The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [10]
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)