The Life and Legacy of Coccinelle
The French star who became a trans icon and cultural pioneer
The effects of the Great Depression struck Paris in 1931, bringing an end to the economic and artistic boom that had characterised Paris during the interwar years, often known as ‘les années folles’. That same year, a rare ray of light in an otherwise gloomy period shone through: the child who would grow up to become Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy, better known by her stage name Coccinelle (Ladybird), was born.
Raised in the Temple district of Paris, nearby to what is now the thriving gay nightlife of the Marais, at the age of four Dufresnoy reported her sense that something was wrong with the gender she had been assigned at birth. She was not born to an affluent family, and her first job was working in a hairdressing salon, which her father feared would turn the person he knew as his son into a homosexual. Her next job, however, would see her working in the vibrant cabarets of Paris.
It was as a teenager that Dufresnoy adopted the name Coccinelle after attending a fancy-dress party in a red dress adorned with black spots. This would become her stage name as a performer within the city’s thriving scene of transformistes. These transformistes were generally understood by the public as female impersonators, with some performers identifying as transvestites or seeing themselves something along the lines of what we might now recognise as drag queens. Many, though, such as Dufresnoy, clearly felt an affinity with femaleness that extended far beyond their stage personae, and a community of trans women was to form around and through this lively cabaret scene in Paris’s Pigalle district.
Coccinelle’s stage show drew on the iconic film stars of her day, particularly the style and presence of her idols Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe.
Her fascination with these figures far exceeded her performances on stage – indeed, Coccinelle’s life off-stage was also marked by theatricality, charisma and a cultivated glamour that she clearly enjoyed. Coccinelle worked firstly at the cabaret venue Chez Madame Arthur, which opened its doors on the Rue des Martyrs in the late 1940s, and then at the famous Le Carrousel de Paris, which had opened in 1947. At that time, Le Carrousel featured acts by other trans women, including the
British actress and model April Ashley and the Algerian-born performer Bambi (Mariepierre Pruvot). Some of the friendships initiated within this scene would last a lifetime, such as that between Coccinelle and Bambi – with Coccinelle reportedly telephoning her ‘Bambichette’ every Sunday during the last years of her life.
This Parisian cabaret scene was a renowned haven for transfeminine individuals; a place where their gender expression was not simply tolerated but admired and valued, even rewarded financially. The community surrounding it also provided a network of care and communication, as well as a means of sharing tips regarding possible support and medical interventions. It was from a fellow trans women who Coccinelle met while on tour in Nice that she learned of the possibilities available to her.
Following up on this lead, Coccinelle eventually became a patient of Dr Georges Burou, the French gynaecologist, whom many trans women visited at his Clinique du Parc in Casablanca, Morocco. Around this time, there were only very few such centres of medical expertise. Dr Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology, or Sexual Science) in Berlin, which provided treatment for Lili Elbe (whose story was made famous by the 2015 film The Danish Girl) and Dora Richter, was all but destroyed after Hitler came to power in 1933, its archives and library publicly burned. The Institute only re-emerged – this time in Frankfurt – in 1973. In the US, the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program in Palo Alto, California, associated with the pioneering doctor of transgender healthcare, Harry Benjamin, would not be founded until 1968. Some medical assistance for trans individuals was available in Europe: in Sweden, and in Denmark’s Copenhagen University Hospital, which provided surgical interventions for the American trans woman Christine Jorgensen in the early 1950s, after she had obtained special legal permission from the Danish Minister of Justice. In France, however, many surgeons feared prosecution if they dared to carry out innovative gender affirming surgeries, since legislation existed at the time banning ‘castration’. As a result, the first sex reassignment procedure in France (at least officially) would not take place until the late 1970s.
Dr Burou, however, pioneered surgical techniques for trans women by working in Morocco, benefitting from a relative freedom from restrictive legislation and a tightly controlled, nationalised healthcare system (such as that which existed in France). Morocco presented neither of these problems, largely because it had been a French Protectorate until 1956 when it won independence from its European colonisers. Other patients who travelled to North Africa to visit Dr Burou included the British historian and travel writer Jan Morris, author of Conundrum (1974), and the British model and actress (and Coccinelle’s fellow performer on the stages of Paris) April Ashley. Dufresnoy made her trip to Casablanca for surgery shortly after Moroccan independence in 1958, and on her return to France took the legal name Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy.
It was not long afterwards, in 1962, that Coccinelle married her first husband, the French journalist François Bonnet. Quite incredibly, the marriage was supported by the Roman Catholic Church in France, in a ceremony at the Saint Jean de Montmartre church in Paris, on the condition that Coccinelle was re-baptised a second time, now as a woman, as ‘Jacqueline’.
Coccinelle’s marriage to Bonnet effectively established a legal precedent in France, whereby trans people had the right to marry: hers was the first union between a transgender individual and another to be officially recognised by the French state. The marriage itself was very much a public affair, and it became a preoccupation of the media both within and outside of France. Coccinelle’s unabashed visibility as a trans woman and her refusal to live in either secrecy or shame is striking even by today’s standards. She refused to accept any limitations arising from her transition, and was without a doubt a pioneer in this regard. Unfortunately, the legal precedent set by Coccinelle led
(at least in the short term) to a negative response from the French state, which had not up to this point had to deal publicly with transsexuality. It began to tighten the legal loopholes and ‘blindspots’ of the French juridical system with regards to trans rights. Hormones, for instance, had previously been unregulated and readily available to buy in pharmacies, but this would soon no longer be the case. Some even argue – quite unfairly – that Coccinelle’s ‘star quality’ and the way she embraced her visibility contributed to this ‘crackdown’ by the French state on many trans practices that had previously gone under the radar.
Similarly, after the public furore surrounding her first marriage to Bonnet, trans individuals who had undergone gender reassignment surgeries like Coccinelle’s were no longer able to obtain new identity papers from French authorities as she herself had done. Even much later, in 1982, the senator Henri Caillavet proposed laws allowing trans individuals in France access to gender reassignment surgery and a change in official identity papers that legally recognised their sex, but these proposals were dismissed, despite the relatively new, socialist government led by François Mitterand being ostensibly gay friendly and progressive. This did not change until 1992, and only after the European Court of Human Rights condemned the French State’s sustained refusal over nearly two decades to award new identity documents to a trans woman who had undergone sex reassignment surgery. And while Coccinelle struggled to gain access to surgical interventions like those carried out by Dr
Burou, having to travel outside of France to do so, contemporary trans rights in France have focused on the right not to have to undergo surgery as a legal requirement to change sex. This was, in effect, the case until 2016, with trans people in France being required to undergo medical intervention amounting to sterilisation, and then having to present this evidence in front of a court, in order to change the sex recorded on their legal documentation.
Despite the lasting legacy and the publicity surrounding Coccinelle’s first
“Coccinelle’s unabashed visibility as a trans woman is striking”
marriage, the union itself was dissolved within only a couple of years. She soon married again, this time with a fellow performer, the dancer Mario Florentin Heÿns, from Paraguay. Her second husband clearly adored Coccinelle – sadly, though, he passed away in 1977.
A third marriage, this time to the trans rights activist Thierry Wilson, followed in 1996 when Coccinelle was in her midsixties and Wilson in his mid-twenties. Wilson and Coccinelle met in the late 1980s, and were together for 20 years until her death in 2006. Since Wilson is also a performer – the creator of the persona Zize Dupanier – it is no great surprise that this third and final marriage also became a spectacle. Positively embracing the inevitable media attention, the ceremony was performed live on the principal French television channel, TF1, on the programme Tout Est Possible (Anything Is Possible), funded in return for coverage by the celebrity news magazine France Dimanche. Wilson recounted in an interview after her death that Coccinelle knew the media would sense a scandal due to their age difference and actively welcomed this idea: “Or Coccinelle adorait les scandales” (Oh but how she loved a scandal).
Together, Wilson and Coccinelle founded and ran the venue Cabaret Coccinelle in Marseille, where they lived together. Coccinelle was as much an activist as she was a performer, and in many ways her unbowed visibility as a trans woman was the greatest activism she could have undertaken. The way she lived her life confronted the French state with transsexuality, which opened a necessary and evolving conversation regarding the rights of trans people. In addition to the defiant, outrageous-yet-dignified way in which Coccinelle lived her own life, she also founded the organisation Association Devenir Femme (To Become a Woman) in 1994, as well as the Centre for Aid, Research, and Information for Transsexuality and Gender Identity, both of which existed to provide support to those considering or undergoing a process of transition.
To honour her memory, a street has been named after Coccinelle in the
Pigalle area of Paris, close to the Rue des Martyrs where the club where she began her career as a performer, Chez Madame Arthur, is still open and running as a drag venue. The street sign reads: “Promenade Coccinelle (Jacqueline, Charlotte Dufresnoy) 1931-2006 Artiste de Cabaret”. This is the first street named in remembrance of a trans person in Europe, and demonstrates Coccinelle’s continued
“Her success as a performer, especially as a trans performer, is remarkable”
importance as a key figurehead of trans rights in France and beyond.
Coccinelle’s success as a performer, and especially as a trans performer, is remarkable. After the publicity of her first marriage, she went on to produce her own show, Chercher la Femme (Searching for the Woman), which ran at the Paris Olympia from 1963. In her typically up-front style, Coccinelle referenced her trans identity in her lyrics, defiant and unabashed as ever. She would later star in residencies at the renowned Chez Nous in Berlin, and then in venues across South America. She also had roles in a number of films over the years, including the Italian Europa Di Note (1959) and the Spanish
Días De Viejo Color (1968). She released recordings of her music, including a ‘Best Of’ in 2005, only a year before she died. As a performer, Coccinelle toured the world – appearing on stages from Iran to Australia, as well as in French-occupied Algeria, which is how Bambi recalls she first even heard of transsexuality. Internationally renowned, interest in her as a performer and as an individual extended far beyond France. As the historian Joanne Meyerowitz notes: “Coccinelle… inspired dozens of magazine and newspaper stories that associated her with the world of celebrity… For American MTFS, the French example served as a draw.” For many abroad, Coccinelle was the epitome of Parisian glamour and what was perceived to be the relatively free and accepting approach to gender and sexuality in the French capital.
Coccinelle’s refusal to live a life in the shadows, and her willingness to confront the state’s lack of imagination in recognising trans people’s rights, ensured that her legacy lives on today.
It is through her inimitable life and the style with which she lived that many in France, and internationally, came to learn about transsexuality, of which she became the inimitable – and immensely glamorous – public face.