On the small table beside the bed sat a manuscript. In a room with only four pieces of furniture, in a Paris apartment a few steps from the Sorbonne, it was the only thing that still belonged to her. Four years after her death, a French doctor would publish parts of it without anyone asking. That manuscript would go on to inspire a film, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and the work of one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century.

But there is a detail almost nobody tells. It all began because a young schoolteacher went to confess a stomach ache to a bishop, and in less than a year, a judge changed her sex with a piece of paper and took away her job, her love, and her name. This is the story of Herculine Barbin. And at the end, there is something to understand about why her case still matters, 158 years later, more than anyone might imagine.

There is a sentence she wrote that still hurts to read, and there is also a lie a famous philosopher told about her. In this story, the word “hermaphrodite” will appear, because that was the word used in the nineteenth century. Today the word is “intersex,” and that is the word that will be used here. The old word was used as an insult, and in this story there were already too many of those.

Herculine Barbin was born on November 8, 1838, in Saint-Jean-d’Angély, a village in southwestern France. The family gave her a long and elegant name, but at home everyone called her Alexina. She was raised as a girl because that is how she was registered at birth. Her family was very poor.

These were the years when France was filling with factories, and while some grew rich, thousands of families like hers could barely eat. In that house nothing was left over, and even so, Alexina had something money could not buy. She was a brilliant student. Thanks to that intelligence, she won a scholarship to study at a convent of the Ursuline nuns.

There she spent much of her adolescence, surrounded by girls, prayers, and very strict rules. It was a closed world where everyone lived under surveillance. And precisely there, in that place where all her companions were changing, Alexina began to feel that something was happening to her. Years later she would write about it in her memoirs.

As an adolescent she already felt confused. She saw that her body was not changing like the other girls’ bodies. Her entire life depended on a secret she did not even understand herself. According to her own memoirs, in that convent Alexina had friends and the nuns loved her.

She would remember that stage as the last time nobody looked at her as a problem. She was not yet a case. She was still a girl eager to learn, and that peace was about to end. In the mid-1850s, Alexina began studying to become a teacher.

She did well. She passed the exams and earned her certificate. But while her career advanced, her personal life became a whirlwind. She felt attraction toward women, which was already hard to accept in that era.

But what troubled her most was her own body. She never menstruated. Her chest remained flat, and her appearance was more like that of a young man. Moreover, hair grew where other women did not have it, on her upper lip and cheeks.

Her arms and legs had hair darker and thicker than her companions’. She knew this. People made jokes about her, sometimes cruelly. So she began cutting the hair with scissors, wearing long clothes that covered her, and avoiding at all costs swimming in public.

Hiding became her way of living. Every day, before leaving her room, she had to think about how to conceal what made her different. Every conversation could be a trap. Every companion who came too close was a risk.

She lived like a spy inside her own body, without understanding why. No one had explained anything to her, not her family, not the school, not the church. And the question she asked herself in silence was always the same: what is happening to me? To understand what happened next, a little science is needed.

Today it is known that intersex people exist, people born with sexual characteristics that do not fit entirely into the typical idea of a male or female body. This is not rare, nor exclusive to humans. In nature, close to five percent of species have individuals that develop organs of both sexes. Among people, the numbers are larger than many believe.

The United Nations calculates that around 1. 7 percent of the population is born with some intersex variation. That is roughly one person in sixty. If only cases where the differences are visible to the naked eye are counted, the figure drops to about one in two hundred, and some biologists place it lower still, at one in five hundred.

There is scientific debate about where to draw the line because it depends on how the word is defined. But in any case, this is not about a handful of people. It is about millions. Today doctors usually speak of variations of sex development, and many intersex organizations prefer the word “intersex.

” This is not a small detail. Words matter. For centuries, intersex people had no voice in what they were called or how they were treated. They were described by others, studied by others, and operated on by others.

That is exactly what happened to Herculine. For most of history, nobody understood why it happened. Some ancient and medieval societies were more tolerant of these people. But between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, those bodies were described with a horrible word: monsters.

And when the nineteenth century arrived, Herculine was born just in a time of transition. They no longer called her a monster in the churches, but in the medical journals. It was the era of modern medicine. Doctors wanted to classify, measure, and explain everything they did not understand.

For a person like her, that meant a double condemnation: on one side, the attack of society; on the other, the cold gaze of doctors who would treat her as a case study, not as a human being. That was the world she faced when she got her first teaching post. In the late 1850s, Alexina began working at a girls’ boarding school. There she met another teacher whom, in her memoirs, she calls Sara.

At first they were only colleagues. Then they became very close friends. Alexina helped her dress, tightening her corset, and little by little that closeness became something more. They fell in love, and the relationship became intimate, as usually happens.

They began leaving small signs without realizing it: sweet looks, affectionate nicknames, discreet kisses on the cheek. Rumors began to spread among the staff and the students. Even Sara’s mother found out. To protect her family from gossip, she forbade her daughter from seeing Alexina anymore.

Sara promised to obey, but in practice the two stayed together, only with much more care. For Alexina, that love was the only thing that made sense. In her memoirs she tells it with tenderness and also with guilt. She felt happy, but she felt she was deceiving someone because she did not even know what she really was.

How do you explain to the person you love something you do not understand yourself? That question haunted her every time they were alone, and every hidden kiss increased the risk that everything would come to light. It came out in the most unexpected way, because of a pain. Meanwhile, Alexina’s health was getting worse.

It had never been good. She had had periodic illnesses, some without explanation. But in those years intense pains appeared in her abdomen and other parts of her body. In that era there was no simple medical care for a poor young woman.

There was no relief, and Alexina was a very devout Catholic, so she did what a devout person would do. She went to see the bishop of La Rochelle, Monsignor Landriot. The bishop, concerned, asked her permission to consult a local doctor, Dr. Chesnet.

She agreed, and the doctor asked to examine her. That examination changed everything. Dr. Chesnet was astonished by what he found.

Alexina’s body had traits of both sexes. She had a small vagina, a small and underdeveloped penis, and internal testes that had never descended. Detailed medical reports were written. Other doctors participated to run more tests with a single purpose: to determine what sex she was.

Imagine how a woman of just over twenty must have felt, lying before a group of men discussing her body as if it were a museum piece. And in the end, the official conclusion. According to the doctors, Herculine Barbin was a man. Today such a case would be identified quickly.

It would be called a variation of sex development, and an evaluation would be done with consent and psychological support. But in the mid-nineteenth century, nobody knew why it happened. Nobody understood chromosomes or hormones well. So medicine simply decided, and the decision came in writing.

That decision was not a mere formality. Her case was discussed among doctors, and her body became an object of study. There is something very cruel in that. She came to the consultation with a pain and left converted into a case file.

Nobody asked her how she felt. Nobody asked her who she wanted to be. And while the doctors discussed in the technical language of the era, she was left with the feeling that her life no longer belonged to her. Then the story slipped out of everyone’s hands.

The news left the town, spread across western France, and reached the whole country. Newspapers began talking about her. Alexina became the gossip of the region. The headlines described her as the girl who was really a young man, and much of what was written was cruel.

Think about how news traveled in that era. There were no social networks, but there was something similar: newspapers, conversations in the square, and sermons carried the rumor from town to town. In a small city, everyone knew who you were. Going out into the street meant crossing paths with neighbors who whispered.

Going to Mass meant feeling the stares. For a shy person who had spent years hiding, that exposure must have been unbearable. They said she had used her situation to get close to other girls and have discreet affairs. The words “monster” and “freak” appeared again and again.

They accused her of having worked in a girls’ school with a body that, according to the doctors, had masculine traits. Without her having chosen any of it, she had become suspected of a crime she never committed. Then came the legal part. A court took the case and with a ruling officially changed her sex to male.

Think about that for a moment. She did not ask for that change. She never had the chance to explain who she was. A judge, in a courtroom, decided who she was going to be from that day on.

The psychological blow was enormous, and the worst had not yet arrived. In the early 1860s, when the case was closed, Barbin had to resign from her teaching job. Her relationship with Sara broke apart, and then she made a decision that seems brave and heartbreaking at the same time. She moved to Paris.

There she began living with a male identity. She called herself Abel, a masculine version of her second name, Adélaïde. But in Paris she did not find what she was looking for. It was very hard for her to find work.

Her life became poorer and more solitary. She had no family nearby, no friends, no place where she felt accepted. A whole world looked at her without knowing what to do with her. Something needs to be said about that change of identity.

It was not a liberating transformation. It was not a person finally deciding to be who she was. It was a person to whom a court gave a name and a paper and told to manage on her own. She had to change her clothes, her name, her way of speaking, and her work, without preparation and without support.

Anyone who has gone through a major change in life knows how difficult it is. Now imagine doing it alone, poor, and under the gaze of a society that had just read your story in the newspaper. In those years, in the mid-1860s, she wrote something in her memoirs. She wrote that she had suffered a great deal, that she had suffered alone, alone, abandoned by everyone.

She wrote that her place was not marked in this world, that the world rejected her and had cursed her. And she wrote that no living creature shared with her that immense sadness that seized her when she left childhood, at that age when everything is beautiful because everything is young and full of future. That sentence was written by a person of just over twenty-five. An age when many people are only beginning to imagine their future.

She already felt hers had ended. In February 1868, the caretaker of the building where she lived, on the Rue de l’École de Médecine, very close to the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter of Paris, found her lifeless in her small apartment. She had died by her own hand. The investigators concluded it was not an accident, and they found what was in practice a farewell letter addressed to her mother.

She was twenty-nine years old. Nobody knows the exact day. She had probably been dead for several days when she was found. In 1868 there was no way to determine precisely how much time had passed.

All that is known is that it was February. The motives have been debated for more than 150 years. Many believe it was the sum of everything: the traumatic experience of the last decade, the poverty, the loneliness, having lost her job, her life, her name, and her love. All by the decision of others.

And now, what was in that room, because that is what changed history. When her body was found, there was almost nothing around. The apartment was tiny and had only four pieces of furniture: a bed, a table, a chair, and a small nightstand. It was a clear sign of the poverty in which she had spent her last years.

But on that nightstand there was something that would change everything: a manuscript. Her memoirs. She had written them as an attempt to understand what had happened to her. It was her therapy, so to speak, long before that word existed.

She wanted to explain to herself the reaction people had to her body and also why she had developed differently from her companions. In that text she tells what she looked like in adolescence. She writes that at the age when women bloom, she had neither that loose and graceful walk, nor the rounded forms that show full youth. She says her skin had a sickly pallor that revealed fragile health, that her features had a hardness that could not help but be noticed, that her upper lip and part of her cheeks were covered with a fine hair that increased with the days, and that to avoid jokes she used scissors instead of a razor, and the only thing she achieved was that it grew back thicker and more visible.

She writes that her body was literally covered with that hair, so different from her companions’, and that her figure remained ridiculously thin. All of that, she says, was obvious, and she saw it every day. It hurts to read it, especially when you remember how her life ended. Imagine that room.

A small place in the heart of Paris, a few steps from one of the most famous universities in the world. Outside, young students discussed science, politics, and philosophy. Inside, a person without work, without family nearby, and without anyone to talk to wrote so as not to disappear completely. That distance of a few meters between a world full of ideas and a room full of silence is one of the hardest images in this whole story.

That manuscript was not lost. In 1872, only four years after her death, a doctor published parts of those memoirs. His name was Ambroise Tardieu, and he was one of the best-known forensic doctors in France. But he did not publish them to honor Barbin.

He used them as study material in a medical-legal work, as if they were the evidence of a case. The intimate text of a woman who felt alone all her life became a footnote in a medical book. And even so, that text survived, and its influence was enormous. Almost everything known about intersex people of the nineteenth century comes from the voice of the doctors who described them from the outside, coldly and with measurements.

Barbin’s memoirs are different. They are one of the few times we hear an intersex person of that era speak in the first person. She does not say what her body is like for a report; she says what it feels like to live in it. And for historians, that is worth more than any file.

In 1985, a French film called The Mystery of Alexina was released, based on her memoirs and directed by René Féret. And in 2002, the American writer Jeffrey Eugenides published a novel titled Middlesex, which tells the life of Cal Stephanides, an intersex protagonist. The novel was inspired by these memoirs and won the Pulitzer Prize. So a person who died alone and with almost nothing in a Paris apartment ended up, more than a century later, inside one of the most awarded novels of its time.

But the largest piece of this story has not yet been told, because in the 1970s a man opened that old text and saw something different. That man was Michel Foucault, one of the most famous philosophers and social thinkers in France. In those years, Foucault was writing his great work, The History of Sexuality, which was published in several volumes between 1976 and 2018, with a fourth posthumous volume. In Barbin’s story he saw a perfect example of what he wanted to demonstrate: that gender, as we understand it, was built with rules, and that in the nineteenth century those rules hardened.

So he decided to publish the memoirs with his own commentary. In French they came out in 1978, and the English edition arrived in 1980 with a very long title saying they were the newly discovered memoirs of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite. Here is the lie promised earlier. The word “discovered” is an exaggeration.

As already heard, parts of those memoirs had been published in 1872. They were not a hidden treasure; they were a text that medicine had known for more than 100 years and had used without much care. Foucault did something valuable because he returned the text to people, but the story of the discovery was more of a sales hook than a reality. Foucault’s central idea was strong.

According to him, Western society and science had been restricting people born with intersex variations to a single option: choose one gender or another, or accept that a doctor chose it for them. For him, Barbin’s case showed a growing tendency toward gender rigidity, and to mark the contrast he pointed to earlier eras such as ancient Greece or certain sectors of medieval Arab culture, where gender fluidity was much more accepted. For Foucault, the moment that mattered most was that of the sentence. In that instant, he said, the state and medicine agreed to force a person to do one thing or the other.

In earlier times, a person born with traits of both sexes could even choose their situation upon reaching adulthood. With the nineteenth century and the new civil laws, that door closed. Each person had to be man or woman forever, and a doctor had to discover which was the correct answer. Barbin’s story did not stop with Foucault.

In 1990, the American philosopher Judith Butler discussed it in her book Gender Trouble, one of the most influential works on this subject. Foucault had described Herculine’s childhood as a kind of happy limbo without a defined identity. Butler doubted that reading because Barbin, in her own memoirs, does not speak of perfect happiness; she speaks of fear, guilt, and confusion. There is a curious detail.

Foucault could not have known it, but he wrote just as ideas about gender were beginning to shift toward something more flexible, which is what we see today. And now the important question: what happened with all this in our own time? Because here is where Barbin’s story stops being a story of the past. November 8, the day Barbin was born, is celebrated in many places as Intersex Day of Remembrance, a date to remember those who suffered in silence.

A few days earlier, on October 26, Intersex Awareness Day is observed. The most recent data show the change has been great, but much remains. According to Human Rights Watch, in October 2025, more than 50 evaluations by United Nations human rights committees had concluded that non-consensual surgeries on children with intersex traits are human rights violations. Countries such as Malta, Greece, and Spain have banned those operations, as have parts of Australia and India.

The UN Human Rights Council approved its first resolution on the subject in 2024. In January 2025, the United States Department of Health published a historic report on intersex health calling for an end to surgery without consent. And in August 2025, delegates of the Australian Medical Association unanimously supported a resolution recognizing the harm health professionals caused to intersex people. Think about it.

In the nineteenth century, a group of doctors decided who Herculine Barbin was, and a judge signed it. In the twenty-first century, the world is recognizing that that decision should never have been made by others. The central idea is simple: each person must be able to decide over their own body. But honesty is also needed.

A study by the ILGA organization, done before these advances, found that only six countries out of the 193 UN members prohibited unnecessary medical interventions on intersex people. The advances are real, but they are still few for the size of the problem. And in many places in the world, intersex children are still operated on without anyone asking them anything. Intersex organizations report that many people discover the truth about their own bodies only as adults, by reading their medical records or by asking why they were operated on as children.

It is a modern form of the same silence that surrounded Herculine. At the UN, the number of countries supporting joint declarations against these surgeries has gone from 34 to more than 50. It is progress, but a declaration cures no one. What changes a person’s life is a law, a hospital, and a family that know how to listen.

Barbin died convinced that no one had understood her. She was certain her place was not in this world. But she wrote, and because she wrote, more than 150 years later we are speaking of her with respect, with her name, and with her story. Her text inspired a film.

It inspired a novel that won a Pulitzer. It inspired a philosopher to rethink how gender is constructed, and today it is still read in universities, in reading groups, and in organizations that defend the rights of intersex people. Perhaps that is the hardest part to accept, that a person had to suffer so much before the world began to listen. But it is also the part that gives hope, because the voice of Herculine Barbin did not go out.

It still speaks through her own pages, and every person who reads them gives back a little of what was taken from her: the right to be heard. Three things remain from this story. The first is that a diagnosis cannot replace a person. The second is that writing, even if only for oneself, can cross centuries.

The third is the most uncomfortable. Much of the harm done to Herculine did not come from monsters, but from ordinary people who believed they were doing the right thing: a concerned bishop, a curious doctor, a judge enforcing the law. No one wanted to destroy her, and still, together, they did.