Episode 19 - "Pray did you ever hear of the famous Mademoiselle d’eon?"

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant
Episode 19: "Pray did you ever hear of the famous Mademoiselle d’eon?"
Published on March 30, 2021

Note: This transcript was generated by Otter.ai with light human correction

Kathryn Gehred 

Hello, and welcome to Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant. This is Women's History podcast where we feature eighteenth and early nineteenth century women's letters that don't get as much attention as we think they should. I'm your host, Kathryn Gehred, the letter that we're featuring in this week's episode is actually quite a long letter. So instead of going into the entirety of the letter, I'm just going to dig very much into one excerpt from it. I know I've said that I'm not going to do that on this podcast, but it's my podcast and I'm going to do what I want. For this episode, we're going to dig into what this particular excerpt tells us about eighteenth century gender and womanhood. Context of the letter, the letter question is from Abigail Nabi Adams to her brother, John Quincy Adams, and it is dated November 27 1785. So, this is not Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams. This is John and Abigail Adams' daughter. So that's why I'm going to call her Nabby because that was her nickname, at the time of this letter, she is living in London with her mother and father. This was during the period when John Adams was serving as the first US minister to Great Britain, Nabby is writing a letter to her brother John Quincy Adams who had left Paris in May of that year to go back to Boston and finish his formal education. You might remember from previous episodes, this is about that same time period where he is studying so hard that he's making himself dizzy, just being a huge dork in Boston. Nabi at this point is twenty years old. The entire first section of this letter is just her making fun of John Quincy Adams for one of his crushes that she met. So, feel free to check that out. That's also very cute. But that's not the reason why I picked this letter. I picked this one because of one paragraph where Nabby describes hearing about the famous Mademoiselle d'Éon so I'm gonna go ahead and read that excerpt now.

"Abigail Nattie Adams to John Quincy Adams, November 27 1785. Pray did you ever hear of the famouss Mademoiselle d'eon, who served as Chargé des affaires du France and afterwards as ambassador from that Court to this—who obtained le croix de St. Louis, and was in several engagements who fought two Duels on the part of some Ladies, and many more extrordinary matters—whose works, make thirteen vollumes &c. She has lately arrived in this City, and these Gentleman had dined with her and were speaking of her. She has resumed la habit des dames, but Mr. D. told me he was sure, She might go dressd in l'habit d'Homme and not be noticed, but she could not as a Lady. She wears her croix de St. Louis and as one may well suppose a singular figure, as well as an extrordinary Character."

The Adams papers footnote identified Mademoiselle d'eon as Chevalier d'eon. Yeah, they are, and noted that while there was confusion regarding her sex during her lifetime, her autopsy reported her to be male. This piqued my interest, because, to me, just from that paragraph, and that footnote, it sounds as though Nabby's describing somebody who we would describe today as a transgender woman. Now, I'm sure many of you listening to this are yelling at me for not recognizing that name. But I had not heard of d'eon before this letter, so, this was my first introduction, and so in the eighteenth century, there wasn't necessarily a language for what we would describe as somebody who's transgender today. But, just because that language didn't exist, that doesn't mean that transgender people didn't exist or people who had experiences that today we might consider to be transgender. First of all, a little bit of background about d'eon, she referred to herself with female pronouns at the end of her life. So, that's what I'm going to do as well. d'eon was a French aristocrat, who was born in Burgundy in 1728. She became a successful military officer, diplomat, she was a spy for the French during the Seven Years War and eventually actually went to London, as Minister plenipotentiary, which is basically like an ambassador position, and she continued her work in espionage, in London. She was awarded the Cross of San Luis, which gave her the title of Chevalier, but after a falling out with a superior officer. In retaliation, she published a lot of her diplomatic correspondence in a book, which caused a huge scandal. So, around 1770, rumors started to circulate in London and in Paris, that d'eon was actually a woman disguised as man. In the mid 1770s, there were bets placed in London bars on either d'eon the Philly or d'eon the stallion. By 1777, d'eon appeared almost exclusively in women's clothes, and she said that she had been disguised as a man for the entirety of her career. So, by the 1780s, when this letter was written, they on was kind of a feminist icon. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about her, she appeared in a list of woman worthies. Just imagine this time period pretty strict gender roles. Here's this woman that has fought in military engagements and fought and duals and won military awards. So, sort of feminists were happy to welcome d'eon and d'eon herself collected, according to one of the articles I read researching this the largest private collection of proto-feminist works of any known eighteenth century book collector. So, she's got this massive feminist library. The person who wrote the article that I read, basically makes the argument that d'eon is not actually trans. It's part of that sort of spy subterfuge thing. I don't know what exactly what benefit d'eon would get from pretending to be a woman, I have never found anything that's user convincing to me as this is something that's going to destroy the British, right? But, there's debate as there always is about these things. I personally think that it makes a lot of sense for a trans woman to collect a large feminist library, and that's pretty cool, as has been made very obvious by just the intro to this letter, I'm not an expert on transgender history, or transgender studies, or even on eighteenth century gender roles as it would apply to the trans experience. So, I wanted to bring somebody in who knows a little bit more about this subject than I do. I am delighted today to be joined by Julia Ftacek, a PhD student, who studies transgender femininity in eighteenth century British literature. So, hello Julia.

Julia Ftacek

Hi!

Kathryn Gehred

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. 

Julia Ftacek

Oh, it's gonna be so much fun. Thank you for having me.

Kathryn Gehred 

So first of all, can you tell me a little bit more about your work?

Julia Ftacek

I studied British literature in the eighteenth century. And as you said, I study transgender from an entity in that literature. So, I tend to look at literature in a pretty weird way I look for stuff that feels trans. I can explain more about that if I have the time, but, you know, I just look for things where people who would not be perceived as women feel feminine or feel kind of out of place in their masculine gender roles. I'm interested in femininity more broadly. So there's a bunch of things that I do, but I look at literature over the course of kind of the entire eighteenth century.

Kathryn Gehred

The long eighteenth century.

Julia Ftacek

Yes, the very long, eighteenth century, in my case.

Kathryn Gehred

So I know that the Enlightenment brought about a lot of changes in the way that European people thought about gender. So can you tell me a little bit about that?

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, it's a it's a complicated question, because the eighteenth century seems to be the site of a lot of changes to how European people conceived of gender. Prior to the eighteenth century, we're looking at what seems to be a much more flexible system of gender, which is to say that gender was not necessarily in the minds of people than innately connected to one's biology. People who had vaginas could be very masculine, and people who had penises could be extremely feminine, and potentially they could become women or become men despite what their sex assignment might be, and that even sort of bleeds over into the medical theories where men and women were not conceived of as totally different types of beings as they were much later in the eighteenth century. So, there's this kind of like space for play is how a lot of scholars describe it, where your gender could be a lot of things, and indeed, it seemed to be whatever face you are presenting at the moment. So there wasn't necessarily the sense of like an internal gender identity, it was just your habitus. It was what you were presenting for the day, that's sort of what your gender was, which is not to say that, you know, it's like this transgender utopia or something, but it was it was playful, and weird, and varied. And, you know, we know about a Shakespearean cross dress rolls and all sorts of stuff like that there's a kind of playfulness to it, right, and then later in the century, what starts to happen is, as the Enlightenment gets really invested in and I use that term, kind of tongue in cheek, because it wasn't always so enlightened. But, as people in the eighteenth century get really invested in anatomical science and medicine and things like that, they start to articulate a theory of sex differentiation, where men and women are fundamentally different. And the characters of men and women are based on those fundamental differences. So, now all of a sudden, not only is femininity soft, and nurturing, and whatever else, but that's also explicitly the domain of women. And that, that women can't really be anything else. This is kind of increasingly the mainstream view, right? And we see weird things where like, in the early part of the century, where gender was kind of more playful, there was a this this idea that like a woman who dressed as a man, for instance, could easily pass as a man like it would be no problem for, you know, like a woman to put out a military uniform and be seen as a man the entire time she was in the in the military, as is the case with Hannah Snell. Whereas later in the century, all of a sudden people start having this belief that like that could never happen like that's preposterous that I would all like you know, know, right off the bat, if I saw someone wearing the wrong gendered clothes that they wouldn't pass. So, I would know, of course, I would know because innately, they're just different. So we see that change happen really rapidly, and in fact, some of the same people over the course of the century, seemingly changed their mind over the course of like ten years about how gender works. So it's it's weird and dynamic.

Kathryn Gehred 

So I do think it's interesting that there's this like flexibility and playfulness of what femininity and masculinity were, which like, we're much more rigid with it even now, I think.

Julia Ftacek

Absolutely.

Kathryn Gehred

Right.

Julia Ftacek

We're total inheritors of the late eighteenth century regime. It's hard to get out of that even like, even when we're reading early eighteenth century stuff. It's hard to disentangle ourselves from that.

Kathryn Gehred 

And, just even reading the articles I was finding about d'eon that were written, like between 1985 and now you can tell so much more about, like, the time period that the author was writing really?

Julia Ftacek

Oh my gosh, so much d'eon scholarship is just like, incredibly 90s.

Kathryn Gehred

Yes.  So okay, all right. So, um, at this time period, say, okay, 1785 did the concept of what it meant to be feminine, feminine or masculine? Was that different than the way we would think of gender roles? Like what are the similarities and differences?

Julia Ftacek

I it's probably not so different. You know, the idea that women are mothers and soft and exists to make the lives of men easier and more delightful. Like that's totally present in the eighteenth century, we do see some kind of weirdness going on with in terms of, of how eighteenth century people viewed like warriorhood, and like the the proper role of a man in society, the eighteenth century was kind of invested. Or I should say, a lot of people in the eighteenth century were kind of invested in viewing themselves as post the kind of like violent, barbaric wars of the past that now was a much more of a gentleman's culture. And, so a man was expected to be kind of genteel and and proper and polished, right? So there was a kind of change in that regard, where men were no longer expected to be savage, strong warriors, and this kind of caused a weird debate in society, which was like, Are men becoming effeminate? You know, like what's happening to men in society? So I think that debate, I don't know, I there's probably still people saying stuff like that. But yeah, I think that idea that like, men were supposed to be these like, little gentlemen and everything. I think, in some regard, that's maybe gone away. For us, I think there's a lot of people now that are much more in the like, maybe it's like our sports culture. It's like, you know, the raw our masculinity is so hard, I think to eighteenth century people, some of that would have been like, whoa, like, he's awful. But...

Kathryn Gehred 

I know, I've read a little bit about like, the concept of virtue used to be like, yeah, manly virtue, whereas now the definition of that word is like, completely changed.

Julia Ftacek

Yeah. And stuff like, like crying. Like men could totally cry in the eighteenth century, it was it was actually a sign of like, your, your strong moral character that you could cry over things that were emotionally affecting, right. So that's maybe also different from our current culture, is the total culture of sentimentality. Right? Like, you're okay. It's okay to feel sad and to shed tears about things.

Kathryn Gehred 

When and how did you first learn about the Chevalier d'Eon?

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, deal. So I mean, you know, she's, she's a figure in the culture as dimly aware of her. I'm a trans woman myself. So she exists, like, we know about her, right? But but in terms of my work, as I said, I'm I'm a British literature specialists. So that doesn't necessarily lend itself to understanding the life of a French diplomat. But it turns out, you know, d'Eon was kind of a English celebrity for a time. And her transition was very public, and it caught the public's interest really strongly, and there's actually a late eighteenth century novel by the poet Mary Robinson, who is a famous kind of early female romantic, that basically takes the story that d'Eon presented right, I was born a girl I was raised as a boy, that whole whole thing. Mary Robinson wrote this very long, weird novel where one of the characters is that person, Sir Sydney, who is the main character Walsingham. That's the name of the novelist Walsingham, so the main characters, Walsingham. Sydney is his rival, and then in the end, it turns out Sydney is actually a woman, and then they get married and live happily ever after. So that's really how I got very interested in d'Eon because I like that novel. It's part of my dissertation. And, and now I'm kind of interested in reading d'Eon's memoirs are an English translation of them rather, as a piece of literature in the eighteenth century. I think that's a really interesting thing I could do. So,

Kathryn Gehred 

I would like to use one of d'Eon's letters, I think, in the future for the podcast, but I was only finding things in French and I cannot speak from French.

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, I mean, that's the problem. I also don't speak French. So, it's kind of like I feel conflicted about doing this work, because it's like, I can't actually read it. The original.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yes! Exactly. I'm like, I'm sure there's details in here that I'm not picking up because I'm getting like the 1990s male historian version.

Julia Ftacek

No, seriously, like that's a real problem. Like how much of this translation was colored by that? I can't know until I can read the originals.

Kathryn Gehred 

I read an article you wrote for Medium where you talk about looking at history, or reading a text through a queer lens or trans lens. Could you describe a little bit more about what this means and how it could be helpful in understanding d'Eon?

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, I. So, that one was about Lord Byron. He's also one of my or that was my example, anyway. It was Byron. Byron is one of my kind of like guiding figures in my work. I love Byron, he tends to end the period of study that I do, and I'm also convinced that he probably was a trans woman. Yeah, so so that whole thing was sparked by there was an author at the time who was writing a book about the figure we know is Dr. James Berry, who was a trans man. And this author was writing about him as a queer woman, even though that was a pretty blatantly against Barry's expressed wishes in life. He really wanted to be remembered as a man. And so this was kind of a big blow up. And she had this defense about, you know, reclaiming queer womanhood and stuff like this, so I had written this article, where I explained, basically how I view doing this work because I do a thing as many queer scholars do, that we might call a queer intervention or queering, or transing, in my case, right? Where I have to sometimes make claims about texts that are not explicitly there, right? Like I talk about Gulliver's Travels all the time, like Gulliver's Travels is not explicitly a transgender text, but I make that argument anyway. Right? So that's kind of an imposition on the text, like I really have to, to make a claim for that, and so I was trying to think through like, how do I defend doing this? You know, because there's always people who will say stuff like, you can't you can't read the past this way. And Jonathan Swift or whoever, like, would never have written their literature this way. And like, that's true, I guess , but, so I was just trying to think of like, what's the ethical way of approaching history? And what's the result of queering a transing stuff. And ,so part of my argument was, and think about James Berry, in this case, you know, if we, if we read James Berry, as a queer woman, as this author want to do, there's a kind of trans erasure going on there. So, there's a kind of foreclosure of that possibility, and I don't really think it adds much to the conversation about queer women historically, because there are actually plenty of women who cross dressed and, and did exactly what this author wants to claim Berry was doing. Or, there's plenty of subjects for that work, but trans masculinity is something that's a lot smaller and more fragile and harder to find, historically, for a variety of reasons. So, personally, I believe it's kind of a responsibility of artists to nurture readings like that, right, that it opens up more possibilities than it closes upon, and that that, ultimately, is the goal of scholarship, right? That we want to raise more possibilities and nurture more minds and do more with the material than try to find some finicky version of the truth that can't possibly exist. Right. So,

Kathryn Gehred

Right.

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, I don't I it was a complicated argument. I think that I am not sure I articulated very well in that that article, but ultimately, it's how I read things is I want to expand the possibilities of any given text,

Kathryn Gehred 

Right? Well, I might put a link to it. If the show in the show notes. If you don't mind. I just, I liked your argument for for viewing something through a particular lens. Because I think that it can make it can make something that is complicated, more clearer, or it can confuse things depending on which lens you look at things through, and so why limit yourself to which lens you're going to analyze a life for text.

Julia Ftacek

Right? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I think things should be generative, and then expansive, expansive. Yeah. And I think ultimately, like reading things as trans, you know, we don't have to definitively claim things are trans but to foreclose on the possibility, it's a real disservice, I think, to the to the text,

Kathryn Gehred 

Exactly. It sort of leads into my next question, like historians, in particular, sometimes show reluctance to label historic historical figure with a term that didn't exist during their own lifetime, you'll get all sorts of pushback to trying to say somebody even like, could possibly be gay, when even there's like, might be tons of evidence to it. But so, so what are your thoughts on this subject?

Julia Ftacek

So, I'm not a historian. Yeah, I mean, this was, you know, we're talking about d'Eon this is the one of the big arguments that's been made about d'Eon was like, transness, did not exist then. So, she couldn't be trans, which I think is kind of a silly argument. I sort of get it. I mean, the idea is that, like, being transgender now is this kind of like full blown identity, and that, that that therefore requires a certain knowledge of the identity and all this stuff, but, but ultimately, like, my argument is, you know, SIS, people didn't invent the concept of being trans like, certainly there are people who, who felt trans in some capacity. Before the the concept existed, right? I am a trans woman. I experienced like gender dysphoria at age four. Like, I want it to be like Sailor Moon when I grew up, and I didn't know what being transgender was, I didn't understand that there's a community of people I didn't understand that I could like take estrogen, or whatever, but I still wanted that I still felt that that made more sense for myself than whatever people were telling me. Right. So I don't see why it's such a stretch to say that like, d'Eon could have felt something similar, right?

Kathryn Gehred

Yeah.

Julia Ftacek

To say that she's transgenders is not me saying like, she understood herself as a transgender person. It's a kind of shorthand for saying like, she felt something similar to what I felt.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yes. And I think that makes perfect sense, and this to me, reading a lot of the articles that have come out about d'Eon and the way that people have been writing about d'Eon its people are just like, doing somersaults and like coming up with all these insane reasons that she would have spent the last half of her life as a woman, I like literally saw these articles that were like, well, in order to avoid political embarrassment,

Julia Ftacek

I know exactly who you're talking about, and I know I'm gonna name him because actually, I admire his work. And like I, you know, I think people think I like hate his work or like, want a bag on it. I think his autobiography, or his rather, his biographies of d'Eon are beautiful and passionate and compelling. Like, I had so much fun reading this book, I loved it. I just think it's his understanding of what it means to be trans, and therefore his understanding of transgender is misinformed. Mostly because he wrote them as a SIS guy in the 90s. Like, they had no understanding of what it is to be trans, and it shows so clearly, yeah, he's he, I mean, he's made arguments that it was simultaneously a bid for her political career, and it was possibly caused by all the feminist readings she had done, and also that it was like a religious conversion experience where she wanted to be like a bride of Christ. So, there's like this threefold crazy explanation for why she's a woman. Yeah, I also he can avoid saying that she was transgender.

Kathryn Gehred 

It was just sort of startling to me, and then I read another article that was said that it was because it was actually part of a like, political conspiracy that got out of hand.

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, I mean, there's all these you like, d'Eon's life is sort of, I think, like, invites stuff like this, because her life was so weird anyway.

Kathryn Gehred

Like she was a spy.

Julia Ftacek

And why I mean, even if Yeah, right, even if she had never transitioned, she's still led a fascinating life. And being a spy, I think lends itself to like, readings of deceit and everything, you know, and setting aside like the transphobia of readings like that, which is kind of there, I get it, like I do get it. And d'Eon also had weird ways of referring to herself. If you read her memoirs, like she switches pronouns a lot, and she clearly in my mind had a very loose conception of, of gender. She was very fluid. I think, so in some ways, it's not so inappropriate to say stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, ultimately, I just think a SIS guy got a whole lot of stuff first, and for all the truly and I do mean, like very good stuff he's done for d'Eon scholarship. I really don't want to bag on him. Please, Gary, if you're out there listening. I'm a fan. I just, yeah, I would love to talk to him, uh, you know, trans woman to man about what's happened in there, because I don't quite get it.

Kathryn Gehred 

The roundabout point that I was trying to make is sometimes if a story just is so much more clear, and makes so much more sense, if we take our modern understanding of trans experience that seems to fit with a lot of d'Eons experience, it's not completely out of line to view it through that lens.

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, I mean, really choose a trans woman. It's such an easier explanation than everything else.

Kathryn Gehred 

Sometimes the simplest,

Julia Ftacek

yeah, really, in this case, like, come on, but

Kathryn Gehred 

Transphobia and even just sexism. If the political side of the life is much more important than the gender side of life, like,

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, I mean, like, really, there is a pretty heavy misogynist element to a lot of the scholarship surrounding her and a transphobic element that I don't think people even realize they're engaging in.

Kathryn Gehred

Yeah.

Julia Ftacek

And I think that's true of of, you know, I've dedicated myself to like correcting a lot of the scholarship on gender in the eighteenth century, because I think that shows up a lot, because, you know, I mentioned like Gulliver's Travels and stuff like that. Like, I'm not the first person to notice that characters like Gulliver or whoever, like feminized and the text like that happens, right? I'm just the first person to be like, hey, maybe this is transgender, right?

Kathryn Gehred

Yeah.

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, cuz, uh, you know, there's a perception of transness as weird and deviant and insane, and I think you do kind of see that in scholarship about d'Eon that because she was so politically savvy and so clearly intelligent, that there's no way she was trans. Right? Because she's competent. That's kind of the unspoken assumption being made.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yes. The cherry on top is the logical jumps people have to make to make that argument. There's so clearly irrational, not, not 100% irrational but just so I know. So you say you're not a historian, but do you have any thoughts about how historians of the eighteenth century could take better advantage of queer and transgender theory.

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, I mean, I think acknowledging it, you know, like, like, genuinely like citing trans people who write about this stuff, like, that's a big problem I see with the d'Eon scholarship is like, you know, trans people have talked about her, and I never see them cited, right? Like, it's just SIS people all the way down and tend to be a lot of men too, you know. So it's like we're talking about a trans woman and trans women don't get to talk about her, so that's one aspect for it's just purely a citational issue. But also, I think trans studies tends to get discounted by a lot of other fields, as something kind of like weird, and inaccessible, and totally goofy. And I think actually, if you you actually read what we're saying, and the really dense theoretical conversations we have all the time, and we have, like, journals like TSU, for instance, that have been running for a long time, that there's a lot of really interesting stuff there. And we have thought about problems like how do we approach history through a transgender lens? Like these are things we've talked about. Again, and again and again. So this idea that says people, right, who have no access to that experience, feel that they're able to answer those questions, just off the cuff .

Kathryn Gehred

Without doing the reading.

Julia Ftacek

Right. Like, like the work is there, like, look at the work. That's really how I feel about it. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's, there's interesting stuff I think you could do, I'm not a historian, so I don't quite know how to work that into historians tool set, but, but I know there are ways there are trans historians?

Kathryn Gehred

Right, so yeah, totally.

Julia Ftacek

Yeah.

Kathryn Gehred 

I normally end my podcast with a discussion of what is relatable about a letter and what is different. So, what's something that about a letter that makes you really see how humanity has changed or things that have stayed the same? Is there anything about either Nabby's letter or about what we know about d'Eon that strikes you as relatable or as extremely alien?

Julia Ftacek

Yeah, I was. I had not seen that Nabby's letter before you sent it to me. So, I was pretty interested in that. Yeah. Yeah, d'Eon was a big celebrity. So it doesn't surprise me that much. And in fact, I believe this is something Kate's mentions in this book is everyone talked about d'Eon, like teenage girls were talking about d'Eon like, she was just fascinating people, but you know, the thing I think that jumps out immediately about Nabby's letter, it's kind of cruel about the appearance, as a lot of people were because d'Eon was a non passing trans woman, as we tend to refer to, and I am also included in that category sometimes, right? Passing is a weird concept. But, d'Eon, people were not fooled into thinking she was a SIS woman, right like that, or I suppose they were because they had no concept of what SIS meant, but you know what I mean? Yeah. Right. So so that's something that Nabby brings up is, I believe, she says something like she could go in habit of a man and you know, easily, but she could never do that as a lady, right?

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah. Well, but the whole time, same she and her. Right,

Julia Ftacek

Right? I mean, she she sincerely believes that she is a woman, right? Like that's, that's also there, but also that she's a woman who looks like a man. That's what Nabyy says basically. Right? So yeah, that, unfortunately, is very familiar, right? Like, people say about trans women all the time. So yeah, that's like d'Eon experienced transphobia, and if you read her memoirs, and read scholarship about her as much as people want to deny that she experienced transphobia, like that's, that's it, she's afraid of getting assaulted on the street. She had people making humiliating bets about what her genitals look like. I mean, this is all pretty standard, transphobia really, so that's not so weird. The thing that I find fascinating about Nabby's letter and maybe kind of alien is her very sincere admiration, I believe, of who d'Eon is right, like, it's still like, yeah, I don't think she's very attractive, but she's incredible. Like, she's very smart. She's a accomplished combat veteran, like she's done all these things, like she's a woman who did all this stuff. Isn't that great? That I think is like, so wonderful. Because I think trans women do not often get classed as feminist heroes, you know, like, I think trans women look up to other trans women. And then like the general category of women, their icons are always SIS women, right? So, this idea that that that they on this person who had publicly like, lived her life, half her life as a man and then came out as a woman later was being admired in this way by, by girls all over the world was like, that's so heartening. That's the kind of stuff where I'm like, you know, if there's a benefit to reading d'Eon as trans it's because we get this like incredible feminist figure.

Kathryn Gehred

Yeah.

Julia Ftacek

Women looked up to sincerely in her own time. So that's me Nabby's letter is is like gushing about her. Really.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, that struck me as well. I thought that was really cool, and the fact that d'Eon had such a large library of feminist literature

Julia Ftacek

She was like one of the most well read like feminist I hesitate to say scholar, but kind of like she was like a feminist philosopher by the time she got back to France. She has sincerely well read in some like some obscure complicated texts. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing too, is I think there's always this, this perception of her as like, deceptive and insincere. And, you know, she put the work in, really, no matter what her motivations were. She, she certainly understood feminist philosophy better than most people on the continent at that time.

Kathryn Gehred 

Yeah, I think I think she's a great feminist hero.

Julia Ftacek

I'm not so big a fan of her like imperialism. Okay, yeah.

Kathryn Gehred 

Thank you so much for coming, and speaking with me.

Julia Ftacek

Of course, of course.

Kathryn Gehred

I think this is a really fun conversation. And I think you've got a really great perspective to this content.

Julia Ftacek

I do actually encourage people to read like the work the some of the scholarship that we've been talking about, I think it still presents a lot of good stuff. You just have to have that perspective in mind that maybe we there's different ways we can approach gender right, but there's so much to learn about her and so much to admire about her as a person that I sincerely hope listeners will go out and read more about her because she, she deserves it.

Kathryn Gehred 

That is perfect. Thank you so much. For my listeners, I will put some of these books and quotes that we've been talking about in the show notes, you can check them out. And as ever, I am your most obedient and humble servant. Thank you very much.