Book review: François-Timoléon de Choisy, Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme

François-Timoléon, abbé de Choisy (1644-1724) was the youngest child of a fairly high French government official and an ambitious and somewhat mercenary socialite mother. De Choisy was born in the first years of the reign of the then-child Louis XIV. Louis’ younger brother Philippe was encouraged to wear female dress as a child to make him less of a dynastic rival; and de Choisy’s mother raised her youngest child, biologically male, in female dress as well, as a playmate for Philippe.
For the rest of her life, François-Timoléon de Choisy preferred female dress and roles whenever it could be gotten away with, and at multiple moments more or less ran away in order to fully live as a woman: the current book (published posthumously) recounts some episodes of her life in which she was successful in doing so.

( In our contemporary terms... )