The tragic story of the intersex person who puzzled 19th-century France
Herculine Barbin left a wrenching chronicle of her ‘bizarre and double existence.’
One day in 1860, 21-year-old Herculine Barbin went to the doctor to address a persistent pain in her lower groin. The appointment would change her life irreversibly, and scarcely for the better. Though Barbin had gone to the physician for relief, she left with an a shocking diagnosis: she had been a man all along.
In truth, she was both sexes at once. But the finer points of hermaphroditism were not much known in provincial France in mid 19th century. To accommodate Barbin — an intersex person who had spent the first two decades of her life as a female (and who by all accounts still identified as such) — was not a priority.
Herculine Barbin was born in 1838, in Saint-Jean-d’Angély, a small town in western France. Her father died soon after, but with the help of a charitable scholarship she attended a girls boarding school. Her mother was poor, and when Barbin was old enough, she would join her as a sort of servant to wealthy households during the summer.
But the changes of puberty soon set her apart from her classmates. “My features had a certain hardness that one could not help noticing,” she wrote in her memoir. She grew visible hair on her cheeks and her lips. She trimmed them with scissors to discourage attention and avoid “joking remarks.” Ever aware of her differences, she wore long clothes to conceal hair that grew along her arms, and refrained from swimming with her friends as they frolicked on the beach.
Barbin was attracted to women. At 18, she became a schoolmistress, and fell for one of her colleagues, Sara. Barbin requested to help Sara dress (In these passages of her memoir she approaches romantic melodrama: “I would lace her up; with an unspeakable happiness I would smooth the graceful curls of her naturally wavy hair”), and at some point their intimacy progressed until it became full-fledged affair. Their public affection — just-cordial-enough kisses, nicknames — became an object of curiosity and scrutiny in the schoolhouse and in their community. Finally, to protect the family from rumor, Sara’s mother commanded them to knock it off.
They continued as lovers, though, albeit more discreetly. What signaled their end was the fateful doctor’s appointment.
On Barbin’s first visit, her physician could barely contain his surprise at the physiological ambiguity of his patient. What followed was a carousel of probing examinations by multiple doctors for the sole purpose of discerning her sex. They left behind detailed, graphic medical records from which we know much of Barbin’s physiology. She possessed, apparently, labia majora (“very prominent, especially on the right”), a “feminine urethra,” a vagina (with a shallow ending; leading to no cervix or womb). Doctors observed “a sort of imperforate penis, which might be a monstrously developed clitoris.” They also located testicles within each side of Barbin’s labia (in truth a “divided scrotum”). Ultimately, the male characteristics prevailed, and they determined Barbin to be a man.
What followed was the paperwork. Barbin’s examiners arranged for her to change her legal status to male. Doctors suggested “Abel” Barbin as a more masculine replacement for “Alexina,” which she often went by. Sara’s mother was astonished by the results and was sympathetic to her daughter’s great confidant. Nevertheless, their relationship was over.
Next came the performance. At first, hardly anyone recognized “Abel” on her first outing to church, in her new masculine garb. Soon enough she became the talk of the town. Barbin’s so-called metamorphosis rendered her the favorite topic at the “seashore bathing establishment.” Some gossipers, she reflected, “saw me as a real Don Juan, saying that I had brought shame and dishonor everywhere, and profited brazenly from my situation in order to engage secretly in love affairs with women.” The press even seized upon it, and newspapers as far as Paris began reporting on “the girl [who] was, quite simply, a young man.”
We can credit Barbin’s small renown today to Michel Foucault, who rediscovered her memoirs in the archives of the Department of Public Hygiene in the 1970s. He describes her tale as the arc of someone brought down by the society’s tyranny of gender, and the unavoidable insistence that each person must have a true sex, the options numbering only two.
Through her late twenties, Barbin sought menial jobs, but she was turned down repeatedly, including by one woman who judged her too weak to act as a valet. (“Unfortunately, she was telling the truth,” Barbin reflected.) Toward the end of her life, Barbin lived in solitude, occupying the dingy attic of a building in a poor arrondissement of Paris. She was found dead at age 30, having asphyxiated herself over the fumes of a charcoal stove, the victim of a social construct that saw no room for her.
Her memoirs were found on a table, one of the four pieces of furniture Barbin owned. Her writing was the last word on her “bizarre and double existence.” To the world that spurned her, degraded her, and in the end pitied her, she wrote:
“You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.”
