I, Paradox: Joan of Arc As 'Non-Binary'
The latest ingredient in the goulash of today’s leftist ideologues is a newly rebranded Joan D'Arc, the French soldier who helped lead France to several victories from 1429 to about 1431, when she was tried for heresy. Joan was found guilty and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen. The play I, Joan will portray this young woman soldier as non-binary, because she made the practical decision as a soldier to wear men’s clothing.
Authors and producers of performance art can, at least for now, write and produce whatever they want. I support their right to do so, just as I supported Martin Scorsese’s right to make a film of Nikos Kazantzkis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ, despite the moral outage of the Christian right. It’s art. You can love it or hate it, but you can’t stifle free expression in the United States. Not yet.
With this in mind, I now exercise my right to comment on the laughable twists and turns of leftist doctrine. Just as racism is hailed as a remedy for racism, here stripping femalehood from a feminist hero and icon is somehow, I don’t know, more modern? More sophisticated than that old 2017 pussy hat business?
Speaking Your Truth is one of today’s gold standards of leftist morality. Your truth is truth, and you speak it in defiance of the opinions of others. You stand tall on your truth and society at large is instructed to acknowledge, honor and celebrate it.
When someone decides to avail themselves of the newest Unique Person identifiers because their moods change and some days they don’t feel like dressing up, they don the cool kid cloak of non-binary or two spirit or whatever stands in for ‘I’m so complex’. And everyone is expected to stand at attention and applaud the bravery.
The matter of whether to ask for someone’s pronouns is murky. A couple of years ago we were told that it’s not rude to ask for someone’s preferred pronouns, but recently I’ve watched training videos that say to avoid asking and wait for each person to tell you their pronouns, because someone may not have decided yet which gender identity they hold and what pronouns they want to use. No one, especially cis people, should assume anyone’s gender identity or pronouns, ever. This is a cardinal rule.
But somehow those rules don’t apply when a movement decides to co-opt one of the most famous and revered feminist heroes. Because of course gender and sex are so binary that a highly religious 15th century female soldier, who made a wise decision to wear men’s clothing during a time of war when being identified as female would put her at greater risk, must have had a non-female gender identity.
Joan of Arc didn’t call herself ‘non-binary’ because it is a concept invented by the navel-gazing of Western postmodernists. Someone living in 1430 had neither the luxury nor the time to indulge in theatrical pseudo-identity play.
Joan of Arc was a serious person who went to war when she was a teenager. Compare her bravery to today’s doughy hand-wringing society in which the majority of young people are too unfit to join the military, and are so emotionally and mentally weak that verbal disagreements are met with hysteria.
Joan D’Arc was a nineteen-year-old who was executed in the public square by fire. It’s a shame that self-proclaimed feminists think the real Joan isn’t quite interesting enough.