A key rule I follow when reading academic works: follow the citations, and see if they align with their description in the citing document.
This essay contends that Rykener ought to be understood as a transgender woman because she lived and worked for periods of her life as a woman, and other people in her social milieu accepted her as such. More specifically, I argue that Rykener relied on “gender labor” — the labor others perform to inscribe gender—to place herself within the series “women” (a collective of women not reliant on biologically essentialist definitions for membership). By using the framework of gender labor to argue Rykener is a woman, I provide a new way of reading gendered subjectivity — particularly transgender subjectivity — in the archive. Indeed, the historical document — discovered at the top of a 1395 Plea and Memoranda roll at the London Records Office — gives significant space to the various ways in which Rykener lived as a woman.
Henningsen, Kadin. ““Calling [herself] Eleanor”: Gender Labor and Becoming a Woman in the Rykener Case.” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. Vol. 55. No. 1. Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, 2019.
We tend to equivocate between the present and the past, projecting our own views onto historical people despite a very different lived context. Nonetheless, Henningsen makes a strong case that at least one transgender person existed in 1395, a whopping six centuries ago. This contradicts a not-insignificant number of transphobes who want to claim transgender people are a modern fad or social contagion that never existed in the past.