Most of what we know about Barbin comes from their later memoirs. Herculine Adélaïde Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in France in 1838. They were assigned as a girl and raised as such; their family referred to them as Alexina. Their family was poor but they gained a charity scholarship to study in the school of an Ursuline convent. According to their account, they had a crush on an aristocratic female friend in school. They regarded themself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into their friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for that. However, their studies were successful and in 1856, at the age of seventeen they were sent to Le Château to study to become a teacher. There, they fell in love with one of the teachers.
Puberty
Although Barbin was in puberty, they had not begun to menstruate and remained flat chested. The hairs on their upper lip and cheeks were noticeable. In 1857 Barbin received a position as an assistant teacher in a girls' school. They fell in love with another teacher, Sara, and Barbin demanded that only she should dress them. Her ministrations turned into caresses and they became lovers. Eventually, rumors about their affair began to circulate. Barbin, although sick their whole life, began to suffer excruciating pains. When a doctor examined them, he was shocked and asked that they should be sent away from the school, but Barbin stayed. Eventually, the devoutly Catholic Barbin confessed to Jean-François-Anne Landriot, the Bishop of La Rochelle. He asked Barbin's permission to break the confessional silence in order to send for a doctor to examine them. When Dr. Chesnet did so in 1860, he discovered that even though Barbin had a small vagina, they had a masculine body type, a very small penis, and testicles inside their body. In 20th-century medical terms, they had male pseudohermaphroditism.
Reassignment as male
A later legal decision declared officially that Barbin was male. They left their lover and their job, changed their name to Abel Barbin and was briefly mentioned in the press. They moved to Paris where they lived in poverty and wrote their memoirs, reputedly as a part of therapy. In the memoirs, Barbin would use female pronouns when writing about their life prior to sexual redesignation and male pronouns, including Alexina and Camille, following the declaration. Nevertheless, Barbin clearly regarded themself as punished, and "disinherited", subject to a "ridiculous inquisition". In his commentary to Barbin's memoirs, Michel Foucault presented Barbin as an example of the "happy limbo of a non-identity", but whose masculinity marked them from their contemporaries. Morgan Holmes states that Barbin's own writings showed that they saw themself as an "exceptional female", but female nonetheless.
Death
In February 1868, the concierge of Barbin's house in rue de l'École-de-Médecine found them dead in their home. They had died by suicide by inhaling gas from their coal gasstove. The memoirs were found beside their bed.
Memoirs publication
Dr. Regnier reported the death, recovered the memoirs and performed an autopsy. Later he gave the memoirs to Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, who published excerpts as "Histoire et souvenirs d'Alexina B." in his book Question médico-légale de l'identité dans ses rapport avec les vices de conformation des organes sexuels, contenant les souvenirs et impressions d'un individu dont le sexe avait été méconnu . The excerpts were translated into English in 1980. Michel Foucault discovered the memoirs in the 1970s while conducting research at the French Department of Public Hygiene. He had the journals republished as . In his edition, Foucault also included a set of medical reports, legal documents, and newspaper articles, as well as a short story adaptation by Oscar Panizza.
Modern commentaries and references
According to Morgan Holmes, the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt has identified Barbin as providing a crisis for "modern ideology" through an identification as neither male nor female, but Barbin's own writings describe a self-identification as female, albeit an exceptional female. Barbin's memoirs inspired the French film The Mystery of Alexina. Jeffrey Eugenides in his book Middlesex treats concurrent themes, as does Virginia Woolf in her book, . Judith Butler refers to Foucault's commentary on Barbin at various points in her 1990 Gender Trouble, including her chapter "Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity." Barbin appears as a character in the play A Mouthful of Birds by Caryl Churchill and David Lan. Barbin also appears as a character in the play Hidden: A Gender by Kate Bornstein. Herculine, a full-length play based on the memoirs of Barbin, is by Garrett Heater. Kira Obolensky also wrote a two-act stage adaptation entitled The Adventures of Herculina. In 2014, a manuscript entitled Dear Herculine by Aaron Apps won the 2014 Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press.
