Claude Cahun was a gender non-conforming Jewish surrealist artist who protested the rise of facism, and used poetry as a weapon for anti-Nazi resistance during World War II, along with their partner, Marcel Moore.

Cahun was born in 1894 to a family of creative and intellectual figures in France, and was raised mostly by their grandmother; their mother was institutionalized for acute mental illness. Cahun was living with anorexia, depression, and suicidal ideation during their teenage years, around the time they met Marcel Moore, their lifelong partner.

The two fell in love and moved to Paris when Dadaism was at its height in 1919. They adopted the mentioned ‘gender-neutral’ names, and interacted with Parisian avant-garde who were also breaking gender constructs.

“Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation,” Cahun wrote in Disavowels, their autobiography. “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

Cahun studied literature and philosophy, and the couple would host events inviting avant-garde writers and artists. In the 1930s they moved to Jersey, an island in France, disguised as non-Jewish, and produced and distributed anti-Nazi propoganda.

“They slipped anti-fascist poems into the pockets of soldiers as they walked past them on parade. Moore spoke fluent German, so they would write fake letters pretending to be disgruntled soldiers, urging the new recruits to desert. They stole propaganda posters and cut them up into resistance flyers, which they hid inside cigarette boxes and left around town for soldiers to find… By the time they were caught in 1944, the German forces were convinced that Jersey was home to a full-on resistance movement, never suspecting it was all the work of a pair of middle-aged, eccentric ‘sisters,’” columnist Hugh Ryan writes.