Deon: The Wonder of Her Sex
Jonathan Conlin

Author, envoy, soldier, spy, the Chevalière Deon (1728-1810) crossed boundaries of sex and nation, moving between Britain and France, presenting as a man and as a woman. For fifty years the Chevalière served the French crown as secret agent, censor, dragoon officer and diplomat. She spent the next thirty years as a celebrity, famed for giving displays of swordswomanship in her signature black dress.

Deon presented as a woman forced by her parents and King Louis XV to adopt male costume. After her transition contemporaries hailed Deon as "the wonder of her sex". As Mary Wollstonecraft noted, Deon showed what emancipated women could do. Within weeks of Deon's death curious Londoners could buy coloured engravings of her penis. Deon's identity was reduced to this post-mortem encounter with her anatomy. The mystery of her sex (now "solved") replaced the wonder of her sex.

Deon sold her life story to two publishers. She failed to submit, however, despite writing her life story in a variety of forms: as a masquerade of the ancien régime, as a Christian conversion narrative, as a chapter in a new history of "strong women". Unwilling to let one version define her, Deon spent thirty years in a labyrinth of her own construction. No trans woman has left us such a large archive of life writings, or lived her life on such an epic scale