The life of Elena de Céspedes , which was the name of our protagonist, seemed like it was going to be difficult from day one. I would dare to say that even from the moment her mother, a slave who served in the house of the girl's father, the Céspedes, found out that she was pregnant. She was born in 1545 in the town of Alhama de Granada, and being the daughter of a slave, she was born a slave. She was serving in the house of her biological father, who was not acting as a father, until she was 16 years old. At that time, perhaps out of remorse or some interest, her father gave her the freedom, her surname and her dowry to marry. She got married and had a son. And everything seems to indicate that she accepted the marriage to achieve freedom, because as soon as her son was born, she gave him up for adoption and abandoned her husband.
Elena de Céspedes
For a few years she traveled through various towns, earning a living with what came her way:weaver, darner, knitter... until she reappeared in 1568 in the Alpujarras, as a soldier of the king sent to quell the Moorish rebellion. Logically, here it was no longer Elena de Céspedes, but Eleno de Céspedes, the mulatto Céspedes or, simply, Céspedes. Elena did not change her appearance to join the army, but she did it because he felt like a man. He was a transsexual, a man trapped in a woman's body. And from that moment on, she acted like a man. Of course, a beardless man with an effeminate voice that raised many suspicions. Defeated the Moors, he traveled to Madrid, recently named the capital of Spain and with many opportunities, where he began to earn a living as a tailor, a job closely related to his previous jobs but more masculine. And it did not go badly for him, until a Court surgeon crossed his path, with whom he struck up a great friendship, who opened his eyes to his true vocation:surgery. Seeing Eleno's unusual interest, his new friend lent him books to read, acted as a private teacher and even allowed him to help him in his interventions. Within a few years, Eleno, though without a degree, looked like a professional surgeon. Knowing that he would have a difficult time there, he moved to El Escorial, an incipient town after Felipe II set his sights on it, to exercise his new job. And things would go wrong again:a neighbor, who knew him from his time in Madrid, denounced him for practicing without a title. Without a problem, he returned to Madrid and got the title, becoming the first female surgeon in the history of this country . Well, in everyone's eyes he was a man. Needless to say, as a woman, it would have been impossible, since we are in a time when women could not practice certain professions, and this was one of them.
And how was his private life?
Well, he had several relationships with women, nothing serious, and it is said that he cheated on them because he was carrying a kind of dildo with which he replaced his physical deficiencies in relation to the flesh. Until he found love. The lucky or unlucky one, depending on how you look at it, was María del Caño . After a brief but intense romance, he asked her to marry him and she said… yes, I do. But first, he had to pass the cotton test:he had to demonstrate that he had all the anatomical attributes necessary to be able to enter into a canonical marriage, whose basic purpose was none other than to procreate. His appearance and his voice caused doubt and it was thought that he could be a “capon”, a fact that would have meant the denial of the matrimonial dispensation. And it passed the test!!! On May 11, 1586 they got married in Yepes (Toledo) and they were happy and ate partridges… just one year. Another acquaintance from his time in the Alpujarras denounced him for pretending to be a man, being a woman, and practicing as a surgeon - his suspicions accompanied him throughout his life. And not only that, when he pulled the thread it was discovered that he had been married before and, being accused of bigamy, in addition to sodomy and mocking the Church, his case was passed on to the Toledo Inquisition. And here he had to pass an exam again, this time much more exhaustive, which resulted in her being a woman.
So how did he pass the first test of masculinity? Well, there are three versions:first, that he bribed the person who had to examine him; second, that, being an excellent surgeon, because she was, she implanted herself the male genitalia of a dead man to pass the test and then get rid of them; and third, Elena's version:she was a hermaphrodite. According to her, after giving birth to her son, a penis was born that he still had when he married María - that's why he passed the test of masculinity - and that, after the marriage, the member became ill and, faced with the possibility of extending the infection, it was amputated. In her defense of the accusation of bigamy, she argued that her husband had died, but no death certificate was found. For the Inquisition there was no doubt...
It is clear that Elena, taking advantage of her more than solvent medical knowledge, had prepared some type of device through which to convince the witnesses about her masculine condition. In our opinion, she may well have used the genitalia of a recently deceased corpse, in order to exhibit them in the place where her own, female, were. We are thinking about the possibility of sewing them up for the duration of the scans, and then quickly removing them.
And so she accused him of…
Usurpation of the masculine habit and the prerogatives of the man, that of making fun of the sacrament of marriage, but above all the crime of sodomy against another woman, whom he had deflowered with an instrument that simulated the virile member.
Elena was sentenced to receive a hundred lashes in the Plaza de Toledo, another hundred before the church of Yepes, where she had married María, and destined to work, as a woman of course, for ten years in a hospital and without receiving any salary. By the way, her case had become so popular that the director of the hospital asked the Inquisition to transfer him to another because it had become a sideshow. They all wanted to see her. Had they had cell phones of hers in the 16th century, everyone would have asked her for a selfie.
Elena showed that a woman could be a great surgeon and, furthermore, that she was a very intelligent woman. Elena knew that she could not confess that she felt like a man trapped in a woman's body -a transsexual, if that term had existed at the time-, a sin that should not even be in the inquisitor's manual but that, surely, It would have brought him the death penalty accused of having sold his soul to the devil or something like that. So, following Elena's script, María, who managed to get out, played the role of innocence - she said that they slept with the light off and that, as a good Christian, she had never seen his penis and, much less, daring to touch-, and Elena that of ambiguity, pulling from the classics and taking advantage of any text that evidenced other cases of hermaphroditism throughout history.