A Trans Reading of Laurence and the Healing Church
Content Note: This theory discusses menstruation, reproductive anatomy, and transgender identity in the context of Bloodborne's lore. It is speculative and based on thematic analysis rather than explicit canonical confirmation.
Without understanding Laurence as a trans or nonbinary person with female reproductive organs, the Healing Church becomes an organization inexplicably obsessed with menstruation for no discernible reason.
The Healing Church's highest symbol is a bleeding vulva. Their most sacred figures are the Blood Saints—women who endlessly refine and re-bleed blood. The communion rune, worn and venerated throughout Yharnam, depicts menstrual blood flowing into a chalice. Yet the Church is built around Laurence, not Queen Yharnam, not any female founder.
If Laurence is understood as cisgender male, this creates a profound narrative dissonance: why would an institution founded by and centered on a man make menstruation its holiest sacrament?
But if Laurence is trans or nonbinary with a menstruating body, suddenly the entire symbolic structure of the Healing Church makes coherent sense.
Before examining the specific evidence, it's essential to understand that Bloodborne is fundamentally about transformation and the dissolution of biological boundaries:
In a game so thoroughly invested in bodily transformation and the breaking of biological categories, transgender identity is not anachronistic—it is thematically central. Laurence being trans would not be an imposition of modern concepts onto the narrative; it would be an expression of the game's core philosophy about flesh, identity, and transformation.
The Communion rune is the most important symbol of the Healing Church. It appears in multiple tiers of increasing decoration, each more elaborate than the last, signifying deeper levels of veneration.
The rune depicts a vulva with blood flowing from it, meant to be caught in a chalice below. The opening is also rendered as an eye—connecting menstruation directly to Insight, to divine sight, to cosmic perception.
This is not abstract symbolism. This is anatomically specific. The Healing Church's central icon is menstrual blood being collected for sacred use.
If Laurence has female reproductive organs and menstruates, then:
"We are born of the blood, made men by the blood, undone by the blood."
If Laurence is trans masculine, this phrase becomes literal autobiography. His blood—menstrual blood from a vulva—is what made him into a man. Not despite his anatomy, but through it. His bleeding body is inseparable from his masculine identity, and both become sacred.
Oedon is described as the only Great One with potentially masculine associations, yet is explicitly formless—existing only in blood and voice, lacking any corporeal presence.
The name "Oedon" appears to derive from Oedipus—the figure at the center of Freud's theory of psychosexual development and gendered identity formation. The Oedipus complex is fundamentally about identity conflict, about the struggle between what you are assigned and what you become.
If Oedon's name encodes gendered psychological conflict, and Oedon represents Laurence's consciousness in the dream theory framework, then the name itself points to trans identity—the conflict between assigned sex and actual gender, between body and mind, between what others see and what you are.
All other Great Ones have female characteristics (Kos, Ebrietas, Flora/Moon Presence, Mergo's Wet Nurse) as they are emerged from Queen Yharnam's body parts. Oedon alone is designated "masculine" while having no physical form whatsoever.
This is perfect trans coding:
If Oedon is Laurence's consciousness, then the Communion rune depicting a bleeding vulva is literally showing where Oedon resides—masculine identity (Oedon) existing within menstruating body (the blood flowing from the vulva). The eye in the rune represents Insight, consciousness, Oedon seeing through the blood.
If Oedon = Laurence's consciousness, the encoding becomes explicit:
"We are born of the blood, made men by the blood"
Born of the blood = assigned sex from menstruating body
Made men by the blood = transition through that same sacred blood
Blood Saints are figures within the Healing Church who refine blood and produce it in usable form for blood ministration. They are exclusively female.
Their role is to recreate what Laurence's body did naturally. They bleed, they refine, they produce the sacred blood over and over in ritualized form. They are living proxies for Laurence's menstrual cycle, maintaining the flow of sacred blood after his death.
If Laurence menstruated, the Blood Saints are the Church's attempt to perpetuate his biological function through other bodies. They become institutional surrogates for his lost cycle.
This also explains why they are specifically women—not because women are "naturally" suited to this role in some essentialist sense, but because the Church is trying to replicate the function of Laurence's specific anatomy, and they choose people with similar reproductive systems to continue the sacred bleeding.
The Blood-Starved Beasts in Old Yharnam are explicitly female and anatomically dissected/flayed. Their bodies are exposed, their flesh raw, their forms suggesting both beast transformation and surgical violation.
These beasts visually echo Laurence's own fate—dissected on the Surgery Altar, his body taken apart, studied, his beast hide removed and worn by Brador. The Blood-Starved Beasts appear to be ritualized recreations of what happened to Laurence:
If the Church revered Laurence's bleeding body as sacred, they might attempt to recreate his transformation ritually—choosing women (or female beasts), allowing or forcing their transformation, then dissecting them in imitation of what was done to Laurence. These beasts become horrific echoes of the Church's founder, perpetual reminders of the sacred body that was lost.
Laurence's voice acting throughout the game is notably soft, young, and androgynous. This includes his dialogue in the skull memory cutscene as well as all of his cut content voice lines.
The voice does not read as "mature masculine authority figure." It reads as young, ambiguous in gender, neither clearly masculine nor feminine. This vocal characterization supports a nonbinary or trans masculine reading—someone whose gender presentation doesn't align with binary masculine stereotypes.
Combined with the game's text describing "young Byrgenwerth scholars," the voice acting suggests Laurence is not the bearded patriarch the fandom now often assumes, but someone whose age and gender presentation are both more ambiguous and complex.
Some might argue that the Healing Church's menstrual symbolism stems from Queen Yharnam—a pregnant woman whose body was dissected at Byrgenwerth, whose Great Ones were created from her body parts. However, this explanation fails on multiple levels:
Queen Yharnam's violation is significant to the lore, but it does not explain why the Healing Church, specifically, is institutionally structured around menstrual blood collection and veneration.
If Laurence is trans/nonbinary with female reproductive organs, every piece of the Healing Church's symbolism and structure suddenly makes sense.
His menstrual blood becomes the source of blood ministration—the Church's founding miracle
The Communion rune depicts his anatomy as the holiest symbol, with Oedon (his consciousness) residing within the blood
Oedon's formless nature represents masculine identity existing independently of physical form
Oedon's name (from Oedipus) encodes gendered psychological conflict
The Blood Saints are institutional proxies maintaining his biological function
The phrase "made men by the blood" becomes his own transition narrative made theology
The Blood-Starved Beasts are ritual recreations of his sacred, dissected body
His androgynous voice reflects a gender presentation that doesn't fit binary categories
His dissection on the Surgery Altar is the violation of the body that gave everything
Without this reading, you're left with a Church that worships a cis man while being bizarrely, inexplicably obsessed with menstruation. With this reading, the Church makes sense—it is built on venerating a trans masculine person whose bleeding body became sacred, whose monthly cycle became sacrament, whose anatomy became the foundation of an entire theology.
Bloodborne is a game about bodies that refuse to stay fixed. Humans become beasts. Beasts become humans. Great Ones emerge from human organs. Eyes develop inside skulls. Flesh becomes cosmic.
In this context, Laurence being trans is not a deviation from the themes—it is their purest expression. His body transformed blood into sacrament, anatomy into theology, menstruation into the foundation of masculine identity. He was both/and, never either/or—bleeding and male, sacred source and man, the body that gives and the self that transcends.
The Healing Church didn't worship masculinity. They didn't worship femininity. They worshipped transformation itself, and Laurence—trans, bleeding, becoming—was transformation incarnate.
"We are born of the blood, made men by the blood, undone by the blood."
— The complete cycle: birth, transition, and the cost of sacredness.