The 13th century in the West gave rise to the legendary tale of a parturient pope, that of the popess Joan. Although this story is at the heart of a rich literary, iconographic and historiographic production, from the 13th century to the present day, it has only been considered through the reading grid of a single possibility until now, the cis possibility, that of the sole congruence with her assigned sex: Jeanne, a woman, disguises herself as another, as a man, and in so doing, cross-dresses and hides. This possibility alone does little to account for the range of medieval possibilities: Joan is also John, and John himself is possibly a trans man.

The hypothesis of the Johannine narrative as the product of a society that at least recognized the possibility of fluidity of expression is nonetheless conceivable. It’s a question of seeing the character of John from a new angle, that of a cultural echo of a trans fact known to the medieval scholar. This generalized trans fact seems to be the most apt to rigorously explain the manifest ambiguity of the literary and iconographic corpus.