For four years, Bridgerton has shattered Netflix streaming records as it introduced black aristocrats into the 19th century nobility of England, deflowered panting virgins who only learn how babies are made after steamy sessions of coitus interruptus, and showed the court debut of five of the eight siblings born to the titular dowager Viscountess Violet Bridgerton. It’s campy, sappy, and utterly anachronistic with its colorblind casting and orchestral covers of contemporary pop. Still, the series, based on the book series by Julia Quinn, hewed closely enough to the timeless tropes of the Regency romance genre that it felt fantastical.

But Bridgerton has finally crossed the woke Rubicon in its embrace of the cardinal lie of identity politics: that while race is essential, gender is meaningless to the core of a character.

That gender doesn’t have more impact on a character’s “lived experience” is a dumb enough proposition in modern-day storytelling. In a historical setting where courts granted husbands the legal right to beat their wives within “reasonable bounds,” total control over their property and children, and the authority to confine and rape their wives without punishment, the notion that gender was a mere social construct is an insulting one. Most audiences have little problem with transforming the race of a character, but bending gender is another story, with the series ruining the most beloved male character in the process.

Each of the eight Bridgerton books focuses on the eventual marriage of one of the eight siblings, but the sixth book, When He Was Wicked, subverts the usual formula by beginning with a couple that is already married. Francesca Bridgerton is happily wed to John Stirling, the Earl of Kilmartin, whose cousin Michael is ignoble in every way. The quintessential “rake,” Michael embodies all the traits of the Casanova trope. He is handsome, promiscuous, licentious, and indeed, “wicked,” secretly lusting over the wife of his cousin, who also happens to be his best friend.

Predictably — and because any book, but especially a romance, cannot begin with a happily ever after — John dies, and Francesca finds out that after years of failing to conceive an heir, she’s pregnant with his baby but miscarries, making Michael the new Earl of Kilmartin. Grieving over the loss of John and ridden with guilt that he has prospered because of John’s death, Michael flees to India for multiple years. When he returns to Great Britain, a still-wounded Francesca decides she wants to remarry, but only for fulfilling her lifelong desire to become a mother. Michael predictably teases and seduces Francesca into (multiple) illicit sexual escapades and, with the threat of pregnancy, marriage. The “happily ever after” arrives not just with the wedding bells, but when Michael realizes that Francesca actually does marry him for love, not just to justify their pursuit of pleasure retroactively. Francesca eventually does have her long-desired child, a son she names John after the first husband she is finally at peace with having loved in a different way, but just as deeply, as she loves Michael.

In Bridgerton the television show, Michael Stirling, the dashing and debonair Earl of Kilmartin, is now a black woman named Michaela.

“While book fans will always have their Michael, it felt like queer fans didn’t have anyone in either the books or in the series who was really featured to relate to,” Season Three showrunner Jess Brownell said of eliminating Michael from the story. “I would encourage people to channel some empathy for people who have not gotten to see themselves inside this world.”

Bridgerton fans have spent years cheering on a black Queen Charlotte and the introduction of gay characters not originally in the books. But the erasure of Michael has sparked a furor among a mostly progressive and young audience, and for good reason. Beyond the disrespect shown to the source material in particular, Bridgerton is now a historical romance that no longer wants to abide by the genres of history or romance in fiction.

Although the candy-colored visual palette and colorblind casting always made Bridgerton feel less strictly factual than, say, Downton Abbey, the social stakes were always strong enough to cement us in the contemporary confines of Regency England’s strict rules of class and gender. Whereas the Bridgerton brothers were allowed to whore and drink their way around London after-hours, even the daughter of a viscount could face categorical social ruin over a single unsupervised rendezvous with a man who was not her husband. A solid historical romance, such as Francesca’s book, leans into the taboos of the time, playing out the forbidden fantasy of a widow risking an out-of-wedlock pregnancy by sleeping with the new earl who technically owns the very bed in which she sleeps. In a more serious genre of fiction, this is played straight for what it is: evidence of a legal, theocratic patriarchy that no woman alive would choose to live in today. But in historical romance, this tension can be both rationally regarded as unfair to Francesca but romantically regarded as titillating.

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The gender-bending of “Michaela” not only eliminates the entire infertility subplot of Francesca’s story, one of the most heart-wrenching in the books, but also erases one of the most dramatic sources of tension. Nineteenth century Scotland implemented similar male-preference primogeniture inheritance rules as England, meaning that with few exceptions, the Earldom of Kilmartin would not go to a female cousin, assuming that John still dies in the end. Even if “Michaela” becomes the countess of Kilmartin, she and Francesca could never legally marry, actually giving them an easier cover of secrecy than the book version of the couple. Whereas male homosexuality was still deeply criminalized in practice in Regency England, lesbians at the time could not legally run afoul of homosexuality prohibitions because at the time the law did not believe that sexual intercourse without a penis (or a man, for that matter) could exist. Spinsters and widows could live together in “sentimental friendship” without any explication of the homoerotic subtext, and in a rare case in 1812 when two school teachers did attract public notice after a student’s guardians accused them of being lesbians, Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie sued their accuser for libel and won. On what grounds? Whatever they had been doing in a shared bedroom did not count as sexual intercourse because “without [male] penetration the venereal orgasm could not possibly follow.”

So while Michael and Francesca in the book must publicly admit to marriage, Michaela and Francesca can live together as “cousins” indefinitely without ever confessing to a romance.

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Worst of all of this is the fact that the show disrespects John by making it clear in the season’s final scenes that Francesca was never actually in love with him. Indeed, when John introduces Michaela to her, it is Francesca who seems taken aback by desire. In the book, the opposite is true: Francesca and John are genuinely in love, and while she embraces Michael as a friend, it is Michael who is instantly in love with her. Francesca’s whole emotional journey is overcoming her guilt, feeling like she is betraying her love for John as she falls for Michael. Coupled with the social scandal of marrying her husband’s cousin and the legal tension of the reality that Michael is the owner of the property once considered hers in marriage, Francesca goes through a genuine emotional journey in the books, complete with overcoming half a decade of infertility and truly earning her happy ending.

But in the painfully woke, modern, and egalitarian new rules of the television show, Francesca has little to overcome. It’s just a matter of time before the husband she tolerates passes away, and then she can finally hop into bed with the real object of her desire. That’s not historical, and it’s certainly not romantic.