Alexina B., the 19th century French intersex whose sad story has given rise to an opera commissioned with great success by the Liceu, is a specter that returns from the past to the present by, through music and a libretto based on her memoirs, make it clear that what led her to suicide was not the difficulty of identifying with one or the other sex (she had both in her anatomy) but the social conventions of gender, which forced her to leave the world of women in which he was raised to, if only that, be welcomed in that of men.
The performances of this opera by Raquel García-Tomás (the second woman to debut at the Liceu in 175 years) ended yesterday, so it’s not too bad to make a spoiler: Alexina commits suicide when she is banished from the girls’ boarding school where he was a teacher, because as a man he no longer has a place there, even though the director of the center and his daughter Sara (for whom Alexina feels a burning desire that leads her to think that “I must be a man”). Whether after the countless medical examinations she is declared a man, or whether she remains a woman, or all or nothing at the same time, Alexina is loved there as a person.
An unconditional love that luckily she also receives from her mother, while the factual powers see her as a monster: the priest to whom she confesses; the local doctor, who visits her for groin pains and who, far from helping her, runs away after palpating her genitals… Obvious: how was he to analyze the logical existence of diverse bodies, if up to two centuries then the medical establishment has not deigned to study, for example, endometriosis!
The point is that seeing herself declared a man by a judge means for Alexina, in the 19th century, to go out into an unknown world and scavenge to earn a living. Ground. strange Without help to wake up in his new identity… It is the social convention of the genres that sends him into limbo. And, in full delirium, he thinks he’s an angel and embraces the afterlife by inhaling toxic gas.
I wonder what Alexina would think today if social policies impose more than ever the dichotomy of genders and the biology of women and intersex people has been reduced to an imaginary of false identities.
