Michel Foucault — Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite — The unapologetic erotic diary of a french intersexed radical who was assigned female at birth, and raised in a convent; just one of the many lost voices from our vibrant LGBTQ history. The devoutly Catholic Barbin confessed to Jean-Francois-Anne Landroit, the Bishop of La Rochelle of her secret, and was examined by a Dr. Chesnet, in 1860. He discovered that even though Barbin had a vagina, they had also a penis and testicles inside of their body. In 1868, Barbin committed suicide due to their struggle with poverty, gender and sexuality troubles and the false persona she felt forced to maintain.
Judith Butler called Foucault's introduction a "romanticized appropriation" of Barbin's experience; rather, Butler understands Barbin's upbringing "not as an intersex body exposing and refuting the regulative strategies of sexual categorization but as an example of how the law maintains an 'outside' within itself".
The birthday of Herculine Barbin is November 8th, which is deemed as the radical Intersex Day of Remembrance.