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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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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New Publication: Trans Textuality: Dysphoria in Medieval Skin

"A trans soul lives in the skin 
and goes deeper with each touch of the knife. "

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Transliterature was recently featured in a special collection on Queer Manuscripts edited by Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt, published by postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies with the article, "Trans Textuality: Dysphoria in the Depths of Medieval Skin." Thank you to everyone who encouraged this piece along and who attended its reading at the New Chaucer Society session in London.

Abstract:

"This article proposes a theoretical method of approaching manuscripts, such as the Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, through transgender theory, called trans textuality. Beyond looking for transgender identities in medieval texts, such a method asks, ‘what is a trans way of reading?’ and ‘how might non-human objects function in trans ways?’ The study is informed by foundational texts in trans psychoanalysis concerning the processes that trans skin undergoes during transition, texts which are put in conversation with medieval manuscript studies and new materialisms. The resulting response focuses on the threefold work of trans textual skins: depth, duration, and dysphoria. Whether the object is the organ of a transgender body or a medieval manuscript, such trans texts are skin constructs which relate through materiality and metaphor the ongoing narrative of bodies in transition. The article concludes with a twofold study of Fragment VI of the Ellesmere manuscript where the images and writing of the Physician and Pardoner demonstrate the principles of trans textuality: the depth of meanings from other times and genders, the duration of a body through transitions in form, and a dysphoric soul striving in the deeps of medieval skin."

Read the full article online at postmedieval online.

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New Publication: Were There Trans People in the Middle Ages?

"Yes...
Sorry, did you need more than that?"

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Transliterature recently partnered with the Public Medievalist in order to produce a summary of some of my research in order to introduce a lay audience into the history of transgender in the Middle Ages. Already the article has had wide readership just in time for the midterm elections! As addressed in the article, responses to medieval trans studies reflects many of the interests as well as anti-trans prejudices which cluster around contemporary transgender studies. Yet overall, it has been a gift to speak again to a wider audience to let them know that the future of our past is much vaster and more complicated than society leads us to expect.

Introduction from the Public Medievalist:

"A fantastic article on the long history of medieval transgender people, by the amazing Gabrielle MW Bychowski. If you've been led to believe that being transgender is a relatively "new" phenomenon, or some kind of "postmodern lifestyle choice", you should read this article. There is a long transgender history that shows clearly that being transgender is simply part of the human condition, and can't be imagined away."

Read more on the Public Medievalist Website!

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Trans Literature: Transgender as a Literary Archive

"When you hear the same stories over and over again, from people from all over the world, you start realizing that transgender is not an anomaly. 
It’s a part of the spectrum of people’s realities."

Susan Kuklin
Beyond Magenta

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Introduction

As a recognized archive, transgender literature remains largely on the horizon. There are no "trans lit" sections of most major book stores. Yet in recent years, feminist and LGBTQI book stores are beginning to have shelves or at least special displays that host a variety of books on transgender: history, medicine, self-help, family stories, memoirs, and fiction. As a field of academic study, trans literature is even further behind. This is ironic, given the number of transgender studies scholars who have degrees in English or at least have used trans films in their work. Yet even as transgender studies begins to break away from being a mere sub-set of queer or gender studies, trans literature remains largely subordinate to other fields of trans research: psychoanalysis, sociology, history, and media studies. Of them all, media and film studies has come perhaps the closet to describing transgender film as an archive worthy of study in its own right. As more trans films begin to win awards or at least get nominate, film may continue to lead the way in public awareness of the wider literary archive.

Yet once one begins to ask the question, the number of trans literary texts and narratives that begin to appear are massive. On the surface are those books and films that have begun to get some distinction. When one expands beyond those books marketed as "transgender" by publishers, marketing firms, or stores, one sees how trans literary archives have long existed. One finds trans narratives categorized in genres and archives defined more broadly as women or queer literature, as well as disability, post-colonial, and African-American literature. Looking further for trans narratives, genres, and literary forms, suddenly one arrives at medical, legal, religious, and historical texts that tell trans stories as pieces -- even center pieces -- of other agendas. At this point, one needs to begin to learn other methods of research, other professional and linguistic languages, in order to locate these trans narratives. But once learns how to find them in places not readily marked by the category "transgender literature here," the flood-gates burst open. Suddenly one begins to see trans literature all over the place, from media and books, to medical and government documents, to blogs and suicide notes, to historical manuscripts and saint's lives.

With such a massive and widely distributed archive, it is difficult to give a mere reading list. Such lists are available and reflect mostly recent English language publications currently sold in local book stores or films available on Amazon or iTunes. What I wish to provide in place of giving a "Top 10" or potential candidates for a new literary canon, is a method of categorizing and patterning trans literature as types of narrative. Through such an approach, my goal is to help you dig into the broad, interdisciplinary, and buried archive of trans literature so you will be able to grow the canon rather than merely reiterating the same handful of books and films on sale in specialty markets. So let's dig in and see where and when these narratives lead us!

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The Transition Narrative

As a formal genre, I argue that the transition narrative fits into the example (or exempla) genre. The example (or exempla) are defined by a doctrine (or dicta) that provides a theoretical concept for proof and facts (or facta) that provide the evidentiary grounding. In the case of most transition narratives, the visualization and narration of the facts of altering one's gender signifiers are supposed to fulfill the doctrine of one's trans identification. This doctrine may be as simple as "I am a woman, not a man," or may be as complex as "I have gender dysphoria." While other genres may utilize the transition narrative, the example is the genre most often used and most closely tied the rhetoric used for many transition stories.

Historically, the discursive context that produced and consumed the most number of transition narratives in the modern era is the medical field. In this case, the facts of case studies are given to prove whatever medical and psychological doctrines the researcher is trying to prove. For authors seeking to explore the histories and literary archives of trans persons undergoing transitions, one will spend a lot -- if not most -- of one's time reading such case studies from books written and consumed within a medical context. In some cases the dicta being proven are affirming of these transitions, offering advice for procedures, and others are critical warnings against transitioning. This tension is more pronounced the further one goes back in the study of medicine. If one pushes back even further, prior to the modern medical interest in transition narratives, a researcher will find them present within religious texts that also take the form of exempla. In this case, religious exempla are interested in using these histories and folk stories to prove doctrines of faith and philosophy. As in the early medical exampla, the dicta that accompany the trans facta are often not affirming of transitions, although there are some surprising examples of sympathy for the facts of the case.

The examples of transition narratives take on three dominant forms. These forms present the facts in different ways which correspond to different doctrines of change. The three dicta of change I highlight here are greatly influenced by Carolyn Walker Bynum's work on Metamorphosis. The three forms of transition narrative are: absolute change, hybrid change, and no change:

• The Doctrine of Absolute Change
• Facts are presented within a structure of before and after. There is often a defining event (such as surgery or a name change) which represents the transition. The narrative often diminishes the time given to this period of change because it represents the ambiguity that Absolute Change is trying to diminish.
• In this form, the narrative will often refer to the person's time before transition using the name and pronouns that accompanied that gender presentation (such as "he") and then after the event the person will be described using the name and pronouns that fit that gender presentation (such as "she").
• Examples using absolute change include: Caitlyn Jenner's The Secrets of My Life, The Danish Girl (book and movie), and many medical journals, especially the more sympathetic ones.

• The Doctrine of Hybrid Change
• Facts of different genders are presented alongside each other, before transition and after. Whereas absolute change tends to collapse transition into the short period of a single key event, hybrid change narratives tend to prolong transition to a much greater degree. One may see multiple transitional events, where the person is living one gender in one context and another gender in another context. The effect of this narration often supports doctrines of gender as a fluid spectrum, where male and female traits are present at the same time just in different degrees.
• In this form, the narrative will often switch between pronouns and names. Such examples will even favor the name/name or pronoun/pronoun way to describing a person, such as "John/Eleanor" or "He/She."
• Examples using hybrid change include: most discussions of Eleanor Rykener, Boys Don't Cry (and other discussions of Brandon Teena), and She-Male porn (a genre which depends on presenting trans women as monstrous hybrids, thus the choice and construction of the word "she-male" as "the best of both worlds").

• The Doctrine of No Change
• Facts are presented so as to foreground the present of the identified genders from the very start. The gender assigned at birth is presented as secondary and based on appearances and the identified gender is presented as primary and based on essences or predispositions. Also called the "born this way narrative." This is the most popular among current transgender stories because it affirms that transgender is a discreet and insular identity that is unchanging, based in nature rather than choice or nurture. These qualities have proven important and effective in convincing doctors, medical insurers, the courts, and government bodies to provide assistance and protection for trans people.
• In this form, the pre-transition name and pronouns are de-emphasized. Sometimes, the post-transition name and/or pronoun of the person is used from the start even while it records how other people used the socially assigned deadname and pronouns. Other times, these names and pronouns will be used in describing the person pre-transition but will come with an explanation, "scare quotes," or asterisk* denoting them as based on appearances rather than the person's identified gender.
• Examples using this form include: If I Was Your Girl, A Fantastic Woman, Trans America, and Leelah Alcorn's suicide note.

Transition narrative exempla are very effective and common in circumstances where transgender is considered novel or contentious. This is because exempla transitions are geared at showing as a way of telling. You get the theories of transgender communicated but in a way that typically does so obliquely through narratives and facts that work on the emotions of the audience. By giving case studies with facta that invoke pity (how terrible!) or identification (they use the same lipstick as me!) the dicta can be consumed without inciting the debates that tend to arise when discussions are based more in abstraction.

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The Memoir

Whereas Transition Exempla may be the most numerous in the archive, the confessional memoir is perhaps the most popular. It occurs with relative frequency since transgender has entered public discourse that a trans person gets told, "you should write a book! Tell your story!" Indeed, this turn towards memoir is often part of the process of marginalized identities entering the mainstream. When there is a recognized lack of fact or fiction (beyond the medical or sociological which can be considered to academic for public audiences) memoirs or biographies tend to be the first to fill the void. Whereas exempla demand that readers take some medicine with their sugar, some dicta with their facta, memoirs seem to offer pure sugar, all facts with no doctrinal agenda. Now, one may still derive theories and believes from reading a memoir but they are not nearly as important, if they come at all. Memoirs thus give the sense of learning truth (or truthiness) without the fetters of ideology.

Calling trans memoirs confessional gets at their rhetorical function and their historical genre. Because memoirs are typically highly formalized, edited, and published for a wider (if still somewhat niche) audience. As such, not every trans person will have the chance, means, or desire to write a memoir. Yet nearly every trans person will be asked or even required to tell their life story. This biography may sometimes be given by others but the first person confession is generally preferred as the most authoritative. This may take public form such as an interview, a vlog/blog, or a speech in front of a community group. This may also take an important institutional form, wherein the trans person must confess the truth of their lives to doctors in order to get treatments, to insurers in order to get coverage, to employers or Human Resources to get accommodations, to government agencies to get new documentation, and lawyers or judges to get protections or compensations. Confessional life stories also are frequently used to persuade friends and family members to cooperate with a transition. Rare is the situation where a trans person transitions name and pronouns without someone demanding to hear the life story of the person.

Historically, before transgender was accepted enough to get book deals, confessions were a prominent and important genre in establishing transgender as a discrete condition of life. Before a psychiatrist is willing to sign on to support an individual trans person and before the wider medical industry got into the business of publishing research on trans people in general, a trans person had to sit in front of a doctor and convince them of the veracity and necessity of their gender. The most common and effective way to get these authorities on their side was by providing the facts of one's life. Before doctrines (dicta) could be drawn up to explain the facts (facta) of trans people, making exampla possible, the facts were confessed wholesale to the best of the trans person's ability. And before the private confession of the therapist's office, there were confessions to priests and judges. For much the same reason, as religious institutions and the courts have dominated much of western culture, trans people historically had to also try to convince these authorities of their veracity as well. Thus we see the long history of transgender found in religious and legal documents. At times, the recorder of the confession imports their own doctrines and ideology, but often enough the confession is so surprising to the authority that they do not fully know how to make an example of it. As such, confessions often break free of over doctrine in order to persuade often suspicious audiences of the internal and external realities of transgender.

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The Journey

If transition examples frequently collapse time into a before/after picture and confessional memoirs often assert an essential truth that took a lifetime to unravel, journey narratives tend to fall somewhere in the middle. In fact, journey narratives are often all about the middle, extending the second act of a three into a narrative in and of itself. As such, even though transition narratives can at times be presented as journeys they are presented in ways generically distinct from examples of transition. In fact, they may be seen as inversions of each other. An example typically focuses the narrative on the trans person as the object of study. Even confessional memoirs are sold as the outside looking into the mind and soul the trans person. Yet trans journey narratives are more interested at looking through the eyes of transgender person outward at the world. The trans person becomes the subject and the world becomes the object. Whereas the before/after picture emphasizes the visual difference in the trans person, the timeline of a journey is more about the scenery and saying look at my life "here" and compare it to my life "there." At times, these places are literally different spaces, such as the move from a rural or suburban hometown to the city. Yet frequently, whether or not there is a journey through space there is a usually journey through time. And the goal of this journey from a narrative stand-point is to get the reader to come along with the trans person, to look along with them, to see how the world looks from a different perspective.

For a fan of pilgrimage narratives and travel narratives, it is unfortunate that the vast majority of such trail literature is not only cisgender but white able-bodied heterosexual and male. Yet tropes and narrative structures of these journey narratives are still at play in transgender journeys but in a different form. As noted, there are often physical journeys that define a trans journey narrative, moves across country, from a parent's home to college, going to a new job, getting a new place after a divorce. These physical moves often correspond to other changes in the trans persons life. Part of the journey may be transition but may also be coming out to the family, finding a safer place to live, getting a more accommodating job, etc. Such physical journeys are often described in great detail because journey narratives generically focus on environment. Details such as social contexts and the availability or absence of support are important features of the social terrain, even though the physical differences between one city and another may not be as drastic as walking from the mountains into the dessert. Yet any journey through space is also a journey through time. A journey narrative in this way may resemble a confessional memoir, insofar as it gives details of a life across time. Yet their purposes and foci are different. A confession functions to give insights about the interior life. A journey narrative on the other hand focuses more on the change of circumstances over time. How did moving in with Dad after your parents divorce affect your gender presentation? How did living in Boystown, Chicago affect your freedom of gender expression? How did taking the rural small town job affect your work life? The focus in these journeys are on the external life, which this genre considers no less important.

Because they often lack the typical markers of travel literature (a hiker with a backpack, a walking stick, mountains in the distance) it can seem tricky to locate trans journey narratives. Often you will find them located among other genres: memoir, transition examples and case studies, and histories. An interesting trend in journey narratives are the higher number written by activists or academics. This may be because the activist and academic are habituated in analyzing their surroundings as much if not more than analyzing themselves. For instance, when Eli Clare tells his life story, he will often pause for an extended consideration on his geo-social context, his historical context, his philosophical context. Thus one learns as much if not more about Clare's world as one does about him. Likewise, a characteristic of Laverne Cox's interview or lecture style is that she will introduce a piece from her own life story but primarily as a way to take a journey through the other stories that surround her social contexts: the experience of people of color, women, working actors, LGBTQIA people etc. Yet even non-activists and non-academics will turn to the journey narrative. If I Was Your Girl tells the story of a trans girl moving back in with her father after her transition and mental health breakdown while she lived with her mom. Thus the novel records being a fish out of water in her new school. Being a fish out of water is one way of describing many trans journeys but also travel narratives in general. This is because journey narratives give perspectives that allow us to see the world we live in through a new light and suddenly the world becomes stranger and more interesting. 

Admittedly, a specific form of trans journey narratives are beginning to develop utilizing more traditional markers: the trans road story. From To Wong Fu to Trans America, the trans journey on the road becomes a way of showing the different contexts and problems trans people experience as they move from one place in the country to another. These journeys typically involve many of the features of other travel narratives, including the negotiation of transportation, pilgrimage narratives, including a prophesied holy land or loca sancta on the horizon, or epic and romance, including strange battles, dangers, and veering.

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Next up: Transgender as Literary Theory

Thus far, we have consider the tropes of transgender often found in cisgender narratives as well as the common types of narratives written by or at least focused around a transgender person. Yet this still leaves trans literature largely in the position of text or object for academic study. What is important to consider are the ways in which transgender may affect our methods of reading or enacting literary analysis. What is a trans way of reading? How does transgender affect the way narratives and archives are formed? Stay tuned for the third part of this series as we consider transgender as literary theory!

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The Cisgender Turn: John Britby's View of Eleanor Rykener

"Qui quidem Johannes Britby inde allocutus fatebatur quod ipse per vicum regium de Chepe die dominica inter horas supradictas transiens, dictum Johannem Rykener vestitu muliebri ornatum, ipsumque mulierem fore suspicantem fuerat assecutus, petens ab eo, tanquam a muliere, si cum ea libidinose agere possit."

The Interrogation of Eleanor Rykener
London 1394

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Introduction

On December 11th, John Britby (Johannes Britby) claims to have been walking down Cheap Street around 8:00-9:00 P.M., where and when he turned on and accosted (petere) a local person, Eleanor Rykener (recorded also as John Rykener by the scribe of the account). He affirms that she presented as a woman and indeed that he considered her a woman. Britby solicited Rykener for sex work. He paid her and they went to a local horse stall to complete the transaction. Soon after, they were both turned on and accosted by local law enforcement, then brought to court. Therein Britby told his story and how he viewed the case of Eleanor Rykener.

This is the story of Eleanor Rykener from John Britby's perspective and it is important to consider. First, it is socially important to also recognize that before Rykener is allowed to enact her agency in the exchange with Britby, he is the one to accost her. He turns on her before she can turn on him or even turn back on herself to set limits and costs for her body. Second, it is narratively important to recognize that before Rykener is allowed to tell her own history, the cisgender man gets to speak first. Before the transgender turn to the story, we get the cisgender turn.

The first interaction between Britby and Rykener is the man's accosting of the trans woman. In Latin, the word used is "petere." This means "to ask, to seek, to pursue" but also "to desire, to attack." According to Britby's story, it was him as the cisgender man who enacted the initial blow of power that set the rest of the events into motion. He sees her. He approaches her. He talks to her. He promises money. He takes her away to a private place. He presumably touches her body, in ways not disclosed. Then he is the first person allowed to speak in the courtroom. Consistently, the cisgender man is the one driving events as well as driving the narrative.

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Accosting

How may this cisgender turn on the medieval trans woman be qualified? Unpacking the word "petere" can help demonstrate the way that medieval cisgender approached medieval transgender. In the first case, the pre-modern cisgender perspective begins by asking the question: who are you? Or, perhaps more accurately: who are you to me? Britby wants to know if she will be his sexual partner for the evening. Will she take on that role for him? This cisgender man is the one who gets to set the terms and premises of the exchange with transgender people. In a cis-normative world and a patriarchal world, this is the logical order of events. 

Britby is the one who seeks out Rykener. It must be admitted that later generations might never have known the story of a medieval trans woman without a medieval cis man seeking her out. The cisgender man has the power to move across social boundaries, into the margins of Cheap Street, and bring a trans woman out from the shadows of obscurity into the light of legal and historical analysis. 

Britby also may be said to pursue Rykener. She is not willing to go with him right away but demands payment. He provides this monetary incentive, showing that her resistance or hesitation is not enough to dissuade him. Even after he seeks and finds her, Britby will continue to pursue her. Britby pursues her because the cisgender man desires the trans woman. He does not have her currently in his life. Whether he is without any women's company at home or whether he simply desires the particular company of a trans woman, Britby desires Rykener. This desire is worth emphasizing. There is something a cisgender life lacks that a transgender life can offer, even if in this case it may have been something a cis woman could also offer. Yet despite have the trans woman having the power of attraction, the cis man has the power to act on his desire, overcoming boundaries and resistance to do so. 

Given this power differential, the potential for "petere" to mean "to attack" is worth consideration as well. The translation as "accost" gives some sense of Britby's actions as a sort of attack, assault, or harassment. Even if the cisgender man approached her with all intended politeness, the situation he establishes between the cis man and the trans woman, as well as the exchange he proposes between them serves to underline that he has power that she does not have. Presumably, he wishes to touch her body. She demands money, meaning that she might otherwise refuse without him overcoming this defense with payment. Regardless of whether sexual penetration occurs, the historically defining act of Eleanor Rykner's story is that of a cisgender man penetrating her life, agency, and potentially (likely) also her body.

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The Story of John Britby

I will argue in the next section on "the Scribe" of Eleanor Rykener's story that the Cisgender Turn of history reflects and repeats in the archives the accosting that Britby enacts in person. But before we move on to considering the legacy of the cisgender turn, it is necessary to acknowledge that the story of Eleanor Rykener is not told by her for the most part. Yes, the document includes her confession. Yet the writer is a cisgender man (presumably) and the first person to ever tell her story in the document is another cisgender man. Historians and literary analysts must note how having a cisgender man be the first to tell a trans woman's story will prejudice the telling and receiving of this story. He has a power to speak that she lacks. Yes, she will speak. But her words will always come second to his. The view of the court will be affected and so will generations of historians afterwards, no matter how they might try to forget, by the languages and assumptions that a cisgender man will make about a trans woman. We may move forward and emphasize the medieval transgender voice but this transgender turn will always ever come after the cisgender turn.

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The Future of Medieval Transgender Studies: Kalamazoo 2018

"It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,

 a step along the way"

Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw

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The Loathly Lady of Medieval Studies

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 (i.e. pay us), honor (i.e. treat us with dignity), lust, joy, and rich array (i.e. let us have fun and express our bodies as we will), flattery (i.e. treat us like we know what we are talking about, maybe even cite us), and marriage (i.e. make commitments to us). 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.

This is the story the Wife of Bath tells in the Canterbury Tales but it is also, I believe, the story of this session. The knight of medieval studies wants to know what it’s future looks like, the court of women and allies, or society for the study of medieval feminist studies, has given demands but now the knight of medievalism finds new potential futurity in the Wight that has been sometimes treated as an ugly crone and sometimes flirtatiously as an unspeakable desire, medieval transgender studies. Within the confines of this court and session, there seems to be some commitment, words towards a shared future. But the question of what kind of future remains. Is the Wight of medieval trans studies to be forced to pass under the beauty standards of this predominantly patriarchal and sometimes abusive knight leading her to inevitably stray from and resist him? Or will the field be grim faced but committed? Both options are on the table as well as the choice that the knight does choose and medieval studies should as well: liberation.

In identifying the sometimes loathly sometimes elf maiden in the Wife’s Tale with medieval trans women and medieval trans studies, I make a claim about the enmeshment of the medieval and the trans which many would like to keep separate. Transgender may exist out and honestly but should do so over there, in modernity, only flirtatiously visiting the medieval homestead when the knight’s lusts dare have fun with us, maybe even make jokes about us in satirical conference papers about eunuchs. Indeed, we have seen this been the case, with medieval studies of sexuality, some performed by our queer friends and forerunners, which flirt with the trans but ultimately noncommittally and tangentially. Or else trans scholars and studies will be claimed and committed to as a member of the medieval household but only as a killjoy diversity subgroup, that one Wight that is here but still doesn’t have full commerce with all the beautiful people. And either choice, keeping us proud and at a distance or close but begrudging, functions to keep the medieval medieval and keep transgender transgender. 

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Cistory

(Cisgender Versions of History)

Cis queer historians have likewise followed the impulse of the knight in un-trans-ing medieval transgender in order to make them queer sodomites, best unknowable and unspeakable. One such queer scholar once claimed to “look through and not at the transvestite.” Indeed she does, never once using any trans word besides this claim to look through transvestism, as her primary focus is the queer unspeakability of sodomy. Eleanor’s gender, she claimed, is as unknowable as her sin and sexuality. All of this unknowability, she concludes, is very queer. I am not here to contest that there is something very queer about medieval transgender but to say that medieval trans-ness is unknowable is to intentionally un-know all the ways that such trans-ness names itself and tells its story. At times, such as in the case of Eleanor Rykener, she may be forced to reveal details of her life, like her deadname, she otherwise would not disclose. Yet she uses her detection as a way of resisting the cis and queer impulse to uncover and un-trans her.

Like Eleanor, By being accosted, captured, and detected first by medieval cisgender men and later by cisgender historians, our loathly lady becomes exploited, limited, and un-trans-ed in order to provide a momentary playful release to cisgender systems that will proceed on despite the transness in the archive. Indeed, by overwriting or unwriting this trans-ness, the medieval cisgender men and the cisgender medievalists create then compound the dysphoria in the archive by contradicting the multivalence of identified and expressed gender with a gender assigned to her by society then history. Eleanor becomes a sodomitical cross-dressing cis male and the Wight becomes an ugly old woman or else a somewhat queer elfin cis woman. At times the impulse to un-trans medieval figures may make allowances, such as defining the Wife of Bath by her tale by saying the teller is a strong and thereby masculine woman or describe Rykener by the double-billing as John/Eleanor that limits Eleanor to at best co-equal with John. 

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Dysphoria in the Archives

These figures embody the un-trans-ing and unknowing of trans-ness that leaves the baseline foundational assumption going into medieval studies the belief that of course such medieval persons were not transgender. Indeed, this insistence on having our cake and eating it too is exactly the conflict is the DSM-5 definition of dysphoria. The Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM-5) short definition of gender dysphoria is: the “marked difference between the individual’s expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her.” I draw attention to the fact that the disorder, dysfunction, and distress is social and not individual. The problem is not that a person is transgender. The problem is that the cisgender society accosts, captures, and un-trans-es the transgender person. Dysphoria begins in the environment, dysphoria begins in cisgender people, then is transmitted into transgender bodies where is does wreckage to lives, destroying transgender pasts, transgender presents, and transgender futures.

This is dysphoria the price of either treating transgender studies as a modern field we may invoke on occasion playfully and unfaithfully, not doing our due diligence to her, or else as a diversity box we check begrudging but otherwise ignore and isolate, occasionally giving lip service to when forced to be a court of women or a society of medieval feminists. Dysphoria is the personal internalization of a social division that is willing to make exceptions but otherwise will not transform the fundamental division of male and female, medieval and trans studies. And notice, the dysphoria may not be named as such until the trans figure makes itself known but the conditions in society that produce this dysphoria, the divisions in the field and in the archives pre-exist and may even outlast a loathly lady standing up in a session pointing them out. Because these divisions are nonetheless about the control and subordinacy of cis men and women, even though it is currently trans, queer, and non-binary people and studies feeling the beating stick.

As a primarily social event between people rather than a strictly internal psychological event, dysphoria can then be detected in the field and in the archives, especially archives that deny trans identification or expression. Dysphoria is a disorder in cisgender societies and archives that demands transgender interventions to repair, to liberate, and to re-narrate. This session then is both a call for and an enacting of such a reparative, liberating, and retelling. In not only to see in these papers how we might attend to the way that the medieval cis order and medievalist cis histories have created dysphoria in the archive by learning lessons on how to transform the future of the past by transforming compulsory cisgender lives and stories. Dysphoria in the archive teaches us the need to trans(form) queerness that reifies the cisgender order by un-transing our past, thereby threatening our present. Because the root of dysphoria is the cisgender desire to not see transgender, then or now. The future of medieval transgender studies may begin the process of liberating cis folk from their ingrained ignorance.

So how do we affirm rather than accost, liberate rather than capture, and deepen rather than uncover medieval transgender and dysphoria? How do we diminish and reclaim the dysphoria in the archive towards a positive pre-modern transgender studies? I argue that the Wife of Bath’s Tale, specifically the loathly lady already shows us the way by how she turns back on the cisgender order. First, consider how the Wight responds to the knight accosting her. If she is going to be exploited, she demands to be paid before she consents. In historical terms, this is to say that historians must let the trans people speak and consent to how we use their stories. Let trans persons of the past and their allies today set their terms. Thus, if we are to tell trans histories then we must listen to trans voices. Educating, accepting, promoting, publishing, reading, and hiring trans scholars should be the goal because as the loathly lady tells us, if you want to use trans bodies and stories then you should commit to us and pay us. Commit to us with scholarships, citations, jobs, and tenure. In the meanwhile, consult, listen, and read trans studies. 

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Liberating the Past

The second lesson from the loathly lady is her response to the impulse of the cisgender order to grasp, seize, capture, and limit her: she demands liberation. For those who have not read the Wife of Bath’s Tale for it’s trans-ness recently, perhaps because we are distracted by the Wife’s own female masculinity, the story ends after the knight being given the choice between an insubordinate distant beautiful partner or a committed but begrudely accepted partner, when he says, the choice is yours. In the end, the best future I see for medieval transgender studies is one based around liberation. This would mean not insisting on trans studies as only that proud but unmedieval modern thing on the one hand and on the other hand not relegating medieval trans figures to a few odd loathly isolated figures and scholars. In short, let medieval transgender studies become what it needs to become. And what that will look like is not something this elf maid / loathly lady can tell you at this particular court of feminists.

What I can tell you is how the Wife of Bath’s story ends. Because after the knight gives his partner the freedom to be whatever she may be, she immediately becomes a beautiful bride. Because what is beautiful is the freedom to be who we need to be be and become what we need to become which means the freedom to not only uncover and express truth but also the liberty to change our minds and even our pronouns. The Tale says she became the elfin maiden again and the story ends there, cut to black and roll credits. Yet I am not convinced that she will always stay that way. With her full liberty, she is free to use her powers as she pleases and needs. This means sometimes she may need to wear the face of the loathly lady killjoy. This may mean sometimes being the fairy dancing in the wood. Sometimes it means standing with a court of feminists as we interrogate an oppressive, misogynistic and sexually abusive field. The Tale ends there but the future is uncertain and that is the point. Because liberation demands uncertainty.

The medieval trans studies that I practice and teach my students is one of many faces, mostly ones that do not look like me. And this is important, because most of my readers and students also don’t look like me, even the trans ones. Because there is no one way to be trans today and certainly no one way to be trans in the past. There is some value in identifying trans persons in the past as helping us see ourselves in the past but if the middle ages is a mirror it is a broken mirror that reflects and refracts, distorts and multiplies. Let’s not just consider those we once called “male to female or female to male” but also those mothers to virgins, reproductive men who become eunuchs, knights who become monks, intersexual hermaphrodites and trans masculine Amazons. Trans does not just allow for movement across the binary or the creation of a space in between but a breaking open of the binary so we see that even within the category of man and woman there are many identities and transitions between. Medieval trans studies is not just about transgender people who look like me. Medieval trans studies is about all of us. 

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A Step Along the Way

The last lesson, I draw from this is not to turn away from the trans-ness in the archive not to turn away from the dysphoria in the archive. Transgender faced a cis accosting in the medieval moment just as trans histories face limiting and erasure in medieval studies. Dysphoria generated by the cis past and present is the elided reality to be detected, revealed, and disclosed. We need dysphoria not just as a way to detect trans people in archives but as a way to see the history of transphobia in cis history and cis historians. Because the loathly lady does not just tell us about herself but about her time, about the generations of historians after her, and about us. She teaches us to detect the systems that oppressed her and oppress us. The goal of liberating medieval transgender studies is that this means liberating all of us. Consent benefits us all. Equity benefits us all. Intersectional justice benefits us all. Commitment to each other in the field and not to a certain way that field has looked in the past is what will see that we have a future at all.

This liberation means working towards a future and medieval studies that is not our own. To quote a prayer made famous by Oscar Romero, “No statement says all that could be said…No confession brings perfection…No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way… We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.” I yearn for a day, perhaps soon, perhaps not so soon, that my remarks today and my scholarship are no longer necessary and indeed quite dated. My hopes are that some of those listening today and speaking today will be those who take us over that next step, that write that next article, organize that next session, teach the next generation of medieval trans scholars. We want to give these students and scholars more liberation than we had. A more ethical profession than we had. A middle ages that is fully medieval and therefore more fully trans. We want them to walk on the foundations that we are excavating and the foundations that we may become. And like all moments in the past and soon to be past, these moments are moments of uncertainty and many possible futures. The medieval past did end up here today but did not have to. Every moment is a moment of possibility if only we have the liberty to choose. Likewise, today, this session, “Towards a Medieval Transgender Studies,” is about the future but also about marking a moment. “We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way.”

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Click Here for More about Medieval Transgender Studies

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