Herculine Barbin (1838–1868) was a French intersex person who was treated as a female at birth but was later redesignated a male after an affair and physical examination.
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Most of what we know about Barbin comes from his later memoirs. Herculine Adélaîde Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in France in 1838. He was regarded as a girl and raised as such; his family referred to him as Alexina. His family was poor but he gained a charity scholarship to study in the school of an Ursuline convent.
According to his account, he had a crush on an aristocratic female friend in school. He regarded himself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into his friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for that. However, his studies were successful and in 1856, at the age of seventeen he was sent to Le Chateau to study to become a teacher. There he fell in love with one of the teachers.
Although Barbin was in puberty, he had not begun to menstruate and remained flat chested. He would trim the hairs on his upper lip and cheeks which only made the hair thicker and more noticeable.
In 1857 Barbin received a post of an assistant teacher in a girl's school. He fell in love with another teacher, Sara, and Barbin demanded that only she should dress him. Her ministrations turned into caresses and they became lovers. Eventually rumors about their affair began to circulate.
Barbin, although sick his whole life, began to suffer excruciating pains. When a doctor examined him, he was shocked and asked that he should be sent away from the school, but he stayed.
Eventually, the devoutly Catholic Barbin confessed to Jean-François-Anne Landriot, the Bishop of La Rochelle. He asked him permission to break the confessional silence in order to send for a doctor to examine him. When Dr. Chesnet did so in 1860, he discovered that even if Barbin had a small vagina, he was bodily masculine and had a very small penis and testicles inside his body. In modern terms, he had "male pseudohermaphroditism".
A later legal decision declared official that Barbin was male. He left his lover and his job, changed his name to Abel Barbin and was briefly mentioned in the press. He moved to Paris where he lived in poverty and wrote his memoirs, reputedly as a part of therapy.
In February 1868, the concierge of Barbin's house in rue de l'École-de-Médecine found him dead in his home. He had committed suicide by inhaling gas from his coal gas stove. His memoirs were found beside his bed.
Dr. Regnier reported the death, recovered the memoirs and performed an autopsy. Later he gave the memoirs to Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, who published excerpts as "Histoire et souvenirs d'Alexina B." ("The Story and Memoirs of Alexina B.") in his book 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 ("Forensics of Identity Involving Deformities of the Sexual Organs, Along With the Memoirs and Impressions of an Individual Whose Sex Was Misidentified") (Paris: J.-B. Ballière et Fils, 1872). The excerpts were translated to English in 1980.
Michel Foucault discovered the memoirs in the French Department of Public Hygiene. He had the journals republished with his commentary in Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite. It inspired the French film The Mystery of Alexina. Judith Butler refers to the Foucault's work and the journals in Gender Trouble, and Jeffrey Eugenides in his book Middlesex treats concurrent themes, as does Virginia Woolf in her book, Orlando: A Biography.
Barbin appears as a character in the play A Mouthful of Birds by Caryl Churchill and David Lan. Barbin also appears as a character in the play Hidden: A Gender by Kate Bornstein. Herculine, a full length play based on the memoirs of Barbin, is by Garrett Heater.