A Gender Variance Who's Who

L.S. was an attractive woman who worked as a fashion model in Paris. In 1909, aged 20, she was engaged to be married. She was bothered by apparent tumours in her labia majora and attended the Hôpital Beaujon.

However a biopsy of the tumours resulted in them being identified as testicles. The doctors then decided that she was a 'true male', that is a masculine pseudo hermaphrodite. She was informed that her feminine 'genital aspiration', that is her engagement to her fiancé, was an act of homosexuality.

• T. Tuffier & A. Lapoint. "L'Hermaphrodisme: Ses variétés et ses conséquences pour la pratique médicales (d'après un cas personnel)". Revue de gynécologie et de chirurgie addominale, 17,1911: 209-268.
  
• Alice Domurat Dreger. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, Ma, Harvard University Press. 2000: 130-2.
  

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L.S. had the misfortune to live during the period when gonads were taken to define a person’s ‘true’ sex.

While Drs Tuffier & Lapoint conceal the patient’s name behind the initials LS, they published 4 photographs of her, one dressed and three nude, all where her face is clearly identifiable.

Adélaîde Herculine Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d’Angely in Charente-Maritime. Her family usually referred to her as Alexina.  Her father died when she was young, which resulted in her being raised in an almost exclusively female and strongly religious environment.

Alexina was chosen for a charity scholarship to study at the school of an Ursaline convent. In 1856 she was sent for teacher training. Afterwards she became an assistant teacher in a girls’ school, where she had an affair with a fellow teacher, Sara.

Abdominal pain and religious guilt led Alexina to a confession with the bishop, and with her permission to break confessional silence, he sent for a doctor to examine her. The doctor found that she had a small penis and testicles inside her vagina, had never menstruated or developed breasts, and shaved facial hair.

In 1860 a tribunal heard evidence from Dr Chestnet of La Rochelle. As a result the register of Barbin’s birth was changed: the sex to male, and the name to Abel. It was deemed that Barbin had always been male. The next Sunday, Abel Barbin, dressed as a man appeared at the church of Saint-Jean between his mother and one of the town’s most respectable ladies.

This did not mean that Abel could marry Sara. The scandal was great and they were kept apart. A family connection secured for Barbin a position of clerk to a Paris railway company. Dr Chestner wrote up the case for the Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale.

Abel committed suicide at the age of 30 by inhaling from his gas stove in his room in the rue de l'École-de-Médecine in Paris. The police doctor, who had been called, examined the dead man’s genitals expecting to find that he was a syphilitic - a common cause of suicide at that time - but finding something quite different. Word spread quickly, and Dr E Goujon at the Faculity of Medicine acted quickly so that the body would not be lost to science. He performed an autopsy and took careful notes, including two detailed drawings of Barbin’s genital area.

In addition Barbin had left memoirs, in which the male persona is referred at as Camille. They were given to Auguste Ambroise Tardieu who published excerpts in his Question médico-légale de l'identité, 1872.

In 1893 the German psychiatrist and novelist Oskar Panizza, wrote a fictionalized version of Alexina/Camille as Ein skandalöser Fall: Geschichten, which is obviously taken from the account in Tardieu but set in the eighteenth century.

Five years later, Armand Ernest Dubarry, a French novelist who wrote several medical pot boilers, published L'hermaphrodite, again based on Alexina/Camille.

In 1908 Neugebauer summarized Camille’s story in his immense inventory of hermaphroditism. Either by his doing, or as a printer’s error, Barbin’s name was affixed to the image of somebody else.

After that interest in Barbin dissipated until, in the late 1970s, the memoirs were discovered in the archives of le département français de l'Hygiène Publique, and were published by the controversial academic Michel Foucault.

The story was filmed in 1985 as Mystere Alexina. To the plot from the book, the filmmakers added an intrigue of being secretive about the gender of the actor who played Alexina: Philippe Vuillemin, a comic book artist, was billed as Vuillemin only.

In 2010 Sarah Leaver, who has a similar intersex condition, performed a one-woman play based on Barbin’s memoires.

• Chesnet. “Question d’identité. Vice de conformation des organes génitaux. Hypospadias. Erreur sur le sexe” . Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 2, 14, 1860: .206-9.
• Abel Barbin. Mes souvenirs. 1863-8. Published Paris: Editions du Boucher, 2002. www.leboucher.com/pdf/herculine/xherculi.pdf.
• E. Goujon. “Étude d’un cas d’hermaphrodisme bisexual imparfait chez l’homme”. Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie normales et pathologiques de l’homme et des animaux, 6, 1869: 599-616. Reprinted in Foucault 1978/80.
• Auguste Ambroise Tardieu. Question médico-légale de l'identité dans ses rapport avec les vices de conformation des organes sexuels, contenant les souvenirs et impressions d'un individu dont le sexe avait été méconnu,. Paris: J.B. Baillière et Fils,1872. Contains selection from Barbin’s Souvenirs.
• Oskar Panizza. Ein skandalöser Fall: Geschichten. 1893. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and published in Foucault 1980. Reprinted: München: Martus Verlag, 1997.
• Armand Ernest Dubarry. L'hermaphrodite. Paris: Chamuel, 1898.
• Franz Ludwig von Neugebauer. Hermaphroditismus beim Menschen. Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1908:748.
• Michel Foucault (ed) Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Translated by Richard McDougall as Herculine Barbin: being the recently discovered memoirs of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite. New York: Pantheon Books; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980.
• René Féret (dir & scr). Mystere Alexina. Scr: Jean Gruault, based on the book by Herculine Barbin & Michel Foucault, with (Philippe) Vuillemin as Alexina Barbin. France 86 mins 1985.
• Alice Domurat Dreger. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, Ma, Harvard University Press. 2000: 16-20, 23, 28-9, 51-2, 76, 239n21.
• Sarah Leaver (writer & performer). Memoirs of a Hermaphrodite, 75 mins 2010. Performed in London, Brighton, Manchester, Liverpool www.decibelpas.com/index.php?id=85.
• “Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin:_Being_the_Recently_Discovered_Memoirs_of_a_Nineteenth-century_French_Hermaphrodite.

EN.WIKIPEDIA     FR.WIKIPEDIA    TRANS.ILGA

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Dr Goujon left us two detailed drawing of Barbin’s genital area, but we have no record of her face.  The drawings may be viewed in Dreger’s book.

The EN.Wikipedia article, in line with its usual practice, retrojects final gender back to birth.  “It's wikipedia policy to use the gender that the person decided upon as the pronoun throughout, not alternate them”.  However it gives not the slightest evidence that Barbin chose to be male, or even accepted the gender reassignment.  Suicide was her method of refusing to be male.  Even stranger, having imposed male pronouns, it names the article with Camille’s birth girl name: “Herculine Barbin”.

Actually the birth name was Adélaîde Herculine Barbin, so if only one first name is given, it should be Adélaîde Barbin.  However it would be better to refer to Alexina, as this is what family and friends called her.  This is one case where the film got it more right than most of the books about this person.

Likewise Abel is a name imposed.  When Alexina uses a male name for herself, she uses Camille.  I have used Camille in the name of this article in that it is the last name that Barbin used for herself.

If Barbin had been born earlier, s/he would have been determined to be a hermaphrodite, and permitted to choose a gender.  This freedom had been gradually reduced since the eighteenth century and by 1860 the church, the state and medicine in alliance took it upon themselves to determine the ‘true sex’ of a person, and compel them into it, without any consideration of the person’s feelings.

Previously to 1860, the major determinant in sexing a person had been presence or lack of a penis or vagina.  Barbin had both and should have been a hermaphrodite.  However the new fashion was that gonads determined sex.  Barbin had testes but no ovaries.  This criterion was the trump until chromosomes were discovered in the twentieth century.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am not a follower of Michel Foucault.  However I feel that his paragraph from page xiii is certainly worth pondering:

Alexina wrote her memoirs about that life once her new identity had been discovered and established. Her "true" and "definitive" identity. But it is clear she did not write them from the point of view of that sex which had at last been brought to light. It is not a man who is speaking, trying to recall his sensations and his life as they were at the time when he was not yet "himself." When Alexina composed her memoirs, she was not far from her suicide; for herself, she was still without a definite sex, but she was deprived of the delights she experienced in not having one, or in not entirely having the same sex as the girls among whom she lived and whom she loved and desired so much. And what she evokes in her past is the happy limbo of a non-identity, which was paradoxically protected by the life of those closed, narrow, and intimate societies where one has the strange happiness, which is at the same time obligatory and forbidden, of being acquainted with only one sex.

Fatime was the fourth daughter of a Muslim peasant family in Kosova. Lacking a son, the parents deemed the child to be a boy, Fetah.

Widowed at an early age, the mother was left the difficult task of guiding her son through the rites of boyhood. This was essential in that a widow with only daughters had no right to retain her husband's house and land. She managed to avoid the synét (circumcision) and postponed the search for a bride indefinitely.

In 1944 the 18-year-old Fetah was recruited by Tito's People's Liberation Army to fight the Axis occupation. Only after two years in the army was he examined by a doctor, who declared that he was a woman, and he was discharged.

Back in his village he was appointed to the revolutionary community council where he campaigned for rights for Muslim women, in particular the ending of veils and seclusion.

The village became aware that Fetah was a 'woman'.  In 1951 Asllan Asllani decided to marry Fetah. He was still in male clothing and resisted. Asllan 'seized' Fetah and made her his bride. At the wedding she returned to the name Fatime and changed to wearing the wide harem trousers.

They had a son and two daughters. Fatime later claimed to a journalist that she was content. The mother died without granting forgiveness for the loss of her only son.

• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:162-3. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 270-1.

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Fetah was not a typical sworn virgin in that he was raised as a boy from birth.  Grémaux suggests that Fetah switching back to Fatime indicates that the Sworn Virgin tradition was already in decline by the 1950s, however Fatime’s untypicality means that her case does not support the suggestion.

Note that the gender changes are both initiated by men, the father and then Asllan.  Fetah’s only time of choice was that he chose to stay a man after being discharged from the Army.

Geneva and Nola of Anderson, Indiana, who had four elder brothers, were 33 and 31 when their mother died in 1931.

They then switched to dressing as men, explained that they had only recently learned that they were men, and that their mother, desperate for daughters, had raised them as girls. They asked a court to change their names to Noel and Gene.

Marion’s parents in rural Pennsylvania, wanting a girl, announced their baby to be so, and then were embarrassed to switch the child to boys clothing. They had named the child Marion as it is fitting to both sexes.

Marion’s ‘boyish’ ability in sports led the neighbors to suspect that she might not be a girl. They explained the situation to Marion at age 9. He threw a tantrum and wept, but his parents persuaded him to continue. They considered moving to another place where Marion could start over as a boy, but Mr Bodmer had acquired considerable property and become Chief Burgess.

Marion continued through high school as a girl, as a good student and for three years was on the girls’ basketball team, however the other girls considered that she played like a boy and her nickname was Gus. 

At age 19 Marion switched to male clothing with the intention of entering the legal profession, and to that end registered at a preparatory school in Allentown for the summer, and Dickenson law School in the fall.

He married a Turkish-born doctor and they lived in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania and had two children.

• “ 'Girl' For 19 Years Revealed As Man; Marion Bodmer of Selinsgrove, Pa., Graduated From Female High School, Changes Attire”. July 14, 1929. The New York Times.
• “ ‘Girl’ for 19 Years, Boy To Stay in Allentown”. The Reading Eagle. July 16, 1929. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FJAzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KeEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4342,2840616&dq=marion+bodmer+pennsylvania&hl=en.
• L.H.Hamsley. “Imposters in Petticoats”. In David O. Cauldwell (ed). Tranvestism … men in female dress. New York: Sexology Corporation. 1956: 63.

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This story, which resembles fantasies found in transvestite fiction, was actually reported in the US national press at the time.

Thank you to Kathy Padilla for the photograph and the obituary of Marion's wife.

Marion is on the right in the front row in the photograph.

In the Egypt Today article on Sally Mursi, Drs Abdel Monem El-Gergawy, the head of urology, and Magdi El-Aqad, the Deputy Dean of Medicine at Assiut University Hospital, discussing other cases, tells how some boys are raised as girls. In most of these cases, they and their colleagues offer the patient surgery and turn them into men.

Yet the biggest complication El-Gergawy has to contend with in Upper Egypt isn't genetic, but cultural: female circumcision. The doctor notes that many of the genetically male children his team has treated have had their penises amputated at a young age because they were mistakenly identified as females. The penis, seen as an oversized clitoris, was simply reduced or excised completely.

Circumcision is an informal law in Upper Egyptian families. In most villages, they circumcise the girl 40 days after her birth. So in intersexed cases, they simply cut off the penis, putting us and the patient in a more difficult situation, he says. We then have to start from scratch, constructing a new penis. Female circumcision is a crime that should be banned by all means. As you can see, it doesn't only damage a girls life, it can also destroy the future of a male.
…. 

But not all patients jump at the chance of becoming men, El-Aqad notes, recalling Fatma, a masculine but attractive married woman referred by her gynecologist, to whom she went complaining of amenorrhea and problems getting pregnant.

The gynecologist quickly determined that Fatma had no vagina. Worse, she had been having intercourse with her husband through her abnormally large urethra, which was stretched and torn by the act.

It was intolerably painful and inhumane, El-Aqad says, but strangely enough, they satisfied each other sexually. Our [genetic and physical] tests indicated Fatma was born as a boy, but her penis was amputated during circumcision. Ignorance on her part and that of her husband to say nothing of her physician and parents saw the problem go from bad to worse. In her case, we kept her a female.

At the end of the day, its the patient who makes the final decision. She loved her husband and was [sexually] excited by being with a man, so we removed the remains of the testicles and constructed a vagina. Now, she's having intercourse in a much more pleasurable environment, which is better for her. We gave her female hormones, so her breasts grew bigger and her body hair thinned. Her husband married another woman so he could have a child, but he didn't divorce her, El-Aqad says.

• Azza Khattab. “Sally’s Story”. Egypt Today. July 2004. http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1737.

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This is one case where John Money’s assumptions pan out.

As intersex activists have pointed out many times, surgical mutilation of intersexed babies and traditional (female) circumcision are related issues. Here we see circumcision mutilating male babies who may not even be intersex.

Greg Lankton was the third child of a Presbyterian minister in Flint, Michigan. As a child, Greg made dolls, played dress-up and was like other girls. He was also raped by his grandfather.

His family preferred a daughter to a gay son, and proposed a sex change. Greer was rejected by several sex-change doctors, but his mother found a surgeon who would do it. It was paid for with financial help from the father’s church congregation. However within a year Greer regretted the surgery and attempted suicide, although after recovery she did continue as female.

In 1987 she married her long-time boyfriend, Paul Monroe, also an artist, with her father as the minister, and Teri Toye as the bridesmaid. She and Paul experimented with drugs. She was a successful New York artist making dolls, sculptures and drawings. She worked with Jim Henson of Sesame Street. She was featured in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennial of 1995.


Her last showing was in “It’s all about ME, Not You” at the Andy Warhol Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Among her works is a sad-faced bust of Candy Darling; a sculpture of a toddler-hermaphrodite giving birth to twins, and an emaciated near-life-sized Sissy Boy.

She was raped during the preparation for the Pittsburgh show, and died of a drug overdose shortly afterwards.

• Cloey Lankton. Posting Artmaker. 01-22-06 http://motherboards.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/5106060101/m/7716047701/p/3. No longer available.
• Paul Monroe. Posting. Artmaker. 01-28-06 http://motherboards.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/5106060101/m/7716047701/p/4. No longer available
• Julia Morton. “Greer Lankton, a Memoir”. Artnet. 2007. www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/morton/morton1-26-07.asp.
• “Greer Lankton”. The Blitz Kids. www.geocities.com/greerlankton/index.html.

Poppaea Sabina

In the Roman year AUC 818, the year that in the later Christian calendar would be numbered 65, Nero, in the 15th year of his rule, had a row with his second wife, Poppaea Sabina, who was pregnant with their second child. This led to his kicking her in the stomach, as a result of which, she died. He had already honoured her with the title of 'Augusta' after their first child. Nero was devastated. Her body was embalmed and put in the Mausoleum of Augustus; she was given a state funeral; and she was proclaimed to be a goddess.

He also resurrected her in a way that would fit a horror b-movie. One of his slaves had the misfortune to resemble Poppaea. Nero had Sporus castrated, dressed as the empress and addressed as ‘Sabina’. He paraded her through Rome, and publicly embraced her. They were publicly married in Greece in 67.

In AUC 821 (68 CE), as Nero's rule fell apart, he retreated to the suburb of Via Salaria with a few of his loyal servants and slaves. Sporus was among them, as was Marcus Epaphroditus, Nero's secretary, who actually helped Nero to commit suicide, or perhaps killed him.

Subsequent emperors.

Otho (Poppaea Sabina's previous husband whom she left for Nero), on becoming emperor, took Sporus as consort under the name Poppaea.

His successor, Vitellius, ordered Sporus to act on the stage as a woman being ravished, a final humiliation that lead to her suicide.

Notes:

None of the ancient sources says anything of what Sporus may have felt.

Sporus is definitely a male name. The feminine would be Spora, but is never used.


Not the Greek mathematician and astronomer.

Nero was somewhat of a drag queen himself. He composed songs, sang and danced in public, and sometimes appeared in drag.

• Dion Cassius. Ixii. 28, Ixiii. 12, 13, 27, Ixiv. 8, Ixv. 10 ;
• Suetonius. Nero. 28, 46, 48, 49 ;
• Sextus Aurelius Victor. De Caesaribus. 5, Epit. 5 ;
• Dion Chrysostom. Oratio. xxi;
• Suidas, s. v. “Sporus”
• ++Shaun Tougher.  The Roman castrati : eunuchs in the Roman Empire.  Bloomsbury Academic, 2021: 33-5, 40-53.
• ++ Anthony Everitt & Roddy Ashworth.  Nero: matricide, music, and murder in imperial Rome. Random House, 2022: 322-3, 341-2, 344-5, 349.

EN.WIKIPEDIA
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The Christian connection

Poppaea Sabina was probably the first proto-Christian in Rome. Josephus visited Rome in 817/64 to obtain the release of some Jewish priests and found that Poppaea was always ready to facilitate Jewish petitions towards her husband. He succeeded in his mission, and returned home bearing gifts. He described her as θεοσεβής (theosebioi) which is usually translated as 'God-fearer'. See the entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia. It is ironic that she became a Roman goddess but not a saint.

Marcus Epaphroditus, the secretary who killed Nero, was also a colleague of Paul the Apostle, and the sponsor and publisher of two of the works of Josephus. See Philippians 2:25: "Yet I supposed it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus, my brother, and companion in labour, and fellow soldier, but your messenger, and he that ministered to my wants".    There are those who say that Epaphroditus is the Marcus who gave his name to the second Christian gospel.

Thus Sporus links two of the key early Roman Christians.