‘Selective historians’: The construction of cisness in Byzantine and Byzantinist texts

Far from being a natural, prelapsarian state, cisness is a hegemonic ideal of gender performance demanded of all people. This article explores the construction of cisness in the field of Byzantine studies, and the historiographical tropes through which it is maintained, naturalised and made invisible. It uses analysis of hegemonic cisness in Byzantine studies to suggest new avenues of investigation for Byzantine gender history. It proposes ‘cisness’ as method; a focal point for historical and historiographical investigation. It asks, was there cisness in Byzantium? If so, did it resemble ours?

Anamorphosis is defined as 'a distorted projection or drawing of anything, so made that when viewed from a particular point, or by reflection from a suitable mirror, it appears regular and properly proportioned; a deformation'. 2You may have heard of drawings like this in the caves at Lascaux; odd fusions of man and animal, curved against the wall of the cave to look right to a viewer, standing in the right spot, which is the only spot where you have space to stand. 3 Lacan fired this visual subjectivity into imagery when he described the experience of leaving a room containing Hans Holbein the Younger's The Ambassadors (1533). 4As he glanced back to look at it for the last time, he finally saw 'its sinister truth': the anamorphic skull which dominates the painting's foreground. 5What had happened visually had also happened emotionally, and in thought.He had, looking back, seen entirely differently.
Gutt finds this anamorphosis in transition, and in the writing of history.The before transition is recontextualised and transformed by the after, but this transformation necessarily happens at a distance. 6he new narrative cannot be fully integrated into the old, the pretence of the self as stable no longer sits easy.'Reading through the anamorphosis which the trans perspective entails is not only unavoidable for the trans subject, but also an essential part of inhabiting trans identity'. 7In imagining the motivations of historical figures, we are all looking for parts of ourselves.Emotions we recognise, pain we can imagine from the pain we have felt.As Gutt points out, this recognition of the self is relatively unproblematised when the perspective that produces it is more culturally normative. 8Historians are rarely challenged just for applying words like 'woman' and 'man' to the past; it would not inevitably cause a backlash to say that a historical figure wanted power, or grieved, or felt anger.A trans historian, though, is caught in the double-bind of the DSM-5. 9Our experiences and our desires are quite literally mad.We do not have the social license to see ourselves fractured and reflected in historical figures; we are standing in the wrong place to write.Put simply, if you foreclose trans readings, you foreclose trans writing.When we reflect on the similarities between our lives and those of historical figures, we are accused of spreading our social contagion to the dead. 10To read our own anamorphoses in a text, to communicate that to a cis academic establishment who have rendered our unqualified subjectivities unimaginable, we are forced to accuse historical figures of transness.And then, of course, we are chastised for pathologising them.For a trans historian, it is not viable to simply universalise our experiences of gender.In order to relate to historical figures' gendered experiences in our writing in a way that is legible to cis readers, we have to assert that those figures were trans.There is a gap to be bridged, and the onus to bridge it falls on us.
'Transsexuals … are said to be "selective historians'", tending to stress events which fit in with their ideas and to suppress those which do not'. 11So went the 1970 judgement that retroactively unwomaned April Ashley, allowing her aristocratic husband to annul their marriage, preserving his fortune and creating the UK legal precedent that renders trans people liars unless proven otherwise by a panel of doctors and judges. 12Gutt's article works hard to refute the idea that only transsexuals are 'selective', to make visible the forces that mark us as uniquely unreliable and to find the selectivity in cis history.This is my starting point for building a method.This article will look for the construction of cisness in Byzantine and Byzantinist texts.I will not be looking for individuals or stories I can name as trans, although I will find them, but for the hegemonic force that renders trans life unimaginable.

WHAT IS 'CIS'?
Jules Gill-Peterson uses 'cisgender' to describe a 'a fiction that gender tells itself', one that is historically and culturally contingent to the post-1950s West and the emerging sexological distinction between sex and gender. 13'Cisgender', in this formulation, is not something a person can be, but rather the limit of what they can do or want, and therefore be, a limit that extends to their selfconcept and desires as well as their physical and social life.When gender became distinct from sex, Gill-Peterson argues, the relationship between gender and sex became the subject of the same kinds of psychiatric and state intervention that gender/sex had for centuries prior.Cisness, thus conceived, is a recent development and one that harms us all.
I will broadly adopt Gill-Peterson's definition of cisness: 'cisness is not a state of being, it's a set of operational norms that we use to discipline people's gender and punish their transgressions'. 14Where I differ from Gill-Peterson's definition is in the extent of what I believe can usefully be described by 'cis'.I use 'cis' not only to describe the gendered demands made of the relationship between one's embodiment and desires, but the shape of those demands; where the limits lie.Gender is not symmetrical, it is hierarchical.Julia Serano coined the term 'transmisogyny' to describe the way trans women and transfeminine people are 'culturally marked' for not only their transness but their 'direction of transgression', and subject to incomparable violence, social censure, mockery and monstering. 15In describing the boundaries of cisness, this asymmetry is crucial.The figure of the tomboy has no girlish counterpart, except the despised sissy-boy.This asymmetry is also racial: the figure of the tomboy is archetypally white.The contours of cisness are white supremacist.Limited expressions of masculinity by white girls and women have been celebrated as 'healthy' in imperial contexts, in which they were taken as evidence of white racial supremacy, beneficial to fertility and racial hygiene. 16Transfemininity and trans womanhood have been treated by fascists present and past as a specifically Jewish existential threat to not only the white race but to white manhood. 17sambu Za Suekama coined the phrase 'Triple Consciousness' to describe how Black trans* people simultaneously perceive and navigate how they understand themselves, how white supremacism and antiblackness understand them and how they are understood by transphobes and homophobes in their own communities. 18These forces all come together to shape the limits of which gender transgressions can be rehabilitated as cis.
I read for cisness in both Byzantine and Byzantinist texts; this entails two different processes.In reading for cisness in the historiography, I am looking for cisness as we know it.My hope is that, in unpicking the function of this force in the historiography, I will unlock new possible readings and lines of questioning to direct towards the primary sources being cited.In reading for cisness in those sources, I am looking for something else.I do not expect to find it the same shape as in the present day.While I accept Gill-Peterson's contention that the demand for an aligned body and identity is a product of twentieth-century sexology, I do not consider that demand the sum total of cisness.My questions is: how were the limits of appropriate gender/sex delineated and enforced in the Byzantine world?Was there a social force analogous to present-day cisness, and if so, did it differ from the 'cis' we are familiar with?

WHERE IS CIS?
'Cisness' is expansive enough without attempting to cover the full span of the Byzantine world and its entire attendant historiography; some narrowing is needed.In order to structure what is at its heart a first salvo into the hegemonic cisness of Byzantine studies, I have chosen to focus this article around three historians, each of whom I have judged to be emblematic of a different tendency in their engagement with cisness, their writing of gender and their writing of the (im)possibility of trans history.Betancourt, Ringrose and Tougher: each are the focus of an individual analysis, in which I examine their work in relation to other historians who share or interact with that tendency.Each section is first an examination of cisness in the historiography, followed by an exploration of cisness in sources cited by the historian I am focused on.
I have chosen these historians because of their work on Byzantine eunuchs and more broadly on gender deviation in the Byzantine world.Although eunuchs are not the focus of this article, writing about gendered difference (and especially about kinds of gendered difference that are not easily made equivalent to present-day concepts and social positions) exposes some of the unspoken frameworks being used to read and write gender.Betancourt's reading for transness as an essential nature, that must be unearthed or ruled out by a knowing present-day reader, reproduces the quarantine logic of the gender clinic even as they react against it. 19Ringrose's museumification of embodied gender deviance as a much-missed but ultimately irretrievable feature of a now-alien world produces a cis present.Tougher's simultaneous defence of eunuchs as not feminine, and of 'normal' Byzantine men as having attention drawn away from them by lascivious eunuchs, exposes the patriarchal shape of cisness.Although I find hegemonic cisness in all their accounts of eunuch life, they are far from agreeing.While Tougher reads Byzantine eunuchs as men and defends the breadth of that category, both Ringrose and Betancourt frame their gender positions as more expansive and ambiguous, with Ringrose proposing a 'third gender' framework, that Betancourt has productively complicated.Each historian has done important work -in reading their work for its relationship to the construction of cisness, I am not intending critique for the sake of critique.Each historian's relationship to cisness is also inflected by the disciplinary context in which they wrote.Both Ringrose's and Betancourt's work can be situated in the feminist scholarship of the moment in which they wrote, while Tougher's writing on eunuchs is as much a product of the kinds of empirical readings of sources which the field has traditionally privileged as it is his relationship to cisness.
It must also be noted that my intention in looking for hegemonic cisness in Byzantine studies is not to suggest that this field is uniquely subject to it.Trans readings of Byzantine history are still in a putative stage of development and the field as a whole has been slower than Western Medieval Studies to respond to Carolyn Dinshaw's methodological intervention into queer history writing. 20his means that perhaps some of these structures are more visible in Byzantine studies -but their articulation is relevant to all trans history writing.I do not want to set a new, impossible, standard for writing uninflected by hegemonic power -I want to follow the fault lines that cisness produces in their work, to suggest new readings and directions of investigation for the questions raised by their research.
This article works primarily with translated sources; most significantly the surgical manuals of seventh-century Byzantine surgeon Paul of Aegina, monastic founding documents (typika), legal codes, histories, saints' lives narratives, and, where relevant, the writings of second-century Church Father Clement of Alexandria, who although pre-dating this period, had significant theological influence within it.By interleaving my critiques of cisness in Byzantine Studies with my attempts to find cisness in Byzantine texts, I hope to form a coherent picture of what avenues of investigation are foreclosed by hegemonic cisness.I suspect (and hope) that this approach will also encourage new vibrant and eclectic studies into gender in the Byzantine world.
By attempting a history of cisness as a coercive force, I will glance into what progressive historians might call trans history, but I will not limit my investigation to historical figures we might call trans.By privileging cisness as my object of study, I will focus on the parts of the enforcement of sexed normativity that involve the permissibility of gendered desires, of gender-crossings, of bodily and social deviation and of pathologisation and criminalisation as mechanisms of enforcement.These are topics of relevance to disability studies, feminist and gender studies, critical race theory and trans studies.This analysis will not be total or complete: instead, I want to write something that is beautiful and clarifying to trans historians and productively disturbing to everyone else.

CONSTRUCTING CISNESS INTERSECTIONALLY: THE SEXOLOGIST'S GAZE AND TRANSSEXUAL MONKS
We start our examination of the construction of cisness in Byzantinist texts with the published work in the field most explicitly opposed to writing history as cis.Betancourt's 2020 book Byzantine Intersectionality applies Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality to the field of Byzantine history writing. 21Instead of treating gender history, gay history, the history of race and the history of violence as distinct sub-fields, Betancourt approaches the intersections of multiple marginalisations as uniquely rich and telling sources, through which to read for the structures that underpin these marginalisations and how they were resisted.The product of this is as much a method as it is a history.It approaches the question of how one thematically organises a truly intersectional history, how to weave a narrative out of so many strands.Some of their chapters focus on individual sources; others on distinct themes.It is the chapter 'Transgender Lives' on which this analysis is focused.
'Transgender Lives' does not set out to naturalise or reinforce cisness; if anything, it sets out to refute it.Betancourt writes against the demand that we write the past as cis.They call the possibility of transness in pre-modern historical figures 'a reality we must accept, lest we deny the lives of trans people today'. 22In their chapter, they identify a number of Byzantine figures and narratives, including saints lives', the eleventh-century intellectual Michael Psellos and Byzantine eunuchs, that can be read through the lens of transness, genderfluidity and non-binary identity and expression. 23Where Betancourt focuses on the possible transness of individuals, an imagining of transness creeps into their work that echoes the logic of the gender clinic.This is not unique to Betancourt, nor is their writing a particularly heinous example of this tendency. 24What is distinct about Betancourt's writing within Byzantine studies is the extent to which this happens despite the author's every intention to the contrary -this effectively disambiguates a structure of thought from a wider prejudice, and in doing so clarifies what the logical structure is.In this section, I will examine the way cisness is constructed in Byzantine studies via this tendency -which I will call the sexologist's gaze -both in Betancourt's work and in its reception. 25In doing so, I will suggest alternate avenues by which we might recognise transness in historical texts.
Betancourt opens the chapter with a translated quote from The Life of Hilarion.The quote describes the appearance of Hilarion/Hilaria who was, at the time, called 'Hilarion the Eunuch' because of their appearance as a beardless monk.It says that 'her breasts … were not as those of all women', that 'she was shrunken with ascetic practices' and that 'even her menstrual period had stopped because of the deprivation'.The following paragraph relates their (mis?)recognition as male by her lay sister.'How should she know her', it asks, 'since her flesh had withered through mortification and the beauty of her body had altered, and her appearance, she being naught but skin and bone?'.The final sentence almost appears an afterthought.'Besides all this she was wearing a man's garb'. 26etancourt starts with a problem; its resolution creates a problem for us.A Byzantinist seeking transness would come very quickly to the wealth of saints' lives written in the Greek-speaking Mediterranean between the fifth and ninth centuries, describing transmasculine social transition. 27hey were translated widely and proliferated across Europe. 28The reason these present a problem to Betancourt is more historiographical than it is historical.Most modern historians describe these monks either as 'transvestite' or 'cross-dressing' saints.The phrase 'transvestite nuns' is particularly enduring.The framing is transitory.The monks pass from a binary A to B, or perhaps, from A to A disguised as B. The transition is understood as disguise, partly because of the determination of historians to allow such figures to pass through it unscathed.Gender, in this framing, is a nature, an essence, that remains true regardless of external circumstance.Under this framing these monks could not be called trans history, if their reasons for living trans lives can be put down to anything other than a gendered essence at odds with their sex assigned at birth.The historian is put in the position of the sexologist, picking through the evidence of a life to decide whether they qualify as trans.Typically, the historian looks for reasons to say they were not.
Betancourt wants to find transness among these saints' lives, but their approach does not refute the idea of essence.Early in the chapter, they compare the lives of four transmasculine saints. 29Their comparison of the narratives of Marinos, Dorotheos, Eugenia and Matrona is premised on the idea that each figure has a gender identity, which, given enough information, we might uncover. 30Reflecting on another narrative, they describe a figure named Eugenius being accused of having impregnated a woman, and responding by revealing their breasts, and declaring themselves to be 'by nature a woman'. 31Their response is contrasted to the false confession of Marinos and the private revelation of Dorotheos; they bare their breast and, in Betancourt's words 'she declares her gender identity female and her name Eugenia'. 32Gender identity' is something of a step from 'nature' (although it is a step that is relied upon later in the chapter when interpreting Psellos' words regarding his own feminine 'nature').33 Eugenius' 'I am by nature a woman' could be read as 'I was a woman but have been altered'.Instead, Betancourt takes this declaration of gender identity as overwriting the constant self-identification as male that living as a monk entailed.Like the sexologist, Betancourt places the burden of proof on transnessall possible cis explanations must be ruled out before transness might be considered.Eugenia's social retransition is framed as a revelation of the truth, a detransition.Grouping her with Matrona, Betancourt argues that 'that Matrona and Eugenia see themselves as women throughout their time in the monastery is a point emphasized by the authors'.34 Eugenius' performance of tasks associated with women (drawing water, chopping wood, sweeping) is presented by Betancourt as further evidence of the author's insistence on Eugenia's female gender identity.While this is one reasonable reading, it launders a narrative of transition and retransition as one of natural cisness, gendered essence that might pass through the trials of manhood without alteration.One might be 'by nature a woman' and live, for a time, as a man.Betancourt's reading of Eugenia does not allow a transness that is uncomfortable, that involves the experience of change, that questions itself. Th description of Hilarion the eunuch is a description of bodily transformation; all the saints Lives Betancourt cites describe social transition, often repeatedly over a lifetime.When Betancourt states that 'the extant sources do not provide enough information to support an argument that any of these people felt their gender identity did not match their birth-assigned sex in the way that this subjectivity is simplistically imagined today', they are employing the sexologist's gaze.35 This is a crucial part of the construction of cisness in Byzantine studies; transness is asked for a differential diagnosis, and cisness is allowed to remain the default.
As Jules Gleeson observed, Betancourt's 'mining' of saints' Lives for trans readings risks obscuring more than it reveals; saints' Lives hinge around the ethically exceptional and the repeated familiar commonplace and as such are not a representative sample of gendered Byzantine life. 36If, though, we distance ourselves from the sexologist's gaze, there is much to observe.The very existence of these narratives as saints' Lives tells us that the desire to become a man was not entirely conceptually ruled out of cisness in the Byzantine world.A woman might, narratively at least, become a man and be understood to be behaving both rationally and morally.What this meant practically is difficult to unpick.Although saints' Lives deal with the exceptional and the miraculous, they had cultural power and their impact did not always align with the values they depicted.The typika of John I Tzimiskes (971-72) and Constantine IX Monomachos (1045), for example, banned the beardless (that is, eunuchs and young men) from monastic life at Mount Athos, and Manuel II (1406) went so far as to say (admittedly in what is clearly a post-hoc justification for a pre-existing practise) that this was in fear of sexually motivated women disguising themselves as eunuchs and entering monasteries. 37his legislation points less to a widespread practice of transition to monkhood, and more to a culture that feared both the sexual possibility it saw in the embodied transmasculinity and transfemininity of eunuchs, and the conceptual danger of women disguised as eunuchs.Perhaps Manuel II really was afraid that hordes of libidinous cross-dressing women would descend on Mount Athos -or perhaps he, and Constantine IX Monomachos before him were afraid of a sexual slippage between man and boy and eunuch and woman, and a kind of worldly temptation that could not be evaded but only withstood, or given in to.While narratives of exceptional transition by saints in Byzantium may have made transmasculine transition imaginable in the way it needs to be in order to be attempted, it also made it legible as a threat to cisness.
To write about transness, we do not need to disambiguate the true gender identities of historical figures from their social and material circumstances.The life of St Eugenia can be a trans narrative however it is read.If we understand her as a woman forced to conceal her sex and pretend to be a man, we are reading a transfeminine narrative.If we read her transitions as multiple, not as unmaking each other, she can be both transmasculine and transfeminine.When we do not demand a consistent and isolate gender identity of historical and literary figures, we free them, and ourselves, to read transly.

NATURAL EUNUCHS, MUSEUMIFICATION AND THE CIS PRESENT
In The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium, Ringrose contrasts modern day transsexuality with gender in the Byzantine world. 38According to Ringrose, transsexualism occurs when an adult concludes that their 'inner being' is incompatible with 'the physiology of his/her body', inevitably leading to genital surgery. 39This is an offensively badly researched caricature of the logics and desires that underpin transition, but that is in many ways the smallest problem with it.Ringrose also groups transition with non-consensual medical interventions made on the bodies of intersex children, as examples of the 'extremes' that 'our Western culture' would go to preserve a clear sex and gender binary. 40Ours is a time of neatness, our sexes are clean and unambiguous.Transsexualism is of the too-ordered too-literal adult mind.In Ringrose's Byzantine world, however, intersex children were reared as 'natural eunuchs', a group considered 'especially honoured by God' because they were assumed to have a lifelong freedom from sexual desire. 41he subtle and multidimensional picture Ringrose offers of gender variance in the past is painted on the blank canvas of the present, but the present is not blank.The caricature that Ringrose presents in her description of gender in 'the modern West' is not simply a flawed imagining of transness, it is a fantasy that is incompatible with the realities of trans people, and as such it makes transness unimaginable. 42As she frames it, any reach towards transness is a reiteration of cisness in its violent regulation of gendered possibilities.In order to highlight the complexity of Byzantine gender diversity, Ringrose has unwittingly erased the complexity of gender diversity at her time and place of writing. 43n this whitewashing we find the construction of cisness.Using a patriarchal sexological explanation of transness which has historically been forced on trans people by a medical establishment with the power to withhold transition-related care, Ringrose is therefore never compelled to compare the gender variance of her eunuch subjects with that of present-day gender-variant people.The Byzantine past, as Ringrose constructs it, was a space in which gender was more complicated and malleable than it is today.Gender today, Ringrose takes at its word.Trans life is reduced to the patriarchal rules it navigates and subverts, essentially made unimaginable.Her writings suggest, perhaps, a future in which gender is once again malleable, but she does not see that future as having any relationship to present-day transsexualism -something she presents as a mistake of the overly literal mind.The present is constructed as cis, in contrast to a past which is imagined to be free from cisness, and therefore from the folly of transition.
In the first part of this section, I explore this problem through the lens of colonial museumification, focusing on the 'natural eunuch', in order to detail the process through which present-day cisness is created in the text.I describe how Ringrose asserts the total success of a cis, white, hegemonic 'West' in the present, and therefore erases her participation in the creation and maintenance of such an entity.I then engage with a source of relevance to Ringrose's work, to demonstrate what is erased when the history of gender variance is yoked to a lost utopia and start to build a picture of what Byzantine cisness might have looked like.The problems I observe are not unique to Ringrose, nor do they undermine the novel questions posed by her research, but they demand critical analysis.
Ringrose argued that some intersex children in Byzantium were raised as 'natural' eunuchs, able to fit comfortably into a third gender role, rather than being measured against boyhood or girlhood.This contrasts sharply with the present, when non-consensual cosmetic or gender-normalising medical and surgical interventions made on the bodies of intersex children are widely practised, despite campaigning by intersex survivors and human rights bodies. 44Ringrose's assertion of the violence of the cis state in the present is absolutely correct.I use 'the cis state' here with reference to the reasoning behind cosmetic and normalising surgeries and medical interventions made on intersex children; although this is often glossed with medical language, the development of 'normal' behaviour and gendered identity is prioritised. 45Medical interventions on intersex children are not solely intended to normalise the body: the mind is targeted too.Sometimes, development and maintenance of cis gender identity is explicitly raised as a reason for hormone treatment: a 2019 article about the incidence of psychosis and 'sexual identity disorder' in patients with Klinefelter syndrome argued for early treatment with exogenous testosterone 'to prevent the possible occurrence of psychiatric disorders'.One of the disorders listed was 'delusion of sexual identity'. 46Similarly, a 2021 study of children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia assessed the relationship between medical intervention and development of gender dysphoria, gender-related 'identity issues', 'non-heterosexual orientation' and 'masculinised behaviour' -such phrasing implies a value judgement that privileges straight and cisgender outcomes. 47Prior to the creation of the sex/gender distinction by John Money in 1955, transness had been planted with gayness and intersexuality in taxonomies of 'inversion'. 48Presenting the struggles of intersex and trans people as diametrically opposed, rather than as overlapping and in many ways united, does the work of people like Money. 49By collapsing this violent maintenance of cisness in with trans identity and medical transition, Ringrose has equated the oppressor and the oppressed, the social force that demands people not transition or desire transition with transition itself.This is particularly striking in the context of her assertion that castration perhaps made eunuchs hormonally inclined to be administrators. 50Ringrose blames transsexuals and the doctors who have power over them for sex essentialism, while participating in it herself.This is the simplest aspect of the construction of cisness in her work, but it is far from the most destructive, or indeed the most instructive.
The best way to understand the structural problems in Ringrose's analysis of gender that are widely shared within the field is to look for the factual inaccuracies they produce.One of the most significant of these inaccuracies is in the contrast Ringrose draws between the experiences of intersex children in the present and those of intersex children in the Byzantine world.Ringrose's utopia never was.While the meaning of 'natural eunuch' remains ambiguous and it is certainly possible that it described some people who were intersex, it did not preserve them from being compared with a hegemonic standard of maleness.In the mid-tenth-century Life of St. Basil the Younger, for example, Samonas (called 'a eunuch by nature'), was attacked for being 'the continuous recipient of the unholy acts'. 51His position as 'natural eunuch', whatever this meant, did not mean that he was not measured against manhood and found wanting for his participation in receptive anal sex.The existence of 'natural eunuch' as a category also did not protect those children born with intersex variations understood by Byzantine physicians to be operable on, from risky, invasive, surgery.Ringrose herself repeatedly cites the medical manuals of Paul of Aegina, a seventh-century Byzantine surgeon who drew heavily from the Galenic tradition. 52Elsewhere in the text, though, uncited by Ringrose, lie Paul's extensive instructions on the surgical management of intersex conditions in children in order to produce normatively sexed bodies and normatively sexed minds and desires. 53While these are not the words she is using, Ringrose is constructing the present as cis and the past as not.This erases the violence of the past and does the rhetorical work of that violence in the present.
In trying to up the contrast, Ringrose has lost the detail.It would have been possible to argue for 'natural eunuch' as a Byzantine social role that allowed some freedom for intersex people and others whose gendered embodiment and expression fell outside of Byzantine manhood and womanhood, without implying a total contrast between the too-neat present and the fluid and near-utopian past.This is a framing of 'natural eunuch' that might productively blur the boundary between trans history, gay history and intersex history.
The Perfect Servant erases the construction of cisness in the Byzantine world and the failure of cisness in the present because it has to.If we explore why this position is necessary for Ringrose's thesis, we can begin to observe the entanglement between the construction of cisness, whiteness and the masculine objectivity of the scholar.In The Perfect Servant, Ringrose makes the argument that eunuchs constituted a 'third gender' in Byzantium.This framing carries the lingering odour of colonial anthropology. 54Third gender' frameworks in anthropology have been critiqued for their role in constructing an incorrectly gendered racial other, that, in its otherness, naturalises the gendered organisation of white supremacism.55 Although the figure of the third-gendered Byzantine eunuch is presented positively, this process is nonetheless at work in Ringrose's analysis, is both temporally and geographically structured and is particularly notable in the way she writes about the Hijra.Ringrose dismisses the Hijra as 'ancient cult' who somehow 'continue to exist' in modern-day India, reshapes trans subcultures into the medical establishments they resist and writes out the possibility of present-day trans scholarship.In doing so, she museumifies trans life.56 In The Perfect Servant, the gender deviation of the past was real, authentic, good gender deviation, while trans people in the present are uncritically reinforcing the gender binary.57 Anyone who transgresses Ringrose's present-day gender binary is almost definitionally excluded from participation in scholarship.Museumification, as defined by James Clifford, is the process by which displays of identity and culture become objectified as a 'site of subaltern exploitation'.58 Instead of being understood as something ongoing, mutable and alive, a museumified culture is mourned while it is being suppressed, by the very people suppressing it.It is presented as ancient and as belonging to the ancient world -what remains of it is just that, a remnant.In Ringrose's writing, you can see several processes of museumification at play. Th clearest is surely her presentation of the Hijra as part of the category of 'men [sic] who castrate themselves in order to serve in priestly cults'.59 Taxonomised alongside the ancient Greek priestesess of Cybele and the eunuch tomb guards of Mecca and Medina, Ringrose comments on the 'durability' of 'such communities'.60 Rather than a vibrant and complex present-day subculture, the Hijra are imagined to be a remnant of a previous age -this exposes, among other things, the extent to which museumification is a process of colonial consolidation.Ringrose's description of transness in 'our Western culture', though, is also a kind of museumification.Here, it is not a specific culture being museumified, so much as the possibility of one.By aligning trans life with a pathologised notion of transness that centres genital surgery Ringrose conjures a present in which there are two, cis, genders.61 Trans subcultures, the social contexts in which trans genders are least subject to the whims of cis recognition, are hygienically scoured from the moment of writing.Although she does not use this language, Ringrose has written a present in which hegemonic cisness is total, and even transition is a manifestation thereof.Against this dull background, the rich and hopeful genders of Byzantine eunuchs glitter.
Jean Baudrillard said that 'In order for ethnology to live, its object must die'. 62Although resonant, the death is not a metaphor.The anthropological corpus from which Ringrose draws her third-gender framing is colonial necropolitics.The objectification of the gender deviant body, especially when it is not protected by whiteness, is necropolitics.The people Ringrose writes out of the present, in order to gaze lovingly at the past, are easy to write out because they are marked for death.There is no transsexual in the room to object to Ringrose's equivocation between our murderers and our lost, dead, loved ones.Cisness, in Ringrose's thesis of the eunuch as third Byzantine gender, operates to keep gender deviance in the realm of the conceptual, as the subject rather than the object.The absolute distinction between sex and gender, which is projected across the present and past, renders the otherness of the past unable to harm the certainties of the present.We are, Ringrose asserts, too locked in our gender binary to conceive of the third gender that existed in Byzantium.But the 'we' here is an amalgamated mass of doctors, sexologists and transsexuals -those who are pathologised and those who pathologise.Ringrose's 'we' flickers between the gender police and the gender criminals.The sex police and the sex criminals.Behind the impenetrable glass of a thousand years, we marvel at the possibility of a person who is neither man nor woman.
When the seventh-century Byzantine physician Paul of Aegina wrote his instructions on how to castrate a patient, he included a caveat.This was the only such warning in his surgical manual.Not, it must be said, that he did not warn of potential adverse outcomes, of symptoms to watch for, of contraindications, or of the urgency of some procedures.What was distinctive about this warning was that it was against the outcome itself, castration: 'the object of our art being to restore those parts which are in a preternatural state to their natural, the operation of castration professes just the reverse'. 63The 'natural' state Paul spoke of cannot be reduced to how things are -he does not mean what exists, he means what should exist.Elsewhere, he not only gives instructions on how to perform a high-risk surgery to normalise the genitals of an intersex infant, but urges the reading physician to perform it; calling 'the complaint' 'no ordinary deformity'. 64'Natural' to Paul is a world with two discrete sexes.In fact, there are a number of surgeries described in his book that are entirely for the purpose of sexual normalisation -some of which are described with reference to how the appearance of sexual deformity will affect the patient's social standing, but also how it might affect their behaviour.By looking more closely at the cutting edge of pathologisation of sexual difference, we can begin to see how it resembled and differed from our own sexual hegemony -a kind of comparison ruled out of Ringrose's analysis.Paul of Aegina's surgical manuals are we the closest we can get to the scalpel blade of Byzantine cisness and are rich in parallels and distinctions from the cisness we know today.
In total, there are eight operations listed in The Seven Books of Paul of Aegina that are intended to alter the sex of the subject.There is a surgery to normalise what would now be understood as a low-level hypospadia by partially or wholly removing the glans of the penis. 65There is a surgery that is still commonly practiced in a very similar form to remove breasts and resculpt the chest to a normative male appearance. 66There is a surgery that is also commonly practiced in a similar form today, both by paediatric surgeons in countries that have not legislated to ban non-consensual genital normalising surgeries on intersex infants and by surgeons that practice what is euphemistically referred to as 'female circumcision': a partial or total clitoridectomy. 67There are three loosely described operations to 'cure' 'hermaphrodites', who are notably divided into 'male hermaphrodites' and 'female hermaphrodites', according it seems to the surgical possibility of making them resemble endosex men and women -a logic that persists to this day in the surgical sex assignment of intersex children. 68And finally, there is castration -not always performed via orchidectomy, but sometimes via compression. 69Both methods are detailed, and despite Paul's vociferous objection to castration, he notes that orchidectomy is preferable to compression, because eunuchs castrated via compression sometimes 'have venereal desires, a certain part, as it would appear, of the testicles having escaped the compression'. 70A man, to Paul, is preferable to a eunuch, but if a patient must grow up to be a eunuch, it is far preferable that they do not bring venereal desires with them. 71he level of risk deemed acceptable in order to produce sexual normality is stunning.Although surgical techniques in Byzantium were well developed and involved anaesthesia and pain-relief, several of the genital surgeries described are noted as being risky.When presented with a patient with an imperforate glans, Paul actively encourages a surgeon to excise the most sensitive tissue (the glans) in order to produce a shape and appearance that is closer to normality.This is not a simple operation.'Since', Paul warns, 'a haemorrhage frequently takes place, we may stop it by styptics if possible, but if not, we must have recourse to burning with slender cauteries'. 72uite unlike the theoretical frameworks used by Betancourt and Ringrose, Paul of Aegina rooted gender inevitably in the body. 73A penile hypospadia might prevent you from procreating (leaving you among the spadones), but it also prevented you from urinating while standing, which is given as a reason for treatment, suggesting that it constitutes its own kind of gendered risk. 74The gendered effects of bodily difference did not come only from the interpretation of such bodily difference.Clitoridectomy is not only practiced to correct for the 'shameful deformity' presented by an above-average clitoris, but to correct for the sex-slippage that such a body-map might produce, in behaviour and desire.'Some women have had erections of this part like men, and also venereal desires of a like kind'. 75Similarly (although more ambiguously), gynecomastia is presented as a risk to the gender of the patient, as well as a risk to their status and position.A man with breasts bears the 'reproach' of effeminacy, Paul warns, and therefore it is 'proper' to operate.The premise that having breasts makes one effeminate, or is itself effeminacy, is presented neutrally; Paul does not problematise that inference.It is unclear from his writing whether his medical opinion is that having breasts makes one simply vulnerable to being feminised or whether it is inherently effeminising.One could project a quite complex model of the role of the body in gender-position and identity formation onto the intention of the author of this manual.
Gill-Peterson argued that cisness is an artefact of the present day and that we can trace the contours of its development back through legal and medical history to the pathologising of gender deviance. 76t is certainly true that many of the artefacts of cisness as we know it are not present in Paul's writing.He does not work to preserve the rhetorical inevitability of sex; what he calls gynecomastia is corrected to 'pseudogynecomastia' in present-day medical analyses of his work. 77Paul responds to the prospect of a boy growing breasts with careful instructions as to how to remove the tissue and masculinise his chest.These instructions prioritise the removal of tissue; where for some it is enough to make a 'lunated (shaped like a crescent) incision below the breast', in order to achieve a truly normal chest without any suggestion of effeminacy some require 'two lunated incisions, meeting together at the extremities, so that the smaller may be comprehended by the larger'. 78If, after such a surgery, there is still some appearance of breast tissue, a revision must be performed: 'if, through mistake, we should cut away too little, we must again remove what is redundant, and apply the remedies for fresh wounds'. 79Two things stand out from this.First, that Paul's relationship to cisness is as something that is maintained by the proper maintenance of the body, rather than within the mind.It is fine to describe a man as having breasts, as long as we remove them.This stands in contrast to present-day writing about gynaecomastia, and secondary literature commenting on Paul's manuals, which typically emphasise the extent to which the breasts that are being remarked upon are not breasts -lacking some essential quality of breasts, or if they are to be understood as breasts, as not emasculating. 80To be maintained fully, cisness in the present day demands the impossibility of transition; the drive towards normatively sexed bodies and behaviour in Paul's work does not suggest this in the same way.This is not limited to the work of Paul of Aegina or the earlier Byzantine period.Although much had changed by the twelfth century, there is a similar acceptance of the possibility of someone changing sex or becoming ambiguously sexed and a similar practical demand to guard against this possibility.Sometime around 1140, for example, Nikephoros Basilakes composed a rhetorical exercise exploring the validity of the story of Atalanta, which conceded that via upbringing and bodily and social practices Atalanta might have 'transposed her gender'. 81The second thing that is notable is that such was the extent of Paul's commitment to maintaining the appropriately sexed body, such was the threat to the gender of the patient, that he would recommend a surgery with a long and difficult recovery.Paul of Aegina was constructing cisness just as urgently, and just as violently, as it is constructed in the present.When we let go of Ringrose's lost utopia and its contrasting perfectly binary present day, when we read for the construction of cisness, the gender regulatory forces of the past are brought closer to the present.What exactly was considered a threat to cisness was quite different, but the scalpel-blade that constructed it remains terrifyingly similar.In the contrast between Paul's forceful enjoinder against the practice of castration, and the detailed instructions he provided on performing orchidectomy, we can see the gap between a cisness that attempts totality and a cisness that is total, between what is said to be natural and what is known to exist.The hand that wielded such a scalpel was not a sure one.

TRANSMISOGYNY, ANTI-EFFEMINACY AND THE CISNESS OF EUNUCHS
Cisness is not symmetrical.In the present, and in the Byzantine past, manhood demands the will to manhood.The logics of patriarchy are not beautiful, not even, and not internally consistent, but they are recursive; they repeat themselves over and over at different scales, a doomed fractal.Wishing for manhood can be, under certain circumstances, an accepted or even demanded part of twentyfirst-century cis womanhood; the inverse is not true.Nowhere is this asymmetry clearer than in the cisness of Byzantine eunuchs.In a review of Charis Messis' Les eunuques à Byzance, entre réalité et imaginaire, Tougher made his position on the gender position of Byzantine eunuchs unambiguous.Eunuchs were men, and they were not very good at it. 82Tougher is not without a point.Some eunuchs certainly were men.Some, of course, were not. 83That eunuchs could be men tells us little about the bounds of Byzantine cisness.That Tougher wants to read that possibility as the authoritative gender position of eunuchs in the Byzantine world tells us something more about cisness in the field of Byzantine history.To ask 'what gender were Byzantine eunuchs' is to treat sex assignment as destiny.Instead, I would like to ask: could Byzantine eunuchs be cis?What did the forces that produced Byzantine cisness demand of eunuchs?In approaching these questions, I argue that although Tougher's work allows for a multiplicity of gender identities to be held by eunuchs, it is nonetheless invested in the cisness of eunuchs.That investment has something to tell us about the shape of cisness in Byzantine studies.
There has been considerable debate over the gender positions held by Byzantine eunuchs; were they men, a third gender or in some way non-binary? 84It is notable that this debate has not engaged seriously with the possibility of some eunuchs being women. 85Ringrose, for example, dismissed Aristotle's assertion that eunuchs are changed 'into a female state'.Aristotle, Ringrose supposed, simply lacked the requisite vocabulary to express his agreement with her. 86The shape of this lacuna is both bio-essentialist and transmisogynist.Gender history does not imagine transition to be meaningfully possible, but it especially rules out the possibility of transfeminine transition. 87One thing is clear: if Byzantine eunuchs were women, they were not performing cisness as they were asked to.Byzantine eunuchs were measured against manhood and found wanting, even when they were by all accounts engaged in it.
What would a eunuch have to do to be cis?He might look to the much-vaunted example set by the sixth-century general to Justinian I, Narses. 88Narses came to Byzantium as a Persarmenian slave and transitioned from an administrative role to a military one via his skilful quashing of a rebellion from his position as Justinian's sacellarius. 89Narses' masculinity was celebrated: sixth-century Byzantine historian Agathias relished the contrast between Narses' origins and his military prowess. 90The ultimate culmination of this is in Agathias' account of a battle between the Frankish and Roman armies.He describes a pair of Alamanni soldiers congratulating themselves on the victory they assumed would be guaranteed to them while 'a eunuch of the bedchamber' commanded the Byzantine army, only for their force to be brutally crushed. 91hile it seems clear that Narses lived, at least for the latter portion of his life, as a man, it is less clear that he could be called a cis man. 92Although Narses was praised for his exceptional masculinity by both Procopius and Agathias, who respectively suggested that he would make his mark through 'deeds of wisdom and manliness' [ἔργα ξυνέσεώς τε καὶ ἀνδρείας]', and lauded him as 'manly and heroic [τὸ δὲ ἀνδρεῑον καὶ μεγαλουργόν]', his eunuch status could always be invoked if he fell out of favour. 93hen, for example, Procopius described an argument between generals Belisarius and Narses, he described Belisarius as a 'man general [στρτηγῶ ἀνδρί]'. 94While all access to manhood is contingent on behaviour and the performance of masculinity, Narses' was more than most.Agathias' account might appear to be affirming the manhood of Narses, but in doing so it reifies the precarity of his access to manhood.Look, Agathias says, even our eunuchs are stronger than you.It is Roman manhood, more than eunuch manhood, that is being affirmed in this anecdote.Narses' biography is resonantly transmasculine.He benefited, in a limited way, from the unimpeachability of his desire for masculinity.He is treated by both Procopius and Agathias as an exceptional eunuch, whose courage and energy belie his sex. 95His masculinity, which cannot be simply attributed to his body, is understood to come from his soul. 96arses was not the only eunuch to find his fortune in the armies of Byzantium.Even in his cohort, there were two other eunuch commanders, Solomon and Scholasticus, and the number of eunuch commanders increased in subsequent centuries. 97Like men, and women, eunuchs were measured against a standard of manhood. 98Warren Treadgold has argued that the occasional presence of eunuchs in military roles is evidence that they were, simply, men. 99Although Tougher acknowledges a plurality of gendered positions and identities occupied by eunuchs, he ultimately makes a similar argument.Eunuchs were men, and 'other Byzantine men sorely require the attention that has been lavished on eunuchs'. 100It is here that we find Tougher's contribution to the construction of cisness in Byzantium.While Tougher writes sensitively about Byzantine anti-effeminacy, his interest is always centred on the eunuch he can redeem to manhood.In Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, Tougher argues for a reading of eunuchs as 'permanent youths', rather than 'feminised males'. 101Eunuchs, Tougher observes, regularly filled positions of significance in the church, the government and the military -this is surely evidence that eunuchs were men, albeit men disabled by castration. 102It is almost hard to express how absurd a dichotomy of 'permanent youth' and 'feminisation' reads in the context of Byzantine sexual cultures. 103When male youth is a sexually feminised state, understood as a period of unique beauty, and made acceptable only with the promise that it is a developmentally normal one that gives way to manhood, 'permanent youth' is inextricable from feminisation.To be permanently youthful is to be without the modest covering of ephemerality.
Narses is exceptional; by definition, Narses was an exception.When Tougher and Treadgold argue that eunuchs could be like Narses, and therefore were men, what they mean is: eunuchs could sometimes be men and that is the potential they consider important.This centring of the possibility of manhood is anti-effeminate, transmisogynistic and a radically incomplete assessment of eunuch life.
Tougher has been more open to drawing a continuity between eunuchs and trans people than most historians in the field.In commenting on the existence of eunuchs in the present day, Tougher suggests that for some, 'it can be a step on the path of transsexualism'. 104This does not translate into respect or affection.Where Ringrose refuses a continuity between Byzantine effeminacy and present-day transness, Tougher allows a continuity but does nothing to challenge the value system that despises effeminacy.When describing the discovery of a burial that may have held a gallus, a devotee of Cybele, Tougher adopts a panel-comedy affect; referring to her as 'the supposed Yorkshire transvestite'. 105ike the braying comedians he imitates, Tougher keeps his subjects at arm's length. 106t is the impulse to defend against the charge of effeminacy that hampers Tougher's analysis.In 'Bearding Byzantium: Masculinity, Eunuchs and the Byzantine Life Course', Tougher argues that the increased social acceptability of castration in Byzantium over the sixth century led non-eunuch Byzantine men to want to wear beards in order to assert their masculinity and distinguish themselves from eunuchs. 107This may well be true.If so, though, it raises the far more interesting prospect of men shaving their beards in order to resemble eunuchs -one which is so unthinkable to Tougher as to not merit investigation.This is especially striking in the context of a chapter chock-full of condemnations of male hair removal as effeminacy.Tougher writes about anti-effeminacy without either naming or challenging it; in this sense, his writing is anti-effeminate: it reproduces the sexual hierarchy that cisness demands.Unlike some aspects of twenty-first-century cisness in Byzantine studies, anti-effeminacy is absolutely shared by Byzantine texts.It is perhaps the most important component of cisness in Byzantium and demands attention.It is the burning sun of Byzantine patriarchy, and we must stare at it directly.In order to complete our sketch of Byzantine cisness, therefore, I now turn to the early Christian theologian Tougher cites so extensively: Clement of Alexandria.
Transmisogyny and anti-effeminacy were and are integral to the structure of patriarchy and therefore to cisness (or vice-versa). 108In 'Monster Culture (Seven Theses)', Jeffrey Jerome Cohen proposed a methodology for reading cultures: 'from the monsters they engender'. 109In concluding this sketch of Byzantine cisness, I would like to attempt to apply this method.To monster a group or an individual is a violent act, and through examining the way transfemininity was monstered in Byzantium, we can begin to understand the shape of the violent regulation of gendered possibilities that constituted Byzantine cisness.
In 'Bearding Byzantium', Tougher cites the Paidogogos of second-century Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, to provide background to the powerful connection drawn between beards and masculinity in the Byzantine world -Clement despised the removal of body and facial hair, which he saw as an effeminate act. 110In charting the longevity of the cultural impact of Clement's ideas about gender and body and facial hair, Tougher remarked also on the last non-Christian emperor of Byzantium, Julian (361-3).Responding to his (mostly Christian) critics mockery of his beard, Julian invoked the spectre of beardless effeminacy in very similar language to that used by Clement.
But you, since even in your old age you emulate your own sons and daughters by your soft and delicate way of living, or perhaps by your effeminate dispositions, carefully make your chins smooth, and your manhood you barely reveal and slightly indicate by your foreheads, not by your jaws as I do. 111e primary focus of this excerpt is not precisely the virtue of beards; rather it is the effeminacy of deliberate beardlessness.This recurs once again in the Encomium of Baldness, a playful rhetorical work by Synesius of Cyrene written around 400 AD. 112Although Synesius argues against the masculine virtue of facial hair, he does so via appeal to the same set of negative images used by Emperor Julian and by Clement of Alexandria; the adulterer, the effeminate, the galli (unambiguously transfeminine priestesses of Cybele), all of whom were accused of taking too much care over their hair. 113He, like Clement, is arguing for the masculinity (and therefore superiority) of his personal appearance and grooming regime; the fact that he comes to the opposite conclusion is immaterial.In reading Synesius of Cyrene, Tougher typically focuses on the figure of the masculine bald man Synesius attempts to invoke; this is one half of Synesius' appeal to cisness.Tougher notes that Synesius argues for the military helmet as a symbol of baldness and credits the shaving of soldiers' faces with one of Alexander the Great's military victories. 114It is the other part, though, that captures my interest.The monstrous figure that denotes the boundary of cisness, defining it from the outside.
Synesius did not simply compare the image of the elegantly coiffed effeminate with the shiny dome of the soldier's helmet; he went one step further, proclaiming that pretty hair was the give-away for hidden effeminacy.He rails against 'effeminate wretches' who 'make a cult of their hair', who he suggests engage in sex work not out of economic necessity but as an act of sex and gender exhibitionism, to 'display fully the effeminacy of their character'. 115Then, he goes on to say: And whoever is secretly perverted, even if he should swear the contrary in the marketplace, and should present no other proof of being an acolyte of Cotys save only in a great care of his hair, anointing it and arranging it in ringlets, he might well be denounced to all as one who has celebrated orgies to the Chian goddess and the Ithyphalli. 116e implication is clear: long, well kempt, perfumed and curled hair is not just hair, it is a signifier, one that signals total abnegation of manhood, and therefore of cisness.This demonstrates one of the mechanisms by which cisness was maintained and enforced in the Byzantine world.Relatively minor embodied gender transgressions, like too-long or too-pretty hair, could be linked to transfemininity and to sexual receptivity, the two farthest points from patriarchal manhood.That is not to say that this prevented people from committing such gender transgressions; rather that it made them risky, a weapon that could be used against you by anyone who wanted to do you harm. 117The other thing demonstrated by Synesius' invective is the relationship between effeminacy, unmasculine vanity and presumed sexual receptivity.It would be tempting, based on the relationship Synesius draws between long beautiful hair and receptive anal sex, to suggest that the animating force of this antipathy is, if not homophobia, a narrower pre-modern equivalent. 118There is, however, a fantastically complicating detail in Synesius' remark on the reasons such 'effeminates' engage in sex work: being sexually available is presented as an instrumental, rather than terminal value.In Synesius' imagination, sex work is the means, but social recognition of the feminine gender of the sex worker is the end: to 'display fully the effeminacy of their character'. 119The monster Synesius invokes to shore-up his own gender position, to guard his own cisness and his access to hegemonic masculinity, is an unambiguously transmisogynist fantasy.It is here that Byzantine cisness most sharply converges with twenty-first-century cisness.
Clement of Alexandria's writing demonstrates, perhaps more than anything else, the yet-vital theological bases of patriarchal gender.Men and women are different in body, and therefore in mind, Clement asserted, but this did not extend to the soul: But if there were no difference between man and woman, both would do and suffer the same things.As then there is sameness, as far as respects the soul, she will attain to the same virtue; but as there is difference as respects the peculiar construction of the body, she is destined for child-bearing and housekeeping. 120 far so progressive.It is from this starting point that Clement expresses his masculinist hierarchy of gender: 'women are therefore to philosophize equally with men, though the males are preferable at everything, unless they have become effeminate'. 121For, if the inferiority of women is a bodily condition, it does not reflect on an innate defect of the soul.Effeminacy, though, suggests a more profound deviation from the natural order.Put simply, men and women have genderless and perfect souls, that is to say male souls, but effeminates have effeminate souls.This is not an isolated comment in Clement's writing.Clement of Alexandria feared and hated effeminacy, transfemininity, any femininity, any deviation from manhood, that could not be excused by the body.In the midst of one of several extended condemnations of effeminacy and body hair removal, Clement remarks of the 'effeminates': 'and, in truth, unless you saw them naked, you would suppose them to be women'. 122his monstering of trans womanhood, transfemininity and effeminacy is shockingly current.The slippage between 'adulterer' and 'effeminate' in the writing of both Synesius of Cyrene and Clement of Alexandria is redolent of the sexualised moral panic that constructs bi and gay trans women as the monsters of present-day gender.Clement of Alexandria warned that, although resembling women, cinaedi were 'men enough for lewd offices, ministers of adultery, giggling and whispering'. 123He even found time to warn against a subculture of women who 'delight in intercourse with the effeminate', who in characterisation will be instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with transfag cultures. 124nti-effeminate tracts such as these demonstrate not only the entanglement of cisness, transmisogyny and anti-effeminacy, but also the failure of such rhetoric to completely prevent transfeminine life.The risk that Clement's effeminates present is not just to their own genders, but to the collective genders and sexualities of everyone around them.They were, they are, a threat to cisness itself.

CONCLUSION
Gill-Peterson was not wrong to locate the construction of cisness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.The demand for an aligned body and mind, the threat posed by the possibility of transition and the tidal inevitability of trans liberation have all produced a distinctly modern cisness.This cisness is built around the gender clinic, the sexologist and the colonial anthropologist.It is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, so total as to feel like nothing.Byzantine studies, like almost all fields, participates in the maintenance of this hegemonic force with minimal critique.Even the progressive and genuinely affectionate work is buffeted by it.
It is not, however, the only cisness to have ever existed.Byzantium had its own patriarchy, and therefore, inevitably, its own cisness.In some ways it differed radically from the cisness we know.In the present day, belief in the possibility of changing sex is presented as a threat to cisness, whereas in the Byzantine world it was the risk of changing sex (either via castration, illness or personal grooming) that was understood as the threat.
In other ways, Byzantine cisness was strikingly like the cisness of the present.It was deeply transmisogynistic and anti-effeminate, profoundly asymmetrical and frequently invoked in political invective and rhetoric.It was policed via suspicion and rumour, non-consensual surgical intervention and legislation.It was empowered by the monopoly on legitimate violence held by state power.It was racialised.It was violent.In the twelfth-century chronicle of Kedrenos, following a political betrayal by a powerful eunuch, is recorded a devastating aphorism: 'If you have a eunuch, kill him; if you haven't, buy one and kill him'. 125And, like the cisness of the present, it failed.No amount of spilled blood could prevent the ruptures at its edges.
Cisness tells us that it was a neutral and omnipresent element of the past, everywhere and nowhere, unnecessary in its ubiquity.The landscape on which we build.I have looked for it, and I have found it volcanic and awake.I am not disheartened -I believed I would.The lie that says that the past is near-empty of trans life because transition had not been invented yet is the same lie that says trans children do not come out until adulthood because it had not occurred to them to do so.Instead, I am encouraged.Centuries, even millennia of the violent prevention of transition have not been able to stop me from being here to write this article.I hope the method I have attempted here can be developed into something more robust, and the field of cis studies can grow and be refined.Clement of Alexandria was right: we are a threat.