The Chevalier d'Eon and "Gender Ideology"

I really wanted to write a little fluff on a particular historical figure I happen to find interesting. However, the viciousness being targeted against trans people and the unhinged rhetoric of the so-called "gender criticals" has instead made me think of all this from the perspective of a historian of gender. And my thoughts keep coming back to Charlotte-Geneviève-Louise-Augusta-Andréa-Timothéa d'Éon de Beaumont, thankfully known more commonly as the Chevalier(e) d'Eon, who is arguably the most famous pre-20th century trans figure.

I touched on this before in my essay Gender Panic, but gender-blurring categories has as much of a history as gender itself. I'm dipping my toes into unfamiliar waters, so please tread carefully with me, but it is true that cultural norms based around categories of male and female exist in many cultures across the world  (although it has to be said that the idea of gender as a category distinct from sex is actually a 20th century Western invention, but of course this doesn't at all mean that gender as a cultural and social thing did not exist before the 20th century). Still, the way gender is defined and expressed and how malleable or rigid these roles can be vary greatly. In some cultures, one's gender roles can even change over time, with people of a certain age beginning to take on the roles of another gender.

Again, I'm not an anthropologist, but it does seem to me that third- and fourth-gender categories always existed as a sort of social pressure valve, allowing a space for people dissatisfied with their culture's gender roles to occupy. And since gender is often linked to one's labor and social roles, these spaces had a spiritual significance, like the māhū of Hawaii and Tahiti who were born male but became considered neither male or female and performed roles as priests, healers, and preservers of cultural memory, and the castrated and cross-dressing gala priests of ancient Anatolia and the Middle East whose historical roots very well likely stretch into prehistory, among many others. Even the medieval historian Ruth Karras has proposed thinking of monks and nuns in Europe as third and fourth gender categories. Why third and fourth genders seem to be constructed this way across time and cultures I won't even begin to speculate. I just want to explain why I find it ironic that the people who claim to want to abolish gender seem deadset against the modern incarnation of a profound historical phenomenon that let people escape their societies' prescribed gender roles for millennia.

I often think of this rich history when people on Twitter or in their own Substack articles throw around "gender ideology" as a pejorative. But it should be blatantly obvious that gender is ideological for everybody. If you define ideology as having a set of assumptions that inform how you receive information and understand the society and world around you, we all have ideologies. Your friendly, neighborhood centrist who decries both right and left for letting their ideologies get in the way of the facts? You better believe they have an ideology.

This talk of ideology brings me back to Chavelier d'Eon. First, though, a brief primer: the Chavelier d'Eon was a diplomat and spy in the service of King Louis XV of France. At some point, she began claiming that she was a woman. It was far from unheard of for women to pretend to be men in order to become a sailor or enlist in an army, so there was some precedent. Still, since d'Eon had developed a certain notoriety by threatening to publish politically sensitive letters written between her and other French envoys and officials, her identity became a source of national speculation. In fact, traders on the London Stock Market took bets over her true identity, and for a while d'Eon was in danger of being kidnapped in order to make her biological sex publicly known.

We don't really know what Louis XV thought of all this gender-bending, but we do know that his grandson and successor, King Louis XVI, found it intolerable. The go-between assigned to handle negotiations with d’Eon, Pierre-Auguste Beaumarchais, was instructed to inform d’Eon that she would not be allowed to return to France until she agreed to hand over all incriminating papers and to agree to dress like a woman from now on. d'Eon only agreed to leave London if some of her debts were also paid. In the end, d'Eon did at last return to France and received by Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. However, while Louis XV was willing to at least tolerate d'Eon's gender-bending, the royal couple insisted that d'Eon dress entirely as a woman, without even the medals she had been rewarded for her past service. In her writings, d'Eon expressed she found this "more bitter than pills of aloe." Eventually, she would return to London. However, there her life would descend into poverty after she lost the pension granted to her by Louis XV with the fall of France’s monarchy in the Revolution. It was only until after her death in 1810 that it was discovered that she had been anatomically male all along.

Of course, in d’Eon’s time and long before stories abounded of women who pretended to be men to join armies and navies and go on adventures around the world. Much more rare were accounts of men becoming women, unless it was part of a lurid tale of sodomites. It was understandable why a woman would want to pretend to be a man, even if such a metamorphosis was still scandalous and had the taint of sodomy. But there was no apparent advantage to the reverse. If anything, in the enlightened age d’Eon lived in, it was in some ways harder to be a woman than it had been in the Middle Ages. The rights of at least wealthy, landowning women became more restricted in many regions, such as women being barred from attending meetings of the parlements of France or it becoming more difficult for women to work as physicians except as midwives. More crucially, especially in Protestant nations where convents had been shut down, even wealthier women had few avenues for independence or for escaping the fate of marriage and children. Who would give up their rights and, more importantly, their independence as a man for that? And that’s not even considering the stigma, and the brutal punishment or even execution, that could await any man found out to be dressing as a woman. d’Eon’s contemporary, Mary Hamilton, was a woman who presented herself as a man for a number of years, even marrying a woman. After her arrest, she was publicly whipped and sentenced to six months of hard labor. It is not difficult to imagine something worse happening to d’Eon or someone like her.

Historian Anna Clarke, who has written about the Chevalier d’Eon extensively in several essays, saw her as inspired by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his radical views on individual self-determination. While Rousseau was also an advocate for the trend of his time toward more rigid gender roles, d’Eon flipped Rousseau’s concept of gender. While Rousseau argued for an innate femininity that was domestic and submissive, d’Eon instead stressed the idea of women as beings capable of great empathy and, to use a complicated but fantastic term often invoked in eighteenth-century France, sensibilité. Fortunately, d’Eon left behind an autobiography in which she tries to articulate how she viewed herself and how she understood the apparently conflicting sides of her personality in gendered terms:

“I had two personalities. My mind tended toward tranquility, solitude, and study. Prudence told me that this was the wisest and simplest way to shield myself, but my heart loved the clash of weapons and the display of all the military drills. Unable to consult either man or woman, I consulted God and the Devil and, so as not to fall into the water, I jumped into the fire.”

In the sixteenth century, writers had popularized the idea of “Cartesian feminism”, which proposed that, if the philosopher Rene Descartes was right and there are few if any preconceived notions that we are born with, then gender itself must not be inborn and is instead mainly a product of education and social conditioning. Cartesian feminism never went away–indeed, one can argue it made a stunning comeback with Mary Wollstonecraft–but in the eighteenth century the views of philosophers like Rousseau, that gender was both innate and anatomically embodied in humans, predominated. But what’s remarkable is that d’Eon took these ideas of a gender binary and made them her own, allowing her to express and comprehend her own personality and life story in ways that were totally her own.

I’m not sure how self-described “gender criticals” receive the existence of someone like d’Eon. I suspect they would claim she was an aberration and was still duped by her own society’s own ideology, even though d’Eon lived long, long before the man who in their view committed the original sin of giving gender identity its name, Dr. John Money. (Ironically, they fall into the same rhetorical trap the postmodernist scholars and queer theorists they despise do, thinking that just because someone gave something a scientific name or term that thing did not exist before then no matter what the historical evidence clearly says, but that’s a topic for another day). Actually, they do have a point–d’Eon was indeed deeply influenced by Rousseau, as we can tell from her writings–but it’s an extremely myopic one. And not just because their own claims about gender and “ideology” are in of themselves ideological, but that they’re tackling a profound philosophical issue with the usual heavy-handedness of reactionaries. We are all contaminated by ideology in the sense that none of us come by our identities and our understandings of the world around us ex nihilo. The preference of many of us here in the United States for representative democracy rather than divine right monarchy is because we were brainwashed by ideology. So too is the idea that we probably shouldn’t burn people alive because of their beliefs just another case of ideological corruption. As for the topic of how the outside world shapes our self-actualization, well, that’s a complicated, messy subject I don’t feel qualified to even touch with a ten-foot pole. Who can measure the forces and circumstances and internal psychological struggles that, for example, causes someone to reject the majority religion or politics of their family and community and convert to a minority and maligned faith or political affiliation instead?  But I will say, yes, there certainly are people alive today who transitioned who wouldn’t have if they came of age in the 1950s and 1960s instead, just like there are gay and bisexual people alive coming of age and coming out of the closet now who probably would have instead stayed in the closet if they became adults as recently as the 1980s.

The fact is that, even though the concept of gender identity is modern in the sense that we now have a precise, technical, and standardized language for it, social gender norms and people who went beyond them are not modern. In fact, they have been around as long as we have had written records, and very likely much longer. This is not–or rather should not be–controversial. Such people kept appearing in the historical record even in times when they had no legitimate outlet and could have been harshly treated or even killed under the law. The idea that gay and gender non-conforming children are being seduced or pressured into becoming trans is frankly just as ahistorical as it is illogical.

We can only go by what D’Eon herself wrote in her autobiography, The Maid of Torraine. But given that Rousseau failed to inspire an entire movement of men choosing to become women, I think it is fairly safe to say that d’Eon may have followed a similar path even in another world where Rousseau never lived. Rousseau and the culture d’Eon was born into gave her the tools she needed to express ideas she had formed in her own mind. I’m reminded of how eighteenth-century writers adopted ancient Greek philosophy, then known to have its homoerotic elements, for their own purposes. Slang terms appeared in seventeenth and eighteenth century France, like amour philosophique (“philosophical love”) to describe romantic and sexual love between men. By the same logic used by the gender criticals, some people at the time might suggest that Socrates inspired eighteenth-century men to try out homosexuality, like the arch-reactionary Jesuit writer François Garasse actually did. Clearly, though, people attracted to the same sex existed before the rediscovery of Plato in western Europe. In this and other cases, language does not create the phenomenon; it provides the ways we can understand or even embrace the phenomenon.

As for d’Eon and today’s gender criticals, my curiosity about how gender criticals will address history is smothered by my certainty over how dreary and, well, ideological their arguments would be. I suspect it would echo the same arguments I heard against historical cases of same-sex marriage in the ‘00s. Such cases are questionable for some pedantic reason anyway, or just extremely marginal, they would say. Of course, even as a lover and lifelong student of history I don’t think d’Eon’s story, fascinating and relevant and revealing as it is, can go all that far in providing a case for trans rights today. But at the very least, some need to pause over the fact someone in the late eighteenth century, at the same time what we think of Victorian gender roles were beginning to gain a foothold in the minds of the upper and middle classes, could live their life openly in such a way as d’Eon. Even more so, that d’Eon could do so at a time when widely known examples in western Europe of men making themselves to women were extremely rare, and the cases d’Eon would likely to have known would have been cast as scandalous examples of sexual deviance. Ironically, even now, so long after her death, d’Eon is a problem for those in power.