Ovida Delect

Ovida Delect (24 April 1926 – 9 October 1996) was a French poet, Communist, politician and member of the French resistance during the Second World War. She was also a trans woman and wrote a two volume autobiography about her life, in which she identified similarities between her own experience and that of Christine Jorgensen. Delect starred in a documentary, which brought the experiences of trans women into the wider canon of women in French film.

Biography

Early life Delect was born in Caen on 24 April 1926. In the early 1940s, Ovida was a student at the Lycée Malherbe and lived in rue Laumonnier in Caen. According to Victoria Thérame, who stated in the preface to Delect's work , that:

". [Translation: It starts with a kid who has a kid's body and the audacity of a hero. It continues with a sixteen-year-old boy who knows he is a girl, who has strong convictions and freedom in mind.]"

Resistance and imprisonment

Whilst at Lycée Malherbe, Delect established a small resistance group with a number of other students: Roger Câtel, Bernard Duval, Bernard Boulot, Claude Lunois and Jean-Paul Mérouze. The group was attached to the National Front, a movement created by the French Communist Party (PCF). She pretended she was a member of the National Popular Youth, a branch of the National Popular Rally, presenting herself as a supporter of collaboration with the Germans. She managed to steal important files and create major disturbances in the ranks of this organization by disseminating fake news items and false information. These actions led to her being arrested by the Gestapo on 23 February 1944, together with several of her comrades. She was tortured for at least ten days at 44 rue des Jacobins, before being deported to Germany. Under torture, she did not denounce her comrades. She was deported to and imprisoned at the Neuengamme concentration camp. To survive in the Paris, she worked at what she described as “small jobs” in her biography.

During the summer of 1952 in Hyères, she met her future wife Huguette, a kindergarten teacher from Sarthe. While she did not yet go by the name Ovida publicly, she confided her identity to her friends and wife and she publicly discussed her poetic and humanist aspirations.

In 1953, Ovida read about the transition of Christine Jorgensen in the press and was reportedly shocked by the similarity between their lives. At the end of the 1960s, Delect wrote , a poetic prose novel that tells the story of a young girl under the occupation in Caen. She commented that the work was “a transposed autobiography."

Delect decided at the age of 60 to participate in the filming of a documentary directed by Françoise Romand, called . The film was broadcast in 1986. in Paris to read her poems. In her book, , Bard discussed how “with Ovida Delect […] the skirt is resisting in all senses of the word, because it was resistant all the time: like a “failed girl” in the face ... of her parents, Catholic conservatives, then as a high school student facing the occupier [...] deported to the Neuengamme camp where she survived for a year thanks to the feminine universe she maintained in her imagination".

Delect died on 9 October 1996. The inauguration was timed to coincide with the 41st year of Paris' Pride March and the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris. She was a prolific writer, producing multiple volumes of poetry throughout her life, as well as two volumes of autobiography.

Delect's appearance in the documentary has been recognised as a notable point in the history of women in French cinema. However, not all reviews were positive, including a transphobic review by Armond White which cast doubt on Delect's identity and described her poetry as "bad".

Selected works

(Éditions du Pavillon, 1969). (Self-published, 1982). (FeniXX réédition numérique, 1988). (Editions L'Harmattan, 1994).

Filmography 1986: by Françoise Romand, 52 minutes.