you too can piss off both the catholic church and cisfeminists at the same time by saying this one simple phrase: joan of arc is part of trans history
#op pls keep talking! & @palestrangermoon
you've let in the vampire thank you. also most of this comes from leslie feinberg's transgender warriors which has a whole chapter on jeanne d'arc & which everyone should read imo!
so when i say "trans history" i do not mean that "trans" is a Real Thing that exists. we made up being "trans" and we cannot say that anyone in history is Objectively Trans, like its a fact we can prove. but we can say that people in history shared common experiences with trans and genderqueer people of today, and by linking them to our modern construct of transness we get a fuller picture of the human experience with gender diversity. also, and i cannot emphasize this enough: women afab can be trans. men amab can be trans.
but also, jeanne d'arc isn't just trans history because she crossdressed. the story often gets framed as her wearing men's clothes to fight in war, but its deeper than that! both from a secular trans sense and from a religious standpoint (which makes her an important figure for trans christians). & this gets compounded with the impetus in art to make sure jeanne d'arc looks appropriately feminine. which can be compared to the ways that, before fe/male impersonation had a queer connotation, male impersonators had to make sure that, even in drag, they always looked visibly cisfeminine.
on one level, regardless of gender, jeanne d'arc was oppressed by transphobia. she was the target of blatanly transphobic attacks for her gender expression. she was called a hommasse, a slur for masculine women, her crossdressing "contrary to Divine laws" and "abominable before God". while she was also a military threat, her trial was about her crossdressing- that was the crime that she was charged with after they failed to find evidence she was a pagan.
specifically, her claim that her wearing men's clothing and cutting her hair was a God-given command. and yes, part of that command was also going to war, but it does not seem like it was just "you have to wear men's clothing so you can fight." To Jeanne, crossdressing was its own command. She said she would rather die than stop, unless God told her to, and that "were [she] still so dressed and with the king and those of his party, it would be one of the greatest blessings for the kingdom of France."
Its claimed that she repented at first and was sentenced to life in prison as long as she started wearing women's clothing again, and that she later "relapsed" and started wearing men's clothing. some TERFs have argued that she had to wear men's clothing to avoid getting raped- but she was well known to be assigned female. The clothes she wore would not matter, given that she was famous enough that actual monarchs wanted her dead. And Jeanne said that she chose to start wearing men's clothing again which was compared to "a dog returning to its own vomit." And it was this that allowed them to burn her alive as punishment.
So on a second level, this is a lot more complicated than a normal cis woman wearing men's clothes to a specific end. Jeanne viewed her masculine gender expression as vital to her soul. It was used as the justification for killing her, so she quite literally chose to die rather than present as cisfeminine.
And on a third level, she didn't refuse to present cisfeminine to make a bold statement about the right of women to wear pants or go to war. She did it because it was God's command. And if Catholic canon matters to you at all, she is a canonized saint. The Church has given her a big ol blue checkmark in the sky. If Jeanne believed that crossdressing was its own command, and not just a means to an end, then she believed that genderqueerness is a holy command given by God. Which opens up a wonderful new trans-centric theology! It creates space within Catholicism (and anyone else who cares about Catholic saints) to view transness as a special role which comes from Divine blessing. And frankly, this cultural impact alone makes her part of trans history the same way plenty of cishet women are part of gay history because of their cultural impact on gay people.
And the best part is, we can say all of this and also see her as part of women's history! Because women's history, too, does not have to be exclusively about woman-born or woman-identified women. It can be about a larger cultural experience. And Jeanne d'Arc suffered because of transphobia which is always fundamentally misogynistic. I would argue it even makes sense to say her death involved transmisogyny in a very literal sense. The thing about transfeminism is that it can free us from the need to view personal identification with the role of "woman" as vital to feminism. Being a woman, in whatever sense, is certainly not unrelated to feminism, but one can be a feminist and have any kind of personal or communal relatonship with womanhood. Anyone can be inspired by the story of Jeanne d'Arc and her bold defiance of both misogyny and transphoba, no matter how she may have personally understood her gender.
