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Christians should ‘embrace transness as an essential part of its values,’ she says

Christianity is not “anti-trans,” and there are early church saints to prove it, a University of Iowa graduate student wrote recently.

In her piece at The Conversation, Sarah Barringer said scholars have identified at least 34 “transgender saints” in early Christianity – evidence that “not all Christians are anti-trans.”

“Based on these stories, I argue that Christianity has a transgender history to pull from and many opportunities to embrace transness as an essential part of its values,” she wrote.

Along with her graduate studies, Barringer also teaches literature courses at the public university, according to her bio at The Conversation. Her dissertation is titled “Transmasculine Narratives in Medieval Literature.”

“And in my research of medieval history and literature, I found evidence of a long history in Christianity of what today could be called ‘transgender’ saints,” she wrote. “While such a term did not exist in medieval times, the idea of men living as women, or women living as men, was unquestionably present in the medieval period.”

Barringer gave three examples: St. Eugenia, St. Euphrosyne, and St. Marinos.

“All three were born as women but cut their hair and put on men’s clothes to live as men and join monasteries,” she wrote.

“Eugenia, raised pagan, joined a monastery to learn more about Christianity and later became abbot. Euphrosyne joined a monastery to escape an unwanted suitor and spent the rest of his life there. Marinos, born Marina, decided to renounce womanhood and live with his father at the monastery as a man,” Barringer wrote.

Quoting other scholars, she wrote that early Christians considered “transness” to be “holy”:

The Catholic Church opposed cross-dressing in laws, liturgical meetings and other writings. However, Christianity honored the holiness of these transgender saints.

In a 2021 collection of essays about transgender and queer saints in the medieval period, scholars Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt argue that medieval Christianity saw transness as holy.

“Transness is not merely compatible with holiness; transness itself is holy,” they write. Transgender saints had to reject convention in order to live their own authentic lives, just as early Christians had to reject convention in order to live as Christians.

Traditional Christian teachings are that marriage is between one man and one woman, and human beings cannot change their gender.

However, Barringer is not the only academic to have argued otherwise in recent years.

Currently, the University of Minnesota offers a class about “transgender saints” and “intersectional medieval art,” The College Fix reported in April.

Meanwhile, the University of Nebraska recently awarded a graduate student credit for conducting a drag performance that appropriated the Catholic Mass in a church, according to another College Fix report.

MORE: ‘Faithful Christians’ can support gay marriage, Fuller seminary leaders say

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Christians worship in a church; CL Median/Shutterstock

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