French memoirist Herculine Barbin was BOTD in 1838. Born Adélaïde Barbin in Saint-Jean d’Angely to a poor family, she was assigned female at birth and won a charity scholarship to be educated at a convent school. According to her memoir, she had her first sexual experience with a female student. In 1856, she was sent to college to train to become a teacher, beginning her career at a girls school in 1857. She had an affair with a female colleague, creating a scandal at the school. After suffering severe pains, she was examined by a doctor, who discovered she had male and female genitalia, and recommended she be sent away from the school. After confessing her secret to the local bishop, Barbin was persuaded to undergo another medical inspection, who classified her as a male hermaphrodite. Barbin was subsequently reclassified as male, changing his name to Abel Barbin and assuming male dress. Press coverage of Barbin’s identity prompted him to flee to Paris, where he lived in poverty, writing a memoir in which his early life was described using female pronouns and his post-designated identity as male. Barbin committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1868, aged 29, leaving a copy of his memoir beside his bed. Portions of the memoir were published in 1872 as Histoire et souvenirs d’Alexina B (The Story and Memoirs of Alexina B) in Dr Auguste Tardieu’s medical textbook 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 (Forensics of Identity Involving Deformities of the Sexual Organs, along with the Memoirs and Impressions of an Individual whose Sex was Misidentified). Though largely forgotten in the 20th century, Barbin’s story appears to have inspired Virginia Woolf‘s gender-swapping 1928 biography Orlando. Interest in Barbin’s life was rekindled by philosopher Michel Foucault, who discovered a copy of the memoir and published it as Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite. In his foreword, Foucault described Barbin as an example of “the happy limbo of a non-identity”. The memoir was translated into English in 1980, inspiring a series of fictional texts, including Caryl Churchill‘s 1986 play A Mouthful of Birds, Jeffery Eugenides’ 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex, the French-language feature film Le Mystère Alexina (The Mystery of Alexina) and Raquel García-Tomás’s 2023 opera Alexina B. A trans perspective on Barbin’s story was first explored in Kate Bornstein‘s 1989 play Hidden: A Gender, starring Bornstein and Justin Vivian Bond. Queer theorist Judith Butler critiqued Foucault’s “romanticised appropriation” of Barbin’s story in their 1990 book Gender Trouble, arguing that Barbin’s gender identity was characterised by ambivalence and social exclusion. Since 2005, Barbin’s birthday has been celebrated as Intersex Day of Remembrance, also known as Intersex Solidarity Day. No verified photographs or drawings of Barbin exist; a series of photographs have been incorrectly ascribed to him in various republications of the memoir, which are reproduced above.