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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Transvestite Metaphysics in Roman de Silence (Pt 2)

"There is great unity 

between man and woman, 

because the two 

are of one substance"

Roman de Silence
Heldris of Cornwall

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The following is a transcript of a paper,
"Transvestite Metaphysics: Quantum Entanglement and Natural Philosophy in 13th century Literature," delivered at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts 
in Orlando, Florida. March 18-22, 2015.

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Transvestite Metaphysics

What is the alternative to a modern Scientism that doesn't account for the gender implications of its ideologies and excludes transgender from its theory of everything? Towards this goal of thinking science and biopolitics together, we need to turn to a period before science was industrialized and institutionalized as a distinct discipline from other university fields like philosophy, literature and politics. Looking at the 13th century, science may look starkly different on the surface, astronomy was astrology, chemistry was alchemy, but this lack of modern disciplinarity meant that scientists did more than how we would narrowly consider science. I argue that a critical return to medieval quantum physics of the 13th century, through the metaphysical thought of John Duns Scotus and the trans ontology in Roman de Silence, offers a pre-modern approach to science and biopolitics where matter and meaning, body and clothing, science and culture are not essentially divided but fundamentally entangled at a quantum level.

Medieval scientists knew their Aristotle and practiced metaphysics, poetics, politics, alongside their physics. Indeed, some may be surprised to learn that quantum physics not only existed but grew up in the medieval period, stemming back to Artistotle’s metaphysical treatises where he defined a quantum object as "that which is divisible into two or more constituent parts of which is by nature a 'one' and a 'this'" (Aristotle, Metaphysics V, ch. 13, 1020a 8-10). This theory became fundamental to medieval theories of everything where thinkers like Duns Scotus were trying to bring together physical observations of a world of diverse gender and genus with the physical and metaphysical assertion that all matter derives from a single substance – be it the atom, energy, or God - wherein “the whole time and the parts of motion are joined to some ‘mutated being’ which is not one in the same motion” (Scotus, V.X). In his Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Book VII, Question XIII, Duns Scotus proposes the following theory of everything: each body shares a common “that-ness” (quiddity) or substance but manifests a distinct “this-ness” (haecceity) where body (such as clothing) can become entangled with other bodies (such as the skin) on a quantum level so that attributes of the one can be "transferred to other things also" (Aristotle, V, ch. 13, 1020a 8-10). 

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Duns Scotus's Quantum Realism

What does Duns Scotus’s quantum theory mean and how does it marry a scientific theory of everything with medieval gender politics? Turning to a contemporary Chivalric romance, the Roman de Silence, we find the author of this highly literate genre writing a text for a highly educated audience that would have known their Aristotle and Duns Scotus and been paying attention for how unique individuals can co-exist within wider theories of everything. Silence is a romance about a child born female in a time when English law forbade women from inheriting property, so the parents raise Silence as a man, putting him in armor and training him to be a knight. This text, often noted for its so called transvestism, demonstrates how medieval literature was not distinct from physical and metaphysical treatises by introducing the characters of Nature and Nurture into the plot in order to debate and affect Silence as he/she transforms not only his body but society’s sense of body and clothes, matter and meaning, thing and everything.

Nature arrives in two key moments in the narrative when Silence undergoes substantial changes to his/her body, during which time the concept of “Tolte” (Totalness) becomes critical to the debate between gender and genus over the transgender body. The first occurs at Silence’s birth, when Nature takes undifferentiated quantum “matter” that is “beautiful and pure" [Li matere est et biele er pure], then “goes to her coffer [secre va] and opens it up. / She has at least a million molds there, / and she has very great need of them, / for if she had only one form / everyone would be alike [la samblance estroit si commune / de tolte gente] / that no one would ever be able to tell / who was who or what their name was" (1865-1892). This idea of “tolte” invoked here, where a single substance with many molds fits well with Duns Scotus’s theory of entanglement where every “this” (individual) co-exists at a quantum level with “that” essential substance. "Nothing," states Duns Scotus, "is itself one greater than a unity proper to it" (Duns Scotus VII. QXIII.209). This univocality of being, put into contemporary language means that 'everything equally exists but not everything exists equally.' The 'tolte' of everything only exists as the sum of all differences plus the single unifying substance. It is emphatically positive / additive. There is no universal without particulars but nor are there particulars without a unifying quantum essence.

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Theories of Tolte

The medieval theory of “tolte” relates to the theory of everything but is distinctly conscious to the “this-ness” and the “thatness” for embodiment and biopolitics. In English totle means Total but comes from the “Old French total, from Medieval Latin totalis "entire, total" (as in summa totalis "sum total"), from Latin totus "all, all at once, the whole, entire, altogether," of unknown origin.” (Online Etymological Dictionary). It is critical then that Nature puts her single pure substance into diverse forms "both big and little [grans et petites] / ugly, misshapen, and perfect [laides contrefaites, parfites[, / for thus all people [tolte gent] are fashioned, / big and little, handsome and fine [grant et petit, et biel, et gent], / she has so many different [diverse] forms,/ but one mold she [Nature] has kept aside / she has never used yet." (1895-1901). The idea that Nature has molds for “tolte gents” means that the medieval quantum theory of totle gives critical attention to singularity, diversity, politics of embodiment when it theorizes everything. This means that not only the trans(vestite) body is an artificial construct, even when Nature is doing the constructing, because all bodies are objects of specific subjective choices. Nature falls from the station of a transcendent signifier (i.e. God as Creator) because each person "grant et petit" are made with reference to the "tolte gents." Particular persons are only particular because they exist in a state of exception from everyone else. The everything being referenced is formed by adding up each particular into the universal.

In particular, Roman de Silence looks to understand the place of trans bodies in their theories of tolte by establishing Nature’s quantum approach to gender from the start. "Jesus the pious, true, and good / created Adam [Adan], thus we know to be true,” we learn from the text, “and right away created Eve [Evain] from his rib. / And here is the hidden reason, / why he made her from his rib: / so that they would be of one mind [voellance], / as they are made of one substance. / Both should be of one mind [voloir], / united in joy and sorrow [a l'esjoir, et al doloir]. / There is great unity [grant commune] between man and woman, / because the two are of one substance" (1701-1712). Here the one quantum substance can take the form of multiple genders with political implications, suggesting the formation of distinctly transgender bodies but also calling for ontological solidarity across gender where we fight for each other, “united in joy and sorrow.” Trans bodies cannot be considered mere "accidents" or "particular" exceptions that can be thought separate from universal metaphysical questions. The relation of the one to the all remains as critical as ever. Rather, the trans body becomes the embodiment of an ontological solidarity. By examining the "tolte gents" through the story of a trans body, universal theories become more important. Furthermore, through this common cause in the "tolte," each particular becomes implicated in the existence and politics of each other particular. Power and knowledge (i.e. "voellance") over individual persons or subgroups, like transgender, is necessarily bound to understandings of the "tolte" universe.

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De-Natured Reality

By Nature’s final reappearance in Roman de Silence it is evident that there are problems in any theory of everything insofar as it attempts to root authority in Nature and the natural sciences in ways that can produce the Scientism of Cooper, becoming trained to think in terms of fixed universals that they take the forms of gender they know as the single authoritative realness. Nature, although she knows that Nurture or other forms may craft bodies, when Silence begins to age and be transformed into a man, she complains, "When I heaped all the beauty I had stored up upon you alone … I used a special mold for you / when I created you with my own hands" (2505-2508) [et la bialtet qu'ai tant cele ai tolte en toi amoncelee… car une special forme ai / dont a mes ii mains te formai]. The claim that she put all the beauty in the universe in Silence, “tolte en toi,” reflects Duns Scotus’s claims about all of the “that-ness” of the universe in any specific “this.” "As one is coextensive with being," writes Duns Scotus, "so each mode of 'one' is coextensive with some grade of being, to which grade this mode of unity is proper" (VII.xiii). Contrary to the Nominalists of late medieval metaphysics or individualists of modern politics, no particular body can exist without being formed by, of, and with the "tolte en toi." While that coextensive being manifests particular modes of relation to each body, the work of that mode (or grade) to substantiate each thing with unity is necessary. 

Over the course of Roman de Silence, the trans man puts on masculine attire, armor and shields transforming his cultural signification but also his humoral biology. The tournaments and training that goes with armor, “took him out often in the scorching heat / in order to make a man of him. / He was so used to men's usage / and had so rejected women's ways" (2472-2474). The French here is key: rhyming “heat” (“halle”) with “man” (“malle”) and female behavior (“use”) with refuse (“feme refuse”). Beyond performatively re-aligning his gender it is also physically reconstructing. "I have a mouth too hard for kisses / and arms too tough for embraces,” notes Silence, “One could easily make a fool of me / in any games under the covers, / for I'm a young man, not a girl" (2646-2650). Medieval science of the body regarded gender as more than about genitals, including facial features, skin, body frame and humors (what we may now call hormones) as equally key in determining gender and equally available for sexual reconstruction.  According to Duns Scotus's quantum principle of the univocality of being, While the power of each may exist unequally, both equally exist. The particulars of these attributes linked with transvestism cannot be discounted as non-real. The particular masculinity of Silence, like skin, is coextensive with other attributes of his gender, like genitals. Nature is coextensive with Nurture. Through the work of Nurture, Silence can refuse and de-nature Nature's work, but cannot exist outside of dialog with the tolte that forms him.

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Nurture's Entanglement

What we end up with in Roman de Silence, is a medieval quantum theory of tolte (everything) that at once includes gender in its considerations but leaves room for the dissent of other authorities, including those of Nurture, representing, among others, the word of clothes, culture, literature and the humanities. Unlike the modern debate, the divide is not between constructionism and essentialism but between two different forms of essentialism: the fixed forms of Nature and the reconstructed bodies of Nurture. "I have completely denatured her,” claims Nurture, “She will always resist you." (2594-2595). [Jo l'ai tolte desnaturee. / N'avra ja voir o vus duree]. Nurture is still speaking of metaphysical quantum theories of “tolte.” She is “tolte desnaturee,” connected with everything but it no longer is under the lone authority of Nature (or the Natural Sciences). This is how metaphysics becomes biopolitical. Who and what gets to count as "real" is inextricable from political subjectivity. There are benefits for certain people for certain things to be considered real or proper to a certain form, while other alternative forms of reality may challenge their claim over bodies, properties, and power. Whether it is Nature claiming control over a body, or Sheldon Cooper claiming power-knowledge over a body in the name of natural science, there are things which parties can gain or lose by affirming these versions of reality and discounting alternative realities. In both the 21st and 13th century, the trans woman become metaphysically real while resisting tyrannical authorities of gender.

Resistance is not the same as power, however, as Nature then, as Natural sciences today still possess overwhelming authority over how bodies are managed and understood. After a successful life as a trans man, the knight is undone by the King of England. "He ordered Silence to be undressed [despollier]. / It was just as Merlin had said: / he found everything in its proper place” (6571-6574). This traumatic violence of stripping a trans person naked in public in order to humiliate them into submitting to natural forms of gender is powerful but is also resisted. The final like “tolt issi l'a trove par tolt" may mean, total is there is for total, affirming a naturalistic theory of everything, but in French we see nurture’s alternative suggested in the pun in Medieval Latin “tolta,” the act of taking away (Merriam Webster) or classic Latin “tolta,” wrong (Latin Dictionary). The line may read, “wrong is there for wrong” or “taken away is that which is taken away.” Nature asserts what is real so as to exclude things when defining its theory of everything.  This is the fundamental claim of Duns Scotus's univocal quantum being. "For if one removed from A [Silence] only that whereby it would be divisible (i.e. its haecceity)," writes Duns Scotus, "what remains (i.e. the nature) would be repugnant to being divided" (VII, xiii). In other words, to attempt to return the particulars of Silence's life back into an original quantum unity cannot occur without taking away what makes Silence particular . Silence, as a particular "this," cannot exist without the universe of gender, a real "that," but neither can "that" universe exist without the particular "this" of Silence.

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Naked Science?

Is the answer then to look to medieval philosophy for our science? Should poets, literary critics, and gender studies scholars take over the grants reserved for theoretical physics? The answer is not so simple as deconstruction the artifice of naturalism or scientism to return to a naked truth. The work of construction and re-construction is ever present. This is the haunting lack of resolution at the end of the horrifying stripping of the trans knight in Roman de Silence. While this movement of power/knowledge is supposed to fix theories of Silence's body and gender, it only adds to the insufficiency of Nature as solitary authority. "After Nature / had recovered her rights," concludes Le Roman, "she spent the next three days refinishing [repolit]/ Silence's entire body, removing every trace / of anything that being a man left there [le cors de malle]." (6669-6673). Removing the clothes does not reveal a pure truth of the body. The effects of the clothes remain entangled on the body. Silence can return to the form Nature made her, but it is not merely a deconstruction (de-polit) but a reconstruction (repolit). Indeed, the emphasis on the need to remake the whole body, "Par tolt le cors et a tolir," emphasizes how the work of Nurture never leaves the "tolt" being considered. Masculinity is not a part of the whole which can be nullified as not-real but a pervasive methodology which effects every part of every body, "tolt quanque ot sot le corse de malle." The pun at the end of the line suggesting that the masculine body, "le corse de malle," is also the wrong body, "le corse de mal," plays at this tension set up from the statement that men and women share a common substance. Masculinity cannot be expunged from femininity, just like reality of womanhood cannot be fully distinguished from the non-reality of the transvestite. The "tolt le cors" cannot be understood without reference to the sum of all participating realities of Silence's gender. The feminine now is not longer the single authorial Silence, it exists as a product or re-production from a trans masculine.

The desire to strip down the universe or transvestites in particular is implicit in many attempts at scripting a theory of everything where the final word can be given on knowledge and with it the power forever fixed in the hands of he who holds it. Yet there is no naked science. There ever remains something excludes from out theories of everything, no theory nor theorist can account for "tolte" everything and everything constantly changes as new particulars come into being, so we must embrace, unlike Sheldon our entanglement and dependency in other bodies and other disciplines, be they theoretical physics, geologists, poets, literary critics, and gender studies, modern and medieval, asking who or what are we leaving out now, if we look to bridge matter and meaning, body and clothes, nature and nurture, this and that, real and unreal in our transvestite metaphysics. Transvestism always looks to add things together rather than make everything naked. A transvestite metaphysics is a science of the tolte which takes its own power-knowledge production into account and looks towards what it excludes to add more and more to the productive contact of coextenstivity. The fundamental quantum move becomes one of reaching out to other genders, time periods, and departments to share ideas, methodologies, authorities, products, and funding if one is to truly claim a desire to construct a "tolte" theory of everything.

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More Quantum Theory & Trans Knights in Estoire de Merlin

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