Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky Listener, Discretion is advised. In seventeen seventy one, the London Stock Exchange introduced a betting pool at three two odds that the notorious cultural figure the Chevalier Dion, whose long resume onto that point included stints as a diplomat, spy, soldier and political writer, was biologically a woman. This was an actual betting pool that people bet actual money on. The interest in the Chevalier des Genitalia became so frenzied that for a period of time John couldn't leave her home without armed guards because of all the strangers who were trying to physically rip her clothes off and expose whatever was beneath, presumably to their financial advantage. After a year, the betting pool was abandoned because no progress was made on actually coming up with a determination that was deemed satisfactory. If you can possibly believe it, Dion wasn't willing to undergo a public physical examination. But Dion's gender expression became such a topic of public interest in the eighteenth century that the Court of the King's Bench in England, and then ultimately the French government would weigh in to issue formal declarations that she was in fact a woman and would and should be publicly treated as such. The Chevalier Deon is one of history's most compelling and confounding figures, sometimes regarded as a proto queer figure, the namesake for a number of groups that support the transgender community. She is sometimes incorrectly recognized as the first openly transgender person in Europe, but that declaration is both an oversimplification of the Chevalier and a fundamental misunderstanding of gender expression. Throughout history, trans people have existed as long as people have existed, and certainly the Chevalier Dion would not have thought of herself as transgender, nor would she have had the vocabulary to do so so. Perhaps understandably, there's plenty of confusion and a good amount of disagreement, even among prominent historians about the appropriate pronouns to use when we're talking about the Chevalier personally. With the research and reading I've done, I've decided to use female pronouns continually throughout the episode. Just as the London Stock Exchange discovered barring an inspection of a now corpses genitals. There's no quote unquote right answer for the chevalier biological sex, and to me, even thinking along those terms is well a little gross and intrusive, not to mention, as you'll find out later on, pretty unhelpful in the end. So what we do actually know about the Chevalier is that she spent the last three and a half decades of her life making it very clear on an official and on a personal level that she was a woman and wanted to be treated as such. It feels like the very least I can do as a podcaster telling her story to take her at her word there. During her lifetime, the Chevalier was celebrated by contemporary feminist thinkers like A. Lump de Gorge and Mary wolf Stonecraft. In her vindication of the rights of women, wolf Stonecraft specifically include Dion as an example of a woman who was able to succeed in a man's world. Wolf Stonecraft rights, I shall not lay any great stress upon the example of a few women, sappho Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame Dion, et cetera. These and many more, maybe reckoned exceptions and are not all heroes as well as heroine's exceptions to general rules. I wish to see women neither heroin nor brutes, but reasonable creatures who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution. The Chevalier's life would have been filled with intrigue and scandal and more than a few international incidents, even if she hadn't also been a walking example of this strange performance of gender, both in the eighteenth century and today. I'm Danis Schwartz and this is noble blood. The figure who had come to be best known as the Chevalier Dion was assigned male at birth when she was born on October five, seventy eight into North France, a little town tucked into the hills of the wine regions of Burgundy. Her being assigned male delighted her father. They were a noble family, but noble and poor, a terrible combination. Once the Chevalier's father had a son his own air, he was entitled to a certain inheritance from his in laws. Physically, the Chevalier Deon remained small her entire life, five ft and four inches tall, with long legs, blue eyes, and a voice that was high pitched enough that it was remarked upon presenting as a man as her father's. There, Dion studied civil and canon law to become a lawyer like her father. She graduated from College Mazzara at age twenty one in seventeen forty nine. Over the next five years, like many other young, intelligent literary people, Dion made a name for herself as a political writer, one successful enough that she even gained some notoriety. Her career was also enough to propel her into a prominent job working as a secretary for a number of high ranking court officials and as an official royal censor for history and literature, and then ultimately she got a job as the secretary of the diplomat sent down behalf of France to the court of the Russian Empress Elizabeth. Or at least that was what Dion was doing in Russia officially. Unofficially, she was working as an agent of the top secret spy network known as the Secret of the King or Secrete de Rouix. The group was so secret that there were officials in the actual government who didn't know what existed. The point of the Secrete de Rua was to serve the King Louis fift exclusively so that he could operate in certain foreign spears without involving France as a whole. Sometimes, like in Russia, the task of the Secrete de Rua ran contrary to the officially stated French diplomatic goals. The king's plan, as Deon later recounted, it was to put his cousin, the Prince de Conti, on the Polish throne so that Poland could operate as a satellite French nation, and so Deon was meant to make nice with embrass Elizabeth of Russia, to help foster good relationships with her and to undermine Habsburg power in the area. There's very little corroborative documentation about Dion's time in Russia, possibly because some of it was in a secret capacity, so for some details we have to rely exclusively on her own, possibly embellished memoirs written later in life. According to Dion, at the time she was sent to Russia, the English were attempting to restrict French access to the Russian court, and so they were only allowing women and children across the border. So in order to complete her mission, Dion took on the disguise of a woman, a woman named Lea de Beaumont, Dion passed as a woman and then passed across the border. This is, according to Dion's memoirs, the first instance of her publicly presenting as a woman for political purposes in this case, but to ultimately positive effect. It's also worth pointing out that Empress Elizabeth's court in Russia was a place where cross dressing was a common and delighted in form of entertainment. The Empress through weakly cross dressing parties called metamorphosis balls, in which men arrived in petticoats and Elizabeth herself showed off her figure in men's riding oaths. As a young future Catherine the Great would write of these parties, quote, the only woman who looked really well and completely a man was the Empress herself, As she was tall and powerful. Male attire suited her. She had the handsomest leg I had ever seen. Some people say Empress Elizabeth just wanted to throw these parties because she was tired of hiding her handsomest leg underneath voluminous women's petticoats. By all accounts, Dion dazzled in her post, but she was ultimately withdrawn from Russia. When France was pulled into a more immediate international conflict, the Seven Years War with England, John was made a captain of dragoons and fought valiantly, distinguishing herself enough that she was made the secretary to the Duke of Vernay and was deployed to London to assist in the drafting of the peace treaty. When the war ended in seventeen sixty three, Dionu received the Order of Salouis and was granted the title of Chevalier, the French equivalent of a knighthood. She was only thirty five years old, and she was going to continue to be incredibly useful to the king. After the Seven Years War, France was in fragile condition. It had been stripped of its North American colonies, and it was saddled now with two things, enormous debts and a hatred of the English. The Secrete de Rouix had a new goal to see if invading Britain was a thing that might be on the horizon. Dion was given a post as a temporary liaison to the English court, a short term diplomatic job, while the real ambassador to England was being appointed secretly on the orders of King Louis the fifteenth. Her job was also to scope out the English coast line to see if there was a place that would lend itself to a French invasion. But our former good soldier Dion wasted very little time becoming a thorn in the King's side. She had expensive tastes, and she was formally reprimanded for importing too much expensive wine on France's dying, which would have been troublesome at any time, but was especially impudent when France was cash strapped and deeply in debt from the war. But Dion was about to cause more trouble than just buying wine. Soon enough, the real official ambassador to England was appointed, and Dion was politely told to vacate the position. The official ambassador was a man named Comte de Guerchi, who had almost no diplomatic experience and even fewer friends. He was a mediocre bureaucrat, and as soon as he arrived, Dion was to be demoted to serve as his secretary, even though Dion outranked him as a member of the secret In short, it was an outrage not to be abided, and Dion said as much in the numerous letters that she wrote back to France, saying that it was an insult that she was expected to vacate the ambassador position for someone as unqualified and unlikable as the Comte. Later do All would also write that she believed that she was being sabotaged back in France by the King's favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who was threatened by anyone but her having prominent influence over the King. Dion was fired for insolence and given two weeks to pack her bags and come back to France. At this point, she knew she was in trouble. Poor low ranking nobleman could be thrown into the best deal for less than what she did. She wouldn't be returning back to France for a party with sparkling grape juice in the office kitchen, and so de All made the decision to just not. She just didn't return to France. Louis was outraged, of course, and he demanded that Dion be extradited, but the French Foreign Minister just shrugged and said that Dion was welcome to stay in Britain as a private citizen. The French crown went so far as you tried to physically kidnap Dion and bring her back to France, all to no avail. Without a country or any real political protection, d a made an incredibly risky decision, the nuclear option. She published a book of state secrets, full of all of her correspondent through her service in the secret Dubrois, with plenty of salacious details and the promise that this was just the first volume of many, that there were even more scandalous secrets on the way. It was, like I said, a risky strategy. But when that paid off. Without political protection, Dion turned to the protection of celebrity and fame, the protective bubble of attention and the adoration of the British people for this woman who basically just betrayed the French government, Dion became an overnight international celebrity, the person everyone was talking about the next morning at the water cooler, so to speak. She was the main character of European politics for fifteen minutes. In Gary Cates's biography Monsieur Dion as a Woman, the writer includes a contemporary letter from a sixteen year old girl writing to a friend, astounded by Dion's impudence. As for Dion's implicit blackmail to spell more French secrets, that worked too, because she hadn't included the worst of King Louis secrets. Louis the fifteen quietly awarded a lifelong pension of twelve thousand livres in exchange for the promise that she would withhold the most incriminating secrets, and maybe the promise that she would continue to pass along some reports on British politics as long as she was over in England. Dion was in exile in an uneasy truce with the French crown, but certainly not permitted to return to France, and so she began her life in exile in England as a political celebrity. It's also about now that the rumors started, rumors that were possibly started but almost certainly fueled by Dion herself, that that scandalous French expat who had up until this point presented as a man, was actually a woman. This is when the betting pool came about, and the hordes of frenzied gamblers, desperate to examine Dion's genitalia by assaulting her in the street. Dion, for her part, kept coyly mum, continuing to present as a man until finally an investigator arrived on behalf of the French government trying to discover the truth. At this point, Dion sighed and became clean. Yes, she actually was a woman. She had been born a woman biologically, but was raised as a son because her tyrannical father was desperate to have an heir. In seventeen seventy seven, when Dion was forty nine years old, the Court of the King's Bench made its formal declaration on behalf of the English government from Westminster that yes, the figure who had been known up until that point as Monsieur Dion was actually a mademoiselle. Quote, she who had called herself the Chevalier Dion until that day, was an individual who did not possess with the Appalachian man promist and that she was quote a virago disguised in a uniform. It was actually all part of an astonishingly clever roots on the part of Dion, as Hugh Ryan wrote for the website Them Dots, By claiming that she had secretly been a woman all along, disguised as a man, Dion was allowed to publicly transition in a way that never would have otherwise been socially acceptable. But by framing it as coming clean, not only was her transition acceptable, it was celebrated, met with absolutely no loss of status. Here she was a good Christian woman who could no longer live a lie, who had pretended to be a man this entire time in noble service to the French king. Now living as herself, Dion's goal was to return to France as a heroine. A few years prior, King Louis the fift died and his ransom Louis the sixteenth, had taken the throne. Louis the sixteenth had no ambitions to invade Britain, and he also did not see the need for duel foreign services, and so the Secrete de rule was abolished and Dion's pension along with it. It took fourteen months of negotiation between Louis the sixteenth representative and Dia to negotiate her return to France, but ultimately the terms were settled with an agreement that came to be known as the Transaction, which allowed Dion's return to France, stipulating that she would henceforth present as a woman, though she would still be allowed to wear the insignia of the Order of San Louis. Her title was changed from Chevalier to Chevalier, making her the first female knight, and even though Dion wanted to continue to wear her dragoon uniform, the king wouldn't allow it, and so the transaction also provided funds for new outfits from Marie Antoinette's dressmaker, Rose Bertie. On November one, Mademoiselle le Chevalier Deon emerged from a four hour twilet in an elaborate dress with a powdered wig and a face full of makeup to be formally presented at Versailles. It was a rebirth of sorts. She had returned to France, and she had returned as herself. Unfortunately, Dion was about to learn a terrible lesson about what it meant to be a woman in the seventeen hundreds, In a word, boring. For an unmarried, relatively poor noble woman, French court offered very little to do. There was sitting around getting dressed, chatting, maybe playing cards for a woman who had spent the earlier decades of her life traveling the world as an international spy slash diplomat slash enfonte reblay of the political world. Being a lady sitting around in petticoats was mind numbing. When France joined the American Colonies revolution against the English, Deon tried to put on her dragoon uniform again and fight. She suggested that she could assemble an all female battalion. The French government suggested that she joined a convent. She was so insistent in her ambitions to join the war efforts that ultimately Dion was arrested and then imprisoned in the dungeon below the Chateau of Dijon for nineteen days, upon which she was released as long as she promised to shut up about the whole wanting to go into battle thing. Disheartened, Dion returned to England. She said it was just temporary to settle some business, but it became fairly clear that she had no intention of returning to France. At least in England, she was able to escape some of the restrictions of the highly rigid French court, and soon she would have no choice but to stay in London. The French Revolution broke out, and though Dion was safe in England, her small pension was lost, as was all of her family property Intinair. Now a woman in her sixties, Dion was impoverished, forced to sell her possessions and her vast collection of books to get by. Her main form of income was dawning her full dress and participating in public fencing demonstrations where she would best men, but her short career as a fencing performer ended at age sixty eight with an injury. At this point, for financial reasons, Dion was forced to take a roommate, an old widow named Mrs Cole ms. This Cole was the one who would go on to discover Dion's dead body just a few years after Dion was paralyzed from a fall the Chevalier. Dion died at eighty one years old, impoverished, though Dion had spent the last thirty three years of her life living as a woman, Upon her death, Mrs Cole pulled back the bed sheets to reveal that Dion had male genitalia, although it was also noted that Dion had certain female sex characteristics. None of that information feels very relevant or scientific to me, but contemporary historians suggest that Dion might have been biologically intersex. In the end, that feels far less important and far less relevant to the realities of Dion's actual life, the way she lived presenting as a man, which granted her the access and opportunities of education, and then cleverly pretending that she had been a cross dressing man her entire her life, so that she could publicly transition and live as a woman. The famous feminist Mary Wolstonecraft, thought of as a woman on par with Sappho, and the famous letter writer Eloise or Eloisa Dion both defied and defined modern conventions of gender. It's a strange fallacy that people assume trans people are a new phenomenon. The vocabulary might be new, but presentations of gender throughout history are much more varied and more nebulous than some people seem desperate to keep believing. The Servali Deon became an international celebrity presenting as a man, and then she did it again, backwards and inhales. That's the story of the Chevalier Dion. But continue listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about her legacy. A portrait of the Chevalier d'on now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, featuring Dion with a full head of curls and a gown and a hat with a tricolor ribbon, meant to show her support for the French revolutionaries. The announcement about the portraits, purchased back in twenty sixteen, is wildly let's say, casual in its language, with the Guardian mis gendering her and switching seemingly at random between pronouns. At the end of her life, Dion was buried in a private plot at Saint Pancras, although her grave was lost when the church was constructed into a train station. Maybe it's symbolically resonant. Her soul is in a place of change and departure, where no one has to stay in the same place for too long. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Monkey. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky Listener, Discretion is advised. In seventeen seventy one, the London Stock Exchange introduced a betting pool at three two odds that the notorious cultural figure the Chevalier Dion, whose long resume onto that point included stints as a diplomat, spy, soldier and political writer, was biologically a woman. This was an actual betting pool that people bet actual money on. The interest in the Chevalier des Genitalia became so frenzied that for a period of time John couldn't leave her home without armed guards because of all the strangers who were trying to physically rip her clothes off and expose whatever was beneath, presumably to their financial advantage. After a year, the betting pool was abandoned because no progress was made on actually coming up with a determination that was deemed satisfactory. If you can possibly believe it, Dion wasn't willing to undergo a public physical examination. But Dion's gender expression became such a topic of public interest in the eighteenth century that the Court of the King's Bench in England, and then ultimately the French government would weigh in to issue formal declarations that she was in fact a woman and would and should be publicly treated as such. The Chevalier Deon is one of history's most compelling and confounding figures, sometimes regarded as a proto queer figure, the namesake for a number of groups that support the transgender community. She is sometimes incorrectly recognized as the first openly transgender person in Europe, but that declaration is both an oversimplification of the Chevalier and a fundamental misunderstanding of gender expression. Throughout history, trans people have existed as long as people have existed, and certainly the Chevalier Dion would not have thought of herself as transgender, nor would she have had the vocabulary to do so so. Perhaps understandably, there's plenty of confusion and a good amount of disagreement, even among prominent historians about the appropriate pronouns to use when we're talking about the Chevalier personally. With the research and reading I've done, I've decided to use female pronouns continually throughout the episode. Just as the London Stock Exchange discovered barring an inspection of a now corpses genitals. There's no quote unquote right answer for the chevalier biological sex, and to me, even thinking along those terms is well a little gross and intrusive, not to mention, as you'll find out later on, pretty unhelpful in the end. So what we do actually know about the Chevalier is that she spent the last three and a half decades of her life making it very clear on an official and on a personal level that she was a woman and wanted to be treated as such. It feels like the very least I can do as a podcaster telling her story to take her at her word there. During her lifetime, the Chevalier was celebrated by contemporary feminist thinkers like A. Lump de Gorge and Mary wolf Stonecraft. In her vindication of the rights of women, wolf Stonecraft specifically include Dion as an example of a woman who was able to succeed in a man's world. Wolf Stonecraft rights, I shall not lay any great stress upon the example of a few women, sappho Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame Dion, et cetera. These and many more, maybe reckoned exceptions and are not all heroes as well as heroine's exceptions to general rules. I wish to see women neither heroin nor brutes, but reasonable creatures who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution. The Chevalier's life would have been filled with intrigue and scandal and more than a few international incidents, even if she hadn't also been a walking example of this strange performance of gender, both in the eighteenth century and today. I'm Danis Schwartz and this is noble blood. The figure who had come to be best known as the Chevalier Dion was assigned male at birth when she was born on October five, seventy eight into North France, a little town tucked into the hills of the wine regions of Burgundy. Her being assigned male delighted her father. They were a noble family, but noble and poor, a terrible combination. Once the Chevalier's father had a son his own air, he was entitled to a certain inheritance from his in laws. Physically, the Chevalier Deon remained small her entire life, five ft and four inches tall, with long legs, blue eyes, and a voice that was high pitched enough that it was remarked upon presenting as a man as her father's. There, Dion studied civil and canon law to become a lawyer like her father. She graduated from College Mazzara at age twenty one in seventeen forty nine. Over the next five years, like many other young, intelligent literary people, Dion made a name for herself as a political writer, one successful enough that she even gained some notoriety. Her career was also enough to propel her into a prominent job working as a secretary for a number of high ranking court officials and as an official royal censor for history and literature, and then ultimately she got a job as the secretary of the diplomat sent down behalf of France to the court of the Russian Empress Elizabeth. Or at least that was what Dion was doing in Russia officially. Unofficially, she was working as an agent of the top secret spy network known as the Secret of the King or Secrete de Rouix. The group was so secret that there were officials in the actual government who didn't know what existed. The point of the Secrete de Rua was to serve the King Louis fift exclusively so that he could operate in certain foreign spears without involving France as a whole. Sometimes, like in Russia, the task of the Secrete de Rua ran contrary to the officially stated French diplomatic goals. The king's plan, as Deon later recounted, it was to put his cousin, the Prince de Conti, on the Polish throne so that Poland could operate as a satellite French nation, and so Deon was meant to make nice with embrass Elizabeth of Russia, to help foster good relationships with her and to undermine Habsburg power in the area. There's very little corroborative documentation about Dion's time in Russia, possibly because some of it was in a secret capacity, so for some details we have to rely exclusively on her own, possibly embellished memoirs written later in life. According to Dion, at the time she was sent to Russia, the English were attempting to restrict French access to the Russian court, and so they were only allowing women and children across the border. So in order to complete her mission, Dion took on the disguise of a woman, a woman named Lea de Beaumont, Dion passed as a woman and then passed across the border. This is, according to Dion's memoirs, the first instance of her publicly presenting as a woman for political purposes in this case, but to ultimately positive effect. It's also worth pointing out that Empress Elizabeth's court in Russia was a place where cross dressing was a common and delighted in form of entertainment. The Empress through weakly cross dressing parties called metamorphosis balls, in which men arrived in petticoats and Elizabeth herself showed off her figure in men's riding oaths. As a young future Catherine the Great would write of these parties, quote, the only woman who looked really well and completely a man was the Empress herself, As she was tall and powerful. Male attire suited her. She had the handsomest leg I had ever seen. Some people say Empress Elizabeth just wanted to throw these parties because she was tired of hiding her handsomest leg underneath voluminous women's petticoats. By all accounts, Dion dazzled in her post, but she was ultimately withdrawn from Russia. When France was pulled into a more immediate international conflict, the Seven Years War with England, John was made a captain of dragoons and fought valiantly, distinguishing herself enough that she was made the secretary to the Duke of Vernay and was deployed to London to assist in the drafting of the peace treaty. When the war ended in seventeen sixty three, Dionu received the Order of Salouis and was granted the title of Chevalier, the French equivalent of a knighthood. She was only thirty five years old, and she was going to continue to be incredibly useful to the king. After the Seven Years War, France was in fragile condition. It had been stripped of its North American colonies, and it was saddled now with two things, enormous debts and a hatred of the English. The Secrete de Rouix had a new goal to see if invading Britain was a thing that might be on the horizon. Dion was given a post as a temporary liaison to the English court, a short term diplomatic job, while the real ambassador to England was being appointed secretly on the orders of King Louis the fifteenth. Her job was also to scope out the English coast line to see if there was a place that would lend itself to a French invasion. But our former good soldier Dion wasted very little time becoming a thorn in the King's side. She had expensive tastes, and she was formally reprimanded for importing too much expensive wine on France's dying, which would have been troublesome at any time, but was especially impudent when France was cash strapped and deeply in debt from the war. But Dion was about to cause more trouble than just buying wine. Soon enough, the real official ambassador to England was appointed, and Dion was politely told to vacate the position. The official ambassador was a man named Comte de Guerchi, who had almost no diplomatic experience and even fewer friends. He was a mediocre bureaucrat, and as soon as he arrived, Dion was to be demoted to serve as his secretary, even though Dion outranked him as a member of the secret In short, it was an outrage not to be abided, and Dion said as much in the numerous letters that she wrote back to France, saying that it was an insult that she was expected to vacate the ambassador position for someone as unqualified and unlikable as the Comte. Later do All would also write that she believed that she was being sabotaged back in France by the King's favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who was threatened by anyone but her having prominent influence over the King. Dion was fired for insolence and given two weeks to pack her bags and come back to France. At this point, she knew she was in trouble. Poor low ranking nobleman could be thrown into the best deal for less than what she did. She wouldn't be returning back to France for a party with sparkling grape juice in the office kitchen, and so de All made the decision to just not. She just didn't return to France. Louis was outraged, of course, and he demanded that Dion be extradited, but the French Foreign Minister just shrugged and said that Dion was welcome to stay in Britain as a private citizen. The French crown went so far as you tried to physically kidnap Dion and bring her back to France, all to no avail. Without a country or any real political protection, d a made an incredibly risky decision, the nuclear option. She published a book of state secrets, full of all of her correspondent through her service in the secret Dubrois, with plenty of salacious details and the promise that this was just the first volume of many, that there were even more scandalous secrets on the way. It was, like I said, a risky strategy. But when that paid off. Without political protection, Dion turned to the protection of celebrity and fame, the protective bubble of attention and the adoration of the British people for this woman who basically just betrayed the French government, Dion became an overnight international celebrity, the person everyone was talking about the next morning at the water cooler, so to speak. She was the main character of European politics for fifteen minutes. In Gary Cates's biography Monsieur Dion as a Woman, the writer includes a contemporary letter from a sixteen year old girl writing to a friend, astounded by Dion's impudence. As for Dion's implicit blackmail to spell more French secrets, that worked too, because she hadn't included the worst of King Louis secrets. Louis the fifteen quietly awarded a lifelong pension of twelve thousand livres in exchange for the promise that she would withhold the most incriminating secrets, and maybe the promise that she would continue to pass along some reports on British politics as long as she was over in England. Dion was in exile in an uneasy truce with the French crown, but certainly not permitted to return to France, and so she began her life in exile in England as a political celebrity. It's also about now that the rumors started, rumors that were possibly started but almost certainly fueled by Dion herself, that that scandalous French expat who had up until this point presented as a man, was actually a woman. This is when the betting pool came about, and the hordes of frenzied gamblers, desperate to examine Dion's genitalia by assaulting her in the street. Dion, for her part, kept coyly mum, continuing to present as a man until finally an investigator arrived on behalf of the French government trying to discover the truth. At this point, Dion sighed and became clean. Yes, she actually was a woman. She had been born a woman biologically, but was raised as a son because her tyrannical father was desperate to have an heir. In seventeen seventy seven, when Dion was forty nine years old, the Court of the King's Bench made its formal declaration on behalf of the English government from Westminster that yes, the figure who had been known up until that point as Monsieur Dion was actually a mademoiselle. Quote, she who had called herself the Chevalier Dion until that day, was an individual who did not possess with the Appalachian man promist and that she was quote a virago disguised in a uniform. It was actually all part of an astonishingly clever roots on the part of Dion, as Hugh Ryan wrote for the website Them Dots, By claiming that she had secretly been a woman all along, disguised as a man, Dion was allowed to publicly transition in a way that never would have otherwise been socially acceptable. But by framing it as coming clean, not only was her transition acceptable, it was celebrated, met with absolutely no loss of status. Here she was a good Christian woman who could no longer live a lie, who had pretended to be a man this entire time in noble service to the French king. Now living as herself, Dion's goal was to return to France as a heroine. A few years prior, King Louis the fift died and his ransom Louis the sixteenth, had taken the throne. Louis the sixteenth had no ambitions to invade Britain, and he also did not see the need for duel foreign services, and so the Secrete de rule was abolished and Dion's pension along with it. It took fourteen months of negotiation between Louis the sixteenth representative and Dia to negotiate her return to France, but ultimately the terms were settled with an agreement that came to be known as the Transaction, which allowed Dion's return to France, stipulating that she would henceforth present as a woman, though she would still be allowed to wear the insignia of the Order of San Louis. Her title was changed from Chevalier to Chevalier, making her the first female knight, and even though Dion wanted to continue to wear her dragoon uniform, the king wouldn't allow it, and so the transaction also provided funds for new outfits from Marie Antoinette's dressmaker, Rose Bertie. On November one, Mademoiselle le Chevalier Deon emerged from a four hour twilet in an elaborate dress with a powdered wig and a face full of makeup to be formally presented at Versailles. It was a rebirth of sorts. She had returned to France, and she had returned as herself. Unfortunately, Dion was about to learn a terrible lesson about what it meant to be a woman in the seventeen hundreds, In a word, boring. For an unmarried, relatively poor noble woman, French court offered very little to do. There was sitting around getting dressed, chatting, maybe playing cards for a woman who had spent the earlier decades of her life traveling the world as an international spy slash diplomat slash enfonte reblay of the political world. Being a lady sitting around in petticoats was mind numbing. When France joined the American Colonies revolution against the English, Deon tried to put on her dragoon uniform again and fight. She suggested that she could assemble an all female battalion. The French government suggested that she joined a convent. She was so insistent in her ambitions to join the war efforts that ultimately Dion was arrested and then imprisoned in the dungeon below the Chateau of Dijon for nineteen days, upon which she was released as long as she promised to shut up about the whole wanting to go into battle thing. Disheartened, Dion returned to England. She said it was just temporary to settle some business, but it became fairly clear that she had no intention of returning to France. At least in England, she was able to escape some of the restrictions of the highly rigid French court, and soon she would have no choice but to stay in London. The French Revolution broke out, and though Dion was safe in England, her small pension was lost, as was all of her family property Intinair. Now a woman in her sixties, Dion was impoverished, forced to sell her possessions and her vast collection of books to get by. Her main form of income was dawning her full dress and participating in public fencing demonstrations where she would best men, but her short career as a fencing performer ended at age sixty eight with an injury. At this point, for financial reasons, Dion was forced to take a roommate, an old widow named Mrs Cole ms. This Cole was the one who would go on to discover Dion's dead body just a few years after Dion was paralyzed from a fall the Chevalier. Dion died at eighty one years old, impoverished, though Dion had spent the last thirty three years of her life living as a woman, Upon her death, Mrs Cole pulled back the bed sheets to reveal that Dion had male genitalia, although it was also noted that Dion had certain female sex characteristics. None of that information feels very relevant or scientific to me, but contemporary historians suggest that Dion might have been biologically intersex. In the end, that feels far less important and far less relevant to the realities of Dion's actual life, the way she lived presenting as a man, which granted her the access and opportunities of education, and then cleverly pretending that she had been a cross dressing man her entire her life, so that she could publicly transition and live as a woman. The famous feminist Mary Wolstonecraft, thought of as a woman on par with Sappho, and the famous letter writer Eloise or Eloisa Dion both defied and defined modern conventions of gender. It's a strange fallacy that people assume trans people are a new phenomenon. The vocabulary might be new, but presentations of gender throughout history are much more varied and more nebulous than some people seem desperate to keep believing. The Servali Deon became an international celebrity presenting as a man, and then she did it again, backwards and inhales. That's the story of the Chevalier Dion. But continue listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about her legacy. A portrait of the Chevalier d'on now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, featuring Dion with a full head of curls and a gown and a hat with a tricolor ribbon, meant to show her support for the French revolutionaries. The announcement about the portraits, purchased back in twenty sixteen, is wildly let's say, casual in its language, with the Guardian mis gendering her and switching seemingly at random between pronouns. At the end of her life, Dion was buried in a private plot at Saint Pancras, although her grave was lost when the church was constructed into a train station. Maybe it's symbolically resonant. Her soul is in a place of change and departure, where no one has to stay in the same place for too long. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Monkey. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M