Thank you, I am familiar with this argument, and I was hoping you would try this with me. Let's talk history.
1. It's an entirely modern convention to consider being trans an identity. From a theory standpoint, trans identity is created when someone transgresses gender norms. The words that Joan used for herself don't change the fact that she and I share the fundamental experience of transgressing gender boundaries. I have every right as a trans person to celebrate the people who lived the way I do, even with different language.
No one who hates trans people hates us for our identity; they hate us for our behavior. Likewise, Joan was not executed for any unknowable "identity" but for her cross-gender behavior.
2. Joan's motivations for wearing men's clothing are unknown. She never spoke of her motivation herself (Hotchkiss). Although witnesses arrested that she endured guards attempting to assault her, there is no unified witness on why she returned to men's clothing or even if she did that herself or if guards forced her to. (Guards forcing her to wear men's clothing does not negate my point, I'll get there in a second.) The assertion that she wore men's clothes to protect against sexual assault is nonsensical, as scholars have pointed out that men's clothes don't afford a lot of protection when you're shackled in a jail cell (Hotchkiss, Schibanoff). Personally, I don't know what people who perpetuate this myth think men were wearing at the time that was assault-proof. She was in a tunic, doublet and breeches. Furthermore, if men's clothing made women so impervious to rape, why didn't ALL women crossdress in the middle ages? Analyses of Joan's crossdressing that treat it as a minor detail rather than central to who she was fail to deal with the fact that very few women crossdressed!
Joan initially wore men's clothing to fight in battle. Why she wears men's clothing outside of battle she never comments on, except that it was her call. She only desisted under torture. Accepting women's clothes in order to go to mass after being tortured doesn't indicate that wearing men's clothes was not personally important to her but the exact opposite. After she returned to wearing men's clothes, which triggered her execution, she told the judge that she never intended to swear off men's clothing! (Warner). Joan herself never stated that it was to avoid assault; this is extrapolated from witnesses who described guards assaulting her.
Only recent scholarship has dealt meaningfully with Joan's cross-gender behavior. The Catholic church, on the other hand, has a vested interest in myths like "she wore men's clothes to avoid rape." The Church must dismiss Joan's crossdressing as inconsequential in order to both canonize her and denigrate trans people simultaneously. But it is not a serious historical argument.
3. Historically, Joan was killed by the church, not by "the English king." Joan suffered a military defeat and was captured by Burgundians allied with the English. Charles VII of France did not attempt to ransom her, which is a significant betrayal, because the ransom of knights was so rote and standardized that there were set prices for it. The Burgundians sold her to Henry V, the English king, who did not kill her, but handed her over to Bishop Cauchon in France. She was then charged with heresy and tried in an ecclesiastical court in France, under the supervision of Cauchon, for heresy. 131 clergy members presided over her trial and execution. Five articles of accusation against her in the trial were related to cross-dressing.
You're right that there was a political angle to Joan's death-- Charles VII had no more use for a peasant after he was crowned king, so he didn't ransom her, and everyone involved in her execution, although French, was pro-English. However, it was very much the church that killed her.
Why do it through the church? If Henry V wanted to kill her "at all cost" why didn't he simply execute her as a prisoner of war, as he did to the prisoners of war at the Battle of Agincourt just 15 years earlier? (Hollinshed)
4. Because Joan's execution was explicitly punishment for transgressing gender boundaries. It was both misogynistic and queerphobic violence carried out by church authority. This would never have been carried out against a male knight. The trial was rife with hatred of Joan's cross-gender behavior. Even her execution was an act of humiliation specifically for crossdressing. After her men's clothes were burned away and she was presumed dead, they extinguished the flames to display her naked body and posthumously humiliate her for her cross-dressing (Warner).
You cannot separate Joan's cross-gender behavior from her betrayal and execution. Doing so is historically and intellectually dishonest. Given that Joan only desisted under torture, said she never intended to recant wearing men's clothes, and chose to die rather than stop, the only reasonable assumption is that wearing men's clothes was important to Joan. Not as a defense, since it is a completely inadequate defense, but for some reason particular to her internal experience. The only reason she herself gave was that it was God's call.
Joan spent nearly 500 years as a folk hero before she was canonized in 1920 and, I would argue, co-opted by the Catholic church. You do not own her image or her history. You cannot erase that she was executed for cross-gender (what we would now call transgender behavior). You cannot claim her for the church at the exclusion of generations of queer people that she inspired. You cannot ask us not to see ourselves in her. You do not own her and you do not own queer responses to repressive institutions.
Hotchkiss, Valerie R. (2000). Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe
Schibanoff, Susan (1996). "True Lies: Transvestism and Idolatry in the Trial of Joan of Arc"
Warner, Marina. (1981). The Trial of Joan of Arc.
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland.
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