Blake Gutt recently completed his PhD, entitled 'Rhizomes, Parasi,EST Folds and Trees: Systems of Thought in Medieval French and Catalan Literary Texts'. The project analyzed sanctity as a kind of parasitism; an encyclopedic, arborescent theory of everything; and the folding and rhizomatic forms embodied by systems of gender. Blake is now a postdoctoral scholar with the Michigan Society of Fellows, and an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. His current research project investigates portrayals of gender transition and transformation in medieval European literary texts, in relation to modern transgender theory. Medieval literary texts provide a perhaps unexpectedly subtle and nuanced space for thinking through the significance of gender transition. A corpus of rich and complex sources featuring non-normatively gendered characters exists in medieval literature, cutting across temporal, generic and linguistic boundaries. When modern transphobic rhetoric imagines trans existence as a new phenomenon, and the Middle Ages as a time before the concept of gender identity even existed, medieval portrayals of non-normative gender and gender transformation become a powerful weapon in demonstrating that trans identities are part of the natural range of human existence. By juxtaposing modern and medieval theories of gender, each can illuminate the blind spots of the other.