There she was, sitting in court. Veil across her face. Demure. The judge pronounced the sentence and she sighed deeply. The bailiffs came over to remove the veil as the judge mandated. Turning aside as they did so, she could be seen to weep. Thus the Correctional Tribunal of Oran dealt with Mohammed Ould el Hadj in 1867, a “new case” unlike anything that the shocked tribunal had seen before: “neither man nor woman,” a person born male who acted and dressed like an Arab woman. Picked up on the newly-important charge of vagabondage, Mohammed Ould el Hadj pleaded to be judged in the court as a woman. Saying he knew no work “proper to a man” – he claimed to have been raised his whole life as a woman – el Hadj challenged the gendered binaries of colonial society. Responding to the challenge, the President of the Tribunal asserted a biological reality of gender: “but you are a man, Mohammed.” Working through the record of this case, along with documents relating to the overall juridical process in Algeria, this paper will examine questions of colonial sociability, gender, and jurisprudence through a reconstruction of this extraordinary moment. How did the Tribunal come to a judgment in this new kind of case? What role did imperial justice have in the policing of dress and gender in Algeria? How did the “modern” practices of policing and public hygiene affect in the charge of vagabondage that landed el Hadj in prison for two months? Throughout we will see that Mohammed Ould el Hadj presented a new challenge to discourses of modern governance and scientific management that structured the sovereignty of French Algeria.