Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice.

I'm Eli.

And today we're talking about the story of the female Pope, Pope Joan.

We have a couple of content warnings before we start this episode.

There is mention of an execution, and we also talk about imprisonment and the death of somebody

in prison.

So if that is something you don't want to hear, feel free to skip this episode and check out

any of our other episodes.

So before we start, I want to talk a bit about why we think Pope Joan is relevant to

this podcast.

So firstly, from the point of view of modern conversations about Pope Joan, people

have heard her if you just look at like online articles and stuff like that as being the

trans Pope.

People have seen Pope Joan as a part of queer history, possibly as a trans man, the way we'll note that I am

going to use female pronouns throughout this episode.

And when medieval chroniclers were writing about Pope Joan and the church itself, which now

no longer accepts Pope Joan as a Pope, did accept Pope Joan as having been a Pope.

The story of Pope Joan generated a lot of discussion about gender and, you know,

what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman and things like that. And that's pretty

queer. I'll allow it. Good. I think also, though, like it's probably worth saying that in these

many episodes, because they're kind of an aside to our main podcast, that we are maybe going to be

...