Is Alexina a woman? She has a vulva, labia majora, and a feminine urethra, independent of a sort of imperforate penis, which might be a monstrously developed clitoris. She has a vagina. True, it is very short, very narrow; but after all, what is it if it is not a vagina? These are completely feminine attributes. Yes, but Alexina has never menstruated; the whole outer part of her body is that of a man, and my explorations did not enable me to find a womb. Her tastes, her inclinations, draw her towards women. At night she has voluptuous sensations that are followed by a discharge of sperm…Finally, to sum up the matter, ovoid bodies and spermatic cords are found by touch in a divided scrotum.
Chesnet knew well what he had uncovered: Alexina was a hermaphrodite. Medicine may have recognised hermaphrodites, but not so the law or society. A choice had to be made, and those ovoid bodies decided it. Since the seventeeth century, medical convention had held that, when gender is in doubt, gonadal sex is what matters; and Alexina had testicles. It is still so: a modern clinician would call Alexina a ‘male pseudohermaphrodite’, for she had only testes (‘female pseudohermaphrodites’ having only ovaries and ‘true hermaphrodites’ having both). Leaving her employment and her lover, Herculine Adélaïde Barbin shortly became, by legal statute, Abel. He appeared in public to general scandal, suffered a brief flare of notoriety in the press, and fled to the anonymity of the capital where he attempted to start life anew. And it is in Paris, just a few years later, that the memoir ends. It was found beside the bed on which he died.
GENITALS
To understand Abel Barbin and the many others whose lives have fallen, and fall, between the two sexes, would be to know all that makes us male or female. And yet his story can be simplified, reduced to its essentials. It is not merely that he fell in love with one gender rather than another, nor even that he found himself in a body whose gender was poorly suited to his desires, nor even yet that he lived in times that were unforgiving – such stories are familiar enough. No, his story is more remarkable than any of these. It is about having a body that failed to negotiate either of the two paths to gender in an altogether convincing fashion. It is, fundamentally, a story about genitals.
When we consider the male and female body we see in each, without pausing to think about it, an identity, a homology, to the other. A heart is a heart no matter which gender it sustains. Genitals are not so obvious. Their fleshy intricacies seem less versions of each other than organs of radically divergent construction which, somehow, miraculously enough, work together. Below the navel, we are mostly interested in the differences.
Anatomists, however, have other tastes. Confronted with diversity, their instinct is to simplify and unify, to search for schemes that will yoke together the most unlikely structures. This theme – the finding of homologies – runs throughout this book. But here we’re concerned with something a little different: not homology among species that have long evolved apart, but rather between the two sexes. The first reasonable account of the correspondence between male and female genitals was given in 1543 by Andreas Vesalius, the founder of a great school of Renaissance anatomists at the University of Padua. Ovaries, he argued, were equivalent to testicles. And each female fallopian tube was equivalent to a male vas deferens, as was the uterus to the scrotum, the vulva to the foreskin, while the vagina, a hollow tube, was the female version of the penis itself. For Vesalius, then, female sexual organs were the same as those of males, but merely located internally. This theory seemed to explain everything. To give it maximum effect he illustrated it with a depiction of the vagina, cervix and uterus as male genitals in a state of perpetual semi-erection.
Sex-education manuals invariably depict the male and female reproductive systems in some detail, often as two-toned tangles of labelled tubes. Unappetising though such diagrams may be, they are reasonably accurate. The reader who recalls one of the female reproductive tract will immediately observe that it bears little resemblance to Vesalius’. A close look at his diagram, figure twenty-seven from the fifth book of De fabrica, shows that it is wrong in a host of details. Vesalius showed the vagina as a long, stiff, rod-like structure, but it is not; nor does it have a swelling at its tip where the glans would be. And though the scrotum may be divided into two halves (by the raphe – the point of fusion between the two foetal genital folds), the uterus is not. Some of Vesalius’ errors were surely simply made in haste. His diagram was based on the remains of a Paduan priest’s mistress that had been illegally exhumed by his students, and suggests a swift and brutal dissection. Even so, the errors are puzzling; Vesalius is usually so meticulous. One cannot help but think that the vagina he drew is as much a product of what he saw on his dissecting table as it is of his theory of the unities between male and female.
That such unities – homologies – exist is certain; it’s just that they’re quite different from what Vesalius thought they were. But Vesalius’ errors were not merely a matter of a bump more or a groove less. Allowing that it is difficult for us to see the world as a sixteenth-century anatomist did – to truly know what he did and did not know – as one looks at Vesalius’ diagram, one senses that something is awry with the whole thing; that something is simply missing. Indeed, that is so. Intimate though his knowledge of the female reproductive tract was, Vesalius failed to put his finger on the most important bit of all.
It was another Paduan anatomist, Renaldus Columbus – the same Columbus who got into trouble over an extra rib – who, in 1559, discovered what Vesalius missed: the clitoris. He called it ‘the Sweetness of Venus’, and his description is evocative, ecstatic, and imprecise: ‘Touch it even with a little finger, semen swifter than air flows this way and that on account of the pleasure even with them unwilling… When women are eager for a man’, he continues, it becomes ‘a little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself a sort of male member.’ But then he places this delightful organ in the uterus. And it is by no means clear that Columbus was really that original. Rival anatomists accused him of naming a structure that was already known to the Greeks.
Even Columbus failed to find all there was to the clitoris. In 1998, to the delight of all who have ever perceived that there is more to sex than the titillation of what is, after all, a tiny piece of flesh, the clitoris more than doubled in size. A team of Australian anatomists (headed, perhaps unsurprisingly, by a woman) working on fresh, young cadavers rather than the preserved, elderly ones that are the usual fare of medical students, revealed that the clitoris is not merely the smallish stalk of anatomy textbook and sexological dogma, but a large fork-shaped structure that surrounds the urethra and penetrates the vaginal wall.