When I was at my worst, I kept in mind all those people who thanks to their written testimonies accompanied me despite being dead. Perhaps they had died precisely because they couldn’t abide being isolated and misunderstood. So at times I thought of myself as being strong, a survivor—because I was alive—barred from the world that knew me best, the netherworld, whose doors you are opening to me. Thanks. Aren’t you just the gentleman? I won’t hide the fact that at times I feel self-pity and don’t want to “go gentle into that good night.” How woozy I get when I think of the passing of time nowadays.
With me in mind, S stocked a book that contained the beautiful and explicit testimony of what they used to call a hermaphrodite, one who at baptism was forced to take the name of a girclass="underline" Adelaide Herculine Barbin.
This man was born on November 8, 1838, in the French village of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, though his diaries were published only a few years ago for the first time. I was moved by how he dealt with the main issue, his intersexuality, but there was something deeper at work: how honest he was in telling his story, the simplicity and purity he demonstrated in a century that saw what Herculine Barbin was as a public disgrace. Herculine was uncannily aware of his tragic destiny from early childhood, when nobody, not even he, could appreciate how exceptional his body was. He foresaw his own tragedy and yet was still able to love. Just like me.
Herculine describes somewhere in the diary how his doctor, who was aware that he was more man than woman in his adolescence, commented on how accurate his godmother had been by insisting on calling him Camille. Camille is both a masculine and a feminine name. So at least one person noticed that Herculine Barbin’s gender was undetermined at birth. The same thing happened to me when I was born and my gender was considered ambiguous, though I didn’t have a godmother who called me by a name that reflected who I ultimately would be. The whole naming business has always obsessed me. Honestly, I’ve never understood why we have to spend our entire lives with a single name given to us by someone else. A person’s name is the most sacred thing of all. It sees us through our entire lives, personifying us to everyone else, and for that reason it’s something we should be able to choose ourselves. Countries have rituals of all varieties, but not a single ceremony that allows us to confirm or reject the name we were given at birth. We haven’t even opened our eyes yet, and someone has engraved the name inflicted on us on a marble slab. Me, I refuse to accept it. I will be the one to choose what name goes on my tombstone. Please, leave it at H, for Hiroshima. You’ll never know my birth name. My gender and name were imposed on me, the outcome of a mistaken assumption, like a bad bet in a game of cards. But it was my life being wagered, not just money, when I was no more than a lump of defenseless flesh that surely could sense her parents’ disappointment at not being able to pridefully proclaim the key words of the event: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” Maybe I noticed the disillusionment while I was still wrapped in my mother’s warmth, the silence or the shame of whoever tried to imagine me outside of that undefined limbo.
The book included a medical report written in 1860 by a Dr. Chesnet, who detailed the state of Herculine—who was customarily known as Alexina—when Herculine visited his practice at the age of twenty-two because of sharp pains that were probably caused by inguinal testicles, meaning testicles that never fell and so remained invisible. The doctor’s report was originally published in the Annales d’hygiène publique et de médicine légale, and I unapologetically tore the reproduction of this report out of the book because I couldn’t help feeling as though it belonged to me even though it didn’t exactly correspond with my case. I didn’t have access to any other kind of official report on my body. So here’s the fourth hint, it’s a little more self-explanatory:
I never had access to any kind of report on my body.
The report said the following about Herculine:
[…] has brown hair and measures 1.59 centimeters. Her facial features are not well defined and appear undecided between those of a man and a woman. The voice is feminine, but there are times in conversation or in coughing when deeper, more masculine timbres resonate. The upper lip is covered in a fine down: there are whiskers on the chin and cheeks, especially on the left-hand side. Her chest is that of a man’s, flat and without the manifestation of breasts. There’s never been menstruation, to the great frustration of her mother and family doctor, who wasn’t able to bring on the flow. The upper limbs are not rounded, as is characteristic in well-formed females; they are quite dark and slightly hairy. The pelvis and hips are a man’s. The upper pubic region is covered in black hair that is growing thicker. Opening the thighs one can see a longitudinal slit, which extends from the mons Venus to the anus. There is a peniform body on the upper part that is about four or five centimeters long from the point of insertion to the free tip, which is made up of a glans that is covered by a foreskin that is slightly flat in the upper part and that has never been perforated. This small member, as far from the dimension of the clitoris as it is from a penis in its normal state can, according to Alexina, engorge, stiffen, and grow. However the erection must be very limited, as the imperfect penis is held from the inside by a sort of frenum membrane that allows only the glans to be freestanding.
WHAT REALLY CAUGHT MY INTEREST in this part of the report was how they describe Herculine’s genitalia as a “member” whose dimensions make it as far from being a clitoris as a penis. That’s exactly my case. A baby stuck halfway between clitoris and penis. But isn’t that just like a baby? A being that is neither male nor female? Why not keep the status open till it’s time for the baby to develop physically and decide an identity for itself? But no, for some odd reason gender is rendered definitively like a judge’s ruling: boy or girl, lad or lass, male or female, old lady or old man.
But like me, Herculine knew perfectly well in her own mind and heart that she was only attracted to one sex. Herculine liked women. She felt like a man, though she was raised as a girl, a woman, surrounded by girlfriends until well after puberty, finding work as a governess in an all-girls school, where she met her first love, one of the headmistress’s daughters. She fantasized about marrying her and envied men who had that right. They slept together every night, and her companion’s mother thought it merely a platonic friendship and felt stirred by their devotion. In her diaries, Herculine doesn’t go into detail about the sexual side of the affair with her young friend, but it’s clear that they are in love with each other and sexually active. So it was strange for me to read a medical report written eight years later by another doctor, E. Goujon, included in the Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie de l’homme, referring to Herculine’s case as being an example of “imperfect hermaphroditism.” What does it mean to be imperfect? Has anyone ever recorded a case of perfect hermaphroditism in the history of medicine? If hermaphroditism can be considered a fusion of the masculine and feminine, then Herculine was perfect—taking into account the data given in the report a few years later—since “the shape of the individual’s external genitalia allowed him, though he seemed manifestly masculine, to take on the role of either man or woman during coitus.” Though ejaculation hadn’t taken place through the penis because, according to these reports, it didn’t have an orifice, but instead through the vagina, the latter, at the same time, allowed for penetration. Fifth or sixth hint, I’ve lost track: