Xir Majesty

Academics working with the Globe Theatre speculate that Queen Elizabeth I may have been nonbinary and—out of an abundance of inclusivity—will henceforth refer to her as ‘they’:

“I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,” Elizabeth I once said to rally her troops to face the Spanish Armada, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king”.

And was a non-binary person too, according to academics working for Shakespeare’s Globe, who have cast doubt on the gender identity of one of England’s greatest queens.

Elizabeth I has been presented as possibly non-binary in an essay published by the theatre, which refers to the female monarch with the gender-neutral “they/them” pronouns.

The essay was written by a “transgender awareness trainer” in defence of the Globe’s decision to stage a new play featuring a non-binary Joan of Arc, but both the play and the essay have raised concerns that famous females are being written out of history.

The essay claims: “Elizabeth I… described themself regularly in speeches as ‘king’, ‘queen’ and ‘prince’, choosing strategically to emphasise their female identity or their male monarchical role at different points.”

Now, I’m not a historian but I can state with great confidence that Queen Elizabeth I, who died in 1603, did not identify with a concept that’s younger than the microblogging site Tumblr. I’ll even show my work:

A nonbinary person is a person who believes that your personality (or perhaps your desperate desire to manifest a personality) is what makes you a man, woman, both, or neither. This concept did not exist until the 2010s. Therefore, Queen Elizabeth I was not nonbinary.

People in the (even quite recent!) past did not see their lives in these terms because these terms did not exist, thus the kind of people trans activists desperately project on the past did not exist either.

That should be OK! Ideas change. New ways of conceptualizing ourselves come into being, which bring new kinds of people into being. But, frankly, whether it's OK or not, that's how it is.

There were unusual and extraordinary women in the past. Often, what made these women unusual or extraordinary was that they broke out of restrictive sex roles. They were still women. These women’s lives were still shaped by their sex—when they rejected conventional sex roles, their sex shaped the form their rejection took!—not by our 21st-century concepts.

A woman who wanted to hold onto her throne spoke of her "king's" heart and stomach. This did not mean to her what it means to today's fanatical beachcombers.

To those who still think you must be missing something, you're not. This ideology is really this regressive.

I can't overstate how overextended this line of credit is. People think that they must not be capable of understanding the depth and subtlety of the arguments gender ideologues put forth because these arguments sound so dumb and regressive.

Reasonably, people think that there must be more there because who could believe such crap, much less try to pass it off as progressive?

Eventually, this line of credit will run out.