The Queen, The Monster, The Woman, and the Human

Let us Consider the Cracks in the Patriarchy

In light of last week’s UK Supreme Court ruling that anti-discrimination laws protecting women do not apply to trans women, I am sharing remarks that I made two months ago, in February, for the launch of Humans: A Monstrous History, a new book by my colleague Surekha Davies. If you attended that launch, these remarks are slightly expanded and revised from the original.

I will echo the chorus of those who recognize that feminism fights for all women.¹ Trans women are women. The fight for transgender rights and the fight for women’s rights hardly stand in opposition to each other. On the contrary, they are intricately interwoven with each other.

They are one and the same fight.

As Surekha Davies puts it in her chapter on “Gender, Sex, and Monstrous Births,” no one in the early modern period “had any idea what actually went on inside human reproductive organs.”² What counted as a “monstrous birth” in medieval and early modern Europe? Definitions have shifted over the centuries, but Wikipedia offers a succinct summary of the social and religious context and the implications of so-called ‘monstrous births.”

“A monstrous birth…is a birth in which a defect renders the animal or human child malformed to such a degree as to be considered ‘monstrous.’ Such births were often taken as omens, signs of God, or moral warnings to be wielded by society at large as a tool for manipulation in various ways. The development of the field of obstetrics helped to do away with spurious associations with evil but the historical significance of these fetuses remains noteworthy. In early and medieval Christianity, monstrous births were presented as and used to pose difficult theological problems about humanity and salvation.”

Not just in early and medieval Christianity: theological problems associated with monstrous births continued well into the 18^th century.

What did “monstrous births” mean to the people who observed and wrote about them? As Davies unpacks in Humans: A Monstrous History, the historical language around such births points to deeper anxieties about women, gender, and reproduction – anxieties that persist to this day.

Clearly, in the early modern mindset, a woman’s body was powerful in that it could generate new life. But her mind was powerful too, sometimes in terrifying and uncontrolled ways. Davies cites an 18^th-century case in which a young woman was obsessively drawn to a picture of a two-headed monster in an almanac. Reportedly, this woman looked at the picture day-in and day-out during the time she conceived and, about nine months later, gave birth to a stillborn two-headed infant. The explanation given at the time was that her imagination had shaped the fetus: somehow, that picture of the monster had worked its way through her eyes and mind to imprint itself onto the fetus.

I think this story points to a deeper anxiety: no one understood the mysteries of any pregnancy, whether that pregnancy resulted in a so-called “monstrous” birth or a “healthy” one. This mysteriousness made pregnancy itself – and by association, the female body as defined through reproduction – potentially unruly and disruptive to a certain social order.

The thinking around monstrous births introduced questions that pulled at loose threads in this social order. If a woman could give birth to a monster after looking at a picture of a monster, did that mean a woman who harbored thoughts toward a man other than her lawful husband could imprint her fetus with the features of the man she desired? Even if she hadn’t slept with that other man, even if she was adulterous in mind only, was it possible for a woman to imagine into existence an illegitimate child? This was an alarming possibility. In patriarchal early modern Europe, property, wealth, power, and dynasty were based on hierarchies tied to birth status, bloodlines, and succession. Understandably, anxiety about paternity and legitimacy was rife: what if your wife gave birth to a son who was not really your son? What if the heir to the throne was not the legitimate child of the king?

Monstrous births revealed a crack in the system. Monstrous births showed just how fragile that dynastic order was, because they amplified the reality that no one had any real control over the reproductive processes that served as the engine of a system governed by birth and succession. It all came down to whatever mystery was unfolding within a woman’s body.

One solution to this female reproductive unruliness was human-constructed law, a kind of superstructure imposed to control the output of women’s bodies for the sake of social order. To illustrate this point, let me talk a little bit about queen consorts because the social and political role of the consort reveals quite starkly that women were defined by reproductive function. A queen consort is the wife of the ruling king. She does not reign as sovereign. Queen Camilla, for instance, wife of King Charles II, is a queen consort. Queen Elizabeth II was a queen regnant, or sovereign queen.

A consort’s most first and most important political role was to produce an heir for the kingdom. In certain kingdoms, like France, the heir had to be a boy (girls and women could not inherit the throne in France). Even when a woman could legally rule as sovereign, such as in England and Spain, it was understood that succession proceeded more smoothly when the heir was a boy, and boys always inherited before their sisters. Such was the case with Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, for example, who inherited the throne of England before his older half sisters, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth Tudor.

But of course, a queen consort’s body didn’t always comply. Sometimes queen consorts couldn’t get pregnant, or they miscarried, or they delivered stillborn infants. Sometimes they gave birth only to baby girls. When any of these mishaps occurred, the dynastic order – a clear and predictable order of succession – threatened to collapse.

And so, we see in episode after historical episode how law intervened to remove the danger of the non-compliant female body. That law often took the form of annulment, in which the Church enabled kings to put aside unwanted queens so they could marry again. In perhaps the most infamous case, Henry VIII of England broke with the Catholic Church (which had denied him a divorce), creating himself as the head of what would eventually become known as the Church of England so that he could remove his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn. Henry invoked Church law, namely the Book of Leviticus to justify divorce. God, Henry said, was punishing him because he had defied sacred law and married his deceased brother’s wife. The “punishment” had taken the form of Katherine’s imperfect fertility. Katherine had endured many pregnancies, but only her daughter Mary Tudor had survived past infancy.

But Anne Boleyn, too, disappointed King Henry. After the birth of her daughter Elizabeth, Anne failed to produce a male child within a satisfactory time period. And so, the state (comprised of King Henry, assisted by Thomas Cromwell) invoked sacred laws against adultery and incest to accuse Anne of sleeping with her brother, among other fabricated charges. To these charges, the state paired secular charges of treason to put Anne on the scaffold.

There are no authenticated contemporary portraits of Anne Boleyn that are still extant. This one, from Hever Castle was made around 1550. Anne died in 1536.

Historians continue to debate why Henry cooled towards Anne. But it seems likely that had she given birth to a son, Anne not only would have avoided execution but would likely have remained Henry’s wife. As it was, Henry moved on to Jane Seymour who bore him the son that would secure Henry VIII’s legacy and the Tudor dynasty: the future Edward VI. Having fulfilled her reproductive duty, Jane died two weeks after giving birth, either from postpartum sepsis or a postpartum hemorrhage.

When I think about Anne Boleyn and the charges of incest, I can’t help but see an effort by the state to transform Anne into a kind of “monster” in the sixteenth-century mindset: an unnatural woman, sister, wife, and mother.

And I also can’t help but see the connections between the language around “monstrous births” and embedded anxieties about the power that female reproduction exerts over political and social systems. Like the monster, the female body – Anne Boleyn’s body, or the body of any queen – represents a certain fallacy of human control. You can impose certain religious and secular laws about a wife’s obedience to her husband, or a subject’s obedience to her king. But in the end, a woman’s body, fueled by her imagination, is going to do what it’s going to do. How to control that female propensity for unruliness and disobedience?

So goes the early modern thinking.

And so goes 21^st-century thinking.

The push to control women’s reproductive freedom and to deny transgender women not only their civil rights but the very fact of their existence reveals, once again, a social and legal effort to define “woman” principally in terms of reproductive function.

This is how the patriarchy propels itself: by defining, valuing, devaluing, and even criminalizing women according to how they fulfill reproductive functions. Transgender women (and men, and nonbinary and intersex people) resist these patriarchal definitions. So do cis women who embrace reproductive autonomy and refuse to define their gender and the value of their personhood principally through the lens of fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood.

And if you aren’t sure about the real-life devastating effects of defining and valuing women exclusively according to reproductive function, just ask a woman who faces death because she can’t get an abortion. Ask a trans woman rendered socially and legally invisible. Or: just ask any 16^th-century queen. Ask Anne.

In closing, let me return briefly to the concept of the “monstrous birth.” The “monster” is a figure that exposes the constructed nature of social beliefs. The act of monstrifying certain people reinforces certain social conventions as if they were natural and immutable. Rather than fearing the so-called “monster,” we should resist categorization as a tool of oppression, and instead welcome the opportunity to explore different ways of seeing and thinking. This is what the figure of the “monster” invites us to do. The monster gives us a chance to recalibrate.

When it comes to women, gender, and reproduction, the “monster” exposes the narratives we have used to defined and control women’s bodies, indeed all bodies. In seeing monsters this way, we can begin to rewrite those narratives — to transcend essentializing and simplifying beliefs designed to keep certain kinds of people down and instead to embrace complexity.

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1. Men are also the beneficiaries of feminism because feminism is the fight against patriarchy rather than a fight against men. Because no one wants to read a 20-minute post from me, however, I will reserve this dimension of the discussion for another post.

2. Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025), p. 105.