The easy pastoral style, the bucolic feel of the autumnal setting, the natural falling away, the sibylline turning of seasons, all suggest a certain comfort, a momentary coming to terms with transition, an acceptance of fate on the part of the Judge. The change of seasons is mimicked in the bodily transition. The mist perhaps connotes a veil, an accoutrement of desire, the accompaniment of beauty, the allure of vision naturally softened before the unveiling of the body occurs. Seduction preceding revelation. What appears most evident, however, is the trajectory back and forth between gender dysphoria and transitional relief, as also between sexes, one then the other, part and whole, bi and tri, or, as Preciado puts it, who forces one to choose? Judge Schreber, Miss Schreber, Mr Ms Dr Jur. Präsident Miss Esquire, so many prefixes and suffixes to come unfixed. When the Judge collided with his past he let his body speak, the most radical of gestures and one that exceeds the structural blindness, the binary divides of law, of morals and of medicine to this day.

There is no question that Schreber struggled and suffered, doubted and regretted at various stages as his ‘unmanning’ (Entmannung) became manifest, but it also needs to be recognised that he equally if slowly came to accept his trajectory and at times even welcomed his fate, its pleasures and hir experiences of femininity, soul voluptuousness and even blessedness. He shares both his pain and his pleasure, and throughout the Memorabilia, his text vividly tracing the trajectory and complexity of transition in the categories and performances of identity that the late nineteenth century struggled with as it lived out the Biblical generative dictum masculam et feminam fecit eos in its classical juridical form, which adds that the masculine is greater than the feminine.