May God so keep me.
Joan of Arc was not trans. Setting the record straight, so to speak, in honor of her feast day, and in preparation for the impending "LGBT Pride Month."
Joan of Arc’s feast day is today, May 30, the anniversary of her martyrdom. As a historical and religious figure, Joan of Arc presents a thicket of apparent contradictions and to many. She’s been championed by the left as the queer Saint, the lesbian Saint, the trans Saint—but if she is these things, how could she possibly be canonized? Is the Church implicitly permissive of certain kinds of gender bending? After all, she took on a traditionally masculine role as the general of the French army during the Hundred Years’ War and ostensibly wore the garb to match. A Google search about her clothing, for example, unearths article after article with titles that include terms like “cross-dressing,” “gender identity,” and “masculinity.” These terms, while perhaps too loaded with contemporary social politics to apply to Joan, are not entirely out of place in the rhetorical realm where she dwells. In fact, they reflect the language of primary documents written about her in her lifetime. For just one instance of many, the twelfth Article of Accusation in the transcript of her trial describes a “male costume” for which she “put off and entirely abandoned women’s clothes”:
with her hair cropped short and round like a young fop’s, she wore shirt, breeches, doublet, with hose joined together and fastened to the said doublet by 20 points, long leggings laced on the outside, a short mantle reaching to the knees, or thereabouts, a close-cut cap, tightfitting boots and buskins, long spurs, sword, dagger, breastplate, lance and other arms in the style of a man-at-arms, with which she performed actions of war and affirmed that she was fulfilling the commands of God as they had been revealed to her.
Maybe Joan was a monstrous she-man, born in a time when her true frankengender had to be kept in a very literal way under wraps, but if so, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a Doctor of the Church, got her wrong. Joan of Arc, though not canonized until nearly a quarter of a century after Thérèse’s death, was an object of great admiration and even identification for Thérèse. In many ways, Thérèse is a paragon of Catholic femininity: she is called the Little Flower, and repeatedly in her autobiographical writings, she aligns her identity with that of women in scripture. Moreover, she characterizes her relationship with Christ using the language of a bride: “It shall never be said that a woman in the world does more for her husband than I do for Jesus, my Beloved,” she wrote. In the two plays she wrote about Joan’s life and the prayer she wrote to propel Joan’s canonization forward, she frames Joan not as an exception to the call of feminine duty, but rather as a devoted participant in it, extending to her, too, the role of Christ’s bride. In her “Canticle to Obtain the Canonization of the Venerable Joan of Arc,” she writes,
By fighting, Joan saved France,
But her great virtues
Had to be marked with suffering,
With the divine seal of Jesus her Spouse!
It would be silly to say that the left’s argument for Joan’s innate masculinity is entirely unfounded. Nonetheless, this conception of Joan is limited in its scope and simplistic in its understanding of who this Godly woman was, and why she lived the way she did. Joan never characterized herself as manly, nor did she ever comment on her personal sentiments about her clothing. In the transcripts of her trial, the only language she ever uses to describe how she identifies with her wardrobe is in her solemn belief that the Lord Himself called her to it: “Everything I have done is at God’s command; and if He had ordered me to assume a different habit, I should have done it, because it would have been His command.”
As general of the French army, Joan became known throughout France as the Maid, a title she enthusiastically accepted. The title befits not only her private virtue but also her military style: one of her first moves as leader of the French army was to expel all prostitutes from the army camps. She also demanded that her soldiers attend Holy Mass and make regular Confessions. These moves reveal two essential principles of the ethic of her leadership: first, she considered herself a commander in a spiritual war, even more than a physical one; and second, she believed that military victory would only come about (or else would only be meaningful) if it was preceded by victory at the level of the soul.
It follows that Joan’s virginity was essential to her conception of self as a soldier, a sort of “eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12). In the language of Church symbols, the image of the virgin is concentric with that of the bride, which is concentric with that of the Church, which is concentric with that of the City of God: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-27). Many artistic depictions of Joan intuit this about her layered performance of self: in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, about which I’ve written many times, Joan wears a ring on her right ring finger which she received, like her ardor for Christ, like her body itself, from her mother. In the movie, her captors attempt to steal it from her finger, a symbol of their trying to trick her into being unfaithful to her true Husband.
But one need not look at artistic renderings of Joan, or Scripture, or even the verbal testimony of Joan herself to know that she was protective of her womanhood and understood its sanctity: it is evident in her clothing, the very thing that causes many scholars to think she regarded her femininity as restrictive or extraneous. The quote I pulled from her trial that details her garments: she wore a “doublet, with hose joined together and fastened to said doublet by 20 points” and “long leggings laced on the outside.” She commissioned these for herself: the transcripts of her trial read, “[T]he better to accomplish her plan, the said Jeanne required the said Captain to have a male costume made for her, with arms to match; which he did, reluctantly, and with great repugnance, finally consenting to her demand.” Some have argued that practicality drove her choice of dress, and that may be so: a dress would have made it difficult to ride a horse. Yet these garments were also hugely impractical: dressing would have been a lengthy task, requiring the tying of twenty knots, and the lacing of leggings up to her hips; more importantly, they would have posed a great challenge to anyone trying to undress her. She was a girl, living among rough men: just as she fiercely defended her country, she also had to defend herself, cost no object.
Transgender activists often regard the body as something to be altered at whim or will, but this attitude is one that that Joan plainly would have rejected. She understood her body as something to be protected, a creation of the Father, an expression of the Sacred, a God-breathed word. As Thérèse of Lisieux wrote about her in her “Canticle,” “Lord, Joan is Your splendid work.”
Ultimately, Joan brought about her own execution by assuming her men’s clothing after she had sworn to put them off on pain of death: “it was right that she, Jeanne, should humbly submit to and obey the sentence and ordinance of the lord judges and ecclesiastics, and should altogether abandon her errors and her former inventions, never to return to them; how, if she did return to them, the Church would not receive her to clemency, and she would be wholly abandoned.” Many scholars believe that her trials indicate that there was a spoken promise between Joan and her accusers that she would live out her days in solitary confinement, wearing feminine clothing, in a women’s prison; but her captors went back on their word and placed her in what now might be considered a men’s high-security prison, where there is evidence that the guards were ordered to try to rape her. Just four days after receiving her life sentence, her judges visited her and saw that she had resumed her men’s dress, saying that “it was more lawful and convenient for her to wear it, since she was among men, than to wear woman's dress. She said she had resumed it because the promises made to her had not been kept.” She also says that “if … she were put in a gracious prison [and were given a woman as companion], she would be good and obey the Church” (brackets from original text).
Left-leaning scholars are right to see rebellion in Joan’s clothing; but they fail to identify Joan’s choice of dress as an indicator of her intuitive understanding of feminine modesty. Modesty calls each individual (not just women) to dress and comport themselves in a manner that aligns with the occasion at hand: for instance, it is immodest to wear flashy clothing when an occasion calls for humility, however much of the body the garments cover; similarly, it is not immodest for, say, an Olympic volleyball player to wear spandex shorts and a sports bra at a competition, because it expresses her role there, even if the garments are revealing. (Okay, sometimes I wonder if those uniforms need to be that skimpy, but what do I know?) Her rebellion was not against the demands of femininity, but rather against a dishonest interpretation of the law.
Joan of Arc is my Confirmation Saint, the Saint whom I asked to guide and protect me when I renewed my Baptismal vows as a teenager. I haven’t known most of the readers of this newsletter very long, and I don’t want to give too lengthy and confessional a personal history, but in my early twenties I believed with my whole heart that I was called to a kind of masculine sensibility: I dressed androgynously, I did not value feminine beauty, and after I returned to the faith, I wanted to be a priest, maintaining my unisex persona. I held the genuine belief that Joan had led me to these conclusions, that I had chosen her to lead me all those years ago because we shared a desire for a greater portion of the masculine than the world allowed us.
One of the greatest accusations leveled against Joan of Arc during her trial was the sin of presumption: how could she know that it was the Lord who gave her her orders, and not an agent of the devil? I thought, truly, that my rejection of my own femininity came from God, as guided by Joan. As I turned more toward Christ, I began to more directly ask Joan to pray for me and to give me her wisdom; I even got a tattoo of her, thinking that she would lead me more deeply into my manly affect (though I never considered becoming a man, thank God). But as I have allowed her to pray for me and Christ to work in me I have found that all I want is to be a good woman: a good mother, and a good wife, however He calls me to these things. There was no cognitive grappling with the confusion that gripped me in my past. It simply fell away. One day I woke up and didn’t think about those things anymore. And when I consider how the Lord has loved me, I think of Him as my Beloved, the One who knows my heart and coaxes me closer to Him.
Joan did not have a direct answer for her accusers when they laid this allegation of presumption against her. Rather, she said what I have come to believe is a prayer. The transcript of her trial reads:
Asked if she knows she is in God’s grace, she answered: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.”
Joan of Arc’s example calls a women deeply into themselves, to understand and work to become who they are in God’s sight, their mission here on earth, and how they can answer the call to arms in the heavenly war for souls. With that knowledge, the rest falls into place: the order received, all one has to do is rise there.