D’Eon became a household name for the British – who offered the minister plenipotentiary protection for their courage in denouncing the French – while simultaneously receiving pension from Louis XV in exchange for reports on British politics.

Louis XV’s death led to another repurposing of The Secret, which no longer planned to invade Britain and d’Eon signed ‘The Transaction’ – an agreement to withhold revealing more of The Secret’s secrets, as long as the new king publicly recognized that d’Eon was a woman.

In France, d’Eon’s right to self-determination and privacy was already being violated: “The groundswell of gossip was enough that in 1771, London bookmakers started taking bets on [their] gender...The bizarre public debate made d’Eon’s life difficult; [they] couldn’t leave the house without armed guards, owing to the many people who wanted to see [them] naked, yet [their] understandable refusal to publicly reveal [their] gender prolonged the debate for years,” Linda Rodriguez Mcrobbie writes in Atlas Obscura.

D’Eon’s clothing on their return to France was policed by cisgender folks: they were made to switch from their Dragoon captain’s uniform to traditionally femme presenting clothes, styled by Marie Antionette’s clothing director Rose Bertin.

Some folks gradually recognized d’Eon for who they were, but patriarchal constructs continued to restrict them from living fully:”When d’Eon continued to demand the government allow [them] to go to war, [they were] arrested and thrown into a dungeon beneath the Chateau of Dijon. [They were] released after 19 days and the promise that [they] would stop asking. Every political effort d’Eon made from then on would be immediately quashed by the French government, who eventually forced [them] into retirement on [their] family estate in rural Tonnerre,” Mcrobbie writes.

With the French Revolution, d’Eon lost access to their pension and started sword fencing exhibitions, offering to lead an army of women before retiring after an injury.

Following their death in 1810, the public once again attempted to reduce the sword-fighting Dragoon Captain’s multitudes, through a projection of inherent gender biases of patriarchal constructs – something that continues to do wrong by them today, and countless other gender-nonconforming folks.