In 1858, fresh from life with nuns in an orphanage school, the deeply religious Alexina Barbin comes to a coastal village to teach the village girls, where she met Sara with whom she falls in love. During their first night together, they discover that Alexina is not a woman. The revelation shocks Alexina, but not her lover, who gives her a new name, Camile. The school is scandalised by the love affaire, and Alexina, who ultimately seeks marriage and social acceptance, makes an appeal to the bishop for an official ruling on her gender. The Mystery of Alexina is based on the life of Herculine Barbin, a hermaphrodite who was assigned the gender female at birth in 1838 but was judged to be male by the time he/she turned twenty-two. The script is taken from Barbin's diary, first published in 1876 and edited by Michel Foucault in 1978 when he found them in the medical archives. From it, Foucault could draw attention to an exemplary historical instance of a 'simple soul' who found, as a last resort, a way of constructing identity through writing and hence of being extricated from, but also reinserted in, society's medical, religious and legal systems and discourses.