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Joan of Arc

Is it fully correct to refer to Joan of Arc as a crossdresser? Granted she ran around in armor, carrying a sword, but Im not sure if women of the Russian Army, during World War II, were "crossdressing" anymore than Pope Joan was. Pizza Puzzle

The article does not state that Joan of Arc was a cross-dresser. It states that Joan of Arc cross-dressed for reasons unknown (and currently unknowable). There's a BIG difference between those two things!
However, although the article does not say so, Joan of Arc did not just cross-dress for battle, but was ultimately burned because she refused to promise never to wear male clothes again. That points to some problem with gender identity, also an intersexual condition has been assumed by some authors. Again, those theories are unprovable.
And nobody implied that the women of the Russian Army were cross-dressing; as far as I can tell from the pictures they had a female uniform.
Pope Joan om the other hand is an apocryphical figure, nobody knows whether such a person ever existed, much less why she was playing a man's role. If she existed, however, she was cross-dressing; again, though, not necessarily a cross-dresser.
-- AlexR 16:39 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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In response to the above:

As a historian who specializes in Joan of Arc (and whose writings on the subject, I noticed, had been included as a link from a previous version of the cross-dresser page itself, it seems), I would make the following points:

Firstly: we can in fact determine Joan's motive for "cross-dressing" because a number of the clergy who took part in her trial later admitted what her actual motive was: since the type of male clothing she was wearing had "laces and points" by which the pants and tunic could be securely tied together, such clothing was the only means she had of preventing the attempted rape she was being subjected to at the hands of her English guards. Additionally, they said that she was finally maneuvered into a "relapse" by two methods: 1) after she had adopted a dress, her guards increased their attempts to abuse her in order to induce her to re-adopt the protective clothing, and 2) in the end they finally left her nothing else to wear but the offending male outfit, which she put back on after a prolonged argument with the guards (according to the bailiff at the trial, Jean Massieu). This was seized upon as an excuse to convict her by the pro-English judge, Pierre Cauchon - who had long been a "collaborator" with a position as counselor for the English occupation government itself, and had been placed as her judge by the English in order to convict her using any excuse or trick that could be devised. All of this is exhaustively documented in the records, and has never been legitimately in dispute among those historians who specialized in the subject (as opposed to the authors of some of the pop books that are available, most of which are based on very poor scholarship).

Uh, sorry, but we do not know her motives, and never can ans will, unless somebody can build a time machine and goes and askes her. Court documents are notoriously unreliable when it comes to these matters, because a) people did not even have the vocabulary to express the concepts we have today about gender and b) every statement made is at least to be suspected of having been made not to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (assuming that there were words to express it, see point a), but "minimise damage" from the accused and to maximes it in cases of conviction from the court's side. So sorry, your statement is false and NPOV. And as far as the scholars are concerned, how many of those have a thorough knowledge of gender issues and cross-dressing. You certainly have not, otherwise you would not read something into the bits about Joan that are not even there. You are acting on your prejudices here, and nothing else. -- AlexR 15:18, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The witnesses were quoting Joan herself on the subject of her motives - they were not "analyzing" her, but rather citing her own statements (as I thought would be understood from my previous note). Your arguments both above and farther below are based on the assumption that the witnesses were giving their own interpretation, which was not the case. -- AWilliamson

Unless this page is going to include every single woman who ever wore such clothing out of necessity, Joan of Arc does not legitimately qualify as a "cross-dresser" in the sense that this page implies, and therefore should not be included - after all, there were numerous other women who wore male clothing in that era for purposes of protection, as was allowed under an exemption (in cases of necessity) granted by the medieval Church itself. This brings us to the next point:

Nope, sorry, but this page does not state that Joan of Arc was gender variant, and it states clearly that many people, especially women, did cross-dress for other reasons. All this page "imlies" is that A cross-dresser ... is any person who wears the clothing of the opposite gender, for any reason . It's really news to me that Joan of Arc does not fall under that definition. The problem here lies entirely in your fantasy, not on this page. -- AlexR 15:18, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Since the page lumps two types of people together, it's only reasonable to provide an explanation in each individual case if the person is going to be included at all. -- AWilliamson

2) Concerning the link that the cross-dressing article had earlier provided to a page I wrote concerning the theological issues in Joan's case: while I'm grateful that the link was provided, the associated description nevertheless misrepresented my information - e.g., the clerical opinions cited on that page are not those of "later" churchmen attempting to rationalize her actions, but rather clergy of her own period justifying her actions based on the exemption granted by medieval theological works such as the "Summa Theologica", "Scivias", etc. Some of these clerical opinions were written during Joan's lifetime, and the rest were written during the appeal of her case shortly after the English were driven out of Rouen in 1449. One comes from the Inquisitor-General who overturned the conviction and described her as a martyr in 1456.

Yes, but these were statements made by people thinking in patters which had not room at all for gender variance, and not by Joan herself, so the only thing these statements can tell us is what these people thought about her - and that has absolutely nothing to do with the question here. -- AlexR 15:18, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

See my comments farther above: these witnesses were in fact quoting Joan herself. -- AWilliamson

3) Concerning "Pope Joan": there was no such person. It's a fictional story with no historical basis, and therefore should not be included.

Errrrmmmm... She is called "most likely fictional" already, but I sincerely dount there is any conclusive proof that she never existed (proving the non-existance of something is always a bit tricky). So sorry, but I do not see any reason to remove her. -- AlexR 15:18, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

To argue that a fictional figure should be assumed plausible because "it's impossible to prove a negative" is truly astounding - one could make the same claim for literally all fictional characters. This has nothing in common with history. -- AWilliamson

I would ask that the page be un-protected so I can make some of these needed changes.

Regards, Allen Williamson AWilliamson, Joan of Arc Archive ( http://archive.joan-of-arc.org/ )

I support this request and would like to see the new changes. Perhaps a section on just Joan that details the controversy and conclusions as laid out above would help stem future edit wars. Stbalbach 04:11, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I do not support the idea - this is a question that is very Joan-of-Arc-specific, and belongs into that article (where I would very much appreciate it), not this one. If we started long speculations about every person that is or might reasonably be listed here that article would drown in such information, and the main information would get lost. -- AlexR 16:02, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

OK I've unprotected it. It was only protected becuase someone kept removing her name without discusion here. As i know nothing about the subject the edit looked like vandalism :-( Theresa Knott (The torn steak) 08:28, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Since I made quite a few statements, I thought maybe it might be a good idea to sum them up - Joan of Arc cross-dressed, and I sincerely doubt that anybody denies this. This article is obviously about people cross-dressing, not just modern-day western self-identified cross-dressers. That is clearly stated, and actually reading it might help when one sees "implications" that are just not there.

We could move the article to cross-dressing, actually, that might help. Then "cross-dressing" would have to be deleted, though, because it is currently a redir to this one. I noticed that when I wanted to move it there a few weeks ago (for pretty much that reason). -- AlexR 16:02, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Given that both Stbalbach and Theresa Knott have agreed with my proposed changes, and AlexR has consented to a compromise, I'm going to go with Stbalbach's suggested compromise: retain Joan of Arc on the page but explain the context for her "cross-dressing", preferably as a link to a separate page so a full explanation can conveniently be given. Hopefully this will be acceptable; but either way, there's no point in engaging in a perpetual tug-of-war with anyone who happens to object: the historical facts are not legitimately in dispute here. -- AWilliamson

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(Addendum: I have started working on the above compromise; if I have violated any rule of etiquette in doing so - I'm new to Misplaced Pages - please forgive me. I assume that at some point these disagreements are allowed to be resolved in favor of the accepted view among experts, otherwise there would be endless debates on literally every topic).
Regards, Allen Williamson (AWilliamson), Joan of Arc Archive ( http://archive.joan-of-arc.org/ )

Sexual orientation

The text says: However, most male-bodied cross-dressers prefer female partners. So do most female-bodied.

So everybody who cross-dresses wants a female partner? If true, that implies that female cross-dressers are homosexuals, by and large, and that male cross-dressers are heterosexuals, for the most part. Interesting. In fact, so interesting that it practically demands evidence and explication. It says that the sex of a person has a truly profound influence, in the subset of humans who cross-dress, on whether one is homo- or hetero-sexual.

But.... I suspect that it's just a carelessly constructed sentence. Without knowing the basis for the 2 sentences I wouldn't dare to change them.

Patrick0Moran 06:38, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

"So do most female-bodied. " is unsubstantiated. I'm going to reword it. Dysprosia 06:40, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Actually, my experience confirms that most female bodies CDs prefer female partners. That however may be so only because there is a role model in the lesbian community for people who want to cross dress, while there is none for straight women (or more general, androphiliac female bodied persons). On the other hand, cross-dressing used to be an established part of the gay community, but that has very much changed, and in many parts it is, at least off-stage, frowned upon. So cross-dressing among gay men has declined, while it never quite took of among straight women. So that is merely a cultural matter, albeit a very influencial one. Whether you call that a profound influence is a matter of definition then ;-) --AlexR 11:20, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Regarding female cross dressers in history

Regarding female cross dressers in history. This is a fairly large topic because before womans liberation many male roles were off-limits to females so it was actually very common to see women dressing up as men to gain access. I've searched Wiki and this is the best place I have found on the topic. It has nothing to do with sexuality, or fetish really. For example I posted Dorothy Lawrence and she did it for one reason only: to gain access to the front lines of WWI so she could make money selling her first-hand accounts. Now, one could speculate on her sexuality, but that's not history, that's specultion. In fact, the military in WWI feared a wave of women imposters trying to gain access to the front lines for various reasons. It really has nothing to do with sexual preferance or fetish or anything like that, which the term "crossdresser" seems to imply. Is there another more appropriate article to discuss this? Or do we need to create one? Certainly, there must be a history book on this subject or even entire sub-field (gender studies?) Stbalbach 20:12, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That's two things you mention: One, what the word cross-dresser implies, and the other the problem with historical figures.

• The word cross-dresser itself does not imply any sexual preferences or fetishes, although it is often associated with both. That however would happen with any word describing cross-gender behaviour, as it happened with this word. After all, it has been coined specifically to avoid these associations - transvestitism, which it replaces, acquired so many of them that it has become pretty useless. (And how many people actually know that even Transsexual does not describe a sexual orientation or preference, and the sex-part was not supposed to imply that, either, when the word was coined?)
  I do agree that the article could be somewhat clearer on the subject; while that information is certainly there, the article is obviously the result of many edits, and little attemting to make one smooth piece. I do not think, however, that there is much need of another article; after all, cross-dresser or cross-dressing is the correct term to use. Expanding the articles on particular cross-dressing people of course would be most useful. (And BTW, the term "sexual imposter" is most certainly incorrect; after all, as far as we know, she did not pose in any particular "sexual" way.)

"sexual imposter" is a British term from the early 20th Century. It is correct in its historical usage, it is what Dorothy was actually called (it was "PC" for the time), but I imagine many people are not aware of that and so it would cause confusion. "Sex" in this case meaning gender. Stbalbach 00:04, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• The other thing is, and I already added a bit about that to the article yesterday, the problem with historical figures and their motives. There are a multitude of motives for cross-dressing, raging from clearly transgender to plain necessity, and about everything in between. Sexual orientation probably played part in some cases, sure, but like all motives is very difficult to detect in hindsight; sexual play and fetishism are even harder to proof, and the later is a 20th century concept, anyway. Not to mention that there is another problem, namely, that we cannot trust even those few documents we have. In times where words and concepts like "transgender" or "transsexual" or even "gender identity" or similar did not exist, and where it is often argued that not even something like a "homosexual identity" (for those cases where sexual orientation might have played a role), and/or where people had to fear persecution simply for cross-dressing, or where the documents we have actually are court documents, we can neither expect that people express themselfes in ways that are sufficiently similar to our own thinking, nor would they have the words to do so. And certainly they had an excellent motive, in cases of persecution, to phrase their explanations in ways that would minimise their punishment. ("I wanted some adventure" would certainly be inappriopriate - but "I am a man inside, no matter what my body says" would in many cases have placed them in mortal danger.)
  So that is a very tricky thing, talking about historical persons who cross-dressed.

So, in conclusion, I'd say this article needs some work, but moving parts of it into another article would need very good reasons, the whole matter does belong here. -- AlexR 23:15, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree the article needs more neutral emphesis on all the various forms, not just contemporary sub-sets. As I say, this is outside my realm of knowledge otherwise I would provide some kind of historical summary and place the modern usage within that context. Stbalbach 00:04, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)