okay not trying to derail but OP told me to sound off about this so while i do enjoy this take get ready for my personal favourite take on gender in much ado - transfem Beatrice / transfem Claudio as parallel characters. Transfem Beatrice is I think a take I've seen quite a lot and it was how I first read the character when we studied much ado in year 9. She's obviously unique in the play in how much agency she has as a woman compared to Hero and Innogen and Margaret, and I've always found the reading of this as being her occupying a trans space interesting - I know a lot of people see her as transmasc, but the transfem reading works so well as well. "Would that I were a man" and her insistence at the beginning of the play that she will never marry because there will never be a man who she is for, who is also for her are both so beautifully painful, and also I think it plays interestingly into the way she experiences agency and freedom. she speaks her mind, she speaks a lot, she isn't afraid to verbally parry and stand up to the men around her, and in this reading that has a lot to do with the fact that she wasn't raised to be deferrent, she wasn't raised to be afraid of holding her own. But she is, now, seen as a woman, and with all that she wants that, with all that she is a woman, the societal restrictions of the place and time she is in apply more and more, so that she is grating against the norm just by expressing herself. she is finally seen as she is, as she wants to be, and now she is fighting not against how the world sees her as something she isn't, but how the world won't let her be what she is: in her transformation she finds other parts of herself suppressed. i think it's quite telling that the moments she is most loud, most opinionated, most comfortable, are around her family and Benedick. Her family has known her all her life, it is easier to be herself with them. And Benedick is... a bit of a special case. Even with him, towards the beginning of the play she is more subdued.
Now for Claudio. This is a take I have seen a lot less but I am no less attached to it. He may not even have realised he is transfem, but he is, and Beatrice knows it. An egg waiting to crack. I feel a lot of Claudio's actions happen because he is trying to act as he feels a man in his position should and not how he wants to. It might just be the Tennant / Tate production doing a lot of heavy lifting with how I feel about certain scenes, but things like both the wedding scenes, where he, in all the pain, makes such a public spectacle of Hero, and then later when she "dies" he is so rocked by it. Obviously, he is deeply hurt by the whole fake cheating thing regardless of what his gender is, but the way he is so easily led into what he does about it sort of reeks of an internal dialogue of "this is what a man, a proper man, a military man would do, and therefore this is what I must, no matter what I want". Even his friendship with Benedick, and how he interacts with Leonato, sort of have an underlying impulse of this is how a man interacts when you start reading from that angle. The reason this is important is less to do with Claudio himself than with Beatrice. In this reading. Claudio represents for Beatrice everything she could have been - liked and in love and happy. Celebrated. But still not true. Not true to herself, not living her life out of the shadow of expectations she could not and did not want to meet. It's why Claudio's public betrayal of Hero hits her so hard - not only has he wronged her cousin, whom she loves, but he has it all, he has everything she gave up to be herself and he has ruined it all. It's Beatrice knowing, in that moment, that she made the right choice and it's also Beatrice mourning her cousin and it's also Beatrice mourning the freedoms she has lost: the knowledge that someone could do this to her. It's seeing Leonato turn so quickly on his daughter and knowing this is no world for women, and knowing that she gave up everything to be one. It's rage and jealousy and also sympathy, in some small way, because she can see Claudio for what he is, and she knows that he will never find a place in this world where he can have it all, either. When she and Benedick start to connect, it's the rush and joy and also trepidation of this having felt impossible for so long, but maybe, just maybe, she can have a life where she is truly happy and she is loved. It's the final wedding scene where she can look at Claudio without resentment, without resenting him for having what she lacks, and she can hope he gets to where she is, because being what she is is no longer a sentence of a loveless life of straining against expectation and patriarchy, but one where there is a shot at both being yourself and feeling safe in that and finding happiness.
Anyway this was also absolutely not Shakespeare's intention but it's important to me. And also just take a look at Claudio at the costume party in the Tennant / Tate production. Look at his shirt and his earring and tell me that man is cisgender, I dare you.
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