Ry Herman on Finding Inspiration in Queer Fairytales

In the summer of 2024, I went looking for fairy tales that had LGBTQ+ subtext. In a time of renewed attack on queer identi­ties, there’s something I find reassuring in the evidence that we’ve always been around, even in the oldest of texts. Queer people wrote queer love poetry two thousand years ago, and we still do.

Since fairy tales are close to my heart, the first stories I was told in my childhood, I wanted to see what I could discover in them. I hadn’t expected to find much. The most widely known fairy tales are very heteronormative and have rigid gender roles—Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella are all expected to marry a prince, and once they do, their journeys are over—but I was certain there would be something.

After a bit of digging, I came across a tradition of folktales, myths, and fairy tales that contained not only queer subtext but explicitly queer text. Dozens of stories adhere to the following broad pattern: 1) The heroine of the narrative disguises herself as a man. 2) She falls in love with, becomes engaged to, or marries another woman. 3) In the end, the heroine is magically transformed into a man. In the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (ATU) system of folk­tale classification, which catalogs thousands of stories in groups based on shared plot elements, this is known as tale type 514, “The Shift of Sex.” Some of these stories are extremely old.

The Greek myth “Iphis and Ianthe” and the story “Alimbeg’s Daughter” from the Nart sagas of the North Caucasus region both date back thou­sands of years. Many of the tales are clearly related to each other, with shared elements that pop up with some frequency across different stories—such as a talking animal, usually a horse, or a series of tests required to prove the disguised hero­ine’s masculinity. They may have had their origin in a single tale that was adapted into new forms as it spread through different regions and cultures.

But the stories can also vary widely from each other within the loose ATU 514 framework. In one the heroine might be tasked with collecting back taxes from a bunch of poisonous snakes; in another she might have to free a woman imprisoned in a hazelnut. Fairy tales can be very weird.

I found myself wondering what would hap­pen to a nonbinary protagonist, someone outside the traditional roles entirely. When I first encountered these stories, I was delighted. Trans-positive fairy tales!