Elizabeth I was “really a man”

I’m a huge history nut. My favorite historical figure is probably Queen Elizabeth I. She kicked ass. There are a lot of crazy untrue myths about her, like with most women in history. But today I want to talk about the one that bothers me the most because it’s rooted in some really disgusting sexism. The one that says Elizabeth was really a man.

That’s right. Even though her parents had desperately wanted a son and had no reason at all to raise one as a daughter, some how she was actually male. Don’t ask me how. This is one that’s become a bit of an urban legend, spread on by giggling teenage boys and “Old Boy’s Club” professors. I even saw it on a myspace “fun facts” bulletin, which for some reason are widely believed by stupid teenagers everywhere. 

Let me make this clear: Elizabeth was a woman. According to historical records her doctor passed on to one of her advisors, she had a completely normal woman’s body. She had breasts and a vagina and got her period once a month at least until she was forty-six (when the records were made to see if she was fertile for a potential marriage alliance). 

There is no evidence whatsoever that she was anything other than a woman. So why is this rumor so widespread then? Sexism, pure and simple. Elizabeth was smarter than most of the men around her. She ruled like a man and achieved more than any woman in England before her since Queen Boudica fifteen hundred years earlier. This was unsettling to the sexist culture of the times, which believed that women were inferior to men and could not accomplish anything intellectually.

How could they continue to keep women down and maintain these beliefs when a woman was accomplishing so much in her own right? They said she was really a man. Various explanations went around for this, though none of them really make any sense. People wanted to believe it, so they did. The fact that Elizabeth never wanted to get married or have children (which, as most Tudor men and republican politicians will tell you, is something all women want) was extra “proof” of their assertion.

Queen Elizabeth I was an extraordinary woman. She was probably the greatest monarch England has ever had, and she changed how the world saw what women could do. If you ever hear from some convincing man that she “had something extra in her petticoats”, as the myspace bulletin phrased it, see it for the sexist rhetoric it is, not legitimate history.