If Souls Change Sex: A Question from Plato’s Timaeus

The Timaeus is one of Plato's odder works. It’s one of his most unusual dialogues in genre, tone, and method. It's not even much of a dialogue. It's mostly one man talking. Some have proposed that it is an unfinished dialogue, even an experimental work. I think there is something to that claim.

I sat with Dr DT Sheffler in a seminar where we did a close reading of Timaeus. I found it odd, given my background with medieval literature, that I'd never read it before. It was one of the few Platonic works known to medieval scholars, mostly through an incomplete Latin translation by Calcidius. The Latin text ended with section 53b. Fragments of other dialogues were known, such as the Meno and the Phaedo, usually as embedded quotations in commentaries or secondary sources.

It is striking how frequently Plato turns to myth as a vehicle for philosophical insight.

During the class, we wrote frequent short papers instead of a final research paper. The seminar was part of a Great Books program, where the pedagogy is more disputation-based. You write, you argue, you defend. I'll write more about that, sometime.

For now, I'd like to present my final argument in the class.

If Souls Change Sex: A Question from Plato’s Timaeus

Any attempt to read questions of gender identity into Plato’s Timaeus risks an obvious anachronism. The dialogue possesses neither a modern concept of gender identity, nor addresses the kinds of distinctions that structure contemporary trans theory. Yet Plato’s account of the relation between soul and body, and his description of sex as a feature of embodied life rather than of the soul itself, invites a more interesting question. If the same soul can inhabit both male and female bodies across successive lives, what, if anything, anchors "maleness" or "femaleness" at the level of being? This essay does not claim that Plato anticipates modern trans thought, but rather that the logic of the Timaeus places pressure on any strict identification between biological sex and the deeper identity of the person.

The Timaeus is more of a mythology and an exploration than a systematic treatise. It is an εἰκὼς μῦθος (eikōs mythos), a likely story. This makes any interaction between trans theory and the Timaeus into a mythological question. Is the mythology of the Timaeus compatible with modern trans theory, and theories of gender identity? I argue that it is.

Forms

There are some stable, core commitments in Plato's dialogues about Forms. Forms are unchanging and eternal. They are more real than this present reality, which only reflects them dimly and imperfectly, like shadows cast on the wall of a cave. By reference to these eternal, unchanging Forms, particulars are what they are. But Plato is deliberately unsystematic. What some call his theory of forms is really a multi-voiced, evolving body of thought carried by intriguing fragments across several dialogues, sometimes in the mouths of characters other than Socrates, sometimes posed as questions by Socrates rather than definitive statements.

Male/maleness and female/femaleness are never explicitly identified as Forms in the Platonic dialogues. In the Republic, it is suggested that souls are not inherently male or female, making sexual difference irrelevant to a person’s abilities or capacity to be a philosopher. The function of the soul relevant to philosophy is not sex-dependent. In the Symposium, Aristophanes narrates a myth where original humans were round creatures with two faces, divided into three sexes: male (from the sun), female (from the earth), and androgynous (from the moon). Zeus split them, which is why humans now seek their "missing other half." This essay treats maleness and femaleness not as Forms, but as features of embodiment.

Transmigration of the Soul

In the mythology of the Timaeus, a man is viewed as the pinnacle of rationality and creation. He proceeds toward the divine. A man who is unfit, through cowardice, irrationality, or sensory excess, produces progressively less rational embodied selves. In his next incarnation, he becomes a woman, then an animal. This is covered in Timaeus 90e-91a, "According to our likely account, all male-born humans who lived lives of cowardice or injustice were reborn in the second generation as women." Sections 91d–92c describe further degradation: men who did not pursue philosophy or astronomy became four-legged land animals, while others became fish and aquatic creatures, no longer worthy of breathing pure air.

We know from the Republic that during the choice of new lives (617d–620e), souls are guided by traces of their past experiences, selecting their next life according to habits and lessons carried over from before. However, after drinking from the River Lethe, they lose these memories, so while experience shapes their choices, conscious recollection does not completely survive rebirth. We also know, however, from the Meno, that Socrates coached a slave boy into solving geometry problems in 81a–86c that this is evidence for his theory of recollection (anamnesis), the idea that learning is remembering knowledge the soul had before birth.

So, we know explicitly in the mythology of Timaeus, when combined with fragments from other dialogues, that souls can migrate from male to female bodies, and memories may be accessible from previous lives. Those souls migrate across male and female bodies while remaining the same soul, therefore sex cannot be a property of the soul itself, only of its current embodiment.

This raises an immediate question: if sex belongs only to the body and not to the soul, what might ground a soul's sense of displacement in its current embodiment? The anamnesis passages in the Meno suggest a partial answer. If traces of prior embodiment persist in the soul, recoverable through recollection even if not consciously remembered, then a soul that has inhabited a different sexed body might carry forward something of that prior experience, surfacing not as explicit memory but as a felt misalignment between the soul's accumulated history and its present embodiment.

Having established that the Timaeus treats sex as a feature of embodiment rather than of the soul itself, it is worth asking whether this metaphysical gap between person and sexed body finds any resonance in contemporary thought about gender identity.

Trans Theory

Talia Mae Bettcher is a contemporary American philosopher whose work focuses on transgender identity, feminist philosophy, and the nature of personal identity. In "Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance," she argues that trans identity concerns the distinction between the body as socially interpreted, and the person as they understand themselves to be. She argues that those who identify as trans are not "in the wrong body," but instead reframes the issue as a problem of social meaning and misrecognition of the person.

Plato’s account in the Timaeus distinguishes sharply between the soul and the body, treating sex as a feature of embodiment rather than of the rational principle that constitutes the person. When read alongside the work of Talia Mae Bettcher, this distinction takes on a new philosophical resonance. Bettcher argues that trans identity reveals a gap between the body as socially interpreted, and the person as they understand themselves to be, a gap that cannot be resolved by appeal to anatomy alone. Although Plato’s myth embeds a clear hierarchy of embodiments, his metaphysics nevertheless implies that the self is not exhaustively defined by the sexed body it inhabits. In this respect, the transmigration of souls across male and female bodies in the Timaeus is at least compatible with the claim that identity is not reducible to biological sex, even if Plato himself would not have recognized the modern form of that claim. Within this mythological context, a sense of unbelonging or of having lost something once possessed can be understood as a mythological expression of prior embodiment, and recovered memories.

The Timaeus does not depict women becoming men through increased rationality or virtue, but Plato’s view in the Republic, that virtue and philosophy are independent of sex, makes this a reasonable extension of the Timaeus mythology. Also, in the Myth of Er in the Republic (X, 620a), the soul of Atalanta chooses the life of a male athlete because she recognizes the honors attached to it. So the journey of female to male in successive lives seems mythologically possible.

What Plato’s account suggests, even if he does not state it outright, is a distinction between what is essential to the person and what belongs only to embodiment. The rational soul, which persists across lives, carries identity; sex, which can change with each incarnation, belongs to the body and is therefore not constitutive of the self. Even if one were to treat maleness and femaleness as Forms, Plato’s account still distinguishes between the level at which identity is grounded and the level at which it is expressed. The soul persists and carries rational continuity across lives, while sex varies with embodiment, suggesting that identity is anchored in the former rather than the latter. The soul may participate in the Form of maleness or femaleness across different successive incarnations.