Mother Juana de la Cruz (d. 1534) offers a medieval model for modern LGBTQ people, exemplifying radical authenticity to the queer and holy truth of her own identity. Juana's gender combined masculinity and femininity, and she proclaimed the presence of God she found inherent in that identity. Her sermons invited her listeners, too, to discover God in their own experiences of gender. Juana called on her audience to experience the divine through gender fluidity; gender non-conforming images of God, the saints, the Virgin and Christ are found throughout her sermons. When she told the story of her own re-gendering by God at her conception, she spoke the truth revealed to her of the gender transcendence she lived out in the authenticity of her life. Pointing to her Adam's apple as proof of this miracle, Juana also pointed to the source of her own miraculous and authentic voice, which is simultaneously both her own voice and the voice of Christ.

Juana was born in 1481 to farming parents in the village of Numancia, halfway between Madrid and Toledo. Contrary to the gender expectations of her day, she grew to fame for her sermons, whose echoes would reach the New World as her Sisters carried her relics and fame to the Americas and beyond. Entering a Franciscan community of women as a teenager, she took the name Juana de la Cruz, eventually becoming the community's abbess. For centuries Mother Juana has been celebrated in Spain as ‘la Santa Juana’, but more recently she has gained scholarly attention due to the abundant gender theology of her sermons.