A Sister with Fifty-Thousand Brothers

Abstract

Since 1992, Parisian architect and town planner Olivier Chaumont had belonged to the Grand Orient of France, then an exclusively male masonic order. Following a sex change in the mid-2000s and now legally a woman known as Olivia, her lodge willingly accepted this new identity. The brother became a sister, and in so doing helped precipitate the opening up of the Grand Orient to women. This momentous episode in France’s masonic history is captured here in an autobiographical essay written specially for the 2013 themed, double-issue of Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism: ‘Women and Freemasonry’.