The rampant misogyny of transing Elizabeth I

Appropriately, it was April Fool’s Day when I read that Queen Elizabeth I is to be portrayed as a cross-dressing man in a forthcoming television show. But we live in times when the more silly and outlandish a rumoured cultural or political plan, the more likely it is to be true. Majesty – an oddly ‘heritage’ title for a project that clearly considers itself ‘transgressive’ – is set to film this summer, and is seeking ‘trans actresses’ (what we used to call cross-dressers, before they got really cross) to play the monarch.

The Sun, which first reported it, seemed drearily inclined to go along with the usual sexist claims of the trans lobby. ‘She is known for having traits associated with a male monarch’, it mouthed in a mealy manner in an article last week. What would those be – not getting her tits out for, if not the cameras, then the portrait painters of the era? ‘Some have speculated she had male pseudo-hermaphroditism, known as testicular feminisation’, the Sun continued, also noting that ‘others are obsessed with the Bisley Boy myth’. Yes, ‘obsessed’ isn’t too extreme a word here – I often hear people at bus stops discussing the Bisley Boy myth. This is the claim that Princess Elizabeth died in her youth and was replaced by a local boy with red hair. It was popularised by Bram Stoker in his 1910 book, Famous Imposters – because Bram ‘Dracula’ Stoker never made up far-fetched stories based extremely loosely on real people, did he?

The Sun quoted a ‘TV insider’ who insists: ‘Most historians dismiss the claims as misogyny motivated by the idea no woman could be as strong or capable without actually being a man. But it’s a theory which captures the imagination and appears to answer a lot of other questions around the unique queen.’ 

What would these questions be? That Elizabeth never married and had no children? Must be a bloke, then – what real woman would forego such unqualified pleasures? It’s a sign that trans thought is so woefully conventional, so gender straitjacketed, that it just doesn’t seem able to grasp, in this case, why a woman would refuse to hand over her hard-won power to a man by marrying a stranger who didn’t even speak her language. Or that she said on the eve of the Spanish Armada invasion: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king’? It’s called wordplay, I believe, and was extremely common until people with Tin Ear Syndrome – a disease affecting the ‘trans community’ and their inordinate number of ‘allies’ – became so prevalent among those in the arts and media.

This, of course, is our old mate ‘Queering the Past’ (or ‘lying’ as those not educated beyond all common sense and honesty know it) beloved of universities, museums and other beclowned institutions. There have been some truly rib-tickling examples of it, such as the claim that ‘trans Vikings’ existed, which sounds like a Monty Python sketch; sometimes the whole circus gets too much even for the most proudly gay public figure. In 2023, the museum dedicated to conserving the Mary Rose hosted a blog, promising to understand the collection of everyday objects found on the 16th-century ship ‘through a queer lens’. This prompted the great Philip Hensher to post on X: ‘I am as keen as anyone on gay sex, but I have to say to these curators – you’re fucking mental.’

We can easily mock the kind of mind that can tie itself into the most labyrinthine of sailor’s knots in order to posit the notion of invading ‘trans’ hordes raping their way across countries, presumably using papier-mâché penises, without the poor women of those nations noticing. Who cares about Vikings’ rights anyway? But it’s beyond a joke when real women who lived in (relatively) recent memory – who we know had to fight against monstrous insults and / or oppression – have their remains picked over by academic half-wits, apparently for no greater cause than making inadequate men (befrocked or not) feel better about themselves; Joan of Arc, Rosa Bonheur, Louisa May Alcott, Storme DeLarverie. Some women pretended to be men so they could be doctors, soldiers, pirates – not because they really considered themselves he / hims. The class privilege of those intent on ‘queering’ every female ‘presenting’ as female in history quite understandably prevents them from understanding how earning a living was the reason many women pretended to be men – including, of course, the Brontë sisters, or Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, as they were known. Or even JK Rowling, whose publishers advised her that boys would not buy books written by someone called Joanne.

Famous women are rare in history. They are generally there because they dared to do what was not expected of them – sometimes on pain of death. Yet somehow, it’s now ‘progressive’ to cancel them out by posthumously changing their sex. It’s especially idiotic in the case of Elizabeth I, who if she had really been born male (and let’s remember that royal births have been witnessed by the courtiers and politicians of the day, a practice which only ended in 1948, prior to the birth of Prince Charles) would not have seen her mother executed, when Elizabeth was still a child. Her father married and murdered multiple times because he couldn’t get a male heir. It’s telling that those who scream most loudly about having their feelings hurt when they’re called Martha instead of Arthur don’t mind trampling all over the graves of women killed by the savage misogyny of the age. Their lack of respect for the dead reminds one of the way rape and murder victims once had their reputations trashed by authorities defending violent males.

A less important but still significant side effect of ‘queering’ or ‘transing’ the past is that this will mean fewer roles for actresses, already at a disadvantage in a profession that throws them on the scrapheap far earlier than men. Shakespeare’s heroines were originally played by teenage boys, as it was considered improper for women to display themselves in such a way. The call for ‘actors who identify as transgender women’, as the casting call for Majesty puts it, means that women can be edged out once more. Over the past few years, the woman-face actors Karla Sofia Gascon, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Laverne Cox have been nominated for Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Emmys and BAFTAS in the female categories. Tellingly, there’s been no traffic the other way, with women pretending to be men being put up for male prizes.

When I was a youngster in the 1970s, and Margaret Thatcher first came to notice as a leader of the Tory Party, I remember the sneering from both right and left about her being ‘a man in drag’ and ‘a female impersonator’. I never thought I’d be hearing the same sort of trash talk about powerful women half a century later, as the Elizabeth project so creepily does. Tell you what, queer folx, let’s just explain away every driven, successful woman in history as a man and have done with it; from Don Ciccone and John Crawford in the showbiz world to everyone from Lionel Shriver to me in the writing world. Because women aren’t ambitious and forceful, ever. Talk about erasure!

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.