Trans Community, Then and Now

For many of us, seeking a trans or genderqueer history is a lonely project.Lou Sullivan, for instance, wrote as he researched the life of Jack Garland, whom Sullivan read as a trans man like himself, "I gather Jack Garland's remnants with delight + think of his life compared to mine + it does make me feel better.But not much." 1 As Cameron Awkward-Rich and Hil Malatino note, "but not much" signals the way affectively driven projects of trans (or queer) recovery may fail to meet the emotional needs of the reader who sets out on such a project. 2 That is, a trans reading, even when we find what we want, is often still a lonely reading practice.Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography promises a brief reprieve from this solitude in its pages, with the editors writing that these trans and genderqueer stories of saints' lives "offer companionship" to the lonely reader ( 14).The contents of the collection's chapters range broadly across the time and space of the Middle Ages, from Byzantine contexts to late Iron Age Scandinavia, roaming Christian Europe in the meanwhile.Setting transness in its medieval contexts provides an invaluable counterargument to claims about the supposedly recent invention of transness.We have always been here, and for the roughly thousand years of the Middle Ages, "here" was proximate to the divine.This argument about the relationship between transness or genderqueerness and sanctity will no doubt also prove useful to scholars of modernity already thinking about transness.The collection is part of an effort to outline the existing connections between trans identities and holiness in mostly Christian, especially Catholic, contexts.It speaks directly to Christian discourses that would, as M. W. Bychowski writes in the collection's final chapter, "undermine trans lives," citing the weaponization of the book of Genesis against queer or trans individuals (253)."Transness is not merely compatible with holiness," editors Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt argue, "transness itself is holy" (14).