Herculine Barbin Llamada Alexina

“You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.”

These are from the words of A. H. Barbin, the subject of this book from Barbin’s own memoirs—which is the core text contained in the book. The book, compiled by the famous Michel Foucault, was part of his greater work on the history of sexuality; I have not read that fuller work, so I can’t comment on the connections there. I was primarily interested in Barbin’s story, especially as told in their own memoirs, which are vivid and are extremely emotionally persuasive. You watch as Barbin is reared in different convents and religious communities as a child, having various affairs with the women they live with, mostly secret trysts. You learn how Barbin’s physical ailments manifested, resulting in a medico-legal intervention that had their sex reassigned at the age of twenty-two. Barbin’s story as an intersex person is not unique or without comparisons, but the memoirs themselves have Barbin’s unique voice. For this part of the book, the compilation and translation of the memoirs, I give Foucault a fair amount of credit.

The rest of the book contains medical and legal documents pertaining to Barbin’s reassignment, which tend towards repetition and needless sensationalism. The worst is the included ‘dramatization’ of Barbin’s story, a short story written by novelist Oscar Panizza. This last piece felt extremely unnecessary and overly dramatic, fixating on some of the more tragic details of what Barbin had to endure at the hands of cruel society.

What I liked in particular about the memoirs was Barbin’s internal conception of themselves; you see them as a young girl, living in convents with fellow girls having little qualms about it. In their teenage years, you see some reservations about modesty and feelings of alienation from being different than the other girls, but there is still a relational sense. However, after the reassignment, you see Barbin struggling in their masculine assigned sex, particularly with trying to find work as a ‘weak effeminate man’ and destined to live a life of solitude (they couldn’t get married, as women must have children in those days, apparently). The difficult thing the reader has to grapple with is that Barbin did everything right—they tried to fit in with the sex assigned to them at birth, failed to do so, and then quietly took up their reassigned sex once the medical and legal systems in place decided it must be so. Yet, there was no normalcy remaining for Barbin, and the singular joy and love of their life was left in the past.

It’s easy to understand how Barbin’s story ends and why it does, but it is harder for the reader to reconcile this with the society they lived in. Interestingly, many had positive or jocular responses to Barbin’s reassignment, despite knowing them as a girl for many years. I suppose if the doctors and courts will it, you become agreeable to it, no matter how strange it is. Still, it was positively surprising to see an article clipping talking rather crudely but optimistically about Barbin appearing at mass with male attire for the first time; at the end, the article wishes him a happy life. This rings so differently from the heated discussions had today about forced infant reassignment surgeries and a general widening understanding of intersex identity; for all that, it doesn't seem to be a much less hostile place for intersex people. In Barbin’s time, there was hardly any discussion or understanding at all, yet people were able to be accepting, or at least sympathetic, in spite of that. (Of course, not everyone was, and Barbin still struggled to function with finding work; they were forced to live a socially estranged life.) I am glad that Barbin decided to undertake the project of writing down memoirs of their life, even though it may have taken many years (the beginning hints that they are twenty-five, but they were thirty when they died).

The medical and legal documents compiled by Foucault are interesting but nothing noteworthy, and the short story by Panizza is absolutely atrocious to read through. I would recommend reading this for the memoirs alone, because it is worth taking a glimpse into Barbin's singularly extraordinary life.