Herculine Barbin – The Woman a French Court Legally FORCED to Become a Man

A convent certificate from 1857 names her Mademoiselle Alexina Barbin: top of her class, devout, a trusted schoolmistress. Three years later, a doctor examining her for chronic pain finds no uterus and undescended testes. Within months, a French court will erase twenty years of her identity and rename her Abel. This video tells the true story of Herculine Barbin, one of the most significant intersex cases in modern history: her childhood in a poor, devout family and education through a convent scholarship, her love for a fellow teacher that led her to confess to a bishop, the medical examination and legal ruling that stripped her of the only identity she had ever known, and the poverty, isolation, and death that followed. We look at how her private memoir was recovered after her suicide, published without her consent in a forensic medical textbook, then rediscovered over a century later by philosopher Michel Foucault, and how scholars including Judith Butler and intersex researcher Morgan Holmes have argued over what her story actually means ever since. This isn't a simple case of medical misdiagnosis. It's a story about institutions forcing a person into categories that never fit, and continuing to argue over her story long after they took everything else from her. #HerculineBarbin #IntersexHistory #Foucault #TrueStory #History #Documentary