Casimir Pulaski was born in Warsaw, Poland, on March sixth of 1745. His was a family of minor nobles, and so Pulaski was born to a decent amount of wealth and fame. Pulaski trained to practise law, but his legal career was derailed as Russia began escalating attempts to bring Poland under its control.¹ He became part of the Bar Confederation, a group of militant nobles, and for several years fought for Poland’s sovereignty.² Though he seemed to view orders from his superiors as suggestions rather than commands, Pulaski did show military talent, and he became a hero to Poland. In spite of that, when a botched attempt to kidnap Poland’s Russia controlled king turned into humiliation and a treason conviction, Pulaski was forced to flee to France.³

In Paris he met Benjamin Franklin, who recommended Pulaski to Congress and to George Washington, and Pulaski eagerly became part of yet another struggle for independence.⁴ When Pulaski arrived in America he found an army completely devoid of cavalry, something Pulaski knew was essential to fighting a war against a European power. Pulaski took on the bulk of responsibility for creating the American cavalry.⁵ Though many in the Continental Army found Pulaski hard to work with, he was good at his job, and when he died in battle in 1779 he was laid to rest as an American hero.⁶ Exactly where he was laid to rest though, no one was quite sure. When researchers decided they were going to answer this question, Pulaski’s last adventure began. 

The Mystery of Pulaski’s Body 

On October ninth, 1779, during an attempt to reclaim Savannah, Georgia, Pulaski was hit by grapeshot from a British cannon. Though the grapeshot was removed, the wound became infected, and Pulaski died a few days later, on the fifteenth.⁷ For years afterwards, however, no one seemed quite sure where Pulaski was buried. It seemed he had died onboard a ship called the Wasp, bound for South Carolina, but what did this mean for his burial place? Was he buried at sea, as some said, or on Greenwich Plantation in South Carolina? The family who owned Greenwich Plantation insisted for decades that Pulaski was buried on their property, and in 1825 they decided to settle the question. The body that was buried on their property (by then just a skeleton) was exhumed, and the remains were sent to a medical college for eight months, where they were examined. The scientific advancement of the time enabled experts to establish that the body was around Pulaski’s age and height, and that it bore evidence of injuries Pulaski was known to have suffered. Experts were reasonably sure the body was indeed Pulaski, so it was reinterred under Pulaski’s monument in Savannah, Georgia.⁸ 

The body was exhumed again in the 1990s, by researchers hoping to answer the question definitively. The lingering doubt as to the body’s identity could have been caused by the researchers in 1825 noticing something about it that they could not explain.⁹ With a small, slim stature, a soft jawline, and a curiously oval shaped pelvis, the body appeared female. Could this be the body of an unidentified woman, rather than Casimir Pulaski?¹⁰

When it was reexhumed in the nineties, researchers were struck by these female qualities. Upon seeing the remains, one researcher immediately said “It’s a woman. It’s not Pulaski.”¹¹ What really convinced them it was a woman’s body was the pelvis. According to Larry Cochard, associate professor of medical education at Northwestern University, “The pelvis alone will correctly determine a skeleton’s sex 95 percent of the time or more.”¹² This is because men have a heart shaped pelvis, while women have an oval shaped one.¹³ Despite this newfound conviction that the body was female, however, researchers could not discount the evidence that the body was indeed Pulaski, the same evidence that had convinced the researchers in 1825. A new theory was put forward to reconcile these facts: Casimir Pulaski may have been intersex. According to the Intersex Society of North America, “Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.”¹⁴ But, as Virginia Hutton Estabrook, assistant professor of anthropolgy at Georgia Southern University and part of a third research team, said in recent interviews “All of these discussions of Pulaski [being] intersex were super speculative when the easiest explanation was that it was just not Pulaski.”¹⁵ Attempts to confirm the body’s identity through DNA analysis were fruitless, as the body had deteriorated past the point where they type of DNA needed for testing could be extracted. A sample was taken and the body was reburied.¹⁶ 

Recently a third research team, the one including Estabrook, realized that a new type of DNA testing, using mitochondrial DNA, could be used to test the sample. It was tested against a sample from Pulaski’s great niece, and proved to be a match.¹⁷ Adding the new fact that the body has Pulaski family DNA to the previously known facts that the body is the right age, height, and has the right injuries, it is now as close as possible to certain that the body buried under the Pulaski monument in Savannah, Georgia, is indeed Casimir Pulaski.

How Do We know Pulaski Was Intersex, and Not a Cross-Dresser or Transgender?

With the revelation that Pulaski’s body had female characteristics, many writers have suggested that Pulaski was either a transgender man, or simply a woman cross-dressing to enjoy opportunities that were only given to men.¹⁸ While transgender people have existed as long as hummanity itself, and though history is rich with stories of women dressing as men to pursue opportunities barred to them, niether of these explanations make much sense for Pulaski. The simple fact is that there are existing records of Pulaski from the very beginning of his life. If Pulaski just appeared in the Polish Army, seemingly out of nowhere, the idea that he was a woman in disguise or a transgender man would make sense. Instead, the earliest documentation of Casimir Pulaski is the four copies that exist of his baptisimal records. These records testify that Pulaski was baptized with four names, a common custom at the time. They were: Kazimierz (Casimir), Michal, Wladyslaw, and Wiktor. Pulaski was baptized in the presence of some of the most powerful people in Poland.¹⁹ Pulaski was not his parents’ first son, nor was he their last, so there does not seem to be a reason for them to lie and say he was male. After that he was raised as a male would have been, his parents intending that he should serve in the military and eventually practice law. 

How Would Being Intersex Have Impacted Pulaski’s Life?

Though they often did not fully understand it, doctors as early as the fourteenth century did have the concept of people being born with sexually ambiguous bodies.²⁰  At the time it would have been referred to as being a “hermaphrodite”. Whether or not hermaphrodites truly existed became a contentious debate throughout the mid to late seventeen hundreds, but often the debate was split by definitions. Many doctors who argued that hermaphrodites did not exist, such as physician and Fellow of the Royal Society James Parsons, defined a hermaphrodite as “an animal, in which the two sexes, Male and Female, ought to appear to be each distinct and perfect, as well as with regard to the Structure proper to either, as to the Power of exercising the necessary Offices and Functions of those Parts.”²¹ Many doctors sided with Parsons, contending that no human could simultaneously have a full male reproductive system and a full female one. These doctors claimed that people who had been labeled hermaphrodites were not people with characteristics of both sexes, but simply people whose genitals had formed a little unusually, causing people to think they looked like the genitals of the opposite sex, and believed these people could be correctly identified as either male or female.

The doctors who did believe in the existence of hermaphrodites did not argue that a person could exist with a full male and female reproductive system, they defined the term differently. These doctors agreed with the definition given by the 1721 Physical Dictionary, which explained “such are called Hermaphrodites, the cooformation [sic] of whose Genitals are amiss, so that the Pudends or privy Parts of either sex seem to be wanting, or else both appear in the same Person.”²²

Though these two sides do not exactly seem to be fighting the same war, as time went on one or the other would occasionally emerge victorious. When Pulaski was born in 1745 the tide was turned against the belief in hermaphrodites. Though it would go back the other way as Pulaski became an adult, the medical community was still far from agreeing. 

So would Pulaski have identified with the term? If Pulaski was aware of his unique anatomy, he may have. There were doctors and medical texts who could have explained the concept and its precipitate debate to him, or to his parents. According to baptisimal records, when Pulaski was born he was not immediately baptized, due to a “debility.”²³ Some have suggested that Pulaski’s anatomy was visibly different, and that his parents or a doctor noticed this.²⁴ Additionally, Pulaski is only known to have had one romantic relationship in the thirty-four years he was alive, and it is possible that this is because he knew his condition would prevent him from being physically intimate.²⁵

If these things are true, and Pulaski did think of himself as a hermaphrodite, he would have kept it a secret. In the early seventeen hundreds intersex people were labeled “monsterous”, and regarded as a horrible accident in nature. Though by the time Pulaski became an adult society had moved towards seeing it as a medical condition, a feeling of fear and disgust lingered on.²⁶ Additionally, in Britain and the colonies a person’s legal sex was whichever their body more closely resembled, so Pulaski may have found himself having to prove that he was male enough to serve in the Continental Army.²⁷ 

Very likely, however, since people with ambiguous genitalia were often labeled female at that time and Pulaski was apparently labeled male, he externally did appear to be male, and his female characteristics were internal.²⁸ If this was the case, it is possible that no one, including Pulaski himself, noticed the difference. Even today many intersex people do not realize they are intersex until later in life, and then it is often with the aid of modern medical technology.²⁹ Pulaski may have lived his entire life without ever realizing there was anything different about his body. 

Since the discovery that Pulaski is intersex it has been frequently mentioned that he obviously identified as a man. Though there is no evidence to refute this, there is also no evidence to support it. The fact that Pulaski lived out his life as a man does not mean that he identified as one. If Pulaski identified as a woman, he would have had to keep it a secret. Just as many transgender people at that time no doubt found themselves forced to conceal their true gender, so Pulaski would have been unable to decide during his life to begin expressing his true gender, if it were anything other than the sex he had been assigned at birth. Thus there is not currently sufficient research to say whether Pulaski identified as male, female, or gender nonconforming. 

Casimir Pulaski’s wild, adventurous story now has a new twist: the hero of Polish and American Independence was intersex. It is possible that Pulaski knew he was intersex, and searched for answers about his body and his life in medical debates about “hermaphrodites.” However, it is more likely that Pulaski never knew he was different than other men. Even if Pulaski did not know he was intersex, he can still be a hero to intersex people, and a reminder to us all that our nation was built by all kinds of people. 

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1. Casimir Pulaski, Charles River Editors
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kazimierz-Pulaski “Kazimierz Pulaski”
3. See #1
4. Ibid.
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1WDK_5D7kc&feature=youtu.be “Who Was Casimir Pulaski?”, The History Guy
6. Washington’s aides losing patience with Pulaski: George Washington to Brigadier General Casimir Pulaski, 26 January 1778
7. See #1
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. #9 explains that the researchers in 1825 may have noticed the body seemed female. For information on how the body seems female, see: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/was-revolutionary-war-hero-casimir-pulaski-intersex-180971907/ “Was the Revolutionary War Hero Casimir Pulaski Intersex?”
11. https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-life-casimir-pulaski-intersex-040319-story.html “‘It’s a Woman It’s Not Pulaski.’ New Documentary Argues Revolutionary War hero was intersex”, Nara Schoenberg
12. Ibid.
13. https://vivadifferences.com/male-vs-female-pelvis/ “Male Vs. Female Pelvis: 12 Major Differences Plus Comparison Table”
14. http://www.isna.org/faq/what_is_intersex “What is intersex?”
15. See #10
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. For writers suggesting Pulaski was a woman, see https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna991371?__twitter_impression=true “Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski might have been a woman or intersex”, Corky Siemaszko, and note that the Smithsonian documentary about the new discovery is called The General Was Female?
19. http://www.poles.org/birth.html 
20. https://pages.uoregon.edu/healarts/studies/alternatives/Alt%20PDFs/Hermaphrodites_Reis.pdf “Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America, 1620-1960”, Elizabeth Reis
21. http://cjh.uchicago.edu/issues/spring16/6.7.pdf “Rationalizing Sex: the Hermaphrodite in Eighteenth Century Medical Writing”, Sarah Welz Geselowitz
22. Ibid.
23. http://www.poles.org/birth.html 
24. https://qz.com/1589007/casimir-pulaski-may-have-been-female-or-intersex/ “A famed general of America’s Revolutionary war may have been biologically female or intersex”, Natasha Frost
25. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/revolutionary-war-hero-casimir-pulaski-might-have-been-woman-or-n991371 “Revolutionary War Hero Casimir Pulaski might have been a woman or intersex”, Corky Siemaszko
26. See #20
27. Ibid.
28. See #21

29. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2149389/Man-goes-hospital-kidney-stone–discovers-hes-woman.html “Man Goes To Hospital With Kidney Stone…And Discovers He’s a Woman”