# The Changing Shape of Sex

**Source**: https://arthistory.yale.edu/news/changing-shape-sex
**Parent**: https://arthistory.yale.edu/

#### The Changing Shape of Sex

February 25, 2026

In a recent lecture titled “The Shape of Sex: Images of Nonbinary Gender before Modernity,” Leah DeVun, professor of history at Rutgers University, placed contemporary social, political, and religious conflicts about sex and gender within a broader historical framework. She demonstrated “that nonbinary categories aren’t actually so new after all, and that tradition — even Christian tradition — could sometimes embrace nonbinary categories.”

Centuries before modern, fixed categories of male and female, ideas about sex, gender, and gender transition were “rich and complicated,” said Prof. DeVun, who is also affiliated with the Graduate Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers.

In her talk, Prof. DeVun, who is the author of the prize-winning books, “The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance” and “Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time,” referenced artwork as well as historic and religious records depicting changing attitudes over the centuries. These materials, she argued, challenge the assumption that gender binaries are natural or timeless.

“The difference between male and female was a matter of degree rather than bipolar distinction, and intermediate sexes were described neutrally rather than in terms of disgust or moral outrage,” she said of earlier eras.

Prof. DeVun’s work centers on teaching and researching gender and sexuality history, with a focus on medieval and early modern Europe, as well as contemporary queer and trans studies.

“The preference for binarism — that is, that only male and female are legitimate and real sexes and genders — is a historically situated phenomenon, a preference that waxes and wanes over time,” she said. “It is not a natural or inevitable division of humankind that remains the same throughout time.”

Prof. DeVun spoke of how people in pre-modern Europe understood bodies and genders that did not fit into a strict male-female division.

“Between the years of about 200 and 1400, theologians, lawyers, scientists, and others debated the nature and existence of individuals who, because of their bodies or behavior, did not fit binary roles of simple maleness or femaleness — people who they called at the time ‘androgynes,’ [meaning] neither sex, or both sexes at the same time.”

She noted that medical and natural philosophical writers, including those of the 12th and 13th Century, “looked at the sexed human body and saw different ‘biological facts,’ with some describing binary male and female categories, while others described in neutral terms sex as a continuum, with masculine men and feminine women at the poles, but with several additional possible categories — including feminine males, masculine females, and individuals ‘of both sexes,’ in whom male and female traits existed in balance.”

In early Christian and medieval thought, she said, “there were images and ideas of people, saints, and even Jesus and Adam as somehow beyond simple male/female categories.”

A preference for sexual binarism, however, emerged out of specific efforts by Christian Europeans to organize their society, she explained.

Prof. DeVun argued that ideas about sex and gender beyond a binary were important intellectual tools “that allowed Christian Europeans to order their geographic, religious, political, and natural worlds, and to make claims about who should be accepted as a human being.”

She emphasized that trans and nonbinary histories have a crucial role to play in contemporary political and social discourse, “including how public memory is preserved, how students learn, and how lives get lived. To erase these histories from our syllabi and curricula would betray our scholarly mission to provide accurate accounts of the historical past.”

LGBTQ+ people, she noted, can find particular meaning in locating ancestors of today’s communities and forging a sense of kinship across time, “especially when we encounter a past when nonbinary categories and practices were not always vilified by religious tradition, but rather sometimes embraced and idealized.

“While I offer no simple equations between premodern and modern peoples, I argue that we can better grasp the historical force and complexity of the sex and gender categories used now to organize our social and cultural worlds, and we can better imagine a world of radical change and difference in the future, by understanding this history.”

Prior to the lecture graduate students and researchers joined Prof. DeVun for an object study session at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Participants examined objects featuring nonbinary imagery from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century.

Prof. DeVun is also co-editor of “Trans\*Historicities,” a special issue of the journal *TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly*. She is also the George William Cottrell Jr. Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where she is working on new research exploring historical and cultural encounters with otherworldly experiences, mediums, and spirit possession, to think about a long history of how humans have conceptualized and interacted with disembodied intelligences.

— FRANK RIZZO