WHILE their heterodox identities are little celebrated in the modern church, several extraordinary 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 female, they nonetheless lived exemplary lives as apostles or monks, and their adventures 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 phenomenon 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 worthy of apostolate and sent his new recruit 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,’” according to Clovis Maillet’s Les Genres 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 assigned 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 century. 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 numerous examples of people acclaimed, revered, and even canonized for their transmasculine 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 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 female 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 female 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 royals 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. Kidnapped by the thief’s accomplices, Joseph was hanged in place of the convict, but angels allowed him to survive his fate and fulfill 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 hagiography by Engelhard de Langheim stops.
Those three stories, drawn from 34 examples of gender transition in hagiographic texts, demonstrate the fluidity of interpretation 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 masculine dress was no trivial matter. In their times and throughout the first fifteen centuries of our era, clothing was an essential signifier, identifying 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 financial 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 religious authorities had thrust upon them.
Yet Thecla, Eugene, Joseph, and countless others overcame these limitations and became the heroes of stories passed on for decades. Perhaps paradoxically, their journeys were made possible by the religiosity 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 bestowed 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).
