(Part 11, Season 14): Intersex in the Ancient World

Below is the script for Season 14, episode 2 of my Philosophy Fluency podcast. 

You can listen to this episode here.

🎧 

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Fluency, episode 2 of Season 14. Over cinnamon coffees today, I'll be discussing some fascinating parallels between ancient historical sources, and the plot in Cavendish's play, The Convent of Pleasure. I shall flesh out my interpretation by comparing, contrasting and philosophising about these historical sources. It may be worth pointing out that even if an example isn't necessarily verified as historical, stories still can be relevant. They show that people were aware of things in the past even if they had no personal experience of them.

As promised in my previous episode, I'll discuss the god:

-known to the Ancient Romans as Hermaphroditus;

-otherwise known as Hermaphroditos to the Ancient Greeks. 

Ancient Greeks also referred to the god Aphrodite (as a feminine god) or Aphroditus (as a masculine god), who is sometimes depicted as visibly intersex. Sometimes the names Hermaphroditus and Aphroditus are used interchangeably, but should not be confused with other gods, such as Hermaphroditus' parents, Aphrodite and Hermes, whose names were put together to create the name for their child, Hermaphroditos. 

I mentioned in a previous episode last season, that the Medieval Jewish thinker, Maimonides, mentioned that pagans would crossdress to match the gender of the god they were worshipping. Further to this, it's important to be aware of the fact that people cross dressed for worship in the Classical world too, so Cavendish may have based the petticoat scene in The Convent of Pleasure on Classical times as well, since Ancient Greek and Latin sources were highly popular in her era. It's even more plausible that Cavendish could have come across these sources in one way or another, including through academic conversation.

Briefly put, McDaniel tells us that, and I quote:

"the Roman antiquarian Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, who lived in around the early fifth century CE, in his Saturnalia 3.8.2 records that men made sacrifices to Aphroditos wearing women’s clothing and women made sacrifices to him wearing men’s clothing".¹

This was to honour the intersex nature of their hermaphrodite god, and I quote: 

"Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was usually considered female, but, in the city of Amathos on the island of Kypros, she was worshipped in a male form under the masculine name Aphroditos. In Greek art, Aphroditos is typically portrayed as an androgynous figure; he wears a kind of dress that the Greeks traditionally regarded as feminine, but yet he is lifting up the dress to show" his manly features. "In some depictions, he is also shown with a beard to further emphasize his male aspect."²

Moreover, we can be quite sure that Cavendish had heard of Hermaphroditus because she wrote about how much she admired Ovid and wanted to be a famous writer like him. So it's highly likely that she encountered the story about how Hermaphroditus became intersex. 

The stories of sex ambiguity don't stop at the god Hermaphroditus in Ovid's Metamorphosis either. Ovid also includes the Ancient Greek and Roman myth of Iphis and Ianthe, in which Iphis was born a female, but needed to be brought up identifying as a boy so that her father would let her stay in the family. However, on falling in love with a woman she wants to marry, she prays to the god Luno and then Isis, who transforms her into a man in a dramatic, earth shattering temple scene, so Iphis can have a valid wedding ceremony and be betrothed to her fiancée. And indeed they do marry.³ 

For some scholars, this raises the question about Roman attitudes about lesbian marriages compared to heterosexual marriages.⁴

This reminds me of Cavendish scholars who ask whether 17th century audiences would find the happy ending marriage in The Convent of Pleasure more plausible after one of the lesbians in the couple is deemed to be a man. 

I think such plots function as a social commentary and criticism: why is it that, in societies that don't have gay marriage, the same two people who are in love with each other are allowed to marry or not allowed to marry, simply because of their gender identity, nothing to do with how much they love each other. When you see the political and social situation mapped onto the identical couple, it brings out the absurdity of it, for me. It shows people don't value love which could be why today we see so much hate around. Love is not seen as an important basis for marriage, it's merely about social control, especially the control of women.

Worse still, this is so restrictively within the gender binary, it can exclude clearly intersex individuals, such as Barbin, the famous 19th century intersex person that the French Philosopher Michel Foucault discussed and published about. There are many different interesting scholarly interpretations surrounding the life of Barbin,  although I personally agree with Foucault that Barbin's real life story does teach us a great deal about the political and social abuse of power to control even intersex people into false, binary biological sex categories. 

Nevertheless, for my present purposes of analysing Cavendish's play The Convent of Pleasure, I'll briefly highlight the brilliant French film made in 1985 and directed by René Féretin, depicting Barbin's life, titled Mystère Alexina, translated as The Mystery of Alexina in English. 

In that film, the issue is raised whether Barbin had hoped that she could marry the woman she was in love with, Sara, if she could legally change her gender to male, on providing evidence she's a sufficiently physically masculine intersex person. However, although in the fictional plot in The Convent of Pleasure, the Princess and Lady Happy do manage to validly marry on the strength that the Princess is a man, despite opposition from some people such as the Mediator, Barbin was not so lucky in love and changing sex, and her life ends tragically. Unlike intersex people in the medieval times, Barbin wasn't allowed to choose her gender once she fell in love as an adult in 19th century France. She learnt the shocking truth that society still wouldn't accept her as a man in a heterosexual relationship with a woman but would rather eradicate her all together as an intersex person. It's a very emotional and moving film, one I recommend you all watch.

This week I've narrowed my focus  to intersex themes and storylines in Greek and Roman mythology that appear in Ovid's Metamorphosis and highlighted their relevance to Margaret Cavendish's plot and characters in her play, The Convent of Pleasure. 

Nevertheless, there are also further stories in the ancient world that include intersex people⁵, such as the story of Heraïs who was included in the book 'Library of History', 32.10.2–9, written by the Ancient Greek historian Diodoros Sikeliotes. Although it seems fantastical that this woman suddenly, naturally physically metamorphosed into a man after a period of not feeling well, without any medical intervention, this is not as unrealistic as it sounds. There is a part of the world today where something similar to this happens: in a community in the  Dominican Republic, there is a type of intersex people there they call Guevedoces. Their body is considered to look female at birth so they are assigned female and raised as girls. But at puberty, they naturally acquire male anatomy. If you look at the details of the Ancient Greek story of Heraïs and compare it to the Guevedoces, there are some striking similarities. So I agree with William Hanson⁶, an American Classicist who argued that mythology is inspired by real life stories and sex metamorphoses stories are based heavily on real life intersex people. 

Do join me next Friday. This season of Philosophy Fluency will be published on Fridays. I'm also publishing the scripts on my Cavendish blog (I've provided a link in this episode's description) which also has my first book on Cavendish available to read there too.

So until next Friday, enjoy your weekend, take care and spread kindness and love.

References:

¹McDaniel, Spencer. August 21st 2020 'Transgender and Intersex People in the Ancient World', ‘Favorinus of Arelate Archives’. Tales of Times Forgotten 21 August 2020. 

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/tag/favorinus-of-arelate/.

²Ibid

³Ibid

⁴Ibid

⁵Ibid

⁶Ibid

Bibliography: 

🖊️Ovid's Metamorphosis:

📚 Book IV in which the story of Hermaphroditus, especially: 

Bk IV:317-345 Salmacis falls for Hermaphroditus

Bk IV:346-388 Salmacis and Hermaphroditus merge.

‘Metamorphoses (Kline) 4, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center’. Accessed 19 September 2025. https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph4.htm#478205198.

📚 Book IX

Bk IX:666-713 The birth of Iphis

Bk IX:714-763 Iphis and Ianthe

Bk IX:764-797 Isis transforms Iphis

‘Metamorphoses (Kline) 9, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center’. Accessed 19 September 2025. https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph9.htm.

🖊️You can access Margaret Cavendish's play: The Convent of Pleasure that I discuss in my Philosophy Fluency episodes from the following online source:

📚Cavendish, Margaret (1668) ‘The Convent of Pleasure.’ Last accessed 12 September 2025. 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html

🎥Film: 'Mystère Alexina', 1985

Film production company: Cinéastes Associés, Les and TF1 Films Production

René Féret (Restager, Scenarist, Production manager), Jean Gruault (Scenarist), Anne-Marie Deschamps (Musician), Vuillemin (Actor), Valérie Stroh (Actor), Véronique Silver (Actor)

Part 10 (Season 14): Hermaphrodites in History

Below is the script for the first episode of Season 14 of my Philosophy Fluency podcast. 

You can listen to this episode here.

🎧 

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the brand new Season 14 of Philosophy Fluency. Last season was dedicated to Margaret Cavendish, and I analysed her philosophy of gender, especially within her play: The Convent of Pleasure. In the last couple of episodes, I put forward and described my intersex interpretation of the character of the Princess in this play, based on the historical figure of Queen Christina of Sweden. I also suggested that the character of the mediator was based on Queen Christina's mother who became hysterical after learning that the sex assigned to her baby son was considered a mistake. She couldn't adjust to her son being a daughter, unlike her husband, the father of the baby, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, who took it in his stride and brought her up more like a boy. 

Over mocha coffees today, I'll expand on my reading of Cavendish's philosophy of gender in her play The Convent of Pleasure. 

So, further to what I've just summarised about my interpretation, I think one strength of my intersex understanding of the Princess character in The Convent of Pleasure is that it answers the potential objection that the LGBT+ identity of the Princess isn't historically fitting because it may require modern day concepts and vocabulary about trans identities. 

This type of objection can range from people who merely value historical accuracy to others who simply hold anti-trans views whilst pretending it's somehow just a unquestionable fact that trans identities are somehow new and only part of a recent trend for so-called 'gender ideology' that didn't exist in past eras, in this case, back in the 17th century. 

Well, in my academic opinion: 

One, people's genuine experiences of their own gender expression and identity are timeless and occur in every century. Like other life experiences and sense of self, it doesn't rely on whether you can learn about it educationally first or what terminology is available to give it a name. 

Expanding our vocabulary about gender and personal experience is just there to assist the clarity and precision of our communication, not to create new concepts and identities that weren't there long before. Language is always lagging way behind people's life experiences, so its main purpose is to  describe what already exists as a non-verbal concept and identity. 

Two, there's both textual and historical evidence in support of my view that people encountered intersex people all the way down the ages, and society was well aware of them. Their clear existence in all historical ages doesn't rely on a sense of an individual's identity and there are biological, physical descriptions (including medical, religious, literary and biographical) which tell us what these intersex people were like and how they were treated in past societies.

The vocabulary around being physically intersex has changed, but the descriptions are still recognisable. It was Richard Goldschmidt, an endocrinologist, who renamed people of indeterminate biological sex as intersex in the 1910s, although this term didn't catch on until around the 1940s¹. Before then, intersex people were more commonly described, for instance: Born as a eunuch; and hermaphrodites. The latter term was used by Margaret Cavendish, for example, in her natural philosophy, but these days, it is now mostly reserved for historical references or only used if the intersex person so wishes. 

For instance, a birth certificate was reissued in 2012 in Ohio, America, for an intersex person, to correct their sex assigned to read that they are 'hermaphrodite', after showing medical proof that they were what's known as a 'true hermaphrodite' when they were born². Interestingly, this case was won in accordance with the binary gender ideology that TERFS and gender critics perpetuate, not despite it. Like good philosophy, it followed their so-called biological argument right through to its logical conclusion: if a ruling in America in 1987 claimed that birth certificates should be "an historical record of the facts as they existed at the time of birth" then if the baby is medically deemed a hermaphrodite at birth, then that should be recorded too.³

To record even a true hermaphrodite at birth as neatly fitting into male or female like other babies is, technically speaking, recording and trying to historically preserve a biologically inaccurate fact. 

A few years later at the end of 2016, Sara Kelly Keenan finally received her reissued birth certificate that changed her sex marker from female to intersex⁴. Like Queen Christina of Sweden, Keenan was considered to be a baby boy for the first few weeks, but this was suddenly reversed and he was given a birth certificate stating that he was a female⁵. Once an adult and given the choice, Keenan felt that their gender is non-binary, so they updated their ID to include this gender too⁶. In this way, in 2016, Keenan achieved both a legally recognised biological sex (ie intersex) and gender (ie non-binary)⁷. So all their official documentation could show that they are outside the gender binary, not just in terms of identity but in terms of biological reality too. 

So if TERFS and gender critics were genuinely interested in biological reality, they'd recognise the biological reality of, and true scientific facts about, intersex people, not shun them, eradicate them and rely on offensive tropes to label them abnormal so not worthy of consideration and rights. They remove them from the debate because they're inconvenient for their binary arguments and ideology. That's not only constructing gender binary arguments out of a strawman fallacy, it's also creating a false and dangerous ideology that has perhaps never been so virulent, and prevalent in the world in the past as it is today. 

There's an ever increasing extreme crackdown on any reference to, any acknowledgement, research, and access to knowledge about anything outside the gender binary, even when it's about the variety of intersex people that have been recorded and acknowledged, both in positive and discriminatory ways, all the way down the ages from:

1) Greek mythology, in which there's an intersex god called Hermaphroditus, who gave rise to the term hermaphrodite. Indeed, in The Convent of Pleasure,  the women worship pagan gods from the classical world. As I've discussed previously, in the Petticoat scene the Prince Princess is concerned she's not dressed correctly for worshipping Mars.

The worship of these gods in The Convent of Pleasure could be a nod from Cavendish to the famous Greek god Hermaphroditus. More on that in the following episode, next week. 

2) the skeptic philosopher Favorinus during Ancient Greek times, who was known to have intersex traits during his lifetime and was recorded as being an hermaphrodite in ancient books;

3) to both the Old Testament, the Tanakh in Judaism, such as Isaiah 56, most notably verses 4-7, and New Testaments, such as Matthew 19:12, which are both religiously positive about intersex people; 

4) to Sir, Lord Edward Coke, a 17th century judge who wrote a three volume treatise titled 'Institutes of the Lawes of England' published between 1628 and 1644, so Margaret Cavendish, born in 1623, would be aware of this during her lifetime. So the concept of being intersex was certainly available to Cavendish in her era so she may well have included this in her play, The Convent of Pleasure. 

As an additional point of interest: Sir Coke's legal treatise has underpinned American and English Common Law ever since. It is still cited in contemporary court cases, such as Roe v Wade. So I'm now wondering why this was not factored into this year's UK Supreme Court Ruling on biological sex.  It seems to me, that the ruling stating that there are only two biological sexes of male and female contradicts Sir Coke's legal treatise, and therefore also the legal concepts and definitions in English law, which acknowledge the existence of a non-binary sex, that of hermaphrodite and androgynous. For instance, he wrote that an hermaphrodite could inherit as either a male or female. 

and finally, 5) intersex people have been recognised through to the modern day Malta Declaration which lists the human rights of intersex individuals and was set out at the third International Intersex Forum in 2013. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg of my research over the past two weeks. There's plenty more to come.

So do join me next week as I continue my research journey. Until then have a good week and take care.

References: 

¹Genomics, Front Line, and Shannon Gunn. ‘Intersex: When Binary Notions Simply Don’t Fit’. Front Line Genomics, 18 November 2020. 

https://frontlinegenomics.com/intersex-when-binary-notions-simply-dont-fit/.

²NBC News. ‘Nation’s First Known Intersex Birth Certificate Issued in NYC’, 29 December 2016. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nation-s-first-known-intersex-birth-certificate-issued-nyc-n701186.

³Ibid

⁴Ibid

⁵Ibid

⁶Ibid

⁷Ibid

You can access Margaret Cavendish's play: The Convent of Pleasure that I discuss in my Philosophy Fluency episodes from the following online source:

Cavendish, Margaret (1668) ‘The Convent of Pleasure.’ Last accessed 12 September 2025. 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html

Part 9 (season 13): The Intersex Princess

Below is the script for episode 10, the final episode of Season 13 of my Philosophy Fluency podcast. 

You can listen to this episode here

🎧 

Hello and welcome to the last episode of Season 13 of Philosophy Fluency. Let's enjoy some coffees with rose petals on top, to celebrate and support the England Roses' dominant wins so far during the current Women's Rugby World Cup. Their sporting excellence is paving the way for women and girls in Sport and is another shining example, in addition to the Lionesses women football team, of how sporty English women really are. 

At the end of the previous episode, I put forward my suggestion that the real life Queen Christina is a plausible model for the character of the Princess. There are intriguing parallels between Queen Christina and the Princess:

As I touched upon previously, both:

1) have their biological sex questioned and 'a mistake' is declared, changing their perceived sex to the opposite, whilst a Princess. At birth, when Christina was a Princess, before she became a Queen Regnant, the women who assigned her male later said they'd made a mistake and reassigned her female, apparently to great embarrassment. The mediator uses the same word "mistake" when she says, and I quote from Act V, Scene II: 

"How, never such a Mistake; why we have taken a Man for a Woman." 

2) they both try to escape societal stricture on gender by entering a convent, albeit very different types of convents. Nevertheless, Queen Christina enjoyed more freedoms than most women in her convent.

3) both suffer from genderphobic women having an hysterical fit over the biological sex of Christina and the Princess. In this way, the mediator could be modeled on the narrow-minded and rather sexist women around the baby Princess Christina. Moreover, an even closer match to the hysterical character of the mediator is Christina's mother, Maria Eleonora, whose poor mental health, hysterical behaviour and terrible attitude problem and lack of love for her son turned daughter Christina, was such that her husband, the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, decided it was best she didn't bring her up herself, so that her madness didn't affect the young Christina. 

I suggest that a 17th century reader or audience may recognise the life story of Queen Christina in the plot of The Convent of Pleasure. Furthermore, I think it's plausible that the root cause of the bigotry could be the same between Christina and the Princess. Given that the mother is hysterical and negative about her own daughter after her biological sex reassignment as a baby, so the mediator's hysterical prejudice and attitude problem may also be due to intersexphobia. 

4) both Christina and the Princess are crowned a King: Queen Christina was literally, officially crowned a King during her coronation. The Princess wins the prize of being unofficially crowned King, while Lady Happy is crowned Queen, for being the couple who danced the best at a maypole event. However, the Princess is a Prince and ruler in a foreign country. So in that sense, the Princess can also officially function like a monarch and can rule like a King. 

So I argue that there's at least a strong possibility that the Princess/ Prince is intersex, in which case, Cavendish can leave both the so-called biological sex and the gender identity of this character an eternal mystery, always somewhat ambiguous. This would have the advantage of bringing out the inherent, naturally occuring complexities within both sex and gender. 

5) like Margaret Cavendish herself, Queen Christina and the Princess both feel comfortable wearing full male and full female attire in public and all three of them are on the receiving end of bigotry as a result, both in the 17th century and still today, such as Virginia Woolf in the 20th century who famously made derogatory remarks about Cavendish and universities still in the 21st century have an attitude problem towards Cavendish and scholarship on her, especially Philosophy departments. And that's not just sexism, because not all women philosophers in the past are affected by this prejudice, especially if they're cis, heterosexual, religious Christian women in history. 

Unlike any other scholarly interpretation, my intersex reading would illustrate Cavendish's theme and questions in the play, about the nature of gender: 

Would we really know who is male and female, simply by observing them? 

Are people neatly in the binary categories of male or female by nature or not? 

Although this is clearly a long-standing debate, this is also a very contemporary debate. It involves the topic known as the nature or nurture debate. It asks very modern day questions about whether gender is biologically-based or identity-based, or both. 

Perhaps Cavendish wants the play to end somewhat up in the air. I suggest that Cavendish wants to dispel the gender binary. And she'd be right. Gender isn't clear cut. People are not clearly this or that, which is why the sports world ceased to do sex testing decades ago and why some experts today still insist sex testing is still not always 100% reliable and informative. 

It's amazing to think that Margaret Cavendish had the brains to work this out four centuries ago yet TERFS and so-called gender critics still haven't reached that advanced, nuanced stage of thinking in the 21st century. 

I shall conclude this season on Cavendish now by highlighting that, although The Convent of Pleasure has some serious messages about gender, biological sex, social expectations, genderfluidity and feminism to analyse, this play is nonetheless meant to be light-hearted, witty, and entertaining. 

I shall be taking my usual week off after a season. I need some time for research. I'll be back on Friday 12th September with the next season, Season 14. Until then, enjoy yourselves and take care! 

References:

Cavendish, Margaret 'The Convent of Pleasure', 1668, available at: 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html 

Part 8: Discussing Question1: Is there a Gender Reveal scene in Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure?

Below is the script for episode 9, the penultimate episode within Season 13 of my Philosophy Fluency podcast. 

For the reference bibliography of works cited in this episode, see the end of this blog post. 

🎧

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Fluency Season 13 episode 9. We've had a heatwave this past week. I hope everyone's been enjoying their holidays and soaking up some of the beautiful sun. 

Yesterday was International Butch Appreciation Day and in this episode we will be appreciating butches in history especially the 17th century.

I've given you all extra time to think about the questions I invited you to mull over in the previous episode because I doubt you'll be in the mood to listen to philosophy when the weather is so amazing.

What have I been doing? I've been enjoying myself working at my art, experimenting with various styles inspired by art sessions that I've attended. I really enjoy interacting with other artists and seeing their work too. 

So over coffees let's return to last week's episode. I left you with several questions. There are no right or wrong answers to those thought provoking questions. So, over our summer ice coffees today, I'll explore the ideas within those questions and sketch out my approach to unearthing possible answers to them. 

My first question was:

1) is this definitely a big gender reveal scene? 

This depends on who the princess really is? A Princess or a Prince? Of course, these royal titles are very gender binary, there isn't an equivalent word for a non-binary person with this title. Neither does such a title account for anyone who is:

1) Outside the gender binary, such as a genderfluid person, as Cavendish was herself. Such a person could be comfortable with being referred to as both a Prince and a Princess. 

2) Trans women are not men. So if the Princess is a trans woman or a trans feminine woman, then the Princess isn't a man, so the mediator is not revealing anything about the Princess's sense of gender, hence no gender reveal. Either the mediator is merely revealing the sex the princess was assigned at birth; or she's simply being sensationalist and anti-LGBTQIA+, in one way or another. 

3) A butch woman. 'Butch' is a gender expression, that nevertheless spans women of various gender identities and sexualities. Some butches are simply gender expansive cis women (sometimes referred to as gender non-conforming women). It is often assumed that all butch women are lesbians, because the butch lesbian is the best known type of butch, but in reality, they may or may not be lesbian. Other butches are also not trans, but may wish to adopt a more masculine identity, such as wearing men's clothes, using male pronouns, a male name, be called their female partner's husband, and so on. For instance, Mathilde de Morny, (born 1863, died 1944) was a cross-dressing noblewoman who became known as "Missy", which was spelt backwards to create her artist name: Yssim; "Max or Uncle Max", or "Monsieur le Marquis". She was fascinatingly portrayed in the 2018 film Colette, which depicts Missy's lesbian relationship with Colette, in which Missy is seen as being like Colette's husband. 

Colette and Mathilde “Missy” de Morny
 (Photo: public domain) 

Although the term butch lesbian wasn't in existence in the 17th century, Margaret Cavendish's era, I think gender identities and sexualities transcend centuries, because they are simply lived, authentic experiences, whether you have a term to attach to that human experience during your lifetime or not. There were, for instance, women who 'passed' as men during the Early Modern period, some of whom did not just do it for personal gain (such as entering a profession barred to women) but rather felt they were living a more authentic life to present their gender as male and to marry a woman, which they somewhat legally did, under their male name.   

One example of a true life story during the 17th century, who lived during the same time period as Cavendish is a person who was assigned female at birth and was named Catalina de Erauso, who was sent to a convent but refused to lead a religious life and escaped after suffering abuse from the nuns. Catalina adopted a male identity and went by the name Antonio instead, amongst other male names. It's an absolutely amazing life story, that's been turned into stories in popular culture, such as comics, films and historical novels. Scholarship is divided on the gender identity and sexuality of Catalina who became Antonio, who was comfortable with presenting in a very masculine way, identifying as a man and was only attracted to and had relationships with women and even married a few women in South America. Was she simply a woman merely 'passing' as a man to survive? Was she a butch lesbian? Was he a trans man? Again, like with Cavendish scholarship, and Shakespeare scholarship on Ariel, there are a variety of scholarly interpretations, arguments and stances, most of which pointing to plausible supporting evidence. Although I think any attempts to deny that Erauso is of great significance to LGBT+ history is really not plausible. 

Here's a 17th century painting and a commemorative bust of Catalina / Antonio de Erauso, both proving Cavendish right that recording a variety of people in history is extremely important, so we do not skew our historical perception of lifestyle, achievements and which identities existed in the past. Hence people assigned female at birth also need access to fame, military work, being preserved in artworks and books during their lifetime, not just for their own benefit or individual glory, but for our collective historical knowledge too. 

Artist believed to be: Juan van der Hamen, c.1626

Statue in Orizaba, Mexico, 
commemorating
Catalina / Antonio de Erauso,
here referred to as 
la Monja Alférez
(Photo: Public domain: 
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike)

I suggest there's parallels to be drawn here between Antonio and Cavendish's character of the Princess. Not only was Antonio in a convent, sometimes referred to as being trapped in a convent, but she also passed so well as a man, that she encountered her relatives as a man and none of them recognised her as their female relative, Catalina. They all believed it was a man who they didn't know. This shows that Cavendish is right to ask whether people could successfully and believably present as the opposite sex and go on being undetected.  

Moreover, when the ambassador addresses the Prince, is he right or wrong? He may be right in one way, wrong in another. For instance, right because the Prince is in male clothing but wrong in that the Prince may have been born a woman, which the ambassador may or may not know. 

After all, Queen Christina of Sweden was first assigned male at birth, then shortly afterwards his biological sex was questioned, considered a mistake, and he was re-assigned female. Nevertheless, her father didn't take that on board too seriously and brought Christina up to be just as highly educated as a boy with manly pursuits such as fencing. It wasn't just that Christina dressed as a man she pulled it off convincingly complete with manly mannerisms and a male voice. She was described as mannish by those who knew her. Here's a guide on how Queen Christina of Sweden might have dressed in the male attire of her era and class. 

She was known to have little patience with women and their feminine demeanour and their obsession with beauty and fitting in with some ideal of womanhood. Indeed, she had an aversion to heterosexual marriage and the whole world of what women said and did. 

She went on to found an academy for Philosophy and Literature and Cavendish writes a play called The Female Academy. There are distinct parallels here between Queen Christina and the Prince/Princess and Cavendish.

Queen Christina's father considered her a female heir, and she was considered a Queen when she ascended the throne. Nevertheless, she would wear male attire, and the official royal title she received on being coronated in 1633, was King. 

So, picture this: during Cavendish's lifetime in the 17th century, a royal who was considered a woman, and called a Queen, could nevertheless be seen to be in male attire and officially titled King on their ascension to the throne. 

So what made Queen Christina's sex at birth so difficult to determine? Was it as simple as a mere mistake? Was it due to misogynistic stereotypes that meant if she presented with certain gender non-conforming physical and personality characteristics, such as being hairier and a louder screamer, you assumed she must be a he? Or was it the same as these days, that people struggle to confidently assign a sex to babies who are intersex? This may explain why her father was more prepared to give Christina a first class education and training fit for the future King she would become, if perhaps he thought she was not entirely female. Nevertheless, this was rather forward thinking of him. 

Since now, in the 21st century, intersex people's bodily autonomy and human rights are disregarded, trampled on and their existence is often erased. They suffer from the extreme end of genderphobia and human rights violations. 

Queen Christina, wanted to escape heterosexual marriage so escaped to Italy in 1654 dressed as a man using a male name to live in a Catholic convent, despite being non-religious, abandoning the throne of Sweden to her cousin. She generally led an unconventional life for a woman and a royal one at that. Furthermore, Queen Christina was active in theatrical communities and was a patron of the arts. So she's highly relevant to the genre of plays. 

Christina stayed with various people along the way to Italy, visiting various countries such as Denmark, the Dutch Republic, and staying with a Jewish merchant in Antwerp. During her travels she was visited by an ambassador by the name of Pierre Chanut who knew Descartes (d. 1650) who, in turn, had corresponded with Queen Christina and visited her in Sweden. Descartes stayed with Chanut whilst also finishing 'Passions of the Soul' (1649) which he surprisingly dedicated to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (not Queen Christina) who also studied Philosophy and Astronomy and may have been tutored by Huygens. So, Elizabeth was the recipient of two treatises on the passions one from Edward Reynolds, the other from Descartes.

Elizabeth of Bohemia, like Queen Christina and the Prince/Princess in Cavendish's play, also entered a convent, a Lutheran one in Hereford, Germany despite being a Calvinist. 

Queen Christina relates to Cavendish's play in two ways:

Firstly, the Prince/Princess would appear to have followed just this path: both called male/female royal titles, and abandoning their position of power in a foreign country to enter a convent. And an ambassador visits him at the convent. There's a rebellion which the Prince/Princess has to squash just as Charles I had to raise an army to squash a rebellion. 

Is this rebellion one that is back in the Prince/Princess's place of origin, or has the transphobic Mediator started a civil war within the convent to push out a royal.

Secondly, it's Lady Happy who founded the Convent of Pleasure to find an alternative to marriage and heterosexuality. The purpose of the convent was not to pray, but to live an enriched female experience with broader horizons and opportunities and overcome restricted gender expectations. 

What's the main relevance to Cavendish's play, 'The Convent of Pleasure'? It's easy to assume at the moment, with all this TERF ideology trying to dominate society and school education, that nobody ever questioned biological sex or gender identity or lived unconventional lives outside the gender binary until only a few years ago, when they decided to blame everything on so-called gender ideology raising awareness and giving people a springboard from which to go on a journey of self-discovery about their personal sense of their own gender and which gender they'd like to live as in society. This contemporary stance is hugely problematic for many reasons, two of which are rather fundamental:

1) It's factually inaccurate. Yes, everybody does have a gender identity, because being cisgender is also a gender identity. Access to information has nothing to do with how people authentically feel within their own skin. If they are genuinely cisgender, then no amount of education about the existence of trans people and the diversity of experiences of gender that others have, will change that inner sense of being cisgender for you. And, if you educate yourself about various examples in history and science, then you know that biology simply isn't as clear cut about biological sex as people like to pretend, so that can never be some substitute for gender identity. 

Indeed, if you are ignorant about gender identity theory, you are more likely to mistake yourself as trans or non-binary when you are not. Learning about gender will merely make you more educated, empathetic, tolerant and knowledgeable about the people you meet and maybe even any children you may bring up, who will tell you what they feel their gender identity and expression is, whether or not you try to misinform them and keep them in a cis-heteronormative bubble. 

2) As we can see by these historical examples and literary examples, including Cavendish's play, questions about the nature of gender identity and expression are nothing new, they are age old. 

Indeed, with all this technology and emphasis on ID these days, it's significantly harder than ever before in history to make any changes to your gender expression and identity. So it would be an uneducated and ignorant stance to assume that these gender topics within Cavendish and elsewhere merely superimpose a contemporary lens onto an historical era where it doesn't belong. Many would say: Surely everything was very gendered and binary in those good old days, so researchers should stop foisting their present day LGBT+ trends onto eras where they don't belong. Well, actually, quite the contrary. History has a lot to teach us about gender and sexuality, and a lot to suprise us with! 

Contrary to social expectations, we will continue to misunderstand historical texts if we remain stuck in our 21st century bigotries and superimpose them on eras which had different priorities from ours and were not always more regressive in every way from modern day western societies. 

Hence, Cavendish did intentionally raise awareness and explore important issues about sex, gender and sexuality, and question societal expectations. She was therefore also right to ask to what extent gender expression and gender identity is 'by nature' or not. It's a more timeless question than one imagines. 

Perhaps Cavendish doesn't want to pin the Princess down to a particular gender or pin down the sexuality of both the Princess and Lady Happy. As the LGBTQ+ motto has always been and I've always believed in: Love is Love. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ So who Lady Happy or the Princess/Prince are is irrelevant. All that is relevant is that they've fallen in love.

However, if you ask me what I think the identity of the Princess/Prince in the Convent of Pleasure is I'd say the character was modelled on the societal intrigue surrounding the apparently ambiguous biological sex and gender identity of Queen Christina.

Do join me soon for the final episode of this Season 13. Enjoy the summer weather, and continue to ponder the questions I raised in the previous episode and this one. 

The script for this episode is already available on my Cavendish blog: The Feminist Margaret Cavendish Circle, so do take a look there, I've included some pictures to bring to life just how masculine these women in history were. 

Part 7: The Gender Reveal - Or Not?

Here's the script for episode 8 within Season 13 of my Philosophy Fluency podcast. 

For the reference bibliography of works cited in this episode, see the end of this blog post. 

This episode is available to listen to on demand on Spotify 🔗 here.

🎧 

Hello and welcome to the 8th episode of Season 13 of Philosophy Fluency. Last week, I paused Season 13 and released a special edition bonus episode, to celebrate the Lionesses winning the women's UEFA Euro 2025 championship. We were all so proud of the England team, especially since women footballers have had to build up their sport from zero, after suffering a decades long ban on women playing football in the UK, from 1921 to 1971. So their win took on such significance too, both for women and for the whole nation as well, since football is something of a major, national sport here in England. 

In this episode, I return to Cavendish's play: The Convent of Pleasure, first published in 1668, by following on from my episode 7 on the theme of the Princess's petticoat. To recap: in that episode, I discuss the petticoat scene in Act IV. Scene I, which depicts the Princess praying to Mars and apologizing for wearing a petticoat while doing so. I analysed this passage in light of pagan rituals within which it was customary to dress in the gender of the god you are worshipping, not in accordance with your own gender identity. Hence, I questioned Tiller's claim in her talk that we can read into the Petticoat scene as showing that the Princess is not entirely at ease in feminine attire, and that this monologue acts like a precursor to the Princess acting like a threatening man when she, now revealed as a he, claims he'll send an army to the convent. 

So, to build on all this, over ice coffees today, I shall give a reading of the passages in question later on in the play, in order to:

1) give you a direct understanding of how the original text reads. It's a passage that I often find sounds very different from how it's talked about in Cavendish scholarship 

2) to bring the play to life, so you can envisage it and it seems less hypothetical 

3) so we are all on the same page, quite literally, when I'm discussing my research thoughts on this passage and play, because we'll all be looking at the same original wording. I'll read the entire scene, otherwise I'm not sure it will make much sense to listeners, especially since it's not a famous play, so people are not familiar enough with it to fill in the context for themselves. 

The Convent of Pleasure by Margaret Cavendish, 1668, ACT V. SCENE I.

"Enter the Princess and the Lady Happy; The Princess is in a Man's Apparel as going to Dance; they Whisper sometime; then the Lady Happy takes a Ribbon from her arm, and gives it to the Princess, who gives her another instead of that, and kisses her hand. They go in and come presently out again with all the Company to Dance, the Musick plays; And after they have Danced a little while, in comes Madam Mediator wringing her hands, and spreading her arms; and full of Passion cries out.

O Ladies, Ladies! you're all betrayed, undone, undone; for there is a man disguised in the Convent, search and you'l find it.

They all skip from each other, as afraid of each other; only the Princess and the Lady Happy stand still together.

Prin. You may make the search, Madam Mediator, but you will quit me, I am sure.

Mediat. By my faith but I will not, for you are most to be suspected.

Prin. But you say, the Man is disguised like a Woman, and I am accoustred like a Man.

Mediat. Fidle, fadle, that is nothing to the purpose.

Enter an Embassador to the Prince; the Embassador kneels, the Prince bids him rise.

Prin. What came you here for?

Embass. May it please your Highness, The Lords of your Council sent me to inform your Highness, that your Subjects are so discontented at your Absence, that if your Highness do not return into your Kingdom soon, they'l enter this Kingdom by reason they hear you are here; and some report as if your Highness were restrained as Prisoner.

Prin. So I am, but not by the State, but by this Fair Lady, who must be your Soveraigness.

The Embassador kneels and kisses her Hand.

Prin. But since I am discover'd, go from me to the Councellors of this State, and inform them of my being here, as also the reason, and that I ask their leave I may marry this Lady; otherwise, tell them I will have her by force of Arms.

Exit Embassador.

Mediat. O the Lord! I hope you will not bring an Army, to take away all the Women; will you?

Prin. No, Madam Mediator, we will leave you behind us."

I'll leave you with a few questions to think about before the next episode:

1) is this definitely a big gender reveal scene? 

2) is the mediator simply one of those pious, hysterical, fantasist TERFS who is just trying to cause trouble, conflict and pretend there's a safety problem for the women to be afraid of, despite the fact that they've just been absolutely fine and happy, living in close quarters alongside the Princess all this time? 

3) Does this scene tell us more about the Princess or the mediator? 

4) We have a slip here that suggests this could be written by Cavendish's husband rather than herself. So do such pivotal scenes tell us about Cavendish's authorial intentions or not? 

5) Does this scene help us understand the true gender identity of the Princess or not, given that it's coloured by the mediator's phobic reaction? 

Do join me next week for a discussion and analysis of this passage. Have a good week! Enjoy the hot weather. Stay hydrated.

References/Bibliography:

Cavendish, Margaret 'The Convent of Pleasure', 1668, available at: 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html 

Part 6: The Petticoat in the Convent of Pleasure

Further to my previous series of posts, I'm sharing another of my Philosophy Fluency podcast script. Here's my script for my episode 7, Season 13, where I build on my research thoughts on Cavendish and discuss a question I asked at the Cavendish on Literature conference last month. 

For the reference bibliography of works cited in this episode, see the end of this blog post. 

This episode is available to listen to on demand on Spotify 🔗 here

🎧 

Hello and welcome to episode 7 of Season 13 of Philosophy Fluency. Over chilled coffees today, I shall look at the issue of the petticoat in Margaret Cavendish's play, the Convent of Pleasure, first published in 1668. 

In Act IV. Scene I, the stage directions tell us that the Princess "walks a turn or two in a Musing posture, then views her Self, and speaks".¹ After this, her name is shortened to Prin. in the online edition that I gather is a copy of the first ever publication edition of Cavendish's book: 'Plays, never before printed', which was printed in London by A. Maxwell, in 1668². I point this out because some contemporary editions reproducing this play have altered this gender neutral abbreviation by expanding it to Princess. For instance, the editors Liza Blake and Shawn Moore say on the website: Digital Cavendish: A Scholarly Collaborative, that they advise readers to, and I quote:

"note here that by expanding the original’s printing’s “Prin.” to “Princess” we have lost the generative gender neutrality or ambiguity of the original speech prefix."³

Nevertheless, when it comes to stage directions, they took the editorial decision to incorporate brackets and put the c-e-s-s letters in the word princess into square brackets so readers are more aware of the notion that prin refers to stage directions for a princess looking character.⁴

Personally and academically, I never agree with such editorial linguistic alterations to historical original texts. Writers in past eras could be deliberately, very unconventional in their creative decisions so you can never be sure that you are not changing the meaning or implications or message of their work. 

So, although apparently abbreviations were standard practice in the Early Modern era, this does not assure us that Cavendish did not wish to use this convention as a vehicle for playing with gender assumptions about the Princess. Referring to the Princess by using the abbreviation Prin., could symbolise her gender ambiguity, whether she is male, female or non-binary since it's a gender neutral abbreviation. 

So I argue that it's always best practice to retain all the original idiosyncrasies, in case the symbolisms and meanings and unconventional creative practices are lost as we make big assumptions and iron out anything that isn't immediately clear to a reader in the 21st century.  

The Princess's lines are as follows, and I quote:

Prin. "What have I on a Petticoat, Oh Mars! thou God of War, pardon my sloth; but yet remember thou art a Lover, and so am I; but you will say, my Kingdom wants me, not only to rule, and govern it, but to defend it: But what is a Kingdom in comparison of a Beautiful Mistress? Base thoughts flie off, for I will not go; did not only a Kingdom, but the World want me."⁵

Then, according to the stage directions, she leaves.⁶ 

So, what options do we have for interpreting this passage? I think it could be a rather pivotal scene, given the scholarly debate surrounding the Princess's true biological sex and gender identity and the questions raised about the possible sincerity or insincerity with which she presents and expresses her femininity and masculinity. 

In her talk on the 12th of June last month, at the Cavendish on Literature conference at Southampton University, Michaela Tiller brought up this petticoat scene when the Princess is praying to the god of Mars, in her paper: 'Cavendish and crossdressing: on the performance and embodiment of gender in English drama'.⁷ Tiller seemed to suggest that this scene shows that, the Princess is actually somewhat uncomfortable in her female clothing, and this only comes out once she's alone, when she doesn't have to keep up feminine appearances amongst other women⁸. 

I remembered off the top of my head that pagans worshipped their gods whilst wearing clothes that match the gender of the god, not their own gender. Therefore, when worshiping the god Mars, both men and women wore men's armour to honour him as the god of war. I've discussed this elsewhere as part of my research on LGBTQ+ positive interpretations of Jewish scripture, and this pagan crossdressing topic arises in Jewish approaches to and arguments about whether or not there are religious prohibitions on trans people dressing according to their gender identity as opposed to their sex assigned at birth. Whilst researching the religious anti-trans arguments that trans people are having to battle against, I discovered that the Jewish medieval philosopher, Maimonides, argued in his Guide for the Perplexed that Deuteronomy 22:5 which seems to translate as claiming: 

"A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God"⁹

is actually about preventing idolatry by disallowing the pagan custom of dressing in accordance with the gender of the male or female pagan god. This makes sense to me and strikes me as an accurate, objective reading of the Torah, known as the Old Testament to Christians. Since Judaism is a purely monotheistic religion that only has the one God, this polytheistic, pagan custom is irrelevant and contrary to Judaism. 

So I suggest that Cavendish may have known about Maimonides's reference to pagan worship and crossdressing or somehow come across information about pagan worship elsewhere. Like me, Cavendish may have found it fascinating that people's modern day confusion and issues with dressing in gender non-conforming ways, and even crossdressing, were not shared by people in ancient times. Indeed, as I discuss in my volume 3: Research Thoughts on....Spinoza, the Roman emperor Nero expressed various genders through his clothing and took on different gender roles in marriage, being both a husband and a wife to people of different sexes and genders.¹⁰

So gender roles were sometimes more fluid in ancient times than in Cavendish's era, and even these days in the 21st century when binary biological sex ideology is attempting to take over and suppress scientific knowledge and expression of any genders that don't conform to their so-called gender critical opinions. 

Furthermore, Cavendish generally drew on classical Roman culture and literature. In Roman culture, the god of Mars was a military, protective figure who wore chest armour, a Corinthian helmet, shin guards, and held a shield, sword and spear, and so on. The god of Mars is depicted by the colour red which symbolises blood. So wearing a red cloak would be appropriate. You'd also try to look like an heroic and honourable soldier, dressed in the typical attire worn by an army in battle. Nevertheless, Mars was not some vicious warmongering god. His purpose of going to war was to merely bring about peace, so his values are oriented around peace, not war.

He is also the god of Agriculture, so he can be associated with fertility too. 

So, given Cavendish's periodic classical references, she may be picturing the Princess, at this point, as the Roman god Mars may have looked, whilst, at the same time, being aware of the gender debates and religious controversies surrounding Deuteronomy 22:5. 

At question time, I explained to Tiller¹¹ that the pagan custom and ritual was to dress as the gender of the god one is praying to so everyone dressed in women's clothing when praying to the goddess Venus and everyone dressed in men's attire when praying to the god of Mars. Hence, crossdressing was commonplace amongst pagan worshipers irrespective of gender identity. So, I suggest, that the princess may simply know that she shouldn't wear a petticoat when worshiping Mars, and therefore apologises out loud for wearing female attire because she's breaking the pagan etiquette and customs surrounding correct worship rituals. Therefore, if this is true, then on this picture, that passage may not tell us much about the Princess's internal sense of gender identity because she would apologise for breaking this religious practice, irrespective of her biological sex or her gender identity. 

Tiller¹² replied she was unaware of this pagan crossdressing religious custom. She merely saw this scene as being one of the many shifts in gender throughout this play. And she had interpreted this passage within the context of for instance, another scene towards the end of the play, when the princess ends up, seemingly, a macho male Prince who is liable to remove Lady Happy out the convent by force, using the power of the whole army of a nation. Hence, Tiller¹³ related this later section, referring to war, as being relevant as to why the Princess is praying to Mars, the god of war, earlier in the play. 

The passages in the Convent of Pleasure that I assume Tiller is referring to, are in Act V Scene I.¹⁴

I'll resume my philosophical analysis of this section in the Convent of Pleasure in the next episode. Feel free to follow, like and interact with the official social media channels for Philosophy Fluency, on Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and X. You can also leave a comment on the Spotify platform about an episode. Until next time, have a good week! 

References / bibliography:

¹Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, First published in: 'Plays, never before printed', Printed in London by A. Maxwell, 1668.

Available online at the University of Pennsylvania Digital Library, edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom 

Accessed 26 July 2025. 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html

²Ibid

³Digital Cavendish Project. ‘The Convent of Pleasure Edited by Liza Blake and Shawn Moore’, 5 July 2017. http://digitalcavendish.org/complete-works/plays-never-before-printed-1668/convent-of-pleasure/

⁴Ibid 

⁵Cavendish 1668 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html

⁶Ibid 

⁷Tiller, Michaela. 'Cavendish and crossdressing: on the performance and embodiment of gender in English drama' University of Southampton, 2025.

⁸Ibid

⁹Deuteronomy 22:5-11 

¹⁰Kaucky, Liba. Chapter 4: 'Women and Eunuchs – Effeminacy and Power (in the TP)' in Research Thoughts on... Spinoza - Volume 3: A Feminist Approach to Spinoza's Political Treatise (2019)

https://myspinozaresearchdiary.blogspot.com/2019/05/spinoza-vol-3-ebook-chapter-4-women-and.html?m=1

¹¹Tiller 2025

¹²Ibid

¹³Ibid

¹⁴Cavendish 1668 

Part 5: Is the Comparison between Ariel and the Princess Helpful?

Further to my previous four posts, I'm sharing my Philosophy Fluency podcast script. The one in this post is my script for my episode 6, Season 13, in which I extend my research thoughts on Cavendish and Shakespeare, following the Cavendish on Literature conference last month. 

For the reference bibliography of works cited in this episode, see the end of this blog post. 

This episode is available to listen to on demand on Spotify 🔗 here

🎧

Hello and welcome to Season 13, episode 6 of Philosophy Fluency. Over cooling ice coffees today, I shall build on my research questions and topics in last week's episode. 

So, picking up from where I left off in the previous episode, there's a wide variety of interpretations of Ariel's gender, ranging from: (interview)

1) Ariel is simply a woman: 

for example, Bianca Summons who suggested back in 2004 that Ariel was originally seen as a woman in Shakespeare's day so we should continue with that historical perspective today¹; 

2) Ariel is androgenous: 

for instance, some read Ariel as androgynous, such as Miranda Garno Nesler's interpretation in 2012² and Goga's MA thesis³ which puts forward a trans androgynous argument in 2022; 

3) Ariel is trans: 

for example, Mary Ann Saunders⁴ who sees Ariel as a transwoman or a trans feminine airy spirit; and Ezra Horbury⁵ who gave a very different, nuanced and historically informed trans interpretation of Ariel in 2021. In Robin Haas's abstract for this year's LAMDA run conference⁶, they argue that Ariel is trans and reflects the trans experience, although, in the abstract, they don't specify in what way Ariel is trans. Nevertheless, Haas⁷ sees parallels to be drawn with the Princess (who they interpret as trans feminine) in Cavendish's playwriting. 

This brings me to the nugget of my argument in this episode and the previous one: 

Once we are aware of the many different ways we can interpret Ariel's gender and overall situation and character, does this help or hinder our interpretation of Cavendish's Princess in the Convent? 

There's obvious differences between them: As Ezra Horbury⁸ points out, Ariel is non-human, a fairy and somewhat childlike, and these are important relevant factors that must contextualise our understanding of Ariel, whilst being aware of Early Modern historical concepts, such as their view of both male and female children as genderless people; and their more genderfluid depiction of fairies than we typically have today, when fairies are now portrayed as cis gender, ultra feminine beings. In the Tempest, Ariel is also trapped in a tree by a witch at one point, whereas the Princess is not trapped in the Convent at all, she is choosing to enter and live in and enjoy the all female world of the Convent of Pleasure. So freedom for Ariel is outside of the confines of the tree, whereas for the Princess, freedom is within the convent, away from the confines of her royal duties outside of the Convent of Pleasure. The purpose is totally different too: the witch is being oppressive by forcing Ariel to live in the tree whereas the purpose of the Convent of Pleasure is not to be oppressive, on the contrary, it is to free females from misogynistic, patriarchal oppression in the world outside and to enable them to be happy, free and flourish to their full potential. 

So I argue that, in terms of the plot and character, there are not many parallels to be drawn, indeed there's many important dissimilarities. 

If we nevertheless wish to explore the gender expressions and identities of Ariel and the Princess, perhaps amongst other characters in Elizabethan and Early Modern plays, then I think drawing parallels are interesting but limited. 

Do we: 

1) compare and contrast Ariel and the Princess then interpret their gender as ultimately different expressions and identities? 

Or 2) would we have to remain with the same gender identity between Ariel and the Princess to remain consistent in our research approach? If so, then do we read the Princess's gender in light of Ariel's gender, or the other way round? Should Shakespeare's writings be so influential on our interpretation of Cavendish's own authorial intentions? On this approach, if Ariel is a trans woman or trans feminine then so is the Princess. If Ariel is non-binary then so is the Princess. If Ariel is androgynous then so is the Princess. 

This tension of which to choose and why, should come down to what solid textual evidence we have. Nevertheless, different scholars have different readings of Ariel despite having access to the same original Shakespearean text. With Cavendish's play, the original Convent of Pleasure text has been complicated by the slips which muddy the water about Cavendish's authorial intentions and whether all passages in the printed text inform us correctly about Cavendish's depiction of the Princess's gender. 

Hence, I argue, whether we read the Princess as a woman; a trans woman; a trans feminine person; a somewhat androgynous person; a non-binary person; or a genderfluid person depends more on the wording of the Convent of Pleasure and what weighting we are prepared to give the slips or not, than being too concerned with the literary context of other Early Modern plays, informative and interesting as it is, especially within the field of Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Gender. 

Do join me next week, for more Philosophy Fluency and an analysis of Cavendish's Princess and Lady Happy in the Convent. Have a good week and enjoy the lovely summer weather. If you'd like to read the scripts for these last few podcast episodes, they're available on my blog: The Feminist Margaret Cavendish Circle. 

References/ Bibliography: 

Text discussed:

Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, First published in: 'Plays, never before printed', Printed in London by A. Maxwell, 1668.

Available online at the University of Pennsylvania Digital Library, edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom 

Accessed 26 July 2025. 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html.

¹Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Mary Ann S. Saunders. ‘The Tempest as Trans Archive: An Interview with Scholar Mary Ann S. Saunders’. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 14, no. 2 (28 April 2023). doi:10.18274/bl.v14i2.351. pdf version p119

²Ibid 

³Goga, Aurora Jonathan. 'Gendering “Ariel and all his Quality” (I.II.193): Nonbinary Embodiment in Text and Performances of The Tempest.' Master’s Thesis in English Literature and Culture, Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen (May 2022)

https://bora.uib.no/bora-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/3000920/Aurora-Jonathan-Goga---Gendering-Ariel-and-All-his-Quality.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

⁴Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Mary Ann S. Saunders. (28 April 2023). 

⁵Ibid; Horbury, Ezra. Early Modern Transgender Fairies. (2020) draft paper available at: 

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10113822/3/Horbury_TSQ%20Early%20Modern%20Transgender%20Fairies%20Revised.pdf 

Later published as: 

Horbury, Ezra. ‘Early Modern Transgender Fairies’. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1 February 2021): 75–95. doi:10.1215/23289252-8749596.

⁶Haas, Robin. ' “Merrily, merrily shall I live now”: Reading for Trans Joy and Futurity in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure' paper presentation at the 47th Comparative Drama Conference 9th July 2025

‘CDC 2025’. Accessed 25 June 2025. 

Conference website: 

http://comparativedramaconference.org/

2025 Abstracts: 

https://www.lamda.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Bookof Abstracts-47th ComparativeDramaConference.pdf

⁷Ibid

⁸Horbury 2020; 2021

Part 4: Aesthetics and Gender: Ariel and the Princess

As in my previous three posts, I'm sharing my Philosophy Fluency podcast script. This one below is for episode 5, Season 13, which explores a selection of my research thoughts on Cavendish and Shakespeare after attending the Cavendish on Literature conference last month. 

For the reference bibliography of works cited in this episode, see the end of this blog post. 

This episode is available to listen to on demand on Spotify 🔗 here

🎧

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Fluency, Season 13, episode 5. This week in London, UK, we have another heatwave so, I'll pour out some iced coffee and begin exploring a slightly different research angle to the trans reading of Shakespeare's character of Ariel in his play 'The Tempest' and Margaret Cavendish's character of the Princess in her play: 'The Convent of Pleasure'. 

My discussion is within the fields of the History of Philosophy; Aesthetics, in particular the philosophy of literature and the philosophy of theatre; the Philosophy of Gender; LGBTQIAPD2S+ Philosophy; and Intersectional Feminist Philosophy. 

In this episode, I shall continue to disseminate some of my latest Cavendish research thoughts and show its relevance to recent scholarship in academia. 

In this episode, I shall take the parallel between Shakespeare's Ariel and Cavendish's Princess that Robin Haas draws in their paper, when she reads both these characters as transwomen. 

I am currently exploring the following research questions: 

Why read Ariel as being a transwoman as opposed to being a non-binary character? Such as either androgenous, which is a trans non-binary gender identity; or as genderfluid, which isn't an inherently transgender identity, that depends on whether the person or fictional character is still partially cisgender or not. 

If there is a parallel to be drawn between Ariel and the Princess, then, if we were to interpret Ariel as non-binary, would this give us a non-binary understanding of the Princess or not? 

If the Princess is non-binary, would this be a trans non-binary gender identity, such as essentially gender neutral, or androgynous? Or would the Princess be more like a third gender, akin to those in other cultures, such as the Muxes in Mexico who are often born male but present as non-binary or trans feminine and undertake female gender roles and jobs alongside women in female spaces? Or would the Princess be genderfluid, like the ever shape shifting character of Ariel? Would the Princess be a trans or non-trans type of genderfluid person? 

Or, if we understand Robin Haas's argument to amount to the Princess as being more in line with being trans feminine rather than fully a trans woman, then would we end up with the Princess being somewhat non-binary, as in a feminine-aligned non-binary person? 

Or, do the similarities and differences between Ariel and the Princess simply tell us that attempts to draw parallels break down? Why? Because, one could argue, Ariel is a spirit or somewhat non-human therefore inherently more genderless and shape shifting, whereas the Princess is very much a human being, hence gender and social roles and expectations and forming real relationships is a far more relevant concept to explore than it is with Ariel. 

It would seem that Mary Ann Saunders's trans focused reading of Ariel¹, and Robin Elizabeth Haas's trans reading of the Princess² are unusual within Shakespeare and Cavendish scholarship. 

In terms of LGBTQ+ readings of Ariel, especially within English Literature scholarship: 

It is more typical of gender diverse approaches to interpretations of Ariel to argue that Ariel is a non-binary, perhaps a genderfluid, or an androgynous or a genderless character. 

A standard reading of Ariel (on educational platforms) is described thus, and I quote:

"Ariel's gender is flexible, interpreted differently over time, enhancing his magical quality in the play."³

"Over the years, Ariel has been played by both male and female actors, and the character’s gender is open to artistic interpretation."⁴

For instance, in the Elizabethan times, in Shakespeare's era, the role of Ariel was played by young male actors because women by and large were not allowed to go into the acting profession. Later, in the Restoration period, the character of Ariel was played by women. This is perhaps relevant to our understanding of Robin Haas's interpretative approach, given that their research interest and specialisation apparently lies in the Restoration period, because her PhD student profile on the Department of English section of the Rutgers University website states, and I quote:

"They are particularly interested in questions of identity and performance on the Restoration stage and at the 18th-century masquerade"⁵

So perhaps there's some Restoration period staging assumptions at work within Robin Haas's trans approach to Shakespeare's and Cavendish's plays. 

Nevertheless, more standard readings of Ariel highlight that Ariel is referred to using masculine pronouns during the play, including within stage directions (stating "his wings") and Ariel refers to himself with a male pronoun when he talks about "his quality"⁶. 

Nonetheless, some explain away any masculine pronouns by reminding us that this might simply be the playwrighting convention of Shakespeare's time, given that all actors were men. 

However, Jamieson points out in this educational resource that, and I quote:

"Consequently, directors have never taken a hard stance on Ariel's gender. In many ways, this is fitting, as the sexlessness of this spirit helps to perpetuate the airy magical quality for which Ariel is famous."⁷

Hence, for instance, other scholars and graduate students have explored the idea that Ariel is better understood as a non-binary character, outside of the male/female gender binary. For example, in the MA thesis: 'Gendering “Ariel and all his Quality” (I.II.193): Nonbinary Embodiment in Text and Performances of The Tempest.', Goga argues for a non-binary understanding of Ariel⁸. I've only just discovered this MA thesis, but I'd be interested to read it in more detail. What I can initially gather from the thesis abstract, is that this argument may amount to a trans non-binary, and more specifically, an androgenous, interpretation of Ariel⁹. Goga mentions that trans interpretations of Ariel are rare and feels that readings and some stagings of Ariel tend to fall into the gender binary of either masculine or feminine depictions¹⁰. 

Do join me early next week for more Philosophy Fluency, in which I build on this week's episode. In the meantime, enjoy the sunshine! 

Works cited in this episode:

¹Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Mary Ann S. Saunders. ‘The Tempest as Trans Archive: An Interview with Scholar Mary Ann S. Saunders’. Borrowers and Lenders The Journal of Shakespeare Appropriations 14, no. 2 (28 April 2023): 117–24. doi:10.18274/bl.v14i2.351.

https://borrowersojsazsu.tdl.org/borrowers/article/view/35

²Haas, Robin Elizabeth. ‘Collaboration, Publication, and Queer/Trans Recognition in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure’. University of Southampton, (2025).

³Jamieson, Lee. ‘Who Was Ariel in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest?”’ ThoughtCo. (Updated on February 04, 2020) Last Accessed 9 July 2025. 

https://www.thoughtco.com/ariel-in-the-tempest-2985274.

⁴Ibid

⁵Department of English. ‘Details’. Accessed 9 July 2025. 

https://english.rutgers.edu/people/graduate-student-profiles/details.html?start=30.

⁶Jamieson (2020)

⁷Ibid

⁸Goga, Aurora Jonathan. 'Gendering “Ariel and all his Quality” (I.II.193): Nonbinary Embodiment in Text and Performances of The Tempest.' Master’s Thesis in English Literature and Culture, Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen (May 2022) 

https://bora.uib.no/bora-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/3000920/Aurora-Jonathan-Goga---Gendering-Ariel-and-All-his-Quality.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

⁹Ibid

¹⁰Ibid

Part 3: Cavendish, the Princess, Gender and the Slips

Further to my previous post, here I'd like to share my podcast script for episode 4 of Season 13, which includes a selection of my research thoughts on Cavendish after attending the Cavendish on Literature conference last month. 

For the reference bibliography of works cited in this episode, see the end of this blog post. 

This episode is available to listen to on demand on Spotify 🔗 here

🎧

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Fluency, Season 13, episode 4!

In last week's episode, I contextualised Robin Elizabeth Haas's paper¹ at the Cavendish on Literature conference that I attended last month at Southampton University by seeing it in relation to other scholarship in her chosen topics in her paper. Over ice cold coffees today during this heatwave in London, UK, I shall build on the exploration of whether the character of the Princess in Cavendish's play 'The Convent of Pleasure' is trans or not by extending my more descriptive discussion of my research last week to my analytical research analysis of the debate this week. This is still seasonal for LGBT+ Pride, despite Pride Month ending on Monday, because there's still plenty of Pride Parades to go, including the big London Pride Parade this Saturday. 

I ended the last episode on Mary Ann Saunders's interpretation of Shakespeare's character of Ariel in The Tempest as being trans. How so? Well, briefly put, Ariel is referred to with masculine pronouns in the play, but nevertheless, three times within the play, Ariel changes into looking female. 

To be more specific and nuanced about her scholarship, Saunders draws on her personal experiences as she specifically moulds her trans interpretation to the way Ariel was depicted in Julie Taymor's film version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, released in 2010². In her research within the field of Literature, Writing and Discourse, Saunders explores the question of the extent to which cisgender writers fall into, conscious and perhaps unconscious, cisgender bias and stereotyping³. Saunders was especially concerned about scholarly interpretations containing nasty, anti-trans bias when she read a paper which viciously described the film's visual depiction of Ariel as physically looking part male and part female as, and I quote: "grotesque", "monstrous", a "body horror" while wrongly and insultingly claiming that it's an "impossible" looking body, despite this reflecting many trans people's personal experiences of transitioning⁴. So, despite not being a Philosopher, Saunders began her stance by responding to arguments made within secondary literature on Shakespeare. 

She also finds contemporary relevance to this. For instance, raising awareness of anti-trans stereotypes that depict transwomen as faking their womanhood to trick people into relationships they wouldn't consent to if they knew they were trans⁵. In the case of Ariel in The Tempest, the scene in question is when Prospero turns Ariel into presumably a female-presenting sea nymph in order to deceive and entice a Prince into desiring Ariel⁶. 

Here we can see the potential parallel with some anti-trans readings of the Princess in Cavendish's 'The Convent of Pleasure' as essentially being a man tricking his way into the female-only space of the Convent to trick an unsuspecting lesbian into a sexual relationship and marriage with a biological cis man Prince merely masquerading as a biological cis woman Princess. 

However, I think that Saunders has given herself more margin for error so she can keep her argument and scholarship easily plausible, defendable and contained by limiting the scope and focus of her initial trans reading of Ariel to a specific paper about a depiction in a specific film. That way, she can support her arguments as comprising of true, quite indisputable statements, for instance, that there's textual evidence that papers analysing the depiction of Ariel in that 2010 film can contain anti-trans stereotypes and bias that alienate trans people and ignore their trans experiences. 

In contrast, I suggest that Robin Elizabeth Haas⁷ has set herself a much harder task by making more sweeping statements in her scholarship and by relying on the authenticity of the slips. I haven't yet made a detailed study of what assurances we have that these slips are beyond all doubt, definitely written by Margaret Cavendish. 

But let's just indulge in exploring a few hypotheses for a moment, to put together some initial research questions, such as: Why would Margaret Cavendish need to attach corrections slips to books she, I believe, was self-publishing? She began self-publishing, albeit through a printer, from 1653, and The Convent of Pleasure, first appeared when she self-published her collection Plays Never Before Printed in 1668, using the female printer Anne Maxwell. So Cavendish presumably wouldn't need to add slips to correct a publisher or a sexist male printer because she was already using a woman's printing service for about the last two years. 

Suppose Margaret Cavendish never instructed or wrote any paper slips? How could we establish whether any of the slips, all of them, or none of them, are fakes? 

For instance, has the paper used for these slips been scanned and analysed for signs that they date back to her in the 17th century? What assurances do we have that Cavendish authored or instructed these slips herself? Given the shocking discovery of the fake Dead sea Scrolls, what checks have been conducted to ensure none of the slips in Cavendish's works are fakes, either added in a previous century, or in the 21st century? After all, some misogynistic men in her lifetime falsely claimed that Margaret Cavendish did not author all her own work. For instance, even the Cavendish family's own doctor and fellow Natural Philosopher, Walter Charleton, pretended that Cavendish was not the original, independent female writer and sole author of her works as she sold herself to be⁸. Furthermore, although Cavendish had difficult publishers, which is why she went on to self-publish, she is no longer having to battle male publisher's at time these slips were added to The Convent of Pleasure. 

So, given this negative historical backdrop of plotting against the reputation of Margaret Cavendish, it's not impossible that someone would be motivated to create some fake slips to alter her work to make it appear as though she depended on her husband to help her write her work, and to convince people that she, Margaret Cavendish, was misrepresenting herself as a capable, intelligent, independent woman who never needed to co-author in order to produce her ideas and books. 

This is a typical misogynistic stance that attempts to destroy women's reputation and work. As soon as their work is of a high standard you try to pretend they couldn't possibly have done it themselves. Unbelievably, this type of misogynistic nonsense still circulates today against talented, highly intelligent women. And now we're trying to impose this misogyny onto women in the past. The 18/19th century philosopher, Mary Shepherd has also suffered from this recently. Scholarship⁹ is trying to remove one of her treatises by claiming it was written by a man. A preposterous idea because the man in question wasn't even a philosopher. 

Therefore, it is important and rather pivotal to establish the authenticity  of these slips otherwise researchers could be distracted away from focusing on Margaret Cavendish and focusing instead on her husband, William, and whether he, the long-suffering husband, was simply not accredited for his contribution to her writings. This appropriates women's history by coming out with a competing claim that women write men out of history too for which researchers have no evidence. It's rather a fanciful claim in the modern sense of the word. Indeed, this focus on William has already been suggested at the end of the Southampton conference, to my horror because William Cavendish himself stated that her poems were written solely by her and defended his stance against the doctor who tried to claim otherwise. Why are we questioning William's defence of his wife, Margaret? 

It's also unacceptable to take attention away from a female philosopher/scientist and start emphasizing the alleged importance of a man, worse still, a husband. 

This is an identity issue. Just as we try to rebalance the history of philosophy to celebrate under represented groups, such as women, especially as in Cavendish's case, a woman who was genderfluid and a lesbian, we try to turn attention back to a man. 

This sounds like some modern gender critical and anti-LGBT ideology being imposed on past women writers/philosophers especially if they are perceived as going against sexist societal expectations by not being simpering, feminine, good Christian women. In this way, identity is written out of history to support the notion it never existed in the first place.  

The 18th century philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft suffered from this too. Today, many scholars agree that Wollstonecraft was sapphic which led to her being included in Islington's Pride LGBTQ+ heritage plaques project, acknowledging her sapphic identity¹⁰. This plaque is pink coloured but a distinctive rectangular shape which highlights her "queer legacy"¹¹ and that she had lesbian relationships with women. Wollstonecraft used to also have a circular pink plaque, which was pink rather than the usual blue London plaque to specifically commemorate women's achievements in history. Although it was only recently erected, it was no sooner up then down. It's now listed as lost. It has been mysteriously, quietly removed and not replaced. According to London Remembers¹², it was taken down on some vague excuse that it was because of renovations to the frontage of the building. Why wasn't it permanently on the wall of the building like all other plaques? Wollstonecraft is an excellent example of far right ideology suppressing anything that isn't binary, heterosexual, emphasizing the differences between men and women. That is, men being geniuses and women, well, just a sad inferior version of men.

Returning to Margaret Cavendish. I really hope that the slips are authentic and that we can know, beyond all reasonable doubt, that they are originals and therefore can inform our Cavendish scholarship. I presume that such checks have already been carried out before the slips have been incorporated into Cavendish scholarship. Nevertheless, I shall take the precaution of continuing to research and question the authenticity of these slips, before I base my interpretation of Margaret Cavendish too heavily on them. Because, Margaret Cavendish was a very self assured woman who was confident in her own intellectual abilities so she wouldn't want her husband indeed any man to help her or adjust her writings And, furthermore, she was a feminist, before the word was in circulation, so wanted to show that a woman can live by the pen and be famous by their own efforts. 

After all the medieval feminist courtly writer, Christine de Pizan was widely acclaimed by royalty and intellectuals as the first woman to live by the pen. Her poetry and prose was widely known and hugely respected. Perhaps Margaret Cavendish modelled herself on de Pizan. The latter was a court writer and Margaret Cavendish was at court as part of Queen Henrietta Maria's close circle. So there's a similarity between them, right there, especially since both were in French courts for a period of time, even though they were born elsewhere. And this may be why Cavendish, inspired by de Pizan, also wrote poetry and prose.

In my opinion, the certainty of the authenticity of the slips is a pressing issue, given that entire editions of Cavendish's work are relying on the slips being of scholarly value and relevance, and that PhD student researchers such as Robin Elizabeth Haas are relying on the perceived wisdom in academia that these slips are genuine and do tell us something significant about Margaret Cavendish's authorial intentions and wishes. 

Enjoy the lovely weather and do join me next week for the next installment of Season 13 on Cavendish and more Philosophy Fluency. 

Works cited in this episode:

¹Haas, Robin Elizabeth. ‘Collaboration, Publication, and Queer/Trans Recognition in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure’. University of Southampton, 2025.

²Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Mary Ann S. Saunders. ‘The Tempest as Trans Archive: An Interview with Scholar Mary Ann S. Saunders’. Borrowers and Lenders The Journal of Shakespeare Appropriations 14, no. 2 (28 April 2023): 117–24. doi:10.18274/bl.v14i2.351.

https://borrowersojsazsu.tdl.org/borrowers/article/view/35

Ibid

⁴Fisher, Gavin. ‘Shakespeare's Transgender Spirit Sparks UBC Professor's Talk’. CBC News, 14 March 2016. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/shakespeare-s-transgender-spirit-sparks-ubc-professor-s-talk-1.3489788. 

⁵ Fisher (2016); Joubin, Saunders (2023)

⁶ Fisher (2016); Joubin, Saunders (2023)

⁷ Haas (2025)

⁸Semler, L.E. Stories of Selves and Infidels: Walter Charleton’s Letter to Margaret Cavendish (1655). In: Shaw, J., Kelly, P., Semler, L.E. (eds) Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan, London. (2013)

 https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349958_15

⁹Boyle, D., “A Mistaken Attribution to Lady Mary Shepherd”, Journal of Modern Philosophy 2: 5. (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/jmp.2077

¹⁰ Islington’s Pride. ‘Our 50 LGBTQ+ Heritage Plaques Across Islington’, 18 May 2021.

https://islingtonspride.com/2021/05/18/50-heritage-plaques-2/.

¹¹ Ibid

¹² London Remembers. ‘Mary Woollstonecraft - Lost Plaque’. Accessed 9 July 2025.

https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/mary-woollstonecraft-lost-plaque/.