Readers revisiting queer fairy tales may find more than hidden romance: old stories also show how ideas about gender have shifted, and how storytellers have reshaped them. Ry Herman’s exploration of these traditions connects ancient myths and folktales with a modern question: what happens when a hero doesn’t fit neatly into the roles a story expects?
These fairy tales have a surprisingly familiar plot
A heroine disguises herself as a man, falls in love with a woman, then becomes a man by magic. It sounds like an unusually bold twist for a traditional fairy tale, but folklorists recognise this recurring pattern as tale type 514, “The Shift of Sex”, in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system. The folkloredatabase.com entry catalogues the type as part of a broader effort to group folktales by shared plot features.
Ry Herman encountered the pattern while searching for LGBTQ+ themes in traditional stories. The trail led from the Greek myth of Iphis and Ianthe to tales from the North Caucasus and beyond. As Herman observes in Lit Hub, stories can travel and change, picking up local details along the way. And fairy-tale details can be gloriously peculiar: one heroine may face poisonous snakes, another a woman trapped inside a hazelnut.
The endings don't always feel like a happy-ever-after
Some versions put the heroine's transformation at the centre of the story, and the character actively wants it. Herman highlights the Serbian tale “A Woman Became a Man” and the Finnish story “Satu” as examples where a change of sex is sought rather than simply imposed. The first even includes an elaborate ritual involving a duck taken from a sleeping outlaw's head. Folklore doesn't always explain its props.
Other tales leave more room for women’s romantic attachment. In “Florinda” and “The Story of the Unicorn”, the relationships between women are not just a passing disguise or a temporary misunderstanding. Herman notes that the women in the latter story live as a married couple for years before the protagonist's transformation.
But many versions steer towards conventional gender roles by the ending. The heroine's change may happen because of a curse or another outside force, rather than through her own choice. That shift can make a tale seem queer in its setup while still resolving its tension by restoring a familiar social order.
Folklore changes as it passes from teller to teller
That tension is part of what makes these stories worth reading closely. Folktales aren't fixed texts: as they move between communities and generations, details can be adapted, softened or dropped. Scholarship on folklore and gender explores how stories reflect the assumptions of the societies that tell them, while ATU classification helps researchers compare recurring plot structures across versions.
It's a useful reminder that “traditional” doesn't mean timeless or unchanging. A tale may preserve an old idea, reshape it for a new audience, or carry traces of meanings later tellers tried to smooth over. Herman's reading suggests queer themes may remain visible even when a story's ending works to contain them.
What a nonbinary hero might change
Herman's response is to imagine a protagonist who doesn't have to settle into a conventional male or female role. Their novel This Knight Topples Empires grows from that question, drawing on the tale tradition while centring a nonbinary character. Herman writes in Lit Hub that the character's experience is informed by their own, while not being intended as a universal account of nonbinary life.
That distinction matters: a story can offer recognition without claiming to speak for everyone. For readers choosing where to start, look for tales with several recorded versions, then pay attention to who wants a transformation, who causes it and what the ending treats as “right”. The differences between versions can be as revealing as the plot itself.
Why these old stories still feel current
The enduring appeal isn't simply that queer people can be found in old stories, though that discovery can feel comforting. It's also that familiar plots invite new questions. If a heroine's disguise makes a romance possible, what does the story say when that disguise comes off? And why must every ending settle gender in the same way?
Herman's work turns those questions into an invitation rather than a tidy answer. Fairy tales have always been strange, flexible things; sometimes the most modern reading is to let them stay complicated.
Explore a few versions of the same tale and see how each storyteller changes its meaning.
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