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.