Love is Love and Trans People Have Always Existed
Friday, February 14, 2025 - 08:00
I don't usually get quite so political in my blog titles, but the rage has to spill out somewhere.
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Full citation:
Burshatin, Israel. 1999. “Written on the Body: Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteenth-Century Spain” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 9780822323495
Burshatin - Written on the Body
Because of the ways that I define the scope of the Project, I end up including a lot of transmasculine content. I often say that there is no lesbian history without transmasculine history, regardless of how the historic individuals understood their own identities, because of they ways that society assigned masculinity to the desire for women or to any sort of transgressive behavior by women. But there are some individuals who--while shedding fascinating light on issues relevant to lesbian history--very clearly understood themselves to be men and demanded that society treat them as such. Eleno de Céspedes is one of those people and regardless of the language that I and other researchers sometimes use in trying to communicate the facts of his life, I want to recognize that.
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As might be expected given the author and subject, this article covers much the same ground as Burshatin 1996. The current article focuses on Céspedes’ position as a challenge to various sovcio-political doundaries: gendr, race, national, and sexual.
The official structures that documented and prosecuted Céspedes’ case both framed the narrative in specific ways and documented the subject’s own framing and identity claims that constructed a very different story.
Born female to an enslaved Black mother, Céspedes achieved freedom, became male, served in the army, and trained as a surgeon. After marrying a woman, Céspedes was recognized by a former army comrade who knew of the gender crossing, and was then charged with sodomy—specifically, engaging in penetrative sex using an instrument. In contrast to that secular offense, church authorities were concerned with the act of marriage. This latter became the focus of the trial. In the end, the conviction was for bigamy, because Céspedes could not offer proof that the husband they had married (prior to gender-crossing) had died before their subsequent marriage to a woman.
[Note: This is reminiscent of a similar instance in England, where the conviction for bigamy can be interpreted at some level as recognition of the “validity” of marriage between two assigned-female people.]
There were a number of complicating factors. Céspedes offered a defense of being a “hermaphrodite” who had undergone a physiological sex change. But medical examination contradicted this claim. There were side charges that the appearance of masculinity was due to magic. Céspedes’ sentence was harsh in absolute terms (two sessions of public whipping, a public confession, then public service as a surgeon), but this was aligned with typical punishments for bigamy at the time (and to some extent, more lenient than usual).
The article traces several parallel processes of “self-fashioning,” not only of gender but of occupation and economic status. Racial self-fashioning was beyond Céspedes’ ability, but they moved across a permeable racial boundary by manipulating other aspects of identity.
The article goes into much more detail regarding the racial/religious politics of 16th century Spain and how Céspedes maneuvered through them.
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