“Nevermore a manly shape retaine”: Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus , Fairness, and Trans Femininity c. 1602

This article considers how Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus depicts feminizing transition as itself a function of early modern race-making. I argue that Beaumont’s epyllion dramatically reshapes those we now call assigned male at birth using the uneven and erotic vocabulary of early modern English racial hierarchies. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus ’s portrait of a fair hermaphrodite requires the disavowal of those who are not white and, in the case of Egypt, European. I maintain that Beaumont’s verse sutures a nymph to a boy only by continually signaling their racial sameness through anaphora and hyper-bole. That the poem so explicitly aligns feminizing transition with whiteness unsettles more recent, colorblind narratives of trans womanhood that can otherwise overlook the effortful makings of race. Beaumont’s blunt expressions of fairness many times over create what we may now recognize as a trans girl, softening a so-called “manly shape.”