Pragmatic women have cross-dressed throughout history – but it doesn’t make them transgender

Women passing as men is a well-documented manoeuvre that goes back centuries. The history stretches from the legend of Hua Mulan, the fifth-century Chinese warrior who took her ageing father’s place in the army, to 18th-century pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Cross-dressing women defied all odds and deserve to be honoured and celebrated. But their heroism is at risk of being obliterated by the politically correct liberal establishment who want to recast the boldest women of our history as ‘transgender men’.

In Shakespearean England, a cohort of women paraded around the streets of London in ‘broad-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn, and some of them stilettos or poniards’. In the playhouses, cross-dressing was common. From Moll Cutpurse in Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl to Rosalind-turned-Ganymede in Shakespeare’s As You Like It,  cross-dressing in Elizabethan comedy was a reflection of the gender crisis taking place in contemporary England. Half of women were unmarried or widowed.