In Transgender Warriors, Leslie Feinberg writes: 'I couldn't find myself in history. No-one like me seemed to have ever existed'. Such a feeling - what I call 'historiographical dysphoria' - is familiar to marginalised subjects, those of us who have been written out of cis-hetero-normative history. Gender dysphoria refers to the distress and dis-ease caused by a mismatch between one's assigned gender and one's identified gender. Historiographical dysphoria is an artefact of gender dysphoria, and, more generally, the multifarious dysphorias that come from an authentic existence that does not, cannot, and will not fall in line with the dominant norms of cis-hetero-normative society. This is the distress and dis-ease caused by the wilful cleaving of an individual from the past, from the collective past of their community. Transphobic rhetoric insists upon the newness of transness, and indeed trans people. We are a symptom of modernity's degradation, a disease in urgent need of cure. There we no trans people in the Middle Ages, no queer people, no crips either. We have no past, and, as such, we will not be allowed a future. This is the story that traditionalist historiography so often tells. In recent years, things have begun to change. Trans saints have become ever more visible in scholarship, a vital resource for trans and genderqueer people at a time of ever-rising transphobia. We turn to the past to survive the present and to scope out new ways of being in the future. This paper articulates the possibilities and pleasures of trans-medievalist work, focussing on trans saints. This is scholarship that attends to trans lives, experiences, and traces in the medieval past and operates 'trans' time itself. It rejects normative linear chronology in favour of the fierce embrace of trans-queer-crip time(s), of the blurry temporalities of transition itself. In this way, trans-medievalist work offers a powerful methodology for the entire medievalist field.
Megan Bradshaw (2026) studied this question.