Saintly men may act like women, and saintly women may act like men; but what about eunuchs? For the medieval West, the rarity and scarcity of eunuchs renders this question almost academic. When eunuchs do appear in Western sources, they are usually foreigners, heathens, slaves, or all three; castration in the West, whether punitive or medically indicated, was always emphatically out of the ordinary. Even in Byzantium, where castration – punitive, medical, or otherwise – was much more familiar than in the contemporary West, eunuchs occupy an uncomfortably ambiguous position. This is especially true in the context of Byzantine Christianity, where eunuchs are a subject of great concern for ecclesiastical authors: what did saintly behaviour look like for those who were, according to Byzantine understandings of the body, neither fully male nor fully female? Were eunuchs blessed with untemptable chastity, or were they cheating their way into heaven through a virtue that could never be truly tested? Did this proverbial chastity even exist – or was it merely a cover for eunuchs’ innate sensuality and lack of self-control? Eunuchs could, and certainly did, achieve sainthood. Eunuch saints, especially martyrs, had existed from the earliest days of Christianity, and Lives of new eunuch saints – like Niketas the Patrician (761/2-836), Nikephoros of Miletos (fl. 965-969), and Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) – appear throughout the Byzantine period.