History is being rewritten by woke ideologues yet again

As if woke ideology had not discredited itself enough already, the gender police have come for Joan of Arc. Aged 19, she was burned alive as a heretic; a century ago she was canonised. Now children are being taught that she was “non-binary”.

Thus history is rewritten to suggest that Joan was really condemned for refusing to accept the gender she was “assigned” at birth. No longer a female patron saint of France, she has been recast as the first LGBTQ+ martyr.

It should go without saying that the posthumous press-ganging of this greatest of French heroines for propaganda purposes is historical nonsense. At her trial, Joan was unjustly accused of many things, but none of her accusers doubted that she was a woman. To deprive one of the bravest women in history of her sex is both anachronistic and misogynistic. And it is simply wrong to suggest that there is any scholarly basis for such ahistorical gender reassignment. She wore breeches on occasion: but it has been a very long time since anyone thought that women can’t do that and remain women.

This is not to say that there is no room for reinterpreting the historical facts, or even for a fictional reimagining of Joan’s story. Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part l, reflecting the legacy of the Hundred Years’ War, shows her morphing from innocent maiden into evil sorceress. Schiller’s play The Maid of Orléans romanticises her life, inventing her tragic love for an English knight.

In George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan she is shown as a medieval suffragette: “a great middle-class reformer…a little higher than Mrs Pankhurst”, as T S Eliot put it. Shaw’s play was adapted by Otto Preminger into a film starring Jean Seberg, with a screenplay by Graham Greene. Finally, in 2022 Charlie Josephine’s play I, Joan at the Globe presented her as a transsexual, going a stage further even than today’s activist educators. (Our reviewer gave it two stars.)

On stage, of course, anything goes – after all, nobody has to sit through a theatrical production if they don’t want to do so. But what is taught in the classroom to a captive audience of pupils is another matter. The story of Joan of Arc is quite challenging enough – it was, after all, the English who burnt her at the stake.

For our schools to traduce the memory of a young woman who died for God and for France is to add insult to injury.