Tale of Proto-TERF Island, The Witch of Edmonton, Or, How Cisness Gets Invented
A final essay for my Early Modern Trans studies class with the iconic Professor Colby Gordon. The class was one of the reasons I started the Tales of TERF Island miniseries (check it out!)
Why hello there, my friends. Gather around, and I’ll tell you a story about the invention of cisness. But first, I shall start with something you all know: The United Kingdom, or as trans people in the UK and US call it, TERF Island, has become a harbinger of the world’s worst transphobes. Some of them are feminists who like Nazis (ignoring that they would be first to be killed when said Nazis come to power, maybe they’re into the uniform????). Others are celebrities, like the Wizard Lady or Graham Linehan. This has led to material consequences for trans people, who are denied healthcare and prosecuted by the state for just existing. This has led to many deaths from denial of care, but also from mental health issues that stem from that. I am also not trying to neglect the carceral systems that lead to trans people, like the prison systems, homelessness. But not every story of TERF Island is horrible: one that I have ardently followed is Leo Fox’s graphic novel Boy Island (which is getting released as a book by Silver Sprocket Press). I have been buoyed by the support trans people have given each other for top surgery and general solidarity against the Tories and their Labour Quislings.
However, TERFs did not just start with The Wizard Lady. Nor did it start in the 1970s with Janice Raymond and other extremist lesbian separatists. To get a fuller picture of trans history, we must journey back to where our tale takes place: early modern England. There were trans people there, as in all points in time, but there were also witch hunts, which relied on gender variance as a marker for humiliating genital inspections, mob violence, and public execution, a precursor for our modern TERF Island. The Witch of Edmonton, a 1658 play, also focuses on a particular transphobic witch hunt against Mother Sawyer, based on a true story of a witch hunt against Elizabeth Sawyer in 1621—a “ripped from the headlines” Lifetime movie of its day--. Rather than demonizing Mother Sawyer, the playwrights stage witchcraft as the scapegoat of a corrupt social order, as Mother Sawyer’s lines gain the audience’s sympathy: despite this, she is executed. I did put some silly headlines in bold because I can, and I hope it helps you understand the moral of this tale if there is one.
Is heteronormativity okay in this play? Are any existing systems okay in this play?
The short answer here is no. But that would not be much of a story, would it? Our play starts with the main plot, which concerns a secret marriage between Frank and Winnifred, who are both in the employ of Sir Arthur, a rich man who is implied to have an affair with Winnifred. From the first line of this play, which Frank says to his soon-to-be wife Winnifred— “Come wench! Why there’s a business soon dispatched”(1.1,1-2) heteronormativity, particularly this marriage, does not come off okay. Literally the first words that Frank says to her is an order and a derogatory term for a woman. It is also a common trope in Jacobean tragedies for secret marriages to end poorly. Frank and Winnifred’s are no exception.
Frank takes Winnifred to a family friend and then presents himself to his dad, where he is married to Susan. He denies his first marriage to his father, despite having the time to do so. Why does he deny Winnifred’s existence as his wife? Well, it is because he wants his father’s inheritance, which with Winnifred’s lowly status, he would not be able to. His fear of disappointing his father, as well as the monetary gains he gets from marrying Susan leads to his second, fatal marriage, resulting in Susan’s murder, as well as Winnifred being forced to crossdress as a guy while very pregnant with a illegitimate child. Sir Arthur also comes off as a creep, as his relationship with Winnifred is just a part of his power dynamic over her as both her boss and landlord, which is to say that he is the sole provider of her housing and financial situation. (note: I wrote this before the Neil Gaiman allegations. Don’t worry, I’ll write something about it soonish).
Mother Sawyer is remarkably aware of the A Plot, and that these systems do not work. In her show trial at Act 4, she speaks of the social ills that she gets blamed for instead of those in power1. To her, witchcraft is in the abusive relationships she sees. It is also in the opulent displays of wealth that are seized from the poor. Her execution does nothing to solve the problems of Edmonton. In fact, she is publicly executed without forgiveness from her neighbors, not helped by her willingness whereas Frank is given all the townspeople’s forgiveness, as he repented in the usual Christian way and seems to have guilt. What it does is restore people’s faith in the social order, and that she deserved her fate because of her non-normative gender, which is mentioned further in this next section:
The Demonization of Witchcraft Is About the Cisheteropatriarchy
Witches have the power to transcend and transgress the boundaries of human and animal, as well as destroy heteronormative manifestations in the monogamous and heterosexual family. Witches also were identified from forced genital examinations, such as finding a third nipple (“the devil’s teat” where familiars would suckle from) or allegations of queer sex with spirits, such as with the Dog.
In the village of Edmonton, there are many forms of abhorrent behavior. In Amussen’s article, she picks up on the misuse of people by patriarchs, such as Arthur with Winnifred, and Frank with Winnifred and Susan (Asmussen, 178). Yet all of this gets projected onto the older, impoverished, Mother Sawyer. In the initial scene where she is introduced, she states that she is used as a common sink, something that is particular with trans women due to their gender nonconformity threatening women’s sense of gender and men’s attraction. I am sure that we are aware of trans women being labeled as predators. I can see some of you nodding your heads.
This happens here with Mother Sawyer. She is blamed for literally everything that goes wrong in the village, from Frank’s bigamy and Sir Arthur’s impregnation of his servant, as well as the crop failures, livestock deaths, and the suicide/suspicious death of Anne Ratcliffe. Witches were also accused of transitioning people against their will, as well as providing gender-affirming care. So not only are witches marked by gender nonconforming traits themselves but are also accused of providing said gender-affirming care. I did mention earlier in our tale Mother Sawyer’s speech at her show trial, but I also wanted to mention that the elderly were seen as trans. Their hormones, or humors as they were called in the early modern period, switched as they got older. They were also subject to poverty, as they were unable to work.
*sigh* Let’s Talk About the Dog
In the introduction to The Witch of Edmonton, the author mentions the Dog. While many people call the Dog “he”, including Munro, because the dog is played by a male actor,(Munro, 69) I would like to suggest that our furry friend is an example of a xenogender, and will be using dog/dogself pronouns to refer to dog. I picked these because that is the Dog’s name, but it is also important to define what a xenogender is. It is a gender identity under the umbrella of trans and nonbinary identities that goes beyond not only binaries, but human classifications. The Dog shapeshifts into a variety of creatures—from a devil to a spaniel to a human figure preparing to infiltrate the British State. Dog figures were central to witchcraft pamphlets as both familiars sucked from the gender variant parts of witches and sexual companions for them.
Therefore, with the Dog, the lines between human and nonhuman, as well as its variant roles as a familiar, are blurred. It is also important to note that sexuality is not only demonic, but also racialized. Another example is with the confessions Magdelena De La Cruz, a Spanish nun who stated in her confessions that she had a familiar who showed up as a Black man: here the racist associations with Black men and deviant sexualities, especially with the familar’s association with deviant sex, are wrapped up in the demon. It is also important to note that the actors who played the dog sometimes did so in black paint that looks much like Blackface, as in one 1993 and 1999 staging of The Witch of Edmonton (Munro, 72)
Wait, Why Does This Play Matter?
I hope that this play shows some things never change, or do, but come back in different forms. I do not know how to end this article without showing that this is a tale of Britain’s fixation on gender nonconformity as a part of the canon that is sympathetic to trans/gender non-conforming people. I did put an example below about Macbeth featuring a trans actor to show representation, as seen in the Macbeth Corollary after the Works Cited. I mean, Macbeth and Banquo do have a line where they are wondering what gender the Witches are, as they have conflicting gender markers (both beards that mark masculinity and clothes without clear gender markers). However, when stepping outside of the Shakespearean plays, one can find a different type of trans representation. One way is seeing crossdressing. Another is with the uncomfortable histories of enforcing the cis heteropatriarchy.
The latter is uncomfortable to sit with but is worth discussing. If trans people are in all points in time, why, there were trans colonizers, trans settler-colonizers, trans cops, alongside trans sex workers, priestesses, gender bending outlaws that can be easily reclaimed by us. My final word to you is to be careful as to what history you want to tell. The first history is reductive, but the second is broader, despite the violence that historical trans people carry out/are done to them. I have briefly mentioned racism and how that plays into gender variance, as well as misogyny, but others that will come up are the trans-Atlantic slave trade, settler colonialism and state surveillance which enables all these systems. The Witch of Edmonton is just one entry into this trans history. Remember, transness is not just about crossdressing. It is also about systems of oppression and what the state (or the settler colonists or the patriarchs) finds as desirable subjects, and which they subject to marginalization and death.
Works Cited
Amussen, Susan D. “The Witch of Edmonton: Witchcraft, Inversion, and Social Criticism.” Early Theatre, vol. 21, no. 2, 2018, pp. 167–80.
Lucy Munro. The Witch of Edmonton. The Arden Shakespeare, 2017. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=2474408&site=ehost-live.
The Macbeth Corollary
This is the production of Macbeth that I saw last summer, produced by Del Shakes. Most of the witches (including Hecate, who is the revived spirit of the murdered king) are portrayed as trans or nonbinary. They shift as various characters (including the Porter) and Witch 2 (played by CJ Higgins, a friend of mine) has an amazing scene where he plays the wounded Sergeant with the makeup of said wounds around his top surgery scars. My mom and I loved the acting and makeup, and we are going to their performance of Julius Ceasar next year