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Friday, October 30, 2026 - 11:30
Many people have tried to relate Lucian's 5th Dialogue of the Courtesans either to actual Roman attitudes towards women's same-sex relationships, or to the reality of those relationships. The problem is that, not only is any underlying truth filtered through an elite male author, there isn't always agreement on what Lucian's purpose was in writing the dialogues. Bissa tries to use internal evidence in the text to tackle some of these questions.
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Full citation:
Bissa, Errietta M.A. 2013. “Man, Woman or Myth? Gender-bending in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans” in Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici, No. 70: 79-100
Lucian’s dialogue #5 has been analyzed from many different angles, with a corresponding number of conclusions about whether and how it reflects the reality of female same-sex relations in classical Greece or Rome. (Lucian wrote in Greek but within the context of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE, but set his dialogues in 5th c BCE Greece.) I recommend reading various takes in combination. Blondell & Boehringer 2014 consider the work as a satire on Athenian philosophical dialogues of the 5th century. Haley 2002 asks whether the dialogue should be viewed as a male fantasy, or as a precursor of the modern butch/transgender interface. Brooten 1997 and Boswell 1994 treat Megilla and Demonassa’s relationship as evidence for at least the idea of same-sex marriage in that era. Whereas Cameron 1998 works very hard to interpret the language as referring to sex acts rather than marriage.
Bissa notes the scarcity of classical material on f/f relationshps and thus the importance of placing the material that does exist in context. The article primarily concerns Lucian’s 5th Dialogues of the Courtesans, with some comparative material from Martial’ Philainis poems. The author asks several questions: Is the depiction of the characters (specifically Megilla and Demonassa) meant to be a familiar stereotype or a caricature? Is the depiction meant as a fantastic, unreal image? What does the dialogue reveal about the intended audience’s beliefs and understandings about erotic relations between women?
Is Megilla—as described in the initial conversation between the two courtesans—“mannish” in an abstract sense, thus accounting for her sexual tastes? Bissa reads the reference to Megilla as possibly being a hetairistria as defining that role as indicating masculinity (rather than simple same-sex desire), but then picks that idea apart, arguing that the description “desires…like a man” shouldn’t necessarily be read as indicating masculinity, but rather categorizing active sexual behavior as “like a man.”
In terms of appearance, Megilla is given no masculine characteristics until she removes her wig to show her shaven head “like the manliest athlete,” suggesting that her masculinity (to the extent that it exists) belongs to the private realm, not to a public stereotype. This is reinforced by Megilla’s description of her internal thoughts and emotions as masculine, but again a private, internal experience.
Further, in terms of sexual activity, both women (Megilla and Demonassa) are described as taking an active role, with Demonassa being perhaps even the more assertive. In this context, Bissa notes that Megilla initially describes herself to the courtesan as a “neaniskos”—a word meaning “young man” but associated with the younger partner in a m/m relationship, the eromenos. This adds a potential layer of complexity to the nature of the Megilla-Demonassa relationship (as depicted): that Megilla’s masculinity is that of a youth, to Demonassa’s feminine-erastes. Megilla also describes herself as like a man but in response to the courtesan’s interrogating her about her gender.
Discussions of sexual preference in astrology literature of Lucian’s day do suggest that there was a stereotype of the masculine woman who desired women, but this was not the only available image, as demonstrated by the presentations of Martial’s Bassa, as well as by Demonassa. Whereas Martial’s Philainis is also described in exaggeratedly masculine terms, but in terms of public performance, in contrast to Megilla’s private masculinity. In sum, Bissa concludes that there isn’t evidence for a consistent and established stereotype of the “homosexual woman” (Bissa’s words) in antiquity.
Demonassa also fails to adhere to a proposed stereotype of “the feminine partner of a masculine woman”. She is not sexually passive, taking an active role with the courtesan (possibly even more active than Megilla’s role). Although Megilla describes Demonassa as her wife, she doesn’t have the characteristics of a stereotypical wife. She is rich. She—like Megilla—hails from a city with a reputation for sexual adventurousness. And she is said to have the “same tastes” as Megilla. She and Megilla have hired the courtesan as a couple. None of this comports with the typically-invisible role of the female partner of a tribade. [Note: Bissa, like many others, seems to treat tribas as inherently implying female masculinity. Or maybe is critiquing that stance. I’m not sure.]
The next question to be examined is whether the character of Megilla represents an entirely fantastic image that never existed—as described by Halperin (in a quoted passage) a “fantasied image of gender inversion, that phobic male construction of a hyper-masculine woman” which Halperin says doesn’t correspond to any known sexual orientation. In response to this, Bissa asks whether Lucian does conflate f/f desire with gender-reversal, and whether the image of Megilla represents a negative male fantasy.
To answer this, Bissa takes the text-internal evidence as indicating the readership’s assumed beliefs and attitudes. The courtesans (as stand-ins for the audience) are surprised and confused by Megilla’s masculinity, but not by the idea of being hired to entertain women sexually. This appears to be counter-evidence for the idea that f/f sex was normally assumed to involve a mannish woman. While there is a persistent motif throughout history of “the masculine woman who desires women” that might be considered a stereotype, it is one based on reality. Just not the only reality. To the extent that Megilla falls within this stereotype, Demonassa clearly does not.
[Note: Bissa seems to take Lucian’s description of hetairistriai as implying this stereotype of female masculinity. But given the vanishingly small number of citations of the word, and that Plato’s use does not imply masculinity, I have my doubts.]
Scholarly analysis of what the dialogue tells us about female same-sex desire in the ancient world focuses largely on Megilla, and thus on the gender-crossing aspects, once the character of Demonassa is given equal weight, this emphasis is weakened and made more complex. There are clues in the dialogue to a variety of takes on f/f sexuality. The courtesan’s questions cover both nature and individual choice as possible explanations for Megilla’s tastes.
Historically, analyses of the dialogue have suffered from the prejudices of the scholars. The courtesan’s blushing as she tells of the encounter has been pointed to as a sign of sexual shame, but in other circumstances in Lucian, blushing has a wide variety of contexts. Further, the courtesan has agency: she is given gifts in exchange for her participation—just as she would from a male client—and the implication is that she went into the event expecting that it would involve sex. Overall, the impression is given that while the gender-bending was unexpected and perhaps even shocking, the same-sex encounter itself was not.
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Thursday, October 29, 2026 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 355 – The Sultan’s Vetala by Priya Sridhar - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/10/31)
I love it when we not only get a fiction episode at the end of October, but we have a story to schedule that partakes of the supernatural or a touch of horror. When I suggested to Priya that we might air this story on Halloween, she was delighted by the idea.
Priya Sridhar is a 2016 MBA graduate and a published author. She has been writing fantasy and science fiction for fifteen years and counting, including the Powered series from Capstone and Offstage Offerings from Unnerving Press. Priya lives in Miami, Florida with her family.
“The Sultan’s Vetala” is inspired by the burial of Razia Sultan, who died in 1240 near Kaithal in Northern India. Priya offers the following content note about this story: “This is a story about burying a dead body. A vetala is a spirit that inhabits a dead body and makes it move around. This story has a lot of that, domestic abuse, on-screen drowning, and death mentioned.”
I will be the narrator for this story.
This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.
The Sultan’s Vetala
By Priya Sridhar
Battlefield dust weighed no heavier than the sweeping sand-clouds from the mountains. Blood had long dried and clotted fields of flowers, turning their beauty into a grieving, fraying textile.
Shazia tightened the dirty linen around her head. Many bribes had allowed her to travel with a sole escort and no watchful soldiers; her husband savored his victory and so ignored the one person who should linger in his abode. She had removed all of her jewelry except for curved Kanphool earrings and an emerald Phuli from her nath. Covering her face meant that few peasants noticed the gold or precious stones. The remaining jewels and coins were sewn into her clothes and satchel. Still, they had taken plenty of caution, she and her soldier.
Razia’s elephant had shown them the trail. Trampled footprints rendered into blood puddles that led to the creature’s corpse. Tusks and tail already sawed away, the rest left for the snow leopards and vultures.
Shazia had no tears to spare. She still knelt and prayed for the poor creature that had served her sister. Its bloodied eyes stared beyond hungry clouds of flies.
Minhaj walked a respectful distance from Shazia; his khanda sword remained clean and blunt. Unlike many of the sultanate guards, the glory of battle and kingship failed to melt his stone heart; he agreed to go with her when she said there was utter secrecy. He checked every body they found, unwrapping bloodied linens to look into dead men’s faces.
They found the place, nestled between the sacred mountain and the holy Yamuna river. Peasants had muttered to avoid a new graveyard several miles from Kaithal. Any wanting to steal a coin from the gold-laden corpse found their senses lost amid the red sand and gravel.
Breathing bodies surrounded the corpse that she sought. They moaned as she approached, leather shoes stumbling in the sand. All in rough peasant garb, some with curved swords.
Razia wore gold and hammered pearls to battle, showing no fear of dacoits despite entire armies coming to behead her. Her body slumped against a drooping juniper, looking as if she were asleep. If not for the arrow at her throat, Shazia might have believed she could wake her sister.
“Take care, Your Highness,” Minhaj whispered. “These men are senseless now, but they can spring to action at any moment.”
Two glazed eyes opened. Razia stumbled to her feet. Minhaj’s hands reached for his sword.
“You have nothing to fear,” it said. “These men will never regain their senses until the sunrise. So they have crossed the dead.”
“What is this?” Minhaj asked.
“It’s a vetala,” Shazia swore. She did not believe in the tales, but she knew what danced before her eyes. Holy men had warned her about what haunted these fields.
The vetala grinned. It hadn’t removed Razia’s gold-plated armor, but the pointed helmet lay askew, metal leaves twisted off and stained. Razia’s pierced throat had long stopped bleeding; the arrow carved an ugly slash that ran from the left side of her narrow chin to the right side of her war coat. The arrow jerked as she spoke.
“Shall I slay it?” Minhaj asked. His hand rested on his khanda.
She shook her head. Drawing a weapon on a being that could not die was like trying to stop a waterfall with a single cup. You would drown before you could lift your hands.
Shazia pressed her palms together and bowed her head. A devout Muslem, she knew not to upset the Hindu spirits.
“What good tidings!” The vetala moved Razia’s sand-coated lips. “A living human with her mind intact. How does your heart taste?”
The knife strapped under Shazia’s lungi froze her thigh. She had packed weapons to travel, knowing how men and creatures reacted to vulnerable women.
“Salutations, O marvelous spirit. I wish to retrieve my sister’s body,” she asked the vetala. “Please.”
Razia’s eyes had never looked so misty, even when she had stopped lining them with kajal. Nor had she ever smiled with such careless wickedness. As sultan, Razia reserved her smiles for her favored family. Shazia had taken months to receive those smiles, often when other nobles weren’t watching. Then Razia stopped smiling at anyone after her first loss in battle.
“You are a soldier’s sister?” It cocked Razia’s head. “Some lucky peasant? Or a wife fit for a king?”
Shazia’s palms sweated. She was neither.
“This one fought to the bitter end, neither man nor woman. Woman of birth, man of clothing.”
“I wish to give her a funeral.” Shazia refused to look away from the mangled face. “I can offer you jewels, coins, or prayers for the next world.”
“I have no use for coins, not I. Jewels are pretty baubles, though, and I could use prayers.”
“May I carry her body from here if I offer you a ruby and a prayer?”
“Hmmm.” The vetala considered. “Did you love your sister?”
“Yes.”
“Speak truth and offer your token. You cannot hide from the dead.”
The threads in the lungi’s hidden pocket snapped when her fingers dug into them. Shazia brought out a ruby no bigger than a baby’s teardrop.
“I love her as one sister should love another,” she croaked. “That is my truth.”
“You may take her when you love me.”
Shazia blinked. She considered the vetala tapping the arrow’s shaft. It made a sloshing sound, like the hollow reed had collected blood in its chambers.
“How can I love you like my own sister when you lack a form of your own to touch and caress?” she murmured. “A loved spirit moves to heaven and frolics in paradise. I cannot truly understand you when you lack a body and stay in this realm.”
The vetala traced the arrowhead that pierced the throat, leaving blackened flesh. It shuffled backward.
“You are a wise princess, Shaziyyat. A form of my own? How do I know what forms you prefer?”
The vetala rested Razia’s body against a tree. It slumped back into a false slumber before exiting, a ghost with a grinning skull.
Ether entered Shazia’s open mouth. Instead of shutting it against the invasion, she spread her teeth and allowed it to enter her.
“Your Highness!” Minhaj drew his sword.
Shazia waved him away with her free hand; the other clutched the ruby. Angering a spirit as it explored her lungs would not end well for her.
“There was a princess in far-off lands that wanted to bury both of her brothers,” the vetala whispered in her mind, ear, and mouth all at once. “Both fought on opposite sides of war, refusing to share a kingdom. One brother was buried; the other was left for the dogs and crows to eat. The king, her uncle, decreed that any who buried the disgraced one would suffer a brutal death. The poor princess, thinking of her brother’s body left to rot, went and wrapped him in a shroud. She was caught, and the king sent her to a tomb where she would live until her rations dwindled. But his son loved her and begged the king to change his mind. The king refused until bad omens hit his kingdom. Then he buried what was left of the brother’s body and opened the tomb. But the princess had already hung herself with the shroud they had left her with; her betrothed proceeded to run a sword through himself. The king was left with his guilt and more bodies to bury.
“Answer me this, sad princess, or I shall tear you into twenty pieces from the inside out and leave you for the birds: who was more at fault for the princess’s death?”
“The king,” she whispered. “He valued the rule of law over the bonds of family.”
The spirit exited through her ears, nose, and mouth. Ether flowed over the hand with the ruby, removing it with a cold caress. It reformed in front of her, leaving ashes on her tongue. One ruby for an eye lined with a dark substance like kajal, the ether for a ripping mouth.
“You do not love me yet.” It echoed like the dusty wind. “But you will. Come back at dusk tomorrow, and maybe I will let you take your sister home.”
The echoes faded, the ruby settling on Razia’s chest.
“Is it gone?” Minhaj asked.
“No,” Shazia replied. “It has returned to her body to sleep.”
“Then we can take the body for a funeral?”
She shook her head.
“I’ve read the tales. If we try, it will simply return to this spot.”
The men stirred. The moans stopped as they came to their senses. They sat cross-legged.
“They will regain their senses at sunrise,” Shazia remembered.
“There is a grove with water a few lengths away,” Minhaj said. “We shall make camp there. These ruffians will not follow us.”
She looked back at the body leaning against the desolate tree. Men had kissed Shazia before. Some had meant it once, like her husband. Only one woman had kissed her, some visiting royalty who filled her with fire. But the vetala’s kiss felt colder and more vibrant than what a living person could provide.
Sleep refused to come; they spent the night preparing the grove and hiding from bandits. Shazia swatted away bugs when not helping gather fuel or collecting water from the tiny stream. They wove the trees together with string to repel the sun and wind.
“Your Highness, why not simply cut the spirit from the body?” Minhaj suggested as he stoked the morning fire. “We could return with holy men with mantras and spells and return the vetala to a graveyard after disarming it.”
“Men have tongues, and tongues spread words. Few know this was her resting place.” Shazia rubbed her throat. “I wish to fetch her body before the riffraff turn up to steal pieces of her fine armor and garments.”
“Nevertheless.”
“She died an enemy to the current sultan. Our brother may deny her a proper burial. I wish to give her one before he can decide.” She shivered, thinking of the princess in the vetala’s story weaving a shroud into a noose. The sultan would do far worse if he lost his temper.
“Does that make you his enemy, to go on this quest?”
“If so, you could turn me in to the sultan, get an award. But maybe I am just a sad princess wanting to do my duty.”
He added a fuel cake to the fire. New flames spurted.
“And what would become of my honor if I were to turn on you, Your Highness?”
“What became of others’ honor these past few years?” she murmured.
“We all had difficult choices to make. I’ll watch over while you rest.”
“You should rest first. I’m not exhausted,” she lied.
Minhaj raised his eyebrows. A fly buzzed past his turban.
“Your Highness, your needs come before mine. I insist.”
She brought her knees to her chest. Fatigue threatened to topple her. He reached for her bedding.
“If you seek my death,” she whispered, “make it come quickly.”
“Mine will come before yours, Your Highness,” he promised.
They arrived at dusk. Minhaj had smothered the fire with fallen birch leaves. He dusted away any footprints left in the sand and red gravel. They refilled their water skins and ate dried bread.
No living humans this time within this clotted clearing; they must have returned to their peasant abodes. The vetala approached them in its borrowed skin.
The stench hit Shazia before the sight. Razia’s skin had discolored further. Flies hung around the softest spots.
“Salutations, O spirit. I have come to retrieve my sister’s body.” Shazia opened her palms to reveal a tiny sapphire. “I have uttered a prayer for you. Please take a bauble as a token of my word.”
“Aye, you came as agreed.” The vetala garbled more softly with Razia’s pierced throat. One eye opened, unblinking.
“Please. Her body won’t last long enough for a burial unless we prepare it.”
“You came to face the dead for her. Do you love your sister?”
“I do.” She maintained contact with that dead gaze, which had once reproached her from a lavish prison when it belonged to a living person.
“Did you love her in life?”
“I did.”
“Why do you come now to her death when you didn’t in life?”
Shazia nearly dropped the sapphire. The vetala grinned, showing Razia’s teeth. Decay blackened each molar.
“You know my truth,” she responded. “Otherwise, you would not ask.”
“Speak it.”
“I did come to her in life. But I could not give her what she wanted,” she spoke softly. “She was crowned twice and imprisoned once. My husband did not believe in her crown and so forbade me from supporting her. I had to visit her in secret while she was confined.”
“What was your punishment when you disobeyed him?”
Her arms shook further. If she stripped them of her cotton coverings, they would show the scars. She had been naïve and argued with her husband when the court imprisoned Razia; he taught her with his rings to hide her opinions. Time had not softened the blemishes.
The vetala didn’t allow Razia’s body to rest this time. It allowed the corpse to remain standing when it entered Shazia’s open mouth. Limbs stiffened and rooted in the soil.
“A brother and a sister went to war,” the vetala hissed in her ear. “Both wanted a throne with a heavy burden and great honor. The sister was named the heir and sultana, but the brother believed it was his birthright. She named herself sultan instead. The people loved her, but the ministers and court loved her brother. They tried to strip her of her crown.”
A gasp escaped her throat, but the ether didn’t. Shazia knew this story.
“The sister was forced to raise arms against her brother. Before she could enjoy her rule, a second brother coveted her throne. They raised their armies, and the brothers and sisters between them had to make a choice: stay neutral, or get involved. Some wanted royal favor, while others preferred to avoid bloodshed. Still more did not understand why take the heavy weight of a crown.
“The sister had a confidante, a sibling who would take her opinion. This confidante never betrayed her, not even when beaten with a hand that held heavy rings. Yet she had no power to crown the sultan. She could not agree to fight for either her sister or her brother. Who should she have chosen if given the power?”
Shazia choked. The spirit’s ether kept filling her, igniting her grief.
“Speak your truth, or I will crush your bones from the inside out.”
“Neither choice is the right one,” Shazia responded. “Everyone loses in war. Choosing no side is cowardly, but choosing one can sentence you to a miserable life.”
“A miserable life. Not death.”
“Death comes to all of us,” Shazia retorted. “It doesn’t have the pain that comes with life.”
“Clever princess. Did you avoid the pain that haunted your life?”
The spirit’s ether didn’t close her throat.
“Poor, sweet, naïve young Shaziyyat. You could not help Raziyyat in life; now you help her in death. Speak your truth.”
She couldn’t. Only whimpers escaped her mouth. Her scars throbbed like fresh bruises.
“Your Highness?” Minhaj gripped his khanda hilt.
Shazia burbled out a protest: do not attack. A blade would startle the spirit. Minhaj hesitated.
“Do you love me, princess?”
“No,” she croaked. “What love comes from memories of pain?”
It exited quickly, leaving her to stumble. Minhaj caught her. The sapphire fell; wind spun the gem into the spirit’s right eye socket. More kajal to outline this eye.
“Demon,” Minhaj said.
“Death,” Shazia responded.
“I am both and neither.” Despite not having eyelids, the sapphire winked in and out of the dusk. The ruby appeared, red and sparkling. Ether whitened around it, resembling a flowing sari lined with pearls. More ether formed a body with round weight on top and bottom.
Shazia had never heard of the stories where the vetala stood as a dazzling ghost. Her hands wanted to grasp that form, hold it tight, and allow it to kiss her again. She caught her breath, trying to find air in her lungs and not the stale memories of ashes and ground animal bones.
As quickly as the gems appeared, they vanished into the ether. The vetala entered Razia’s form once more.
“The men who came to rob your sister still dream of gold and sheets of pearl armor,” the spirit said with the mangled remains of Razia’s throat. “They will come as soon as the sun permits them. If you seek to avoid them, travel quickly with her body. They will not dare cross the southern river border.”
“And what of you?” Minhaj asked. “Will you stay in this makeshift graveyard?”
The ether entered Razia’s stiff body. Movement, as if the vetala moved Razia around like a wooden figurine.
“Your soldier needs two hands for his sword. I will assist you by walking your sister to her grave.”
“This is a bad omen,” Minhaj warned. “This creature does not belong to the living world.”
“And this body does not yet belong to the dead,” the vetala retorted.
“May I pull the arrow from her throat?” Shazia asked.
“When she stops bleeding,” the vetala responded.
They stopped by the camp to gather their things. A handful of rations. Ropes that tied the branches, undone with painstaking minutes.
“Your brother’s camp is not far from here,” the vetala remarked. “His life carries a stench on the southern winds.”
“Aye. My husband travels with him,” Shazia replied.
“So that is how you knew he would not miss you.” A flash in those deadened eyes. “Fighting his campaigns, nursing battle wounds, not knowing how his demure wife has vanished from her bedroom laden with the finest silk and muslin.”
“His habits are familiar.”
“His habits and a heart of stone that should be pounding for his beloved. Instead, he hurts those he loves and ignores those that love him. And for the sister-in-law that fought for her crown.”
“Please hold that infernal tongue,” Minhaj insisted. “We must make haste before the dawn, if you speak truth. Must you upset her Highness further?”
“Peace, Minhaj.” Shazia wiped her eyes. “We bury my sister soon. My grief may emerge early, but I will commit to my duty as you do yours.”
Silence as they navigated the path to the riverbed. The vetala moved with ease despite the body’s stiffened limbs. Minhaj glared at it, keeping his sword between the creature and Shazia.
The Yamuna shores had shallow waters. One could walk several meters and still not reach their knees. Red-striped fish with shredded fins darted in these shallows, swift as monsoon raindrops.
“Are you deceiving us with more spells?” Minhaj asked the vetala.
“Not I,” the corpse said. “Deceit would not amuse me now.”
“Then we’re being followed. Look at those lights.”
Shazia spotted them. Torches reflecting off metal. Farm ploughs, perhaps, or swords. Chanting in a language she barely recognized.
“Dawn has not yet broken,” she whispered. “They should have lost their senses upon approaching.”
“Two score men and a fakir,” the vetala noted. “He’s using mantras to make them walk through the night when the sun is close to rising. Clever.”
“For them, not for us,” Shazia noted. “But we covered our tracks, and our trail!”
“Any travelers would use the river to navigate, and a holy man can follow magic where it goes.”
“I can take on ten men,” Minhaj said. “Mayhap I can hold off the rest so you can flee, Your Highness.”
They increased the pace. The banks felt slipperier, and Shazia’s legs nearly slipped on the shallow riverbed.
Mumbling followed them. Men calling, fighting the trance that robbed them of sense. A fakir chanted so the living could thwart the dead. Bodies spread out to cut off any escape.
Shazia groaned; the riverbank begged her to stay and sink. Once they got too close, it’d be over. Their fogged faces would clear on seeing Shazia’s few jewels in addition to her sister’s armor. She would be lucky if they beat the hidden jewels out of her before breaking her neck.
“You should keep yourself out of this war.” Those were Razia’s last words to Shazia, whispered to her during one illicit meeting. Razia had ridden out with her army, mounting her elephant.
“My husband chose our brother,” Shazia had responded. “I cannot stay out of it.”
She wished she had said something greater, something braver. Begged Razia to let her come. Declared her loyalty to her sister, pledging herself and her husband. But she had spoken a truth they both hated.
Now they could exchange no further comforting lies or harsh truths. Shazia would die like her, murdered and robbed for gold and pearls.
Razia would have chosen to stand and fight if she were burying Shazia. She could handle twenty armed men. Intimidating a fakir would come easily to her. No hesitation or fear, no promised one to raise a hand against her…
“You chose her first,” the vetala spoke.
“What?” Shazia could barely form the words.
“You chose your sister over your brother, for your father wished her to rule. She knew, and that is why she told you to hide. It is why your husband sought to break your will. He knew your truth and wanted to turn it into a lie.”
“He wanted to beat my love for her out of me,” she whispered.
“You think yourself a coward for not following her,” the vetala went on, “but you fled your silks and satins to find your sister’s resting place and give her the honor due to her. Following her orders was hard, but you stayed out of the war. You survived. And now you make your own choices. Shaziyyat, you are one of the bravest humans I have met on this rich, complex Earth.”
She inhaled the words. They filled her with a sparking rage that she had buried beneath her grief. She clenched and unclenched her hands. A spoken truth that strengthened rather than weakened.
“Do you love me?” The vetala’s ether surrounded her.
“Yes,” she hissed back, and she understood. All love was pain; it wrecked your bones and your heart, and your mind. But the love you needed was all that and more, so that you could also cause pain and embrace it at the same time.
When someone loved you, they saw your pain. And you saw theirs.
Shazia inhaled the vetala’s essence. Ecstasy dripped and moistened her lips. She swallowed some pleasure as the rest flowed towards the torches. The raging ether of the dead flooded the air.
Screams, protests from the holy man. The peasants would lose their senses to the dead until dawn. They had enough sense for the vetala to steal during these precious minutes.
Shazia and the vetala impressed their will upon the many minds to walk past the shallows. Find the deeper rocks on the river bottom, tether clothes to them so they would not float, wait for the currents to suffocate life out of them.
The fakir shouted as two men grabbed him and marched him to those unwanted currents. He tried to regain control with his mantras. The vetala used one man to stuff the remains of a turban into the fakir’s mouth. He gurgled as they pulled him under.
Bubbles stopped flooding the shallow shore. The holy river claimed the flesh belonging to hungry peasants.
“That,” Minhaj said, “was not honorable.”
Shazia panted out the vetala’s ether.
“No,” the vetala agreed. “No more honorable than two dozen men seeking to rob a corpse for its bloodstained pearls.”
They washed Razia’s body before cleaning her and replacing her armor. Minhaj polished each pearl and fleck of gold.
The vetala showed them a spot on the plains far from flooding currents or collapsing soil. It left Razia’s body, taking the same solid form with an illusion of clothes. Shazia offered her spare muslin and turned around. She used real kajal, not ash, to paint each jewel-eye. An ether form had never felt so warm or alive. Later, Minhaj helped the creature dig.
Shazia painted her sister’s eyes one last time, not caring that one hung open. Her tears fell on the wound. Shazia would not cover that up. Her sister fought bravely for the birthright their father had promised. Heaven would know.
She offered one last kiss before covering those greying cheeks in linen. Razia’s cheek had never felt so dry. Nor had it stunk with age.
Minhaj helped her place the bundle in the ground. She struggled with the weight, threatening to fall into the hole instead.
“Farewell, Razia,” Shazia whispered. “If we meet again, I will choose more wisely.”
Sunbeams hit Razia’s grave as they all retrieved the mountain soil to bury her. No marker with her name, no mourners throwing themselves against the compact dirt. Only memories shared between the living and the dead.
“It is done,” the vetala said.
“Aye.”
“And then we will head back to the land,” Minhaj said. “Where do you travel, demon spirit?”
“Where I please.” That wicked grin. “I need to understand how to create a form that the princess can love.”
“This form is pleasing,” Shazia responded.
“May your wish never render itself into flesh and bone,” Minhaj muttered.
“So it may be. And what of you, soldier? Will you mourn your warrior son who died with this sultan?”
A gasp from Minhaj. Shazia turned.
“I asked you no truth, but you knew you would not see him again when he made his choice to march with the sultan. No mother to mourn him, no body to bury.”
“We can find him,” Shazia said. “A proper burial.”
Minhaj’s eyes watered. The grip on his sword softened.
“Perhaps.” He looked away. “There may not be a body for us to wash and bury.”
“And what of you, sweet princess? Will you return to a life where your husband wears rings?”
“I…” Shazia rubbed her head. Dust smeared her forehead. “I have a husband. I am a princess. There are duties.”
“Did his duties include striking you where no one could see the marks?”
She hugged her elbows together. Minhaj moved as if to offer a comforting hand. Then he paused. Shazia looked up, gaze following the shoreline.
“Come,” she said. “This way.”
They marched along the coast: the runaway princess, the grieving soldier, the wavering ether using rubies and sapphires to see.
“Your jewels and coins will run dry,” the vetala remarked.
“As will our good fortune.” Shazia twisted her neck to look back at the rippling waves.
“You will lose your looks and your fine clothes.”
“And I will suffer more. Pain that I will not have imagined in a palace with no want for food or cotton.”
“Then why are you heading west, higher on this mountain, instead of south? Your home is past your brother's and husband’s armies, laden with dripping fruits and endless coffers of gold.”
“I do not need to speak my truth,” Shazia replied. “You know why I seek a direction far from the rising sun and the land beyond the river.”
“That life has pain,” the vetala replied, “one that you cannot stand any further.”
“Where you go, I go, Your Highness,” Minhaj offered.
“I know of treasures buried in those cities,” the vetala added. “Forgotten coins and jewels that could buy a comfortable life.”
Clogged waves washed away their footprints as they marched farther away from the revealing light. West held promises far from dusty battlefields and broken sultans.
Show Notes
This quarter’s fiction episode presents The Sultan’s Vetala by Priya Sridhar, narrated by Heather Rose Jones.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
- Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Major category:
LHMPTuesday, October 27, 2026 - 12:11
Want to know what a year in the sales life of a very small-time author looks like? Let me nerd out about numbers for you.
Due to several factors, mostly relating to my retirement last year, 2026 has been the first year I've made a serious push to participate in in-person book sales at events, mostly local Pride events and book fairs. Since the in-person season has come to a close, I thought I'd share what that looks like for a small author who doesn't do nearly enough book promotion. (I plan to work on that, but it's the hardest part for me.)
Currently, I have 7 books out: 5 from small presses and 2 self-published (one of which is very niche non-fiction).
Currently I get income from those books via 3 methods: royalties from my publishers, income from online books sales for the self-published titles (currently all through third parties, though I'm working on setting up to sell direct from my website), and in-person sales (all titles). As my first self-published title came out about a year ago, this is also the first year where that category shows up.
Just as background, up through around 2020, royalties were averaging just over $1000/year. Since 2020 they've averaged about half of that. Covid or coincidence? Or simply the fact that these titles have been out for a while? (Although sales had remained rather steady since the year my first book came out.) Since the 2026 royalty data won't be complete for another half year, I'm taking the most recent one-year period as a baseline comparison, which is $320, below the recent average.
Online sales are trivial. Maybe $20. My titles aren't best-seller material in any case and I've done very little so far to promote that angle, mostly because I find the task emotionally daunting.
On the other hand, direct, in-person sales for the year have netted me $234 across 10 events. Now I need to clarify what "net" means in this case. It's gross sales less sales tax collected, card processing fees, and my share of the table fee for selling at the event. It doesn't include convention costs (membershp, travel, hotel) becuase I would have attended those events anyway. And it doesn't include mileage to go to day events (because I"m not tracking and itemizing that currently)
So overall, book income for 2026 is looking like 320 + 20 + 234 = $574**
When I try to give people a sense of what my writing income looks like, I tend to describe it as "Starbucks money." Is that the case? Let's take a look, courtesy of my financial tracking database. Expenses for Starbucks & Peet's Coffee for the first 3/4 of the year come to $680. So, no, I'm not even making "Starbucks money." (No snarky comments about how I should stop going to coffee shops to save money. That isn't the point of this analysis.)
But let's back up and look at those in-person events. The biggest factor in whether an event made me money was the table fee. For the two events where I lost money (a couple bucks in both cases) my share of the table fee was $60-69. The two events where I netted the most ($67-70) didn't involve a table fee. Overall, table fees for all events for the year were $160, so about 2/3 of what my overall net income was. (The other major expense, of course, is cost-of-goods.) But notice that the pre-fee income was quite similar. At most events, I sold somewhere in the range of 6-11 books, which is quite respectable for a small local Pride festival, like the ones I attended in Concord and Fremont. On the other hand the local Pride festivals in Martinez and Emeryville (2 and 1 respectively) were scarcely worth the trouble. The thing is, you can't predict just from the nature of the event. All four of those events were quite similar in size and attendence. The two with higher income also had higher table fees, but I don't think there's any cause and effect there. It's a crap shoot, and as long as the small book events continue to pay off in the aggregate, I don't know that it's worth trying to pick and choose.
(Note that I've been doing the local events as part of the Bay Area Queer Writers Association, where 3-5 authors will share a table or two and split costs. Having a co-op table with a larger number and variety of titles makes the thing worthwhile, whereas I wouldn't be making any profit if I were getting solo tables, given the volume of sales I have.)
**Anything I receive from the Anthropic settlement will blow this out of the water in terms of income for the year.
Major category:
PromotionWednesday, October 21, 2026 - 09:00
Often when a book or article brings in literary criticism to discuss a historic topic, I feel like it's more of an intellectual game. But in this case, it really does feel like the literary and the real-life aspects are so solidly braided together that the approach makes sense.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4
Chapter 4 Inheriting “Hermaphrodism”: How Degeneration Theory Changed Literature and Medicine
As usual, the chapter opens with an illustrative example: a real-life case that reflects the literary themes to be discussed. An aristocratic family line pins their hopes on a child who is first classified as female, then reclassified at adolescence when masculine characteristics emerge (both anatomical and behavioral). But the heir had undescended testicles and was understood to be incapable of reproduction. A marriage was arranged, a false pregnancy was created, and a baby was obtained to continue at the family line. The deception ended unhappily. The wife died “of a broken heart,” the child was later repudiated, and the intersex person at the center of the schemes dies of venereal disease—labeled “depraved and degenerate” by the doctor reporting the case.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the motif of intersexuality as a result of hereditary “degeneracy” enters both the medical and literary discourse around intersexuality. “Doubtful sex” became associated in the imagination with mental illness, intellectual disability, and an attraction to debauchery.
The chapter examines these connections in the context of Zola’s novel La curée. Doctors were no longer focused on determining “true sex” but on diagnosing the consequences for society of the presence of such persons. The image of hereditary degeneracy covered a wide variety of contexts, including sexuality, criminality, and poverty. These theories held that “degeneracy” was caused by a combination of heredity and societal factors. (This is a pre-Darwinian time when genetics was not well understood.) In Zola’s novel, the environmental factors included participation in homosexual relationships in school (by characters of both sexes).
Zola (in a different novel) describes a “hermaphroditism” that encompasses anatomy, sexuality, and behavior. A similar view is found in medical writing, where things such as hysteria and “sexual inversion” or traced to hereditary defects in the patient’s family.
The societal interest in intersexuality shifted from viewing it as an individual curiosity to one of a whole range of symptoms of the decline of civilization, alarming in particular in how it affected the birthrate. (France’s birthrate declined consistently between 1825 and 1939. While other European countries saw similar declines in the 19th century, they were recovering by the turn of the century.)
Zola was not alone in considering that single sex boarding schools were a major cause of homosexual tendencies, which then would lead to other forms of degeneracy. Medical writers also identified “innate” sexual inversion, in addition to this situational cause. [Note: We are in the middle of the development of sexology at this time, though the author doesn’t really touch on that larger picture—possibly because France wasn’t at the center of the sexology movement.]
One aspect of “degeneracy” theory was that undesired behaviors—however acquired—could imprint themselves on the person’s genetics and be passed to future generations. Thus the treatment of such persons, some suggested, should not focus on “curing” them and returning them to ordinary society. While many early German sexologists focused on destigmatizing variant sexuality, suggesting the creation of a “third sex” category, French authors took a more negative view. [Note: All of this was focused primarily on people assigned male.] French theory associated inversion with effeminacy, impotance, and intersexuality. This tendency contributed to sidelining French thought from the mainstream of sexology.
Within this milieu, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire stood out as contrary, arguing for the analogy of male and female anatomy (a “one-sex” view) and for the impossibility of determining a “true sex” in some doubtful cases. He also rejected “degeneracy theory” and saw no connection between intersexuality and mental illness or homosexuality. Although Saint-Hilaire demonstrates the variety of French thought, he was also very much in the minority.
In viewing homosexuality as involving mixed gender characteristics (e.g., “a woman in a man’s body”) the fields of intersexuality and sexual preference were intertwined within the larger concept of hermaphroditism.
As noted previously, the conflation of anatomy and behavior under “degeneracy theory” was reflected in an increasing interest by doctors in the psychology and family history of their patients, not simply their physical anatomy. Several case studies are presented that show how degeneracy theory distorted the analysis of intersex cases. Whereas previously the goal had been to establish a “true sex” and reassign the person to that category, now any anatomical ambiguity was treated as a symptom of a general mental and moral flaw, and diagnosis could mean exclusion from society entirely. The patient’s preferences and goals, rather than being taken into account, were treated as evidence of duplicity.
Beliefs that maternal experiences could be “imprinted” on a developing fetus meant that mothers could be blamed for any abnormalities in a child, including intersexuality—a motif that occurs in both medical writings and literature. [Note: this idea had a very long history, but was brought to the fore by a focus on family histories of intersex people.]
The rest of the chapter is deep literary criticism of Zola’s novel.
Epilogue: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Contemporary Resistance to “True Sex”
This section discusses the history of medical interventions to “correct” intersex bodies and how 19th century attitudes and practices continued into the 20th century, including the increasing preference by doctors to withhold information from patients and their families. The chapter also covers how minority medical resistance to “true sex” ideas served to inform shifting attitudes within the 20th century.
Time period:
Place:
Tuesday, October 20, 2026 - 10:00
In parallel with the 19th century French medical establishment's difficulties in responding to non-binary bodies, French literature enjoyed playing with ambiguous gender, and reflected many aspects of the medical trends.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4
Part II: Contextualizing High and Low Literary Narratives; Chapter 3 Is She or Isn’t He? Plotting Ambiguous Gender
The second half of this book looks at the use of hermaphroditism (in its various interpretations) in 19th century French fiction, and how that interacted with real-life dynamics. The subjects of those novels were not necessarily depicted as intersex, but might challenge the integrated sex/gender/sexuality binary in other ways. Given the treatment of grammatical gender in French and the lack of any obvious way to express non-binary identity, the problems represented by a gender-transgressive character are always foregrounded. Similar linguistic issues arose in medical reports of ambiguous patients, with doctors alternating gendered language, or resorting to references like “the patient” (which would have grammatical gender unrelated to the referent).
Novelists sometimes tackled the challenge in innovative ways, using circumlocutions and epicene names to keep character gender mysterious, as in Cuisin’s Clémentine (1820).
This was one of a multitude of 19th century French novels—many now obscure—that took androgyny as a theme. Better known works include Balzac’s La fille aux yeux d’or, Gauthier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, Rashilde’s Monsieur Venus, and others.
Linton’s study argues against the traditional literary distinction between the “romantic androgyne” and the “decadent hermaphrodite” themes, as well as arguing that literary androgyny was closely connected to interest in intersexuality.
In one group of novels, the sex category of the protagonist is obscured until the conclusion and is the main driver of the plot, challenging the reader’s understanding of sexual difference. The consequences of the final reveal are often dodged by removing the protagonist from the story’s context by various means, without undermining the tension that pervaded the story.
The chapter focuses on a detailed dissection of several texts, which goes well beyond what is of interest to the Project, so I will only hit some highlights.
In Clémentine the eponymous protagonist has been imprinted prenatally with mixed sex characteristics by their mother’s obsessions. Although this manifests partially as mixed gender behavior, there is a dawning realization that their body is anomalous as well. The novel takes a hostile attitude toward medical curiosity and the treatment of intersex people as “curiosities” for study and display (while depicting Clémentine’s humiliating experiences in some detail). Clémentine variously attracts the romantic attention of both men and women but only returns that of the men.
Like the protagonists of Fragoletta and Mademoiselle de Maupin, an inherent part of Clémentine’s masculinity is a swashbuckling virtuosity with the sword, as well as an irresistible attractiveness to both sexes. The stories are variable in the extent to which they embrace or only tease a pansexual dynamic that inherently encompasses some form of homosexuality.
At this point I’m going to give up on the detailed summary, sorry.
One quoted passage from a translation of Madamoiselle de Maupin is worth giving in full as it demonstrates the types of characteristics that were believed to reflect biological sex. “Neither one nor the other of these sexes is my own; I have neither the foolish submissiveness, nor the timidity, nor the pettiness of women. I do not have the vices of men either, their disgusting, vile nature and their brutal tendencies; – I am of a third sex altogether that does not yet have a name; higher or lower than them, inferior or superior. I have the body and the soul of a woman, the mind and the strength of a man, and I have too much or not enough of one or the other to be able to pair up with either.”
Time period:
Place:
Monday, October 19, 2026 - 20:00
Linton goes deeply into the details of the 19th century French conflict between the law and biology around sex categorization.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4
Chapter 2 Outlaws from Birth: “Doubtful Sex” and the Civil Code
The chapter opens with an 1881 French annulment petition involving a wealthy 22 year-old woman and a younger non-wealthy aristocrat. The case—which involved “doubtful sex” was covered in detail in the French press and even made it to the New York Times under the headline “Queer French Lawsuit.” [See side-note below.] (Note that both parties were Spanish, though the court case was in France.) The arrangement was planned as a double wedding, Mercedes de Campo to the young (less than 18-year-old) Count San Antonio, and San Antonio’s sister to Mercedes’ brother. Mercedes was reluctant, but was pressured into it by the families. Mercedes’ marriage was not a success and her husband eventually admitted that it would never be consummated. After initial attempts to keep things quiet, Mercedes sued for annulment on the basis that her husband was not a man—that his gender could not be determined. The case never came to court as the French court determined it had no jurisdiction over Spanish citizens, leaving the question of San Antonio’s sex undetermined. Despite this, the theoretical questions behind the case were argued in detail in the media and medical journals.
[Side-note: This headline illustrates some of the problems with determining when the word “queer” first became associated with variant sexuality or gender. Since such variation was invariably considered “curious and strange”—one of the pre-existing senses of “queer”—the word might be used without intending any special sub-sense. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the use of “queer” here was meant as a sort of dog-whistle, but neither would I rule out the possibility that it was in the process of acquiring that function at this date. I once ran across a mid-19th century description of sculptor Harriet Hosmer that described her as “queer” in the specific context of her gender transgression, but alas I’ve lost track of the quote and haven’t been able to track it down again.]
As noted previously, the visibility of intersex people was increasing due to the rise of public hospitals and new medical specialties, as well as the legal requirements for registering the sex of infants. French law had no place for anyone not clearly categorized as male or female. Marriage was predicated on the presumption of reproduction. And various sociopolitical forces increased anxiety about a falling birth rate.
Various persons proposed addressing the problem of “doubtful sex” by changing the laws, but this was not necessarily out of sympathy for the uncategorized people. Reasons might include “to safeguard marriage” or to avoid the chaos of legal changes of sex category in adulthood. Non-binary people threatened the legal structure of French society, and changes were demanded to mitigate the situation, even if it required the creation of a third legal sex category. One advocate cited the “horror” of being required to change legal sex later in life, complete with the resulting consequences for gender performance, social life, and economic options.
[Note: Of course, the option of not tying gender performance and legal rights to opportunities to one’s sex category wasn’t considered—and is still debated today.]
Medical manuals provided detailed guidance for determining a newborn’s sex, but these were being demonstrated to be inadequate in a minority of cases. Further, in some cases “erroneous” categorization was not identified until puberty or when discovered due to an unrelated medical procedure. Some were not identified until after death and only by the chance of there being an autopsy.
The professional concerns were not a matter of abstract correctness of category. One author wrote luridly of the fear of “deformed, incomplete men…hidden, disguised under women’s clothing…taking advantage of their sterility in order to surrender themselves to libertinage, to prostitution, and to the most audacious depravation.” [Note: Sound familiar? Depraved men disguised as women?]
And, of course, the increase of interest into cases of doubtful sex was self perpetuating as doctors rushed to publish case studies.
As early as the late 1890s, doctors had begun to advocate for a legal third category of “doubtful sex”—if only to make their job of sex categorization easier. What this would mean for a child’s upbringing wasn’t always addressed, but the proposals included re-examination at puberty or before marriage. Another proposal was to simply erase non-binary people from the legal landscape, removing the privileges and rights associated with either male or female, forbidding marriage and inheritance. [Note: The wording suggests that this was aimed primarily at removing any rights association with male status.]
One author of the time noted that Germany and Austria allowed for a classification of “doubtful sex” which could be revisited later. The debate continued into the early 20th century, when some pointed out the negative implications for non-binary people of creating an official category. It could single them out for mockery without creating a social context for their lives. The consequences of this concern included a policy of doubling down on the need for strict binary assignment and, if considered necessary, infant surgery to align the child’s body with the assigned sex. Other others argued that, by not assigning people to a “third sex” they were free to pursue sex reassignment or not, as they chose. There was quite a mixture of prioritizing civil concerns versus patient concerns on both sides of the third category debate.
The book returns to the context for France being a flashpoint for intersex concerns. Other countries often had legal contexts for addressing intersex persons, but the Napoleonic code (implemented 1804) not only declined to recognize non-binary sex as existing, but removed impotence and genital variation as legal grounds for divorce. This had consequences for couples when intersexuality was not identified as an issue until after marriage. Previously, when impotence was grounds for annulment, many of the physical consequences of intersexuality would allow for a separation (if desired and raised by the couple). Similarly, apparently female physiology that didn’t allow for penetration could also be grounds. This was the situation that still held in Germany and England, for example. But under the new laws in France, the only way to dissolve a marriage in the case of an intersex partner was to claim that their sex had been incorrectly assigned previously.
When questions of doubtful sex came into the courtroom we can see the types of concerns and evidence brought to bear. (The book cites the case of Anne Grandjean, although the question of intersexuality in that case isn’t at all obvious. See my discussion of the relevant documents: https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/6335) despite 19th century French law being silent on the topic of non-binary status, some argued that it could be used as grounds for divorce under other clauses in the law.
A detailed court history is given of a couple where, after two years of marriage, the husband petitioned for annulment on the grounds that his wife lacked the necessary female organs to be considered a woman. The wife resisted this framing and refused the court mandated midwife’s examination. She brought her own physician’s testimony that she had “some” female organs, although her vagina was imperforate. A number of other doctors provided “expert” testimony, despite having never examined the defendant. There is an extensive presentation of their arguments, based entirely on their various personal pet theories, and contradictory both in terms of what was prioritized as evidence and their eventual conclusions. In some cases, it’s clear that the witnesses had already decided that the marriage should be annulled and constructed their arguments toward this end. In the end, the court ruled against the defendant based on this highly convoluted reasoning, compounded by her continuing refusal to submit to a medical examination. Across the course of the testimony, she had been declared to be a malformed woman, a malformed man, and a person with no sex at all.
The key arguments were presented by Dr. Tardieu (discussed earlier), but by the end of his life his theories were being dismantled in several areas, partly on the basis of being contradicted by the observable data. (There is a brief discussion of how these legal issues continued to play out across the 20th century.)
One aspect of the legal situation was a rising concern over the possibility of unidentified “same-sex” marriages. If all people had a “true sex” but that sex could not necessarily be determined based on apparent anatomy, then there might be all manner of marriages that actually involved people of the same sex, where the matter had not been brought to light. While some viewed this as an existential crisis, especially in the context of falling birth rates, others felt there was no need to prevent non-binary people from marrying or to annul such marriages, if the couple didn’t desire it. Some doctors recorded conclusions regarding “true sex”—and even operations to address anomalies—related to patients they had concluded were in “same-sex” marriages without feeling any obligation to inform the authorities or act further on the matter. (Or even, in some cases, to inform the patient of their conclusions.) In such cases, their records might mention the happiness of the marriage as a significant factor.
The opinions and attitudes of physicians had an enormous power over the outcome of such consultations. Rarely we see a record of a patient rejecting the result and going for a second opinion. In cases where an original sex category became obviously in error later, the support of a doctor’s testimony was essential if the person wanted an official reclassification. While in other cases, a doctor’s testimony could override the patient’s desires and completely overturn their life, as in the case of Barbin.
Time period:
Place:
Saturday, October 17, 2026 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 354 - Why is Intersexuality Relevant to the History of Lesbianism? - transcript
(Originally aired 2026/10/17)
Content Note
Let’s start with a content note. Historic discussions of intersexuality have a hard time avoiding the word “hermaphrodite,” which today is considered offensive when applied to intersex persons. However, in historic use, “hermaphrodite” was used in a variety of contexts to indicate combinations of masculine and feminine attributes and applied to the entire spectrum of sex, gender, and sexuality. This could include people with ambiguous genitalia, but also people who combined aspects of performative gender assigned to both men and women, or who performed gender attributes not matching their assigned sex. Pre-modern gender theory did not clearly distinguish these concepts. I acknowledge that the use of the word “hermaphrodite” in the context of intersexuality is considered offensive today and apologize for any harm that discussing the historic usage may cause for readers. As the historic use of the word applies to a semantic complex for which there is no neutral corresponding term today, it’s hard to avoid the word entirely.
As usual, I’ve focused this discussion on Western, largely Christian culture in keeping with the primary focus of the Project. As intersex is a natural, rather than a cultural, phenomenon, every culture can be expected to have some way of recognizing and addressing it. There is an extensive discussion of intersexuality in Xie’s dissertation on historic Chinese attitudes toward gender deviations. DeVun includes discussions of intersex within Jewish and Arabic traditions. As the topic is tangential to the focus of the Project, I haven’t specifically sought out work on other cultures.
Discussion
So why is intersexuality relevant to the history of lesbianism?
Within a cultural context where physiological sex, performative gender, and sexual preference are expected to march in parallel, any deviation from the expected alignment is a social disruption. People causing such disruptions have, at various times, been classified as “hermaphrodites” although different eras emphasized different aspects of the equation, and other labels are also possible. Interpretations of, and reactions to, such deviations will either stigmatize the individual (variously as sinful, monstrous, criminal, diseased, or some other framing) or will attempt to reanalyze the deviation to restore the expected alignment in a way that requires the least cognitive dissonance. For example, it might be argued that the sex assignment was incorrect, or that the gender performance was due to economic reasons.
If we take as a fixed frame of reference a situation that produces the appearance of same-sex desire between women, then we can explore how the society handles deviations of performative gender or physiological sex. Deviations of performative gender fall more under the topic of female masculinity and are out of scope for this episode. Deviations of physiological sex correspond loosely to intersexuality and raise questions of how sex is identified and categorized. Historic debates around the nature and sexual classification of intersex people can shed light on cultural understandings of “who is a woman?” and “what does it mean to be of the same sex?” as well as the question “who gets to decide?”
While modern classification as intersex can encompass issues of anatomy, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs, prior to the 20th century (and the ability to identify chromosomal and hormonal factors), sex classification was focused on visible genitalia and secondary sex characteristics, with behavioral aspects brought in when those failed to provide a clear answer. More specialized considerations of internal anatomy began to be available around the 19th century. Most academic studies of the history of sex difference don’t address intersexuality in any meaningful way, lumping in anatomical ambiguity with behavioral gender transgression (such as cross-dressing or homosexuality) but we can trace historic attitudes toward intersexuality within those studies.
Common visible intersex conditions might manifest as a smaller than typical penis or an enlarged clitoris, or a combination of an apparent penis of some size with an apparent vaginal opening, though not necessarily large enough to enable penetrative sex, or some other variation. There is a much wider range of less visible intersex conditions, but these are less likely to have contributed to pre-20th century ideas about sex and gender. While estimates of the prevalence of intersex conditions vary widely, they are common enough to justify historic models of sex trying to account for the phenomenon.
The “one-sex” model of sexual difference, originating in classical times, allowed for a sliding scale of categorization, with male at one end, female at the other end, and various types of intermediate or ambiguous bodies and behaviors in between. Intermediate forms under this model of sexual differentiation were not identical to the classical idea of the “androgyne”—a perfect melding of male and female—but rather represented a failure to adhere to the ideals of purely male or purely female. Although the one-sex model wasn’t systematically displaced in medical theory until the early modern period, philosophical debates during the 12th century tackled the question of just how to draw dividing lines and whether “hermaphrodites” represented an intermediate state or an entirely separate “third sex.” To some extent, these debates, rather than undermining a gender binary, called for stricter gender boundaries (a situation that would recur in the 19th century). Regardless of the difficulty in classifying ambiguous bodies, it was considered essential to have a metric for doing so, as sex classification was the basis for social and legal identity.
Because of this surge of interest in “hermaphrodites” in the 12th century (which would wane in following centuries before reviving in the 16th century), we can examine a snapshot of the attitudes of various parts of medieval society. Medical writings tended to accept a three-sex model, including a “neither male nor female” category based on anatomy. Theological writings—concerned with the possibility of sodomy—declined to recognize a formal “third sex” and assigned a sexual category based on sexual response and capacity. Someone who was sexually “more active” could be classified as a man, or if “more passive,” as a woman. But if they “failed” at this classification they were not allowed to switch and must instead remain celibate.
While philosophy and medicine allowed space to debate the fuzziness of sex and gender categories, the law had no such luxury. It recognized only two sexes and enforced clear and drastic differences in what rights the two had. No one could escape the requirement to be legally classified as either male or female. Roman law—which continued to influence European legal systems throughout the middle ages—held that an intersex person would be classified according to the “preponderance of their traits” with a focus on anatomy, but it remained fairly silent on the question of who would make that classification. Various approaches were taken in various contexts to make this assignment, based on the appearance or functionality of the genitals, and sometimes taking into account behavioral gender factors, if anatomy provided no clear guide.
Assignment into a sex category could be particularly fraught if the question arose later in life. Some intersex conditions only become apparent at puberty, when a female-appearing body develops more masculine-appearing genitals, or when a body that appeared to be an under-developed male began to menstruate. Such cases are likely to have contributed to the belief prevalent in classical and medieval times that bodies could change physiological sex. In some cases, this was thought to be a random and spontaneous occurrence, but there was an associated belief that cross-gender behavior could result in a change of corresponding sex.
Classical and medieval authorities concurred that spontaneous change of sex was almost always from female to male, explained as nature moving from the imperfect (female) to the perfect (male). While behavior-mediated sex change could, in theory, occur in either direction, the vast majority of the examples cited in the literature are from female to male. Traces of a belief in behavior-driven sex change can be found as late as the 19th century when women were discouraged from participating in male-coded activities for fear it would affect their reproductive capacity.
While some such sex-change narratives may have been inventions, there are conditions that manifest as a child appearing to have anatomy associated with one sex, but on puberty developing sexual characteristics of a different sex. For example, the genetic condition 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency can result in a chromosomally XY infant being classified as female, but then developing more typically male genitals at puberty. As a recessive genetic trait, this condition might appear randomly in the population and could easily have been the inspiration for a belief in spontaneous female-to-male sex change.
In an environment where the idea of such changes was accepted, some people may have claimed to have undergone a sex change even when not supported by their anatomy, either to live as a man (gender identity) or to engage in socially acceptable relations with a woman (sexual preference). In 16th century Spain, Elena de Céspedes (after marrying a man and bearing a child) took on the name Eleno and began living as a man, including marrying a woman. When questions later arose about their identity, Eleno justified their actions by claiming to have developed male genitals that were later lost in an accident.
Official interest in cases of intersexuality focused around two concerns: reproduction and same-sex relations. From the medieval period up through the 20th century, investigations into proper sex categorization were often raised due to the perceived inability of one partner in a marriage to fulfill the expected sexual role of their assigned sex. (This concern could be driven by male impotence as well as by anatomical concerns.) The annulment of a marriage due to reproductive incapacity sometimes involved re-categorizing the person’s sex, but sometimes simply concluded that they couldn’t perform adequately according to their correctly-assigned sex, or that it was impossible to determine a correct sex classification.
A separate concern was that, due to mis-classification, someone was inadvertently engaging in same-sex acts. The flip side of this concern was that an incorrect re-classification of someone’s sex might result in same-sex acts. As a general rule, a person was only allowed one sex reclassification. Acting as the “wrong” sex was forgivable before the matter had been adjudicated, but a second reassignment meant the person had been knowingly and willfully acting as the “wrong” sex. If they had engaged in marriage or sexual relations in both sexual categories, that raised moral questions as well as legal ones.
A clear-cut case of intersexuality which raised both concerns was recorded in 17th century Virginia when Thomas or Thomasine Hall was challenged due to a history of having sexual relations with both men and women and having lived alternately as a woman and a man. A medical examination confirmed Hall’s claim to be both male and female, leaving the law befuddled as to how to classify them, though the record indicates that the concern was more about gender transgression than about which of Hall’s sexual activities was problematic.
Beginning around the 16th century, and especially within medical circles, another topic that brought lesbianism and intersexuality into overlap was the renewed fascination with the clitoris as a sexual organ and the association of clitoral enlargement with sex between women. (This is an entire topic on its own and there will be a podcast about it eventually.) Factual reports of intersex people who combined female-appearing genitals with a micro-penis are likely to have contributed to the idea of the “macro-clitoral lesbian,” but the latter image took on a life of its own. When reading reports and case histories from earlier eras, it isn’t always possible to determine whether the subject of the discussion is intersex, or whether the observer is ignorant of the range of anatomical variation, or whether non-normative behavior is being reinterpreted as non-normative anatomy. There are numerous cases of apparent female same-sex desire being a trigger for investigating one of the partners to see if they had masculine-appearing anatomy, as in the early 17th century case of Marie or Marin le Marcis who was acquitted from a charge of “female sodomy” by a doctor’s opinion that Marcis had sufficiently masculine anatomy to explain desire for a woman, but not sufficient to be legally classified as a man. (Marcis was then legally forbidden from having sexual relations with either sex, to avoid any possibility of same-sex relations.) One motivation for attributing (apparent) female same-sex desire to “hermaphroditic” anatomy, was the ability to reclassify such people as a type of “third sex,” thus excluding the possibility that “normal women” could have same-sex desires.
This approach faded with the rise of the “two sex model,” under which male and female were considered to be entirely separate states of being. The theory was that everyone clearly had an underlying “true sex” that must be determined, rather than allowing that someone might be intermediate between the sexes and assigned to a category based on a best fit, or to a third category entirely. Previously there was some latitude for considering a person’s social presentation or even personal preference. Some medieval jurisdictions allowed an intersex person to swear to which sex they would live as, rather than being assigned a sex by the authorities. But under the two sex model, medical expertise began to claim jurisdiction over questions of sex categorization.
Advances in the study of anatomy and improved understandings of the biology of reproduction in the later 18th and 19th centuries pared away some of the mythology around intersexuality, without disrupting the idea that everyone had an underlying “true sex” and that there was a physiological basis to gender identity. It continued to be the case that people who deviated from a normative alignment of sex, gender, and sexual preference were perceived as a problem to be solved, but the issue was interpreted in new ways. The “masturbation panic” of the 18th century introduced the idea that what appeared to be a penis-like clitoris could be caused by masturbation rather than being evidence of a male body. At the same time, the prior belief that a naturally-occurring enlarged clitoris (or micro-penis) indicated an intermediate or “third” sex was redirected toward a need to classify the body unambiguously as male or female. Even as medical publications spread awareness of the reality of intersex conditions, they were still treated as a problem to be solved.
The increasing medical acceptance of intersexuality was deployed to try to avoid recognizing same-sex desire. Witness the 18th century French case of Anne or Jean-Baptiste Grandjean who, after growing up unquestioned as female, was instructed by their confessor to live socially as a man due to having expressed sexual desire for women. Several years after marrying a woman, this transgender solution was rejected by a court who convicted Grandjean of “contempt for the sacrament of marriage.” On appeal, Grandjean’s lawyer used a claim that his client was intersex (a claim that had not been made in prior medical examinations) as a defense. The multiple medical examinations of Grandjean came to different conclusions, leaving the truth of the matter unclear, but the point was that a reassignment of sex category—or at least a legal recognition of ambiguity—would have been the only acceptable defense for the marriage.
In the 19th century, the French situation became more complicated because the Napoleonic law code required all infants to have their sex registered within three days of birth, but also made no allowance for any classification other than male or female. This made France central to medical debates over how to classify ambiguous bodies. Doctors developed elaborate and contradictory strategies for determining an official sex assignment, while the law courts had to deal with the consequences of initial sex assignment of infants that were later called into question.
Outside of France, references to a “third sex” could encompass intersex people as well as developing sexological theories around same-sex desire. By the 19th century, intersexuality was starting to go out of fashion as an assumed explanation for gender crossing. But once a person was identified as intersex, that fact might be applied retroactively as explanation for all manner of deviations from expected gendered behavior. The case studies offer a detailed catalog of the attributes and behaviors that were considered to be biologically tied to sex. Sexologists introduced the idea that this physiologically-based gender identity could be at odds with one’s apparent anatomy, which developed into the idea of “gender inversion,” while still assuming that gender identity drove sexual preference. Sexology set out to develop a scientific approach to questions of sex, gender, and sexuality but continued to treat the three as hopelessly intertwined.
Returning to the question of “how is intersexuality relevant to lesbianism,” we must consider the core historic prototype. Sex, gender, and sexual desire were expected to align in specific ways. For much of Western history, these three topics were not treated as distinct. Although we can find language discussing anatomical sex, behavioral gender, and sexual preference, they were not considered to be independent characteristics. Similarly, although historic cultures recognized and described deviations from the default alignment, those deviations were not “bundled” into the same identity categories that have developed across the 20th century. So, for example, the term “hermaphrodite” could refer to any misalignment. Where today’s approach might refer to a deviation of sexual preference as “homosexual,” a deviation of gender as “transgender,” and a deviation of sex as “intersex” (as a vast oversimplification), these were not necessarily meaningfully distinct categories prior to the turn of the 20th century.
The attribution of masculinity to women who desired women was the flip side of the authorities using desire for women as evidence for masculinity in intersex persons. The attitudes are thoroughly intertwined. When doctors and other professionals trying to assign sex to an ambiguous body prioritized avoiding the appearance of authorizing same-sex desire, we can see a reflection of how some unambiguously female bodies were assigned masculine gender in order to make sense of their desire for other female bodies. The people with those female bodies might embrace or reject that assignment of masculinity, but the pressure was there. Similarly, when behavioral attributes like “enjoying active sports” or “having a scientific mind” were considered diagnostic when evaluating cases of unclear sex, we can better understand why women in history might label themselves “masculine” for similar interests without necessarily experiencing what we would understand today as gender dysphoria. All of this complicates the historic analysis of same-sex and same-gender desire. Thus we can see that exploring the intersection of lesbianism and intersexuality helps in identifying the underlying cultural assumptions and models that shape both social attitudes towards lesbianism and the self-understanding that women may have had about their own identities and desires.
References
Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.
Burshatin, Israel. “Elena Alias Eleno: Genders, Sexualities, and ‘Race’ in the Mirror of Natural History in Sixteenth-Century Spain” in Ramet, Sabrina Petra (ed). 1996. Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-11483-7
DeVun, Leah. 2020. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-2311-9551-5
Donoghue, Emma. 1993. “Imagined More than Women: Lesbians as Hermaphrodites” in Women’s History Review 2:2 199-216.
Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0-674-54349-1
Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4
Manion, Jen. 2020. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-108-48380-3
Nederman, Cary J. and Jacqui True. 1996. “The Third Sex: The Idea of the Hermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:4: 497-517.
Vermeil. 1765. Mémoire pour Anne Grandjean. Louis Cellot, Paris.
Xie, Wenjuan. 2015. (Trans)Culturally Transgendered: Reading Transgender Narratives in (Late) Imperial China. Dissertation.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Historic understandings of intersexuality
- The intertwined models of sex, gender, and sexual preference
- How avoiding homosexuality drove approaches to intersex sex assignment
- This topic is discussed in one or more entries of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project here: Intersex
- A list of references can be found in the transcript
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
- Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
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LHMPFriday, October 16, 2026 - 15:00
For years, as I've been reading historic research related to lesbianism, I've regularly come across topics and people where my first reaction is: "Why isn't the question of intersex being raised here?" A very few authors have integrated the topic into a general history of sexuality, but eventually I decided to pick up some more focused studies. Now I keep having to remind myself that intersexuality is tangential to my central topic and I shouldn't go haring off after biographies and whatnot. Tomorrow's podcast will integrate my thoughts on why I consider it interesting and important to discuss intersexuality in the context of lesbian history. And then maybe I can set the topic aside and return to my lane.
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LHMPFull citation:
Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4
Part I: A Cultural Prehistory of Intersex from the Archives; Chapter 1 Prescribed Fictions: Stories of “Hermaphrodisim” vs. “True Sex”
[Note: The author assumes a detailed knowledge of the central topic of the chapter, Herculine Barbin. To contextualize the material, here is some background, based largely on Wikipedia. Barbin was classified as female at birth and was educated at a convent school. There she fell in love with a fellow female student, then later with a fellow female teacher. Severe abdominal pain led her to a series of medical examinations, which identified anomalies in her anatomy.]
The literary style of the memoirs of Herculine Barbin is compared to fictional representations of hermaphrodites. Barbin offers what may be the only firsthand account from a 19th century intersex person. Indeed their memoirs were sometimes treated as fictional, plagiarized for other authors fictions, and appropriated for inclusion in medical reports.
This chapter looks at the purposes and conclusions of medical investigations of intersex people, and how those conclusions relate to the idea that all people have a “true sex.” Doctors came down on both sides of the question, as well as disagreeing about methods of sex determination.
Barbin was born in 1838 and recorded (as required by law) as female. In Barbin’s own writings both female and male gendered forms are used, predominantly female before the medical examinations that resulted in a change of legal sex, and mixed male and female afterward. This distinction is largely erased in English translations, and even the original French must be treated with caution as it survives only in excerpted form, as the original manuscript was lost.
Barbin’s legal sex change was done in 1860 (so when they were about 22). But having been required to change legal sex and start a new life, Barbin struggled to rebuild their life, fell into poverty, and committed suicide in 1868. All of which was recorded in their memoirs.
Barbin predicted that their death would renew medical interest in their case. The excerpted version of their memoirs was published in 1872 by Ambroise Tardieu as part of a study of sexual variation. A century later, Foucault would claim to “rediscover” the memoirs, and assert that they had not previously received much interest. (Not true.) Discussions of Barbin’s life generally pointed to their suicide as a consequence of their erroneous sex assignment at birth (rather than a consequence of the disruption of their life by the imposed sex reassignment in adulthood which Barbin alludes to).
Central to Barbin’s life was the importance of story to understanding and shaping identity. Barbin was well read, and one can’t find various literary influences in the memoirs.
The excerpts in Tardieu’s edition were edited and appropriated for an erotic novel L’hermaphrodite au couvent in 1905 written under a transparent pseudonym by a man who also wrote a medical study of hermaphrodism. The novel also draws on the tradition of convent-set erotica, offering sexual encounters that appear nowhere in the memoirs. Appended to the novel were various case studies, with the purpose of validating the believability of the events in the story. Both the novel and Tardieu’s commentary on the memoirs justify Barbin’s (or the fictional character’s) erotic desire for women as being due to an essential male nature.
Barbin had sought medical treatment due to abdominal pain, thought to be menstrual cramps, but the initial doctor, having observed Barbin’s ambiguous anatomy, made no direct diagnosis, only vague cautions about socializing with young girls. It was Tardieu who diagnosed the pain as due to “strangulation of the seminal gland” internally. Much of the anxiety expressed around “incorrect” sex assignment involved the possibility of a covertly male person having access to young women, with the assumed result of sexual activity.
Medical reports investigating cases of “doubtful sex” were often written in dramatic style: opening with a mystery, maintaining suspense, dropping hints, then finally offering a conclusion. The initial “mystery” could include failure to conform to gender stereotypes, as well as more concrete medical issues. The failure to perform perfect femininity was considered a symptom of inner maleness, and vice versa (although the former seems more common). The belief in this underlying “true sex,” combined with heteronormativity shaped pre-formed conclusions about the proper fate of intersex patients. It’s worth noting that Barbin’s memoirs came to no such conclusion about the underlying cause of their attraction to women.
One school of medical thought held that “true sex” depended entirely on the nature of the gonads present. Superficial anatomy, secondary sex characteristics, socialization, and self identity were irrelevant. In Foucault’s study of the subject he claims that, before this “true sex” approach in the 19th century, intersex people were free to choose their gender category—a claim that’s easily contradicted. Further, even once gonadal “true sex” became the dominant approach, doctors disagreed over individual cases, sometimes modifying their conclusions to achieve the happiest situation for the patient. An example is given of two different scholarly analysis of the same historic case. One held that the diagnosis supported a “gonad-based true sex” approach, while the other showed that the tests used by the doctors produced variable conclusions as to what that “true sex” was.
When standard approaches produced contradictions (or pointed to the necessity of recognizing same-sex desire) then literary techniques might be brought to bear to achieve the desired harmonious result. The desire for identifying a “true sex” and it’s intersection with sexuality contributed to the medicalization of sexuality in the 19th century. It was one more factor that must be brought into alignment to support a complete separation of sex categories.
Louise-Julie-Anna—a patient with conflicting attributes—was told that “her very existence was criminal.” This was based in part on a diagnosis of masculinity due to her failure to perform acceptable femaleness, despite having been categorized as female and living as a woman. Whereupon she sought a second opinion. The first doctor had diagnosed her as a deceptive man. The second doctor, noting both male and female anatomy, while concluding she was a man, noted the evidence for her female self-identification and used feminine language for her. He noted that she had had sexual relations with men (and only men) and exhibited feminine “modesty.” Thus both doctors brought heteronormative gender stereotypes to bear on the question, with opposing conclusions, despite agreeing on the question of gonadal sex.
The original trigger for her examination was a combination of excess facial hair, an organ intermediate in size between a clitoris and penis, and a hernia resulting in a strangulated organ, identified by the original two doctors as an undescended testicle. The pain from this condition had not been addressed by the initial examinations, but she convinced a third doctor to surgically remove the organ, at which point it was declared to be an ovary, not a testicle, though the surgeon later walked this back. In the meantime, the patient reframed her story to seek support for removing the corresponding organ. This evidently raised some concerns as castration was illegal (presumably removing the strangulated organ was a special case), whereas presumably removing an ovary raised no similar concerns. (It isn’t clear from the text what the eventual outcome was.)
Medical debates over “true sex” also addressed the question of whether a “true hermaphrodite”—that is, a person with both functional ovaries and functional testes—was possible. The debate was largely conducted on the basis of theory and of supporting the integrity of previous diagnoses. (There’s an extensive discussion of the details of this debate.) The debate also challenged the French legal requirement for sex categorization within three days of birth, noting that diagnostic features such as menstruation and secondary sex characteristics might not be apparent until puberty.
(There is an extensive discussion of the timeline for theories about “true sex” versus “two hermaphroditism.” The two approaches are found to coexist throughout most of the 19th century.)
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Thursday, October 15, 2026 - 12:00
This book and the previous one I blogged could hardly be more different in approach, given that they both revolve generally around intersexuality. While DeVun focused on philosophy and symbolism in medieval Europe generally, while also addressing the practical consequences for people with ambiguous bodies, Linton narrows in on the specific concerns of 19th century France and the interaction of medical and literary discources. I appreciated that Linton clearly addressed the question of why 19th century France was something of a special case. While much of the quoted textual material is a bit enraging for a modern progressive reader, it clearly demonstrates how thoroughly entangled the topics of sex, gender, and sexuality were in people's minds in that era.
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LHMPFull citation:
Linton, Anne E. 2022. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4
Introduction
The introduction opens, as is often the case, with a case history illustrating the main theme of the book. A patient was referred to a doctor for “suffering in the genital parts” and on examination the doctor could make no solid conclusion about what sex the person was. Not only did the person have ambiguous genitals, but they performed socially alternately as a woman (at home) and a man (outside the home).
Several factors brought intersexuality into focus in 19th century France—a focus that manifested both in literature and medical records. France seems to have been a particular flashpoint for this topic and the present book explores why that was the case, as well as making connections between the literary and medical traditions. In contradiction to some theorist’s positions that the idea of everyone having a “true sex” was solidly established by the 19th century, this study finds that both literature and medicine served to undermine this position, concluding that sex could, in many cases, be unknowable.
The topic of 19th century interest does not correspond exactly to the modern category of intersexuality, not only because many conditions classified that way today were not identifiable by 19th century medicine, but also because the historic category of “hermaphrodite” encompass social and behavioral elements as well as physiology. The 19th century position (inherited from earlier eras) was that sex, gender, and sexuality were expected to align, therefore any contradiction or ambiguity within those categories could result in a diagnosis of hermaphrodism.
There is a survey of 19th century French literature that features either characters described as hermaphrodites, or whose indeterminant gender is a key plot point. The exploration of indeterminant gender in fiction was echoed by the language in medical case studies that debated (with no consensus) how to properly assign sex in ambiguous cases.
Fiction was not the only venue for spreading popular awareness of intersexuality. Divorce cases in which it featured were publicized in the papers, intersex people were exhibited in medical schools and “freak shows.” New medical specialties competed for authority over the phenomenon. Although traces of the mythological bi-functional hermaphrodite remained in literature, often as a romanticized and idealized figure, increasingly the depictions were realistic, appearing in decadent literature—though combinations of the two motifs also occurred.
The book begins by examining the historic reasons behind the explosion of interest in 19th century France. This includes medical discussions around sex categorization and the consequences of indeterminacy, especially as they played out in the court. Literary narratives intersect with science in how these cases are argued, which leads to the book’s study of the motif in literature.
Another aspect of this specific moment in intersex history was the spread of accessible literature on the topic that intersex people could use to interrogate their own lives and bodies. In the case of Marie B., who raised questions about herself in the context of a marriage proposal, her own studies of literature on hermaphroditism led her to a contradictory opinion from the doctors—they concluded she was a man, whereas she had confirmed to her own satisfaction that she was a woman.
The introduction goes on to discuss the data and methodology.
Why were hermaphrodites so prevalent in 19th century French fiction and medicine? The rise of large public hospitals serving the poor, an interest in treating venereal diseases (involving examination of the genitals), and expansion of medical publications—all increased visibility. French law (as a legacy of the Napoleonic code) required doctors to record the sex of each birth within three days, with no allowance for ambiguity. Urbanization, shifting family dynamics, and a decreased birth rate raised interest and anxiety around reproductive topics. There was a conflict between sociopolitical efforts to “naturalize” gender difference, while at the same time doctors were identifying cases that undermined the concept.
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Wednesday, October 14, 2026 - 10:00
I could have sworn I'd finished posting all the chapters of DeVun, but I went to start the next book and found this one still in queue. I have my second book on intersexuality all written up and will start posting it tomorrow. And the related podcast will come out this weekend.
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LHMPFull citation:
DeVun, Leah. 2020. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-2311-9551-5
Chapter 6: The Jesus Hermaphrodite—Alchemy in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance
This chapter explores the use of hermaphroditic symbolism (mostly in the mythic “half-and-half” version) in alchemy and in religious symbolism around the figures of Christ and of Adam and Eve. The texts under consideration belong primarily to the 14th and 15th centuries. I’m going to skim this material a bit as it stands aside from the treatment of actual persons.
Alchemy dealt with transformations, both physical and spiritual, by manipulating competing binary properties (similar to humoral theory). This included assigning gendered properties to physical matter. One of the goals was to achieve a perfect balance and fusion of properties. Symbolically, this harkens back to theories of pre-lapsarian man as a non-binary (non-gendered) state, equivalent to the angels. This perfect non-binary substance was symbolized by Christ. Within this context (as opposed to when actual people were involved) non-binary sex he had an entirely positive connotation.
The book’s coverage ends before a major shift in interest about “hermaphrodites” “that included increasing hostility toward intersexuality in medical and legal discourse. [Note: one aspect of the shift was a rise in anxiety about various types of gender-crossing, such as clothing fashions. DeVun doesn’t get into this aspect.]
Conclusion: Tension and Tenses
There is a very short conclusion section that reiterates the book’s main themes and places them in the context of modern academic thought.
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