This installment concludes the legal document, with a verdict that is surprising in some ways and that opens as many questions as it answers. The theme throughout this whole series has been to recognize how very different historic attitudes toward non-normative gender and sexuality could be from what we might imagine. The primary sources for history sometimes have a way of upending our expectations in that way. (Although the effect can be a bit less ambiguous when considering material culture than when considering social history.) Yet it's important to remember that while the details of history may surprise us in unexpected ways, that doesn't mean that we should imagine that "anything goes." In this historic context, it might be plausible that the court would accept and reinforce the categorization of an intersex person as male and validate Grandjean's marriage to Lambert. It might be plausible that the court would accept the lawyer's arguments for recategorization regardless of Grandjean's actual physiology and validate the marriage. (We don't actually know whether the court ruled "intersex, but not male enough" or "the evidence does not support an intersex diagnosis.") But it is implausible that the court would conclude that Grandjean should be categorized as female but that the marriage should be allowed to stand. On the other hand, if the court held that same-sex desire was an unimaginable possibility, then it could be plausible that they could have directed Grandjean to return to living as female but with no restrictions on continued association with Lambert, much less with other women. Within these plausibilities and implausibilities, we can imagine the possible paths to a happy and fulfilling life that a person with non-normative sex, gender, or sexuality might have been able to find in 18th century France. Especially if they were lucky enough not to come to the scrutiny of the law.
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