The child was born in Castile but the initial name is not recorded. The
father was Pero Hernández, a Castilian peasant and the mother an African slave.
The child inherited her mother’s slave status, and was branded on both sides of
her face.
At age twelve, Elena de Céspedes, the owner, died, and the child was freed
and given the owner’s name. The new Elena de Céspedes was married at 16, to a
stone mason. He left after three months, and she received news that he had died.
However she was pregnant. As she reported later, the childbirth was unusual.
During labour, a penis also emerged: “with the force that she applied in labour
she broke the skin over the urinary canal, and a head came out”. Céspedes gave
away the baby, and had surgery to further reléase the member.
Elano – as he now was – was able to have relations with women. He moved from
town to town, working as a tailor, a hosier, a soldier. Finally he lodged with a
surgeon, who taught him the trade. He worked in the Hospital de la Corte, and
built up a library of 24 medical texts.
Céspedes was known for his affairs with women. In 1586, that is after over
twenty years of living as male, he proposed to marry Maria Del Caño. The vicario
(archdeacon) of Madrid, suspecting that he was a
capon (eunuch), required
an examination. The lead examiner was Dr.
Francisco Díaz de
Alcalá, a prominent urologist, and surgeon to the King. Diaz determined
Céspedes’s identity to be male and not hermaphrodite:
“It is true that he has seen Eleno’s genital member, and having touched all
around it with his hands and seen it with his eyes, he made the following
declaration: That he has his genital member, which is sufficient and perfect,
with its testicles formed like any other man. . . . And he thus said and
declared that in his opinion Eleno does not bear any resemblance to a
hermaphrodite or anything like it”.
The marriage went ahead. However a year later, just after injuries suffered
while riding a horse, combined with a bout with cancer, he was arrested and
charged in secular court with sodomy and ‘contempt for the sacrament of
marriage’. He explained that there had been changes:
"At present I have only my woman’s nature. The male member that emerged from me has just recently come off in jail, while I was a prisoner in Ocafia. It only now finished falling off, after more than fifteen days. What happened is that before last Christmas I suffered a flow of blood through my woman’s parts and through my rear end, which caused me great pain in my kidneys. I’d hurt myself while riding horseback and the root of my member became weak. The member became spongy and I went cutting it bit by bit, so that I’ve come to be without it. It just finished falling off about fifteen days ago, or a little more, as I’ve said."
Céspedes was examined by midwives who determined that he had a
vagina, but was a virgin. The charges were changed to bigamy and the case was
transferred to the Inquisition.
Dr. Díaz changed his testimony, now believing that the defendant’s male
genitalia had been a deception:
“an art so subtle that it sufficed to fool him by sight and by touch”.
Céspedes asserted that he was a hermaphrodite.
“I never made any pact, explicitly or tacit, with the devil, in order to pose
as a man to marry a woman, as is attributed to me. What happens is that many
times the world has seen androgynous beings or, in other words, hermaphrodites,
who have both sexes. I, too, have been one of these, and at the time I arranged
to be married the masculine sex was more prevalent in me; and I was naturally a
man and had all that was necessary for a man to marry a woman. And I filed
information and eyewitness proof by physicians and surgeons, experts in the art,
who looked at me and touched me, and swore under oath that I was a man and could
marry a woman, and with this judicial proof I married as a man.”
He insisted that the women whom he had had relations with had no knowledge of
his female organs. He was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to two hundred
lashes. He was then put to work without pay in the Toledo hospital to use his
medical skills, but was obliged to wear female clothing. The hospital
administrator complained:
“The presence of Elena de Céspedes has caused great annoyance and
embarrassment from the beginning, since many people come to see and be healed by
her”.
Thus Céspedes became the first female surgeon in Spain. There would not be
another for some centuries afterwards.
Céspedes was mentioned in Jerónimo de Huerta’s 1599 annotated translation of
Pliny’s
Natural History (as a transgendered mulatta criminal lesbian) and
Antonio de Fuentelapeña’s 1676
El ente dilucidado:
Tratado de
monstruos y fantasmas.
- Vern L.,Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and
Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993: 94-6. (the
Bulloughs never mention that Céspedes was born a slave; refer to him
throughout as ‘she’ and refer to the Archdeacon as ‘vicar’. )
- Israel Burshaton. “Elena alias Eleno”. In Sabrina P. Ramet (ed). Gender
Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives.
Routledge, 1996.: 105- 122.
- Elizabeth Krimmer. In the company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women Around
1800. Wayne State University Press, 2004: 75.
- Leila J Rupp. Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women.
New York University Press, 2009: 95-6.
- Sherry Velasco. Lesbians in early modern Spain. Vanderbilt
University, 2011: 7, 11, 68-9, 75-8, 81-3.
- Richard L Kagan & Abigail Dyer. “Sexuality and the Marriage Sacrament:
Elena/Eleno de Céspedes“. Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews
and Other Heretics. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011: 36-59.
- Von Christof Rolker. “„I am and have been a hermaphrodite“: Elena/Eleno de
Céspedes and the Spanish Inquisition”. Männlich-weiblich-zwischen, 27/11/2016. http://intersex.hypotheses.org/2720.
ES.Wikipedia
Butch
Heroes
__________
So what do we make of this. His penis was maybe a large clitoris, and was later damaged. But why would the midwives, having found a vagina, then declare that Céspedes was a virgin? Elena had previously given birth.
Rolker makes the point: "At the same time, this in my view clearly demonstrates that Elena/Eleno was not ‚accused‘ of hermaphroditism. Rather, hermaphroditism in sixteenth-century Spain (as in medieval France, for that matter) was a defence strategy. Eleno/Elena’s story of first gradually changing from woman to man and later from predominantly male to predominantly female hermaphrodite may be mind-boggling, but given the very real danger of being condemned for sodomy, the story in the end was live-saving."
Potassa was a star in the early days of New York's Studio 54, 1977-8, where she was
noted when on the dance floor, and liked to pick up straight Wall-Street type
guys and take them to a balcony for oral sex.
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