented upon by the trial bishops. This suggests that this transwoman eunuch could not have been the only one and that the church of the time did not view this kind of 'gender identity' as illicit or improper, even though we see quite clearly that Princess Clothild was prejudiced against eunuchs like her who chose to live post-castration as women and we find her openly 'misgendering' (to use the modern word) this transwoman before the court. Yet the church court takes the side of the transwoman eunuch and corroborates her defence against Clothild's accusations.

This account demands that we reasses our own prejudices and assumptions about medieval Christendom's approaches to sexuality and gender identity, without being anachronistic and imputing modern understandings onto the past but recognising that previous civilisation's accomodated tranagendered / gender non-conforming individuals into their society in their own way.

As the historian Roland Bentancourt explains: "In my current research, I have been looking at how saints’ lives, medical handbooks, letters, and art are articulate and self-aware about the various ways in which gender identity can be affirmed through both ascetic and surgical practices". Further in his book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages (2020), Bentancourt makes clear the medieval Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople was "an immensely gender-diverse empire with exceptionally complex approaches to gender [...] medieval writers, philosophers, theologians and doctors studied what we may think of today as modern issues including trans and nonbinary gender identities."

A famous 'transgender' life from the medieval period, indeed a celebrity of this era of Christendom, was the Coptic monk St. Hilarion. He was born female, according to legend the daughter of the Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno in the fifth century AD:


Legend of Hilaria - Wikipedia

The Legend of Hilaria is a Coptic romance, possibly a Christian version of the pagan Tale of Bentresh. It was written between the 6th and 9th centuries AD. During the Middle Ages, it was translated into Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic. It tells the tale of Hilaria, daughter of the Roman emperor Zeno, who disguised herself as a man to become a monk and later heals her sister of an ailment. The tale was incorporated into the synaxaries of the Oriental Orthodox churches, and Hilaria came to be celebrated as a saint.
​

See:

Centuries after the words of the Gospel of Thomas and Perpetua, saints like Hilarion, Marinos, Smaragdos, and Athanasios (to name but a few) became a central part of compilations of saints’ lives, icons, and illuminated manuscripts. But their narratives tell a very different story from that of the early Christian martyr who saw herself fully and truly male in a dream.

In the closing passages of the life of Hilarion, after many trials and tribulations, the holy man is visited by his long-estranged sister after nine year of living in isolation. The narrator’s words are strikingly poignant, as the text details the girl’s encounter with the person she once knew as her sister. Describing Hilarion with female pronouns and alternating between his gendered names, the author writes: ​

“After nine years, they saw that the young girl was beardless and they called her ‘Hilarion the Eunuch’ since there were many such [eunuchs] wearing the habit. For her breasts, too, they were not as those of all women. Above all, she was shrunken with ascetic practices and even her menstrual period had stopped because of the deprivation… The blessed Hilaria, when she saw her lay sister, knew her: but the lay sister knew not her sister, the monk. How should she know her since her flesh had withered through mortification and the beauty of her body had altered, and her appearance, she being naught but skin and bone? Besides all this she was wearing a man’s garb.”
​

Hilarion’s story is not unique, nor is the language to describe him. Each author may handle the protagonist’s pronouns, naming, and imputed gender differently, but each describe the story of a saint, whose birth-assigned gender was female, yet lived out their lives as men.

Despite extensive late antique prohibitions against women dressing as men, such as in the canons of the Council of Gangra in 345, in the Council of Trullo in 692, or even in Deutoronomy 22:5, these saints were venerated with due respect, demonstrating that even legal or Old Testament prohibitions did not impede the space for their worship and praise.

The potent transformations of the body as well cannot be disregarded, as these stories sought eloquently to describe how the saints’ secondary sex characteristics changed throughout their lives, detailing (as described above) the withering of breasts and the ceasing of menstruation"
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This latter detail is repeated in the story of another trans monk, Anastasius, which explicitly tells us that as a brother was dressing him after his death, the brother “saw that on his chest he had women’s breasts, looking like two shriveled up leaves,” a detail preserved verbatim in both the Syriac and Greek versions of the text.

(continued...)

 

[Vouthon]

In pagan antiquity, eunuchs had been very negatively received and were a severely persecuted minority, understood to be a kind of degenerate third gender of natal males who had been 'feminized' and they are described in terms that we today would recognise as being transexual. Eunuchs, in Pliny the Elder’s censorious words, belonged to a “third class of half-males.” The satirist Lucian from Syria concurred, classifying eunuchs as “something composite, hybrid and monstrous, outside of human nature.” Consider, for example, the condemnation by the first century Roman Jewish historian Josephus:

"Shun eunuchs and flee all dealings with those who have deprived themselves of their virility...For plainly it is by reason of the effeminacy of the soul that they have changed the sex of their body” (Ant. 4.290-291)​

Likewise his first century contemporary Philo of Alexandria wrote:

"Mark how conspicuously they [eunuchs] braid and adorn their hair, and how they scrub and paint their faces with cosmetics and pigments and the like. In fact, the transformation of the male nature to the female is practiced by them as an art and does not raise a blush...Those of them who, by way of heightening still further their youthful beauty, have desired to be completely changed into women and gone on to mutilate their genital organs" (Spec. Leg. 3.40-42)

​

The fact that some eunuchs after castration could be referred to as women has precedent in the ancient pagan Greco-Roman world. In the second century AD Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius tells us that one of Emperor Nero’s many depraved crimes included the fact that he “castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies . . . and treated him as his wife.” This clearly implies that castration could sometimes be consciously understood as a surgical procedure for affirming a female identity. As Bentancourt notes: "In the late Roman and Byzantine sphere, the roles that eunuchs filled were often akin to those played by women, and they had particularly privi-leged access to women’s spaces."

The Christianization of the Roman Empire transformed the societal reception, inclusion and status of eunuchs from that of a despised and severely discriminated gender non-conforming minority into a powerful and respected social caste:

At the Byzantine imperial court, there were a great number of eunuchs employed in domestic and administrative functions, actually organized as a separate hierarchy, following a parallel career of their own. Archieunuchs—each in charge of a group of eunuchs—were among the principal officers in Constantinople, under the emperors.[35] Under Justinian in the 6th century, the eunuch Narses functioned as a successful general in a number of campaigns.

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This tolerance of eunuchs arose from Jesus's non-judgmental reference to them in the Gospel of Matthew:

His disciples said to him, ‘If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.’ But he said to them, ‘Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.’​

(Matthew 19:10-12)
​

Matthew’s Jesus, thus recognizes—shortly after speaking of those “made male and female”—that some people are born as neither women nor fully men and he outlined the existence of three types of sexual minority —those born eunuchs, those who were castrated, and those who voluntarily became eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. The first class—eunuchs who were born that way—is particularly interesting, for Jesus uses the phrase “from their mother’s womb” to describe them. Eunuchs from the womb could refer to men born with one or two undescended testicles (cryptorchidism) or with some other genital-related physical or sexual condition that the ancients perceived as a defect.

In the medieval period, the Church recognised three classes of gender - male, female and hermaphrodite (not defined as 'both male and female' but understood as somehow ambiguous physiologically). It allowed people in cases of ambiguous genitalia or sex characteristics to self-identity under canon law which gender they felt appropriate for themselves.

The 12th-century Decretum Gratiani was the church's primary codex of canon law until reform in 1918. It recognises three sex categories: male, female and hermaphrodite. Of the latter it establishes a legal doctrine: "Whether an hermaphrodite may witness a testament, depends on which sex prevails" ("Hermafroditus an ad testamentum adhiberi possit, qualitas sexus incalescentis ostendit."). In 1271 the canonistic oath of identity was phrased as follows: "I reply: s/he may say which sex s/he chooses, as our diocesan bishop, the bishop of Turin [demanded in this case]; and s/he may swear furthermore not to use the other one." (Summa aurea ( n. 66), col. 612).

As is clear from the hagiographies of transgendered saints, male born eunuchs like intersex people were also at times capable of choosing to live with a feminine identity and being accepted as such, while some gender non-conforming female born monastics could effectively (after intense ascetism that masculinized their bodies) live as, and be socially recognised as, having acquired a masculine identity.

For further historical insight, please also read this article:


Were there Transgender People in the Middle Ages? - The Public Medievalist

The medieval court case of Eleanor Rykener shows a legal system that is trying to square a person who lives as a woman, and calls herself Eleanor, with other information that leads the court to identify Eleanor as a man named John. In the testimony of this late 14th century London trial, Eleanor is brought into the courts on accusations of sexual misconduct—she was caught in the act performing sex work.​

The court does not know, or rather cannot decide, because they cannot decide whether or not Eleanor is a man or a woman. She gives her name as Eleanor, and presents as a woman to the courts. But after interrogation, she is forced to confess that she once lived in London as a man named John. She tells the story of her transition, and her new work as a seamstress and sex worker. She discusses sleeping with both men and women—from aristocrats to nuns and priests—some of whom offered her pay or presents.

In the end, a verdict is not recorded. Indeed, while the text records both the names “Eleanor” and “John,” it is written in Latin, which allowed for the proceedings to continue without the male or female pronouns frequently required by English or French. The court, it seems, did not want to decide on a pronoun because they were still trying to decide what gender to consider Eleanor. Thus, history is left with a record of a trans woman, and also a record of the conflict which is textbook gender dysphoria: a marked difference between the individual’s expressed/experienced gender, and the gender others would assign to him or her [...]

A clear example of this is in the medieval chivalric story, the Roman de Silence. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Silence tells the story of a heroic person who is born female and assigned female by “Nature” but who decides to live as a man after consultation with the forces of “Nurture” and “Reason.” He then is raised as a knight, is trained as a minstrel, and has several heroic adventures. It deserves its own article, but suffice it to say, dressing as a man was an essential part to Silence being not just a man, but an exemplary one. [...]

A historical example of habits being used for gender transition comes to us through the story of the Life of St. Marinos the Monk. Marinos is an early Christian figure, who has been canonized both in the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. According to tradition, passed down through story, relics, and shrines, Marinos was assigned female at birth but chose to enter a monastery and live as a monk.

As he was contemplating his transition, his father warned him that his body (especially his genitals) would get him in trouble. Yet Marinos responded to this concern by putting on a monk’s habit, which not only covered over his genitals with clothing but covered over any sort of reproductive sexual life with the veil of celibacy.​

 

[Shadow Wolf]

And people claim this is new.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

And people claim this is new.

It's tricky, though. Modern sexual attitudes are vastly different to ancient ones (admittedly I'm rolling with a massive generalisation, but...).

So, if you mean at a macro level, I don't think homosexuality or trans, etc are at all new, and it strikes me as strange when people claim they are. But neither is it as simple as drawing a line from history. Ancient attitudes can be nuanced in ways we can only guess at based on scant evidence now. That doesn't just apply to something like trans issues in history, but more broadly almost everything.

Our histories are biased based on source. It's unavoidable and leaves us with an incomplete picture. Looking at eunuchs within the Achaemenid Empire, for example, and some historians even argue that the physical castration of eunuchs at some point was replaced by a more symbolic castration, related to function and legal standing. Seems dubious to me, but my point is at least a large amount of our suppositions about the non-Classical world are either complete conjecture, or recorded via classical literature...leaving Greek and Roman ideas more clearly presented by far, and imprinted on our impressions of other people.

If you mean (as I think you meant) that people now commonly overstate binary genders in the past, and ignore inconvenient truths, I agree.

Ooh...aware I'm jumping back a little further than the OP. But I think mediaeval attitudes were somewhat informed by Byzantine and Rome...and those were influenced by Greece and Persia, at least somewhat.

​

 

[Shadow Wolf]

It's tricky, though. Modern sexual attitudes are vastly different to ancient ones (admittedly I'm rolling with a massive generalisation, but...).

That is very true. But, even modern cultures still have had trans people. The first reassignment surgeries happened 60-70 years ago. It's always been there. The only difference is people are more aware.

If you mean (as I think you meant) that people now commonly overstate binary genders in the past, and ignore inconvenient truths, I agree.

Yup. That's what I'm getting at. People (well, certain ones) want to say its all new, but the Native Americans frequently called those individuals in their cultures two-spirits.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

That is very true. But, even modern cultures still have had trans people. The first reassignment surgeries happened 60-70 years ago. It's always been there. The only difference is people are more aware.

Yup. That's what I'm getting at. People (well, certain ones) want to say its all new, but the Native Americans frequently called those individuals in their cultures two-spirits.

Australian history is at best poorly recorded and relies even more on oral transmission than most indigenous history, but there is just not much information.

There's some evidence of nuanced gender roles within the Tiwi communities, but the terms used there are now more commonly used across indigenous communities which has led to some confusion (I can easily find sources that hint at these roles being more general, but can find no evidence of them being on the mainland at all - it would be like taking an Inuit tradition to 'prove' something about the Apache...)

What do we know about queer Indigenous history? - triple j

From Mimi spirits in the Dreamtime to the Tiwi Island Sistagirls, we explore what we know about queer Indigenous history.

www.abc.net.au

 

[Viker]

And people claim this is new.

New to them.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

New to them.

That would be more like when I first heard the original version of When the Levee Breaks a couple months ago and was wowed over a style of guitar that must surely have influenced Chuck Berry. And I'm not saying it's new because it's not.
But they're claiming it's new. And because they do I'll keep mentioning things like this because I do enjoy throwing out "you're wrong," especially when what's wrong is rooted in conservative Christianity.

Ancient civilization in Iran recognized transgender people 3,000 years ago, study suggests

***

www.haaretz.com

Ancient Civilization in Iran Recognized Transgender People 3,000 Years Ago, Study Suggests​

Analysis of funerary artifacts in Iron Age burials at Hasanlu, Iran indicates there were three different sets of offerings: for males, females and a 'third gender'

 

[vulcanlogician]

And people claim this is new.

Really? People think this is new? Since my twenties, when I became familiar with gay culture, I've often wondered what it was like to be gay in the middle ages... and what sort of things the queens did back then when they hung out.

(I'm not gay, but I had a TON of gay friends back in 2003-2010 because I was a part of the rave scene.)

I mean, obviously there were trans people, drag queens, and queer folk back then. And, though I'm sure it was rather clandestined, I'm POSITIVE that these medieval queens got together for some "ye olde campy fun."

Just another thing that should have been documented in the history books, but never was because of widespread repression.