In the United States, several states led by Republicans have restricted the rights of transgender persons: Iowa has signed a law eliminating the protection of civil rights of trans persons; Wyoming has prohibited public agencies from requiring the use of favorite pronouns; And Alabama recently adopted a law that recognizes only two sexes. Hundreds of bills have been presented in other state legislative assemblies, in order to restrict the rights of trans persons.
Earlier in the year, several presidential decrees were taken to deny the transgender identity. One of them, entitled “eradicating anti -Christian prejudices”, said that Biden administration policies in favor of gender affirmation were “anti -Christian”. He accused the equal opportunities commission in employment, of Joe Biden, of forcing “Christians to assert a radical transgender ideology contrary to their faith”.
However, in a clear way, not all Christians are antirans. And in my research on medieval history and literature, I found proof of a long history in Christianity of what one could today call “transgender” saints. Although this term did not exist in medieval times, the idea of men living as women or women living as men, was undoubtedly present during this period. Many researchers have suggested that the use of the modern “transgender” term made it possible to establish precious links to understand the historical parallels.
There are at least thirty-four documents documented on the life of saints with a fluid genre dating from the first centuries of Christianity. Initially written in Latin or Greek, several stories of trans saints have been translated into vernacular languages.
Saintes born women who lived like men
Among the thirty-four original saints, at least three have gained great popularity in medieval Europe: Sainte Eugénie (183-257), Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria (414-470) and Saint Marinos, also designated as Saint Marine of Bithynie (Marine La disguise). The three were born women, but cut their hair and put on male clothes to live like men and enter monasteries.
Eugénie de Rome, raised in the pagan religion, entered the monastery to find out more about Christianity and has become abbess. Euphrosyne of Alexandria entered the monastery to escape an unwanted pretender and spent the rest of his life there. Marina, born Marina, decided to give up her condition as a woman and live with her father in the monastery as a man.
These stories were very read. The story of Eugénie appeared in two of the most popular manuscripts of the time: Lives of saintsof ælfric, and Golden legendfrom Jacques de Voragine. Ælfric was an English abbot who translated the lives of Latin saints in old English in Xe century, making them accessible to a large profane audience. Golden legend was written in Latin and compiled in the 13the century; It is part of more than a thousand manuscripts.
Euphrosyne also appears in Lives of saints D’Elfric, as well as in other texts in Latin, in English and old French. The story of Marinos is available in more than a dozen manuscripts in at least ten languages. For those who did not know how to read, the lives of the saints of ælfric and other manuscripts were read aloud in the churches during the religious service on the day of the Festival of the Holy.
A small church in Paris built in the Xe century was devoted to Marinos and the relics of her body would have been preserved in the Qannoubine monastery in Lebanon. All this to say that many people were talking about these saints.
Sacred transidentity
In the Middle Ages, the life of the saints was less important from a historical point of view than from a moral point of view. As a moral story, the public was not supposed to reproduce the life of a saint, but learn to imitate Christian values.
The transition between man and woman becomes a metaphor for the transition between paganism and Christianity, between wealth and poverty, between worldliness and spirituality. The Catholic Church opposed the travesty in laws, liturgical meetings and other writings. However, Christianity honored the holiness of these transgender saints.
In a collection of trials of 2021 on the transgender saints and queers of the medieval era, the researchers Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt claim that medieval Christianity considered transidentity as sacred. “Transidentity is not only compatible with holiness; The transidentity itself is sacred ”they write. The saints whose genre was fluid had to reject the conventions, in order to live their authentic life, just as the first Christians had to reject conventions in order to live as Christians.
The specialist in literature Rhonda McDaniel explains that at the Xe A century in England, the adoption of Christian values consisting in rejecting wealth, male militarism or sexuality allowed people to more easily overcome strict ideas on male and female genres. Instead of defining gender by distinct values for men and women, all individuals could be defined by the same Christian values.
Historically and even in contemporary times, gender is associated with specific values and roles, such as supposing that household chores are reserved for women or men are stronger. But the adoption of these Christian values allowed individuals to transcend these distinctions, in particular when they entered monasteries and convents.
Christianity has a transgender history which it can be inspired and many opportunities to accept transidentity as an essential part of its values.
According to Rhonda McDaniel, even Cisgenres saints as Saint Agnès de Rome (291-304), Saint Sébastien (IIIe century) and Saint Georges de Lydda (around 275-303) embodied these values, showing that any member of the public could fight against gender stereotypes without changing his body. Agnès’ love for God allowed him to give up his role as a wife. When love and wealth were offered, she rejected them in favor of Christianity. Sébastien and Georges were powerful Romans who, as men, were supposed to engage in violent militarism. However, both rejected their violent Roman masculinity for the benefit of Christian pacifism.
A life worthy of being imitated
Although most of the lives of the saints were written mainly as tales, the story of Joseph de Schönau (1170-1188) was told as both very real and worthy of being imitated by the public. His story is told as a historical account of a life that would be accessible to ordinary Christians.
At the end of the 13the century, Joseph, born Woman (Hildegonde), entered a Cistercian monastery in Schönau, in southwest Germany. On his deathbed, Joseph told the story of his life, in particular his pilgrimage to Jerusalem when he was a child and his difficult return to Europe after the death of his father. When he finally returned to his hometown of Cologne, he entered a monastery as a man, as a sign of gratitude to God for having brought him healthy and except for him.
Although he argued that Joseph’s life deserved to be imitated, the first author of Joseph’s story, Engelhard de Langheim, had a complex relationship with the kind of Joseph. He said Joseph was a woman, but regularly used male pronouns to designate him.
Even if the stories of Eugenie, Euphrosyne and Marinos are told in the form of moral tales, their authors also had complex relationships with the question of their gender. In the case of Eugenie, in a manuscript, the author refers to her using only female pronouns, but in another, the scribe uses male pronouns.
Marinos and Euphrosyne were often designated as men. The fact that the authors have referred to these characters as male suggests that their transition to masculinity was not only a metaphor, but in a way as real as that of Joseph.
On the basis of these stories, I argue that Christianity has a transgender history which it can be inspired and many opportunities to accept transidentity as an essential part of its values.
