GLR May-June 2025

Transgender Journeys as a Way to Sainthood HISTORY MEMO

M AGALI M ERMET W figures that today would be understood as transgender are recorded as having inspired early Christians through their unshakable faith and courage. Identified at birth as fe male, they nonetheless lived exemplary lives as apostles or monks, and their adven tures were praised among the faithful—a fact that has renewed relevance as the trans community again finds itself under attack by religious conservatives. One of the earliest traces of this phenom enon can be found in the apocryphal text The Acts of Paul and Thecla , which dates back to the 1st century CE. Thecla, a young virgin of noble birth who became a disciple of Paul, wanted to preach the gospel, but Paul initially refused to allow it. After being Christianized, Thecla was sent to suffer martyrdom. Subjected to death by fire, she was saved by a rain shower. When she was thrown to the beasts, a lioness protected her. She was thrown into the sea, but the sea lions refused to attack. She then used the water to declare herself baptized. Afterward, Paul considered her wor thy of apostolate and sent his new re cruit out on the road to preach, as a man—her chest girded, her hair cut, and wearing masculine clothing— with his blessing: “And Paul said: ‘Go and teach the word of God,’” ac cording to Clovis Maillet’s LesGen res Fluides. Paul favored strictly differentiated clothing for men and women, so it’s clear that he didn’t send someone he perceived as a woman but instead a person who had transcended his as signed gender to become an apostle, a man. This text was extremely popular and was later considered apocryphal under pressure from theologians like Tertullian in the 2nd century, then Pope Gelasius I in the 5th cen tury. It became lost until the 19th century, when it was uncovered among a pile of Coptic papyri in Heidelberg. This story is far from an isolated case. Across twelve centuries, history offers nu merous examples of people acclaimed, revered, and even canonized for their trans masculine journeys. In the 3rd century, Saint Eugene, also known as Eugenia of Rome, lived as a man in a monastery—traces of his cult and the HILE their heterodox identities are little celebrated in the mod ern church, several extraordinary

napped by the thief’s accomplices, Joseph was hanged in place of the convict, but an gels allowed him to survive his fate and ful fill his mission. Back in his diocese, he lived as a monk until his death. As his body was being washed, an “abnormality” was discovered. That’s where the first hagiogra phy by Engelhard de Langheim stops. Those three stories, drawn from 34 exam ples of gender transition in hagiographic texts, demonstrate the fluidity of interpreta tion regarding gender expression. Accession to masculinity through chastity, abnegation, and the surpassing of oneself was not only possible but was for centuries regarded as a way to reach holiness. These figures’ adoption of mas culine dress was no trivial matter. In their times and throughout the first fifteen centuries of our era, clothing was an essential signifier, identify ing not only a person’s gender but also their social class and rank. From the Roman Empire to the modern era, usurping someone else’s position through dress wasn’t allowed. For such figures, living as men meant freedom. Throughout these periods, women had few legal rights or career options or avenues to fi nancial independence. They passed from a state of childhood under the authority of a patriarch to one of subjugation under the authority of a husband. Few could subsist outside the conditions that social and reli gious authorities had thrust upon them. Yet Thecla, Eugene, Joseph, and countless others overcame these lim itations and became the heroes of stories passed on for decades. Per haps paradoxically, their journeys were made possible by the religios ity of their times. In the first centuries of Christianity, God meant everything. God was responsible for the nature around you, the food on your plate, the air you breathed, your position in society, your ticket to an exalted afterlife. Those trans-masculine journeys were considered acts of God, and God didn’t make mistakes. The helping hand of the Almighty was responsible for changing a fate from the inferiority be stowed by their birth gender to a heroic, God-chosen one. Magali Mermet, a French writer living in the Netherlands, is the author of Secernere: Le choix du secret (as Magali M).

sepulture of one of his eunuch companions have been discovered in the catacombs of Rome—before having to reveal his birth gender by exposing his breasts to prove his innocence in a rape accusation. Eugene was martyred in 257 with two eunuchs. The saint’s gender identification changed over time: feminized in the Byzantine world, he became masculine again in the high Middle Ages before again being identified as a fe male saint. The gender transitions are quite well documented despite a substantial loss of sacred texts during the iconoclastic period. Joseph, also known as Hildegonde, is often described as the first saint of modest origins, coming from a Cistercian

monastery. The monk was identified as fe male at birth but lived as a man until he died in 1188. After the death of Hildegund’s mother, the child’s father took the twelve year-old on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem under the name Joseph. When his father died there, the boy adopted the tonsure (the shaved circle atop a monk’s head) before embarking on a ship back to the Kingdom of Germany with other pilgrims. With roy als and the papacy in a conflict over control of Western Europe, Joseph was asked to walk from Cologne to Verona with a letter for the pope. During his journey, he was falsely accused of theft. When submitted to an ordeal by fire, he wasn’t burned. Kid Saint Eugenia . Courtesy The Orthodox Church in America.

May–June 2025

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