Herculine Barbin was born on November 8, 1838, in the commune of Saint-Jean-d’Angély in southwestern France. Her baptismal name was Herculine Adélaïde Barbin, though her family called her Alexina, and she was raised as a girl. The family was very poor, living through a period of widespread poverty tied to rapid industrialization in France.
Despite these circumstances, Barbin was a gifted student. She earned a scholarship to an Ursuline convent, where she continued her studies into her late teenage years. Even at this early stage, she was deeply confused about her sexuality, as her later memoirs would reveal.
In the mid-1850s, Barbin began training to become a teacher. Her studies went well, and she soon qualified for the profession. Her personal life, however, was in growing turmoil. She was clearly more attracted to women, but troublingly, she had not begun to develop sexually in the way she expected. She had not started menstruating during her teenage years, remained flat-chested, and had a somewhat boyish appearance.
Barbin also developed hair in ways that were unusual for a young woman. Hair grew on her upper lip, cheeks, and other places typically associated with male development. She was aware that she looked different from other young women her age. People joked about her appearance, so she began trimming her hair, wearing long clothes, and avoiding swimming in public.
Hermaphroditism, the condition of having both male and female sexual characteristics, occurs across a wide range of species. In humans, it is more common than is generally appreciated. Approximately 1.7 percent of the population, or about 1 in 60 people, have some form of the condition. About 0.5 percent, or 1 in 200 people, have discernible elements of both male and female sexual organs. Some of these figures are disputed by biologists, with some placing the rate of significantly discernible cases as low as 1 in 500.
Historically, people had little scientific understanding of what caused hermaphroditism. Some ancient and medieval societies were somewhat sympathetic to those with the condition. That was not the case in early modern times. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, people discovered to have elements of hermaphroditism were often reported on as monstrous. This was extremely insensitive by modern standards, but it highlights the difficult circumstances faced by anyone with the condition.
Even in the 19th century, Barbin lived through an age of wide-ranging medical study. Doctors were anxious to discover why people presented symptoms or features they could not explain. This meant her condition became a source of brutal social attacks and a simultaneous medical inquisition.
Barbin’s story came to public attention through developments in the late 1850s and early 1860s. After completing her training in 1857, she took a position at a girls’ school. There, she developed sexual feelings toward another teacher named Sara. At first, they were just colleagues, but they quickly became friends. Barbin would occasionally help Sara dress, and their intimacy grew until the relationship became sexual.
As their love blossomed, the pair began to show small signs of their relationship in public. They exchanged gentle looks, called each other nicknames, and shared discreet kisses on the cheek. Before long, rumors of the clandestine relationship circulated among staff and students. Sara’s mother learned of the rumors and, to protect her family from gossip, prohibited Sara from continuing to see Barbin. Sara agreed and promised to obey, but in reality, the pair carried on with their love affair. They were more discreet about it, though the relationship would come to an end regardless.
During this time, Barbin began to suffer from deteriorating health. Her general health had never been good, and she had experienced periodic bouts of unexplained illness throughout her life. In the late 1850s, she suffered periods of major physical pain in her midriff and other regions. In an age before sophisticated medical oversight for young women, she could not find relief. Being a zealous Catholic, she consulted the bishop of La Rochelle.
Bishop Landriot asked if he could consult a local doctor, Dr. Chesnet, on her behalf. She agreed, and Chesnet soon requested that Barbin attend a medical examination. The doctor was immensely surprised by what he discovered. Barbin presented with both male and female sexual organs, including a small vagina, a small underdeveloped penis, and internal testes that had not descended.
Detailed medical documents were written up, and other doctors assisted with in-depth tests with the express intent of determining her sex. It must have been quite upsetting for Barbin. Ultimately, the medical professionals concluded that she was, in fact, a man. Today, the condition would be quickly identified as pseudo-hermaphroditism, but in the middle of the 19th 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, and the media covered her case as something of a sensation. Newspapers wrote about the girl who was, quite simply, a young man. Much of this coverage was extremely cruel. It was said that Barbin used her situation to get close to young women and have discreet love affairs. The words monstrous and freak also appeared frequently.
A medical inquisition of sorts followed. 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, 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.”
In February 1868, the concierge of the apartment block where Barbin was living on the Rue de la Huchette, near the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter of Paris, found her dead in her apartment. Tragically, she had taken her own life by lighting her coal gas stove and inhaling the fumes. Investigators were highly confident this was not an accident. Her body was positioned next to the stove, and a suicide note addressed to her mother was discovered.
Her motives have been widely speculated on. Many have concluded that 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 when she was found, and because it was not possible to accurately determine how long a person had been dead in the 1860s, the exact day of her death in February 1868 is unclear.
When her body was discovered, there were very few possessions in her tiny apartment. It had just four pieces of furniture: a bed, a table, a chair, and a small bedside locker or desk. This was a clear sign of the poverty of Barbin’s final years. On the little desk was a memoir she had written as a therapeutic effort to understand her situation and what had happened to her following the social reaction to her hermaphroditism.
In one passage, 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 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.”
It makes for difficult reading in places, especially when we consider that she ultimately took her own life. Yet 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. It was published in 2002 and won a Pulitzer Prize. The 1985 French film The Mystery of Alexina was also based on her memoirs. As difficult as her life was, Barbin’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 19th 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. An English translation appeared 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 been published as early as 1872. Foucault’s argument throughout 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 toward gender rigidity. He contrasted this 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 to move toward a more fluid society, which pertains today. Barbin’s birthday, November 8, is celebrated every year today as Intersex Day of Remembrance.