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Herculine Adélaïde Barbin, later known as Abel Barbin (November 8, 1838 – February 1868),
was a French people intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law, after an affair and physical examination. She is known for her memoir, Herculine Barbin, which was studied by Michel Foucault. Her birthday is marked as Intersex Day of Remembrance.
According to her account, she was enamoured of an aristocratic female friend in school. She regarded herself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into her friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for it. Her studies were successful and in 1856, at the age of 17, she was sent to Le Château to study to become a teacher. There, she fell in love with one of her teachers.
In 1857, Barbin received a position as an assistant teacher in a girls' school. She fell in love with another teacher named Sara. Sara's ministrations turned into caresses and they became lovers. Eventually, rumors about their affair began to circulate.
Although in poor health her whole life, Barbin began to suffer excruciating pains. When a doctor examined her, he was shocked and asked that she should be sent away from the school, but she 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 her. When Dr. Chesnet did so in 1860, he discovered that although Barbin had a small vagina, she had a masculine body type, a very small penis, and testicles inside her body. In 19th-century medical terms, she had male pseudohermaphroditism.
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 her from her contemporaries. Morgan Holmes states that Barbin's own writings showed that she saw herself as an "exceptional female", but female nonetheless.
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.
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 their 1990 Gender Trouble, including their chapter "Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity." There is also evidence to suggest Prince's Camille character and album were based on Barbin.
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.
In 2023, the opera "" by composer Raquel García-Tomás, inspired by the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, premiered at the Liceu in Barcelona. With the premiere García-Tomás became the first female composer to premiere an opera at the Liceu in the 21st century and the second in the history of the theater.
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