Abstract This article uncovers the fractured and conflicting understandings of sex and gender in early medieval England around the year 1000 CE by exploring the Old English literary biographies of two saints often presented as women disguised as men. Ælfric’s Eugenia upholds binary gender expectations, while an alternative version of Eugenia —changed by a scribe and surviving in the burned remains of a single manuscript—oscillates between acceptance and intolerance. The anonymous Euphrosyne , in contrast, challenges gender norms throughout. This article argues that these characters and the texts’ competing views on sex and gender can be best understood by recognizing these two saints not as women in disguise but as trans men. A trans studies approach combined with philology and source study respects these two figures on their own terms while also uncovering elements of these texts and their cultural context that usually lie obscured.
Jonathan Davis-Secord (2025) studied this question.