Katherina Hetzeldorfer

Katherina Hetzeldorfer (died 1477 in Speyer) was the first recorded person to have been executed for female homosexuality.

Her case is the first recorded trial against female homosexuality confirmed to have led to a death sentence. Originally from Nuremberg, she moved to Speyer in 1475 dressed as a man in the company of a woman she described as her sister. In 1477, she was tried for homosexuality and posing as a male. She was prosecuted after having been reported by some one to whom she had confided that she and her sister lived as man and wife. It was discovered that she also had bought sex from two women, both of whom claimed not to have known her biological sex even during intercourse, one of them stating that she had used a strap-on dildo made by red leather. Hetzeldorfer was executed by drowning in the Rhine River, a method considered shameful and normally only sentenced to women and children. It was unusual for females to be tried and executed for homosexuality, though female homosexuality was, like male, judged to be heresy as a crime against nature. In 16th-century France, Catherine de la Maniere and Francoise de l'Estrage was executed for the same offence, and in 1537, an unnamed woman was executed for having posed as a male farmhand and married a woman, all for heresy; however, Agatha Dietschi was merely sentenced to pillorying and banishment for the same offence in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1547; the reason was that while Hetzeldorfer had penetrated her female partners, Dietschi had not, and was therefore not regarded to have taken on another gender by impersonating a man sexually, as sexual intercourse was defined as penetration.

References

• Helmut Puff: Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600
• Katherine Crawford: European Sexualities, 1400-1800