Last year, The Globe commissioned me to write a blog on Joan of Arc as part of their promotional material for Charlie Josephine’s play I, Joan. After reading what I wrote, they decided not to publish it, so I’m posting it here. Enjoy! - C

The fact of trans history is tremendously inconvenient to the anti-trans activists so single-mindedly devoted to ridding the public sphere of trans people. After all, the central tenet of transphobia is that transition is a novelty, emerging out of the ether mere moments ago to steal away tomboys and prey upon “confused youth.” The transphobe’s worldview is one in which trans existence must be defined by its newness: our surgeries are experimental (they’re not), dysphoria’s onset is only ever “rapid;” there are so many of us—where did we come from, all of a sudden? Better to slow everything down.

What would it mean for trans writers to claim someone like Joan of Arc, to acknowledge a flicker of recognition across the centuries that separate us? What use might there be in asserting that trans people existed before there were doctors to diagnose us, before sexologists invented words like “eonist” and “invert” and “transsexual” to name us, before psychiatrists and criminologists invented elaborate taxonomies of our perversions? There are, I think, some benefits to such rogue acts of historicization. For one, it makes transphobes incredibly cross, which is an ethical good in and of itself. For another, it loosens the chokehold that clinicians have maintained on defining and gatekeeping transness. Since the mid-20th century, the medical establishment has exercised unilateral authority to determine who is “really” trans and thus deserves access to surgery, hormones, and updated identity documents. The benchmarks created to separate the “true” trans people from the fakers, self-mutilators, and deviants reflect cis anxieties, in particular the fear that too many people are transitioning, that our numbers must be reduced, that transition must be slowed down as much as possible. Imagining trans histories that predate the clinical model of transition, including creative exercises like I, Joan, decouple trans life from medical authority, offering other possibilities for what transness might mean. Maybe being trans isn’t about how you feel inside. Maybe it’s about going to war with England.

Of course, the straightforward and obvious fact is that people have been transitioning for a long time. Take, for instance, Eleanor Rykener, a transfeminine contemporary of Joan of Arc, who lived and worked among women as a tapster, seamstress, and sex worker. We know some of the details of her life because she, like Joan, found herself hauled before an ecclesiastical court that kept records of her interrogation. Unlike Joan, Eleanor was a person of no great political significance. What they shared with each other, and with the many generations of trans people who followed them, was how the courts targeted them for their gender variance.

The legal proceedings that terminated in Joan of Arc’s execution made gender a matter of extraordinary religious and political significance. In the particularly unsympathetic account that formed the basis of Shakespeare’s treatment of Joan of Arc in 1 Henry VI, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Wales (1587), Joan’s condemnation by the Inquisition is described this way: “Wherein found though a virgin, yet first shamefullie rejecting hir sex abominablie in acts and apparell to have counterfeited mankind, and then, all damnablie faithlesse, to be a pernicious instrument to hostilite and bloudshed in divelish witchcraft and sorcerie, sentence accordinglie was pronounced against hir.” The Inquisitors offer to commute the death sentence to life in prison, where Joan would “have leasure” to “bewaile hir misdeeds,” a mercy extended on the condition that “from thenceforth she should cast off hir unnaturall wearing of mans abilliments, and keepe hir to garments of hir owne kind.” First agreeing to this condition, and then almost immediately violating it, “falling straight waie into hir former abominations,” Joan was promptly “executed by consumption of fire.”

What might it mean that Joan was adjudged to have “counterfeited mankind?” On one level, it signals an attempt to pass as male, conceived here by the Inquisition in much the same way that terfs understand it today, as a malicious hoax and an impossibility (indeed, they might well describe my own transition in the same terms as the Inquisitors, convicting me of “rejecting my sex abominably”). But at the same time, “mankind” also meant humanity, a collective noun referring to the entire human species as distinct from animal, vegetative, and ecological forms of life, as arranged into a hierarchy of taxonomical “kinds.” Timon of Athens plays with this sense of the term when turns misanthrope and announces he will retreat to the woods, “where he shall find / The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.” Refusing to “keepe hir to garments of hir owne kinde,” where the “kinde” in question is women, presses Joan outside of the category of the human altogether; they are both a counterfeit man and a counterfeit human, something monstrous or demonic.

In medieval and early modern culture, gender transitivity was regularly sourced to diabolical influences. Heinrich Kramer’s 1486 witch-hunting manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, claimed that witches have been known to steal men’s penises. Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), a refutation of the demonologists (whose number included King James I) mocked Jean Bodin’s treatise On the Demon-mania of the Sorcerers for asserting that witches have a power of “transubstantiation,” according to which “it may be naturallie brought to passe, that a girle shall become a boie; and that anie female may be turned into the male.” Demons themselves were understood to have no fixed gender. Instead, they were thought to be capable of assuming both male, female, and even hermaphroditic forms in order to seduce, impregnate, and defile their human lovers.

Witches, as demons’ agents on earth, were also ascribed indistinct, hybrid, and nonbinary genders. Banquo hails Macbeth’s witches, “so wither’d and wild in their attire” that they “look not like the inhabitants o’the earth,” with the deeply awkward declaration that “you should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.” Failing to conform to sexual dimorphism in a way that frustrates the Banquos and Inquisitors of the world, perhaps by having excess facial hair or “mans abilliments” when “you should be women,” was thus marked as a symptom of witchcraft, the seal of an infernal pact that rendered someone both supernatural and subhuman.

Claiming Joan of Arc for trans history has value, then, beyond insisting that trans life has a long and distinguished pedigree. This trial and execution also tells us something important about the history of transphobia. For if we as trans people recognize ourselves in Joan’s “damnablie faithlesse” refusal to “keepe hir to hir owne kinde,” what is most resonant is not the individualizing matter of identity or gender dysphoria, but the scene of criminalization and dehumanization that characterizes life in a lethally transphobic society. Ironically, the sect of anti-trans feminists so keen on identifying as “the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” might find themselves in this narrative, too—but they would not be the ones bound to the stake.