The feudal landlords were involved in an ongoing war against communards who held out against enslavement as serfs. Scapegoating Joan of Arc and the area of her birth fed this counter-revolutionary campaign.
On April 2, 1431, the Inquisition dropped the charges of witchcraft; they were too hard to prove. It was not until 1451 that the Inquisition was fully authorized to deal with witchcraft.
Сrime of transvestism
Joan was condemned because of her assertion that her transvestism was a religious duty and that she regarded her visions as higher than the authority of the church. Many historians and academicians have seen Joan’s transvestism as inconsequential. In the verbatim proceedings of her interrogation, however, the court records show that Joan’s judges found her transvestism repugnant and demanded that she wear women’s clothing. Joan refused, knowing her defiance meant she was considered damned.
Joan of Arc’s testimony in her own defense revealed how deeply her transvestism was rooted in her identity. She vowed, “For nothing in the world will I swear not to arm myself and put on a man’s dress.”
Joan was taken on a terrifying tour of the torture chamber and its instruments of agony. She was brought to a cemetery and shown a scaffold that her tormentors said awaited her if she did not submit to them. After suffering this psychological torture and the threat of being burned alive, on April 24, 1431, Joan recanted by accusing herself of wearing clothes that violated natural decency. She agreed to submit to the church’s authority and to wear women’s clothing. She was “mercifully” sentenced to life in prison in women’s dress, on bread and water.
Within days she resumed male dress. Her judges asked her why she had done so, when putting on male clothing meant certain death. The court recorded her reply: “She said, of her own will. And that nobody had forced her to do so. And that she preferred man’s dress to woman’s.”
The Inquisition sentenced her to death for resuming male dress, saying “time and again you have relapsed, as a dog that returns to its vomit.” Joan of Arc was immediately burned alive at the stake.
Why was the charge of transvestism so significant?
The real reason can be found in the decree issued by the faculty of the University of Paris on May 14, 1431, which condemned Joan’s transvestism and urged that she be burned as a heretic. These church theologians declared that Joan's cross-dressing was “following the custom of the Gentiles and the Heathen.”
The church was now the only powerful institution that cemented all of feudal Western Europe into one political system. More important, the church was by far the most powerful feudal lord, claiming ownership of one-third of the soil of the Catholic world.
The Inquisition, and later the witch trials, were weapons of terror and mass murder that took a staggering toll in human life—from Ireland to Poland. Many peasant women, including many lesbians, who followed the older rural-based religions were accused of being witches and tortured and burned. Transgendered people, gay men, Arabs, Jews, scientists, herbalists, healers—anyone who challenged or questioned the ruling class and the church was considered a threat and exterminated.
This was counter-revolutionary terror by the land-owning class. It was aimed at the restive and rebellious peasantry as well as the small new bourgeoisie that was to become a challenge to its class rule.
Torture was the rule. The Inquisitors didn’t come armed with just the Bible—they arrived with swords and fire to put down peasant uprisings. The impending collapse of feudalism only heightened the reactionary suppression.
Transgender endures
Yet despite centuries of this murderous campaign transgender was not eradicated.
In medieval Italy and France there were actual transvestite male festive societies known as “Abbeys of Misrule.”
Naogeorgus wrote in The Popish Kingdom (1570) that at the Shroveport festivaclass="underline" “Both men and women chaunge their weede, the men in maydes aray, And wanton wenches drest as men, doe trauell by the way…”
Transgender still existed among the ruling classes, as well. For example, when Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated in 1654, she donned men’s clothes and renamed herself ‘Count Dohna.’ Henry III of France was reported to have dressed as an Amazon and encouraged his courtiers to do likewise.
Throughout the Middle Ages and into early industrial capitalism, transvestism continued to play an important role in many militant struggles as a form of social and political rebellion against class rule.
“In 1630, for example, the Mere Folle and ‘her’ troupe attacked royal tax officers in Dijon; in Beaujolais in the 1770s, male peasants put on women’s clothes and attacked their landlord’s surveyors; in Wiltshire in 1631, bands of peasants, led by men dressed as women who called themselves ‘Lady Skimmington,’ rioted against the King’s enclosure of their forest lands; in April 1812, two male weavers in female clothing—‘General Ludd’s wives’—led a crowd in the destruction of looms and factories in Stockport; the Welsh riots of the 1830s and 1840s, against turnpike tolls and other statutory taxes, were led by ‘Rebecca’ and other transvestites; the Porteous riots of 1736 in Edinburgh were led by men disguised as women, and their male leader was known as ‘Madge Wildfire’; in Ireland the Whiteboys, who were active in the 1760s, dressed in long white frocks ‘to restore the ancient commons and redress other grievances’” in the struggle against the British landlords. (Dressing Up)
As the old land-based feudal order was replaced by capitalism, the very existence of transvestite and other transgendered women and men had been largely driven underground. Many were forced to pass as the opposite sex in order to survive. Transvestite women passed as men and became soldiers, pirates and highway robbers. Yet transvestism continued to emerge culturally throughout Europe in holiday celebrations, rituals, carnival days, masquerade parties, theater and opera.
These transgender traditions persist today in the Mummer’s Festival, Mardi Gras and Halloween. In contemporary imperialist Japan cross-gendered roles are still at the heart of ancient Noh drama and Kabuki theater. But these are not merely vestiges of tradition. Transgendered women and men still exist, no matter how difficult their struggle for survival has become.
Transgender around the world
Our focus has been on European history, and consciously so. The blame for anti-transgender laws and attitudes rests squarely on the shoulders of the ruling classes on that continent. The seizures of lands and assets of the “accused” during the witch trials and Inquisition helped the ruling classes acquire the capital to expand their domination over Asia, Africa and the Americas. The European elite then tried to force their ideology on the peoples they colonized around the world.
But despite the colonialists’ racist attempts at cultural genocide, transvestism and other transgendered expression can still be observed in the rituals and beliefs of oppressed peoples. It is clear that they held respected public roles in vast numbers of diverse societies in cultures continents apart.
Since the 16th century, “transvestite shamans have … been reported among the Araucanians, a large tribe living in southern Chile and parts of Argentina. … Male transvestite shamans have also been reported for the Guajira, a cattle-herding people of northwest Venezuela and north Colombia, and the Tehuelche, hunter-gatherers of Argentina.” (Construction)