Early Christian cross-dressing monks are being reclaimed as possible transgender or LGBTQ saints. More than twenty saints share a similar story: they escaped their lives as women and lived as men, joining monasteries or becoming religious hermits. They usually spent the rest of their lives as men, often for decades. In most cases their biological sex was discovered by shocked communities after they died.
The Church honors these queer saints for living holy lives, despite the biblical prohibitions against women dressing as men in Deuteronomy 22:5. These intriguing saints were assigned female at death. They are usually venerated as women by the official Church, but today they are sometimes categorized as transgender men, butch lesbians, transmasculine, nonbinary, or genderqueer people.
The above quotation may be found on the website “QSpirit.” It is the latest in an attempt to advance acceptance of transgenderism in the Catholic Church—the argument being that taking on characteristics and living as the opposite sex was approved within the history of the Catholic Church, and such persons were actually honored for their holiness. Author Jacqueline Murray employed this argument in defense of Christian Matson—a woman who identifies as a man and lives as a hermit in the hills of Kentucky with the approval of Bishop John Stowe of the Lexington Diocese, known for his vocal defense of the LGBT community. Murray’s article appeared on June 13, 2024, in Religion News Service, entitled “A trans hermit reminds us that the Church once saw sex difference as a matter of degree.”
Lamenting the Vatican’s recent condemnation of transgenderism in Dignitas Infinita, Murray argues that the Church’s insistence on “binary” sex differences is based on teachings of Aristotle codified in the thirteenth century, “when the theologian Thomas Aquinas harmonized Aristotle’s pagan philosophy with Christian theology. Over the ensuing centuries, his teaching of binary sex difference imbued [sic] Catholic theology, particularly because it appeared to align with the separate and distinct creation of Eve from Adam’s rib in one of the two creation stories in the Bible’s Book of Genesis.”
Of course, Murray overlooks that not only Aquinas’s teaching, but the entire Catholic doctrinal tradition regarding the meaning of human sexuality is first based on divine revelation, as found in Genesis 1 and 2! In addition, Church teaching regarding human sexuality is based on natural law—which, according to Aquinas, is based on God’s eternal law.
Jesus himself provides the ultimate exegesis on the meaning of man, made male and female. As recorded in Matthew 19:3-6, the Pharisees test Jesus to see if he will contradict the Law of Moses on divorce. Jesus indeed goes right back to the beginning and affirms that “the Creator made them male and female” (Gen. 1) and that “for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2).
Man created male and female is not simply something taught by Aristotle. The two complementary sexes are willed by God.
We may also mention the teaching of St. Paul, who confirmed the God-willed difference between men and women. In 1 Corinthians 11:4-12, he tells the Corinthians that it matters how men and women wear their hair—as short hair for a man and long hair for a woman affirm this God-given difference, and this difference based on the creation accounts should be respected. The passage is ultimately not about hairstyles, but about the fact that it matters to God whether one’s sex is affirmed or denied.
Murray next relies on the teachings of the second-century A.D. Roman physician Galen, who believed that male or female gender was determined by the temperatures of bodily humors: “The manliest men were at the hot and dry end and the womanliest women at the cold and moist end. In between were individuals with varying degrees of heat and cold.” In other words, gender is not fixed, but “fluid and flexible.” Her point is that, regardless of the antiquated science, the medieval Church had no problem approving this “fluid and flexible” gender spectrum. Nonetheless, Catholic doctrine never approved of a man literally identifying as a woman, or a woman literally identifying as a man, much less bombing themselves with hormones and mutilating their physical bodies to conform to their gender identity.
Murray does offer some examples of who she claims were Catholic holy people on the sexual spectrum. Indeed, very popular with those who seek a change in Church teaching is the fourteenth-century holy “bearded” woman Wilgefortis. According to a folk legend, Wilgefortis was the Christian daughter of a pagan king of Portugal. Having taken a vow of chastity, she prayed that God would disfigure her body, thus making her unattractive and avoid her father’s command that she marry a pagan prince. In answer to her prayer, God caused a beard to appear on her chin. In a rage, her father had his daughter crucified.
But the point of the beard was not to transition Wilgefortis from a woman into a man. Ironically, the beard was designed to protect her womanly virginity, as the facial hair rendered her repulsive to men.
There are other women who, having vowed chastity, took similar action to avoid marriage. St. Catherine of Siena cut her hair short to mar her appearance when her parents tried to force her into marriage. Similarly, St. Anastasia of Alexandria, after becoming a widow, sought to devote her whole life to God. Seeking to avoid a second marriage, she sought the help of the abbot Daniel, who dressed her in a monk’s robe and passed her off as a eunuch so she could live her life in seclusion. These women who disguised themselves as men in no way actually believed that they had become men.
Murray doesn’t neglect to cite the early Church martyr Perpetua, who, with Felicity, met death in the year 203. In the account of their martyrdoms, Perpetua describes a vision of her impending death, stating, “I was stripped, and became a man. Then my helpers began to rub me with oil, as is the custom for contest.”
Why does Perpetua see herself as a man, as vir? She understands her martyrdom as battle, as someone entering into gladiatorial combat. Indeed, in the early Church, influenced by Neo-Platonism and Aristotelian philosophical concepts, the virtue of fortitude was a masculine virtue—associated with what it means to be “vir.” Thus, women who exhibited courage were seen, in a sense, as having taken on this trait.
However, it is important to note that when the actual martyrdom is upon Perpetua and Felicity, their captors mock their feminine nature. Stripped naked and placed on exhibition before the people, they are threatened with death by a “very fierce cow” the devil prepared for them, “mocking their sex in that of the beasts.” Felicity faces this beast “with breasts still dripping from her recent childbirth.” There is not a more compelling image of female martyrdom in all Christian writing. As for Perpetua, when actual martyrdom occurs, any sense of masculine battle disappears. Instead, Perpetua is fully a woman—no longer a strong gladiator rubbed with oil. Rather, she comes before her torturers a “woman of delicate frame.” Also compelling is the actual moment of her death, as the vision of herself as a gladiator seems to be fulfilled. Indeed, she does “do battle” with a young gladiator who is actually afraid to kill her, and not because she “became a man,” but precisely because of her feminine purity: “Perpetua, that she might taste some pain being pierced between the ribs, cried out loudly, and she herself placed the wavering hand of the youthful gladiator to her throat. Possibly such a woman could not have been slain unless she herself had willed it, because she was feared by the impure spirit.”
Murray doesn’t fail to refer to the twelfth-century monk known as Joseph of the Benedictine monastery of Schonau. In this bizarre case, it was discovered upon the death of this faithful monk that Brother Joseph was really a woman. Murray argues that, “far from causing consternation, this gender fluid monk was cause for celebration by their brothers.” Of course, “Brother Joseph” was undoubtedly praised not because she successfully lived the life of a man, or saw herself as a “trans man.” Undoubtedly, she was praised for her holiness, praised as a woman who managed to endure the hardships and sacrifices of monastic life “like a man.”
Moreover, we do not know why she passed herself off as a male. The explanation could simply be that God called her to a monastic vocation—and she had difficulty finding admittance to such a life as a woman. If we do not know why “Brother Joseph” disguised herself as a man, she can hardly serve as the poster boy for queer saints. In any case, let’s get real. Does Murray actually expect the Catholic Church to throw off four thousand years of divinely revealed Jewish and Christian doctrine on the meaning of male and female sexuality because one peculiar fourteenth-century woman passed herself off as a monk, and supposedly her fellow male monks nonetheless lauded her?
Those who defend transgenderism may argue that, indeed, the body is important to personal identity—so important that the flesh must be altered to achieve conformity with the mind. However, since transgenderism requires the deformation of one’s sex to achieve conformity with the mind, based on a Neo-Gnosticism, the fact cannot be escaped that the physical world has no inherent meaning—except on a purely physicalist or functional level—as the philosophical principles of transgenderism would support the abolition of sexual gender altogether. If the physical body—male and female—has no inherent, God-given sense, then nothing in the world of matter bears any inner truth—absolutely nothing!
One cannot claim that male and female sex is ontologically meaningless and yet affirm that other physical substances put to the use of worship maintain their value—such as water, wine, bread, and holy oils.
Based on a Neo-Gnostic despair of the created order, transgenderism marks the end of the sacramental order, because it marks the end of the ontological order. Nothing can be more anti-Catholic than a denial of the ontological goodness of the material world created by God. The good creation upon which the sacramental order of the world depends has fallen apart.
Of all the world religions, it is Catholicism that takes this world seriously and the goodness of what it means to be embodied as man and woman. In the face of the current deconstruction, the Church must bravely defend this truth.