The most significant thing that hits me as I read DeVun's history of the (European) attitude toward intersexuality is how little has changed. There is still a prevailing attitude that everyone must be shoehorned into either "clearly male" or "clearly female" and that the opinions and preferences of the person involved are of little moment. (One change is that in the pre-modern period, it appears that questions over classification and surgery appear to have been raised primarily on reaching adulthood, whereas the modern approach makes those decisions for newborn babies.)
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If people today -- with the availability of modern medical understandings of sexual development and variation -- can have such difficulty fitting intersex people into their understanding of the world, just imagine how much more confused pre-modern people may have been. Though pre-modern people had the advantage of allowing for types of causation that had no actual biological basis. This chapter of DeVun reviews several of the stages of theorizing about non-binary bodies and how to deal with them that prevailed in the medieval era.
Blog entry form is behaving oddly. Good thing today's post is brief and not particularly relevant.
Although this book advertises itself as a history of non-binary identity, the initial chapters have a strong focus on "fictional" versions of non-binariness. While this can be uncomfortable reading for those looking for historic identification, it provides an important context for historic attitudes toward actual people whose sex or gender has not been easily categorizable.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 352 – Is Your Sapphic Protagonist Worried About the Wrong Things? - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/09/19)
It's fascinating to me how solidly misogyny is embedded in early Christian culture that, even when envisioning the ideal state of humanity as androgynous beings "neither male nor female" there's still the unexamined assumption that once you have binary gender, it's necessarily hierarchical. This book will take a while to get to the aspects of non-binary identity that are relevant to the Project, but it's being a fascinating read.
I hope to answer that question in an upcoming podcast. (Probably not this month -- not enough time, and I still have another book to cover before I'm ready to do it.) But the short answer is that questions of how historic societies thought about "same-sex" issues relates very much to their understanding of how the sexes are defined and differentiated.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 351 - On the Shelf for September 2026 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2026/09/05)
Welcome to On the Shelf for September 2026.
It’s been quite a month! The first week of August I was in Orlando for the Golden Crown Literary Society conference, the last week was in Anaheim for the World Science Fiction Convention, and on top of that I started a much more intense physical therapy schedule for my broken arm that can eat up as much as 4 or 5 hours a day (though I backed off on it a little for the conferences).
The last two covered publications about medieval romances had only tangential relevance to the Project, but this article is a treasure. I've previously run across passing references to the same-sex romantic interactions in Amadis de Gaule, but they tended to assume that the reader was thoroughly familiar with the tale. This article focuses specifically on those romances and lays out the background and context for the characters involved.
Discussions of cross-dressed medieval romance heroines commonly mention the tale of Grisandole. For the sake of completeness, I tracked down this comprehensive analysis of the tale. Although Grisandole's cross-dressing doesn't include any of the accidental homoeroticism of many such tales, this article is a great example of how medieval romances were built up out of pre-existing material, and how many parallel versions of a core tale co-existed, swapping elements out or in depending on the local taste.
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