ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the historical relationships in literature between religion and what we might call trans experiences. It takes the historical scholarship of the activist and novelist Leslie Feinberg seriously in order to explore Feinberg’s claims about the history of Christianity and trans life in the early Middle Ages. Feinberg—a secular Jewish writer—focused on European Christianity to expose the source of European imperialism’s gender binary. Feinberg argued that European Christianity suppressed a previous trans-positive communal pagan tradition while importing some trans figures from pagan religions into Christianity as trans male saints. I test Feinberg’s historical hypotheses by examining three premodern sites of gender variance: pre-Christian burials in northern Europe, the obscure Old English gender category bædling, and the trans saints tradition as depicted in the Old English Martyrology. The burials and the bædlings hint at an early transfeminine category of gender surviving into early Christian England. At the same time, the trans male saints suggest that the church, indeed, imported Greek gender-variant figures into itself but sidelined transfeminine figures such as the bædling. These trans figures, however, are all racialized. Christian documents associated both the trans saints and the bædling with foreignness while portraying Jewish and Muslim people and people of color as gendervariant. My chapter thus suggests that scholars have misjudged Feinberg’s work as without historical value. I build on hir work by making two further points: that Christianity has used portrayals of gender variance to further racism and that the rise of Christianity led to a surge of transmisogyny while platforming transmasculine saints.
