CosmoMagazine.com – by David Salt and Zoe Brain
The writer
HERCULINE BARBARIN was a 19th century French hermaphrodite who was treated as a female at birth but later redesignated a man after a scandalous affair and a medical examination.
A hermaphrodite, she started her life as a pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, growing into a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, and becoming a passionate lover of a schoolmistress. After the affair was revealed she was reclassified as a man.
By the age of 30, she was alone and desolate. In 1868 she commited suicide in a miserable attic in Paris. Her eloquent, erotic memoirs were found by Michel Foucault in the archives of France’s Department of Public Hygiene, and published along with the graphic medical descriptions of Barbin’s body before and after her death.