Trans Literature: Transgender as Literary Theory

"How, then, might the transsexual read?"

The titular question to an essay by
Alexander Eastwood

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Introduction

Thus far we have seen the distortion of reality and systems of abuse built into some of the most prominent tropes of transgender found in cisgender narratives, as well as a few forms of narratives that organized transgender literature which offer critical alternative constructions. Yet the danger in this contrast of thesis and anti-thesis is that a divide should form between cis and trans literature so that transgender becomes ghettoized to its own corner of the book shelf. As transgender often intersects with other forms of marginalized identity (race, disability, class, sexuality, religion, etc.) this separation has benefits as well as dangers, such as isolation and tokenism. One begins to fear that trans literature will become only a niche market and reading trans literature will become an identity marker that alienates or others non-trans demographics. While trans literature has good reasons to privilege trans voices, these voices and the ears with which to hear them should not be locked away in an echo chamber. To fight this impulse to isolate and marginalize, trans literature needs to amplify and incorporate trans voices and perspectives into the wider literary ecology. By promoting trans literature not just as an archive but as a method of literary analysis, trans voices can be brought to bare on the many texts, genres, and questions which are essential to the wider world of literary discourse. By developing trans theories of literature and trans ways of reading, one can trans literature (as a verb or action) that was formerly constructed as exclusively cisgender. One can read Pride and Prejudice in a trans way. One can trans War and Peace. One can see the dysphoria in the film Ted. One can examine the trans-operations at work in Game of Thrones. Thus trans literature becomes not only a discrete and insular noun but to trans literature can signify a critical verb that can transform the way one moves through the world of language arts.

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Dysphoric Ways of Reading

Dysphoria defines or contributes to many ways of being trans. Gender dysphoria is a term borrow from the medical industry, specifically the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). For this reason, many trans people identify with the diagnosis for professional and personal reasons. It is an institutional marker which provides access to a variety of services. For the same reason, many trans people disidentify with dysphoria because they do not want to be associated publicly with a condition under medical management and with a book that has the term, "mental disorders," in the title. Yet gender dysphoria is an improvement, in many respects, over the now defunct diagnosis, "gender identity disorder" from the DSM-4. One of the key victories was the removal of "disorder" from the title, as the DSM-5 reflects a change in the medical field from considering transgender a disorder to considering it a condition. As part of this shift, gender dysphoria locates the primary distress and suffering of the condition in an external locus rather than an internal locus. The short definition of gender dysphoria reads, "there must be a marked difference between the individual’s expressed / experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her, and it must continue for at least six months" (DSM-5). A careful read of this diagnosis will not that dysphoria occurs not because someone is born transgender. The cause of suffering is not internal. Rather, dysphoria arises because there is a conflict between their internal identity or mode of expression and the external environment that assigns another gender. The conflict is not between self and self, sane self and insane self. Rather, the conflict is between self and society. Thus, because it is based on social discourses and conflicts, dysphoria can become a way of reading and analyzing texts. How does the text embody or generate dysphoria? If one approaches texts from a dysphoric lens, one begins to see how countless texts and narratives depend on the tensions of the dysphoria it produces. These tensions and dysphoria may even affect people who are not transgender. In this case, the dysphoria is in the environment and not in the person.

Yet dysphoria is more than the sum of self and society. The longer definition of dysphoria from the DSM-5 does acknowledge a list of desires and disgusts that may rage within a transgender mind and body. For this reason, dysphoria does not represent the mere battle between a rigid social roles and a chaotic freedom that wants to go everywhere all at once. Usually, in the ocean of dysphoria there are tides and even whirlpools, where the dysphoric mind is drawn by larger forces (internal and external) towards specific loci of gender. These loci may be broad, such as womanhood. Or highly specific, such as pressed suits and short hair. As in the case of tides and whirlpools, there may be competing desires and disgusts that reflect ambivalence and gender fluidity. Other times, dysphoria is less like the ocean and more like a river, moving full force away from one place and towards another. Many trans men and women, especially those who live lives within traditional binaries, articulate their dysphoria in these terms. For instance, a trans man may have physical disgust at being made to embody or perform elements of femininity and may have an overwhelming need to embody or perform element of masculinity. In this respect, dysphoria is a conflict between self and non-self, one that does not necessarily extend very far into society. Non-self may be understood as those parts of one's body, genitals or hair style, that cause one great distress and disgust. Thus, dysphoria as an internal tension and trajectory of self and non-self often motivate transformation. Transformation is one of the visible functions of this aspect of dysphoria. In the first case, because change and transition mark the movement away from the non-self and toward the self. Or, in cases of oppressive social conditions or tidal backslides, from self to non-self. Additionally, transformation may also be read as trans-formation or the formation of the trans self. This may occur unencumbered as the formation of a self which happens to be trans. Or it may occur out of a rejection of the non-self. The trans formation arises out the failed and dysphoric cis formation. Thus, as a method of reading, readers can identify how texts reflect these competing tensions between self and non-self, between disgust and desire, whether the conflict is like a tide, whirlpool, or river. Because narratives frequently depend on tensions and conflict in order to motivate character change, the dysphoric reader begins to appreciate how closely tied storytelling and dysphoria may be.

Even in ideal conditions of access and acceptance, transitioning often takes time and may be incomplete in the mitigation of dysphoria. Most trans people and care givers are aware that transitioning can less dysphoria but will likely never may it totally go away. In part, this may be because dysphoria in society and the body cannot fully erase the affects and effects of the past. For instance, a trans woman who transitions in young adulthood still has the dysphoria caused by having to undergo a sort of imposed boyhood. When speaking about the past, this boyhood returns in the form of pictures, names, and memories even as they conflict with the current gender identity and presentation. This dysphoria across time may also be felt in the body, a body which may have had the marks of boyhood and adolescence which medical transitioning can mitigate but never fully remove. To use a metaphor from an article I've written on the dysphoria of medieval manuscripts: even after you turn the page, the writing and images from the other side can still bleed through to the present. Our experience of time is more fluid, non-linear and contested than we like the think. Thus, even the most directional river of dysphoria will find ways in which the tidal past causes momentary blocks, diversions, and backwash. Thus, as a method of reading one can analyze dysphoria in the way that time and narrative progression become jumbled by conflicting iterations of the self, whether the internal self of psychology and biology or the external self of identity and expression. Furthermore, one sees how narratives, especially about transgender, reflect and generate dysphoria through the difficulty they have in discussing the same person before and after transition. How do we talk about the non-self which was presented as the self for so long? Do we use deadnames and defunct pronouns or do we correct the past by naming the person more accurately? Often, texts don't have one way of answering these conflicts. The past affects the present and the present will affect our pasts. Recognizing and analyzing how this happens and how it is reflected in the text is another key element of reading dysphorically.

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Trans-Operative Ways of Reading

Transgender narratives often mark the boundary lines between identities, affinity groups, and associations. Operations (i.e. surgeries) emblematically mark the movement from one affinity group to another. Besides psychiatric diagnosis, "gender identity disorder" and now "gender dypshoria," transgender has long been represented and defined by such operations. Indeed, transgender is often presented as an embodiment of the power of operations. Following transition narratives of full change, with a definite before and after dived by the event of the surgery, trans people's narratives and identities become defined as pre-op (pre-operation) and post-op (post-operation). Yet dysphoria and other forms of trans narrative has since pushed against the full change story structure. Often the post-op self is present and active before transition and the pre-op self (or unself) is present and active after transition. This creates the dysphoria of narrative discussed in the last section. It might then be more accurate to say that most trans people are trans-op (or trans-operative) in some or many respects. Trans-operative means operating somewhat in multiple affinity grounds, multiple selves, and multiple timelines at once. Indeed, suspicion that operations will not provide a clear-cut pre-/post-op divide and a fully change lead many people to distrust trans people as potential traitors, spies, or trojan horses in their identified affinity group. The logic goes, "you turned your back on one gender, proving you are a turn-coat, so how can we trust you not to betray us?" Whether or not this is true, the narrative of suspicion in dominant in transphobic and trans-excluding discourses. This has led in part to the proliferation of "trap" tropes. And this mistrust is echoed by other groups, not just the one with which the trans person identifies. The identity which the trans person formerly occupied, by assignment or choice, can feel a degree of betrayal when the trans person transitions. One may see a bit of the spurred lover or spurred team-mate in lesbian feminist communities where one they formerly called their own, as a butch lesbian, comes out as a heterosexual trans man. The feeling is somewhat grief and somewhat a sense of betrayal that their friend would flip the script not only of gender (butch woman to trans man) but also sexuality (lesbian to straight man). In many respects, the person is still the same person and still loves the same person but they are not marked as a traitor by both the community they leave and the community they join. A trans-operative way of reading thus charts the systems of kinship alliances and associations which are crossing and conflicting in narrative.

Yet trans-operative ways of reading are not only about mapping power but about manipulating power. Because trans people are often mistrusted to some degree by their allies and kin, past and present, the change in circumstance can never be considered full, complete, and secure. We see this in a vast number of trans texts where potential and former allies turn their back on the trans person or when catastrophe hits in the form of sudden violence or backslides in progress. A lover turns abusive. A friend cuts off contact. An ally says they cannot help any more. An institution changes its policy or fails to fulfill their promises once real conflict emerges. A government overturns legislative wins. In these precarious circumstances, the trans person who has been considered a turn-coat or double-operative for so long may begin to examine other possible alliances. This does not necessarily mean a change in gender identity but may mean playing with the fluidity and trans-operative capacities that made them appear so dangerous. The trans-operative woman files for marriage to her wife as a man in order to circumvent a government that does not allow for same-sex marriage. A trans man uses a women's restroom or changing room in order to avoid the potential or active transphobic violence found in the men's room. A non-binary trans person presents as binary during travel so as to avoid some of the regularly harassment. Even beyond gender presentation, the trans-operative becomes aware and active across the many affinity groups in which they have experience. A trans woman utilizes knowledge of male culture and privilege as a may of combatting toxic masculinity. Trans men utilize their experiences growing up alongside girls to motivate and inform a dismantling of the patriarchy from within it. Thus, the trans-operative way of reading looks for the ways in which different lines of power, association, and alliance intersect within the life of a trans person. It allows for the considering how embody and utilize the pressure points of systems of sexism, homomphobia, transphobia, classism, ableism or more in order to enact power, especially in situations where they are put in a position of vulnerability or solitude. The trans-operative approach always asks to what extent does a trans person have their foot in the door and to what extent they must or may keep one foot in another room; as well as asks what other rooms might or does the trans-operative pivot when necessary?

The question can also turn back on the reader, asking them to consider to what extent they identify with the trans figure and to what extent they dis-identify with them? How does the text diminish, maintain, or further the contingency of ones affinity for the trans person? What factors outside the text (experience, prejudice, cultural assumptions) or inside the text (tropes, narratives, language) contribute to this relational distancing?

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Genres of Embodiment

Whereas dysphoria and trans-operation centers the conflicts or tensions often present in trans literature, genres of embodiment accretes around the creative impulse of transgender. Drawn from the theories of Sandy Stone, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, genres of embodiment is a way of approaching gender as a co-creative enterprise with a diverse ecology of lives. Using genre over gender plays upon the etymological root that genre shares between French and English, meaning gender but also a set of texts, especially those of creative literary or artistic works. This highlights the ways that gender is creative while also existing within patterns, tropes, narratives, and other discursive limitations. I distinguish genre-analysis from performance analysis to put a greater emphasis on construction over enactment. Perhaps this is the writer and technical theater nerd of me (I don't necessarily think like an actor or performer) but genres of art give a greater emphasis on the physical construction that goes along with the performative deployment of tools and space. As a genre, sculpture forces us to consider the materials and tools needed to construct the art as much as it makes us consider the social and cultural discourses that inform the art. As such, genres of embodiment double down on the way that art constructs the body (not just identity) and the body informs, limits, and frames the construction of artistic enterprises such as gender. A trans woman performs womanhood but has different materials to start with than cisgender women just like different sculptors with different types or shapes of stone with construct different forms of womanhood. Likewise, access to tools affects genres of embodiment. A trans man who has access to hormones but not surgery will embody manhood differently than an intersex or another trans man who has access to surgery (perhaps against his will in the case of the intersex man) but not to hormones. Likewise, a wood carver who has only a chain-saw will make a different sculpture than the wood carver who has only a chisel and hammer.

Beyond helping us consider the role of materiality in the co-creative relationship between body and identity, genres of embodiment also draw us towards the way that the literary informs the construction of one's life. A trans woman (like Caitlyn Jenner) who uses the full-change transition narrative will define herself and construct her life differently than a trans woman who uses the no-change narrative of transition. Following this example, after transition Jenner completely redid her wardrobe and house, claiming that they were the things of Bruce and Bruce is gone. She says that Caitlyn is only a few years old and she needs her own things. This contrasts with a trans woman who sees her whole life as one story and identity, who might not be so quick to let go of her old things because even though she was called by a deadname when she bought or received them, they are still a part of her story. Likewise, because the full-change narrative of transition focuses so much on surgery and operations as a central event, those trans people who consume mostly literature of that genre are more likely to pursue surgery as part of their transition. Whereas the trans person who develops in a context in which the no-change, born-this-way narrative of transition is dominant is less inclined to undergo surgery. Just as the absence or present of certain technologies (such as surgery) will affect what forms of trans life are composed within a certain context, so too the absence or presence of narratives that typify the tool and logic of the tool will affect what forms of trans life emerge. One can even say that the technology (surgery, hormones, diagnoses, clothing) and the narratives are parts of the same social operations. The technology promotes and allows for the narrative and the narrative promotes and normalizes the technology. One can thus trace the evolution of these operations over time, as technological changes affect literature and literary changes affect technologies and their use. Thus, genres of embodiment form what Andrew Solomon (in Far From the Tree) calls "horizontal identities," which are identities shared within a certain context. In an area where hormone replace therapy (HRT) is present, accepted and narrated, one are more able to create an identity of peers who likewise undergo HRT as part of their trans genre of embodiment. Horizontal Identities are like the books that sit next to you on a shelf. Yet across time, as the technologies and narratives grow and adapt, they form generation genealogies, or "vertical identities," which are genres of embodiment formed and shared from parent to child. While Solomon's work is more concerned with literal parents and children, genealogies of trans genres can be traced, for instance, from the sex change operations (castration) that formed eunuchs and which over centuries developed as a technology and narrative of gender change to later inform gender affirming surgeries for transsexual identities. A transsexual woman may not consider themselves peers (sharing a horizontal identity) with an eunuch who lived in different contexts and communities, but one can see how culturally they share a vertical identity that cuts across historical shifts in society, literature, and medicine.

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Loca Sancta: Becoming Foreign in Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives

"The journey was bound to introduce the Christian 

to people, places, and things 

that were strange and indeed alien to him"

Diana Webb

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Peregrini

Like many genres of medieval narrative, pilgrimage serves competing impulses. In the first case, pilgrimage has the ability to make the world strange by placing the pilgrim in conflict and contrast to other peoples. Such narratives use the difference of "the other" to further define the sameness of "the self" against them. In the second case, pilgrimage has the ability to make the self into a stranger by undermining their sense of self and home by throwing them into sympathetic relations with other places and peoples. By encountering and honoring the dignity of the elsewheres, the pilgrimage turns the traveler from a local with an established place in society into a peregrini, a foreigner and stranger, a wanderer with a more dynamic relation to space and society. Indeed, the shift  in the worldview of static place to dynamic space, there is a coinciding shift in the view of the self from a static being local into a dynamic becoming foreign. The the prior depends on conservative politics of enforcing divides and withholding resources while the latter emphasizes diversity and sharing gifts. In "Medieval Pilgrimage: an Outline" from her book, Medieval European Pilgrimage, Dianna Webb traces these competing impulses which brought about pilgrimage as a medieval structure of narrative and biocartographic ritual. From this outline of the genre and ritual, the hermaphrodite arises as embodiments of gendered social constructions of place and people as well as critical figures that shaped pilgrimage as a real and imagined engagement with the world.

The history of pilgrimage in Christian traditions evidences how the practice arouse in response to the universalizing of the Church and the centralizing of places as fixed in the cultural mappa mundi.  "Christian pilgrimage, at least over long distances, was probably relatively uncommon before the reign of Constantine," writes Webb (2). "Christians were true peregrini in the original sense of the Latin word, 'strangers' or foreigners' in the midst of sometimes hostile society" (2). As Christians no longer felt like foreigners in their world, they felt called to go on pilgrimages that would unmore them from their sense of place and transform them back into peregrini. Such dislocation from the sense of being at home would prompt a return to being pilgrims amidst social unsettledness, as well as Webb writes, "spiritual pilgrims between earth and heaven, between physical birth into this world and spiritual rebirth into eternal life" (2). In the uncertain and persecuted beginnings of the Christian church, there was less need for rituals of travel or fantasies of narrative to create a sense of contingency and liminality. Many places, even the wider world, was not a secure home for Christians. It is only after Constantine and later when Christianity rise from subjugated to subjugator among the world and its people that pilgrimage was in demand as a way of becoming- or rebecoming-foreigner.

As a social practice of biocartography, the work of pilgrimage narratives and travels was to assert within God's omnicience and created world a distinction between places, marginal and central, which could be used to subordinate peoples and locations under particular authorities. Webb argues that the idea of loca sancta, sacred locations, were not always considered traditional nor orthodox in the Christian worldview. Webb writes, "[t]he concept of 'holy places,' of sanctified earthly locations of peculiar Christian significance, was in important ways at variance with beliefs in which Christians had been schooled fro the first days of the Church." (2) Yet the movement towards the carving up of a unified shared world into distinct and hierachalized places has evident benefits for the centralizing of power around the Church as a physical and spiritual structure. The "first step" towards a Christian conception of place over space, write Webb, "was taken almost as soon as the ecclesia, the assembly of the Christian people, moved out of private houses and clandestine meeting-places into purpose built churches, and the buildings themselves became the ecclesiae" (2). In other words, the physical construction of Churches began the project of organizing space and orienting populations towards centers of Christian authority. From churches arouse shrines which expanded the work of churches to new areas while also clustering around certain topographies such as Rome and Jersualem to cement their centrality in the imagined mappa mundi. As a result pilgrimage began to serve two competing but not mutually exclusive purposes: (1) social biocartographic structuring of power across networks of places and peoples, friend and foreigner; and (2) personal experience of crossing boundaries of place and people in order to become-foreigner.

The twofold work of pilgrimage at once made intersex and trans bodies into foreigners from foreign lands as well as invited travelers to become hermaphroditic foreigners themselves. As will be shown, the holy sites of hermaphrodites were one of many Greco-Roman traditions adopted (if marginalized) within Christian mappa mundi. "The number of holy wells which became and remained associated with Christian saints speaks for itself," writes Webb (4). Beyond those places named for Hermaphroditus, for instance, the features of trans and intersex loca sancta were adapted for Christianity in ways that erased their classical associations. The well of Hermaphroditus that could transform a person's gender exists within a tradition Christianity wholly embraced: waters of baptism where the spirit was changed or waters of healing where the body was changed. Thus even as histories were forgotten, the locations and rituals remained. Change and travel remained linked ritually and narratively from the classical to medieval era. To understand how this works, a brief understanding of the orientating work of loca sancta as destinations and the disorienting work of pilgrimage in drawing people across borders. Because of the allure for strange and wondrous pilgrimage narratives, encounter with trans and intersex bodies were a natural conclusion for the genre. "Most of the more interesting accounts emerged from the Holy Land pilgrimage," writes Webb, "because the journey was bound to introduce the Christian to people, places, and things that were strange and indeed alien to him. Relatively few narratives are totally devoid of reaction to these stimuli" (175). Once the center of the world became domesticated by familiar routes, maps, and narratives, however, the desire for the foreign became fulfilled along the margins. Hermaphrodites on the Hereford Mappa Mundi or the Isle of Amazons in the Book of John Mandeville then are not extraneous to the genre of pilgrimage but the fulfillment of the project of making the world strange. 

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Place

Among medieval genres, pilgrimage is concerned with the narration of place, dissecting space to establish one location as home and another location as foreign then turning the space between them into a road across which travel and narrative can flow. The narration of place is critical to the genre of pilgrimage which functions according to a linear movement (cyclical if the journey is returned) from one point to another. The environment between these locations are then developed in order to serve as the challenges and changes in the plot. Yet these locations (home, road, and destination) are not all equal. For most of Christian pilgrimage narratives, the reason for the tale is teleological. The destination is the moving, attracting, and orienting force of the narrative. Both home and the road become subservient or marginalized in the tale. The movement of pilgrimage towards a loca sancta is the function of setting places as set aside from one another. Places function as calls for narrative just as narratives organize the social space. Introducing the Blessings of Pilgrimage, Robert Ousterhout defines "loca sancta" as the "special places" behind holy travel, "where the powers of heaven were more easily tapped, either for earthly benefit or for aid in salvation" (Ousterhout 1). In her essay, "Loca Sancta," Sabine MacCormack develops the concept further.  "Certain places, objects, or persons were regarded as sacred or venerable for some reason, and the faithful undertook to visit them for devotional purposes" (MacCormack 7). What is evident in the lived tradition and transmission of belief in loca sancta is the critical role of narrative. As a result of hearing or reading these stories, people became filled with the desire to go there. God could appear anywhere and in anything but when God does appear it is always in particular places and particular things. Ironically, this call to pilgrimage arising out of loca sancta depend both on the specificity of a unique encounter and the belief that by taking the place of the sacred figures in the sacred place that the encounter could be somehow repeated. The power of place is at once particular and transferable. The place are hailed as natural or divine wonders but show the construction and commerce that determine what is attractive and what is estranged.

Foreignness in medieval pilgrimage is not a natural given (what happens to be far away) but is an effect of cultural constructs that structure what places offer an attractive affinity and what locations are merely marginal or even repulsive. Much like the physical architecture that maintained loca sancta from forces of entropy, the repetition of narratives about places and paths reinforced their significance. Genre narratives made locations readable just as locations defined the genre by their physical and social particularities. "Pilgrims may be classified, then, by where they went, and by their reason for going" (xiii). In this context, collections of tales such as the Book of John Mandeville has evident story lines wherein not one but two pilgrimages are made. The second which occurs in the latter half seems to break from many normative conventions but in many respects extends and turns many of the moves in the first half of the book. Eccentricities granted, in this first half readers are given a fairly recognizable pilgrimage narrative. Mandeville travels from a place on the margins (England) to a center of Christian life (Jerusalem). Along the way he undergoes trials and encounters that alter him in preparation for arrival at the holy land. Medieval theologians such as Augustine in his City of God note that even as they tore down and discredited many sacred pagan shrines and groves, Christians would rebuild their own holy structures and narratives around those loca sancta. The "Old" holds in in the spirit of the "New" but needs the work of new buildings and narratives to make the hidden essence of the loca sancta as ancient texts readable to new visitors (Augustine, City of God IV.33). Medieval authorities did not leave pilgrims to read a place "like they would read a book," MacCormack writes, "Christians had taken practical steps to hieghten and make clear such meanings" (25). In a very real sense, Augustine predicts both in his critique of the Old and his envisioning of the New encounters and stories awaiting their narrator the cyclical yet centrifugal movement of pilgrimage that draws circles of travels around loca sancta but which grows with each subsequent journey like New Works built on ancient buildings or tales in a growing saga.

The function of sacredness and foreignness is not only in the environment but a product of the repeated cultural movements that follow, change, or cross these boundary lines. Settings require story to bring them to life and transmit their power across distance and generations of pilgrims. Places and pilgrimage gain and sustain their meaning through the telling and retelling of narratives. "If in Christian eyes holiness was not inherent in a place, it could nonetheless be achieved by Christian ritual and by regular worship," writes MacCormack. "Place might be viewed as indifferent but human action could never be" (17). Places may or may not make active calls of their accord but with narrators to hear and give them speech, the stories became how places came into being as distinct and sacred loci. The location needs the story to make it speak to travelers and the story needs to environment to ground it. Yet in this depdency, there is a suggestion that lands, like people, might take on other roles, identities, and shapes if only society changes the stories they tell. Locations can arise as holy as the result of a story. Coleman and Eade writes that they prefer the term "sacrilize" rather than "sacred," "to emphasize the often partial, performative, contested character of appropriating something or something as holy" (18). Narratives constructed meaning for places that places proved the veracity of narratives, including scripture and saints lives. Movements and places were metaphorical as they were real. "Such a capacity for 'doublethink' may be a characteristic of thought patterns in the Middle Ages," writes MacCormack, "the symbol and the prototype were regarded as equal, or at least a part of the same reality" (7). There was not a fundamental different between reading about a pilgrimage and physically going on one. There is a qualitative difference but much of medieval Christianity functioned by way of intermediaries. Reading a story or being touched by a person or object that in turn touched something holy was the best that many people in the Middle Ages could expect. For those confined at home by poverty, disability, gender, or other circumstance, reading pilgrimage narratives could be a way to undergo the travel through a proxy. 

There is a cyclical repetition in travels as bodies and narratives revolve around specific loca sancta, affirming their meaning and centrality while spinning other places and peoples off into the margins. The difference and tension between what and who are central and what and who are foreign are important enough to be contested. The control over loca sancta gave Christian authorities more power over those who traveled to and through the sacred place (MacCormack 18). By encouraging the flow of people and resources from the margins of the world towards these centers of culture, authorities gained a kind of wider dominion over the margins. While the list of loca sancta may be numerous, certain places and authorities who controlled the wider narratives of pilgrimage gained influence over the others. Among these locations, Rome and Jerusalem were among the few places that controlled the many. "Space as perceived by Christians was thus no longer neutral," writes MacCormack, "in Rome and elsewhere, space was ordered in a system of focal points of sacred power" (19). In the medieval conception of the world as imagined in T in O mappa mundi, the world could be considered like a circle with Rome and Jerusalem in the center and the rest of the world on the margins. The marginal places remain worthy of marking but are oriented towards the center that structures their meaning. In effect, the center becomes more central by the marginalization of other locations. This centrality was affirmed through the unfolding of pilgrimage journeys and stories. Walking on pilgrimage and writing a pilgrimage narrative were deeply entwined. A pilgrim was aware of following a script based on other travels and stories. Likewise, they would likely share their journey with those at home or those who would follow. In many respects, pilgrimage was a discourse that fed into a biopolitical loop where social narratives causes movement which in turn causes a social narrative which causes more movement. One had a sense on the road that one is participating in a story that had been told again and again. New pilgrims enter into the tale and carry on the journey in the place of old pilgrims, like the rhythm of walking where foot replaces foot, or how the arrival of new destinations replace the margin from which one departed.

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Space

While the structure of pilgrimage genres creates distinctions and hierarchies between places and peoples, the movement of pilgrims through the story of the road crosses social and physical boundaries that lead toward a wider sense of shared foreignness and space. Indeed, the encounters with other locations and peoples, including the big Other of God, causes a breakdown in bordered off world views. Even as loca sancta worked to structure discourses of place and people around religious ordering, there continued to be critiques that the experience of God in time and space could never be contained or hierarchized into set parameters. "What temple can I build for God seeing that the whole universe, which is his creation, cannot hold him?" writes Minucius Felix in his Octavius (13). One of the defenses that arose was that loca sancta point outward rather than inward for their significance. "In a holy place," writes MacCormack, "spatial and temporal duration were suspended," making a holy place a kind of mini cosmos in itself. By creating a sense of the wider world and history within a circumscribed locus, mappa mundi and pilgrimage texts like John Mandeville's are mini reproductions of the critical work of loca sancta. Yet these suspensions are not the same as annihilation. Space and time continue to flow outward calling readers and travelers to challenge the limits of the world imagined by such compact narratives and locations. One begins to ask upon encountering that which claims to contain all times and places the question: what elsewheres and elsewhens are left out? "Standards were laid down at the highest levels by which sanctity and miracles were to be authenticated, but pilgrimage was never confined to saints and cults that had received the seal of official approval," writes Webb (xv). While seeming to break down the rules by which the genre is defined, the act of crossing and changing boundaries was in integral element of pilgrimage. As creative work, the constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing of walls was the effect of the ongoing tensions of the genre.

While set apart as places of particular significance, loca sancta gained meaning by networking together through narrative and relative distances. In the authorizing of "Christian sacred space," MacCormack argues that Church authorities "were bringing into existence a network of holy places" (18). Certain locations like Rome and Jerusalem may be able to edge out competitors, yet the popularity of pilgrimage was encouraged by have a wider diversity and number of sacred sites. Not every illness would warrant or allow far travel. Likewise, a journey to Rome may encourage further travels out of a desire to cross new ground. As Rome became domesticated, it lost the allure of being foreign. Even to sustain the attractiveness they held, loca sancta needed to invoke elsewheres in contrast. When one arrives at a center of Christianity, what is evident in the crowds is how many other places and peoples there are in the world. While all roads lead to Rome, when in Rome all roads lead elsewhere. Rather than containing meaning and power in specific places, pilgrimage functioned to share sanctification between loca sancta and even the margins which their centrality eschewed. The attraction of loca sancta for those on the margins is that they might share in the sacredness of another place and that the effects of its grace would travel with them back home. Loca sancta turned from close circuits into nodes in a wider network of power. "A complete map of medieval pilgrimage, were such a thing conceivable, would have to consist of a number of maps, on very different scales, superimposed on one another or visualized simultaneously" (Webb xii).  Pilgrimage as a physical journey and as a narrative is sets up networks of power that runs through those who connect the centers with the margins. Each place, even those on the margins, for those who live or travel there becomes a kind of center. As a result, the enactment of pilgrimage as a ritual and narrative creates many maps with many centers. These locations compete for power yet share a common need to encourage the constant flow of matter and meaning, people and power across the many divisions of space.

Not everyone however was equally able to engage in a sense of space. Because of conflicts between the physical and social environment on particular bodies (women, people with disabilities), the road was not as open to them as others (able bodied Christian men). The ability to be a pilgrim, to sacrilize a location, is not socially and even physically allowed for all bodies. Coleman and Eade writes. "pilgrimage can be seen as involving the institutionalization (or even demostication) of mobility" (17). Who is allowed to travel becomes just as critical as how the travel occurs and what costs and changes it enacts on those who go on pilgrimage. As a result certain bodies became synomous with certain places because they lacked the physical and/or social mobility to leave. Amazons and Hermaphrodites become associated with their Isles, while Mandeville is free to travel between them. Likewise, the experience of world and space was a privelege in contrast with those whose world was only as far as the next town. "Different groups disposed of different resources and also different degrees of freedom, both of which affected the capacity to make long journeys. Female participation in pilgrimage was, of course, conditioned by all these variables. All the indiciations are that men considerably outnumbered women as long-distance pilgrims, but there picture at many local shrines was very different" (Webb xiii). In other words, ablebodied cisgender men could afford to become foreign, become perergrini while other bodies could only experience this through narratives brought back.  Thus while Mandeville looks on trans and intersex bodies within his book, can we imagine trans and intersex people looking back at his body or indeed reading his book? Might he and his travels be as much of a marvel to them as they were to him? Often pilgrims would collect and transmit badges, souvenirs, or else stories and their own bodies as evidence of contacting the divine presences in these loca sancta. The narrators came to embody this power by their ability to claim and narrate their contact with loca sancta, making their body and texts transmitters of grace or secondary relics (21). Reading a text or speaking with someone who walked the places where Christ walked may not be as powerful as going there in person, yet these pilgrimage objects carried with them special significance as intermediaries.

Physicists claim that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Each step forward creates a force backwards. Perhaps in a cultural form of this law there ever seems to be an undertow that works against the centralizing of the authority in a few locations. The margins and the marginalized begin to realize that they have a lot more power than they have been made to believe. The drive to divide the world into loca sancta and non-loca sancta, centers and margins, departures and destinations is not always imposed on the people by authorities but adopted willingly. Webb writes that people want to imagine loca sancta out of a desire for a better world, "[t]he apparently deep-seated human tendency to locate the holy at a distance from one's everyday surroundings and to seek solutions to personal problems and the alleviation of suffering (or boredom) in a journey to such a place" (viii). One wants to believe that there is a loca sancta somewhere else like one believes the grass is always greener on the other side of a wall. What such an explanations allows, however, is the possibility that loca sancta might begin to feel too domesticated by those who live there. As a result, as time and repetition goes on, pilgrimage to the usual few centers of authority may no longer excite. In this malaise, the possibility of anti-loca sancta begins to rise. In the later years of a pilgrimage cultures, the wonders of the margins may begin to rise and draw power, travelers, and narratives away from the centers. After Mandeville successfully walks from one edge of the world to its center in Jerusalem, he feels the call to continue his pilgrimage and his story back into the margins. And many readers are glad he did. For the second pilgrimage is in many ways more interesting than the first and fulfills the promise he made in the start of his book and repeats again as the thesis for his second journey, "now wole Y telle of yles and dyverse peple" (Mandeville). By opening up his narrative and inverting the power structure of place, Mandeville and his Book become more and stranger than they were. Mandeville encounters foreign places and peoples, like the Amazons and Hermaphrodites, only to return home with a body and text that reflects the hard work of becoming foreign.

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Other Pilgrimage Narratives

Anti-Loca Sancta: 

John Mandeville's Second Pilgrimage

Becoming Crip, Becoming Hermaphrodite 

in Mandeville's Travels

The Island of the Amazons: 

the Place of Transgender in Medieval Pilgrimage

The Island of Hermaphrodites: 

Bending the Map of Intersex and Disability

The Sites of Hermaphrodites: 

Intersex in the Greco-Roman World

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Genres of Embodiment: A Theory of Medieval Transgender Literature

"The trans movement suggests a world 

full of gender and sex variation, a world 

much more complex than one divided into 

female-bodied women and male-bodied men." 

Eli Clare

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On Saturday evening, May 14th at the 51st International Congress of Medieval Studies, the Societas Fontibus Historiae Medii Aevi Inveniendis, vulgo dicta, “The Pseudo Society,” held a panel wherein multiple papers repeatedly used derogatory words and references to the transgender community, including negative comparisons with eunuchs and bestiality. During the event, audience members walked out in protest and afterwards the organizers apologized for the offensive content. Throughout the night and the next morning, I processed what all this meant in a wider context. I am not a judge or jury, audience or administrator, so I make no judgment regarding the personal composers of the papers or their intentions; be they good, bad, or an ugly mix of the two. However, I am a transgender woman working in medieval studies at a time when the place of non-cisgender men in the field is under question and when the arrest, beating, and killing of transgender persons are actively sanctioned and encouraged by public figures. In this context, the belittling of trans persons in a public forum can make doing work and living life harder for transgender people by encouraging negative associations and undermining the seriousness of our ventures. If we believe that words have power, we must remember that power can also be dangerous. This is especially the case when a group in a position of higher power mocks a group of lesser power. Free speech does not mean free from consequence. One of the consequences of this dangerous speech is that the night before I was to give a talk on the possibility of medieval transgender studies, the challenging context in which this talk and this possibility existed was highlighted. Without needing to be asked, although I was asked, the question arrived: what do we say when others misuse or abuse the power of speech against a vulnerable community that is struggling to gain theirs?

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Speechless

I am speechless. I have lost my power to speak. Last night not one but two papers were given with hate speech, transgender slurs, that use transgender to belittle medieval castrates and medieval castrates to belittle transgender. Already the next morning, the debates begin: hate speech v. free speech, ignorance v. consequence, a sense of justice v. a sense of humor. The effect of making us funny is that we are not taken seriously, we are not listened to when we speak, and we can't tell our stories. These attacks have power because they do not occur in a vacuum. Their words take force and meaning because of medievalists who believe that gender variant people don’t belong in medieval studies. Their words take on the force and meaning of laws barring trans persons from public bathrooms; a necessity to learn, teach or attend conferences. Their words take on the force and meaning of those giving women pepper-spray to use against trans people, threatening to beat us, and planting ideas in the head of a 16 year old who recently shot a local trans woman. People have asked me to say something about this. I know they want me to make sense of this; to find some way to make things better.

Now, I am speechless and I have no pardons to give; yet I come to this congress on medieval studies because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I come here because 48% of transgender women attempt suicide, because last year doubled the average number of transgender homicides, because parents bury them in clothes and names that contradict their gender identity, erasing all trace of their transgender lives. I sit with my countless dead trans friends and family looking for something to say but I have no words. So I listen. I listen to graves, the ruins of past trans lives, as they whisper to each other. They speak in many tongues from many places and many times. I hope if I learn to understand the dead and discarded trans lives that they might teach me words to say and stories to tell. I come to medieval studies because it is here that we learn to speak the language of the dead from the dead themselves. I come to medieval literature and history because we need their trans stories to make meaning out of our deaths and silences.

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The Pardoner's Exempla

Toward that end, I will now listen with you to a medieval trans figure who knew what it means to be speechless at the point of hate, castration, and rejection from the community. By attending to the Pardoner’s Prologue in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales I hope to offer language for us to discuss medieval trans studies as well as frames which might help us make meaning and connections with them. To begin, I consider how the Pardoner answers hate speech and threats of his divergently gendered body by pointing to other bodies that have been dismembered and discarded. Then, by framing them with the force and meaning of relics, he tells those who view them as trash to kiss and value them. From such medieval and modern work of reclaiming bodies from the trash heap of history, we may understand transgender studies as the reframing of a set of embodied texts that make meaning through reconstructed relations to themselves and to the dangerous forces that made and unmade them.

So what of the Pardoner? Scholars have determined that the Pardoner exists within the genre of literature known as "exempla" and the genre of body known as "eunuch." These structures of literature and genre are not unlike each other. Each takes a text, in this case the body of the Pardoner, and makes it the facta, the material example, to validate a dicta, or doctrine. Eunuchs and other castrates historically were men who had their bodies made examles of for society’s edification. They were castrated as criminals to prove the power of Law, castrated as holy singers in the church to prove the power of God, and even castrated by slave owners to prove the power of rich lords. In the Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner is once described as a gelding, a castrated animal, and is later threatened with castration again by the Host. Even narratively, the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale is framed by the Physician’s Tale about controlling an unruly woman’s gendered body by cutting it to pieces.

Yet the power of the Pardoner's words is that he is able to re-narrate fragmented, scarred, and discarded bodies to become holy bodies that produce a sense of re-claimed wholeness. These words wrap around and redefine his body and associated body parts so that “Relikes been they, as wenen they echoon.” Of the Pardoner's many relics, he spends the most number of lines preaching on the efficacy of a part of slaughtered lamb, "a sholder-boon" from "an hooly Jewes sheep." Such shoulder-bones, following the surgical logic of discarding parts as refuse, would have been thrown away after butchery. The relic points to rejected parts of body and society, lamb and the Jewish community, locating mechanisms by which the fair, smooth appearance of wholeness is formed. By reframing material facts, it is from the state of fragmentation that the body of the Pardoner and the shoulder-bone imparts wholeness to society.

As a body that has experienced being oppressively made into a living example for others, the Pardoner's demonstrates how exempla might liberate a body by reclaiming and reframing its meaning. To evidence this, the trans figure boasts the transfiguring power of his words and relics. First, promises the Pardoner, for those who "taak of my wordes" and physically place the shoulder-bone in a well, live-stock pierced by "any worm, or worm ystronge" and washed in the water will be made "hool anon." Second, bodies penetrated by disease, "of pokkes and of scabbe, and every soore" if they drink of the well shall "be hool." Third, if listeners "keep eek what I tell," says the Pardoner, “the good-man that the beestes oweth... drynken of this welle …His beestes and his stoor shal multiplie." If one drinks in the words of the Pardoner’s artificial wholeness and reclaims butchered bodies from the refuse of society there will be more life in the world. A sense of wholeness in the body and society comes into being out of the presence and power of fragmented bodies formerly deemed meaningless and worthless. New dicta arise out of forgotten and silenced facta. In this way, the Pardoner shows us how  to regain control of the exempla of castration and fragmentation that made him a eunuch. Furthermore, he demonstrates how the mechanisms of castration make and depend on eunuchs to prove their power. By listening to the facta being whispered by silenced bodies we can gain knowledge and power over the genres that define our bodies and structure our stories.

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Genres of Embodiment

So what genres define our bodies and our stories, past and present? Our medieval transgender lives are relics that we have forgotten how to read. They have no monstrances or reliquaries that tell us their stories and instruct us to value them. Instead, they have been discarded as waste among the trash heaps of history or else taken and used to tell other stories for other agendas. While laying the indispensable groundwork on which medieval transgender studies might arise, queer medieval scholars, like Carolyn Dinshaw in Getting Medieval, desire “to look at, not through, the transvestite,” as part of a project of queer history, yet too often see only “a crisis of categorization” that points to a queer concern, the unspeakable sin, “that is sodomy” (106). This desire for finding queer silence draws queer scholars away from the construction of transgender and towards the indeterminacy of the text, concluding “the silence of the records regarding this case [of a transgender life] might be the final silence of death, or the muteness of a maimed life” (112). The analysis that turns towards the silence and death of transgender can too often miss the whispers and resurrection. Thus the danger of queer medieval approaches to medieval transgender: that in the excitement of undoing binaries, we invoke specters of trans lives only to deconstruct the genders and genres by which they are able to speak.

The transgender lives of the past did not only live outside binaries and categories but understood (even misunderstood) and used (even misused) them in order to reclaim power over their bodies and their speech. In other words, our transgender lives do more than simply disturb your cisgender lives. We create and we exist within wider genres of trans embodiment. A critical trans approach to body and narrative insists on thinking in terms of relations and sets. Editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) and author of Transgender History, Susan Stryker, holds out hope for transgender's ability to reconstruct (and not only deconstruct) categories. Stryker argues that transgender is a word that ever challenges limits,  an “umbrella term for an imagined community encompassing transsexuals, drag queens, hermaphrodites, cross-dressers, masculine women, effeminate men, sissies, tomboys, and anybody else willing to be interpreted by the term” (4). As a critical methodological term, transgender is not merely a claim to an identity category or medical dysphoria but a way of being inter-textual. Trans(-gender) studies embraces the prefix "trans-" as a way of thinking with and relating different ideas, locations, times, and bodies. Whereas other theoretical projects may see transgender as falling in the silence between modes of discourse, transgender studies insists that by linking and extending discourses the trans bodies may speak louder and in more varied ways than cisgender texts that obey their limits.

By establishing trans genres of embodiment, we can offer narrative frames that allow trans lives to speak rather than leaving them in the deconstructed ruins of gender. In a seminal trans studies essay, “A Post-Transsexual Manifesto,” Susan Stone call for us to embrace trans theory as the creative work of reconstructing categorization, “[t]o begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written” (232).  In contrast with definitions of transgender as a modern pathology or emergent third gender, Stone calls for a social model of transgender as a critical intervention in the study of genre. In this framework, transgender is an archive of relics that have been cast aside or silenced because they challenge our current modes of categorization, “a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structural sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored” (231). Rather than merely undoing binaries, transgender transforms fixed pairs into dynamic and diverse sets that meet and converge, emerge and branch. Rather than demanding we set aside our history, a critical trans studies challenges us to do the potentially harder work of changing how we structure and understand our history. By learning how to read in a dysphoric way, medieval literary scholars can learn how to read trans lives that often speak in doubled or trebled voices. By reading for genres of embodiment medieval trans studies can offer new frames by which silenced trans bodies can speak, “to begin to articulate their lives not as a series of erasures… but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the reconfigured and reinscribed body” (232). Trans modes resist the enclosure of difference in the medical model or the silence of a cis-historicist model of gender, by admitting that all bodies function inter-textually.

To review, unlike a certain brand of queer studies that would like to see gender (including but especially the categories of man and woman) erased and forgotten, transgender studies makes the radical yet pragmatic move to insist that we can keep thinking in terms of categories but reframe what and who determines what bodies (facta) fit into what genres (dicta). This move from gender to genre plays upon a critical etymological genealogy. The English term “gender” comes from the French “genre” which in turn comes from the Latin “genus,” meaning a category. If “trans” signifies a crossing, a critical understanding of “trans-gender” or “trans-genre” should not be limited to recognized genders, but open to existing between categories, as well as changing and producing categories in the process. This critical approach does not seek to exist without gender and genre but to build archives of modes of embodiment that is constantly growing and being revised.  Transgender and disability studies scholar Eli Clare sums up the critical work of trans studies by reframing the discussion of gender and genres, "The trans movement suggests a world full of gender and sex variation, a world much more complex than one divided into female-bodied women and male-bodied men. Many trans activists argue for an end, not to the genders of woman and man, but to the socially constructed binary." A transgender man is still a man, just not in that way. A transgender woman is still a woman, just not in that way. A gender queer person is still gendered just not in that way. Changing, creating and mixing genres is complex but so is the realities of gendered life. Ever “across” or “between” modes of embodiment, a critical trans literary theory follows the diverse genres of transgender through their historic genealogies, from eunuch to the transsexual, from hermaphrodite to intersex, from division to dyshoria, from monasteries to mad houses. Each genre existed within different genres of embodied gender and understood themselves by reframing the rules of different genres of literature; genres we may need to relearn.

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Reframing our Relics

"Nay, nay!" cries the Host. Like many anti-trans reactionaries, the Host fears that the trans bodies and stories of the Pardoner threaten the naturalized hierarchies of his world. If the silenced speak and the discarded are recollected, then those on the bottom of the patriarchal chain of being might try to rise up against their oppressors. The Host fears the call to love that which he has regarded as shameful and so he uses hate speech and humor to put the trans speaker back in his place. He yells, "[t]hou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech, / And swere it were a relyk of a seint, / Though it were with thy fundement depeint!” The Host claims that the remade bodies of the Pardoner and his relics are not fundamentals of Nature, but "fundements" to be refused as shit. The Pardoner’s body resembles the fragmented relics and stories he tells and the Host threatens to ensure that the stories of these broken bodies share similar ends. One might imagine someone making similar comparisons between transgender and bestiality, implying that both are equally unnatural, shameful and worthy of scorn. A trans discourse that demands we change our ways of framing and valuing the world is reacted to with hate speech that blurs the line between playful mockery and pretense to violence. "I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond," says the Host, "In stide of relikes... Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie!" The Host threatens the Pardoner with violence and the refusal of remade bodies and meaning. Through hate speech, people like the Host refuse the revaluation of discarded parts as new wholes in their own right. Parts remain parts. Refuse is refused. Trans bodies are denied the power to speak their own facta or dictate the dicta by which they’re understood.

Is there hope in the scars and silences of the Pardoner? What can we do with exempla that are deployed to make an example out of the trans body? It should not be missed that after these threats and mocking, the trans figure is scared into silence. The effects of a cisgender speaker using their power in a public forum in this way is that trans voices can be unpowered or excluded. This silence does not arise out of the transgender person's escape from the order of speech but by the active work of those undoing their voice. Persons and organizations like the Host reject the reframed and reimagined relics trans discourse offers and insists that they are dangerous fantasies projected on dead and silent bodies. Yet as we acknowledge the social forces that enforce this silence, can we see the retreat into speechlessness as yet another mode of discourse? Can we see silence as a call for help from those who might fill in the gaps and read between the lines? While scholars argue that the Pardoner’s silence at the threat against his body is a sign of passive absence, this may be an active opening up the body’s vulnerability in order to pressure others to remake and reclaim scarred bodies and relationships. Submitting to the Host’s sharp words and knife, the Pardoner compels the Knight’s help. “Namoore of this, for it is right ynough!” cries the Knight, “Sire Pardoner, be glad and myrie of cheere; And ye, sire Hoost, that been to me so deere, I prey yow that ye kisse the Pardoner.” The Knight has social authority to defend the Pardoner but also physical power. He is a person of privilege who might leverage his speech and body in defense of the silenced and vulnerable trans figure. And this is more than an unprompted act of charity on the part of the cisgender man. Choosing non-violent resistance, the Pardoner bears his vulnerable body, challenging onlookers to recollect a sense of solidarity with the refused body and to call out, “Namoore of this, for it is right ynough.”

What can seem to anarchical queer schools of thought like a return and submission to old rules of gender and narrative, in a trans genre theory is revealed to be a reconstructing and reclaiming of the modes of production. In order to change the rules of systems, we often need to learn to think like systems. In the process we learn about our vulnerabilities as well as the vulnerabilities of the discourses in which we are entangled. As a result, a transgender approach to eunuchs takes into account the eunuch as a genre of medieval masculinity as well as an engine in the mechanisms of the genre of exempla (the example) on which modern medicine is built. Genres of embodiment like exempla make the material facta of trans lives indispensable to the dicta of gender control. Anti-transgender discourses need the facts of trans lives to prove their doctrines, even as their framing of these lives distort and silence these facts. In the end, this does not result in the destruction of trans lives in anti-trans narratives but in the control and subordination of them. We become jokes for them to tell and fears for them to spread. Framed by exempla, eunuchs sell the tales of their lives to secure physical and social capital for those who have influence over them; be they the state, the Church, or the academy. Under the orders of these cis-exclusive organizers, the trans eunuch is made “whole” and safe by leaving behind parts of his body, meaning, and power. Yet the scars of the Pardoner reminds the knight and the readers of the countless bodies caught on either side of the bloody operations of sharp machines: power flows not through the erasure of scars but through the open making and unmaking of the body, revealing the dangerous instability of all lives — enfolding transsexuals, castrates, virgins, geldings and mares in a shared vulnerability and resistance. The genre of the eunuch exempla shows us that there are unique forms of resistance in embracing one’s vulnerability, one's mockery, one’s speechlessness. By not giving pardons, trans bodies connect to the agency of those around them in ways that put pressure on the system that makes and unmakes them.

Conflict is intrinsic to narrative and embodiment. It is not an over-reaction for a transgender medievalist to see the larger war and dangerous threats implicit in what may be pardoned as playful jabs. Yet the power of our oppressors can be used against them and our vulnerability can work for us. By silencing us so publicly, you are drawing others to hear our stories. By sending more of us to our early graves, you are adding to the cacophony of ghosts whispering in the machines of our destruction. By deconstructing our bodies, you reveal the maps for reconstruction written in our scars and sinews. Conflict comes with cost and we are paying it in the lives and stories of our transgender family. But one day that bill will have to be paid. For once we learn to listen to the transgender stories of the dead, each seemingly silent gravestone and medieval text will come alive with the call for justice. We do not rest in quiet peace but rest in untapped power. For those with the skills and intention to read in a critical transgender mode, the trans body incites storytelling by its scars of castration and surgery, confessions of sin and dysphoria, places of isolation and exclusion, and relics of death and silence. We know the questions people ask of these trans bodies: how did this happen? When did you change your name? What was it before? How did you change your body? What is it now? What made it change? Will it change again? All these questions require going backwards and forwards in time. These questions require stories. But I am here to say that sometimes the trans bodies go speechless. They are quieted by the violence of hate speech prefiguring exclusion and acts of violence. Where they don't give answers or pardons, they offer questions and challenges. Yet even when trans lives are speechless, excluded, or killed, our ruins and relics will remain with you. So long as the past remains, we may find the reliquaries, genealogies and genres of embodiment that help us make sense of our present. When the living are dead silent, their relics will continue to speak. Will you listen?

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Listen to more transgender stories

medieval and post-medieval

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