Sexual Identity, answers which raise more questions than they resolve.
Ambroise Auguste Tardieu ( 1816-1879 ) wore the same first name as his father, a well known artist at his time. However, it is for his works in forensic medicine that Ambroise Tardieu "junior" remained famous.
Ambroise Tardieu was a professor of forensic medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris which he chaired as dean, as well as President of the Académie de Médecine. He published numerous works among which some stand out. For example, it was one of the first ones to concern a different glance the ill-treatment of the children by according a value to their testimony. We also quote his achievments about the sexual identity, and make reference here.

In 1874, he publishes an entitled work: "question médico-légale de l’identité dans ses rapports avec les vices de conformations des organes sexuels (medical legal question of the identity in its connections with the congenital malformations of genital organs) ". This text processes cases of confusion of the genders which appear typically when virgin and ignorant couple discovers the impossibility to complete sexual intercourse because of a hermaphroditism or an erroneous declaration of the sex at the birth. Ambroise Tardieu is particularly interested in the case of "Camille", which tells the painful course of girl to boy in the autobiography which he leaves before committing suicide. Ambroise Tardieu uses this text to highlight the suffering which entails this confusion of the genders: " The extraordinary fact that I have to report and which will be of use as epilogue to this medical legal study of the congenital malformations of genital organs, will form in a sense the psychological complement. It indeed supplies the cruelest and the most painful example of the fatal consequences that an error committed from the birth in the constitution of the registry family status. We visit the victim of such an error, after twenty years spent under the clothes of a sex which is not his, battling against a passion which ignores itself, warned finally by the explosion of his senses, then returned to his real sex at the same time as in the real feeling of his physical infirmity... "

Herculine Barbin, transexual in XIXth century

It is the same text which Michel Foucault will dig up and publish in 1978 at Gallimard under the title of " Herculine Barbin or Alexina B)

Michel Foucault ( 1926-1984 ), philosopher, psychologist, professor studied the relationship which societies maintain with their deviants and them minorities. He held a powerful critical speech centered on the subject of the power, and always refused to settle a theorization putting that his intellectual's role consisted in seeing and in saying, in pointing out what he names the unbearable. In spite of a remarkable intellectual route and duly recognized by Institutions, Michel Foucault was never a popular character in France, doubtless it was too "disturbing", it is with the American intellectuals who associated him to the other thinkers as Derrida, and Deleuze in what we called "French Theory", that Michel Foucault knew a full success.

Within the framework of his studies on the sexuality Michel Foucault was interested in the case of "Camille", declared girl to her birth, educated as such, but become a man for the registry family status. The book presents at first the autobiography of the interested. Camille depicts it in the flourished and overloaded style of the sentimental novels of her time, her girl's life, her brilliant studies, the beginnings of her career of primary school teacher.

Nevertheless if Camille plays perfectly her feminine role during her childhood, reached the adolescence, the development of her body raises problem. Camille indeed presents unmistakable signs of manliness: hair on the face and on the body, the male silhouette, the narrow hips. The time is for the prudery, bodies remain hidden, what explains partially that Camille hermaphrodite's state has not been elicited. It is because she falls in love with her colleague Sara, because the drama is formed, she becomes aware that she is not a girl like the others, her emotions are not any more the expression of a soft friendship. Camille and Sara soon share the same bed, under the roof of Sara's family which manages girls' pension where they are both primary school teachers. Camille feels more and more tortured, page 62, she writes speaking about the mother of Sara: " Poor woman who saw in me only the friend of her daughter, whereas I was his lover " Camille lives a dreadful agony of which she will want to go out by the truth, she confides in a priest, a doctor, soon the return in girl's life became impossible, she testifies on the page 64: " was I a culprit, a criminal, because an unrefined error had assigned me in the world a place which should not have been mine? " Camille will change place of residence, profession, identity and gender, but will not find the happiness. He terminates his life at the age of twenty five years.

The book consists of Camille's autobiography presented and commented by Michel Foucault, and reports of the forensic scientist who proceeded to the autopsy. Besides the value of the testimony, this autobiography raises clearly the problem of the sex and the gender, but also that of the relationship to the body. The heroine curses her appearance, she lives her body as a real burden. Her difference is a source of suffering. She tells:

“Qu’en est-il aujourd’hui du changement de genre? Certains considèrent le transsexualisme comme une pathologie mentale, d’autres telles Alexandra Augst-Merelle et Stéphanie Nicot revendiquent une reconnaissance pleine et entière pour les “trans”, la gratuité de la transformation, et dénoncent le processus pratiqué en France, qui comprend notamment une expertise psychiatrique qui décidera au final de l’issue de la requête. On lira un intéressant entretien avec ces auteures sur le site altersexualite.com.A light hair which increased every day covered my superior lip and a part of my cheeks. We understand that this peculiarity often attracted me jokes which I wanted to avoid by making a frequent usage of scissors by way of razors. I make a success, as it had to be, as to thicken it more and to make this hair still more visible. I had the body literally covered of hair, also I avoided carefully confiding arms, even in the strongest hot season, as made my partners. As for my waist, it stayed of a really ridiculous thinness. All this struck the eye, I noticed it every day. "

What about of gender changing today? Some consider the transsexualism as a mental pathology, the other such Alexandra Augst-Merelle and Stéphanie Nicot claim a full and whole recognition for "trans", free access to the transformation, and denounce the process practised in France, which notably includes a psychiatric expertise which will decide in the end on the exit of the request.

" When you are transsexual, any sex is the opposite sex " it is what declares a member of Berdache Society, in an interview with In. Bolin, in 1994. The social anthropology today tends to refuse the medico psychological traditional categorizations to privilege the angle of the social acceptability of the deviants. This point of view does not more allow than the precedents to encircle objectively the question of the transexualism.

Bibliographie

Pour en savoir plus Sexologie magazine, vous propose de découvrir l’histoire tragique d’Herculine Barbin;
Consulter le document

Pour expliquer aux plus jeunesles questions que pose l'identité sexuelle

Ne m'appelez plus Julien de Jimmy Sueur, L’Harmattan, 2003, 139 p., 12,20 €

Havre de paix, de Fujino Chiya
Quatre nouvelles énigmatiques, quatre tranches de vies de jeunes adultes du Japon contemporain, pour découvrir une autre culture, une autre morale sexuelle, une autre littérature. L’auteure est présentée comme transsexuelle, fait assez rare pour être signalé. Des nouvelles réservées à de bons lecteurs amateurs d’une littérature sans tape-à-l’œil.

La face cachée de Luna, de Julie Anne Peters, Milan, coll. Macadam, 2004, 369 p., 9,5 €.
La face cachée de Luna est presque une première mondiale en littérature jeunesse, et pour un coup d’essai, c’est une réussite incontestable, même si l’on peut reprocher quelques longueurs, et quelques stéréotypes dans la vision de la famille américaine moyenne et des adolescents complexés. L’information sur les transgenre est bien documentée, et le récit fait le point sur l’homophobie et sur les nuances de l’arc-en-ciel altersexuel.

Pour les lecteurs avertis

Un texte écrit par deux transsexuelles , animatrices d’une association militante et donc particulièrement impliquées dans le processus,
Changer de sexe : Identités transsexuellesAlexandra Augst-Merelle et Stéphanie Nicot, éditions Le Cavalier Bleu, 2006

Changer de sexe : Le Mouvement transgendériste par Patrick Califia-Rice, Epel, 2003

Sans oublier, bien entendu les incontournables ouvrages de Michel Foucault,
Surveiller et punir, Paris: Gallimard, 1975)

Histoire de la sexualité, tome 1 : La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976)
Histoire de la sexualité, tome 2 : L'usage des plaisirs, Gallimard 1984
Histoire de la sexualité, tome 3 : Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)

Comment les idées de Michel Foucault et de ses contemporains sont-elles devenues la "french théory"?

French Theory, François Cusset, Editions La Découverte, collection Découverte Poche, 2005

et ont donné naissance, entre autres aux ”gender studies”

Trouble dans le genre : Le féminisme et la subversion de l'identité Judith Butler, éditions La Découverte, 2006

Enfin, pour un regard philosophique et psychologique

La Métamorphose impensable : Essai sur le transsexualisme et l'identité personnelle, Pierre Henri Castel, Gallimard, 2003 Être un homme ou une femme est-il naturel ou culturel ? L'identité sexuelle s'enracine-t-elle dans le corps, est-ce un donné physiologique, voire neurobiologique ? Ou ne s'agit-il que d'un rôle qu'on joue, qu'on pourrait intervertir avec d'autres et dont on puisse altérer le texte ? La métamorphose transsexuelle est une voie d'accès privilégiée à ces interrogations, parce que le réel de l'identité, avant d'avoir pu dire son mot, est ici forcé par un fabuleux acte autoconstructif : si tant de magistrats, tant de psychiatres sont embarrassés par les transsexuels, si leur affaire est à la pointe avancée de la bioéthique, de la critique de la culture ou de la protestation libertaire, c'est justement parce qu'ils assument leur identité comme une "construction sociale". Dans la sphère éthérée des débats savants, ils font sentir l'urgence d'une affaire de vie ou de mort, en un court-circuit inattendu entre une question de catégorisation et une atteinte directe à la chair. Le problème est, pour le dire d'un mot, métaphysique. Il vise le nrnud obscur qui attache ce corps à ce je ; il oblige donc à dévoiler quelle nature humaine il faut, à un moment ou à un autre, nous supposer. Et il est à peine besoin de l'approfondir pour que la philosophie, la psychanalyse, mais aussi la médecine, la sociologie, le droit - toutes disciplines aspirant à sauver leur rationalité, voire leur scientificité, face à ce qui paraît la déraison même, "changer de sexe" - en ressortent ébranlés. Telle est la crise des certitudes qui motive cet essai.