Abel Barbin

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 1860, 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.