Herculine Adélaïde Barbin, later known as Abel Barbin (November 8, 1838 – February 1868), 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. She is known for her memoir, Herculine Barbin, which was studied by Michel Foucault. Early life Most of what is known about Barbin comes from her later memoirs. Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in France in 1838. She was assigned as a girl and raised as such; her family named her Alexina. Her family was poor but she gained a charity scholarship to study in the school of an Ursuline convent. According to her account, she was enamoured of an aristocratic female friend in school. She regarded herself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into her friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for it. Her studies were successful and in 1856, at 17, she was sent to Le Château to study to become a teacher. There, she fell in love with one of her teachers. Puberty Although Barbin was in puberty, she had not begun to menstruate and remained flat chested. The hairs on her cheeks and upper lip were noticeable. In 1857, Barbin received a position as an assistant teacher in a girls' school. She fell in love with another teacher named Sara. Sara's ministrations turned into caresses and they became lovers. Eventually, rumors about their affair began to circulate. Barbin, although in poor health her whole life, began to suffer excruciating pains. When a doctor examined her, he was shocked and asked that she should be sent away from the school, but she stayed. Eventually, the devoutly Catholic Barbin confessed to Jean-François-Anne Landriot, the Bishop of La Rochelle. He asked Barbin's permission to break the confessional silence in order to send for a doctor to examine her. When Dr. Chesnet did so in 1860, he discovered that although Barbin had a small vagina, she had a masculine body type, a very small penis, and testicles inside her body. In 20th-century medical terms, she had male pseudohermaphroditism. Reassignment as male A later legal decision declared officially that Barbin was male. She left her lover and her job, changed her name to Abel Barbin and was briefly mentioned in the press. She moved to Paris where she lived in poverty and wrote