Transgender Warriors : Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman

Leslie Feinberg has created a fascinating compilation of transgender history.

This book "works" in that it engages the reader and stimulates thought, questioning and debate. Even the highly negative reviews that appear here reinforce this. The review authors are inflamed by a book of substance, one which presents a consistent theoretical underpinning as it provides a wealth of historical data.

A lot of political statements are made on all sides about the natural order of things. Look at the debate over same-sex marriage in which the debate is framed in terms of traditional values.

Feinberg, in this work, does the field of gender studies a great service in expanding our awareness of just how much diversity is historically encompassed in our common tradition.

Read this book, then reflect, then challenge both it and yourself.

The Stonewall frontliner offers an engaging expedition back through the past into the present through critical transgender-centering reinterpretations of familiar and unfamiliar stories. Hir re-reading of Joan of Arc from a transgender socialist feminist perspective is intriguing, motivating, and delightful. Feinberg is able to achieve visibility for heterosexistly obscured transgender moments and people across a lengthy span of time and geography.

Braiding hir own narrative into the work provides a reflexive empassioned appeal to liberation workers that renews spirits to confront gender, desire, and sexed supremacy with a certain pride in transgender revolutionary work. The blend of freshly unearthed truths, experiential revelations, and proffers for theory work well for a feminist readership.

Of course this book is personal. Of course it is passionate. It is an important attempt by a recognized trans author and amateur historian to catalyze a larger project of tracing authentic patterns of gender expression that don't conform to the binary that has been forced upon society since the rise of class divisions (i.e., since the collapse of "primitive" or "tribal" collectivism). And the book thereby contributes to efforts to demystify the notion that "two sexes" are a scientific fact and historical truth.

Hopefully others will pick up where Feinberg leaves off and apply other methodologies to uncover what has really been going on throughout human history where it comes to gender.

What the book lacks in traditional academic rigor it more than makes up for with its first-person self-consciousness, originality and plausibility in the interpretation of historical data. It is richly illustrated, literate, contemporary and very relevant to today's discourse.

Where did the author of this book get her information about Joan of Arc?
Joan of Arc wasn't a feminist or pagan. She was a simple peasant girl who was so devoted to God that when she heard the voices of saints telling her to crown the Dauphin, she did it, even though she "knew nothing of how to mount a horse or command an army."
There have been so many misconceptions about Jehanne d'Arc that people are confused. With this misguiding book and the recent movie "The Messenger," people aren't being shown the true story of the French teenager that lived 500 years ago.
Joan could "match any woman with a needle and thread," and was good with the normal housewife duties that her mother Isabelle taught her. If by some twist of fate that Heavenly voices never came to her, Joan would likely have been just any country girl in the Middle Ages. She would likely have married and had children and never dreamed of wearing men's clothing, which she did for her own protection in the company of thousands of male soldiers. And the church at Poitiers had given her the permission to wear the clothing in the first place! It's not like Joan endorsed the idea of females wearing mens clothing. It was in the interest of her own safety.
If you want to read a "real" book about Jehanne, than read the accounts of her trials, where you can read her real words, and forget about the books like this that don't show her true life.

While there certainly have been people throughout history who did engage in cross-dressing as a preference, this book has managed to ignore most of them while erroneously claiming such to be the case about numerous others who did not legitimately fit the description.
Perhaps the worst distortion occurs in the section on Joan of Arc, about which the following points should be made:
- On the issue of her decision to wear male clothing, and the book's claim that she allegedly "died for the right" to wear it: this subject is covered in a great many eyewitness accounts and other documents which clarify the "spin" which her accusers put on the issue when they wrote the trial transcript. Direct quotes from Joan in a number of accounts say that she wore soldiers' clothing (of a type which had "laces and points" which allowed her to firmly tie the pants and tunic together), partly as a defense against rape (which was especially a problem while in prison) as well as to discourage sexual advances while bedding down with her army in the field. This was the accepted way of doing it, and if it was thus being done out of necessity the Church itself granted permission (see medieval theological works such as "Summa Theologica", "Scito Vias Domini", and so on). Her accusers were distorting medieval theology when they said that it was "always" an act of heresy. A number of eyewitnesses said that in the end her guards maneuvered her into a "relapse" by leaving her nothing to wear but her old male clothing, and she had no choice but to put it back on after arguing with them "until noon", according to one eyewitness. The author of this book, on the other hand, adopts the dishonest tactic of repeating the claims made by Joan's enemies on this subject while ignoring everything else.
- Even English financial documents prove that it was the English who ran and paid for her trial, and the eyewitness accounts state that they convicted her out of revenge rather than from any genuine belief that she was a heretic. To see what her religious views actually were, you need to look at the eyewitness accounts as well as the letters which she dictated to scribes during her military campaigns, which bluntly declare her devotion to, quote, "King Jesus, the King of Heaven", "Saint Mary", and so forth. This is why there was a successful appeal of her case after the English were finally driven out of from Rouen near the end of the war, leading the Inquisition to overturn the verdict on July 7, 1456.
- Needless to say, the above evidence also refutes the author's claim that Joan was a pagan, which is based on misconceptions about the nature of her trial as well as confusion over other issues, such as her native region (the modern usage of the word "Lorraine" is confused with the Duchy of Lorraine (which was supposedly a hotbed of witchcraft in that era); Joan did not come from the _Duchy_ of Lorraine, which wasn't even a part of France at that time).
- She did not lead a "proletarian" army, but in fact the core of her army was composed of the usual aristocrats and mercenaries (such as Duke Jean II d'Alencon, whom Joan always called "my fair Duke" ("mon beau Duc"); the Count of Dunois, the Baron of Coulances, Lord Saint-Severe, Lord Etienne de Vignolles (aka "La Hire"), and so on). Feinberg's spin on this, as with so many other subjects, is merely an invention.
- There are other anachronisms, such as when the author interprets Joan as a "feminist" while ignoring certain of her recorded statements which sound like precisely the opposite (such as the comment: "I would rather stay home with my poor mother and spin wool [rather than lead an army]", or her statement to Catherine de la Rochelle to "go home to your husband and tend your household", etc). Feminism is a modern movement which really had no counterpart in the 15th century.
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