This timeline visualisation offers a glimpse of some key figures and events relating to intersex through the centuries. This is in no regards complete and might change in the future with edits or additions. To learn more about intersex make sure to learn from intersex-led organisations directly.
Herculine Barbin was a French intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law, after an affair and physical examination. The reclassification brought Barbin unwanted public attention and scandal, prompting her to leave her job and move to Paris in search of anonymity. Isolated and impoverished, Barbin wrote memoirs detailing her experiences, using female pronouns for her life before the reclassification and male pronouns afterward. In February 1868, at age 29, Barbin died by suicide from gas asphyxiation in her Paris apartment; her memoirs were found beside her body.
Barbin's memoirs were first published in fragments in the 19th century and later rediscovered by philosopher Michel Foucault, who published them with commentary in 1978 as Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite. The memoirs, along with medical and legal documents, have become a seminal text in discussions of intersex experiences, gender identity, and the social construction of sex and gender.
In his commentary to Barbin's memoirs, Michel Foucault presented Barbin as an example of the "happy limbo of a non-identity", but whose masculinity marked her from her contemporaries. Morgan Holmes states that Barbin's own writings showed that she saw herself as an "exceptional female", but female nonetheless.
Barbin's life and writings have inspired numerous works in literature and film, and her birthday, November 8, is now observed as Intersex Day of Remembrance, honoring her legacy and the broader struggles of intersex people.
Brief description of the event.
Detailed information about the event goes here.
Additional details about the event.
An interesting fact about this event.
Brief description of the event.
Detailed information about the event goes here.
Additional details about the event.
An interesting fact about this event.
Brief description of the event.
Detailed information about the event goes here.
Additional details about the event.
An interesting fact about this event.