Enrique Favez

“I have suffered indignities and other afflictions attributable only to the vigor of my naturally strange character, with which nature endowed me, singling me out by not giving me any of the feminine passions and giving me a strong propensity for masculine manners.”

– Enrique Favez

Enrique Favez is more often seen under one of his multiple other names. Specifically either a feminized version of his chosen name or his birth name. His legacy has largely been defined as the first female doctor of Cuba. His marriage discussed as one between two women. This understanding of his life is flawed in a number of ways, and much of his story is still tinged by present-day and past transphobia. He is not the first, and will not be the last transgender man to be swept post-humously into the category of woman dressing up as a man, and just like every other time it has happened, it is a failure and a tragedy.

There is a particular brand of transphobia that comes within the study of history. In the case of transgender men, it comes largely in the form of erasure. Because it is understandable that a woman would dress up as a man to experience the privileges that have historically been pinned to that gender, it is incomprehensible that a transgender man may have mixed motives for entering masculine spaces. The idea that some people assigned female at birth would be drawn to dressing like men because of a internal reality that conflicts with their assigned gender, and would later justify that decision to their contemporaries with different reasoning, is, if not entirely unexplored, than dismissed as impossible to prove. 

While there is a truth to this decision, as there deserves to be some care and thought going into defining historical figures as transgender, the conversation often is one defined by allowances from one side of the debate. Where the study of queer history will time and again allow for vagueness, misunderstandings, and discussion, the other side is far less lenient. Because to label someone in the past as queer and be incorrect is seen as a far greater sin than to label them as cisgender and be proven wrong. The truth is, there is harm to be caused on each sides, but historically, one side has had far more power and influence to do that harm. Still, it is the side with less power that is left with a higher burden of proof. It is not enough that a queer person feels connected to a historical figure’s understanding of gender or sexuality, there is a whole set of modern standards for the historical figure to reach to have that connection justified. 

In the discussion of Enrique Favez, there is an immediate discussion of pronouns to face. Upon his death, he was known and understood as a woman by all those around him. Does that mean, that because in contemporary discussions the most recent known pronouns used for a person are the ones that generally should be used, as a rule needs to be applied? Does this question become complicated by the fact that Enrique was legally mandated to act like a woman for the later years of his life? To the latter question, the answer is hopefully universally yes, but that is not reflected in how discussions of his life are held. 

There is a precedent, in this project, to use they/them/theirs pronouns when the preferred pronouns of the person in question are unclear. Should this be applied to Enrique? Or, is it less a question of what is the most recent recorded pronouns used by and for the person, but instead a question of what pronouns they most preferred most recently. Not based in just timeline, but also in preference. That would leave one clear answer to the question in Enrique’s story. He made clear only one pronoun preference in his life, though he used both he and she, he chose he. These questions may seem like obvious ones, or even instinctual steps to a queer reader, but there is a necessity of justification. Not because that instinct is not correct, but in fact because it is, and that makes things complicated. If instinct can be correct, then justification for that instinct is valuable for two main reasons. The first being so there is a set path for people who want to understand the steps took so they can take them themselves. The second being so the work can be checked. There is value to this process. But there is also many ways that this process has been taken in bad faith. 

It is not a question of checking the work, or finding the path, but a question of erasing the fact that anyone could have taken these steps, raising the burden of proof higher and higher until it is unreachable. There is a particular question asked in the discussion of queer history: how can modern labels be used to describe historical figures? This question has been largely buried beneath mountains of people scrambling to make it impossible to even open a discussion of queerness in history. It is not enough for them to use the language of the time like Urnings, it is not enough for them to use language that reflect wide possibilities like queer, nothing is enough. Because of this, the actual question has been largely lost. It is worth addressing though. But first it must be asked whether it is the right question? Is perhaps the problem that the current language for queerness comes with an implied set of rules that don’t transfer well into discussions of history? Such as the overarching agreement that using the most recently known pronouns for a person is the best way to go. 

Whether the reframing of this discussion is worthwhile, what is clear is that within the story of Enrique Favez, is the story of the current system for understanding of history failing. 

Enrique Favez was born around 1791 in Switzerland. His parents died when he was still quite young and he was married off to a French soldier at the age of 15 by the uncle who was taking care of him. His marriage to the French soldier ended with the soldier’s death soon after the death of the child they had together. Enrique went on to dress as a man and go to study medicine in France. 

The motivation of his decision is now questioned. Because women were not allowed to study medicine, and it was clear that this fact is what sparked his transition into being understood as a man, that settles the transgender question in many people’s eyes. Maybe if he had simply decided one day to dress as a man with no obvious motive, then they would believe him to be a man, but that isn’t what happened, and so he must be a woman. This logic is held up by the exclusion of another fact: Enrique was drawn towards the masculine before his dive into medical school. His uncle knew of his transition, and there is record of this not being a new part of Enrique’s identity. In fact, Enrique was married off in part because his interest in the masculine was starting to become a problem. So while this was the first time that he was known to have fully gone under a new identity, it was not the beginning of his gender journey. This truth has largely (and conveniently) left out of many narratives sharing his life. 

Regardless of this, he did well in medical school and worked alongside his uncle taking on his dead husband’s rank in the Neapolianic wars until he was imprisoned in Spain. After the war he went to eastern Cuba, to serve the largely impoverished population as their doctor. While there he met, took care of, then married Juana De Léon. It is here that another problem comes forward. Later in life, Juana would say that she had no knowledge of Enrique’s assigned gender at birth, this has been contested and most sources believe it not to be true. 

There is still debate over this topic, and likely there will never be a true answer discovered, though there are some letters from later in Enrique’s life that are alleged to clear up the mystery a little. These letter’s have not been confirmed to be legitimate, so they will not be quoted here. 

What is known is that Juana was not the one to reveal Enrique’s assigned gender, though she later justified this saying that she was too afraid. Instead it was a maid who saw Enrique inebriated and looked under his shirt. She quickly spread the news around the town and Juana followed soon after, coming to the courts to charge Enrique with deceiving her. Enrique said of this accusation:

“What happened with Juana de León . . . was by mutual accord and for love."

It is through the resulting court case that so much is known about Enrique and his attitude towards his gender, but that is not to say the case was a positive thing by any stretch of the imagination. It was public humiliation at the best of times, and often involved revealing Enrique’s naked body without his consent. 

One thing that is made clear, by both Enrique and the public record was that Enrique was not among the number of intersex people in history who were punished for understanding their genders in ways that changed over time. 

Laureano Fernandez de Cuevas, editor of a Cuban legal journal, wrote of Enrique’s situation: 

"Enriqueta does not present any of those rare defects of the configuration of the genitourinary apparatus; nothing of androgeneity nor hermaphrodism; but rather [you] will see in her the phenomenon of the starkest contradiction between the moral and the physical elements: the character and inclinations opposed to the fair sex; you will see, in a word, the spirit of a man enclosed in the body of a woman."

Within this quote there could not be a clearer display of a transgender individual. Enrique himself also made it obvious, saying again and again through the trial that he was a man who happened to be assigned female at birth. He said of this:

“I have suffered indignities and other afflictions attributable only to the vigor of my naturally strange character, with which nature endowed me, singling me out by not giving me any of the feminine passions and giving me a strong propensity for masculine manners."

Still, his gender is questioned. One particularly influential account of his life is certain he would not identify as transgender. Professor Juliana Martinez writes of this account:

“Pancrazio's book, Enriqueta Faber: Travestismo, documentos e historia, and González-Pagés's book, Por andar vestida de hombre, refer to Favez as Enriqueta, employ mostly female pronouns, and characterize Favez mainly as a woman dressed as a man. In different ways, both texts treat Favez's assigned sex at birth as the defining part of his identity and limit Enrique's masculinity to his clothing. González-Pagés sees it as a disguise, and Pancrazio sees it as transvestism.

Enriqueta Faber : Travestismo, documentos e historia is a sympathetic and rigorously documented analysis of Enrique's life. But the main argument of this book, which equates Favez's life story with a prolonged act of transvestism, is both flawed and unfortunate. From the first page, Pancrazio describes Favez as “the famous doctor-transvestite woman," and in the second footnote of the book, he explains that "the alternation of gender is precisely the point of transvestism." Throughout, he relates transvestism to theatricality and illusion and likens it to a "chameleon-like or impersonator's nature" that allows an individual to identify him/her/themselves with "camouflage or signification itself." He conceptualizes the transvestite as a figure that "provokes nervous laughter, seduces and terrifies, . . . and marks the limits of Cuban culture," and he argues that the case of Favez "is not the only example of transvestism in Cuban culture and literature. This practice is flaunted on the streets during Carnival, in the spectacles of cabaret, and in Santería." Pancrazio conflates different types of genderbending practices with gender-nonconforming identities, which is problematic, because, as Judith Butler stressed in "Critically Queer" (1993), doing so erroneously equates performativity with concrete performances. 

[...]

Pancrazio cites Butler, showing that he is aware of this argument, but he misses the point by explicitly stating that he prefers the word "transvestite" (understood as a supposedly "chameleon-like" figure) to "transsexual" to talk about Favez because of the latter's resistance to descriptions that focus only on performative play. By drawing a parallel between Enrique's life and the ritual forms of transgression enacted during Carnival, which many other scholars have described, Pancrazio aligns Favez with a subversive gender-bending desire that Enrique did not appear to articulate. Favez did not change his gender expression back and forth at will; he was forced to do so during several - often tragic - moments of his life.”

It seems that many of the further discussions of Enrique’s life have been informed by these books that both misunderstand the very nature of the discussion. These warped views have expanded and expanded until the story of Enrique is the story of a lesbian woman doctor who was charged with dressing like a man and sent to become a nun. His time in jail, his escape attempts, and his two suicide attempts are often left out of the conversation. He simply becomes a woman who was found out, sent away to live in New Orleans, and died at the age of 65. It is the tale of a woman becoming a doctor for a brief flash of time, not a man having his career, relationships, and identity stripped from him. 

Returning to Juliana Martinez’s paper “Dressed Like a Man?”, it closes off the discussion with all the grace possible for such a story that has been so sorely mishandled under most people’s pens:

“So what's in a name? How should we talk about Favez? From where or how should we look at him? Was Favez a brave soldier, a skilled doctor, a perverted impostor, a feminist pioneer, a skillful impersonator, an impious woman, a trans pioneer, a monster? Was he all of these things at once, or perhaps none of them? One might also ask whether our anxiety (or at least mine) to find the "right" pronoun or name is problematic in itself. I do not know. But I want to end with this sense of discomfort about language, looking, and naming and with the hope that we can manage to make our language and our laws more welcoming, more effective and affective, less obsessed with examining people and declaring them male or female. I would like to argue, in other words, that we should go back to the trial and embrace its linguistic ambiguity and instability as productive chaos; that we push the boundaries of our language and critically examine the multiple and often conflicting regulating discourses and desires that inform it; that, as Stryker suggests, we make language more monstrous in the hope of opening up a space for diverse ways of mobilizing desire, identities, and bodies. I want to end with the hope that, after so many years, we will finally stop putting Favez on trial and instead take Jay Prosser's questions seriously: "How do you look? What do you see here? And what does what you see here reveal about you?"” 

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material

Dalia, A. (2009, August 5). Cuban Woman Who Lived as a Man. Havana Times. https://havanatimes.org/features/cuban-woman-who-lived-as-a-man/

Enriqueta Favez vindicated by art. (2020, May 3). Rate Por Excelencias. https://www.arteporexcelencias.com/en/articles/enriqueta-favez-vindicated-art

Isobel, L.-J. (2007, December 17). The amazing double life of Enriqueta Favez. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/the-amazing-double-life-of-enriqueta-favez/6206770

Juliana, M. (2017). Dressed Like a Man? Of Language, Bodies, and Monsters in the Trial of Enrique/Enriqueta Favez and Its Contemporary Accounts. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 26(2), 188–206. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.7560/JHS26202

Petra, J. (2020, September 1). Enriqueta Favez: first female doctor in Cuba. Cuba Plus. http://cubaplusmagazine.com/en/news/enriqueta-favez-first-female-doctor-in-cuba.html

Ria, B. (2017). Enriqueta aka Enrique Faves 1791- 1856 Cuba. Rita Brodell. https://www.riabrodell.com/enriqueta-aka-enrique-faves-1791-1856-cuba