Therefore, I do not believe that a brave woman, who was raised in men’s clothing by her family, can be denied this right after she has carried out the dangerous duties in a praiseworthy fashion.” This request was granted and Mademoiselle d’Eon spent much of the remainder of her life residing in London with a female companion. When d’Eon died in 1810, five men who had known d’Eon were asked to examine the body and record their observations in order to settle definitively the question of d’Eon’s sex. All five witnesses testified that the body was anatomically male. The deceased’s female companion of many years professed herself shocked to discover that Mademoiselle d’Eon was not the woman she had always assumed her to be.
A generation after the Chevalier d’Eon’s death, a group of French doctors examined another puzzling corpse—that of a thirty-year-old railroad employee who had committed suicide in a squalid attic room in Paris. Abel Barbin, known for twenty-four years as Adelaide Herculine Barbin (and called Alexina), had been born with a body that appeared female. She was raised in a convent and became a teacher at an all-girl boarding school. Severe pain in her lower abdomen caused Alexina to seek medical assistance while employed at the school. The results of the doctor’s examination changed her life forever. “His hand was already slipping under my sheet and coming to a stop at the sensitive place. It pressed upon it several times, as if to find there the solution to a difficult problem. It did not leave off at that point!!! He had found the explanation that he was looking for! But it was easy to see that it exceeded all his expectations!”
The doctor had discovered Alexina’s undescended testicles and small penis, though he did not reveal this information to either Alexina or her employer, and instead advised the headmistress of the school to terminate the young schoolmistress. Alexina sought the advice of her bishop, who sent her to a second physician, a researcher, who prepared “a voluminous report, a masterpiece in the medical style, intended to ensure before the courts a petition for rectification.” In June i860, the birth register in Barbin’s home district was amended, and the female Alexina became the male Abel—by an act of law, not surgery. Though the body remained the same, the legal person was transformed from female to male. The scandal that ensued when the newspapers and the public discovered that a man had been teaching in an all-girl boarding school condemned Abel to “abandonment, to cold isolation.” His life as a man began in pain and confusion and plummeted rapidly into despair. He attempted to make a fresh start in Paris, but, impoverished and alone in a city that granted anonymity if not happiness, Abel was unable to make the transition from convent-bred woman to working man. He committed suicide at the age of thirty, overcome by feelings of isolation and desolation, the sense that he was absolutely alone in the world.
In his journal, Abel predicted that after his death his anomalous body would become a teaching tool and an exemplar of oddity. “When that day comes a few doctors will make a little stir around my corpse; they will shatter all the extinct mechanisms of its impulses, will draw new information from it, will analyze all the mysterious sufferings that were heaped up on a single human being.” This premonition was fulfilled as Abel’s body was autopsied and the genitals and internal organs probed, studied, and sketched for the edification of future physicians pondering the riddle of “hermaphrodites,” individuals whose bodies did not conform to traditional notions of male and female anatomy.
Though the Chevalier d’Eon and Abel Barbin are perhaps the best-known cases of presurgical “sex changes” in Western history, physically intersexual people such as Herculine Barbin and neurologically intersexual people such as the Chevalier d’Eon have always existed. Gender variance thus appears to be a “natural” phenomenon, an example of biological diversity. Professor Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii, who has studied the phenomenon of intersexuality for more than half a century, argues persuasively that gender variance should be considered neither an anomaly nor a pathology, but a simple variation. “Variety is Nature’s way,” he told an audience at the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE) in March 2003. “How many of us in this room are the same height, weight? We’re all part of a great experiment.” Unfortunately, society doesn’t view gender variance with the same benevolence that it views differences in height and (less benevolently today) weight. “Difference is a dirty word to many,” Diamond pointed out.
As contemporary historians and writers have worked to uncover the hidden history of homosexuality, some long-dead individuals who adopted cross-gendered dress and lifestyles have been lauded as gay pioneers. The most famous such case is that of Alan Hart (nee Alberta Lucille), a Portland physician who began living as a man after a hysterectomy in 1917. The historian Jonathan Ned Katz identified Hart on the basis of a case study published by the physician who oversaw, and encouraged, Hart’s metamorphosis. Katz and the larger gay community promptly proclaimed Hart (who was married to a woman) a lesbian pioneer, and explained Hart’s decision to live as a man as an accommodation to social prejudices and coercion by a homophobic physician.
Among gays as well as straights, the complex relationship between sexual orientation and gender identity has thus sometimes been reduced to a simple formula with four variables: male or female, gay or straight. This perspective is shared by members of the (straight) public who believe that a man who wears dresses can’t possibly be heterosexual, even if he sleeps with women only, just as some gay Americans believe that a female-bodied person who dresses like a man must be a masculine lesbian. Both gays and straights have a hard time believing that both of these individuals might in fact be heterosexual men. That idea challenges everything that we think we know about sex, gender, and sexual orientation. “Some men are born in female bodies,” said Katherine (Kit) Rachlin—a clinical psychologist who has worked with transgendered clients for more than fifteen years—at a conference I attended while beginning research on this book. Like many Americans, gay and straight, I received this statement with certain skepticism. But after having met numerous men born in female bodies and women born in male bodies, I no longer doubt that it is true.
Sexual orientation is invisible, but gender identity is difficult to hide. It’s evident in the way we walk, the way we talk, the way we dress, the way we cut our hair. My identity as a woman is clearly visible in hundreds of small and large ways. When you pass me on the street, your brain registers my long hair, makeup, skirt, pocketbook, and painted nails, and renders the verdict “female.” Even if I cut my hair short, skipped makeup, and wore jeans and a T-shirt, you would still identify me as a woman by my physique, by my gait, and by the way I related to you, my fellow pedestrian, as I walked by. But what if, when you passed me on the street, you felt a moment of confusion? What if you felt it necessary to turn around and stare at me as I walked away from you? What if you turned to your companion and said, “Was that a guy or a girl?” Would you be reacting to sexual orientation or gender expression?
Many people infer the former from the latter, and believe that “masculine” women and “feminine” men are invariably gay. Feminine males and masculine females are often subject to scorn and derision, as anyone who has spent time on a playground can testify. A boy who rejects rough play and sports, who walks or talks in a way considered effeminate by his peers, is verbally and sometimes physically abused. The rules for girls are a bit looser in childhood. But by middle school, girls who are deemed inappropriately masculine by their peers are also teased and harassed. These prejudices carry through into adult life, and the all-purpose word used by many people to enforce gender conformity is “gay”—even when they are referring not to the person’s choice of partner, but to the way he or she expresses gender. It is worth noting that though an increasing number of cities and states have added “sexual orientation” to civil rights legislation, fewer have added riders protecting people whose gender expression makes them targets of discrimination or violence. This lapse is a sign of our continuing failure to understand and acknowledge the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity, and it has major consequences.
Julian Weiss, an attorney who has published several articles about the legal issues confronting transgendered and transsexual people, notes that “gender identity is subject to scrutiny in a way that sexual identity [orientation] is not.” The letter
Law is based on custom. Deeply rooted assumptions about our bodies keep us locked into the belief that there are only two sexes—male and female—and that the sex of the body is always consistent with the sex of the brain. The equations work like this: Born with a vagina, female. Born with a penis, male. It seems incomprehensible
