The Medieval DSM: Teaching On Medieval Disability & Transgender

"Jo l'ai tolte desnaturee"

[I have completely de-natured them]

Roman de Silence
Heldris of Cornwall

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In her book, She's Not There: A Life In Two Genders, transgender author and English professor, Jennifer Boylan, recalls, "One day I was stopped in the hall by a professor of medieval literature... I knew it would be good because scholars of this period seem to be required by the Modern Language Association to be absolutely insane." Now, attending the medieval congress at Kalamazoo may only reinforce this notion that we are all at least a little bit insane. Indeed, I am not here to dispute Boylan’s claim. Instead, I wish to put forth the intersection of transgender studies, disability studies, and medieval studies as a productive sort of crazy-making. Admittedly, my own professional well-being depends somewhat on the premise that all this madness means something significant in the end. In particular, I propose the thesis that medieval approaches to gender and madness may productively contribute to a wider education on disability and transgender studies. Specifically, I would like to outline a pedagogical movement whereby we move students from a knowledge as a possession which might be hoarded and represented by compendiums such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) towards a medieval model of knowledge as a process which depends on a lyrical and dialectical dialogue between multiple authorities, which I call the medieval DSM. Now, many of us here today might contend that given the DSM is called the Bible of Psychology, then the Bible is the medieval Bible of the Psyche. Yet I will demonstrate through a lesson from my seminars, “Monsters & Disability” “Queer Christianity,” and “Beyond Male & Female,” using the debate between nature, nurture, reason, and will from Roman de Silence as the sandbox for discussion, that the medieval DSM might be best translated as the medieval dialectical storytelling method.

While I’ve taught the medieval DSM in a few classes, as I just mentioned, it perhaps is most important for my Disability seminar at Case Western Reserve University which tends to have a higher number of pre-med, nursing, biology, and psychology majors attending the institution’s well known medical schools and working in their hospitals. For these students, lecture courses are the cornerstone with knowledge gained extensively through note-taking, cram sessions, and multiple choice tests based on large compendiums of knowledge like the DSM. For them and the other students of this STEM university, the treatment of knowledge as a process which involves multiple competing perspectives challenges the models of knowledge as object which has made them successful thus far in their studies. Indeed, many regard transgender as an inappropriate topic to study in a disability seminar because it is seen as too political or too based on in the social constructionist models of gender studies, not hard science. Yet lessons such as the medieval DSM used to discuss texts like Roman de Silence challenges their definitions of disability, gender, and epistemology, or how we know what we know. 

For those who are not familiar, Le Roman de Silence is a 13th century French chivalric romance about a trans masculine knight by Heldris of Cornwall. In the narrative, Sir Silence is born in a society that does not allow women to inherit property, so when he are born without a penis, his parents elect to raise him as a son in order to protect his right to inherit their estate. This runs smoothly until he reaches adolescence at which time he becomes aware that he is not like other boys. At this point, Nature and Nurture arrive to debate with him over whether or not he should continue to follow his nurturing to live as a trans masculine male or to follow nature’s decree that he live as a woman. The two sides go back and forth until Reason arrives to offer another and perhaps a higher authority perspective. And in the end, the choice falls to the will of Silence who elects to live as a man, which he does for many years. 

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Nature

Now, when my students hear that we will be discussing transgender in a disability seminar, they expect lectures in line with the discourse of Nature in the story. They expect me to provide them with medical information which informs them first whether or not being transgender is a disability and if it is what sort of health care may be involved. When I hand them this medieval poem, they get confused. This is not the exchange of knowledge-rich professor giving data to knowledge-consuming student. Instead, I am challenging them to think dialectically, considering the natural sciences alongside those of culture, philosophy, and ethics. Even worse, I am challenging them to engage in this dialectical debate of thesis, antithesis and synthesis through narrative. Doing this is key however to growing their perspectives on transgender and disability from being a collection of facts to being a collection of facts, cultures, ideologies, and choices. By getting them to see transgender and disability as ongoing dialectical narratives, I can show them not only how understandings of gender of the mind, body, and soul have evolved over the centuries but help them to question modern definitions and diagnoses. 

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Nurture

For instance, the debate between nature and nurture are present throughout modern medical treatment of transgender people. This dialectic hit a powerful anti-thesis in the 1990s with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act that codified many protections and rights of people with disabilities while also including a clause which first disregards homosexuality as not being a disability or disorder and yet including transgender as being a disorder yet one not deserving of protection or support. Trans diagnoses were listed in this clause alongside pedophilia and bestiality. Indeed, we see this debate occurring today with the Trump administration considering transgender too much of disability and thus marking trans people as not fit to serve while also removing healthcare protections so as to allow anti-transgender insurers and doctors to refuse to cover what they consider to be a life-style and not a disability.

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Super-Nature

and Reason

While the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and dozens of other authorities consider gender dysphoria a valid medical condition deserving of care and yet not one that inhibits a person’s ability to serve, the refusal to recognize the natural facts of trans life are often follows super-natural or spiritual authorities. In Silence we see this escalation from nurture and nature to the super-natural with the arrival of Reason. Here the medieval DSM makes students productively uncomfortable again by challenging them to consider their own first principles, belief systems, and ideological biases. The gender binary that anti-LGBT politicians medical providers promote is not based in science or history but in the philosophical fallacies of pre-determined outcomes. This flawed logical doctrine that there are only two genders causes doctors to operate on intersex children in order to force these exceptions to this binary back into the binary, rather than recognizing that their binary is disproven by the biodiversity of chromosomes, hormones, phenotypes, and neuro-types. 

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Liberty

With natural sciences, cultural nurturing, and ideological rationales considered, modern and medieval scholars will often come to conclusions before stopping to consider that the debate Silence has four members of this dialectical storytelling and not three. While Nature, Nurture, and Reason all make their cases, in the end the decision falls to Silence. Silence choses to live as a trans man. The significance of this decision is highlighted both by the thousands of lines of narrative that extols Sir Silence living his best life but also in the tragedy that ends the story when Silence undergoes a sort of forced to live as a woman by the natural authority of Nature, the cultural authority of the King, and the Super-Natural Logos of Merlin. This tension between the start and end of Silence’s narrative marks how disability and transgender studies is more than just the natural or social sciences debate over what someone is but over the ethical question of who and how we empower trans and crip people to make decisions about their own lives.

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In the end, Le Roman de Silence is an effective tool at not only teaching students about medieval transgender and disability but in understanding a different way of knowing through the medieval DSM. Knowing as a dialectical storytelling method not only teaches students about medieval ways of analyzing differences in body and mind, but in challenging them to reconsider how they know what disability and transgender mean. I firmly believe that critical thinking itself may be defined by this ability to have multiple voices and perspectives in mind at once (whether or not one allegorizes them) and being able to synthesize factual, cultural, epistemological and ethical decisions based on them. This multiplicity of voices is often absent in social media and politics which put us all into echo-chambers where our favorite authorities pass down truths which repeat themselves through retweets, likes, and shares. The ability to sit in a classroom and synthesize perspectives into a shared narrative of knowledge is more important now than ever.

Thus, I return to the quotation offer by my trans sister and fellow scholar of literature, Jennifer Boylan, when she says that “scholars of this period seem to be required by the Modern Language Association to be absolutely insane." In a modern world where modes of thinking are defined by in-groups and out-groups, those who believe or disbelieve the same science, who share or reject the same cultures, who believe or disbelieve the same super-natural authorities, and who approve or condemn the same sorts of choices, maybe this era and our classrooms need more medieval insanity if that insanity means being able to think on multiple levels at once. Being able to at once play the games of the enemy and win, or else to know enough to refuse to play games which are rigged against you, may mean not only the difference between an A or a B grades but can be life-saving for trans and crip people who often find themselves at the mercy of ever changing authorities who try to decide what our lives mean and what our choices me be, and can perhaps be the difference between a livable and an unlivable life for them and others.

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The Patron Saint of Dysphoria: Joan of Arc as Transgender

"By my staff! We are enough!"

Joan of Arc

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Before I begin, I must say that the question of whether or not Joan of Arc is transgender is one of my most asked questions, especially from non-medievalists and people who are vocally anti-trans. No sooner than my name and work is given in news articles or social media than I get trolls sending me messages, “transgender in the Middle Ages? Let me guess: Joan of Arc. What fascist fake-news garbage!” I have here removed the even more disgusting language typically included in these comments. You may also observe that I get these questions, if they are questions at all, from people who don’t genuinely want and answer but who seem to already have their minds made up about what transgender is or is not and what medieval history may or may not be. Yet, the weaponizing of Joan is not only against queer and trans populations but appropriated as a symbol of white Nationalism and an imagined origin myth of a white Christian western race. This image of “Joan the Weapon of White Cisgender Supremacy” is now working beside those harassing, interrogating, and expelling modern day soldiers (who like Joan felt called to serve their country) from a historically critical institution in the breaking down of racial segregation and the largest employer of trans folx in the world: the U.S. military.

In these contexts, the ability to question exclusive claims over Joan the Woman is critical to defend not only Joan the Person but the people experiencing modern echoes of the transphobic harassment and state sanctioned murder of Joan; those harmed by antagonistic governments and politically motivated Christians. I’m aware of how multifaceted these questions and answers are, requiring a chapter within my book project on Transgender in the Middle Ages, so today I will suffice to mark means by which we may begin asking the question: is Joan of Arc transgender?

To this end, I wish to thank the International Joan of Arc Society for inviting me here to specifically explore “Joan the Transgender Person” on a panel titled “Joan the Woman.” I take this as a good faith inquiry wherein we can model the generosity, respect, and critical inquiry lacking in exclusive and weaponizing claims to the saint. If people are willing to candidly pursue

Joan through a critical trans theory lens, we will find that in particular important respects we may say that Joan is trans, however perhaps not in the ways you presently expect. Please note, in identifying Joan as Trans, I do not believe we dismiss the wider complexity of Joan’s life that speaks to many truths and identity claims being true at the same time. That said, this talk is organized into three parts drawn from the main title, the Patron Saint of Dysphoria with each part complicating the idea of “Joan the Woman.” First, I will begin with the politics of this panel and this paper in this moment and ask how the concept of patronage may give us the flexibility to at once consider Joan “the Patron of Women Doing a Man’s Job” alongside Joan the Patron of Trans Folx in the Military.” Second, I move from our time to shortly after Joan’s death to consider how Joan rose in the popular consciousness and religious standing through rhetorical arguments using the canon of trans saints and hagiography. Third, I narrow in on Joan during the final days of life to consider how the conditions and interrogations underwent may be said to have produced a form of gender dysphoria and by which we may be able to say that whether or not we say Joan is transgender, certainly Joan died in no small part because of a medieval form of transphobia. The conclusion of these three approaches to the question of Joan as transgender is that Joan of Arc may indeed be said to be transgender by modern standards (if those standards of transgender are properly understood; which they are often not) and yet there may be a stronger case that whether or not Joan is identified as transgender enough by modern standards, Joan of Arc was certainly considered more than trans enough by medieval standards to die for it. 

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1. Joan the Patron 

Now, turning to consider the concept of Patronage may be useful to providing the foundations for even asking the question of whether Joan is trans. Currently, Joan the Woman is claimed as a patron and model by many Christian women, by virgin women, by feminist women, by women doing jobs traditionally done by men, by women who wear pants or butch clothing, by lesbian women. For many women and even men, Joan is their woman, a woman with whom they identify and people can be very defensive of Joan. Thus, the very question as to whether Joan of Arc may be trans in some way creates a great deal of anxiety. People are anxious that if Joan is somehow proven to be trans, then they will lose some sort of claim over a woman with whom they’ve long identified. This can lead to the dangerous logic: I can’t tolerate losing Joan the woman, therefore Joan must be a woman, and so Joan must not be transgender.

As an alternative to this exclusivity around Joan the Woman, there is the possibility within the Patronage model for the saint to represent multiple identities simultaneously. Take the example of St. Nicholas, who is regarded as the patron saint of children, brewers, pharmacists, and sex workers to name a few. As a patron, saints are considered advocates as well as exceptional figures with whom the population identifies. Yet children and producers of alcoholic beverages are not fighting in the street over the right to send prayers and wishes to Santa Clause, likewise, pharmacists and sex workers are not giving opposing papers at a conference over who gets to identify with St. Nick. On the level of identification, Judith Butler writes that “identity” is one way a person exists for someone else. Put another way, identity can begin with the thought, “oh me too, I thought I was the only one.” To identify is to identify with someone or something other than yourself. In this way, many people can identify with multiple parts of Joan’s experiences without exhausting all of who Joan is and how Joan may be said to identify.

In Joan’s own life, Joan identified with maids. Lesbian women, asexuals and celibate women may all share this identity with Joan. Joan identified with soldiers, an identity largely constituted by men and chivalric masculinity in the era. Thus, soldiers of any gender but especially men may be said to have identified with Joan. Joan identified with martyrs and those unjustly judged by an antagonistic government. One may seem eerie similarity between current bans and expulsions of trans service members from the military. Indeed, before the political assaults on trans service members in the military, trans author Leslie Feinberg identified with Joan in the book Transgender Warrior: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. In this way, patronage as a representative and advocate works across diverse lines of experience, speaking as much about the time of those claiming the saint as the time of the saint’s time. 

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2. Joan the Saint 

Amidst all the people who identified with Joan during life and for generations after, it was only relatively small amount of time after the death of the French leader before Joan’s retrial began, at which point the designation and association with trans saints began. In numerous cases heard across the retrials of Joan of Arc, the figure of Marinos the Monk is frequently cited. Joan’s contemporaries made this connection in part to understand Joan within the context of others similar to Joan that they knew, holy people who likewise expressed genders and habitus other than the one assigned at birth. If Joan’s contemporaries possessed the word transgender, they might have used that explicitly as they connected Joan and Marinos. In the case of Marinos and Joan, both were trans masculinity identified, as they transitioned from an identity as a maid to an identity as a form of celibate medieval masculinity, the monk and the virgin soldier. It is hard to miss that by the late Middle Ages a sub-genre of saint’s life had developed that included different types of saints who lived some form of trans life that was sanctified by the church.

Likewise, the invocation of the teachings of another saint, Saint Thomas Aquinas, was used to further this process of reclaiming Joan the trans heretic to Joan the trans saints. In particular, Question 169 of the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologiae that discusses modest dress was invoked, wherein the reply to objection 3, Aquinas allows breaking the norms of gender specific clothing in special cases, writing, “Nevertheless this may be done without sin on account of some necessity, either in order to hide oneself from enemies, or through lack of other clothes, or for some similar motive.” While Joan was not in disguise or lacking other clothes, there were other necessities and special motives to present in masculinity military attire. By this logic, Joan was not guilty of a lack of modesty because of the necessity of wearing work appropriate clothing but also the necessity of Joan being a person with a divinely sanctioned and driven identification with the medieval masculinity identity of knight.

From trans hagiography to Thomistic theology, the retrial of Joan of Arc seemed less aimed at denying the trans-ness of the martyr as trying to justify that trans-ness is not heretical but may in fact be saintly. The wider debate in the retrials concerned Joan’s motives and mind, which was repeatedly said to be affected by the voice of God. This led to the tension between the super-naturally marked trans-ness of Joan either being demonic or heavenly. These two positions are represented among Joan’s contemporaries by the competing English and French trials. Strongly on the side of heresy and an anti-trans program were the English who sought the death of Joan. Moving in a more progressive direction while also citing ancient authorities, were the French who were willing to allow that even a saint, perhaps especially a saint could be transgender. After all, does not the word saint in some way name those set apart that God marks for some special non-normative purpose? However the spiritual question is resolved, neither side, English or French, unilaterally denied that transness was in some way real and significant. 

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3. Joan the Dysphoric 

To conclude, I’ll consider how the circumstances of Joan’s life and death show signs of gender dysphoria and experiences of medieval transphobia. Thus it is necessary to provide a summary from Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for “Gender Dysphoria.” This is crucial for many reasons but especially because many people who declare that Joan can’t be trans, do not know much about current definitions of transgender or gender dysphoria. Many people operate on public assumptions based on the Gender Identity Disorder version of the diagnosis which has been debunked as bad science or use the word “transvestite” which has largely been out of use in medical communities for almost 50 years.

Here are a few key things to know and consider about gender dysphoria and Joan. First, the short definition of gender dysphoria in the DSM-5 describes the experience of having one’s gender identity and expression misgendered by a society that assigns to you and compels competing gender identities, habits, and roles. Gender dysphoria is a self-society problem not chiefly an internal issue. Second, gender dysphoria may be experienced by people who are not transgender and not all transgender people experience dysphoria. A cisgender woman who wears pants and who receives criticism and pressure to wear dresses experience a degree of dysphoria. Conversely, trans people who transition and live in affirming homes and communities may experience very little gender dysphoria because their gender identity is not subject to great degrees of antagonism. Based on this short definition of dysphoria, we may turn to Joan’s life and death, where we see consistent scrutiny over Joan wearing military garb traditionally assigned to men. Indeed, throughout the trial of Joan, the saint is consistently harassed over clothing, has clothing taken away and replaced, including overt and covert rape threats, as well as a series of verbal denigration over Joan’s gender expression culminating in Joan being killed.

The longer definition of gender dysphoria goes on to discuss symptoms of this conflict, including a strong desire for certain gender markers and habits and a strong aversion to other gender markers and habits. The DSM-5 does not specify what genders are being referenced out of recognition of the great range of biodiversity of gender now recognized in the sciences, such as the recurrent diversification of chromosome, hormones, phenotypes, and neuro structures . Gender studies of the Middle Ages also speaks to the wide range of distinct identities in society which are treated with particular legal, spiritual, and social significant such the Virgin, the Wife, the Widow but also the Eunuch, the Monk, and the Chivalric Knight. Current trans scholarship and medicine affirms that gender transition can occur through many gender identities and exist between gender identities, producing a wide range of non-binary, intersex, and gender queer identities. As such, being a maid, a virgin, a mystic, and a knight all at once was by medieval standards quite trans and likely (as we see in the case of Joan) to produce instances of dysphoria. 

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To conclude, while I cannot say whether or not a time-traveling Joan transported into 2019 would identify as a trans man but I can say that Joan would likely understand and experience many of the circumstances experience by trans men, trans masculine people, butches, non-binary people, asexual people, intersex people, and other members of the trans community. Furthermore, the circumstances of Joan’s life and death which point to extended periods of dysphoria and transphobia, as well as the effort among Joan’s own contemporaries to understand Joan in the context of trans saints and trans hagiography, all point to the reality that whether or not Joan is transgender by modern standards, Joan of Arc was transgender by medieval standards for some to kill Joan for it and others to redeem, sanctify, and later canonize Joan for it. And perhaps, in the wake of Joan the person’s life, death, and legacy we may rightly call Joan the Patron Saint of Dysphoria. Thank you.

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Transgender Icons: Queer Christian Images of Marinos the Monk

"The One Who Saves the Soul
Is Like the One Who Created It"

The Vita of Marinos the Monk

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Assignment Overview

In this exercise, the seminar will produce a series of icons of St. Marinos the Monk based a variety of attributes that characterize saints: Imago Dei, Imitatio Christi, Christus Medicus, Baptism, and Sainthood. These traits all have corresponding qualities in the lives of transgender people in general: authenticity, living your best lives, service to the community, transition, and remembrance. By focusing on these traits, this assignment eschews debates at to whether St. Marinos the Monk is a man (he lived as a man), transgender (he lived a transitioned life from his youth to his death), should be called transgender because he did not use the word (he wouldn't use any of our words, given that he did not speak English), or if he can be holy and transgender at the same time (he is a trans saint). I have addressed these considerations have been made in other posts and forthcoming peer-reviewed articles. Thus they may be reviewed in a lecture. This assignment challenges students to engage not in skepticism but in celebration. How might a trans life be honored as sainted?

By focusing on these positive traits, this exercise turns students away from the testing and skeptical tone that dominates cisgender society and the grim and negative tone that tends to surround queer allies when discussing transgender lives. The Vita of St. Marinos the Monk testify to the positivity and virtues of a trans life as much as they recounting anti-trans prejudices. A few of these negative prejudices include the tendency among hagiographers, icon makers, translators and scholars to deadname as well as misgender Marinos the Monk. He was known as a male, a monk, during life and this should be respected. He called himself Marinos and this should be respected. Additionally, the inability of local early Christian communities to recognize and name trans identities testifies to the ingrained ignorance and dominance of cisgender mindsets. Had society been more aware and accepting, Marinos might have been able to come out during his life instead of after his death. All these negative circumstances may be considered but at the center of the story is Marinos the Monk, a figure of positive traits that overcame these conditions to live a sainted trans life.

The task of assignment is to create an image with a name, a description -- write, St. Marinos the Monk, Patron Saint of [Fill in the Blank] -- and then provide a summary based on close reading the text alongside additional research. These icons will be made in small groups and then shared with the rest of the class.

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Sample Groups

Group 1: St. Marinos the Monk
 and the Imago Dei

Consider the argument between Marinos and his father. Although it seems as though he is calling on his father to save his soul by letting him also join the monastery, take a moment to ponder how Marinos himself might be living out his Imago Dei: saving his soul by transitioning into the image of a monk God made him to be. By affirming his gender (monk), how might Marinos be like the one who created him to be a monk?

"Father, do you wish to save your own soul and see mine destroyed? Do you not know what the Lord says That the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep?" And again she said <to him>, "The one who saves the soul is like the one who created it?"

Terms to research: Imago Dei, living authentically, suicide rate for transgender youths.

Group 2: St. Marinos the Monk
and Baptism

Consider the argument between Marinos and his father. How does Marinos's father misunderstand his trans son's gender? How does living authentically as a monk answer Marinos's father's concerns? How is transitioning and taking monk's vows like baptism?

"Child what am I to do with you? You are a female, and I desire to enter a monastery. How then can you remain with me? For it is through the members of your sex that the devil wages war on the servants of God."

To which his daughter responded, "Not so, my lord, for I shall not enter <the monastery> as you say, but I shall first cut off the hair of my head, and clothe myself like a man, and then enter the mastery with you."

Terms to research: baptism, becoming a monk, monk's habits, coming out to your parents as transgender, gender versus sexuality, asexuality, abstinence and chastity.

Group 3: St. Marinos the Monk
and Imitatio Christi

Consider the ways in which Marinos is living his best life after he is able to transition. How does living an authentic life make one more successful as your work, relationships, and even prayer? How does the comment about Marinos being an eunuch relate to early Christian and medieval understandings of transgender?

"Day by day, the child advanced in all the virtues, in obedience, in humility, and in much asceticism. After she lived thus for a few years in the monastery, <some of the monks> considered her to be a eunuch, for she was beardless and of delicate voice. Others considered that <this condition> was instead the result of her great asceticism, for she partook of food only every second day."



Terms to research: authentic lives, best lives, eunuchs, gender euphoria.

Group 4: St. Marinos the Monk
and Christus Medicus

Consider Marinos's ability to heal with his touch. How does the Monk's authentic life serve to heal others beyond having miraculous powers? How might his authenticity, trans identity, perseverance and sainthood (being set apart) serve to heal who encounter him?

"Eventually it came to pass that her father died, by <Mary, remaining in the monastery>,<continued> to progress in asceticism and in obedience so that she received from God the gift of healing those who were troubled by demons. For if she placed her hand upon the sick, they were immediately healed."

Terms to research: Imitatio Christi, gender dysphoria, gender euphoria, Christus Medicus.

Group 5: Marinos the Monk
and Sainthood

Consider the reaction of Marinos's community after discovering he was trans after death. How does the Superior's reactions mirror those of friends and family after an oppressed transgender person dies? How does death feed into advocacy? Is there a critique to give communities that are better at mourning the dead than helping the living?

"Drawing near and seeing <for himself>, the <superior> cast himself down at her feet, and with many tears cried out, "Forgive me, for I have sinned against you. I shall lie dead here at your holy feet until such time as I hear forgiveness for all the wrongs that I have done you."

..."The superior thereupon send <word> to the innkeeper to come and see him. When he arrived, the superior said to him, "Marinos is dead."... "You must repent, brother, for you have sinned before God. You also incited me by your words, and for your sake I also sinned."

Terms to research: ally, advocate, transgender day of remembrance, deadnames, suicide rate for transgender people, homicide rate for transgender people.

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Starter Questions

1) What core concept did your group examine? How did you translate the theological term into current English? What are other words you consider?

2) How does your passage demonstrate the principles of the concept? In what ways does it address transgender life? In what ways does it address gender Christian life?

3) How did your group visualize the concept and passage? What associations and images are you using to translate the trans Christian sainthood?

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New Publication: The Isle of Hermaphrodites: Disorienting the Place of Intersex in the Middle Ages

"Those who have been made to wait 
have not been waiting idly 
but enacting changes across worlds and eras 
we thought we knew."

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Transliterature was recently featured in a special collection on Medieval Intersex: Language and Hermaphroditism edited by Ruth Evans and published via postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, "The Isle of Hermaphrodites: Disorienting the Place of Intersex in the Middle Ages." Thank you to everyone involved!

The abstract:

"What is the place of intersex in medieval studies? How have non-binary bodies been oriented and reoriented as marginal by medieval literature and history? Might medieval intersex studies disorient such mappings of power? To provide inroads to these questions, this article puts medieval studies and intersex studies into conversation. Affirming the premise that non-binary scholarship offers necessary insights to the history of non-binary bodies, this critical analysis of the intersexual bodies on the Hereford Mappa Mundi and in the Book of John Mandeville utilizes the theoretical frameworks of Cheryl Chase and Hilary Malatino. In so doing, the essay proceeds to first orient the place of intersex using medieval pilgrimage as an experienced and imagined practice, generating and using objects such as Mappa Mundi to position certain places and communities as spiritual centers, loca sancta, eschewing other locations and peoples to the margins. Second, this essay unpacks how the second half of the Book of John Mandeville reorients relations to the margins through a sort of “boundary-lust,” imaginatively embodied by the Isle of “Hermaphrodites;” a medieval conception of intersex invoking the ancient parentage of Hermes the God of Travel and Boundaries and Aphrodite the God of Lust and Sex. To conclude, the passages describing the intersex bodies in Mandeville’s Book are close read alongside intersex and queer studies to conceive of how non-binary bodies disoriented the universality and centrality of binary gender for medieval writers and readers in much the same way that intersex continues to de-centralize the flow of power in modern mappings of gender and sexuality."

Read more of the article at postmedieval online!

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New Publication: Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI

"Full of still stinging cuts and telling scars, narratives of transgender skin operations testify to the countless lives physically and socially made through the artifice of sharp-machines which continually make and unmake supposedly natural states."

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Transliterature was recently featured in Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer edited by Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp with the chapter, "Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI." While published later than other articles and book chapters, this chapter is actually the first finished piece of peer-reviewed work I produced. The book experienced unexpected delays of a couple years that are nonetheless understandable by anyone familiar with the travails of academic publishing. That said, it is great to see the piece finally in print!

The abstract:

This chapter reclaims the Pardoner as a critically trans figure in the Middle Ages through an analysis of the discursive and historical reconstructions of skin. Given how narratives of transition and the politics of surgery become written on the skin of countless transgender lives across time, a trans literary approach to Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales cannot ignore that the Pardoner’s presence and story arises in response to the Physician’s tale of medical authority and the nature of gender. Putting the medieval praxis of castration in dialog with Judith Butler’s theorizing of the ‘sharp-machines’ that construct culturally intelligible trans bodies, this study looks at how the narratives of Fragment VI fashion skin as a natural signifier of gender in the “Physician’s Tale” and as a mark of unnatural reconstruction in the “Pardoner’s Prologue.” Indeed, the deployment of the Pardoner’s body, relics, and voice speak back with tenants of what might be called medieval trans feminism against the subjugation of non-cisgender men and the devaluation of surgically altered bodies throughout Fragment VI. A critical outcome of such a reconsideration of Geoffrey Chaucer’s sexually complex figure is that while we may never know definitively what is between the pilgrim’s legs – as with many transgender persons – nonetheless, based on the physical and social operation of gender he embodies, the Pardoner evidently stands at the crossroads of medieval trans discourse.

The book Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer is available now for purchase!

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Transgender Ethics: NCS 2018 Remarks on the Wife of Bath's Tale

"You fucked the world up now, 

we'll fuck it all back down"

Janelle Monae

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Unmoored in Time

“In th' olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour, / Of which that Britons speken greet honour, / Al was this land fulfild of fayerye. The elf-queene, / with hir joly compaignye, / Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede. / This was the olde opinion, as I rede; speke of manye hundred yeres ago. But now kan no man se none elves mo.” (In the old days of King Arthur, Of whom Britons speak great honor, This land was all filled full of supernatural creatures. The elf-queen, with her jolly company, Danced very often in many a green mead. This was the old belief, as I read; I speak of many hundred years ago. But now no man can see any more elves). But now no man can see any more elves. So begins the Wife of Bath’s Tale and so begins our study transgender ethics, with the uncertainty of changing times. And this raises the question of when and if we might ever see the elves dance again. Is this nostalgia or a utopian dream?

Let’s put this another way. Three years ago, I was invited to join an assembled team of trans people in the arts at the White House to advise the Obama administration on how to leverage the power of communication to make the nation a more ethical and equitable place for people of all genders. During the day, someone pointed out that the very existence of such a congregation of trans leadership in the White House would have been (until very recently) not only unthinkable, but even illegal. Everyone there affirmed how contingent and potentially fleeting this moment of strength was. We wanted to make the most of it. And only a couple years later, such a meeting in the White House is again unthinkable and if not illegal, certainly against current government policies and regulations. How quickly things change and change again! How precarious are our alliances and fidelity! The reason I ask this question and tell this story is that I genuinely feel part of a community without a time to call our own. In his chapter, Transgender Time, from Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills says that scholars he talked to speak of transgender as a critical turn that has already come and gone. Indeed, while arguing for a medieval transgender studies, Mills’s chapter reeks of the anxiety that his language and research on transgender will soon be out of date. Personally, in my own work I hear the opposite but arrive at the same conclusions. From the government, from churches, from universities, and from my own field, I constantly hear people begging for time: slow down, we aren’t ready yet, we aren’t there yet, it's not time yet!

Politically, academically, historically, and personally I feel emphatically unmoored in time, compelling me to find language for the moral condition of never quite knowing whether one is ahead of our time or falling behind, moving forwards or backwards. In trans communities, we get asked, “are you pre-op or post-op?” This refers to whether or not we have had “the surgery,” which is supposed to mark a before and after in the telos of a trans person. Even if we set aside surgery as a marker of periodization, the concept of before and after this or that, hormones or transitions, leaves many trans folk feeling unsure of when they are, between periods that everyone else seems to think is important. I call this condition being trans-op. Literally, between operations. And I will argue today that this is a position of transgender ethics which might help us look back - or forward - to the time of the elves of the Wife of Bath's Tale; a time which may never have been.

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The Trans-Operative

In respect to feeling unmoored in time and alliances, being a trans ethicist feels actually very much like being a medievalist. And so, like the Wife of Bath, I look back into my books for ethical guidance, "This was the olde opinion, as I rede; speke of manye hundred yeres ago." After all, what do we study here if not a time between times? We study the Middle Ages, an era of study defined by what comes after this but before that. And so I ask, what is the medieval answer to a transgender ethical question of contingent alliances and moral infidelity. In searching for such a response, it should be no surprise that I turn to the Wife of Bath. Indeed, the Wife’s whole moral system seems built around moral infidelity to her husbands, of which she boasts of having many, and whether good or bad each marriage seems built in some way around contingent alliances based around mutual uncertainty about commitment. However, while I pay my respects to the nasty woman, I have always found the focus of the Tale far more trans than the tale’s teller: the Loathly Lady. This is a trans-operative woman is I have ever met one. The function of her whole Tale is to demonstrate the ethical machinations of a person caught in the position where they cannot guarantee from one day to the next what the state of their partnerships, power, or even the state of their body will be. 

For those who would enjoy the refresher, here is a summary of the Wife of Bath’s Tale: A knight stands trial before a court of female identified and allied persons, begging for his future and calling in his defense the aid of a sometimes elfin maiden, sometimes loathly lady. This queer maid-crone gives the knight insight into the mystery of futurity and women: liberty. Granting also, the knight has also been told the other demands of this medieval society of females: riches, honor, lust, joy, and rich array, flattery, and marriage. But in the end, liberty is what wins the knight his future but only if he is willing to fulfill his oath to this nasty woman. The court of femmes agree and the knight gives lip service to this foul Wight. Later, in private, the knight seeks from the woman what exactly such a commitment means. What is their future together going to look like? Well, she replies, that is up to you: either I will be ugly but committed, i.e. the crone, or beautiful and uncommitted, i.e. the elf.

The question the Loathly Lady poses seems peculiar but is an extremely honest and necessary reflection of her real state of affairs. After all, the knight is a known rapist and opportunist, willing to promise anything to anyone, even a random crone in the middle of the woods, if it means it will get him out of trouble. In short, the Loathly Lady may have some power over the Knight at this moment but he has shown infidelity in the past and may again, he has abused women like her in the past and may abuse them again. Any power she has now has no time in the past to serve as a foundation nor any certainty about her power in the future. Thus, her ethos towards the knight may reasonably be either one of cynical but persistent experience, an old loyal killjoy that has been around the block so many times his tricks won’t fool her, or else a hopeful yet vulnerable young blood that shares no loyalty with the past or the present. I shall avoid making a joke about Gen-X vs. Millennials. Again, her question may seem to lack the assurances of a fixed form or fellowship but it reflects a world that offers her no such assurances.

And the answer she receives, perhaps is the best that a trans-operative can expect: liberty. The knight allows the Loathly Lady to choose her own form and degree of fidelity. The Tale says she became beautiful and loyal. But I always ask my students, “what happens next, after the screen cuts to black and the credits roll?” The facts and conditions of the world remain the same. The Knight broke trust and raped before, he may again. The Elf Queen turned Loathly Lady turned Elf Queen is a changeling, always between one transition and another. She may change again. Given her choice in partner, despite the power the partnership currently gives her, she may need this power again. Liberty is a power she must maintain, ready to change, to alter the alliance, to be morally unfaithful, to leave if the time and place turns toxic. She needs the power to stay, to hold alliances and fidelity, but also to ethically leave, break bonds and fellowship. This is the offer of contingent alliance given by the Wife of Bath's protagonist but also the only offer given to her by the world. We are told from the start, "In th' olde dayes... Al was this land fulfild of fayerye... But now kan no man se none elves mo." The world can be filled with fairies and now we can see no more of them. The world can be filled with loathly ladies, nasty women, trans women, and feminists, but now we can see no more of them. But this does not mean that they shall not come again. The temporality of the trans-operative is the time of chronicity. Not anachronistic or a-chronic (misplaced in time or timeless), trans chronicity is the condition of going into remission and becoming symptomatic, the monster's escape and return, the transition and fluidity with many beginnings and endings, and a time full of otherwhiles.

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Moral Infidelity

This brings us back or forward to the position of the trans-operative, those not complacent to be operative, nor a double operative, but a trans-operative. I keep one foot inside the room and one foot out the door, one foot in one time and one foot in another period. We are trans-operative because frankly one can never tell when one minute you are welcomed inside the White House and the next minute not welcome in the military, in public bathrooms, or even Pride Parades. It is hard to even say that I am progressive, some days, because I have no guarantee that tomorrow will be better than today or three years ago. Occupying the trans-operative position, one strives for an ethics in a world without assured welcome and no time to look forward to or nostalgically back at. The ethics of the trans-operative Loathly Lady is a word of liberation for ourselves: things transform. Our times, our bodies, our society and jobs will change. Unmoored from time, we reject that things were ever so great as to allow us to be "Great Again" and we reject the passive naivety that our progress as a society will always be for the better. Some days we will be persistent killjoys and some days we will be beautiful traitors.

Because a transgender ethics, the ethics of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, is the ethics of the traitor. Times which do not know where or when to put us, regularly calls us traitors. White supremacists have a special hate for race traitors, white advocates for people of color; at the same time that police, government, and professions question the citizenship of people of color. Among trans-hating queers, we see the sense of double betrayal in the eyes of women who see friends in the lesbian community come out as trans men, not women, and queerly hetero, not gay. Among trans-excluding regressive feminists, TERFs, we see the turf war over feminist spaces that include trans women, who they consider men smuggling in to betray womanhood. Parents do not want trans children using the school bathrooms because they see us as liars and rapists. The US has a President who does not trust a trans soldier to serve their nation faithfully. Let us remember that when the Wife of Bath's Tale begins by saying we live in a time without fairies, "now kan no man se none elves mo," she adds that the lack of fairies is due to our own exclusions: “Of lymytours and othere hooly freres, / That serchen every lond and every streem... Citees, burghes, castels, hye toures... This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes” (Of licensed beggars and other holy friars, That overrun every land and every stream... Cities, towns, castles, high towers... This makes it that there are no fairies). The cities, towns, high towers and walls of our world as well as our profession speak to the outlawing of fairies of various stripes. The very persistence of the nasty woman and transitioning elf is an act of treason against the time and place in which she is not supposed to exist.

We all get called loathly nasty ladies, traps and traitors to our own nations –nations in the political and Chaucerian sense—because our liberty, our power, our bodies, and our alliances are deemed unthinkable or illegal. That is why we must from time to time do the unthinkable or even illegal, why we occupy times and places in which we are not welcome, not because we may but because we must. Because, we have no time to wait or start again. Because we have no past or future into which we can flee for a sense of safety. Because when we occupy times in which white knights of hate are emboldened, when men rape and abuse the vulnerable, and our old allies sell us out, treason to such nations may be the only ethical recourse. In the words of the Venerable Janelle Monae, “you fuck the world up now, we’ll fuck it all back down.” Unmoored from time and nation, we become the loathly lady that ever escapes and returns, we become the beautiful traitors who love our nations enough to stop it from hurting us, and we become agents of change, the trans-operatives and transgender ethicists that are here to tell our allies: if you do not stand with us when we are weak, then you may not receive our loyalty when we are strong.

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