By all accounts, Herculine Barbin was a relatively normal young woman. But a single visit to a doctor, prompted by a pain in her lower abdomen, would unravel her life entirely. The examination revealed that she was, in fact, a man. Her case, that of an intersex person in nineteenth-century France, ignited a shocking media sensation that ended in tragedy.
Born on the 8th of November 1838, in the commune of Saint-Jean-d’Angély in southwestern France, she was baptized Adélaïde Herculine Barbin. Her family called her Alexina and raised her as a girl. The family was very poor, living in a time when widespread poverty, an unwanted byproduct of rapid industrialization, enveloped much of French society. Despite these circumstances, Barbin proved to be a gifted student and earned a scholarship to an Ursuline convent, where she furthered her studies into her late teenage years.
Even at this early juncture, she was deeply confused about her sexuality, as her memoirs would later reveal, though her intersex status would not become clear until her early adult years. In the mid-1850s, Barbin began studying to become a teacher. Her training went well, and she soon qualified, but her personal life was in growing turmoil. Sexually, she was clearly more attracted to women, yet troublingly, she had not begun to develop sexually herself.
She had not started menstruating in her teenage years, and physically she remained flat-chested and somewhat boyish. Furthermore, hair was developing in unusual ways on her upper lip, cheeks, and other places one would usually associate with a male puberty. Barbin was aware that she looked different from other young women her age and knew she had thicker, darker hair on her arms and legs. People would jokingly comment on her appearance, so she began to trim her hair, wear long clothes, and make sure never to swim in public.
The science of hermaphroditism, as it was then known, was poorly understood. It is a condition where someone develops both male and female sexual characteristics, and it is more common in humans than is generally appreciated. Approximately 1. 7% of the population, or one in sixty people, have hermaphroditism of some kind, while 0.
5%, or one in every two hundred people, have the discernible appearance of both male and female sexual organs. Historically, people had very little scientific understanding of what caused it. While some ancient and medieval societies were somewhat sympathetic, this was decidedly not the case in early modern times. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, people discovered to demonstrate elements of hermaphroditism were typically reported on as being monstrous.
Even in the nineteenth century, Barbin was living through an age of wide-ranging medical study, when doctors were anxious to discover why people presented symptoms they did not have a scientific explanation for. This meant her condition would become a source of brutal social attacks, yet also a simultaneous medical inquisition. Barbin’s story came to public attention through developments in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Having acquired a position in a girl’s school after completing her training in 1857, she began to develop sexual feelings towards another teacher there named Sara.
Initially just colleagues, the pair quickly became friends. Barbin would occasionally help Sara dress, and it wasn’t long until their intimacy grew and the relationship became sexual. As their love blossomed, they began to give off small signs in public—gentle looks, calling each other nicknames, and discreet kisses on the cheek. Before long, rumors of the clandestine relationship were circulating amongst the staff and students.
Even Sara’s mother learned of it. To protect her family from the gossip, she prohibited Sara from continuing to see Barbin. Sara agreed and promised to do as her mother wished, but in reality, the pair carried on their love affair, becoming much more discreet before it eventually came to an end regardless. During this time, Barbin began to suffer from deteriorating health.
Her general health had never been good, and she had suffered from periodic, sometimes unexplained, bouts of illness throughout her life. In the late 1850s, the issue became periods of major physical pain in her midriff and other regions. In an age before sophisticated medical oversight, Barbin could not obtain relief. Being a zealous Catholic, she instead consulted the bishop of La Rochelle, Bishop Landriot.
He asked if he could consult with a local doctor, Dr. Chesnet, on her behalf. She agreed, and Chesnet soon requested that she attend a medical examination. Dr.
Chesnet was immensely surprised by what he discovered. On examination, Barbin presented with both male and female sexual organs: a small vagina, a small underdeveloped penis, and internal testes that had not descended in any fashion. Detailed medical documents were written up, and other doctors assisted with in-depth tests with the express intent of determining her sex. Ultimately, the medical professionals concluded that Herculine Barbin was, in actual fact, a man.
Today, the condition would be quickly identified as pseudo-hermaphroditism, but in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was no full scientific understanding of what caused it. Barbin’s story soon emerged in Western France and then nationally. She became the talk of the town, causing something of a media sensation, with newspapers writing about the girl who was quite simply a young man. Much of this was extremely cruel.
It was said that Barbin had used her situation to get close to young women and have discreet love affairs. The words monstrous and freak also recurred frequently. A medical inquisition of sorts followed, in which Barbin was attacked for having worked in an all-girls school despite displaying male sexual organs. A legal case followed, in which the courts effectively reassigned her gender as male.
The psychological impact of all this was immense and hugely negative. In the early 1860s, as the case was resolved, Barbin was forced to quit her job as a teacher. Her relationship with Sara broke up, and she relocated to Paris. There, she began to adopt a male identity, going by the name Abel, thereafter a masculine version of Adélaïde.
In Paris, she struggled to find work and lived an increasingly impoverished and isolated life. In the mid-1860s, she wrote in her memoir or diary: “I have suffered much and I have suffered alone, alone, forsaken by everyone. My place was not marked out in this world that shunned me, that had cursed me. Not a living creature was to share in this immense sorrow that seized me when I left my childhood, at that age when everything is beautiful because everything is young and bright with the future.
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In February 1868, the concierge of the apartment block where Barbin was living on the Rue de la Sorbonne, near the university in the Latin Quarter of Paris, found her dead in her apartment. Tragically, she had taken her own life by lighting the coal gas stove and inhaling the fumes. Investigators were highly confident this was not an accident due to the position of her body next to the stove and the discovery of what was effectively a suicide note addressed to her mother. Her motives have been widely speculated on; many have concluded it was a combination of her traumatic experiences over the past decade, her poverty, and other circumstances.
Because she was assumed to have been dead for several days before being found, and since it was not possible to accurately identify how long a person had been dead in the 1860s, the exact day of her death in February 1868 remains unclear. When her body was discovered, there were very few possessions around her. The tiny apartment had just four pieces of furniture: a bed, a table, a chair, and a small bedside locker or desk—a clear sign of the poverty of Barbin’s final years. On the little desk was a memoir, which Barbin had written as a therapeutic effort to understand her situation and what had happened to her following the social reaction to her hermaphroditism.
Passages reveal her troubled thoughts on her existence, her sexual and physical development, and the lack of knowledge as to why she was developing the way she was. She wrote: “At that age when a woman’s grace unfolds, I had neither that free and easy bearing nor the well-rounded limbs that reveal youth in full bloom. My complexion, with its sickly pallor, denoted a condition of chronic ill health. My features had a certain hardness that one could not help noticing.
My upper lip and parts of my cheeks were covered by light down that increased as the days passed. Understandably, this peculiarity often drew me to joking remarks that I tried to avoid by making frequent use of scissors in place of a razor. As was bound to happen, I only succeeded in making it even thicker and more noticeable. Still, my body was literally covered with it, and so unlike my companions.
As for my figure, it remained ridiculously thin; that all struck the eye as I realized every day. ”
The text would go on to have a major impact. Inspired by it, American author Jeffrey Eugenides wrote the novel Middlesex, about an intersex protagonist named Cal Stephanides. Published in 2002, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
The 1985 French film The Mystery of Alexina was also based on her memoirs. Hence, as difficult as her life was, Herculine’s memoir has left a lasting legacy. Her story returned to wider public knowledge in the 1980s. At that time, the eminent French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault became interested in her story as an example of how gender was being constructed during the nineteenth century.
This was part of his research into what eventually became his work The History of Sexuality, published in different volumes between 1976 and a posthumous fourth volume in 2018. This led him to publish Barbin’s memoir with his own commentary, which appeared in English in 1980 as Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Despite Foucault’s efforts to suggest it was recently discovered, excerpts from her memoir had actually been published as early as 1872. Foucault’s argument was that Barbin was an example of a growing tendency in Western society and science to restrict people born with hermaphroditism to picking one gender or the other, or indeed having the decision made for them by the medical community.
What Foucault detected in Barbin’s life story was a growing tendency towards gender rigidity, which he contrasted with ancient and medieval times, when gender fluidity had been much more acceptable in cultures like ancient Greece or within some sections of Arab culture during the Middle Ages. Foucault could not have known it at the time, but he was writing just as views on gender were beginning to change and move towards a more fluid society, which pertains today. Barbin’s birthday, the 8th of November, is celebrated every year today as Intersex Day of Remembrance.