ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Good morning. Today is an international day of remembrance that most people won’t have heard of. It concerns a French woman who lived in the 19th century. When Herculine Barbin was born her sex was not obvious. It was decided that she should be brought up as a girl and she was sent to study at a convent, later becoming a teacher. She fell in love several times and had affairs with women. She was then stricken with bouts of severe pain. Medical examination showed that her body appeared to be male as well as female. This led to a court case in which it was decided she was legally male. She changed her name and moved to Paris where she wrote her memoirs, using female pronouns when describing her early life and male ones for the time after the court judgment. There was no happy ending to her story. She often felt condemned by the world, and in 1868 took her own life.

Her memoirs became the subject of medical interest. It was assumed that she had been misidentified at birth and was really male all along. The memoirs were also taken up by the philosopher Michel Foucault who used her story to celebrate what he called the ‘happy limbo of a non-identity’, though it was anything but happy for her. She didn’t see her gender as fluid; she thought of herself as an exceptional female. Today we would call her intersex and recognise her as one in about 1500 people who cannot be clearly identified as belonging to one sex or another at birth.

There have always been intersex people, and sometimes they have been regarded as freaks, at other times they have been tolerated. Advances in medicine led to surgery being routinely performed on intersex babies to make them more obviously male or female; surgery that was often concealed from the children themselves. Science prefers certainty to ambiguity and so, sometimes, does religion.

But nature is not as tidy as either science or religion might like. Intersex people are rare human beings but I don’t think they should be forced to be either male or female. On the other hand I find the attempt to recruit Herculine Barbin to today’s campaign for gender fluidity equally disturbing: an appropriation of her uniqueness which I don’t believe her memoirs permit. Sexual and gender identity are not matters either of social compulsion or of personal choice, but of mutual recognition. Sometimes the body simply speaks who it is and we have to grapple with what is disclosed. The Bible points to a human beings made in God’s image, and though that generally means male and female, there are surprises. Salvation comes from a virgin birth. Women are called to be soldiers of Christ and strong men call on the Mother of God for protection. Only if we come to see that sex is far from simple will Herculine Barbin not have died in vain.

Show less