Content warning: sexism, violence against children
Spoiler warning: spoilers for all His Dark Materials books.
In preparation for the final(?) season of His Dark Materials, I wanted to take a moment to reflect upon one of the main characters of the show, Marisa Coulter. I will do so from a book perspective, but much of her book journey is of course relevant to the show as well. In either format, Marisa Coulter is someone to be reckoned with. From the moment we first meet her, we realise that this is someone extraordinary that we are dealing with.
A lady in a yellow-red fox-fur coat, a beautiful young lady whose dark hair falls shining delicately under the shadow of her fur-lined hood, is standing in the doorway of the Oratory, half a dozen steps above him. It might be that a service is finishing, for light comes from the doorway behind her, an organ is playing inside, and the lady is holding a jewelled breviary. (…) The young lady’s daemon is moving out from behind the fox-fur coat. He is in the form of a monkey, but no ordinary monkey: his fur is long and silky and of the most deep and lustrous gold.
(Pullman 2011a, 42)
Who is this beautiful lady, surrounded by luxuriousness and holy light we might ask? Well, we soon find out that she is a child trafficker who is conducting unethical experiments on marginalised children, partly in order to gain power. I’ve previously analysed these events from a fewdifferentpoints of view, so here I wanted to approach Marisa and her actions a bit differently. Specifically, I want to analyse how Marisa’s relationship to gender, class, shame, and power impacts the way she approaches the world.
Promotional shot from the His Dark Materials tv-show, retrieved from this article.
We don’t know too much about Marisa’s background, except that she wasn’t from the same social standing as either Asriel (or presumably her husband Mr Coulter). This is made clear in Northern Lights when John Faa explains to Lyra how Asriel and Marisa met:
When he was a young man, Lord Asriel went exploring all over the North, and came back with a great fortune. And he was a high-spirited man, quick to passion, a passionate man. And your mother, she was passionate too. Not so well-born as him, but a clever woman. A scholar, even, and those who saw her said she was very beautiful. She and your father, they fell in love as soon’s they met.
(Pullman 2011a, 122)
Here we learn a few crucial facts about Marisa. First, that she wasn’t exactly “well-born”, and second that she was considered both clever and beautiful. She was also a scholar, something the reader already knew, but it’s interesting that it’s pointed out in this passage when describing her social standing. Asriel has a lordship and “a great fortune”, and Marisa has her beauty and some academic acclaim. We don’t know as much about Mr Coulter, but it is stated that he was a politician and someone who was raising in power. It makes sense then that Marisa might marry him to gain a better social standing herself. As Asriel says later in Northern Lights:
You see, your mother’s always been ambitious for power. At first she tried to get it in the normal way, through marriage, but that didn’t work, as I think you’ve heard. So she had to turn to the Church. Naturally she couldn’t take the route a man could have taken- priesthood and so on- it had to be unorthodox; she had to set up her own order, her own channels of influence, and work through that.
(Pullman 2011a, 372)
So, she tried to gain power by marrying up, so to say, but that didn’t work. So to start, I’d like to analyse that strategy of hers and what made it fail. To do so, I’ll have to go into some theory…
I think one way of understanding Marisa’s actions is by looking at them through the theoretical perspective of two sociologists: Beverley Skeggs and Pierre Bourdieu. Skeggs has done a lot of writing about working-class women, and while I don’t think Marisa grew up lower-class (just not upper-class), I still think a lot of this applies. When writing about class, Skeggs makes use of the work by Pierre Bourdieu and how he conceptualises class. As he argues, someone’s position in society isn’t just caused by their economic capital, but also social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital (1987). One’s position in what he calls social space is furthermore dependent on not only the volume of one’s capital, but also the composition of said capital, and one’s trajectory. This essentially means that it matters how much capital you have, how much of each type of capital in comparison to each other you have, and where you started in the social space and where you have moved. Economic capital refers to, as one might guess, the amount of money one has. Social capital on the other hand refers to what social connections one has, which networks one has access to etc. But cultural capital is perhaps the most interesting one and one that becomes very relevant for this analysis. Cultural capital refers to for instance education, knowledge of culture (books, movies, music, etc.), and general taste (in clothes, décor, etc). As Bourdieu argues, different type of cultural capital is valid in different social spaces. If we apply this to His Dark Materials, we might consider how at Jordan, tokay is served after dinner, while with the Gyptians one can expect jenniver. You can make similar comparisons about what is seen as good taste in décor, for example when Lyra arrives at Marisa’s apartment:
She had seen a great deal of beauty in her short life, but it was Jordan Collage beauty- grand and stony and masculine. In Jordan Collage, much was magnificent, but nothing was pretty. In Mrs Coulter’s flat, everything was pretty. It was full of light, for the wide windows faced south, and the walls were covered in delicate gold-and-white stripped wallpaper. Charming pictures in gilt frames, an antique looking-glass, fanciful sconces bearing anbaric lamps with frilled shades; and frills on the cushions too, and flowery valances over the curtain-rail, and a soft green leaf-pattern carpet underfoot; and every surface was covered, it seemed to Lyra’s innocent eye, with pretty little china boxes and shepherdess and harlequins of porcelain.
(Pullman 2011a, 76)
Both Jordan and Marisa’s apartment are described to have this sort of luxury beauty, albeit in different ways. It’s interesting to consider how this contrasts with what is valued in the Gyptian community, where the Costa family’s boat is described as “brightly painted” (Pullman 2011a, 37), and the family is “noted for the grandeur and sumptuousness of their boat (ibid, 54). We hardly get a view that the Gyptians’ boats are luxuriously decorated in the same sense that Jordan is, the painting is most likely not as expensive as whatever decorations they have in Jordan, yet the Costas’ boat is still considered one of grandeur in this community, based on what they value. It thus contributes to them having a higher standing in that community. Yet, it would not be recognised as a legitimate form of cultural capital in other spaces. This can be explained by another Bourdieu concept, symbolic capital. Symbolic capital refers to the form the other capitals take when they are deemed legitimate. An example of this would be how a university degree (especially from a “fancy” university) makes one’s cultural capital (in this sense education) legitimate, and thus it functions as symbolic capital. As Bourdieu notes, for capital to matter, for it to wield any power, people need to believe that it does.
The power of words and commands, the power of words to give orders and bring order, lies in belief in the legitimacy of the words and of the person who utters them.
(Bourdieu 1979, 83)
Symbolic capital is therefore crucial to make the other types of capital matter.
Thus far, I’ve mainly talked about class and capital in isolation, not considering other social structures, but as many (eg. Skeggs 2005) have noted, social structures such as gender and race most definitely impact class and capital. As mentioned above, Beverley Skeggs is one scholar whose work regarding this I think is especially interesting. When discussing class and gender, Skeggs have noted how the working class has often been seen as dirty, dangerous, pathological, and lacking respect (2002). As she notes, one strategy that the working class (especially working-class women) have employed to counter this perception is striving for respectability. Achieving respectability then becomes a form of cultural capital, which can compensate for one’s lack of other capital (eg. economic, social, and symbolic). To achieve respectability, one needs to utilise femininity correctly. Femininity thus becomes a tool to achieve more capital and a higher standing in the social room. This can include using femininity when pursuing heterosexual relationships and gaining status through these. But while performing femininity correctly might lead to one gaining more capital, there is also the risk that one will perform it incorrectly, for instance by dressing or behaving in a way that is seen as trashy/promiscuous/slutty will further cement one’s place in the social room. And, as Skeggs note, for someone who does manage to make it out of the classed space they grew up in, it often feels like one is always waiting to mess up. For the other shoe to drop. One can often feel afraid of saying the wrong thing, behaving in the wrong way, dressing in the wrong way etc, because one wasn’t brought up with the social codes that come for granted for everyone else.
While not all of this applies to Marisa, I do think that thinking about her actions through the lens of capital, respectability, and femininity sheds some light on what she was trying to do early in her life, and why it failed. It seems as if she attempted to use her femininity as capital to better her station, particularly through her marriage which became a way to gain more cultural, economic, and social capital. Yet this all obviously got (at least partly) ruined when she had an affair with Asriel and got pregnant with Lyra. In the public perception, she wasn’t a respectable woman anymore, having deviated from the norms surrounding sexuality. No longer a respectable and proper wife, she lost a lot of cultural and symbolic capital. As Marisa puts it herself, having this child outside of marriage has been shameful:
“My child, my own child, conceived in sin and born in shame, but my child nonetheless, and you keep from me what I have every right to know!”
(Pullman 2011b, 37)
It is interesting how Marisa uses the word shame here, in a context where the Magisterium is discussing Lyra and the prophecy around her. As the reader learns later, Lyra is destined to repeat the role of Eve, committing “original sin” again. I have in a previous essay discussed both Lyra and Marissa in relation to Eve, so here I would just like to note how according to the bible (in our world and Lyra’s world) humans started to feel shame over their bodies due to Eve’s actions. Again, shame is connected to women’s sexuality.
Promotional shot for the His Dark Materials tv-show, retrieved from this article.
This connection between femininity, sexuality, and shame is also something Professor Ulrika Dahl has written about (2014). Dahl describes womanhood as more or less a connotation to the affect of shame. This can mean being shamed, but also shaming others, for instance shaming one’s family by “inappropriate” actions. According to Dahl, the way femininity is so closely bound up in shame leads to the two concepts often reinforcing each other.
Maybe shame is the connective tissue that embodies femininities and their relations, that which forever associates femininity to that which is called womanhood and defines the subordination of that which we call the second sex.
(Dahl 2014, 325) My translation from Swedish.
Furthermore, Dahl also argues that this is all tied to social class. Shame prevents us from taking certain paths in life because it reminds us of where we come from, and how we are perceived. Like Dahl says:
Shame moves between us, it spreads, sometimes like wildfire between downcast eyes in a subway cart when someone speaks too loudly, dresses inappropriately, or is harassed. Shame sticks between bodies and things, it’s a form of inherited connective tissue which links you to your class background, your barn, your family’s reputation, your lack of family, it precedes you when you arrive at school or your workplace, in the same way your people’s reputation might precede you when you arrive to a (new) nation. Shame is a repeated movement away, down, and in, an instinctive reaction, shame slides over bodies like sticky slime, and it’s not just the fault of slimy men; it can make us reject the one we love the most or at least the one who wants to love us, shame leaks out of bodies in the form of sweat and tears. Shame holds us in its grip, our private lives and our feelings, our relationships and our way of moving through life and it’s not always possible to deconstruct or intellectually dismiss how shame operates in individuals and collectives. Shame orients us in certain directions and not others. Shame stops us from speaking, questioning, it’s used to silence, not in the least women and feminists (…) Shame is to be exposed and the exposure of your shame is even more shameful. Look down. Know your place. Do not make claims and do not show interest.
(Dahl 2014, 326) My translation from Swedish.
I think this description of shame and how it affects people, especially feminine folk, provides a very clear explanation of Marisa’s actions. The exposure of her “shame”, in having a child out of wedlock, affected her so deeply because the shame was so associated with her position as a woman. And being a woman is already inherently shameful, especially in her world. It’s already associated with sin, the sin of Eve. Marisa’s actions made this association even clearer. She probably, therefore, felt like she had to separate herself as much as possible from the shame, move away from and reject the child she loved out of shame. As Dahl says, shame orients us in this world and Marisa’s shame strongly affected the future steps she would take to regain power.
Another aspect of Marisa’s decision to reject motherhood as she strove to gain more power is of course the difficulty of combining motherhood and a career, even today. And in Marisa’s world, it’s probably even more difficult. As many second-wave feminists pointed out as early as the mid-20th century, an obstacle to true equality for women was that even when women were given access to the labour market, they were expected to put their role as mothers first (eg. Moberg 1961). To handle this, and the shame her extramarital affair had brought, Marisa seems to have tried to separate herself as much as possible from motherhood and sexuality. While still being feminine in her appearance etc and making use of that cultural capital, she devotes her whole career to fighting against sexuality and sin. In her work in investigating Dust and severing children she essentially rejects all that she risks being associated with due to her previous “shameful” behaviour. She also has access to a lot of her previous cultural, economic, and social capital as we can see during for instance the cocktail party in Northern Lights. She’s still (somewhat) respected as a woman of high society, with the social connections to prove it. And she doesn’t hesitate to show off her status through her clothing and decorations in her apartment. Yet, it seems clear that even though she has amassed some power through her forms of capital and her position and the Magisterium, part of why she has been able to do that is that she’s seen as a disavowable asset by the Magisterium. As a woman, and a woman with her past, she can be used by the Magisterium to do unsavoury tasks, but she can also be cut off if necessary.
In conclusion, it becomes clear that Marisa has several different strategies to gain different forms of capital and power. She has tried to use social capital and cultural capital to gain economic capital and symbolic capital, to rise above the class position she was born into. As part of that, she tried to use her femininity to be seen as respectable and gain more cultural capital. But that ability was damaged when she had an extramarital affair and a child out of wedlock. She wasn’t seen as respectable anymore. Her actions brought shame upon her. And this shame was especially connected to her femininity and sexuality. As such, this shame oriented her going forward, for instance rejecting motherhood and building a career in policing sin. Throughout this, it is clear that Marisa’s power is very much tied up with class, shame, and femininity. Both her goals, her means, her limitations, and the consequences of her actions are inextricable from the social structures around her. That’s part of what makes her a fascinating character. She does absolutely terrible things, but she’s also such a clear example of what power and social structures can do to someone. The shame of the patriarchy has burned her, but instead of burning it down in return she for the most part works within it to gain power. Until she doesn’t. Until she becomes part of conservative men’s worst nightmare.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. “Symbolic Power.” Critique of Anthropology 4(77): 77-85.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. “What makes a social class? On the theoretical and practical existence of groups.” Berkley Journal of Sociology, 32: 1-17.
Moberg, Eva. 1961 [2012] ”Kvinnans villkorliga frigivning.” [”The woman’s conditional liberation.”] In Kvinnopolitiska nyckeltexter [”Key texts in women’s politics”],eds. Johanna Essevald & Lisbeth Larsson, 164-173. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Skeggs, Beverley. 2002. Formations of Class & Gender- Becoming Respectable. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Skeggs, Beverley. 2005. ”The Re-Branding of Class: Propertising Culture.” In Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities & Lifestyle, eds. Fiona Devine, John Mike Scott & Rosemary Crompton, 46-68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pullman, Philip. 2011a. Northern Lights. London: Scholastic UK Ltd.
Pullman, Philip. 2011b. The Subtle Knife. London: Scholastic UK Ltd.
This week, I had the opportunity to once again guest on The Silent Sisters Podcast and talk about House of the Dragon! This time we covered episode 9 and all the complex things going on in regard to gender, sexuality, disability, class, and power generally. The amazing Akash also guested on this episode, and I had an amazing time talking with them about all of this!
If you missed it, I’ve guested on The Silent Sisters Podcast two other times during this House of the Dragon season: episode 2 and episode 5. Thanks again to The Silent Sisters for having me, it’s been a blast!
This fall, I had the honour of organising workshops for a non-profit involved in sexual and reproductive health and rights, talking about trans inclusion. As part of those workshops, I talked for a bit about trans history. One response I got after every workshop was that people appreciate learning this history because this was something they had never been taught before. As several people also noted, it’s also great to know these facts when arguing with transphobes who use their inaccurate view of history to argue that being trans is just a trend. So, in this essay, I wanted to discuss the history of trans and gender-nonconforming people, to raise awareness about how transness is nothing new. Before going any further though, I want to point out that while I have a master’s degree in gender studies, I am no historian. What I do know of trans history is a mix of things I’ve studied at university (which, with some exceptions, mainly focused on history from the 19th century going forward), and me reading up on these topics on my own. I will discuss trans and gender-nonconforming people from a variety of historical periods and cultural backgrounds, but I cannot possibly cover all of world history in one essay. That said, here is a brief(ish) trans history.
An illustration of an Iron Age Grave from Birka, Sweden, containing a possible gender-nonconformingperson. Illustration made by Hjalmar Stolpe in 1889.
Concepts and conceptualisations
Before going any further, I should clarify what I mean by trans in this essay. The term trans is sometimes used in different ways in different contexts, but for the purposes of this essay, I use it similarly to how Dr Susan Stryker uses “transgender” in her book Transgender History:
I use [transgender] in this book to refer to people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender. Some people move away from their birth-assigned gender because they feel strongly that they properly belong to another gender in which it would be better for them to live; others want to strike out toward some new location, some space not yet clearly defined or concretely occupied; still others simply feel the need to get away from the conventional expectations bound up with the gender that was initially put upon them. In any case, it is the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place- rather than any particular destination or mode of transition- that best characterizes the concept of ‘transgender’ that I want to develop here.
(Stryker 2008, 1)
Now, while I think this definition is very useful for my purposes here, I feel like I must also point out that not everyone who is included in this definition of transness would identify as trans (see for example Finn Enke 2012). For instance, not all non-binary people self-identify as trans, even if they could be seen as trans using the above definition. When talking about real-life people we should therefore always be cautious when ascribing such labels to them, especially since the term “trans” comes from a very specific historical Western context. I will get into that history further on.
Furthermore, we should be especially careful when assigning the term “trans” to people from outside a Western context, who might have other terms to describe themselves (for more on this, see for instance Boellstorff, Cabral, Cádenas, Cotten, Stanley, Young, and Aizura 2014). Because throughout history and the world, people have understood gender in a variety of different ways. Sometimes it has been as something fixed, determined by the way one’s body looks at birth, and sometimes it has been more fluid. One example I would like to highlight is from a land that my country (Sweden) has colonised, namely Sápmi. As non-binary Sámi activists have pointed out, traditionally speaking Sámi culture wasn’t as binary as many Western cultures are and have been (Märak & Nilla Pinja 2021). Märak and Nilla Pinja also describe that in Sámi religion, the goddess who decides which sex/gender a child would have might sometimes decide to make the child into neither a girl nor a boy, but something else. Non-binary Sámi people are therefore nothing new. But as many Sámi people have also noted, this traditional way of seeing gender has been negatively impacted by colonialism, which insisted on reinforcing a gender binary and heteronormativity (see for example Káddjá Valkeapää 2021; Lifjell 2021; Sandberg McGuinne 2021; Finbog 2022). This is of course similar to what has happened with many other indigenous people, where colonialists have tried their best to stamp out any gender identities and expressions that did not conform to the Western binary view of gender (eg. Roen 2006; Spencer-Hall & Gutt 2021, 28).
There are many too many examples of different cultural understandings of gender to name them all here, and as a white European, I do not feel like it is my place to speak for these people. But I want to highlight just a few places where you can learn more:
KUMU HINA is a documentary about what it’s like to live as māhū in Hawai’i. You can also find educational material related to the movie here, and an explanation of māhū here.
This article discusses multiple Pacific Islander gender identities, such as fa’afafine (Samoa) or fakaleitī (Tonga) while interviewing people living with those identities and different activists.
This video follows fakaleitī Eva Baron who talks about her experiences.
In this video, Geo Neptune explain the term two-spirit, its history and discusses other terms that has been used by native Americans.
This Ted talk by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, talking about gender in India and living as hijra.
The poetry collection you are enough: love poems for the end of the world by Smokii Sumac, a Ktunaxa queer, transmasculine and two-spirit person. You can find videos of readings of some of the poems here.
The article “Can You See Me? Queer Margins in Aboriginal Communities” by Andrew Farrell, a queer Aboriginal person.
This zine, containing conversations with young two-spirit, trans, and queer indigenous people in Toronto.
This article by transgender Aboriginal professor Sandy O’Sullivan, discussing the colonial project of gender.
The bookColouring The Rainbow: Blak Queer and Trans Perspectives- Life Stories and Essays by First Nations People of Australia.
There is of course a much more to read on this topic, and I really recommend looking into it further, and especially listening to the voices of people who belong to the groups they describe.
Finally, I would just like to make clear that while I’m discussing these gender diverse people in the context of this essay on trans history, that is not to suggest that these people are necessarily trans. Some of these groups and people do describe themselves using terms such as trans or non-binary, but many do not. It is not my place, especially as a white European to label them as trans, that would be a form of colonial violence. The reason I wanted to mention these groups here is rather as a way of highlighting how the Western binary notion of gender is not the only way of understanding gender and have in fact been a part of colonialist violence against gender diverse people.
Trans history
As mentioned above, there have existed a lot of different conceptualisations of gender historically speaking, and there have always existed people who lived outside the Western binary view of gender. Yet, terms like transgender, non-binary, genderqueer etc are of course relatively new, historically speaking. So, one might wonder how it makes sense to speak of people who lived before then as trans. Well, as some scholars would argue, one reason for doing this is to counter the many voices who try to use history to legitimise their transphobia by arguing that trans folk didn’t exist historically (Spencer-Hall & Gutt 2021, 19). We know gender-nonconforming people existed historically too, even if their lives have often been forgotten or actively hidden. By holding them up, we help create a trans legacy that contemporary trans people can gain strength from.
In the next part of this essay, I will therefore touch on a few historical periods and what we know of trans/gender nonconforming people from those periods. I have chosen to limit this to mostly a Western perspective, partly because I cannot possibly speak about the whole world at once, and partly because that’s what I have the most knowledge about. Another reason for doing so is, as I mentioned above, that history, specifically that of Europe, is often used to legitimise transphobia. It, therefore, makes sense to understand what that history actually looked like to counter those arguments.
With that said, let’s dig into some trans archaeology.
Transgender Archaeology
As many have noted, archaeological researchers have long had a tendency to (sometimes forcefully) sort their finds into very strict binary categories (Weismantel 2013; Colwill 2021; Turek 2016). This can be seen in how many archaeologists have had difficulties with how to interpret burial sites containing bodies that seem to belong to one sex but are buried with items which do not seem to match that sex. As Weismantel notes, these kinds of finds have often been ignored or hidden away. Alternatively, these burial finds have been assumed to be some kind of mistake on the part of those doing the burial (Colwill 2021). Another problematic aspect of archaeological gendering/sexing of remains is the methods used to gender/sex both the body and the items buried with it. As Colwill notes:
Archaeological sexing is far from a fail-safe tool, particularly for exploring the often-intangible concept of identities. Remains are sexed osteologically (by examining the size and shape of the bones) or on the basis of genomic analysis (‘genomic’ or ‘chromosomal sexing’), and assigned to a particular sex, most frequently a binary male/female one, on this basis. The inaccuracy of such an approach has been criticized by numerous gender archaeologists for its frequent disregard of the possibility of intersex remains (…) Moreover, it is virtually impossible to accurately assign sex to children and adolescents based on osteological sexing alone (…) Genomic sexing is likewise not the magical bullet it is often presented as, offering a ratio of X and Y chromosomes from which a chromosomal arrangement is extrapolated.
(Colwill 2021, 179)
So, as Colwill notes, sexing of remains often risks being inaccurate. But what is more, with many archaeological finds, researchers haven’t even used those methods but instead interpreted the sex/gender of the remains based on the grave goods found with it. As Colwill notes:
When it comes to exploring gender identity through grave goods, it is difficult to avoid the sort of circular reasoning which declares, for example: ‘oval brooches are items of female dress, so graves containing them must be women’s graves; we know that oval brooches are items of female dress because we find them in women’s graves.
(Colwill 2021, 181)
One example of how this might lead to mistakes comes from an Iron Age grave found near the settlement of Birka (in contemporary Sweden). There a person in a grave was first interpreted to be male based on grave goods but then found to have XX chromosomes. As Weismantel and Colwill both point out, situations such as these have made some researchers question traditional interpretative practices, arguing that some archaeological finds could be interpreted as examples of gender nonconformity (2013; 2021). Colwill describes some such examples from Iron Age Scandinavia that possibly reveal some quite interesting ways the people of that time conceptualised gender. Interestingly, some examples of what seems to be burials of gender nonconforming people from this area and time seem to be burials of seiðr practitioners (Colwill 2021, 182). Seiðr was a practice that could probably most closely be described as a magic ritual, or possibly a shamanic ritual. Some have argued that at least some (if perhaps not all) seiðr practitioners held some sort of liminal gender position, partly outside of female and male binarities. This seems to be reflected in some of their burials, with individuals buried with a mix of “feminine” and “masculine” grave goods for instance. That these individuals are buried with those items, in what is often very elaborate and seemingly thought through burials, also indicate that their contemporaries recognised their liminal gender position.
Illustration of one of the burials with a seiðr practitioner, namely Ka.294-97 from Kaupang in Norway
The Trans Middle Ages
Moving forward a bit in history, I would next like to touch a bit on the Middle Ages and the gender-nonconforming people of that era. As for instance, M.W. Bychowski has pointed out (2018), it is often assumed that the Middle Ages was a time when “men were men” and “women were women” and no trans of queer people were around to make things complicated. Yet, there is a fair bit of evidence that gender-nonconforming people, and people who might call themselves trans had they lived today, existed then as well Below, I want to share just a few of these stories. I’ll start with some trans saints.
First out is Saint Marinos, a saint who was assigned female at birth yet lived for a long time as a monk (Bychowski 2018; Bychowski 2021). He was born around the year 300 in Syria and his story is shared in several medieval chronicles. After his mum died his dad joined a monk order and Marinos did the same. He was considered an exceptional monk until a village girl falsely claimed that he had impregnated her. At this point, he could have told people about how he physically could have not impregnated anyone, but he apparently decided not to. He was allowed to stay at the monastery and raise the child there but was obviously disgraced. When he eventually died and his body was prepared for the funeral, the other monks realised he had a body that would usually be termed female. They then also realised that they had wronged him, as he could not have impregnated someone, and prayed for forgiveness.
Saint Marinos (Bychowski 2018)
A common argument against interpreting people like Saint Marinos, and other people who were assigned female at birth yet passed as men, as trans is that they only did what they did to get access to spaces the strict patriarchal order didn’t allow them to enter. But as many people have pointed out, we do not have to assume that these people only did this gender transition for practical reasons (eg. Boag 2005; Feinberg 1996, 87). We seldom have records that show how these historical people understood themselves, we usually just have second-hand accounts, and when it comes to queer history, history rarely remembers faithfully (cf. Spencer-Hall & Gutt 2021, 19). There has therefore often existed a tendency to “straighten out” all instances of queerness/transness in history. Seeing gender nonconforming behaviour as just a pragmatic/practical choice is one example of this. As Spencer-Hall and Gutt puts it: “the reflexive assumption that non-normative gender expressions can only ever indicate cross-dressing is reductive.” (2021, 27) Furthermore, as Feinberg points out, it is arguably insulting to only see trans identities as the product of sexist oppression (1996, 83).
The next life I want to describe is that of Joseph of Schönau, who was born in Cologne and assigned female at birth (Newman 2021). His very eventful life has been retold in several 12th-century chronicles, which is much too long to describe in their entirety here, but I will include the major events here. The chronicles describe that as a child Joseph accompanied his father on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but his father died on the way. While making his way back to Europe, he encountered a variety of challenges which culminated with some people trying to kill him via hanging. In the retelling, it is said that Joseph survived by an angel arriving and supporting his feet until he could be rescued by some local shepherds. Afterwards, he entered a Cistercian monastery as thanks for the divine aid he had received. He eventually died at the monastery, as a monk. What is interesting is that at least one chronicle consistently describes Joseph as male during this part of his life, using male pronouns etc. The retelling of the story also presents Joseph’s identity as a man as neither a choice on his part nor as a disguise, but rather as a divine gift, another part of the divine interventions in Joseph’s life. Another interesting part of the story is that for the monks that knew Joseph as a man, it seemed as if he had transformed into a woman in death. This was perceived as a form of miracle. One interpretation is that through his holy actions, Joseph’s soul was so perfected that he became so intertwined with the divine that he managed to transcend gender. This was made literal in how he had a body that was morphologically interpreted as female even while he was a man. This carries fascinating implications for the gender of the divine, and the possibility to transcend gender.
Next up, I want to talk about the saint Esmarade, whose story is recounted in a 13th-century verse hagiography (Wright 2021). Esmarade was someone who was assigned female at birth, but who left secular life for a monastery where they would go on to present as a eunuch. Vanessa Wright argues that Esmarade can be read as genderqueer since the identity they express does not fit into a binary understanding of gender. The story describes how Esmarade did not wish to marry the partner chosen by their father, instead wanting to remain a virgin and join a religious order. Being afraid of their father being able to find them, they decided to enter a monastery while presenting as a eunuch. As Wright argues, this can be seen as a way for them to articulate a genderqueer identity with the language available to them, since eunuchs were often seen as a sort of in-between between male and female. This is in fact similar to what trans people have done much later in history too. Sølve Holm for instance describes Danish trans people at the beginning of the 20th century describing themselves as “hermaphrodites” because that was language that would be understood by their surroundings (2020).
But, returning to Esmarade, their father came to the monastery to seek advice and met Esmarade without recognising them. This arrangement went on for years, and right before their death, Esmarade told their father the truth and asks that he alone prepare their body for the funeral so that no one else could see their body. This seems to be so that no one else can “discover” what their body looked like and what their assigned gender would have been. This request isn’t followed, however, and a fellow monk prepared their body, leading them to be seen as venerated as female after death by their fellow monks.
Illustration showing Esmarade (in the left illustration the furthest to the right, in the right illustration on the bed) (Wright 2021, 166).
Another possibly trans medieval saint is of course Joan of Arc. I’ve talked about Joan in other essays too when discussing the possibility to analyse medieval people (and fictional characters in mediaevalesque settings) as trans, those essays are available here and here. Joan of Arc is probably most remembered today for her claims of holy visions and successful military leadership and has as such been turned into a symbol of French nationalism and white supremacy (Spencer-Hall & Blake Gutt 2021, 12). Yet her story is undeniably a queer one, regardless of how much white supremacists try to scrub off the queerness. As trans writer and activist Leslie Feinberg once wrote about Joan: “If society strictly mandates only men can be warriors, isn’t a woman military leader dressed in armor an example of cross-gendered expression?” (1996, 31) It is clear that her contemporaries viewed her gender expression with contempt, with for instance the English king Henry the VI writing to Inquisitor Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais:
It is sufficiently notorious and well known that for some time past a woman calling herself Jeanne the Pucelle (the Maid) , leaving off the dress and clothing of the feminine sex, a thing contrary to divine law and abominable before God, and forbidden by all laws, wore clothing and armour such as is worn by men.
(quoted in Feinberg 1996, 34)
Joan of Arc was eventually brought before an Inquisitorial court, charged with a variety of crimes (such as witchcraft and heresy). The court could not prove the witchcraft, so they chose to focus on how Joan’s crossdressing (according to them) constituted heresy since it went against God’s will. For this crime, she was eventually burned at the stake. As both Feinberg (1996) and Bychowski notes (2018), Joan continued to refuse to stop wearing “men’s clothing” even while being accused of heresy. For this crime she was eventually burned to death. As Bychowski notes, it is difficult to say if Joan would have identified as trans had she lived today, but it is clear that what killed her was transphobia.
I have thus far only talked about possible trans people of the Middle Ages who were assigned female at birth, so before moving on I wanted to mention one who seemed to have been assigned male at birth. Eleanor Rykener was a seamstress living in London during the 14th century who was arrested on charges of sexual misconduct, having been caught in the act of selling sex (Bychowski 2018). She presented as a woman when appearing at the court and gave her name as Eleanor, but during questioning, she was forced to reveal that she had previously lived in London under a male name. This provided the court with several quandaries: firstly, which name should they use in the records (they ended up using both), and secondly, if Eleanor is a man, does that mean that sodomy was committed when she slept with men? No verdict is recorded, but it is clear that the court was very confused about how to handle Eleanor’s gender. It is also clear that both someone’s gender identity and how their gender is perceived by their surroundings can have very clear material consequences.
The 19th century and beyond
I am now jumping forward quite a bit in time, but in many ways, the 19th century was a turning point for how trans people were perceived in the West. As Dr Susan Stryker points out: “One of the most powerful tools for social regulation in this period was the rapid development of medical science.” (2008, 36). During this time, sexology and other scientific disciplines started to examine and categorise human sexuality and gender, dividing people into groups and dictating what was normal and abnormal. One such researcher was the Austrian Karl Heinrich Ulrichs who published a series of booklets in 1864-1865. In these booklets, he described people who he called “urnings” that he described as having a female soul enclosed within a male body. This term encompassed both what we might today call homosexuality and transgender. Over the next couple of decades, several other researchers proposed different terms to describe trans people, with the only one that has really survived until today being “transvestite”, as suggested by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910. While the usage of that word is slightly different today, Hirschfeld originally used it to (more or less) mean someone who dressed or lived as another sex than they were assigned at birth (Bychowski 2021). It is also worth noting that in his book Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld actually discusses the life of Saint Marinos which I also mentioned above. Besides being a scholar, Hirschfeld also advocated for LGBTQ+ people (he was gay himself) and he was very involved in the queer community in Berlin at the time.
Picture of a costume party at Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, Hirschfeld is seated to the right, adorned with a spectacular moustache and wearing a suit.
I’ll return to Hirschfeld shortly, but before moving too far into the 20th century I would like to touch a bit more on the 19th century.
Because another relevant event to discuss is the way gender nonconforming expressions started to become more formally criminalised during the 19th century, especially in the U.S. While gender nonconformity had hardly been approved of earlier either, in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a wave of anti cross-dressing laws became enacted across the U.S. These were often municipal laws and were enacted in 40 American municipalities between 1848 to 1974. As Stryker notes, there isn’t much historical research to explain the sudden explosion of such laws in the latter half of the 19th century, but one explanation might be the rise of modern industrial cities (2008, 33). In such places, people had more opportunities to express their sense of gender than they might have had in close-knit communities in smaller towns. Another contributing factor to these anti cross-dressing laws was the rise of feminism, and with it calls for dress reform allowing for women to wear pants. But another important aspect to consider is the immigration to the US from a variety of Asian countries, especially on the West Coast. As Stryker notes:
Gold rush-era newspapers are full of stories about how difficult it was for European Americans to tell Chinese men apart from Chinese women, because they all wore their hair long and dressed in silky pajamalike costumes. To understand the historical conditions for contemporary transgender activism, we thus have to take into account race, class, culture, sexuality, and sexism and we have to develop an understanding of the ways that U.S. society has fostered conditions of inequality and injustice for people who aren’t white, male, heterosexual and middle class- in addition to understanding the difficulties particularly associated with engaging in transgender practices.
(Stryker 2008, 36)
As I have mentioned previously in this essay, norms of gender are heavily culture dependant, and Europeans (and European Americans) have a long history of judging other cultures as inferior because of their perspectives on gender. It is also worth noting that while cross-dressing and dressing in certain cultural clothing was being criminalised, so-called freak shows were busy exhibiting people whose appearance would have been criminalised in public (Sears 2008). In such a way, these people were doubly classified as abnormal: their existence was both criminalised and made into something freakish to be shown off at a show. Sears even mentions one person who after having been arrested for cross-dressing, got recruited by a freak show who made use of their infamy when advertising the show.
Now, I would like to return across the Atlantic to Europe, and Germany… As mentioned previously, Magnus Hirschfeld was one of the more significant sexologists there at the turn of the century (Stryker 2008, 39). But he didn’t just research trans people, he was also an early advocate for them. For instance, he worked with the Berlin police department to end the harassment of trans people, and he employed trans people at his institute (as receptionists and maids, but still). Said institute was called Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (”the Institute for Sexual Science”) and was opened in 1919. There Hirschfeld and his colleagues held lectures and collected historical documents detailing the diversity of sexuality and gender throughout the world. They also had a clinic, where trans people could receive gender-affirming treatments starting in the early 1920s (Holm 2020). It was there the world’s first documented gender-affirming genital surgery was performed in 1931, on one of Hirschfeld’s employees and friends, Dora Richter.
Later during the same year, Lili Elbe (who some might know from the movie The Danish Girl) received the same treatment at the institute. Unfortunately, the institute was attacked by Nazis in 1933, its books burned, and many of those working there were killed (Stryker 2008, 40). Hirschfeld himself survived, not being in Germany at the time.
Burning of the Institute for Sexual Science’s library (Stryker 2008, 40).
Even if much research was destroyed in the destruction of the Institute for Sexual Science, not all knowledge was lost. One key example of this can be seen in the person of Harry Benjamin, a former colleague of Hirschfeld who had migrated to the U.S. in 1913 yet had remained in contact with Hirschfeld for several years (Stryker 2008, 45). In the U.S. Benjamin eventually ended up being one of the leading medical authorities on trans people. For example, he advised on a court case in San Francisco in 1949, arguing against the opinion of other experts (including Alfred Kinsey) who thought that:
…transsexual genital modification would constitute ‘mayhem’ (the willful destruction of healthy tissue) and would expose any surgeon who performed such an operation to possible criminal prosecution. That opinion cast a pall, lasting for years, over efforts by U.S. transgender people to gain access to transsexual medical procedures in their own countries.
(Stryker 2008, 45)
As is hinted at in that quote, however, treatments were available in other countries, for instance in Europe. This was something for instance Christine Jorgensen, who can perhaps be called the world’s first modern trans celebrity, made use of when she travelled to Denmark in 1951 to receive gender-affirming surgery.
Picture of a newspaper cover from Daily News with the headline “EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY- Operations Transform Bronx Youth” with a picture of Christine Jorgensen before and after gender-affirming treatments.
This immediately made Denmark famous for allowing trans people access to gender-affirming treatments, although as Holm notes, this also led them to quickly stop allowing non-Danish citizens access to such treatments (Holm 2017, 36). In the U.S. gender-affirming treatments slowly started to become more accessible during the 60s and 70s, but mainly through university-based research programs (Stryker 2008, 93). This was partly thanks to Harry Benjamin, who had in 1966 published a book called The Transgender Phenomena. In this book, he argued that trans people should be given access to medical treatments, instead of being subjected to psychotherapy. He also proposed diagnostics criteria and medical treatments that have influenced trans health care worldwide way into the 21st century (Krieg 2013). It should therefore be noted that while Benjamin did a lot for the transgender community of his time, many trans scholars and activists today criticise the way his work is still used today (eg. Krieg 2013).
Even while this was all happening, queer and trans communities were being formed both in the U.S. and other parts of the world, taking up more and more visible space. Or rather, some did. As Susan Stryker notes, while many white suburban trans people organised discreetly in private, trans people of colour in urban settings were often decidedly more visible (Stryker 2008, 56). One example of this was the drag ball subculture emerging in several American cities. But another example is of course the increasing activism and resistance shown by especially poor queer and trans people of colour. The most famous example of this, which has often been called the start of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, is of course the Stonewall Riots in 1969. There queer people, the majority being poor and/or people of colour, fought back against police brutality, racism, homophobia, and transphobia.
Picture of Marsha P. Johnson, Joseph Ratanski, and Sylvia Rivera at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in 1970, organised in honour of the Stonewall Riot. Picture by Leonard Flink.
But Stonewall wasn’t the first such instance, a very similar one happened at Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin neighbourhood San Francisco in 1966. As Stryker describes it:
One weekend night in August- the precise date is unknown- Compton’s, a twenty-four-hour cafeteria at the corner of Turk and Taylor streets, was buzzing with its usual late-night crowd of drag queens, hustlers, slummers, cruisers, runaway teens, and down-and-out neighbourhood regulars. The restaurant’s management became annoyed by a noisy young crowd of queens at one table who seemed to be spending a lot of time without spending a lot of money, and called in the police to roust them- as it had been doing with increasing frequency throughout the summer. A surly police officer, accustomed to manhandling Compton’s clientele with impunity, grabbed the arm of one of the queens and tried to drag her away. She unexpectedly threw her coffee in his face, however, and a melee erupted: Plates, trays, cups and silverware flew through the air at the startled police officers, who ran outside and called for backup.
(Stryker 2008, 64-65)
As Stryker notes, a variety of societal factors impacted the outcome at Compton’s Cafeteria, one of the main ones being that the residents of the area were very socially disadvantaged on several levels. This was especially true for trans women who often had very few options both regards to where to live and where to work due to discrimination. They were also often harassed by police, often being arrested for selling sex, regardless if they did so or not, and were then mistreated in a variety of horrible ways. But by 1966 some changes had begun happening, and the inhabitants of the area had begun to organise in a variety of ways, including getting involved in anti-poverty activism. One consequence of this organising was the formation of the organisation Vanguard, an organisation mostly made up of “young gay hustlers and transgender people.” (Stryker 2008, 70) Being formed in the summer of 1966, this was the first known queer youth organisation in the U.S. Considering this background, it’s not surprising that the queens at Compton’s Cafeteria had enough of the police’s harassment and decided to fight back.
Yet, with the increasing trans activism across the U.S. there came a backlash too, of course. This happened in a variety of ways, but one I thought especially worth noting is the backlash within the feminist movement. The opposition to trans people in feminism can be said to have started in the early 1970s, with some feminists arguing that trans people should not be welcome in feminist spaces, and trans women especially should not be welcome in women-only spaces (Stryker 2008). By the late 70s, this view was being expressed by feminist scholars as well, with for instance feminist theologian Mary Daly calling transsexuality a “necrophilic invasion” of women’s spaces. But it was perhaps another scholar, Janice G Raymond who would leave the biggest mark on anti-trans feminism, influencing people for decades to come. In 1979, Raymond published her book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male where she, among other things writes “I contend that the problem of transsexualism would be best served by morally mandating it out of existence.” (quoted in Stryker 2008, 109) She also writes the following about trans women (TW sexual violence):
Rape, of course, is a masculinist violation of bodily integrity. All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves. However, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist violates women’s sexuality and spirit, as well. Rape, although it is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception. It is significant that in the case of the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist, often he [sic] is able to gain entrance and a dominant position in women’s spaces because the women involved do not know he [sic] is a transsexual and he [sic] just does not happen to mention it. (…) Because transsexuals have lost their physical ‘members’ does not mean that they have lost their ability to penetrate women—women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality.
(Raymond 1979, 134)
Raymond’s argument is basically that not only are trans women not women, but by “appropriating” female bodies they exploit women. And if trans women want to join women-only spaces, that is a violation. If this sounds familiar, it is because many anti-trans feminists use similar arguments today as well. It is as hateful and untrue now as it was then.
Conclusion
I will stop here, at the beginning of the 1980s, with trans people fighting back against oppression, and their oppressors fighting them in return. In many ways things have of course changed since then, we have more legal equality in many countries, but in other ways, it feels like we are stuck in the same type of backlash again. Globally, the situation for trans people is currently getting worse again (Pearce; Erikainen & Vincent 2020). There is increased societal backlash against trans people in many places, and anti-trans legislation is also being introduced in many countries. We are also in the middle of what Pearce, Erikainen and Vincent call the “TERF-wars”, with anti-trans feminism running rampant. In many current debates, it is claimed that trans identities are something new, just some trend that young people are following. I hope that this essay has helped make it clear that this is most definitely not the case. Across the world, we have evidence that gender diverse people who don’t fit into Western binary gender norms has always existed. Even if one would just focus on the West, there is evidence as far back as the Iron Age that gender nonconforming people existed. There is evidence of medieval trans people who lived and died, as another gender than they were assigned at birth. And in modern times, we have had access to gender-affirming treatments for trans people for a hundred years. Trans people are not a trend, and we will not be erased.
This essay was edited on March 31st 2022 to include a reference to a post by Dr Liisa-Rávná Finbog (2022).
Boag Peter. 2005. “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History.” Western Historical Quarterly, 36(4): 477-497.
Boellstorff, Tom, Mauro Babral, Micha Cárdenas, Trystan Cotton, Eric A. Stanley & Aren Z. Aizura. 2014. “Decolonizing Transgender: A Roundtable Discussion.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. 1(3): 419-439.
Bychowski, M.W. 2021. “The Authentic Lives of Transgender Saints: Imago Dei and imiatio Christi in the Life of St Marinos the Monk.” In Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, eds Alicia Spencer-Hall & Blake Gutt, 245-265. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Colwill, Lee. 2021. «The Queerly Departed: Narratives of Veneration in the Burials of Late Iron Age Scandinavia.” In Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, eds. Alicia Spencer-Hall & Blake Gutt, 177-197. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Farrell, Andrew. 2015. “Can You See Me? Queer Margins in Aboriginal Communities” Journal of Global Indigeneity, 1(1).
Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon Press.
Finn Enke, A. 2012. “Note on Terms and Concepts.” In Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies, eds. Finn Enke, A., 16-20. Temple University Press: Philadelphia.
Hodge, Dino. Colouring the Rainbow: Blak Queer and Trans perspectives– Life Stories and Essays By First Nations People of Australia. Adaleine: Wakefield Press.
Holm, Sølve M. 2017. Fleshing out the self: Reimagining intersexed and trans embodied lives through (auto)biographical accounts of the past. PhD thesis, Linköping: Linköping University.
Holm, Sølve M. 2020.“Current and Historical Notions of Sexed Embodiment and Transition in Relation to Lili Elvenes.” In Man into woman : a comparative scholarly edition, eds. Sabine Meyer & Pamala L. Caughie. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Krieg, Josephine. 2013. “A Social Model of Trans and Crip Theory. Narratives and Strategies in the Redefinition of the Pathologized Trans Subject.” lambda nordica 3-4/2013, 33-53
Newman, Martha G. 2021. ”Assigned Female at Death: Joseph of Schönau and the Disruption of Medieval Gender Binaries.” In Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, eds. Alicia Spencer-Hall & Blake Gutt, 43-64. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Pearce, Ruth, Sonja Erikainen & Ben Vincent. 2020. ”TERF wars: An introduction.” The Sociological Review Monographs 68(4) 677-698.
Raymond, Janice. 1979/2006. “Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian-Feminist.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 131-143. New York: Routledge.
Roen, Katrina. 2006. “Transgender Theory and Embodiment: The Risk of Racial Marginalization.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker & Stephen Whittle, 656-665. New York: Routledge.
Sandberg McGuinne, Johan. 2021. “Queer terminology in South and Ume Saami.” Instagram story, April 2, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/eoghansandberg/ (saved Instagram story under the highlight Saepmie, slide 26-27)
Sears, Clare. 2008. “Electric Brilliancy: Cross-Dressing Law and Freak Show Displays in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36(3 & 4):170-187.
Spencer-Hall, Alicia & Blake Gutt. 2021. “Introduction.” In Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, eds. Alicia Spencer-Hall & Blake Gutt, 11-40. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender History. Berkley: Seal Press.
O’Sullivan S. 2021. “The Colonial Project of Gender (and Everything Else).” Genealogy 5(3):67.
Weismantel, Mary. 2013. “Toward a Transgender Archaeology: A Queer Rampage Through Prehistory.” In The Transgender Studies Reader 2, eds. Susan Stryker & Aren Z. Aizura, 319-335. New York: Routledge.
Wright, Vanessa. 2021. “Illuminating Queer Gender Identity in the Manuscripts of the Vie de sainte Eufrosine.” In Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, eds. Alicia Spencer-Hall & Blake Gutt, 155-176. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Brienne of Tarth is one of my favourite character in ASOIAF for a myriad of reasons, but a major one is that I find her struggle with being herself in a world that rejects her so very interesting and relatable. I’ve written about Brienne on severaloccasionsbefore, but in this mini-essay, in honour of her participation in Davos’ Finger’s “A Song of Madness”, I wanted to write a bit more about how she, as a gender nonconforming person, struggles to meet society’s gendered expectations. About how she’s not quite a lady, but also not quite a knight.
Since the reader is introduced to Brienne, we see how she is met with a mix of confusion of revulsion by many in her surroundings because she doesn’t conform to Westerosi gender norms. This quote from Randyll Tarly in AFFC demonstrates this view clearly:
‘As for you, my lady, it is said that your father is a good man. If so, I pity him. Some men are blessed with sons, some with daughters. No man deserves to be cursed with such as you.’ (Brienne V, A Feast for Crows)
It becomes even more heart-breaking when Brienne says this about her father (and herself) in a later chapter:
‘A daughter.’ Brienne’s eyes filled with tears. ‘He deserves that. A daughter who could sing to him and grace his hall and bear him grandsons. He deserves a son too, a strong and gallant son to bring honor to his name. Galladon drowned when I was four and he was eight, though, and Alysanne and Arianne died still in the cradle. I am the only child the gods let him keep. The freakish one, not fit to be a son or daughter.’ (Brienne VI, A Feast for Crows)
Clearly, she feels like she has failed her father by not living up to the expectations of her society. But crucially, both she and Randyll notes how she “fails” doubly, namely by not being feminine enough for a daughter but not being a son so her masculinity can be justified. Her in-betweenness is “freakish” or “a curse” in this view. I’ve written about this “freakishness” in Brienne before, so I won’t focus on that here, but I rather want to focus on how she “fails” at being a son or a daughter. A lady or a knight.
In Westeros, just as in our own world, people are expected to follow certain paths through life. What path a specific person is expected to take depends on a multitude of factors, including gender, race, class, etc. (Ahmed 2006). For instance, a woman is expected to find a male partner, eventually marry him, and afterwards have children. She’s expected to follow this straight line through life, and if she deviates from said line, she’s deemed a deviant. Furthermore, if she doesn’t follow the expected path, she’s often seen as a disappointment to her family because she doesn’t reproduce and therefore reproduce the family. This queer person becomes a threat to the family (something conservatives out there loves to argue in a myriad of ways). There are even more lines one is expected to follow, as Signe Bremer points out when explaining the concept of “linear gender”:
Linear gender explicates the heteronormative assumption that a person’s genitals, general bodily materiality, legal sex, gender identity, gendered expression, sexual desire, ways of reproduction, parental status, kinship and death point in the same direction through a life course – along a straight line from birth to death. (Bremer 2013)
That is to say, for someone to be seen as a “real” and “proper” woman, for instance, they are expected to have a vagina, a “feminine body”, have their passport say that they’re a woman, identify as a woman, dress and behave in a feminine manner, be attracted to men, birth biological children, be a mother to said children, marry a man and have a family with him, and then die happy at old age (preferably surrounded by grandchildren). It’s a lot to live up to. As we can see with Brienne, she doesn’t live up to most of this. It’s repeatedly noted how “unwomanly” she looks, be it because she doesn’t fulfill traditional beauty ideals or because she’s muscular and dresses in mail. She definitely doesn’t behave like a “proper” woman, going on to fight instead of staying in the home and doing typically feminine activities. When it comes to her sexuality, it does seem like she is attracted to men, but she doesn’t confirm to gendered expectations since she doesn’t marry and settle down with children. This is partly because she has had a hard time to find someone to marry, but as she also notes:
Brienne had been betrothed at seven, to a boy three years her senior, Lord Caron’s younger son, a shy boy with a mole above his lip. They had only met the once, on the occasion of their betrothal. Two years later he was dead, carried off by the same chill that took Lord and Lady Caron and their daughters. Had he lived, they would have been wed within a year of her first flowering, and her whole life would have been different. She would not be here now, dressed in man’s mail and carrying a sword, hunting for a dead woman’s child. More like she’d be at Nightsong, swaddling a child of her own and nursing another. It was not a new thought for Brienne. It always made her feel a little sad, but a little relieved as well. (Brienne III, A Feast for Crows)
As she thinks, it does make her a bit sad but also a bit relieved that she didn’t end up with a life where she did more closely conform to gender norms. But while she feels relieved, she also feels like she has failed her father in not being the daughter he deserves.
It does seem like Brienne is more comfortable living the life of a soldier, being a true knight even if she doesn’t have the title. But she still feels like she can’t be the son her father deserves either. Being born with the body she has, everyone expects her to be a woman, behave like a woman should, and won’t let her step into the role of a knight completely. One way of understanding that is by considering a concept that Sara Ahmed calls “stopping devices” (2006, 139). By this she means how certain people are stopped or blocked from moving freely through certain spaces. One example that Ahmed gives is how when she travels to the UK, where she’s a citizen, she’s still always stopped at the airport because her looks and name makes people associate her with the Middle East and Islam (and therefore terrorism, because racism). Ahmed argues that the same thing can happen in for instance academia when women or people of colour try to make their way into that very white and male institution (2017). You are stopped, blocked, questioned. People ask if you’re really the professor, if you really belong. Trying to create a space for yourself anyway will often feel like running up against a brick wall. I would argue that a similar thing is happening to Brienne, people don’t expect her to be in this space. To try to make her way as a knight, in tourneys, on battlefields. Her attempts to do so anyway are continually blocked. She’s questioned, mocked, harassed. But, as Ahmed also points out, while trying to get through these brick walls we do eventually weaken them (2017). Brienne’s efforts might, eventually, leave cracks in the sexism institutional walls of Westeros, making it easier for the next generation to get through.
In this essay, I have tried to show how Brienne fails by Westerosi standards to be both a lady and a knight. She can’t be a proper woman and lady because of her gender nonconformity and un-linear gender. But for the same reasons she can’t be accepted as a knight, because she’s not ”enough” of a man. She gets blocked at every turn, until she feels like she is a failure and a freak that her father doesn’t deserve. But nonetheless she fights on, doing her best to break down limiting boundaries and walls on her way. She fights on.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bremer, Signe. 2013. “Penis as Risk: A Queer Phenomenology of Two Swedish Transgender Women’s Narratives on Gender Correction.” Somatechnics 3(2): 329–350.
Martin, George RR. 2011. A Feast for Crows. New York: Bentam Books.
As a genderqueer person who works with sexual education and in my free time write about gender, sexuality, etc, I often encounter people who are confused about what exactly it means to be genderqueer or non-binary. What’s the difference between being non-binary and just not conforming to gender norms, they ask. Well, as it is Transgender Day of Visibility, I thought I would attempt to answer.
First of all, I want to note that this is just one answer to this question, and I no means intend to speak for all non-binary people. Second of all, I here use non-binary as a sort of catch-all-term for people who describe their gender as being outside of the gender binary (i.e. not man or woman, or not exclusively man or woman), but I acknowledge that not everyone who fit that description would call themselves non-binary. Third of all, not everyone who see themselves as non-binary would describe themselves as trans. I personally do, which I thought it might be fitting to publish this on Transgender Day of Visibility, but not everyone does. I will get into some possible reasons for this why later on. But first off, I wanted to relate a bit of my own experience of being non-binary, which will then lead me into some more scholarly perspectives.
I was assigned female at birth and was therefore raised as a girl, however, I never really fit in with the other girls. For most of my childhood and teenage years I could probably be described as a “tomboy”, being much more comfortable when I was out in the forest with my scout troop, getting sweaty and dirty, than I was trying to fit in with the popular and feminine girls in school. I often felt like I had missed some unspoken rule, like there was a script or manual that everyone else was following, that I just hadn’t read. While I sometimes tried to dress more feminine, wearing makeup and push-up bras, I still didn’t feel like I fit in. I was also bullied for quite a lot of this time, mocked for being weird by my classmates. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this, both people who are cis and trans. When I started high school, things got a bit better, I got new friends and, perhaps crucially, I found some feminist and LGBTQ+ spaces. This helped me understand myself more, and I got more tools for analysing gender norms, etc. At this point I saw myself as a queer woman, as I was (and am) attracted to people regardless of their gender. I generally dressed in a mix of feminine and masculine clothing at this point, but hadn’t started questioning my gender. I knew that people who were non-binary existed, I had several friends who were non-binary, but I didn’t see myself as non-binary.
When I was twenty, I started thinking more about what it really meant for me to be a woman. I had recently moved to a new town, where I was to live for a year while studying at the university there. Moving from the city where I grew up and getting to know new people made me consider a lot of things in a new light. At this time, I was also studying gender studies at university, reading a lot about both womanhood and gender in general. Now, I realise that it’s a stereotype that taking gender studies will make you queer, but it did influence me in a way. It’s not that it made my gender identity change in of itself, but spending all of my time reading about gender forced me to confront my own feelings and experiences. Crucially, it made me realise how much I didn’t identify with womanhood. I kept reading texts about women, about women’s oppression, about women’s experience, and I just felt “this isn’t me.” I could recognise myself in some of it, I had been raised as a woman after all, and I could relate to the expectations put upon women (be feminine! Be into guys!) but I just didn’t feel like the texts I read talked about me. After that slow realisation, I had what I jokingly called “my gender identity crisis”, where I over the next few months tried to figure out what the heck it meant that I didn’t identify with other women. I started realising that when someone referred to me as a woman, for instance saying “hi girls!” or “us women”, I didn’t feel like that included me. It’s honestly hard to describe, but it was just this gut feeling that told me that I didn’t belong in that group. After a while, I settled on describing the way I experienced my gender as being genderqueer, since I queered gender. I question(ed) what gender was, how people should act according to gender, and what it means to be a man or a woman. A lot of this was the same thing as I had done for years: I didn’t behave according to gender norms, I questioned gender norms. But what had changed was that I had realised that I didn’t feel like a woman. This feeling in my gut told me I wasn’t a woman, that when someone referred to me as a woman that was wrong. But I also definitely knew that I didn’t feel like a man, even if I was masculine at times.
After this realisation, I started coming out to people, and a few months later changed my name from my very feminine sounding name to a more gender neutral one. I felt like this more closely fit how I saw myself and would (perhaps) make people less likely to immediately assume I was a woman. After coming out, I slowly became feeling more secure and comfortable in myself. I could for instance dress more comfortably in feminine clothes, and still feel like me, still feel queer, because I knew in my heart that I was. I was also more comfortable about for instance not shaving my legs before going swimming, because I felt less pressure about conforming to feminine beauty ideals when I had accepted that I wasn’t a woman. There are still moments when I feel deeply uncomfortable, for instance when I get misgendered. When someone assumes that I’m a woman, refer to me as “she” or use feminine coded words (“sister”, “daughter”, “girl”, etc). When that happens, I often feel like I’ve been punched me in the chest. Sometimes it feels like a stab in the heart, sometimes just as a light push. The intensity depends, but it always hurts. I know people don’t mean it, but it still hurts. I think it hurts the most when people who didn’t know me before I came out does it. That makes me realise that they, deep down, don’t see me as me. They still see me as a girl, a woman. It’s always a little extra heart-breaking. Because I know so clearly, in my soul, in my bones, that I’m not a woman. I’m genderqueer.
So, now that I have described my experience, I would like to compare it to what different researchers have found when analysing non-binary people’s experience. As I noted above, for many non-binary people, gender is experienced as something you feel. You feel that you’re not the gender you were assigned at birth, you feel that you’re something else. One good explanation of this comes from Dr. Dana Stachowiak who writes:
This felt sense [of gender] manifests through our lived experiences in relation to the social construction of gender and the attributes that are socially linked to what mediates masculinity, femininity, androgyny, and so forth. How we identify or disidentify with socially constructed ideals is attached to the multiplicity of our identity. (…) Felt sense of gender essentially translates to a critical embodiment of self, driven by both the corporeal body and the psyche, and the impact of social, cultural, and institutional theories of hegemony on both the body and the psyche. (2017, 535)
Essentially, a non-binary person will identify and disidentify with different aspects of gender, perhaps identifying as feminine but not as a woman, or as androgynous and not a man or a woman. As a non-binary person, you spend your time negotiating your experience and feelings with what society assumes you should feel, and ending up with “a critical embodiment of self”, generally being quite aware of both your body and psyche and how they do or do not match in the way society assumes they should. As Dr. Igi Moon writes from a psychological perspective, when you first experience that divide between how you experience/feel your gender and what society expects (based on your body), that can be quite disorientating (2019). It can feel as if the rug is pulled from underneath you, it can feel unsettling. For many non-binary people, this first realisation leads to trying to negotiate one’s feelings of “in-betweenness” (not being quite a woman, not quite a man), and finding a one’s footing in this liminal space between genders. When that footing is then found, one generally finds it easier to express themselves, feeling more at peace. Moon describes this feeling as “the consolidation of dis-orientation and liminality. There is a sense of ‘self’ as somehow ‘beyond’ cis-gender male or female.” (Moon 2019, 74) This, I think, is what in the end differentiates being non-binary (or genderqueer or any similar term) from just being a man or a woman that breaks gender norms in terms of dress or behaviour. There’s a deep-seated feeling that one’s self is not male or female.
Another difference, I think, concerns one’s experience when moving throughout the world. As I mentioned when telling my story, when people refer to you as a binary gender even while you’re non-binary, that hurts. In a study of trans and non-binary people’s health, it’s described like this:
One of the stronger narratives concerned experiences of repeatedly being misgendered (being referred to by the wrong pronoun, name or gender) or in other ways not having one’s identity respected. (…) The repetitiveness created feelings of fear and self-doubt. Not having your identity recognised by others (a kind of repetitive violence) can affect your health and presence in the world. Participants described how they withdrew from particular spaces and how feeling unsafe limited their lives. Their experiences ranged from avoiding specific spaces that were seen as unsafe, such as pubs, gyms, baths and public toilets, to avoiding almost all spaces except for controlled environments with close friends. (Linander, Goicolea, Alm, Hammarström & Harryson 2019, 919)
As Linander et al. note, this is something that happens both with trans people in general and with non-binary people. In studies made by organisations that work to support LGBTQ+ rights, it has also been noted that non-binary people can often have it especially hard to have their gender be recognised by their surroundings (RFSL 2017, 30). One explanation for this could be that while binary trans people have gained some acceptance (albeit little), claiming a gender identity completely outside of the binary is still extremely difficult to grasp for many (most) people. As several researchers have noted, society in general assumes that if someone doesn’t identify as the gender they are assigned at birth, then they must want to transition into the opposite gender (eg. Krieg 2013; Bremer 2017; Bolton 2019). Much of this can be traced back to the medical understanding of being trans, i.e. that it’s a medical condition to be treated by turning the patient from one binary sex into the other. In that way the patient can then be reintegrated into society as a “coherent” man or woman. Many binary trans people have questioned this view and argue that they are not sick people to be fixed, regardless of if they want gender affirming treatment or not (see for instance Stryker 1994). This view has also made it difficult for binary trans people who don’t want to medically transition, or not “fully” do so, since they are then not seen as “proper” men/women (Bremer 2013). The way transness is sometimes understood as so binary is one reason that some non-binary people feel like that term doesn’t describe them. Personally, I see “trans” as describing a movement, a transition, away from something, so for me a movement away from my assigned gender toward being genderqueer/non-binary, but I obviously respect other people’s view. Regardless, for non-binary people, this societal view of (trans)gender means that their gender is not fully understood by people who don’t understand what it means to have a gender outside of the binary. This non-understanding can often lead to questions such as the one I started this essay discussing: What’s the difference between being non-binary and just not conforming to gender norms? What’s the difference between being a masculine girl or a feminine boy and being non-binary? As I’ve attempted to explain here, the difference is that you have this embodied feeling of not being a man or a woman. You feel it in your guts, in your bones. It feels wrong when someone refers to you as a man or a woman. Some non-binary people experience discomfort with their bodies, specifically body parts that are very gendered, like breasts (Bolton 2019). This can be due to feeling like this part of one’s body doesn’t fit one’s self-conception, or that it makes other people see oneself in a way that doesn’t fit one’s self-conception. For other non-binary people this is less of a big deal.
There’s a million different ways of being non-binary, but what one can say is the unifying trait is not experiencing one’s gender as being a woman nor a man. It’s not just dressing in a masculine way as someone assigned female at birth, or in a feminine way as someone assigned as male at birth. Non-binary people can be feminine, masculine, neither, or a mix of both. It isn’t just gender presentation. It’s how you conceptualise yourself, your identity, perhaps even your soul. It’s feeling strongly that you’re not a man nor a woman. For me it’s also a frustration with having to use these overly simplistic and binary terms to describe my gender, because I know in my heart that what my gender is cannot be captured by those words. My gender overflows these gendered boxes, it leaks through the confines made by the gender binary. It always has in the sense that I’ve been gender nonconforming all my life, but what makes me non-binary is that my very being exists outside of the any gendered script. Who I am cannot be described fully by words because this language is not accustomed to describing people such as me. In the words of writer and activist Eli Clare:
I’m hungry for an image to describe my gendered self, something more than the shadowland of neither man nor woman, more than a suspension bridge tethered between negatives. (2003, 260)
While we hunger for a language to fully describe us, we’ll have to make do with the imperfect tools we have. Which is what I have attempted in this essay, describing my queering of gender and my non-binary self. I hope it has been helpful to you, dear reader.
References
Bolton, Rillark M. 2019. “Reworking Testosterone as a Man’s Hormone: Non-binary People using Testosterone within a Binary Gender System.” Somatechnics 9(1): 13-31.
Bremer, Signe. 2013. “Penis as Risk: A Queer Phenomenology of Two Swedish Transgender Women’s Narratives on Gender Correction.” Somatechnics 3(2): 329–350.
Bremer, Signe. 2017. Kroppslinjer: Kön, transsexualism och kropp i berättelser om könskorrigering. Makadam: Göteborg.
Clare, Eli. 2003. “Gawking, Gaping, Staring.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9(1-2): 257-261.
Krieg, Josephine. 2013. “A Social Model of Trans and Crip Theory. Narratives and Strategies in the Redefinition of the Pathologized Trans Subject.” lambda nordica 3-4/2013, 33-53.
Linander, Ida., Isabel Goicolea, Erika Alm, Anne Hammarström & Lisa Harryson. 2019. “(Un)safe spaces, affective labour and perceived health among people with trans experiences living in Sweden.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 21(8): 914-928.
Moon, Igi. 2018. “‘Boying’ the boy and ‘girling’ the girl: From affective interpellation to trans-emotionality.”, Sexualities 22(1-2): 65-79.
Stachowiak, Dana M. 2017. “Queering it up, strutting our threads, and baring our souls: genderqueer individuals negotiating social and felt sense of gender.” Journal of Gender Studies 26(5): 532-543.
Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: Performing transgender rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1(3): 237-254.
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, a day that I have a somewhat complicated relationship to. For those who are unaware, I’m genderqueer but was assigned female at birth, so I have spent a significant part of my life moving through the world as if I were a woman. As a teenager, I spent a significant part of my time being involved in a feminist club at my high school (shout out to Femmetopia KG, keep up the good work). I remember spending the better part of a school break preparing for a campaign we were going to do for International Women’s Day, making posters with facts about women’s oppression throughout the world. Looking up economic inequality statistics, cursing under my breath at how immigrant women earn even less than Swedish-born women who of course earn less than Swedish-born men. Fuming at crime statistics about sexual violence, and how few cases lead to convictions. Reading reports about deadly violence toward black trans women and challenging my rage into educating my classmates about it all. In a way, things were simpler back then. Back when I still thought I was a woman, before I realised that I was genderqueer. It was easier to fight for women’s rights when I thought I fit into the category I had been assigned at birth, before I realised that while the world sees me as a woman, I’m not.
When I think about what the definition of being a woman is, I’m reminded of this quote by one of my favourite feminist scholars, Sara Ahmed:
Feminism requires supporting women in a struggle to exist in this world. What do I mean by woman here? I am referring to all those who travel under the sign woman. No feminism worthy of its name would use the sexist idea ‘women born women’ to create edges of feminist communities, to render trans women into ‘not women,’ or ‘not born women,’ or into men. No one is born a woman; it is an assignment (not just a sign, but also a task or an imperative, as I discuss in part I) that can shape us; make us; and break us. Many women who were assigned female at birth, let us remind ourselves, are deemed not women in the right way, or not women at all, perhaps because of how they do or do not express themselves (they are too good at sports, not feminine enough because of their bodily shape, comportment, or conduct, not heterosexual, not mothers, and so on). Part of the difficulty of the category of woman is what follows residing in that category, as well as what follows not residing in that category because of the body you acquire, the desires you have, the paths you follow or do not follow. There can be violence at stake in being recognizable as women; there can be violence at stake in not being recognizable as women. (Ahmed 2017, 14-15)
As Ahmed notes here, woman is an assignment that some of us are given or take up. That’s not to imply it’s a conscious choice, even if it sometimes is. We can choose to break free (deliberately and openly) from the assignment and refuse it. I have tried to. Yet, people try to insist that I should take it up. They keep assigning me this assignment of womanhood. So, in a way I’m still included in the category of women, because society insists on placing me there. That means that I know that, to a large degree, when people fight for women and women’s rights, that includes me. Abortion rights, fighting sexual violence, gender discrimination on the labour market… All of that applies to me too. Yet, the path I have followed through life has moved me away from womanhood too. And as Ahmed notes, there can be violence at stake both in being recognizable as a woman and in not being recognizable as a woman. There’s institutional violence in being forced into the gender binary by the state; that small marker on my passport labeling me as ”female”. There’s violence in the words that cut as knives; ”really a girl”, ”confused”, ”mentally ill.” There’s a price to pay when refusing the assignment of woman.
All the while I know I share a lot of struggles with women. Yet I’m not a woman. Sometimes this isn’t a problem, I can intellectually hold both these thoughts in my head at the same time. But sometimes, some so-called feminist will insist that people like me either don’t exist or that we’re really just women who have a lot of internalised misogyny. That makes it complicated. Then there’s days such as International Women’s Day. Where do I, someone who aren’t a woman, but who people try to assign as a woman, fit in during that day? I’m to a large part impacted by the fights for equality that people focus on during that day. But I’m not a woman, and I don’t want to remove focus from women on International Women’s Day (hence this essay being published the day before). I’m someone who has refused the assignment of woman, but who stand in solidarity with those who have taken up that assignment.
In a way this day was easier to handle when I was just an angry teenager who made posters for their high school and believed themselves to be a woman. Now it’s complicated. It forces me to confront my relationship to womanhood. It forces me to confront my place in the women’s movement and feminism. I don’t have any answers, but I will keep doing the work. While I refuse the assignment of woman, I do take up the assignment of feminist and will support women in their struggle to exist in this world.
Reference
Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
When I first read Grant Piercy’s novel Agent of Truth, the sequel to his The Erased a while back, I immediately knew that I had to write some sort of analysis on it. The novel wrestles with themes of power, humanity, and technology, much like its predecessor, and examines what makes us human. This is most explicitly done through the existence of so called ”transhumans”, people who have transferred their consciousness to android bodies. In Agent of Truth, with the introduction of the trans character Cassia the parallels between transhumans and transgender people’s experience also became quite obvious to me. In Cassia’s story, she draws the parallel between transhumans and transgender humans explicitly at some points, mostly when she gets forcibly put in a body that isn’t her own, and how this is similar but worse than being deadnamed (Piercy 2020, 312). In both instances she is being denied who she is, not recognised as the person she actually is, and she can feel it in her body. In both her quest to transition, and getting back control over her body, she has to fight a fascist regime for her right for bodily autonomy. When remembering her gender transition, she thinks this, which might very well also be about getting back to her body after her consciousness was forcibly moved:
I thought about moving forward or killing myself. Ironic that I faced that simple, binary choice. Continue with a life of agony, where I would never be seen as the person I know that I am- that I might be tantalizingly close, but I’d never truly attain it, no matter the work I put in. And to do it all in secret. To refashion my body with the help of back-alley surgeons, black market drugs. To keep it hidden away from the fascists who wanted me dead because of an itch I could never scratch. (Piercy 2020, 123-124)
It’s not a perfect parallel, but it’s a very interesting one. Especially considering the amount of scholarly work that has been done about gender, technology, and medicine (eg. Haraway 1991, Stryker 1994, Preciado 2013). In this essay, I therefore want to analyse the ways that both the Transhumans of The Erased and The Agent of Truth, and trans people of our world makes society question what makes us human, and the way society wants to control these alternative ways of embodiment.
Before analysing the novel, I want to provide a theoretical background to all of this, and to do that I will start with discussing the pretty much ground-breaking text A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century by feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1991). Haraway uses the figure of the cyborg to analyse and problematise our preconceived notions about society. The cyborg, in her view, makes us question our assumptions about gender, reproduction, and so on. It also makes us question the Western world’s goal of unity, in bodies and narratives. The cyborg isn’t just a metaphor for her though, she argues that we are all cyborgs in one way or another, since we are all affected and dependant on technology in today’s society. She further argues that three different boundary breakdowns have led us to this situation where we can question these preconceived assumptions about humanity etc. These boundary breakdowns are: human v animals (where is the boundary really, when we’ve figured out that we’ve all evolved from the same ancestors?), human and animal v machines (since machines have evolved to the level where they don’t need humans controlling them anymore), and physical and non-physical (the existance of such a machine makes one question the divine). She furthermore discusses the concept of identities, specifically in a political context, and the need to understand that identities are broken. One such examples she brings up is the identity of woman, and questions how this can be an identity for feminism to gather round since the experience of womanhood is so different for different women (based on race, class, sexuality, etc). She argues that feminists should instead focus on chosen alliances and “political kinship” and proposes that the myth of the cyborg can potentially function as a new myth to gather round. This is because the cyborg helps us question all dichotomies, since it’s a dissembled and reassembled postmodern collective and self. Haraway envisions a future where we have moved beyond essentialist characteristics, and where the focus instead lies on design, boundaries, flows, and systems. In such a future, sexual reproduction will just be one of many forms of reproductive strategy, and gender norms and groupings based on race/blood/being seen as primitive/enlightened will be irrational. She does, however, note that while the cyborg works well to question all of these things:
The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (Haraway 1991, 151)
This idea of illegitimate offspring being unfaithful to their origins is something I will return to later. But first, I want to discuss a scholar who have in many ways drawn on Haraway’s work to discuss technology and medicine even further.
In his book Testo junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era, Paul B. Preciado describes our current world as a global postindustrial and medical regime (2013). He calls this regime pharmacopornographic because of the way it governs sexual subjectivity through a process of biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotictechnical (pornographic) control (ibid, 33). This argument is similar to how Donna Haraway uses the concept of the cyborg, and Preciado is inspired by this the theoretical framework when conceptualising the pharmacopornographic world (ibid, 45). He argues that this regime can be seen in the ways governments and corporations control sexual subjectivity and bodies through the production of for instance hormonal contraceptives and other sex related pharmaceuticals (such as Viagra), as well as sex hormones. Preciado writes:
After World War II, human mapping in the West, characterized by sexual dimorphism and its classification of sexualities as normal or deviant, healthy or disabled, becomes dependent on the legal and commercial management of molecules essential to the production of phenotypes (external signs) that are culturally recognized as female or male (facial hair, size and shape of the genitals, voice register…), as well as on the techno political managements of the reproduction of the species and on the pharmacological control of our immune systems and their resistance to aggression, illness, and death. (ibid, 112-113)
One example that he specifically discusses is the usage of sex hormones to change one’s body and he writes about people who call themselves gender hackers or gender pirates (ibid, 55). These groups see sex hormones as free and open biocodes and argue that these should not be regulated by the state or controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Preciado argues that in the pharmacopornographic era, a possible act of resistance on the microlevel is to participate in individual experimentation and changing of one’s body, without the “permission” of the institutions of the pharmacoporn complex (ibid, 333). He further argues that there is a need for trans-feminists to use their living bodies as biopolitical platforms to describe the experiences/effects of for instance sex hormones, to create new frameworks of understanding:
In an era in which pharmaceutical laboratories and corporations and state medico-legal institutions are controlling and regulating the use of gender and sex biocodes (the active molecules of progesterone, estrogen [sic], and testosterone) as well as chemical protheses, it seems anachronistic to speak of practices of political representations without going through performative and biotechnical experiments on sexual subjectivity and gender. We must reclaim the right to participate in the construction of biopolitical fictions. We have the right to demand collective and ‘common’ ownership of the biocodes of gender, sex, and race. We must wrest them from private hands, from technocrats and from the pharmacoporn complex. Such a process of resistance and redistribution could be called technosomatic communism. (ibid, 352)
Here, Preciado, just as Haraway, argues for the wrestling away of technology from the powers that be in our world. He also speaks of creating our own stories about our experiences of gender and changing of bodies, not just accepting the narratives imposed on us by those in power. This leads me nicely into the next text I want to discuss, which is very much about narratives about trans bodies.
In her text My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Villiage of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage, Susan Stryker discusses how trans people have often been seen as monstrous, as less than human (1994). She writes:
The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist. (ibid, 238)
Her claiming of this monsterous identity is, as she notes, a form of reclaiming (similarly to how LGBTQ+ people have reclaimed the word “queer”), since trans people have historically been seen as Frankensteinian monsters. She for instance notes the way (so called) feminist writers Mary Daly and Janice Raymond compared trans people to Frankenstein’s monster, and called trans women specifically “agents of ‘necrophilic invasion’ of female space” (ibid), and argued that the (so called) problem of transsexuality should be morally mandated out of existance. Stryker argues that the reason cis people are so outraged by trans people is that they (trans people), makes them question the so called “natural order”. She decides to embrace being called a creature or a monster, writing that the word monster is derived from the Latin noun “monstrum” which means “divine portent” and is formed from the verb “monere” which means “to warn”. The word monster ended up referring living things of anomalous shape, or fantastical creatures such as the sphinx “who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts” (ibid, 240). This was because the people of the time (Ancient Greece and Rome) thought such beings were the sign of some supernatural events and considered monsters (similarly to angels) to be messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. Stryker therefore takes up the voice of the monster to convey this message:
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself. (ibid)
Essentially what she’s saying is that trans people can function as a wake-up call to question the limiting norms of society if people have the sense to listen, and not demonise us (side-note: if you’re a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire, you should read my essay where I discuss this in relation to the character Alleras, aka the Sphnix). A final point that I want to discuss from Stryker’s text is the monster’s relation to its creation, and here I will once again quote her since she puts it much better than I ever could:
The very success of Mary Shelley’s scientist in his self-appointed task thus paradoxically proves its futility: rather than demonstrate Frankenstein’s power over materiality, the newly enlivened body of the creature attests to its maker’s failure to attain the mastery he sought. Frankenstein cannot control the mind and feelings of the monster he makes.It exceeds and refutes his purposes. My own experience as a transsexual parallels the monster’s in this regard. The consciousness shaped by the transsexual body is no more the creation of the science that refigures its flesh than the monster’s mind is the creation of Frankenstein. (…) Heroic doctors still endeavor to triumph over nature. The scientific discourse that produced sex reassignment techniques is inseparable from the pursuit of immortality through the perfection of the body, the fantasy of total mastery through the transcendence of an absolute limit, and the hubristic desire to create life itself. (…) None of this, however, precludes medically constructed transsexual bodies from being viable sites of subjectivity. Nor does it guarantee the compliance subjects thus embodied with the agenda that resulted in a transsexual means of embodiment. As we rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more, arid something other, than the creatures our makers intended us to be (ibid, 242).
Here, again, we return to the theme from Haraway and Preciado, of the creation moving away from the intentions of its creator.
Now, finally, I want to return to Agent of Truth. The first thing I want to note is how the Transhumans of the story very much reminds me of the cyborgs that Haraway describes, in that the escaped Transhumans envision a new world, freer from oppression. This can be seen very much in 77/Ian’s chapters, for instance in the very first chapter when he remembers Four saying: “’This is the Fall in reverse, our expulsion from a negative Eden. Together we ascend.” (Piercy 2020, 11). But it’s also clear that the very existence of Transhumans makes us question boundaries between human and non-human, human and machine, just as she writes. It also provides an opportunity to imagine something beyond our current society, that is, if we can get beyond the current structures holding us down. As 77 thinks much later in the novel:
They drift through the world, pretending to have a greater purpose. They act as though their families, friends, jobs, and loves construct and architecture that droves the progress of their society. In the meantime, corporation and governments actively work against progress, purposefully producing materials that continue a march toward extinction- the entire construct of modern civilization borne on waves of plastic, carbon monoxide, and nuclear waste. They create only to destroy, the social contract of society requiring compromise against personal ethics to participate.
Take, for instance James Burke, the CEO of NMAC, the corporation that manufactured my current body. This body was 3-D printed with materials provided by NMAC to a government contract. The coolant coursing through my musculature would blight the ground we walk if it spilled and leached into the soil (though it’s labelled non-toxic). East Asian sweatshops manufactured the processor neural network that powers my consciousness. Burke earns an obscene amount of money to create bodies like this (…) What does Burke do with more money than God? Does he end world hunger? Does he create affordable housing for the poor? Does he put it toward the healthcare system? Or public transportation? Or helping underfunded social programs? No. He hoards the wealth into creating more wealth. More money than god is used to create more money than god. It’s a cycle of capital building capital. When you know the secret to making money is through exploiting the underclass and creating your own necessity, it doesn’t seem so difficult. (Piercy 2020, 253)
Now, these Transhumans, the illegitimate children of Burke in a way, want to rebel against their creator, just as cyborgs should in Haraway’s view. This, of course, also very much puts me in mind of Preciado’s urging to “wrest [the biocodes of sex and gender] from private hands, from technocrats and from the pharmacoporn complex. Such a process of resistance and redistribution could be called technosomatic communism.” (Preciado 2013, 335). Similarly to how he argues that trans people should get control over these biocodes independent from governments and corporations, one could argue that the Transhumans think that humanity should get to access Transhumaness outside of the same types of institutions (reading the end of the novel though, one can wonder to which degree this has succeeded, or to which degree they have just set up a new system of control). Speaking of trans people creating their own narrative and becoming more than their creator intended, this of course connects very strongly to what Stryker writes about trans people’s relationship to doctors (and Frankenstein’s monster’s connection to Frankenstein). I think this becomes especially clear in the case of Garrick:
Garrick: I hear my own music. I’ve accepted that. Maybe I don’t get to have what everyone else does… but how is that so different from the way people lived before? There’s value in it. There’s something worth saving in what we used to have. But that’s the most difficult thing. It wasn’t always good. It wasn’t always worth it. But there’s something we need to keep.
Guthrie: I suppose you’re right. We can’t just erase ourselves entirely, can we?
Garrick: Even me. I lost so much, but I still kept myself. I was still allowed to identify on my own terms.
Guthrie: I’m sure Cassia would appreciate that.
Garrick: I’m sure she would too. That was why I took a new name. They’d called me Gary when I was under repair, but my name was Erik. So I used a portmanteau when I could. (Piercy 2020, 322-323)
Garrick here very much embodies what Stryker writes about the being becoming more than his creator intended. To paraphrase Stryker, Garrick rose up from the operating table of his rebirth, hearing his own music and identifying himself on his own terms. There are, however, even more connections between that text and the way Transhumans are described.
Another such way is the similarities between the way the posts by the Agent_of_Truth describes transhumans, and the trans people have often been described. One such example is the post by Agent_of_Truth entitled “one body”, where he writes:
God did not require mechanical parts to create our bodies. With that, the Transhumans seek to pervert God’s perfection. We are perfect machines, our bodies perfect containers for our souls and our consciousness. (…) But these abominations that have walked out into the world pervert this perfection with ever step. (…) But for them, there are two bodies. They are the bodies from which they came, the soft flesh of God’s creation, and the mechanical bodies men have constructed for them. Why would they seek to negate the perfection of the organic? (Piercy 202, 81-83)
This, to me, puts me very much in mind of the anti-trans feminists who accuse trans women of being necrophilic invasion agents, of being unnatural monsters. It also, however, reminds me of how the right anti-feminists of today describe feminists and LGBTQ+ people (Paternotte & Kuhar 2017). They often think that feminists and LGBTQ+ activists are trying to destroy natural relationships between men and women, and that they through the normalization of what they see as abnormal sexuality will normalize paedophilia too. Trans people specifically are often seen as a threat against human ecology. Paternotte and Kuhar also notes that while there are sometimes religious (specifically Christian) components in such arguments, they have also spread to non-religious circles. Proponents of these arguments also often see themselves as supporters of truth, truth that is being suppressed, and see themselves as oppressed. This feels extremely similar to what is written by Agent_of_Truth. It should be noted that he also writes about how Transhumans assault women and children at one point (Piercy 2020, 38). All in all, it’s clear that Transhumans evoke similar feelings of revulsion as trans people do, be it from anti-trans feminists or the right.
In conclusion then, I think it’s clear that both Transhumans and trans people makes us as a society question what makes us human. This can lead us to being able to envision a better world, as Haraway discusses in relation to the cyborg, or it can make us hate the figure that makes us question this “natural order” as Stryker writes. It also makes us question who should have the power over the resources of technology and medicine, like Preciado reminds us. Something else that both Agent of Truth’s depiction and discussion on Transhumans, and Preciado and Stryker’s discussion on trans people, remind us of is the importance of questioning the narratives presented by the powers that be. They remind us that even if we are all shaped by our circumstances, we can become more than our creators intended.
References
Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ibid, 149-181. London: Free Association Books.
Paternotte, David and Roman Kuhar. 2017. ‘“Gender ideology” in movement: Introduction.’ In Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing Against Equality, edited by David Paternotte & Roman Kuhar, 1-22. New York: Rowman: Little.
Piercy, Grant. 2020. Agent of Truth. [e-book]
Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: Feminist Press.
Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My words to Victor Frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: Performing transgender rage” GLQ, 1(3): 237-254
Lo the Lynx 