"When I come across a story that makes assumptions about gender, my impulse is to question those assumptions."

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.

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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. There always is.

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! And some of them are exactly that: in the Serbian tale “A Woman Became a Man,” the title character very much wants to make the transformation happen and does so by performing a complicated ritual involving a duck stolen off the head of a sleeping outlaw. (What does the duck have to do with it? I have no idea.) And I particularly like the end of the Finnish story “Satu,” where the protagonist just hands a wad of cash to a witch to get it done. Two or three of the stories are also quite lesbian friendly; the romantically involved women are both pleased when the heroine removes her masculine disguise. The Chilean fairy tale “Florinda” and the Spanish fairy tale “The Story of the Unicorn” are particularly good examples of this. In “The Story of the Unicorn,” the two women even live as a married couple for years before the protagonist’s final meta­morphosis into a man.

But as I studied the tales more closely, I realized that most of them weren’t as queer positive as they seemed. Fairy tales change depending on who’s telling them. Over the centuries, more than a few of these stories passed through places and pe­riods that didn’t exactly look upon queerness favorably. And when that happens, the usual result is queer erasure. In the case of these stories, the queerness couldn’t be erased entirely with­out destroying the plot, but it could be downplayed. So the heroine usually doesn’t seek out the transformation; more often, it’s imposed by some outside force, such as a curse. Most of the time it seems to happen solely to ensure the “right” ending, with everyone locked in a traditional role by the time the story con­cludes.

Like many queer authors, when I come across a story that makes assumptions about gender, my impulse is to question those assumptions. I found myself wondering what would hap­pen to a nonbinary protagonist, someone outside the traditional roles entirely. Much of Jules’s experience of gender is based on my own personal experience (and therefore isn’t meant to be taken as a universal depiction of nonbinary people). Like Jules, I had to take a long and confusing road to come to terms with my own gender identity. Both of us grew up in times and places where we never had a chance to hear the phrase “nonbinary”—Jules in a medieval fantasy land, and me in 1980s America. But, of course, nonbinary people were there in both cases. After all, we’ve always been around.

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Excerpted from This Knight Topples Empires by Ry Herman. Copyright © 2026 by Ry Herman. All rights reserved. Available from Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.