Christianity has long revered saints who could be called ‘transgender’ today

Several Republican-led states have restricted transgender rights: Iowa has signed a law removing civil rights protection for transgender people; Wyoming has prohibited state agencies from requiring the usage of preferred pronouns; and Alabama recently passed a law that only two sexes could be recognized. Hundreds of bills have been introduced in other state legislatures to curtail trans rights.

Earlier within the 12 months, several White House executive orders pushed to disclaim trans identity. One of them, “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” claimed that gender-affirming policies of the Biden administration were “anti-Christian.” It accused the Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of forcing “Christians to affirm radical transgender ideology against their faith.”

To be clear, not all Christians are anti-trans. And in my research of medieval history and literature, I discovered evidence of an extended history in Christianity of what today could possibly be called “transgender” saints. While such a term didn’t exist in medieval times, the concept of men living as women, or women living as men, was unquestionably present within the medieval period. Many scholars have suggested that using the trendy term transgender creates useful connections to grasp the historical parallels.

There are at the least 34 documented stories of transgender saints’ lives from the early centuries of Christianity. Originally appearing in Latin or Greek, several stories of transgender saints made their way into vernacular languages.

Transgender saints

Of the 34 original saints, at the least three gained widespread popularity in medieval Europe: St. Eugenia, St. Euphrosyne and St. Marinos. All three were born as women but cut their hair and placed on men’s clothes to live as men and join monasteries.

Eugenia, raised pagan, joined a monastery to learn more about Christianity and later became abbot. Euphrosyne joined a monastery to flee an unwanted suitor and spent the remaining of his life there. Marinos, born Marina, decided to surrender womanhood and live along with his father on the monastery as a person.

These were well-read stories. Eugenia’s story appeared in two of the most well-liked manuscripts of their day – Ælfric’s “Lives of Saints” and “The Golden Legend.” Ælfric was an English abbot who translated Latin saints’ lives into Old English within the Tenth century, making them widely available to a lay audience. “The Golden Legend” was written in Latin and compiled within the thirteenth century; it is a component of greater than a thousand manuscripts.

Euphrosyne also appears in Ælfric’s saints’ lives, in addition to in other texts in Latin, Middle English, and Old French. Marinos’ story is out there in over a dozen manuscripts in at the least 10 languages. For those that couldn’t read, Ælfric’s saints’ lives and other manuscripts were read aloud in churches during service on the saint’s day.

A small church in Paris inbuilt the Tenth century was dedicated to Marinos, and relics of his body were supposedly kept in Qannoubine monastery in Lebanon.

This is all to say, a number of people were talking about these saints.

Holy transness

In the medieval period, saints’ lives were less necessary as history and more necessary as morality tales. As a morality tale, the audience was not intended to duplicate a saint’s life, but learn to emulate Christian values. Transitioning between female and male becomes a metaphor for transitioning from pagan to Christian, affluence to poverty, worldliness to spirituality. The Catholic Church opposed cross-dressing in laws, liturgical meetings and other writings. However, Christianity honored the holiness of those transgender saints.

In a 2021 collection of essays about transgender and queer saints within the medieval period, scholars Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt argue that medieval Christianity saw transness as holy.

“Transness isn’t merely compatible with holiness; transness itself is holy,” they write. Transgender saints needed to reject convention to be able to live their very own authentic lives, just as early Christians needed to reject convention to be able to live as Christians.

Literature scholar Rhonda McDaniel explains that in Tenth-century England, adopting the Christian values of shunning wealth, militarism and sex made it easier for people to transcend strict ideas about female and male gender. Instead of defining gender by separate female and male values, all individuals could possibly be defined by the identical Christian values.

Historically and even in contemporary times, gender is related to specific values and roles, equivalent to assuming that homemaking is for ladies, or that men are stronger. But adopting these Christian values allowed individuals to transcend such distinctions, especially once they entered monasteries and nunneries.

According to McDaniel, even cisgender saints like St. Agnes, St. Sebastian and St. George exemplified these values, exhibiting how anyone within the audience could push against gender stereotypes without changing their bodies.

Agnes’ love of God allowed her to offer up the role of wife. When offered love and wealth by men, she rejected them in favor of Christianity. Sebastian and George were powerful Roman men who were expected, as men, to have interaction in violent militarism. However, each rejected their violent Roman masculinity in favor of Christian pacifism.

A life value emulating

Although most saints’ lives were written primarily as morality tales, the story of Joseph of Schönau was told as each very real and worthy of emulation by the audience. His story is told as a historical account of a life that will be attainable for odd Christians.

In the late twelfth century, Joseph, born female, joined a Cistercian monastery in Schönau, Germany. During his deathbed confession, Joseph told his life story, including his pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a toddler and his difficult journey back to Europe after the death of his father. When he finally returned to his birthplace of Cologne, he entered a monastery as a person in gratitude to God for returning him home safely.

Despite arguing that Joseph’s life was value emulating, the primary creator of Joseph’s story, Engelhard of Langheim, had a sophisticated relationship with Joseph’s gender. He claimed Joseph was a lady, but often used masculine pronouns to explain him.

Even though Eugenia, Euphrosyne and Marinos’ stories are told as morality tales, their authors had similarly complicated relationships with their gender. In the case of Eugenia, in a single manuscript, the creator refers to her with entirely female pronouns, but in one other, the scribe slips into male pronouns.

Marinos and Euphrosyne were also ceaselessly known as male. The indisputable fact that the authors referred to those characters as male suggests that their transition to masculinity was not only a metaphor, but in some ways just as real as Joseph’s.

Based on these stories, I argue that Christianity has a transgender history to drag from and plenty of opportunities to embrace transness as a necessary a part of its values.