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The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance
The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200–1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.
The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers—theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists—who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.
In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human.
The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers—theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists—who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.
In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2021
45 people are currently reading
1774 people want to read
About the author
Leah DeVun
3 books9 followersLeah DeVun is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. DeVun is the author of Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (Columbia, 2009) and was coeditor of Trans*historicities (2018), an issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 1, 2021
Very interesting. I feel like the tag line is slightly misleading because this does focus less on nonbinary gender and more on nonbinary sex/intersex people. I'm not deducting points for my expectation v. reality problem. It was, as I said, incredibly interesting to see how people of mixed or ambiguous sex were perceived during the middle ages and how that fit into the greater ideas of gender, religion, xenophobia, science, and alchemy. At times, I found the writing redundant or annoying when the author kept referencing things by chapter, but I understand that DeVun wrote the book in months while I devoured it in two days, which I think explains this constant hearkening back.
Either way, I always enjoy learning something new and seeing how the past connects to the present while upsetting the gender binary at the same time.
Either way, I always enjoy learning something new and seeing how the past connects to the present while upsetting the gender binary at the same time.
December 13, 2022
I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to read and understand more about the history of gender and gender non-conformity. DeVun analyzes Medieval texts from England and parts of the Islamic world (particularly medical texts published within the Abbasid Caliphate) and considers how people conceptualized gender, gender roles, and what was non-conformity. As such, she reveals how unnatural the male-female binary is and how there always existed grey areas and debate around the binary. My favourite chapter was the third one which looks at Bestiaries published in England to show how ambiguous gender/sex related to the "othering" of Jewish people. Such an example highlights how gender/sex (the perception of it), was always politicized.
November 8, 2025
This is a stunningly well-written and accessible history of intersex/nonbinary sexed bodies in the worlds of theology, philosophy, religion (and many more) in Medieval Europe. I'm glad this made its way onto my Trans Theory exam list!
June 16, 2025
For the most part this was excellent, but I think that it’s quite irresponsible for a piece of scholarship on nonbinary bodies that deals with the destabilisation of gender categories as a mode of demonisation, with a whole chapter on medieval antisemitism and discourses of pollution to completely fail to mention the myth of Jewish male menstruation. I also think the religio-alchemical chapter could have dug more into hagiographical texts.
May 21, 2025
Possibly the best trans history book I've read.
This opened so many doors into spaces I never thought I would enter, from Jewish theologians in the 4th century debating if humans were divine androgynes before the fall, to Christian alchemists in the 14th pining for the second coming of a hermaphroditic Jesus who would return us all to our angelic nonbinary forms. Like, this was fucking wild, guys. I cannot stress how much I did not care, or think to care, for medieval history, philosophy, and theology, until I read this book. Everything I'd learnt about modernity told me that Christianity had been a tool of brutal colonisation, of forced religious and cultural conversion, and of genocide and the destruction of indigenous ways of life.
But there are no simple narratives in history. There was not a perfect indigenous world beforehand, that accepted and made space for all genders. There was not a total destruction of this world, and all its genders with it. Rousseau's noble savage is as problematic as Hobbes's war of all against all. History is a struggle of opposing and complementary forces. Culture weaves and loops between tradition and novelty. And queer subjects abound, no matter how rigidly gender is enforced by legislative, religious, and moral violence. Kit Heyam's Before We Were Trans goes into the myriad ways gender has been historically expressed, from the femboy actress/content creators of Edo Japan, simped on by samurai and prostitutes alike, to the crossdressing camgirl/prostitutes of early modern London, who wore men's clothing (😱) to get men off. Leah's book does something similar, but solely from within Abrahamic cultures.
We often talk about the gender binary as a recent phenomenon. The Shape of Sex complicates this narrative by showing how both binary and nonbinary gender systems have existed for centuries. Neither are modern phenomena, and the Foucauldian conceit that science as a disciplinary tool only recently turned to gender and sexuality, is plainly wrong. Surgeons, as a profession, emerged in the Middle Ages. Those in Latin Europe were inspired by Islamic naturalists. Both wrote commentaries on intersex people. While some merely categorised them into different sexual morphologies without judgement, others intervened, maiming intersex people in the name of God. Sodomy, understood as an inversion of gender roles, was seen as unnatural, sinful, and corrupt. This logic placed intersex people under scrutiny, for if their genitals permitted acts of penetration (masculine) and being penetrated (feminine), they would pervert the natural order. Nature, then, had to be enforced. Nonbinary bodies were examined, their sex determined, and their genitals corrected, so that the strict binary of active and passive beings (as theorised by Aristotle) would remain safe. Rather than reality determining ontology, ontology determined reality. Ontology was weaponised to enforce morality—as it is still today.
This is just one chapter out of six. Another touches on monstrosity. How hermaphroditism, in maps and bestiaries, was assigned to monstrous races. The hermaphrodite was an Other: excessive, self-propagating, plant-like, confusing, but—most importantly—raced. It was not-European, a vile stain on God's proper order of things, and a warning of moral decay. You, good peasant, don't want to be like the hideous FURRY hyena (owo)! Through the monstrous hermaphrodite, we see nation-building: the construction of morally good subjects disciplined into a gender binary. Because, at a pragmatic level, the clerics, lords, and monarchs needed peasants to breed. To fuck for procreation, rather than pleasure, so that the workforce would be replenished. The gender binary was a tool of class warfare.
Yet, there are more utopian depictions of the nonbinary body in medieval literature. As mentioned earlier, both Jewish and Christian scholars, in radically different time periods, understood the unsexed androgyne and the intersexed hermaphrodite as divine depictions of grace, perfection, and beauty. If God made Adam in his image, and drew Eve from Adam's body, then the feminine must be immanent in Adam's form. He must already contain she. And though this may reek of the conceit that man is the creator of all, Leah argues that such arguments destabilise God himself as a he himself—as a purely masculine being. Similarly, Christian alchemists, searching for immortality, saw the second coming of Christ as a return to the paradise of Eden, where we would be eternal once more. Jesus, who was man and God, was understood as earthly and angelic, feminine and masculine, womb and phallus—a divine hermaphrodite. It was believed that Christ, the philosopher's stone par excellence, would resolve the irreconcilable gender binaries of material life in a heavenly union, where we would no longer suffer hunger, desire, and all the avarices that plague the mortal realm. Such a transmutation would, spiritually, turn us into gold.
That's metal as fuck, right? Did you ever think medieval theologians could be this fucking cool?
Of course, such speculations were predominantly scholastic. While alchemists frothed over boypussy Jesus, real intersex people were mutilated by surgeons. Such utopian philosophies don't negate the concrete harms medieval peasants faced in the name of God. However, they show us that Christianity, and the Abrahamic faiths more broadly, are so much more complex than religious fundamentalists would have us believe. Gender has always been contested, and, with it, the borders of who counts as human and who doesn't. Like Mike Flannagan's Midnight Mass, The Shape of Sex uses Christianity to refute itself, to deepen itself, and to show paths out of reactionary hatred, control, and destruction. History is messy. Christianity is messy. And while the harms it has committed should be condemned, its utopian strivings remain wonderous and inspiring. Like Midnight Mass, seemingly unforgivable horrors can generate compassion and communion, even in the ruins of the world, and of the self. From the demiurge of colonial Christianity—revelation.
This opened so many doors into spaces I never thought I would enter, from Jewish theologians in the 4th century debating if humans were divine androgynes before the fall, to Christian alchemists in the 14th pining for the second coming of a hermaphroditic Jesus who would return us all to our angelic nonbinary forms. Like, this was fucking wild, guys. I cannot stress how much I did not care, or think to care, for medieval history, philosophy, and theology, until I read this book. Everything I'd learnt about modernity told me that Christianity had been a tool of brutal colonisation, of forced religious and cultural conversion, and of genocide and the destruction of indigenous ways of life.
But there are no simple narratives in history. There was not a perfect indigenous world beforehand, that accepted and made space for all genders. There was not a total destruction of this world, and all its genders with it. Rousseau's noble savage is as problematic as Hobbes's war of all against all. History is a struggle of opposing and complementary forces. Culture weaves and loops between tradition and novelty. And queer subjects abound, no matter how rigidly gender is enforced by legislative, religious, and moral violence. Kit Heyam's Before We Were Trans goes into the myriad ways gender has been historically expressed, from the femboy actress/content creators of Edo Japan, simped on by samurai and prostitutes alike, to the crossdressing camgirl/prostitutes of early modern London, who wore men's clothing (😱) to get men off. Leah's book does something similar, but solely from within Abrahamic cultures.
We often talk about the gender binary as a recent phenomenon. The Shape of Sex complicates this narrative by showing how both binary and nonbinary gender systems have existed for centuries. Neither are modern phenomena, and the Foucauldian conceit that science as a disciplinary tool only recently turned to gender and sexuality, is plainly wrong. Surgeons, as a profession, emerged in the Middle Ages. Those in Latin Europe were inspired by Islamic naturalists. Both wrote commentaries on intersex people. While some merely categorised them into different sexual morphologies without judgement, others intervened, maiming intersex people in the name of God. Sodomy, understood as an inversion of gender roles, was seen as unnatural, sinful, and corrupt. This logic placed intersex people under scrutiny, for if their genitals permitted acts of penetration (masculine) and being penetrated (feminine), they would pervert the natural order. Nature, then, had to be enforced. Nonbinary bodies were examined, their sex determined, and their genitals corrected, so that the strict binary of active and passive beings (as theorised by Aristotle) would remain safe. Rather than reality determining ontology, ontology determined reality. Ontology was weaponised to enforce morality—as it is still today.
This is just one chapter out of six. Another touches on monstrosity. How hermaphroditism, in maps and bestiaries, was assigned to monstrous races. The hermaphrodite was an Other: excessive, self-propagating, plant-like, confusing, but—most importantly—raced. It was not-European, a vile stain on God's proper order of things, and a warning of moral decay. You, good peasant, don't want to be like the hideous FURRY hyena (owo)! Through the monstrous hermaphrodite, we see nation-building: the construction of morally good subjects disciplined into a gender binary. Because, at a pragmatic level, the clerics, lords, and monarchs needed peasants to breed. To fuck for procreation, rather than pleasure, so that the workforce would be replenished. The gender binary was a tool of class warfare.
Yet, there are more utopian depictions of the nonbinary body in medieval literature. As mentioned earlier, both Jewish and Christian scholars, in radically different time periods, understood the unsexed androgyne and the intersexed hermaphrodite as divine depictions of grace, perfection, and beauty. If God made Adam in his image, and drew Eve from Adam's body, then the feminine must be immanent in Adam's form. He must already contain she. And though this may reek of the conceit that man is the creator of all, Leah argues that such arguments destabilise God himself as a he himself—as a purely masculine being. Similarly, Christian alchemists, searching for immortality, saw the second coming of Christ as a return to the paradise of Eden, where we would be eternal once more. Jesus, who was man and God, was understood as earthly and angelic, feminine and masculine, womb and phallus—a divine hermaphrodite. It was believed that Christ, the philosopher's stone par excellence, would resolve the irreconcilable gender binaries of material life in a heavenly union, where we would no longer suffer hunger, desire, and all the avarices that plague the mortal realm. Such a transmutation would, spiritually, turn us into gold.
That's metal as fuck, right? Did you ever think medieval theologians could be this fucking cool?
Of course, such speculations were predominantly scholastic. While alchemists frothed over boypussy Jesus, real intersex people were mutilated by surgeons. Such utopian philosophies don't negate the concrete harms medieval peasants faced in the name of God. However, they show us that Christianity, and the Abrahamic faiths more broadly, are so much more complex than religious fundamentalists would have us believe. Gender has always been contested, and, with it, the borders of who counts as human and who doesn't. Like Mike Flannagan's Midnight Mass, The Shape of Sex uses Christianity to refute itself, to deepen itself, and to show paths out of reactionary hatred, control, and destruction. History is messy. Christianity is messy. And while the harms it has committed should be condemned, its utopian strivings remain wonderous and inspiring. Like Midnight Mass, seemingly unforgivable horrors can generate compassion and communion, even in the ruins of the world, and of the self. From the demiurge of colonial Christianity—revelation.
July 30, 2021
Illuminating, brutal and diverse. I skipped the chapter about surgery bc it triggered me.
Read
August 6, 2021306.7685 D514 2021
January 5, 2024
To have a trans history is everything.
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.
June 15, 2025
This book has done what few nonfiction books have been able to achieve, and that is a (mostly) chronological timeline but with categorical chapters. I find with nonfiction that writers either stick to one or the other, but it was satisfying to see both employed here.
I got everything I expected from this book. I really liked the way the author took the reader on a journey: how discussions of nonbinary gender started; why it’s so entwined with Adam and Eve; why there was a demonization of nonbinary and intersex people, and how it’s related to Christians demonizing Jewish and Muslim people; and how it informed and led to gender-related surgeries, as well as later medieval debates about Jesus potentially being nonbinary. (To clarify: the book was linear and the author was very clear on how the pieces all fit together throughout the book.)
The author does a really good job at leading the reader through art and historical texts while also reminding the reader that while there is certainly a pattern in how we’ve viewed gender in the past 1500 years or so, there are still enough differences that we should be careful making a 1:1 comparison of the past and present. She also reminds us that our present-day outlooks on gender are different enough that it doesn’t always work trying to assign modern vernacular to past phenomena.
Although I enjoyed this book a lot, I do think that sometimes the writing was unnecessarily flowery and difficult (aka the author could’ve used more accessible words to describe some of what she was talking about), which is why it is 4 stars rather than 5.
Definitely recommend though if you don’t mind strongly academic language and enjoy learning about history, gender theory, the Bible, and/or art.
I got everything I expected from this book. I really liked the way the author took the reader on a journey: how discussions of nonbinary gender started; why it’s so entwined with Adam and Eve; why there was a demonization of nonbinary and intersex people, and how it’s related to Christians demonizing Jewish and Muslim people; and how it informed and led to gender-related surgeries, as well as later medieval debates about Jesus potentially being nonbinary. (To clarify: the book was linear and the author was very clear on how the pieces all fit together throughout the book.)
The author does a really good job at leading the reader through art and historical texts while also reminding the reader that while there is certainly a pattern in how we’ve viewed gender in the past 1500 years or so, there are still enough differences that we should be careful making a 1:1 comparison of the past and present. She also reminds us that our present-day outlooks on gender are different enough that it doesn’t always work trying to assign modern vernacular to past phenomena.
Although I enjoyed this book a lot, I do think that sometimes the writing was unnecessarily flowery and difficult (aka the author could’ve used more accessible words to describe some of what she was talking about), which is why it is 4 stars rather than 5.
Definitely recommend though if you don’t mind strongly academic language and enjoy learning about history, gender theory, the Bible, and/or art.
December 2, 2025
I LOVED this book, especially when it focused on the history of ideas around sex and gender in the medieval period and the diversity of thought in early Christianity. Was Adam a man, or was he actually an androgynous figure from whose body Eve was separated? If women are not the ideal form, are we all going to be men after the resurrection or are we going to be featureless nonbinary spheres? What's the difference between demon and angel androgyny? This discourse impacted laws and surgical practices. The author proves that there is no scientific basis for binary sex distinctions, arriving at the same conclusion of biologists but by a very different method. There's a point where the link with current events becomes painfully obvious when we realize nonconsensual, abusive surgical practices still continue on intersex people today like they did in the middle ages. I have heard criticism from medievalists and gender theorists that this book 1. covers too vast of a timespan (late antiquity to early renaissance) so it can't go into detail about certain ideas 2. is written from too much of a defensive angle (trying to prove intersex people exist to readers who might not have this prior knowledge). I can see where they are coming from but imagine a reader who isn't in medieval studies or gender studies. It would be a desperately needed introduction for them and that's why I think this book is really important.
December 8, 2025
A really fascinating read, though on the descriptive side for my taste. I still think what it unearths in terms of the history of nonconforming sexes and the normative functions of gender and the social construction of sex norms is really scintillating. However, I feel like this book was squashed by its isolation in the field of trans literary studies in that it felt like it kept having to reassert itself in a descriptive and non analytical way rather than get fully stuck in so at times it felt more encyclopaedic than critical, that is until the dam breaks in the conclusion. I'm looking forward to a time and space where trans literary studies can get into the nitty gritty as opposed to spending so much time just trying to assert the existence of some concept of transness or constructed gender in the first place. Fingers crossed this area of literary criticism gains more traction in the coming years because I think its structuralist leanings produce a fruitful breakdown of texts.
March 17, 2023
4.5!!! soooo absolutely brilliant everyone and their mother needs to read
only knocking off some because the title is slightly misleading. it's not so much genesis to the renaissance but much more of a 13th and 14th century transformation with small sprinklings of augustine and beyond. However i can appreciate that title is far less cool. Also would have liked to see more unpacking of androgyny in different contexts outside of the intersex or 'hermaphrodite.' however this work is soo amazing she is so cool I'm in love. thank you ian for the rec
only knocking off some because the title is slightly misleading. it's not so much genesis to the renaissance but much more of a 13th and 14th century transformation with small sprinklings of augustine and beyond. However i can appreciate that title is far less cool. Also would have liked to see more unpacking of androgyny in different contexts outside of the intersex or 'hermaphrodite.' however this work is soo amazing she is so cool I'm in love. thank you ian for the rec
August 8, 2023
This is not at all what I expected when I put it on hold at the library and I’m some ways, it’s been a slog to read, because my background in the time period wasn’t ever extensive and it’s been some years since university. But I found the account of Berengaria fascinating and both the primal androgyne and the Jesus hermaphrodite were new concepts for me.
March 22, 2025
świetnie napisana i bardzo dobrze zresearchowana praca o historii niebinarnej płci od XII do XV wieku. na youtubie dostępny jest wykład osoby autorskiej z mansfield college w oxfordzie, na którym byłam i zachęcił mnie do zakupienia tej książki i który jest jej streszczeniem. bardzo polecam ten wykład osobom, które zastanawiają się, czy chcą przeczytać tę książkę.
May 21, 2025
A powerful, informative collection of historiography on the basis of sex and gender in the Middle Ages. I'd highly recommend this to anyone remotely interested in gender studies or who wants to challenge the white cis status quo of Christian indoctrination in regard to sex and gender. Mention the Jesus "Hermaphrodite" textual histories and watch your MeeMaw's head explode.
January 12, 2024
Indispensable for anyone studying premodern sexuality and/or the history of sexuality. Devun has an elegant and accessible prose style. I would recommend this to both scholars and general audiences. Instant classic.
April 16, 2023
Very helpful to understanding the use of otherization and how past cultures used non binary and intersex bodies to otherize cultures.
September 30, 2023
Best book ever. Amazing. 500 stars
November 14, 2023
BIG enjoyed this!!!!!!!!!
Read
December 19, 2023Read for exams
Read
November 2, 2024File under “books that would give my late Catholic grandmother a heart attack”
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November 25, 2024Michal was reading it
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews