When the nineteen-year-old Joan of Arc was told she would be burned at the stake, she reacted with horror—not for the reasons you or I might give, but on more mysterious grounds. According to the Dominican friar Jean Toutmouillé, who visited her at the prison in Rouen on the morning of May 30, 1431, Joan cried out: “Alas, am I to be so cruelly and horribly treated that my pure and unblemished body, which has never been corrupted, must today be consumed and burned to ashes!” It wasn’t the death she minded so much as the destruction—better, she said bitterly, to be “seven times beheaded” than for her body to be reduced to a heap of dust.
One of several striking things about this speech is its contrast with the stories of trans-identifying men and women. The philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell, for instance, recalls experiencing “a profound sense that my body’s shape is not the one I want or feel at home in or comfortable with: I want a female body, which is not the body I was born with.” The economist Deirdre McCloskey half-jokes that “Every cell in my body says XY, XY, XY. I wish the bastards would stop saying it.” The cartoon book Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure, promoted to British teenagers as part of a government-funded scheme, features a cartoon of the naked female body with the breasts labeled “fatty lumps that need be gone.” Of course, a desperate discontent with one’s body is not the preserve of trans people alone. It afflicts many people, especially women and most especially teenage girls. But it seems to have afflicted Joan of Arc not at all.
Joan of Arc, Gender Theorist
