Was Joan of Arc transgender?

Joan of Arc or John of Arc?  Let's take a look at the evidence.    Picture from Wikipedia.

This is a claim that pops up on the internet from time to time, but no one seems to give any evidence for it beyond the fact that she wore men's clothes.  That on its own doesn't prove Joan (or Jehanne, as she signed her name) was transgender.

Joan claimed that the saints who appeared to her in visions told her to wear male clothing, and it is possible she simply did it because the voices told her to - or at least because she believed it was what God wanted her to do.  Joan was not mentally unbalanced, but she was very religious, and it's clear from the letters she wrote and the testimony she gave at her trial that she genuinely believed she was a divine emissary sent to do God's work.

We also need to consider how Joan herself might have understood the concept of gender identity.  Medieval Christians believed everything happened according to God's plan.  If God made you a peasant, then He meant you to be a peasant.  You couldn't decide you didn't like being a peasant and wanted to become a duke.  God had made you a peasant and wanting to be anything else was rejecting God's plan.  It was heresy.  Cross-dressing was actually a crime and was ultimately the reason Joan got executed. In her letters (you can find them online here) Joan consistently called herself "Jeanne la Pucelle" - Joan the Maiden, which strikes me as a really odd thing for a transman to call himself.  In my view it's highly unlikely that Joan thought of herself as someone who'd been issued the wrong set of trouser furniture and was really a man.  I think she would have considered herself to be a woman on the basis of her anatomy, which she thought was mandated by God.  But that doesn't necessarily mean she identified as a woman, or was comfortable with being a woman.

Consider this quote from my good friend and fellow FYTQ blogger Nicole: "I thought I was a boy but I was a very uncomfortable boy."  Perhaps Joan experienced something similar.

Identifying as a man would have been a sin, but Joan could have rationalised such feelings by believing that God had called her to dress and behave as a man for His own special purposes.  This would have allowed Joan to accept feelings of gender identity that were against church doctrine.  Ultimately though, we just don't know.  The letters and testimony that survive don't give us any information about Joan's gender identity, or whether she felt comfortable living as a woman.

Menswear would have been a practical option for Joan, both on the battlefield and in terms of deterring sexual assault.  (Men's clothes at the time consisted of trousers attached to a jacket with laces, and getting them off would have been a task and a half.)  But Joan was clear that she didn't just wear male clothes for practical reasons, she wore them because she believed God wanted her to.  She felt compelled to present herself as a male, even though she clearly saw herself as a woman.  It wasn't just clothes either, Joan also wore a male haircut.

In the end, we'll never know if Joan of Arc was transgender.  There just isn't enough evidence.  But it is possible, and it opens up some even more interesting questions what it might have been like to be transgender in the Middle Ages.

Gender Dysphoria and my experience

Gender dysphoria is the feeling a person has that their assigned gender does not reflect the gender they are. From a diagnostic perspective, Gender dysphoria is listed in the DSM - V – Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5^th edition, and has the following diagnostic criteria:

A. marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months duration, as manifested by 2 or more of the following indicators: [2, 3, 4]

1. a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or, in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics) [13, 16]

2. a strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or, in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics) [17]

3. a strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender

4. a strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

5. a strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

6. a strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning, or with a significantly increased risk of suffering, such as distress or disability

This diagnosis replaces an older diagnosable disorder called Gender Identity Disorder, or GID. I needed a diagnosis of GID to be accepted for genital reassignment surgery and I passed it with flying rainbow colors :D (funny how it feels like a test rather than a confirmation of what you know is true).

A diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not a diagnosis of transsexualism of which there is none. You don’t have to be a transsexual to experience dysphoria and actually you don’t need to experience it to be a transsexual. For example, I pretty much have no symptoms of gender dysphoria because I have resolved them through my transition yet I still consider myself a transsexual. A whole host of other queer/trans/other types may experience it, or something similar. I love how this ‘diagnosis’ takes into account alternative gender identities and I think it is fantastic non-binary people are given recognition.  

Another thing to note with this diagnosis is that it does not require you to hate your body. Traditionally we are indoctrinated by various trans communities that you can only be transsexual if you have a strong hatred for your birth sex body and that you desire surgery. This is not a requirement for being diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

I’m starting to believe more and more that being a transsexual has become an identity that you can choose. I think this is the same in regard to gender and sexual identities. A woman can have sexual attractions solely to women but this does not require them to identify as a lesbian. A person might not feel they are male or female but this does not require them to identify as non-binary. As such I don’t think you can diagnose someone else as transsexual. This is something only you can decide for yourself. But in a lot of ways this label is a red hearing anyway. I think many of us focus on whether we fit the label instead of focusing on your distress and how you can resolve it.  

It is a very hard thing to describe what it is like to experience gender dysphoria. When gender dysphoric folk talk about it, it seems to be a combination of a number of different things from social to physical. One thing that is often overlooked is that people experience dysphoria in different ways. Not only that but the strength of these feelings can fluctuate, particularly with age, life changes and other stresses. Puberty is a particularly distressing time for many trans people as this is where secondary sex characteristics start to emerge. It seems to be true for many of us that when unresolved it tends to get worse over time, or at least our tolerance of it weakens. I find it interestingly my dysphoria vanished for short periods of time when newly in love – I have heard many stories of tans people meeting someone and feeling like they are ‘cured’. I imagine huge euphoric moments like when someone ‘finds god’ can mask feelings of dysphoria for a bit. As far as I know it always comes back.

I started to feel aspects of gender dysphoria as a child. It was like a slippery eel I could not quite grasp right on the edge of my consciousness. Something was wrong. I remember wishing I could play elastics with the girls and I would watch them from around a corner at school. I thought I was a boy but I was a very uncomfortable boy. I felt very lost and at odds with many of the expectations of being a boy. I resisted being part of the culture of masculinity.

So how did it feel for me as an adult pre-transition? It was not a hatred of my body. I admired my own strength. I liked using my male equipment but I had a sense of wrongness. Dysphoria for me was that sense of wrongness that was often very undefined. Sometimes it was just a low murmur on the edge of my brain but it could also feel like a nightmare you can’t wake from. Dysphoria was sometimes a feeling of being filled with filth that I could vomit in a never ending stream but without actually feeling physically sick.  Sometimes it was like I was living inside an alien body and I was in there looking out. It was as if I was itchy wearing my own skin.

I would close my eyes and in my mind’s eye my body had curves. It was so real I felt like I could touch them and it was always a shock to open my eyes and not see them there. I often felt I had a phantom vulva and found comfort in pressing the place it should of been. I think that is an interesting aspect of dysphoria that it seems to be related to our internal image not matching our external reality. It is not body dysmorphia in the sense that we do see our bodies as they are. But just like anyone we can be body dysmorphic too, particularly around how masculine or feminine we perceive our features to actually be.  

Birthdays and Christmas were always times of depression for me and I often still respond to them that way. I would get ‘male’ gifts which would just make me weep inside. I would of given anything for a pair of earrings. I mean yes I liked the machete and Metallica t-shirt I got one year and I put them both to good use. But I was left feeling pretty hollow and more and more like nobody actually knew who I was.  

On the social side being considered male made me cringe and squirm – particularly when lumped in with the boys such as when segregated at school by gender or being the butt of gendered jokes. Often when I went shopping for clothes I would be overcome with depression and longing. Dysphoria for me involved a lot of longing – longing to shop in women’s clothing shops, to have been born a girl, to be called she, for a body I did not have.

I never really felt at odds with my penis until I had sorted out other things like starting hormones and dressing as a woman. Before then I always did have a kind of vagina envy but never felt actively distraught about having a penis despite it’s inconveniences. At some point it became the elephant in the room in my head, and not because I was well hung. Imagine you had a big purple pink growth out the side of your body that moved of it’s own accord that everyone said was normal. It felt kind of like that. I found it fun to play with and it was good for scaring the neighbors but it did not belong. It became such a foreign thing I just had to get rid of it – it was a bit like the feeling of having a deep splinter and just needing to get it out. I never realised how big that elephant was until after surgery. Shortly after I realised that I had this massive space in my mind that used to be consumed with the awareness of it.

One interesting aspect of my dysphoria was I would often look at women with duel perceptions. I would see a good looking woman and part of me would find her sexually attractive, but on the other I was full of envy. Often that envy could feel like attraction (though let’s face it, with my sex drive as it was then I was attracted to a lot of people). The envy sometimes left me feeling very bitter. I know some transwomen have reported that after transition what they thought was an attraction to women was actually their envy.

In short dysphoria made me miserable. It consumed me. It impacted on my relationships with everyone and everything and my mental health. I chose to resolve my gender dysphoria before it buried me.

Blog Mistress Nicole

Gender and the pill

How people understand the concept of gender is a topic that fascinates me, and today I'm going to talk about how contraception has influenced our understanding of what gender means.

In the pre-scientific western world, and for many people today, gender was all about procreation and was essentially the same thing as physical sex (that's a whole 'nother post, and we'll get to that later.)  Men fathered babies, and women had babies.  Easy.  And like all simplistic explanations, it's incomplete and doesn't hold true in all circumstances.  But for most people biology was destiny and the world really did work that way.

The reason the world worked like that in so many cases was that people couldn't reliably control their fertility, but in 1960 the first contraceptive pills were approved for use and that began to change.

If you think about it for a while, you'll see that effective, readily available, relatively safe contraception is one of the most important inventions in human history.  In terms of the effect it has on how we live our lives, it's comparable to agriculture, antibiotics, and the internet.  Contraception allows us to fit procreation around all the other things we want to do in life, rather than having to fit our lives around any pregnancy we or our significant others happen to have.  It should be obvious that contraception has revolutionized women's lives in particular, and allowed us all a level of freedom our great-grandparents simply didn't have.

This is not just sexual freedom, it's also the freedom to define what gender means in ways that have nothing to do with reproduction.  Caring for children is no longer an inevitable part of womanhood, so we are free to explore definitions of womanhood that don't relate to childrearing at all.  We can also start to explore the idea that gender identity sometimes has nothing to do with our reproductive organs, and there are many different ways we can identify.  We aren't automatically stuck with one of two roles in life according to whether we have indoor or outdoor plumbing.

Yes, I know it's a silly pun, but it's better than a stock photo of some contraceptive pills, isn't it?

As far as most western societies are concerned, this is a new development.  It's so new that we've only just begun to explore it as a society, which is why many people today still see gender as a question of indoor versus outdoor plumbing.  To me, this is really exciting.  I can't wait to see how our understanding of what gender is evolves over the next 50 years.

The make-over of Merida

I feel kind of under pressure to put up a good first post. How does one kick off a blog? 

I thought about writing about myself. Despite being a terribly interesting trans queer type person I get the feeling that 'all me' trans blogs are pretty common. I want to do something a bit different to that. Certainly I have some stories to tell and I will be telling some of them. But I decided for this blog that I wanted to take a bunch of different kinds of queer voices to collaborate and share each of our own perspectives on life as a queer, trans, or otherwise people. 

To start I thought I might talk about Merida. Merida is the star of Disney Pixar movie called ‘Brave’. This is a story of a headstrong young Scots woman, proficient rider, archer, and experienced in wilderness survival. Brave is not about a girl in a hopeless situation that needs rescuing, but a girl in a situation that is partly her own making and it is up to her to sort it out. The main story in the movie is in many ways about a conflict between what a girl is expected to be and what a girl is – and this is shown in Merida’s relationship with her mum.

Disney is known for a raft of movies with beautiful and often helpless princesses just waiting for their prince to rescue them. In Brave, Merida out guns all the boys and rejects her arranged marriage. She is fiery, stubborn with a strong sense of self. In no way is she a ‘perfect princess’, or a perfect person, and I think that is partly what makes her really awesome.  She is in many ways very ‘real’.

The picture of Merida on the left is the original from the movie. She is wearing clothing that is pretty practical for the outdoors – a thick warm dress, nothing fancy. She is kitted out with her favorite bow given to her by her dad,and she is ready for action. She has the craziest wild hair of a girl who does not give a stuff about making it pretty.  Hey body looks much more realistically proportioned than a lot of other princesses. Her face is of the young girl she is – it is not an idealised beauty and actually is decidedly plain for your traditional Disney princess.  

Merida was just been crowned as Disney's 11^th princess, on the 11th of May no less, and the picture on the right is her animated character make-over for this occasion. 

Wtf Disney? Where is her bow?  Why is she now so skinny?  What happened to her can’t-give-a-stuff hair? What’s up with the huge eyes?  What is with the off the shoulder dress? Would Merida honestly want to look like this? I think she would be horrified. What message is this sending to girls? 

Actually I can easily guess why they re-made her this way. If you put her next to all the other princesses she sticks out. This is a way of fitting her in with the crowd, pulling her into the flock to make her everything the character hated. She outshines them all and shows them up to be stereotypes of femininity. Perhaps this was an attempt to put Merida in her place.

You know, normally I have a little bit of respect for Disney. I had a friend who was able to have their gender reassignment surgery courtesy of their employee health insurance. I think this is awesome in an American environment where most medical insurance providers don't cover this.  

The change in design just speaks to me of something I feel is happening everywhere. It seems to me that equality of people is under increasing attack – this is equality in terms of gender, race, and ‘class’ and freedom from religion. This is something I have observed in my lifetime.  It is like the ‘opposition’ is getting desperate and is redoubling its efforts to put people in their place?

I have so many questions - why do we still have religion? Why are women still not being payed the same amount as the equivalent male in a job? Why are kids still being abused? Why do some people think it is acceptable to rape someone for any reason? Why are childrens' toys and clothing becoming increasingly gendered and sexualised? Why do we keep electing government's whose only concern is the betterment of a small group at the detriment of everyone else? 

These are things I want love to explore in this blog. I also have my own thoughts on being a post op queer trans kinky person and some of the lessons I learnt in my journey. 

I hope to see you soon!

Blog Mistress Nicole