I have an idea for the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth. My idea is for a Mary Rose Ultimate Experience – a funfair ride which replicates the experience of those 500 young boys and men as they sank with the great Tudor warship. There’ll be no need for expensive visuals because it would have been dark down there below deck and I’m hoping the passengers on my ride will be flung violently from side to side because first aboard will be the director and trustees of the museum and there they will have to stay until they promise never again to publish anything remotely like the piece that has just appeared on the museum website.

The blog is prominently displayed on the site and its title is: ‘How can we understand the Mary Rose’s collection of personal objects through a queer lens?’

Is this is what history dysphoria feels like?

The answer to the question is that we can’t, of course, because you don’t ‘understand’ anything through a lens, queer or otherwise. Nevertheless, the author gives it a go. On the subject of a small, wooden octagonal mirror frame dredged up with the ship she writes: ‘Looking at your own reflection in a mirror can bring up lots of emotions for both straight and LGBTQ+ people… For queer people, we may experience a strong feeling of gender dysphoria when we look into a mirror, a feeling of distress caused by our reflection conflicting with our own gender identities. On the other hand, we may experience gender euphoria when looking in a mirror, when how we feel on the inside matches our reflection.’

What has this to do with the original mirror fame? Isn’t this supposed to be a platform for drowned Tudors? Is this is what history dysphoria feels like?

Of a gold wedding ring found on board the author writes: ‘In England, Wales and Scotland, same-sex marriages became legal in 2014… Today, same-sex couples cannot be married by a minister of the church of England, the church that Henry VIII established.’ Try to excise from your mind, the image of the 16th century sailor that ring once belonged to, his bride and perhaps his children, left behind. Who cares for him, when there’s propaganda to copy and paste.

Then there’s a nit comb. Nit combs were the personal objects found most often on the Mary Rose, says the author. She adds, ‘These nit combs would have been mainly used by the men to remove nits.’ I actually find this sentence delightful. It speaks of the sort of desperation we all feel when confronted with a word count. But how will the author manage to understand nit combs through a queer lens? I felt almost eager to find out. The answer was a word association game. Nit combs are not for styling hair, she writes. However, having introduced the idea of ‘hair styling’, she’s off to the LGBTQ+ races. ‘For many queer people today, how we wear our hair is a central pillar of our identity. Today, hairstyles are often heavily gendered, following the gender norm that men have short hair, and women have long hair. By “subverting” and playing with gender norms, Queer people can find hairstyles that they feel comfortable wearing.’ Maybe the author is a time traveller from the 1950s. She sure doesn’t live in Hoxton.

Whoever she is though, she won’t have to suffer the Marie Rose Ultimate drowning experience. However awful the piece, it’s clearly not her fault. She’s almost certainly just an intern, or perhaps a young member of the social media team with the usual Gen Z passion for Queering. The people who should suffer are the people who should know better: the ‘Collections’ team who should love their objects more than this and the directors who read the piece and, fearing ‘transphobia’, didn’t take it down. They know what a terrible disservice it does to the poor crew of the Mary Rose, and to the young writer too.