Is it always the case that women who disguise their female sex are transgender? When we study the past, we need to think about how people doing the same actions in days of yore might have thought about their identities differently than us moderns. The transgendered monks of Byzantium are a case in point.
There are several accounts of holy women who hid their gender to pass as men. St. Anna-Euphemianos, for instance, shaved her head and pretended she was a eunuch in order to get into a monastery. An evil-doing monk started ranting prejudicial remarks about eunuchs, and then tried pushing her down a hill “so that her clothes would be lifted up and he might see her naked and become certain” (of her gender). St. Anna was so santified, though, that divine power caused him to go into near-paralysis — the “happy” end to the tale is that he was convicted of attempted murder and executed by having his head crushed.
St. Mary’s mother died when she was very young, and her father entered a monastery. So that she wouldn’t be left without him, Mary got her father to shave her head and dress her like a man. She was called henceforth “Marinos” and her biological gender was only discovered after she died – she, like St. Anne, had passed herself off as a eunuch.
The written sources of such women were cross-dressing positive. However, the perspective is utterly different from our own day, in which many of us talk about people *as* transgendered, rather than people who are temporarily acting in a transgendered manner. At any rate, these women were praised for their holy nature, and their cross-dressing frequently appears as something they had to do in order to live the holiest life.
The image here is a Byzantine manuscript from 1066, showing a monk tossing a garment to a woman known as Mary of Egypt — writings don’t say that she tried to pass as a man, but stress that, as a holy ascetic, she had so starved herself that her femininity had practically withered away, which was also a typical portrayal of transgendered monks.
Source(s): “Transgender lives in the Middle Ages though art, literature, and medicine,” by Robert Betancourt @getty.edu, the J. Paul Getty Trust. Image in the Theodore Psalter, BL, London, Add. Ms. 19352, following 68r. “The vita of St. Anna/Euphemianos. Introduction, translation, and commentary,” _Journal of Modern Hellenism_ 27-28 (2009-2010), 53-69 at pages 66-67.
