There’s a thirteenth-century manuscript with a trans masculine hero. The Roman de Silence tells the story of a girl raised as a boy, a situation that leads to a considerable identity crisis in the protagonist, as well as numerous debates between personifications of Nature [Nature] and Nouriture [Nurture]. But despite Silence’s preference for being a knight and their fairly consistent adoption of masculine pronouns, Nature wins out over Nurture and the poem, as Simon Gaunt puts it, firmly rejects possibilities of not only gender as a cultural construct but also of indeterminacy—indeterminate gender and meaning—ultimately reinstating the misogynistic status quo and simple, binary definitions of the ‘natural order.’ In other words, the poem concludes that social hierarchies are natural hierarchies, and if Silence revels in linguistic play, much beloved by the postmodern critic, it must be remembered that puns like nature [essence] and nature [genital] finally resolve, when Silence’s false clothes are stripped off before King Ebain and his court, and their truth or essence is equated to their genitals.

I find myself uncomfortably aligned with King Ebain, who strips Silence down in order to discover the truth of their body. In the previous installment, I examined a picture that has been characterized as a simple illustration of the Roman de Silence text [fig. 1]. I searched for visual evidence of its transness and found a rather obscure image that enacted gender ambiguities on the text that would not exist without it. That investigation was fruitful and concluded with the suggestion that we might read this miniature as allegory for the obscurity of all visual representation. But in scrutinizing signifiers of biological difference and understanding transness in relation to disguise, I certainly risk succumbing to a transphobic logic that assumes an equivalence of the naked body and gender identity, as well as trans and non-binary identities as unreal fabrications.[1] As Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt warn powerfully, these are ‘pernicious’ tropes that, on one the hand, often originate with modern critics rather than medieval texts and, on the other, may inflict real harm to living trans and non-binary people today.[2] These are high-stakes interpretative problems.