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Bubbles Rose Lee (194?–?) activist
Bubbles, as a child, had undergone periods of of hunger and starvation. Later, when a friend talked to her about over-eating, she replied: “if you have ever gone hungry like I have, you would understand that there is no such thing as eating too much”.
In August-September 1970, the Gay Activist Alliance and then the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee booked the basement of Weinstein Hall, a New York University residence building for fundraising dances. In the eve of the third dance, to be held 21 August, the administration attempted to cancel the rest. Although the two remaining dances were held, the situation escalated and the Hall was occupied. Among the volunteers were Bubbles Rose Lee, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha Johnson. A further dance was planned for 25 September. However the administration called the New York City Tactical Police Squad, which gave the occupiers 10 seconds to vacate the Hall.
After the ensuing demonstration died down, Bubbles, Sylvia, Marsha, Bebe Scarpi, Bambi L’Amour and others founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) which attempted to provide shelter, food and legal support for street queens.
Their first home was a trailer truck seemingly abandoned in a Greenwich Village outdoor parking area. This was a step up from sleeping in doorways, and a couple of dozen young street transvestites moved in. One morning Sylvia and Marshe were returning with groceries, and found the trailer starting to move. Most of the queens were woken by the noise and movement and quickly jumped out, although one, stoned, was half-way to California when she woke up.
Bubbles knew a Mafia person, well-known in the Village, Michael Umbers, manager of the gay bar, Christopher’s End, operator of various callboy and porno operations and also a friend of future Dog Day Afternoon bank robber, John Wojtowicz. Bubbles spoke to him and for a small deposit, the STAR commune was able to move into 213 East Second Street. There was no electricity or plumbing, not even the boiler worked, nor did the toilets. However with help they got the building working and it became STAR House.
Eventually Mike Umbers came around about the three months rent that he had not received. Bubbles mumbled something about the cost of repairs. Umbers said that if he didn’t get his money, Bubbles was as good as dead. Sylvia screamed that if he killed her, she would go to the police. “That bitch can’t make no money”, Umbers said, “That bitch is fat”. Bubbles skipped town soon after, possibly for Florida.
Umbers decided against violence and simply had STAR put out on the street for non-payment of rent. Sylvia and the others reversed the improvements and threw the refrigerator out of the back window.
Arthur Bell wrote an article for the Village Voice about STAR House and perhaps said too much about how the inhabitants hustle. Its publication was followed by a flurry or arrests on 42nd St.
Umbers was arrested in December 1971 on child pornography charges.
Later it was said that Bubbles had been extradited to Louisiana to face serious criminal charges, possibly murder.
In August-September 1970, the Gay Activist Alliance and then the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee booked the basement of Weinstein Hall, a New York University residence building for fundraising dances. In the eve of the third dance, to be held 21 August, the administration attempted to cancel the rest. Although the two remaining dances were held, the situation escalated and the Hall was occupied. Among the volunteers were Bubbles Rose Lee, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha Johnson. A further dance was planned for 25 September. However the administration called the New York City Tactical Police Squad, which gave the occupiers 10 seconds to vacate the Hall.
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| Cohen p117 |
After the ensuing demonstration died down, Bubbles, Sylvia, Marsha, Bebe Scarpi, Bambi L’Amour and others founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) which attempted to provide shelter, food and legal support for street queens.
Their first home was a trailer truck seemingly abandoned in a Greenwich Village outdoor parking area. This was a step up from sleeping in doorways, and a couple of dozen young street transvestites moved in. One morning Sylvia and Marshe were returning with groceries, and found the trailer starting to move. Most of the queens were woken by the noise and movement and quickly jumped out, although one, stoned, was half-way to California when she woke up.
Bubbles knew a Mafia person, well-known in the Village, Michael Umbers, manager of the gay bar, Christopher’s End, operator of various callboy and porno operations and also a friend of future Dog Day Afternoon bank robber, John Wojtowicz. Bubbles spoke to him and for a small deposit, the STAR commune was able to move into 213 East Second Street. There was no electricity or plumbing, not even the boiler worked, nor did the toilets. However with help they got the building working and it became STAR House.
Eventually Mike Umbers came around about the three months rent that he had not received. Bubbles mumbled something about the cost of repairs. Umbers said that if he didn’t get his money, Bubbles was as good as dead. Sylvia screamed that if he killed her, she would go to the police. “That bitch can’t make no money”, Umbers said, “That bitch is fat”. Bubbles skipped town soon after, possibly for Florida.
Umbers decided against violence and simply had STAR put out on the street for non-payment of rent. Sylvia and the others reversed the improvements and threw the refrigerator out of the back window.
Arthur Bell wrote an article for the Village Voice about STAR House and perhaps said too much about how the inhabitants hustle. Its publication was followed by a flurry or arrests on 42nd St.
Umbers was arrested in December 1971 on child pornography charges.
Later it was said that Bubbles had been extradited to Louisiana to face serious criminal charges, possibly murder.
- Arthur Bell. “STAR trek”. Village Voice, July 15, 1971. Online.
- Martin B. Duberman. Stonewall. Dutton, c1993. Plume, 1994: 252, 254.
- Stephan L. Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: "An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail". Routledge, 2008: 89, 91, 97, 98, 111, 112, 113, 117, 128, 132-3, 147, 252n186.
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Bubbles was sometimes known as Bubbles Rose Marie.
The occupation of Weinstein Hall is notable, in retrospect in that the lesbians and the transvestites got on with each other.
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Lauren Jeska (1974 - ) fell runner
Jeska, originally from Lancashire, studied physics at Oxford University, and then gender studies at Leeds University. She transitioned in 2000.
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Jeska took up fell running, and was the women’s 2010, 2011 and 2012 English champion, and won the British Championship in 2012. She became a familiar winner. It was an open secret among the runners that Lauren was trans, and she had told some officials.
In 2015 she was told that she would not be able to compete and her racing results would be declared null and void as she hadn't provided blood samples to prove her testosterone levels had lowered significantly, and following this UK Athletics was considering a review into her status as female. All athletes were required to take a blood test but Jeska took exception to this and feared being unable to compete. As a result she risked having her championship results declared void.
She twice asked for NHS psychiatric help, but was not referred to a specialist.
Jeska drove more than 100 miles from her home in Machynlleth, Powys, Wales, to the British Athletic headquarters in Perry Barr, Birmingham. She was carrying three knives, including a 13cm kitchen knife. She asked to speak to Ralph Knibbs, UK Athletics human resources and welfare manager (and former rugby player). She walked up to him and stabbed him several times. Two other men who intervened were also injured. This was capturd on CCTV. The presence of a former Royal Navy paramedic helped to stabilise Knibbs. Although he suffered a stroke during the attack, resulting in partial sight-loss.
Jeska plead guilty at a hearing at Birmingham Crown Court in September 2016. After delays waiting for psychiatric reports, Jeska was jailed in March 2017 for 18 years, and an extended licence of five years to be served after release.
The newspaper accounts leave much unexplained. Did Jeska merely study at Oxford and Leeds, or did she have a degree (or 2)? What did she do for a living? In a small town in Powys, one would expect a physics graduate to be a teacher, but Machynlleth is only a short distance from the university town of Aberystwyth.
Why, 15 years after surgery, would a trans woman decline a blood test? Yes it would reveal that she had XY chromosomes, but that was admitted. Her testosterone level should be well below the required level.
There was no way that her attack on Mr Knibbs was going to solve the problem
Jeska took up fell running, and was the women’s 2010, 2011 and 2012 English champion, and won the British Championship in 2012. She became a familiar winner. It was an open secret among the runners that Lauren was trans, and she had told some officials.
In 2015 she was told that she would not be able to compete and her racing results would be declared null and void as she hadn't provided blood samples to prove her testosterone levels had lowered significantly, and following this UK Athletics was considering a review into her status as female. All athletes were required to take a blood test but Jeska took exception to this and feared being unable to compete. As a result she risked having her championship results declared void.
She twice asked for NHS psychiatric help, but was not referred to a specialist.
Jeska drove more than 100 miles from her home in Machynlleth, Powys, Wales, to the British Athletic headquarters in Perry Barr, Birmingham. She was carrying three knives, including a 13cm kitchen knife. She asked to speak to Ralph Knibbs, UK Athletics human resources and welfare manager (and former rugby player). She walked up to him and stabbed him several times. Two other men who intervened were also injured. This was capturd on CCTV. The presence of a former Royal Navy paramedic helped to stabilise Knibbs. Although he suffered a stroke during the attack, resulting in partial sight-loss.
Jeska plead guilty at a hearing at Birmingham Crown Court in September 2016. After delays waiting for psychiatric reports, Jeska was jailed in March 2017 for 18 years, and an extended licence of five years to be served after release.
- Lydia Willgress. “Fell-runner Lauren Jeska tried to kill British athletics official because she feared the body would revoke her titles over transgender status”. The Telegraph, 22 September 2016. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/22/fell-runner-lauren-jeska-admits-attempted-knife-murder-of-britis.
- “Powys fell running star Lauren Jeska who admitted attempted murder set for hospital order”. News North Wales, 17 November 2016. www.newsnorthwales.co.uk/news/169215/powys-fell-running-star-lauren-jeska-who-admitted-attempted-murder-set-for-hospital-order.aspx.
- Frances Perraudin. “Champion runner jailed for attempted murder of UK Athletics official”. The Guardian, 14 March 2017. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/14/champion-runner-lauren-jeska-jailed-for-attempted-of-uk-athletics-official-ralph-knibbs.
- Richard Spillett. “Champion fell-runner is jailed for 18 years for trying to stab a UK Athletics official to death after it was revealed she was born a MAN and could lose her titles”. The Daily Mail, 14 March 2017. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4312594/Fell-runner-jailed-trying-murder-athletics-official.html.
The newspaper accounts leave much unexplained. Did Jeska merely study at Oxford and Leeds, or did she have a degree (or 2)? What did she do for a living? In a small town in Powys, one would expect a physics graduate to be a teacher, but Machynlleth is only a short distance from the university town of Aberystwyth.
Why, 15 years after surgery, would a trans woman decline a blood test? Yes it would reveal that she had XY chromosomes, but that was admitted. Her testosterone level should be well below the required level.
There was no way that her attack on Mr Knibbs was going to solve the problem
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Mary Baker (1911 - ? ) chorine, housewife
At age 16 William Richeson became Mary Baker and found work as a chorus girl in New York theatre.
She later worked as nurse, waitress and chambermaid. In 1931 she married.
In 1937 she was outed, much to the surprise of her husband.
- “Posed Ten Years as Woman, Danced in Chorus, ‘Married’ “. The Daily Mail, 12 October 1937, reprinted in George Ives (ed Paul Sieveking). Man Bites Man: The Scrapbook of an Edwardian Eccentric. Penguin Books, 1981: 128.
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Recurring untruths: Marsha P Johnson’s birthday
“The story’s told/ With facts and lies”. Leonard Cohen.
A new series of untruths, canards, lies and misinformation that are repeated with regard to trans history.
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We know how this canard started.
Martin Duberman. Stonewall :190-2.
“Sylvia Rivera had been invited to Marsha P. Johnson’s party on the night of June 27, but she decided not to go. … No, she was not going to Marsha’s party. She would stay home. … But then the phone rang and her buddy Tammy Novak – who sounded more stoned than usual – insisted that Sylvia and Gary join her later that night at Stonewall. Sylvia hesitated. If she was going out at all … she would go to Washington Square [bar]. She had never been crazy about Stonewall. …. But Tammy absolutely refused to take no for an answer and so Sylvia, moaning theatrically, gave in. …. Rumor had it that Marsha Johnson, disgusted at the no-shows for her party, was also headed downtown to Stonewall, determined to dance somewhere. Sylvia expansively decided that she did like Stonewall after all …. When the cops came barrelling through the front door.”
Note that Duberman says Marsha’s party – not birthday party!
This altered somewhat in the retelling.
Here is part of the IMDB summary of the plot of the recent film, Happy Birthday, Marsha! :
“It's a hot summer day in June, 1969. Marsha throws herself a birthday party and dreams of performing at a club in town, but no one shows up. Sylvia, Marsha's best friend, distraught from an unsuccessful introduction between her lover and her family, gets so stoned she forgets about the party. After encountering a series of micro-aggressions from street harassment to tense encounters with the police that day, Marsha and Sylvia eventually meet at the Stonewall Inn to finally celebrate Marsha's birth. When the police arrive to raid the bar, Marsha and Sylvia are the first to fight back.”
Happy Birthday, Marsha! is of course a lot more trans positive than Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall that came out a few month’s earlier.
However, there are two problems:
A) Was Sylvia Rivera even at Stonewall on the first night of the riots? David Carter in his Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, 2004, does not even mention Sylvia. Very annoyingly he does not give any reason in the book for Sylvia being missing. However he was interviewed by Gay.Today on this very question and answered:
"Yes, I am afraid that I could only conclude that Sylvia's account of her being there on the first night was a fabrication. Randy Wicker told me that Marsha P. Johnson, his roommate, told him that Sylvia was not at the Stonewall Inn at the outbreak of the riots as she had fallen asleep in Bryant Park after taking heroin. (Marsha had gone up to Bryant Park, found her asleep, and woke her up to tell her about the riots.) Playwright and early gay activist Doric Wilson also independently told me that Marsha Johnson had told him that Sylvia was not at the Stonewall Riots.”B) The consensus is that Marsha Johnson’s birthday was 24 August 1945. It could well be that she proposed a party on 27 June, but it was not a birthday party!
The following sites say that her birthday was 24 August: EN.Wikipedia, IMDB, Sexual History Tour, Revolvy, Making Gay History, Black Revolutionary Theatre Workshop,
On the other hand, some sites seem to have worked backwards and assumed Marsha’s birthday from the date of the Stonewall riot (they also for some reason add one year to her age):
The Radical Notion says: “Marsha P. Johnson was born on June 27, 1944”.
Transgender Equality says: “Disappointed that no one had shown up for a party to celebrate her 25th
birthday, Marsha P. Johnson headed to the Stonewall Inn on the evening of June 27, 1969”.
Femmes Fatales at Penn State University says: “Marsha P. Johnson was celebrating her 25t
h birthday at Stonewall during the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969 when the police began a raid of Stonewall”.
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Sally’s Hideaway and Sally’s II - nightclub
In the mid 1980s, after the coming of AIDS, the masculist gay sex bars in New York, the Anvil, The Mineshaft, the Toilet, went out of business, either voluntarily or under pressure from the city. The Anvil had in its early days featured Felipe Rose who dressed as a Native American (he was Lakota on his father’s side) and was later recruited for the Village People disco group. The Anvil also put on drag shows. It closed in November 1985, and Conrad, its manager, moved to Blues, a nightclub at 264 W 43rd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues. Blues was popular with those working in the sex trade around Times Square. This did not work out, and late 1986 – the year that Harry Benjamin died – the nightclub was re-opened as Sally’s Hideaway, managed by two femme queens: Sally Maggio and Jesse Torres, the hostess manager.
Sally and Jesse had worked in the early 1970s at the trans/gay 220 Club, at 220 West Houston Street, where Lou Reed drank and was presumed to have named his album and track, Sally Can’t Dance, after the manager (although it was photographs of his trans lover, Rachel, which appeared on the inner sleeve). Sally and Jesse then worked at the Greenwich Pub, at 8th Avenue and 13th Street, which attracted gay trans and their admirers.
Sally’s Hideaway put on go-go boy contests, male stripping and drag shows – some by transsexuals. Trans entertainers such as Dorian Corey, Jayne County, Angie Xtravaganza performed. The customers were a mix of pre-op transsexuals, drag queens, cross-dressers, transvestites, chasers, male strippers and all kinds of hustlers.
There was a serious fire in 1992. Sally moved the club a few doors away to 252 West 43rd Street, which was attached to the Carter Hotel. It was now known as Sally’s II, or simply Sally’s. The bar was circular, two flights up from the street, and there was also a small lounge, up another flight of stairs at the side of the bar. Behind the bar there was a wall of doors permanently closed until one day Sally discovered the unused theatre of the Carter Hotel, only another set of doors away from the hotel lobby. Sally’s II expanded into this space and used the stage. Drag pageants and drag balls were held, usually hosted by or in homage to the ballroom legends of the day: Octavia St. Laurent, Pepper LaBeija, Avis Pendavis. Paris Dupree’s “Paris is Burning” ball was held here in 1992, and the subsequent 1990 film included opening and ending sequences shot outside Sally’s, and strongly featured Dorian Corey and Angie Xtravaganza.
There was also the Amazing, Electrifying Grace, lip synch performer and comedienne, who had started in the Anvil, and when that closed she emceed and performed at Greenwich Pub for Sally Maggio, and then at Midtown 43 where she did a Sunday Night drag revue. Midtown 43 closed in 1989, by which time Grace was also working at Sally’s. After the fire and the move she was given a steady gig emceeing Sunday and sometimes Monday night. At Midtown 43 Grace had had a following among the butch queens of the ball house crowd, but these did not feel at home in Sally’s.
Trans musician Terre Thaemlitz dj’d there in the early 1990s, until fired for refusing to play the music that was in the charts. The Transy House people, Rusty Mae Moore, Chelsea Goodwin, Julia Murray, Sylvia Rivera, Kristiana Th’mas, went as a group and were regarded as a ‘house’ in the Paris is Burning sense. Self-described tranny-chaser Jonathan Ames was also found there, and the club is featured in his bildungsroman and the subsequent film, The Extra Man.
Sally Maggio died in October 1993. Jesse Torres continued the club, although Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, real estate interests and the Walt Disney Corporation were changing the character of the Time Square area. Jesse died, unexpectedly, in September 1996 while attending the Miss Continental Pageant in Chicago. Giselle, a long-time Sally’s barmaid, took over, but business was waning. After a series of police busts, Sally’s closed in November 1997.
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The one and only account of Sally's is at www.sallys-hideaway,com, The author is identified only by email address as Brian Lantelme, which explains why the Ladylike, 46, 2001 account is virtually the same. However Lantelme does not mention Lou Reed, Jonathan Ames, Terre Thaemlitz or Rusty Rae Moore.
There is no mention at all of Sally's in Julian Fleisher's The Drag Queens of New York, 1996. There is no mention at all of Sally's in Laurence Senelick'The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, 2000,
I would have liked more information about the Amazing, Electrifying Grace, and her transfer from the Anvil to Midtown 43 to Sally's. Was her act the same, or did it change to reflect the audience?
The Anvil was, in effect, a gentleman's club: women, cis or trans were not usually admitted as customers, although it is said that Lee Radziwill, sister to Jackie Onassis, frequented the place in male drag.
Sally and Jesse had worked in the early 1970s at the trans/gay 220 Club, at 220 West Houston Street, where Lou Reed drank and was presumed to have named his album and track, Sally Can’t Dance, after the manager (although it was photographs of his trans lover, Rachel, which appeared on the inner sleeve). Sally and Jesse then worked at the Greenwich Pub, at 8th Avenue and 13th Street, which attracted gay trans and their admirers.
Sally’s Hideaway put on go-go boy contests, male stripping and drag shows – some by transsexuals. Trans entertainers such as Dorian Corey, Jayne County, Angie Xtravaganza performed. The customers were a mix of pre-op transsexuals, drag queens, cross-dressers, transvestites, chasers, male strippers and all kinds of hustlers.
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| Monica Mugler outside Sally's II |
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| Grace |
Trans musician Terre Thaemlitz dj’d there in the early 1990s, until fired for refusing to play the music that was in the charts. The Transy House people, Rusty Mae Moore, Chelsea Goodwin, Julia Murray, Sylvia Rivera, Kristiana Th’mas, went as a group and were regarded as a ‘house’ in the Paris is Burning sense. Self-described tranny-chaser Jonathan Ames was also found there, and the club is featured in his bildungsroman and the subsequent film, The Extra Man.
Sally Maggio died in October 1993. Jesse Torres continued the club, although Mayor Rudolph
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| Jesse |
- Lou Reed. Sally Can't Dance. RCA Records, 1974.
- Jennie Livingstone (dir). Paris is Burning. With Dorian Corey, Paris Dupree, Pepper Labeija. US 71 mins 1990.
- Jonathan Ames, The Extra Man. Scribner, 1999: 91-9, 107-110, 144-5, 157-9, 209-210.
- Brian Lantelme. “Sally’s Hideaway”. LadyLike, 46, 2001: 17-21. Online
- Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini (dirs) The Extra Man. Scr: Robert Pulcini & Jonathan Ames, based on the novel by Jonathan Ames, with Paul Dana as Louis Ives and Gisele Alicea as Miss Pepper. US 108 mins 2010.
- Jeremy Reed. Waiting for the Man: The life and Career of Lou Reed. Overlook Books, 2015: 82.
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The one and only account of Sally's is at www.sallys-hideaway,com, The author is identified only by email address as Brian Lantelme, which explains why the Ladylike, 46, 2001 account is virtually the same. However Lantelme does not mention Lou Reed, Jonathan Ames, Terre Thaemlitz or Rusty Rae Moore.
There is no mention at all of Sally's in Julian Fleisher's The Drag Queens of New York, 1996. There is no mention at all of Sally's in Laurence Senelick'The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, 2000,
I would have liked more information about the Amazing, Electrifying Grace, and her transfer from the Anvil to Midtown 43 to Sally's. Was her act the same, or did it change to reflect the audience?
The Anvil was, in effect, a gentleman's club: women, cis or trans were not usually admitted as customers, although it is said that Lee Radziwill, sister to Jackie Onassis, frequented the place in male drag.
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a very positive advert by Vicks, the vaporub firm, re an Indian girl and her adoptive mother
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Bambi L’Amour, activist
When 15-year-old Sylvia Rivera was arrested and sent to New York’s Rikers Island prison in 1966, she was in the gay-reserved section where she met a good-looking black queen. They threw shade at each other, and then became firm friends.
Bambi was a natural beauty, unable to be taken as a man, even if she tried. She had been given the name Bambi because of her large eyes. She was almost never seen without a bottle and a bag. Once, in male garb, she was attacked on the subway “for being a dyke”.
After the Weinstein Hall occupation in August 1970, Bambi, along with Sylvia Rivera, Marsha Johnson, Bebe Scarpi, Bubbles Rose Lee, was a founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). She would often be with Sylvia when they zapped gay or student organizations.
She was part of the commune at the mafia-owned 213 East Second Street. Her method of pan-handling was rather dramatic: she would stand in the street to stop traffic, and then bang on car windows to demand change.
Her age is not specified in any of the accounts, nor what happened to her after 1971.
Bambi was a natural beauty, unable to be taken as a man, even if she tried. She had been given the name Bambi because of her large eyes. She was almost never seen without a bottle and a bag. Once, in male garb, she was attacked on the subway “for being a dyke”.
After the Weinstein Hall occupation in August 1970, Bambi, along with Sylvia Rivera, Marsha Johnson, Bebe Scarpi, Bubbles Rose Lee, was a founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). She would often be with Sylvia when they zapped gay or student organizations.
She was part of the commune at the mafia-owned 213 East Second Street. Her method of pan-handling was rather dramatic: she would stand in the street to stop traffic, and then bang on car windows to demand change.
Her age is not specified in any of the accounts, nor what happened to her after 1971.
- Martin B Duberman. Stonewall. Dutton, c1993. Plume, 1994: 123-4, 192, 252, 254.
- David Carter. Stonewall : the riots that sparked the gay revolution. St. Martin's Press 2004: 56. New York: Griffin 2005.
- Stephan L. Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: "An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail". Routledge, 2008: 91, 104-5, 106, 122, 127, 128, 132, 147.
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Was Bambi at the Stonewall riots? Duberman p192 has a very brief mention that she was, but as part of Sylvia's perception of what was happening at Stonewall, That is in the most dubious part of his book, as others maintain that Sylvia was not in fact there. Therefore, we don't know if Bambi was there. Maybe.
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Recurring Untruths: Edward Hyde, Governor of New York & New Jersey - Part I
“The story’s told/ With facts and lies”. Leonard Cohen.
A series of untruths, canards, lies and misinformation that are repeated with regard to trans history.
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There is a portrait, which is said to be of Edward Hyde in female attire, that can be viewed in the collection of the New York Historical Society.
Agnes Strickland. Lives of the Queens of England, 12 vols, 1840-8:
Edward Hyde (1661 - 1723) was born into a family with strong links to the Stuart dynasty. His grandfather, also called Edward Hyde, had been a faithful servant to Charles Stuart the younger during his exile under the Commonwealth. When Charles Stuart became King as Charles II in 1660, he appointed Hyde as Lord High Chancellor, Baron Hyndon and then Earl of Clarendon. As a courtesy the eldest sons of the Earls Clarendon were to be Viscount Cornbury. Hyde’s eldest daughter, Anne, married James, the younger brother of Charles II, and gave birth to two future queens, Mary and Anne, before dying at age 34. Hyde, morally inflexible, refused to recognise the main mistress of Charles in 1667, and was impeached and exiled to France, where he died in 1674. His eldest son, Henry then became the 2nd Earl of Clarendon. Thus the Cornbury title went to his son, the younger Edward Hyde. Henry was appointed Lord Privy Seal and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. His first wife had died age 22 of smallpox, a few months after Edward’s birth. Edward attended Oxford University at age 13, and completed his education at l’Académie de Calvin in Geneva. In 1683, he became Lieutenant Colonel of the Royal Regiment of Dragoons. When the Catholic James Stuart became king as James II in 1685, there was an uprising, Monmouth’s Rebellion, objecting to a Catholic monarch, led by James’ illegitimate half-brother, the Duke of Monmouth. Hyde commanded his troops in the repression of the rebellion and was promoted to full Colonel. The same year he also became a Tory Member of Parliament. In 1688, against his father’s wishes, he married Katherine O’Brian. By then Henry Hyde and his brother Laurence had been dismissed from office because they would not convert to Catholicism. Later in 1688 Mary Stuart’s husband, William of Orange, invited by MPs of both parties, invaded to save Britain for Protestantism – The Glorious Revolution . Edward Hyde was one of the first commanders to take his men over to William’s side. Despite this he fell out of favour with William, and had his regiment taken from him. He remained out of favour until 1701 when William appointed him as Governor of New York, to which was added the post of Governor of New Jersey in 1702 when Anne became Queen. Hyde acquitted himself well in negotiations with French Canada and with the Iroquois Nations, but was resented by some for running the two colonies in the interests of the monarch. Katherine died in 1706: of their seven children, three then still survived. Henry the 2nd Earl died in 1709, and Edward returned in 1710 as the 3rd Earl. He was appointed to the Privy Council and named first commissioner of the Admiralty. He was also sent as ambassador to George, Prince of Hanover, Anne’s chosen successor. Hyde died in 1723, having outlived all his children. He was interred in the family crypt in Westminster Abbey.
* Edward Hyde was not the cricketer (1881-1941), the royalist priest (1607-1659), the 1st Earl Clarendon (this was Edward Hyde’s grandfather); the governor of North Carolina (1667-1712), and certainly not the alternate persona to Dr Jekyll in RL Stevenson’s novella.
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In Part II we will consider the actual evidence. That, we will find, is at variance with the claims quoted above.
A series of untruths, canards, lies and misinformation that are repeated with regard to trans history.
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We are interested in Edward Hyde, also known as Lord Cornbury, and after his father's death in 1709 as the 3rd Earl Clarendon, in that he is repeatedly said to have been a transvestite. However there is considerable difficulty in tracing the claims back to actual 18th century accounts.
There is a portrait, which is said to be of Edward Hyde in female attire, that can be viewed in the collection of the New York Historical Society.
Some examples of the claims:
Agnes Strickland. Lives of the Queens of England, 12 vols, 1840-8:
“Among other apish tricks, Lord Cornbury, the ‘half-witted son’ of ‘Henry, Earl of Clarenden’ is said to have held his state levees at New York, and received the principal Colonists dressed up in complete female court costume, because truly he represented the person of a female sovereign, his cousin-german queen Anne.”Peter Ackroyd. Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession. 1979: 84-6.
“Edward Hyde, for example, cross-dressed while he was Governor of New York and New Jersey (1702-1708). He bore a remarkable resemblance to his cousin, Queen Anne, and was fond of walking through the streets of New York dressed in clothing similar to hers.”Richard Davenport-Hines. Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to sex and sexuality in Britain since the Renaissance, 1990: 74.
“According to Glenbervie, Clarendon ‘was a clever man’ whose ‘great insanity’ was showing himself in women’s clothes. When New Yorkers complained that he opened their legislative assembly dressed as a woman, he retorted, ‘You are very stupid not to see the propriety of it. In this place and particularly on this occasion I represent a woman (Queen Anne) and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as I can.’ Effeminacy and male transvestism were not clearly distinguished at this time, and there was no evidence that Clarendon was a molly. He was undeniably, though, a man who felt false when he dressed and behaved as men were expected to do.Roger Baker. Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. 1994: 99
“In 1702, the newly-crowned Queen Anne made her cousin, Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, the Governor of New York and New Jersey, a post that he held for six years. To the astonishment and bewilderment of both his colleagues and the general population he persistently dressed as a woman. This was not private or closet transvestism but assertively public. He opened the Assembly in women’s clothes, government business had to be delayed until he had completed his lengthy toilette, he would stroll through the streets in his skirts and dozens of people gawked at him every day.”Wayne Dynes “Transvestism (Cross-Dressing)” in Wayne Dynes (ed) Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. 1990: 1313.
“In North America Edward Hyde. Lord Cornbury, who was governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708 was a heterosexual transvestite”.Henry Moscow. The Book of New York Firsts, 1995:
“Cornbury’s behaviour seemed odder still when he began dressing in his wife’s gowns and, berouged and bepowdered, flounced daily along the parapets of the fort he commanded, while his sentries smirked. On occasion he sallied along Broadway, where at least once he was arrested and hauled back to the fort; one night, when a patrolling watchman investigated the presence of an apparent prostitute stumbling about the fort, the ‘prostitute’ – Cornbury leaped at him, giggling, and pulled his ears.”Lawrence M Salinger (ed). Encyclopedia of White-Collar & Corporate Crime, 2004: 409.
“In the simplest of terms, Hyde was a drunkard and an unabashed transvestite, with a penchant for addressing the New York Assembly while wearing his wife’s clothes.”Gloria Brame. “The Governor Who Wore a Dress”. Bilerico, September 01, 2011. Online.
“One of the remarkable characters I discovered while doing some transgender history research for my book was Lord Cornbury. …. .Cornbury is reported to have opened the 1702 New York Assembly clad in a hooped gown and an elaborate headdress and carrying a fan, imitative of the style of Queen Anne. … It is also said that in August 1707, when his wife Lady Cornbury died, His High Mightiness (as he preferred to be called) attended the funeral again dressed as a woman. It was shortly after this that mounting complaints from colonists prompted the Queen to remove Cornbury from office.”
Who was the historical Edward Hyde
(mainly taken from chapter 2 of Patricia U Bonomi's The Lord Cornbury Scandal, 1998)Edward Hyde (1661 - 1723) was born into a family with strong links to the Stuart dynasty. His grandfather, also called Edward Hyde, had been a faithful servant to Charles Stuart the younger during his exile under the Commonwealth. When Charles Stuart became King as Charles II in 1660, he appointed Hyde as Lord High Chancellor, Baron Hyndon and then Earl of Clarendon. As a courtesy the eldest sons of the Earls Clarendon were to be Viscount Cornbury. Hyde’s eldest daughter, Anne, married James, the younger brother of Charles II, and gave birth to two future queens, Mary and Anne, before dying at age 34. Hyde, morally inflexible, refused to recognise the main mistress of Charles in 1667, and was impeached and exiled to France, where he died in 1674. His eldest son, Henry then became the 2nd Earl of Clarendon. Thus the Cornbury title went to his son, the younger Edward Hyde. Henry was appointed Lord Privy Seal and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. His first wife had died age 22 of smallpox, a few months after Edward’s birth. Edward attended Oxford University at age 13, and completed his education at l’Académie de Calvin in Geneva. In 1683, he became Lieutenant Colonel of the Royal Regiment of Dragoons. When the Catholic James Stuart became king as James II in 1685, there was an uprising, Monmouth’s Rebellion, objecting to a Catholic monarch, led by James’ illegitimate half-brother, the Duke of Monmouth. Hyde commanded his troops in the repression of the rebellion and was promoted to full Colonel. The same year he also became a Tory Member of Parliament. In 1688, against his father’s wishes, he married Katherine O’Brian. By then Henry Hyde and his brother Laurence had been dismissed from office because they would not convert to Catholicism. Later in 1688 Mary Stuart’s husband, William of Orange, invited by MPs of both parties, invaded to save Britain for Protestantism – The Glorious Revolution . Edward Hyde was one of the first commanders to take his men over to William’s side. Despite this he fell out of favour with William, and had his regiment taken from him. He remained out of favour until 1701 when William appointed him as Governor of New York, to which was added the post of Governor of New Jersey in 1702 when Anne became Queen. Hyde acquitted himself well in negotiations with French Canada and with the Iroquois Nations, but was resented by some for running the two colonies in the interests of the monarch. Katherine died in 1706: of their seven children, three then still survived. Henry the 2nd Earl died in 1709, and Edward returned in 1710 as the 3rd Earl. He was appointed to the Privy Council and named first commissioner of the Admiralty. He was also sent as ambassador to George, Prince of Hanover, Anne’s chosen successor. Hyde died in 1723, having outlived all his children. He was interred in the family crypt in Westminster Abbey.
 |
| Bonomi p31 |
Namesakes
* Edward Hyde was not the cricketer (1881-1941), the royalist priest (1607-1659), the 1st Earl Clarendon (this was Edward Hyde’s grandfather); the governor of North Carolina (1667-1712), and certainly not the alternate persona to Dr Jekyll in RL Stevenson’s novella.
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In Part II we will consider the actual evidence. That, we will find, is at variance with the claims quoted above.
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↧
Recurring Untruths: Edward Hyde–Part II
The only detailed biography of Edward Hyde is: - Patricia U. Bonomi. The Lord Cornbury Scandal The Politics of Reputation in British America. The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
She had earlier published articles that became part of the book: in The William and Mary Quarterly and in the Times literary Supplement.
What is the actual evidence, or what passes as such from the 18th century?
Epistles
Robert Livingstone returned to Albany County, New York in 1706 after three years in London. He wrote to the Treasury office the next year that he had heard such extraordinary stories
“that I durst not attempt to give your honour an account of them as not being possible to be believed … Tis said that he is wholly addicted to his pleasure … his dressing himself in womens Cloths Commonly [every] morning is so unaccountable that if hundreds of spectators did not dayly see him it would be incredible.” (p158)
Lewis Morris, a political nemesis of Hyde, wrote two letters of interest.
The first, dated from internal evidence to 1707:
“the Scandal of his life is … he rarely fails of being dresst in Women’s Cloaths every day, and almost half his time is spent that day, and seldome misses it on a Sacrament day, was in that Garb when his dead Lady was carried out of the Fort, and this not privately but in the face of the Sun and sight of the Town”.And dated 9 February 1708:
“of whom I must say something which perhaps no boddy will think their while to tell, and that is his dressing publiqly on womans Cloaths Every day and putting a Stop to all publique business while he is pleasing himself with that peculiar but detestable maggot”. (p159-160)
Elias Neau, a catechist, writing just after Hyde’s public dispute with two Anglican ministers:
“My Lord Cornbury has and dos still make use of an unfortunate Custom of dressing himself in Womens Cloaths and of exposing himself in that Garb upon the Ramparts to the view of the public; in that dress he draws a World of Spectators about him and consequently as many Censures, especially for exposing himself un such a manner all the great Holy days and even in an hour or two after going to the Communion.” (p161)
The Painting
After almost a century the rumours about Hyde had died down, and been forgotten. In 1796, the writer – and lover of gossip, Horace Walpole (himself given to occasional transvesting), and a fellow gossip, Gilly Williams visited Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie. They talked of the society beauty, Catherine Hyde (1701-1777), Duchess of Queensbury by marriage, the daughter of Henry Hyde, Edward’s cousin, who became the 4th Earl of Clarendon. From there the conversation drifted to Edward.
As Douglas recorded in his diary: Walpole repeated the rumour that Edward Hyde in New York had dressed to represent his queen. Williams added extra, otherwise unrecorded, and not repeated by later writers. His father
“told him that he had done business with him [Hyde] in woman’s clothes. He used to sit at the open window so dressed, to the great amusement of the neighbours. He employed always the most fashionable milliner, shoemaker, staymaker, etc. Mr Williams has seen a picture of him at Sir Herbert Packingington’s in Worcestershire, in a gown, stays, tucker, long ruffles, cap, etc.”
The very next year, 1796, a letter to an art cataloguer from the son of Lord Sandys of Worcestershire described one of the paintings as “The Second E. of Clarendeon in womens’ cloaths”. Edward Hyde was of course the 3rd Earl. His father Henry was the 2nd.
1795-6 was a time was transvesting was topical in that Charlotte D’Eon having returned to England, was living as female and giving exhibition fencing matches.
There was no further claim of a painting of any Earl of Clarendon transvesting until 1867 when the painting that we now know was publically displayed in an exhibition of national portraits at the South Kensington Museum (now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum). For the occasion, a label was attached. However it was not a usual art curator’s description, but a quotation (see Part I) from Agnes Strickland. Strickland, in her books, Lives of the Queens of England, had given only one source [also not repeated in later claims], a letter written in Hanover in 1714 by German diplomat Hans Caspar von Bothmer who was the Hanoverian representative at the court of Queen Anne. Bothmer supposedly repeated a rumour that Hyde, while in ‘the Indies” dressed to represent his queen. This letter is unknown other than for Strickland’s claim.
The New York Daily Tribune reported on the exhibition. It discussed the painting, and repeated the quote from Strickland. This was the first mention of the painting in New York or elsewhere in North America.
Is the painting of a man or a woman?
Bonomi quotes Robin Gibson of the National Portrait Gallery, the expert on the Hyde family paintings known as the Clarendon Collection. Of the painting that we are considering: “I feel certain that the so-called portrait of Lord Cornbury is a perfectly straightforward British provincial portrait of a rather plain woman circa 1710.” The painting was unlikely to be done on the colonies. .. Although I do not think it would be possible to identify either the artist or the sitter of the portrait in question, it seems to me the sort of portrait which might have been painted of a well-to-do woman living well outside London society, perhaps in the north of England. It is not necessarily of a member of the aristocracy.”
Could it be a caricature of Hyde?
“Caricature portrait paintings (certainly in Britain at this date) are unknown to me and extremely rare at any time. Any caricature would have taken the form of an engraving or drawing.” (p19)
The painting in New York
The painting was put up for auction in 1952, and was then acquired by the New York Historical Society, where it is now on display.Other paintings
Here is a portrait, probably of Edward Hyde, in 1681, when he was 19. Compare the faces. Does it look like the same person?
And here is a portrait of Henry Hyde, the future 2nd Earl of Clarendon, in 1643 when he was 4. Could this have been the picture referred to by the son of Lord Sandys?
Evaluation
In a court of law ‘evidence’ such as this would be dismissed as hearsay, and not admitted.
Incidentally not one of Livingstone, Morris and Neau is quoted by 20th century writers who tell of Edward Hyde.
The letters, sent to authorities in London, were not acted on. The claims were not consistent with other accounts, and as said, no witnesses were ever named or recorded. Hyde returned to England in 1710 and was appointed to the Privy Council and named first commissioner of the Admiralty. Even his kinship to the Queen would not have permitted this if he were regarded as scandalous.
Bonomi points out (p161) that other Governors in the same period were involved in scandals. Let us take the case of Francis Nicholson who was Governor of Virginia 1690-2, 1698-1705. The account in Encyclopedia Virginia is:
Meanwhile, his persistent and unsubtle courtship of the beautiful eighteen-year-old Lucy Burwell turned Nicholson into a laughingstock: In a speech to the House of Burgesses on September 22, 1701, Nicholson professed his admiration "for the Natives" of Virginia, "in particular but principally for One of them," but his marriage proposal to Burwell, daughter of the wealthy and influential Major Lewis Burwell of Gloucester County, was refused. The governor only made matters worse when he continued to publicly pursue Burwell even after she had become engaged to the equally privileged Edmund Berkeley II of Middlesex County.
Hearing rumors of Nicholson's political and personal missteps, authorities in London requested that a Virginian named Robert Quary investigate the various complaints against the governor. Although Quary's report was highly supportive of Nicholson and dismissive of his opponents, it did give the impression of being so biased toward the governor that it resulted in Nicholson becoming even less popular within the ranks of the colony's most influential residents, among them Robert Beverley II. In May 1703 six members of the governor's Council requested that the Crown remove the governor from office, asserting that he was a man of poor personal character, and thus was not an appropriate choice to serve as the monarch's representative in the colony. Following lengthy debates in London, the imperial authorities dismissed Nicholson from his governorship in April 1705, replacing him with Colonel Edward Nott.Nothing like this happened to Edward Hyde.
It is well established that the terms ‘gay’ or ‘faggot’ are often used to put down men who are not at all gay. Here are some examples of politicians said to be trans when they were not at all so.
In 1988, Jonathan Falwell, son of Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, put out a comic book showing the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis in drag, (see Marjorie Garber. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety, 1992: 54 – there is no longer anything on the web about this comic book).
Also 1988, a painting by a student, David Nelson, showed the recently deceased mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, in female underwear. This caused a brouhahah, the painting was seized, and damaged before being returned. EN.Wikipedia.
In 2016, Alex Jones got a lot of mileage in the press when he claimed that Michelle Obama is a trans. Online.
Conclusion
Certainly any claim that he did so made after 1998 that fails to discuss Bonomi’s book is deserving of no attention at all.
- Cecil Adams. “Did New York once have a transvestite governor?”. The Straight Dope, January 25, 2002. Online.
- Emily Ulrich. “Biography of Edward Hyde, earl of Cornbury, Governor of New York”. Alma Mater, Spring 2014. Online.
EN.Wikipedia
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Defenestration in Brooklyn
Duberman’s Stonewall book mentions the gay rights pioneer activist, Bob Kohler (1926-2007):
“Kohler would give the young queens clothing and change, or sometimes pay for a room in a local fleabag hotel; and when out walking his dog, he would sit on a park bench with them and listen to their troubles and dreams. He was able to hear their pain even as he chuckled at their antic. …
Yet for all their wit and style, Kohler never glamorized street queens as heroic deviants pushing against rigid gender categories, self-conscious pioneers of a boundary-free existence. He knew too much about the misery of their lives. He knew a drugged-out queen who fell asleep on a rooftop and lay in the sun so long that she ended up near death with a third-degree burn. He knew ‘cross-eyed Cynthia’, killed when she was pushed out of a window of the St George Hotel in Brooklyn – and another ‘Sylvia’, who jumped off its roof.”Wallace Hamilton (1919-1983) had an apartment in Greenwich Village where he welcomed many gay persons. In his memoir, Christopher and Gay, he recounts meetings with ‘Wanda’.
“She had brought in the street, the night’s affairs, the reality of the city, and, with a kind of bizarre hyperbole, broke through the shells of private fantasy that had shut the city out. … Wanda was a queen of brash Auntie Mame femininity. Slight, dark-haired, with a chiselled face, she could wear ordinary male clothes and still come on as womanhood personified. She was a queen who didn’t need drag. …
I’d heard about Wanda’s death from someone on Christopher Street early one evening … The story was that he (sic) had fallen or been pushed out of the fifteenth floor of a hotel in Brooklyn. Since he had no identification on him, the body had lain unclaimed in the morgue for several days before any of his friends had been able to trace him down. He had no family in evidence, and was ready for Potter’s field.”
Is ‘Wanda’ the same person as ‘cross-eyed Cynthia’?
Both names seem to be pseudonyms. Hamilton’s account would date the death to 1971. The account in Duberman is placed in the book just before the Stonewall riots, and therefore suggests 1969, but actually the quoted section is a summary of Kohler’s list of street queens that he had known who met unfortunate deaths. Duberman interviewed Kohler many years later for his 1993 book. Thus Cynthia’s death could be in 1971.
Or perhaps more than one street queen was defenestrated from the St George Hotel!
What do we know about the St George Hotel in Brooklyn?
Here is an article on the hotel. It was built in stages between 1885 and 1929. It was once the largest
- Wallace Hamilton. Christopher and Gay ; a Partisan's View of the Greenwich Village Homosexual Scene. Saturday Review Press, 1973: 8-9. 57-9 .
- Martin Duberman. Stonewall. A Plume Book, 1994: 188-9.
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Transgender lexicons: John Money 1: gender and transexual
Transgender lexicons:
Virginia Prince
Rose White
Raven Usher
Chris Bartlett
Jack Molay
Raphael Carter
John Money
John Money coined a lot of words, and took other existing words and made them his own. Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity, 1972 (co-authored by Anke A. Ehrhardt) and Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference, and Pair Bonding, 1980 both contain extensive glossaries – 16 pages in the former, 17 in the latter, but actually do not contain most of his neologisms. More than that, the glossaries contain both words in general usage and Money’s coinings. Unfortunately, unlike Jack Molay, Money does not indicate his own coinings e.g with an *.
On the other hand Terry Goldie’s The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money, 2014, had Index entries for most of Money’s neologisms, and chapter 6 is “The Edge of the Alphabet: Neologisms”.
Goldie writes: “Money loved jargon and creating jargon. He seemed to have no idea in sexology for which he did not want to find a Latin or Greek word. “ (p148-9)
Money is, of course, most associated with the term gender, so let us start there.
gender role: everything that a person says and does, to indicate to others or to the self the degree in which one is male or female or ambivalent. It includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response. Gender role is the public expression of gender identity, and gender identity is the private experience of gender role.
gender indentity/role (G_I/R): gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is public manifestation of gender identity. Gender identity is the sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s individuality as male, female, or ambivalent, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behaviour. Gender role is everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male or female, or ambivalent; it includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response.
He notes that “people adopted the term and gave it their own definition”. The first change was to separate gender identity and gender role; the second was the separation of sex from gender as “heralded in the title of Stoller’s book, Sex and Gender (1968)”. He continues: “Many textbooks … now introduce the definition of gender by defining sex as a biological entity -- and as what one is born with. Gender is a social entity, which one acquires after birth, and gender role is the social casting or ordainment of gender. This is the strategy by which gender role has been neutered. It has become devoid of any connection with biology and reproduction. It is defined instead as the product of social history, with male and female roles having been more or less arbitrarily assigned on the basis of male superiority and female inferiority.”
Money also includes the rather odd observation:
With all respect for Money’s role in enabling transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins, “gender indentity/role (G_I/R” ) renders null the dynamic behind transsexuality. As it consists of “both introspective and the extraspective manifestations” of gender such that they reinforce each other, he is talking of cis gender. In a trans person there is a discrepancy between gender (role) and gender identity, and the act of transition is to change one’s gender (role) to align it with one’s gender identity.)
‘transexual’ (one S) was coined by David Cauldwell. Harry Benjamin went with the two-S spelling, but Money retained Cauldwell’s one-S spelling. Article.
Riki Anne Wilchins and others proclaimed that they spelt the word with one S to avoid medical implications. I never understood that claim. One-S, two-S -- it was a choice between Cauldwell-Money on one side and Benjamin on the other. Both have medical implications. To avoid such one needs to say ‘transsexuality’ rather than ‘transsexualism’.
____________
* “The Conceptual Neutering of Gender and the Criminalization of Sex” was first given 20 September 1984 as a lecture at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research, Cambridge. It was published in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, 14, 1985: 279-290. It was reprinted as the penultimate chapter in John Money. Venuses Penuses: Sexology, Sexosophy and Exigency Theory, 1986.
Continued in part II
Virginia Prince
Rose White
Raven Usher
Chris Bartlett
Jack Molay
Raphael Carter
John Money
John Money coined a lot of words, and took other existing words and made them his own. Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity, 1972 (co-authored by Anke A. Ehrhardt) and Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference, and Pair Bonding, 1980 both contain extensive glossaries – 16 pages in the former, 17 in the latter, but actually do not contain most of his neologisms. More than that, the glossaries contain both words in general usage and Money’s coinings. Unfortunately, unlike Jack Molay, Money does not indicate his own coinings e.g with an *.
On the other hand Terry Goldie’s The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money, 2014, had Index entries for most of Money’s neologisms, and chapter 6 is “The Edge of the Alphabet: Neologisms”.
Goldie writes: “Money loved jargon and creating jargon. He seemed to have no idea in sexology for which he did not want to find a Latin or Greek word. “ (p148-9)
Money is, of course, most associated with the term gender, so let us start there.
Gender
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl:
gender identity: the sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s individuality as male or female (or ambivalent), in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behaviour. Gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity.gender role: everything that a person says and does, to indicate to others or to the self the degree in which one is male or female or ambivalent. It includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response. Gender role is the public expression of gender identity, and gender identity is the private experience of gender role.
Love and Love Sickness:(8 years later)
gender: one’s personal, social and legal status as male or female or mixed, on the basis of somatic and behavioural criteria more inclusive than the genital criterion alone.gender indentity/role (G_I/R): gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is public manifestation of gender identity. Gender identity is the sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s individuality as male, female, or ambivalent, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behaviour. Gender role is everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male or female, or ambivalent; it includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response.
And 4 years after that:
In 1984, Money presented a paper “The Conceptual Neutering of Gender and the Criminalization of Sex”.* In it he surveys the changes in the use of the word during the 30 years since he had introduced it in 1955. ``As originally defined, gender role consists of both introspective and the extraspective manifestations of the concept. In general usage, the introspective manifestations soon became separately known as gender identity. The acronym, G-I/R, being singular, restores the unity of the concept. Without this unity, gender role has become a socially transmitted acquisition, divorced from the biology of sex and the brain.”He notes that “people adopted the term and gave it their own definition”. The first change was to separate gender identity and gender role; the second was the separation of sex from gender as “heralded in the title of Stoller’s book, Sex and Gender (1968)”. He continues: “Many textbooks … now introduce the definition of gender by defining sex as a biological entity -- and as what one is born with. Gender is a social entity, which one acquires after birth, and gender role is the social casting or ordainment of gender. This is the strategy by which gender role has been neutered. It has become devoid of any connection with biology and reproduction. It is defined instead as the product of social history, with male and female roles having been more or less arbitrarily assigned on the basis of male superiority and female inferiority.”
Money also includes the rather odd observation:
“The discordancy that exists in the case of transsexualism is so complete that, in technical jargon, gender identity is sometimes used as an attribute of only the discordant cases. One effect of this usage has been that some theoreticians of homosexuality have been entrapped into attributing a male gender identity to all homosexuals, provided they do not repudiate their self-declared status as male. The qualifier is then added that the homosexual, despite a male identity, has a male object choice or sexual preference. This nomenclature is totally illogical in cases of gynemimetic homosexuals, or drag queens, who impersonate women in variable degrees on a full-time basis. It is more straightforward to attribute to homosexuals a gender identity that is homoerotic, and in its nonerotic components may or may not conform to the masculine stereotype.”(Comment: Money’s concept of “gender indentity/role (G_I/R)” makes sense in terms of the work that he was doing in the mid-1950s with intersex persons with the same DNA/hormonal conditions who stayed with the gender of rearing, whichever it was. However once the concept of ‘gender’ was released to the wider world, other uses were found for the term. This was inevitable, as it would be for any word that is as useful as ‘gender’. Money is particularly insensitive to feminist usages of ‘gender’ as a social construction and as a system of oppression.
With all respect for Money’s role in enabling transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins, “gender indentity/role (G_I/R” ) renders null the dynamic behind transsexuality. As it consists of “both introspective and the extraspective manifestations” of gender such that they reinforce each other, he is talking of cis gender. In a trans person there is a discrepancy between gender (role) and gender identity, and the act of transition is to change one’s gender (role) to align it with one’s gender identity.)
A note on the word ‘transexual”.
‘transexual’ (one S) was coined by David Cauldwell. Harry Benjamin went with the two-S spelling, but Money retained Cauldwell’s one-S spelling. Article.
Riki Anne Wilchins and others proclaimed that they spelt the word with one S to avoid medical implications. I never understood that claim. One-S, two-S -- it was a choice between Cauldwell-Money on one side and Benjamin on the other. Both have medical implications. To avoid such one needs to say ‘transsexuality’ rather than ‘transsexualism’.
____________
* “The Conceptual Neutering of Gender and the Criminalization of Sex” was first given 20 September 1984 as a lecture at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research, Cambridge. It was published in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, 14, 1985: 279-290. It was reprinted as the penultimate chapter in John Money. Venuses Penuses: Sexology, Sexosophy and Exigency Theory, 1986.
Continued in part II
↧
Transgender lexicons: John Money 2: other words
Transgender lexicons:
Virginia Prince
Rose White
Raven Usher
Chris Bartlett
Jack Molay
Raphael Carter
John Money – part 1: gender and transexual
Paraphilia/paraphiliac: a psychological condition of being obsessively responsive to, and dependent on an unusual or unacceptable stimulus in order to have a state of sexual arousal initiated or maintained.
The Man Who Invented Gender: “Although the Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of paraphilia in 1925, it was largely Money who popularized the term among psychologists. Eventually, the word replaced perversions in psychiatric literature.“
Androgynophilia: erotosexual pairing with a man and a woman serially or simultaneously by a member of either sex.
Andromimetic: a girl or woman being a person manifesting the features or qualities of a male in bodily appearance, dress and behaviour. There is no fixed vernacular synonym except, maybe, a bull dyke, that is a female homosexual who lives in the role of a man. She may request breast removal, but not genital surgery, and usually not hormones to masculinize the voice, beard and body hair.
Apotemnophilia: the condition of being dependent on being an amputee, or fantasying oneself as an amputee, in order to obtain erotic arousal.
(Comment: later, several other sexologists have either discussed or facilitated apotemnophilia. Russell Reid referred two such patients to a patient; Ray Blanchard and Anne Lawrence gave papers at the Third International Body Integrity Disorder Meeting in 2003 comparing apotemnophilia to Gender identity disorder; in 1999 Dr John Brown removed a leg from an apotemnophiliac who subsequently died, and was then imprisoned.)
Gynandromorphy: woman-man-shape. Thus, literally, the term means having some of the body morphology and measurements of an average woman, and some of an average man, or being at neither extreme.
Gynecomimetic: a boy or man being a person manifesting the features or qualities of a female in bodily appearance, dress and behaviour. Specifically, a drag queen, which is the vernacular term for a male homosexual who lives in the role of a woman. He retains his male genitals, even though he may take hormones to grow breasts.
Gynophila– Money’s spelling for gynephilia.
Sexosophy: the body of knowledge that comprises the philosophy, principles, and knowledge that people have about their own personally experienced erotic sexuality and that of other people, singly and collectively.
(Comment: as opposed to Sexology, the science of sex).
Ambisexual -- an alternate term for ‘bisexual’, first cited in the OED for 1938. Money claimed to have been one of the first to use the term, but later dismissed it as meaning nothing different from ‘bisexual’.
Autoagonistophilia: pleasure from being viewed while having sex.
(Other writers spell it Autagonistophilia. Presumably the term, or simply autagonist, could also be used for a kind of exhibitionist drag queen who is not able to simply transvest, but is insistent on being read; likewise the kind of transsexual who cannot simply be a woman, but demands that everyone be aware of her transition. Money does not get into a discussion of this.)
Biologically devout -- explaining sexuality and gender identity purely in terms of DNA, hormones etc.
(Comment: there should be a matching term for explaining sexuality and gender identity purely in terms of family, society, social construction, self fashioning etc – but what would that be?)
Biophilia– forms of sexual desire that lead to procreation. See also Normaphilia.
(Comment: the word is also used by Erich Fromm and then Edward O Wilson for the proposed human tendency to seek connections with other life forms. EN.Wikipedia)
Extraspective– the outward observation of things, the default way to observe, the opposite to Introspective. Normally this would not need a name, in that all life forms do it without knowing about introspection. However in Money’s “gender indentity/role (G_I/R” the two complement each other.
Fuckology – a synonym for sexology. Sometimes spelt with a ‘ph’. In 1996 Money presented a paper to the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and therapists which he titled: “Fuckology: The Science We Lack”. There is a 2015 anthology of papers: Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts.
Homosexology/Heterosexology– a division of sexology by its two major orientations.
Indicatrons“In recognition of the fact that psychology’s units of raw data all serve to indicate something or other to the psychologist or scientist, they can all be categorized as indicatrons.
Katharma. A word to be preferred over ‘freak’. “A person whose social stigmata need to be cleansed by society so that he may become a rightful member of the human race.
Normaphilia– any form of sexual desire that is socially accepted.
Paleodigm: an ancient example or model of a concept, explanation, instruction idea or notion, preserved in the folk wisdom of mottos, maxims, proverbs, superstitions, incantations, rhymes, songs, fables, myths, parables, revered writings, sacred books, dramas, and visual emblems. Paleodigmatics is the organized body of knowledge of paleodigms.
Pedeiktophilia: penile exhibition.
(Comment: because this word starts with ‘ped’, many will take it as having something to do with pedophilia.)
Quim and swive: In neither the standard English vocabulary of literature and science, nor the vernacular vocabulary of uncensored speech, are there terms by which to distinguish what the woman does to the man, in the procreative act, from what the man does to the woman.
The two words, from olden English, best fit the need. Either can be noun or verb.
(Comment: Most online sites that define swive use it for either the male or the female action. Most sites give quim only as a noun, not as a verb.)
Sexual orientation -- Money pushed for this term rather than ‘sexual preference’ in that it is less judgemental and that attraction is not necessarily a matter of free will.
Spookological: “That which is not biological is occult, mystical or, to coin a term, spookological.”
Transvesticism– sometimes used instead of transvestism.
Ycleptance: namimg and being named.
Virginia Prince
Rose White
Raven Usher
Chris Bartlett
Jack Molay
Raphael Carter
John Money – part 1: gender and transexual
Other Words in Money’s Glossaries:
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
Gynandromorphy: woman-man-shape. Thus, literally, the term means having some of the body morphology and measurements of an average woman, and some of an average man, or being at neither extreme.Paraphilia/paraphiliac: a psychological condition of being obsessively responsive to, and dependent on an unusual or unacceptable stimulus in order to have a state of sexual arousal initiated or maintained.
The Man Who Invented Gender: “Although the Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of paraphilia in 1925, it was largely Money who popularized the term among psychologists. Eventually, the word replaced perversions in psychiatric literature.“
Love and Love Sickness:
Allosex-avoidancy: a socially dictated constraint on personal disclosure to members of the other, but not one’s own, sex. It affects both behaviour (as in locker-room nudity, for example) and communication, as in sexual joking.Androgynophilia: erotosexual pairing with a man and a woman serially or simultaneously by a member of either sex.
Andromimetic: a girl or woman being a person manifesting the features or qualities of a male in bodily appearance, dress and behaviour. There is no fixed vernacular synonym except, maybe, a bull dyke, that is a female homosexual who lives in the role of a man. She may request breast removal, but not genital surgery, and usually not hormones to masculinize the voice, beard and body hair.
Apotemnophilia: the condition of being dependent on being an amputee, or fantasying oneself as an amputee, in order to obtain erotic arousal.
(Comment: later, several other sexologists have either discussed or facilitated apotemnophilia. Russell Reid referred two such patients to a patient; Ray Blanchard and Anne Lawrence gave papers at the Third International Body Integrity Disorder Meeting in 2003 comparing apotemnophilia to Gender identity disorder; in 1999 Dr John Brown removed a leg from an apotemnophiliac who subsequently died, and was then imprisoned.)
Gynandromorphy: woman-man-shape. Thus, literally, the term means having some of the body morphology and measurements of an average woman, and some of an average man, or being at neither extreme.
Gynecomimetic: a boy or man being a person manifesting the features or qualities of a female in bodily appearance, dress and behaviour. Specifically, a drag queen, which is the vernacular term for a male homosexual who lives in the role of a woman. He retains his male genitals, even though he may take hormones to grow breasts.
Gynophila– Money’s spelling for gynephilia.
Sexosophy: the body of knowledge that comprises the philosophy, principles, and knowledge that people have about their own personally experienced erotic sexuality and that of other people, singly and collectively.
(Comment: as opposed to Sexology, the science of sex).
Other words used by John Money :
Abidance: continuing to remain, be sustained, or survive in the same condition or circumstances.Ambisexual -- an alternate term for ‘bisexual’, first cited in the OED for 1938. Money claimed to have been one of the first to use the term, but later dismissed it as meaning nothing different from ‘bisexual’.
Autoagonistophilia: pleasure from being viewed while having sex.
(Other writers spell it Autagonistophilia. Presumably the term, or simply autagonist, could also be used for a kind of exhibitionist drag queen who is not able to simply transvest, but is insistent on being read; likewise the kind of transsexual who cannot simply be a woman, but demands that everyone be aware of her transition. Money does not get into a discussion of this.)
Biologically devout -- explaining sexuality and gender identity purely in terms of DNA, hormones etc.
(Comment: there should be a matching term for explaining sexuality and gender identity purely in terms of family, society, social construction, self fashioning etc – but what would that be?)
Biophilia– forms of sexual desire that lead to procreation. See also Normaphilia.
(Comment: the word is also used by Erich Fromm and then Edward O Wilson for the proposed human tendency to seek connections with other life forms. EN.Wikipedia)
Extraspective– the outward observation of things, the default way to observe, the opposite to Introspective. Normally this would not need a name, in that all life forms do it without knowing about introspection. However in Money’s “gender indentity/role (G_I/R” the two complement each other.
Fuckology – a synonym for sexology. Sometimes spelt with a ‘ph’. In 1996 Money presented a paper to the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and therapists which he titled: “Fuckology: The Science We Lack”. There is a 2015 anthology of papers: Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts.
Homosexology/Heterosexology– a division of sexology by its two major orientations.
Indicatrons“In recognition of the fact that psychology’s units of raw data all serve to indicate something or other to the psychologist or scientist, they can all be categorized as indicatrons.
Katharma. A word to be preferred over ‘freak’. “A person whose social stigmata need to be cleansed by society so that he may become a rightful member of the human race.
Normaphilia– any form of sexual desire that is socially accepted.
Paleodigm: an ancient example or model of a concept, explanation, instruction idea or notion, preserved in the folk wisdom of mottos, maxims, proverbs, superstitions, incantations, rhymes, songs, fables, myths, parables, revered writings, sacred books, dramas, and visual emblems. Paleodigmatics is the organized body of knowledge of paleodigms.
Pedeiktophilia: penile exhibition.
(Comment: because this word starts with ‘ped’, many will take it as having something to do with pedophilia.)
Quim and swive: In neither the standard English vocabulary of literature and science, nor the vernacular vocabulary of uncensored speech, are there terms by which to distinguish what the woman does to the man, in the procreative act, from what the man does to the woman.
The two words, from olden English, best fit the need. Either can be noun or verb.
(Comment: Most online sites that define swive use it for either the male or the female action. Most sites give quim only as a noun, not as a verb.)
Sexual orientation -- Money pushed for this term rather than ‘sexual preference’ in that it is less judgemental and that attraction is not necessarily a matter of free will.
Spookological: “That which is not biological is occult, mystical or, to coin a term, spookological.”
Transvesticism– sometimes used instead of transvestism.
Ycleptance: namimg and being named.
↧
↧
John Ronald Brown (1922 - 2010) surgeon - Part I
I wrote a shorter version of this in August 2007. This version goes into more details, about his legal troubles, his patients etc.
John Brown was born in 1922, the son of a Mormon physician. He grew up in Arizona and Utah. He was drafted in the Second World War, and, excelling on the General Classification Test, was sent by the army to medical school. He graduated from the University Of Utah School Of Medicine in August 1947. His first wife ran off with his best friend; his second died of cancer. After twenty years as a general practitioner, he took a program in plastic surgery at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, passed the written exam easily, but failed the oral.
From 1966-8 almost all transgender surgery in the US was done in university gender identity clinics. Georg Burou’s penile inversion technique that he pioneered in Casablanca was becoming better known, and in 1968 Stanley Biber, a doctor-surgeon at the Mount San Rafael hospital in Trinidad, a mining town in Colorado, who had had extensive surgical experience with the US Army during the Korean War, started doing vaginoplasties, using diagrams that he had obtained from Johns Hopkins Hospital based on Dr Burou’s technique.
February 2-4, 1973, saw the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome sponsored by the Divisions of Urology and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. Its principal architect and chairman was Donald R. Laub, M.D., Chief of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. A highlight was the presentation of his techniques by Dr Georges Burou; John Brown also made a presentation, that was well received, doctors at that time not being aware of the idiosyncrasies of his practice. Vern Bullough: “the case of John Brown, who Zelda Suplee, my wife Bonnie, and myself at least halfway encouraged to do transsexual surgery, a recommendation we quickly regretted”.
John Brown set up business as a doctor-surgeon in San Francisco. His assistant was James Spence who had a criminal record but no medical training. Julie approached Brown and Spence about breast implants, and they, assuring her that she would be a ‘perfect woman’, talked her into a full operation. This was one of Brown’s first vaginoplasties; he was assisted by Spence. However unlike Dr Biber, Brown did not have surgical experience and he did not have operating room privileges. However he did network with trans activists.
Another trans woman, Wendy Davidson, who was attempting to organize peer clinics run by transsexuals, also worked with Brown for a while, as did Donna Colvin. Colvin later reported that he shot up valium before surgery, performed on kitchen tables and in hotel rooms. Brown also met with Angela Douglas, who later explained: “‘He wanted to help aid me and came up with several thousand dollars cash to help publish Mirage Magazine. In exchange, I promoted him considerably’.
In October Brown’s work was mentioned sarcastically in Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Journalist Paul Ciotti followed up and was invited to a dinner party where a pitch was made by James Spence to a group of urologists, proctologists and internists. Spence was hoping to establish what he projected to be the finest sex-change facility anywhere in the US. Dinner was served by several transsexuals, who were awaiting surgery. When asked how candidates would be selected for surgery, Spence replied: “It takes one to know one. We let other transsexuals make the decision. They can tell best when someone is a true transsexual — a woman trapped in a man’s body." His surgical method centered on using the glans penis to form a clitoris, and lining the vagina with scrotal skin. Ciotti says of Brown: “he came across as genial, knowledgeable and obviously quite proud of his technique. There was a certain naiveté (and even passivity) about him that struck me as surprising in a surgeon”.
However by January 1974 Brown and Spence were at odds.
In 1977 Brown performed vaginoplasty on Angela Douglas who paid around $600. She described him as one who "fed, housed, paid and helped hundreds, and gave free or nearly free surgery to at least two hundred of us". Another patient that year was Nicole Spray.
![]()
Later that year, the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance revoked Brown’s medical license for "gross negligence, incompetence and practicing unprofessional medicine in a manner which involved moral turpitude". This was partly based on his practice of doing vaginoplasty on an out-patient basis, not in a properly equipped surgical theater, and having patients work as medical assistants as part of their barter for their own surgery. He also misrepresented transgender surgery on insurance forms as "the congenital absence of a vagina". Despite this, the judge also filed a memorandum opinion that Brown was a pioneer making innovative contributions in transsexual surgery: perhaps a better resolution would be to include Brown in a medically recognized organization, with others selecting the patients and providing post-operative care.
In 1979 Julie sued, saying that the operation had left her neither male nor female. She sued for $7 million, but settled out-of-court for significantly less, but “enough for psychiatric care help for the rest of Julie’s life and a new operation”. Brown’s lawyer made the offer after psychiatrist Kathleen Unger testified that the patient would be a mental cripple for the rest of her life.
![]()
Brown worked and successively lost permission to practice in Hawaii, Alaska and St Lucia. In 1981, in St Lucia, he, then 59, contracted an arranged marriage to a 17-year-old, who did not speak English. He taught her the language, and they had two sons.
He then returned to southern California and began an underground practice operating in Tijuana. Tijuana was already a known destination for transsexual surgery. The most eminent surgeon was Jose Jesus Barbosa who worked with Harry Benjamin, and who was the surgeon for Canary Conn and Lynn Conway.
Most of Brown’s patients were trans women who could not afford Dr Biber or Dr Barbosa, or did not meet the requirements re time on hormones, psychiatrist’s referral etc. One patient at this time was Monique Allen, who had vaginoplasty at age 22, and came to Brown for enhancements. She would continue with various other doctors, and eventually had over 200 plastic surgeries.
Patrice Baxter, a cis woman, also had a surgery business in Tijuana. She met Brown, and became a long-time friend and business partner. She also went to Brown for a tummy-tuck, a face-lift and breast implants. Several of her friends and relatives were also operated on: her granddaughter had her ears fixed so that they did not stick out. Brown used Baxter’s home in Mexico for patient postoperative care. By this time he was charging $2,500 for a vaginoplasty – although many of his patients never paid. Baxter was quoted by Ciotti: “"He was brilliant, but he had no common sense. He would walk through plate-glass doors. He couldn’t balance his checkbook." Sometimes in the middle of a conversation he’d just pick up a magazine and begin to read. His bedside manner was no great shakes, either. "He tended to mumble. He didn’t hold your hand." But so what? She asks. "He wasn’t a general practitioner," he was a surgeon.
In 1985 a then-19-year-old had surgery that was so successful that her husband never guessed her past. She later became a manager for an airline. Ann, a traumatized Cambodian who had fled the Khmer Rouge was also pleased with her surgery and became a stripper in Las Vegas’ Chinatown.
On the other hand it was estimated that at least 70 of Brown’s transgender patients ended up with permanent colostomies. UC San Diego plastic-surgery professor Jack Fisher repaired 15 or so of Brown’s disasters: “"He’s a terrible, appalling technical surgeon. There’s just no other way to describe it. He doesn’t know how to make a straight incision. He doesn’t know how to hold a knife. He has no regard for limiting blood loss."
Brown started offering penis enlargements – he did this by cutting the suspensor ligament holding the penis root to the pubic bone. He ran advertisements in The Advocate, and in 1984 he held a seminar in San Francisco – entrance fee $25 per person. He was arrested for medical fraud. However it took four years to come to trial.
![]()
Meanwhile, in 1986 Penthouse Forum featured this as a cover story "The Incredible Dick Doctor”. The article portrayed Brown as an inattentive driver who backed into other cars, and whose trousers fell down in the operating room. The television news magazine Inside Edition followed up with an investigative story on The Worst Doctor in America. Brown actually co-operated with the film crew.
Brown pleaded no contest to the fraud charges in 1999, was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in jail, but served only 30 days.
In transsexual circles Brown came to be known as 'Butcher Brown', but patients still came.
After the broadcast of the Inside Edition program, the San Diego District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation that led to Brown’s conviction in 1990, and a sentence of three years for practicing medicine without a license. Several trans woman, ex-patients, showed up to express support for previous work. His wife, the one from St Lucia, now divorced him, although they remained on good terms. He served 19 months.
Continued in Part II.
John Brown was born in 1922, the son of a Mormon physician. He grew up in Arizona and Utah. He was drafted in the Second World War, and, excelling on the General Classification Test, was sent by the army to medical school. He graduated from the University Of Utah School Of Medicine in August 1947. His first wife ran off with his best friend; his second died of cancer. After twenty years as a general practitioner, he took a program in plastic surgery at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, passed the written exam easily, but failed the oral.
From 1966-8 almost all transgender surgery in the US was done in university gender identity clinics. Georg Burou’s penile inversion technique that he pioneered in Casablanca was becoming better known, and in 1968 Stanley Biber, a doctor-surgeon at the Mount San Rafael hospital in Trinidad, a mining town in Colorado, who had had extensive surgical experience with the US Army during the Korean War, started doing vaginoplasties, using diagrams that he had obtained from Johns Hopkins Hospital based on Dr Burou’s technique.
February 2-4, 1973, saw the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome sponsored by the Divisions of Urology and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. Its principal architect and chairman was Donald R. Laub, M.D., Chief of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. A highlight was the presentation of his techniques by Dr Georges Burou; John Brown also made a presentation, that was well received, doctors at that time not being aware of the idiosyncrasies of his practice. Vern Bullough: “the case of John Brown, who Zelda Suplee, my wife Bonnie, and myself at least halfway encouraged to do transsexual surgery, a recommendation we quickly regretted”.
John Brown set up business as a doctor-surgeon in San Francisco. His assistant was James Spence who had a criminal record but no medical training. Julie approached Brown and Spence about breast implants, and they, assuring her that she would be a ‘perfect woman’, talked her into a full operation. This was one of Brown’s first vaginoplasties; he was assisted by Spence. However unlike Dr Biber, Brown did not have surgical experience and he did not have operating room privileges. However he did network with trans activists.
Another trans woman, Wendy Davidson, who was attempting to organize peer clinics run by transsexuals, also worked with Brown for a while, as did Donna Colvin. Colvin later reported that he shot up valium before surgery, performed on kitchen tables and in hotel rooms. Brown also met with Angela Douglas, who later explained: “‘He wanted to help aid me and came up with several thousand dollars cash to help publish Mirage Magazine. In exchange, I promoted him considerably’.
In October Brown’s work was mentioned sarcastically in Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Journalist Paul Ciotti followed up and was invited to a dinner party where a pitch was made by James Spence to a group of urologists, proctologists and internists. Spence was hoping to establish what he projected to be the finest sex-change facility anywhere in the US. Dinner was served by several transsexuals, who were awaiting surgery. When asked how candidates would be selected for surgery, Spence replied: “It takes one to know one. We let other transsexuals make the decision. They can tell best when someone is a true transsexual — a woman trapped in a man’s body." His surgical method centered on using the glans penis to form a clitoris, and lining the vagina with scrotal skin. Ciotti says of Brown: “he came across as genial, knowledgeable and obviously quite proud of his technique. There was a certain naiveté (and even passivity) about him that struck me as surprising in a surgeon”.
However by January 1974 Brown and Spence were at odds.
In 1977 Brown performed vaginoplasty on Angela Douglas who paid around $600. She described him as one who "fed, housed, paid and helped hundreds, and gave free or nearly free surgery to at least two hundred of us". Another patient that year was Nicole Spray.
Later that year, the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance revoked Brown’s medical license for "gross negligence, incompetence and practicing unprofessional medicine in a manner which involved moral turpitude". This was partly based on his practice of doing vaginoplasty on an out-patient basis, not in a properly equipped surgical theater, and having patients work as medical assistants as part of their barter for their own surgery. He also misrepresented transgender surgery on insurance forms as "the congenital absence of a vagina". Despite this, the judge also filed a memorandum opinion that Brown was a pioneer making innovative contributions in transsexual surgery: perhaps a better resolution would be to include Brown in a medically recognized organization, with others selecting the patients and providing post-operative care. In 1979 Julie sued, saying that the operation had left her neither male nor female. She sued for $7 million, but settled out-of-court for significantly less, but “enough for psychiatric care help for the rest of Julie’s life and a new operation”. Brown’s lawyer made the offer after psychiatrist Kathleen Unger testified that the patient would be a mental cripple for the rest of her life.
Brown worked and successively lost permission to practice in Hawaii, Alaska and St Lucia. In 1981, in St Lucia, he, then 59, contracted an arranged marriage to a 17-year-old, who did not speak English. He taught her the language, and they had two sons.
He then returned to southern California and began an underground practice operating in Tijuana. Tijuana was already a known destination for transsexual surgery. The most eminent surgeon was Jose Jesus Barbosa who worked with Harry Benjamin, and who was the surgeon for Canary Conn and Lynn Conway.
Most of Brown’s patients were trans women who could not afford Dr Biber or Dr Barbosa, or did not meet the requirements re time on hormones, psychiatrist’s referral etc. One patient at this time was Monique Allen, who had vaginoplasty at age 22, and came to Brown for enhancements. She would continue with various other doctors, and eventually had over 200 plastic surgeries.
Patrice Baxter, a cis woman, also had a surgery business in Tijuana. She met Brown, and became a long-time friend and business partner. She also went to Brown for a tummy-tuck, a face-lift and breast implants. Several of her friends and relatives were also operated on: her granddaughter had her ears fixed so that they did not stick out. Brown used Baxter’s home in Mexico for patient postoperative care. By this time he was charging $2,500 for a vaginoplasty – although many of his patients never paid. Baxter was quoted by Ciotti: “"He was brilliant, but he had no common sense. He would walk through plate-glass doors. He couldn’t balance his checkbook." Sometimes in the middle of a conversation he’d just pick up a magazine and begin to read. His bedside manner was no great shakes, either. "He tended to mumble. He didn’t hold your hand." But so what? She asks. "He wasn’t a general practitioner," he was a surgeon.
In 1985 a then-19-year-old had surgery that was so successful that her husband never guessed her past. She later became a manager for an airline. Ann, a traumatized Cambodian who had fled the Khmer Rouge was also pleased with her surgery and became a stripper in Las Vegas’ Chinatown.
On the other hand it was estimated that at least 70 of Brown’s transgender patients ended up with permanent colostomies. UC San Diego plastic-surgery professor Jack Fisher repaired 15 or so of Brown’s disasters: “"He’s a terrible, appalling technical surgeon. There’s just no other way to describe it. He doesn’t know how to make a straight incision. He doesn’t know how to hold a knife. He has no regard for limiting blood loss."
Brown started offering penis enlargements – he did this by cutting the suspensor ligament holding the penis root to the pubic bone. He ran advertisements in The Advocate, and in 1984 he held a seminar in San Francisco – entrance fee $25 per person. He was arrested for medical fraud. However it took four years to come to trial.
Meanwhile, in 1986 Penthouse Forum featured this as a cover story "The Incredible Dick Doctor”. The article portrayed Brown as an inattentive driver who backed into other cars, and whose trousers fell down in the operating room. The television news magazine Inside Edition followed up with an investigative story on The Worst Doctor in America. Brown actually co-operated with the film crew.Brown pleaded no contest to the fraud charges in 1999, was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in jail, but served only 30 days.
In transsexual circles Brown came to be known as 'Butcher Brown', but patients still came.
After the broadcast of the Inside Edition program, the San Diego District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation that led to Brown’s conviction in 1990, and a sentence of three years for practicing medicine without a license. Several trans woman, ex-patients, showed up to express support for previous work. His wife, the one from St Lucia, now divorced him, although they remained on good terms. He served 19 months.
Continued in Part II.
↧
John Ronald Brown: part II.
Continued from Part I.
John Ronald Brown was 69 when he got out of prison. After a period working as a taxi driver, he restarted his surgical practice in Tijuana, but this time also lived in Mexico for a while. He sometimes used the pseudonym of Juan Moreno, and as such had operating room privileges at Hospital Quintana in Playas de Tijuana, although he was not licensed to practice medicine in Mexico. By now he was favoring colon vaginoplasty. Patients would afterwards find that they smelt of rotting flesh. Many of these returned to Brown for revision (and extra billing); others ended up in emergency rooms.
Carrie, who had had vaginoplasty with a European surgeon in 1991, engaged Brown ln 1995 to enhance her labia so that she would be more in demand for nude modeling. He took a layer of skin from the inside of her mouth to sew onto her genitals. She was sent home without antibiotics or pain medicine, and it took three months to heal. A year later Brown came to her Los Angeles home to correct the results by injecting silicone.
Camille, previously an insurance underwriter, had vaginoplasty from Brown in 1997, and he punctured her rectum. Despite this she was sent home without medications or follow-up care. She then needed hospitalization for several days because of pain, complications and infections, and the recto-vaginal fistula continued to leak into her vagina. She became a stay-in, not able to go anywhere.
Mimi, who was also beautiful, was well pleased with her operation, and Brown featured her in a
 |
| Mimi |
He had an advertising brochure:
The prettiest pussies are John Brown pussies.Gregg Furth was a Jungian analyst who had worked with John Money on a body-modification yearning for which John Money had coined a term: apotemnophilia (the desire to have a leg amputated). They published a paper on it in 1977.
The happiest patients are John Brown patients.
Because . . .
1. Each has a sensitive clit.
2. All (99%) get orgasms.
3. Careful skin draping gives a natural appearance.
4. Men love the pretty pussies and the sexy response.
Furth experienced the yearning himself, as did his older friend, Philip Bondy, a retired satellite engineer. They built up a collection of photographs, slides and videos of male amputees.
Furth came across a newspaper article about John Brown, and flew to San Diego. He found Brown quite open-minded about a would-be amputee’s right to choose. In February 1997, Furth returned for the operation, but it was cancelled after the assisting doctor in Tijuana refused to participate when he realized just what was to happen. In 1999 they tried again. However on arrival, Furth found that his desire to be amputated had disappeared. Bondy stepped in to take the operation in his place. However he died two days later of gangrene in a motel in California. Brown was arrested and tried by the San Diego authorities, even though the operation had been done in Tijuana.
The medical receipts showed that Bondy had paid Brown to do the amputation. This mystified the San Diego police, until trans activist Dallas Denny phoned in and suggested that they read up on apotemnophilia. This was confirmed by a police search of Furth’s apartment in New York.
The charge against Brown was upgraded from manslaughter to malice murder in the second degree, which means that the defendant does something that is dangerous to human life, knowing it is dangerous to human life and does it anyway. To make that charge stick, the prosecution needed to demonstrate that Brown had a history of being reckless. The video tapes in Brown’s apartment helped, but they also needed to find transsexuals who would testify against him.
Christina mortgaged her house to pay for surgeries, 10 altogether, by Brown. However the skin grafts inside her vagina were so thin that they tore during intercourse. Also Brown had removed her lower ribs to give a more feminine waist: she developed an abscess there as big as a basketball. Her nose job resulted in different sized nostrils, one turned up. Brown felt bad enough that he phoned to offer a $500 refund. Her mother told him that her son had committed suicide.
Before the trial, brown pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license, relating to seven sex-change operations.
Carrie and Camille testified for the prosecution. Patrice Baxter was a witness for the defense. Brown was found guilty in October 1999 and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison, which he mainly served in Soledad State Prison.
Gregg Furth had met with Dr Robert Smith, a surgeon in Glasgow who had performed two elective amputations, but was then told to stop by his Hospital Trust. They wrote a book on the subject of apotemnophilia which came out in 2000.
Brown appealed in 2001, but unsuccessfully, his lawyer arguing that California was without
For Camille, the pain got worse and worse until she died, shortly after Brown’s conviction.
Still in prison, aged 87, Brown died of health problems including pneumonia in 2010.
---------------------------------------
John Brown did over 600 mtf sex-change operations over 25 years. Some of his ex-patients are still delighted with his work. Many others are not. The motivation to trust your body to him was the apparent low price, but if you had complications, and returned for repair work, this lower price quickly disappeared.
Dallas Denny’s “The Tijuana experience” starts with a quote from Canary Conn. This is unfair. Conn was operated on in Tijuana in 1972 but by Dr Barbosa (named as Dr Lopez in her book). Brown did not start doing sex-change surgery until 1973, and did not set up in Tijuana until 1982.
I like Wendy Davidson’s idea of a peer clinic run by trans persons. It would need to contract with surgeons who were consistently rather than only intermittently good.
Cutting off someone’s leg and leaving them to die is against the law in Mexico. In addition Brown was not licensed to practice medicine in Mexico. As the crime was committed there, they should have had the first shot at prosecution. For another example of US extraterritorial enforcement see Walter L. Williams.
The EN.Wikipedia article on Apotemniphilia does not even mention John Brown.
The Murderpedia article on John Brown says “Number of victims: 1”. Camille and Christina are known to have died as a result of Brown’s bad surgey, and there are certainly others not identified.
Nicole Spray put comments on this blog in 2010 hoping to contact other patients of John Brown. I hope that that worked out well.
There are two doctor characters in fiction who could be taken to be satires of John Brown – except that they predate his work as a surgeon:
1. Dr Montag who helps Myra Breckinrige come into being in Gore Vidal’s 1968 novel.________________
2. Dr Benway who recurs in William Burrough’s novels including Naked Lunch, 1959 and Nova Express, 1964. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Season 5, 2004, featured a surgeon called Benway who accidentally kills patients during back-alley transgender surgery.
- Herb Caen. “Plastic, Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery”. San Francisco Chronicle, 26 October 1973.
- John Money, Russell Jobaris & Gregg Furth, "Apotemnophilia: Two cases of self demand amputation as a sexual preference". The Journal of Sex Research. 13 (2) 1977: 115–124.
- “Transsexual Accepts Suit Settlement”. San Diego Union, March 2, 1979. Online.
- Eric Nadler. “The Incredible Dick Doctor” Penthouse Forum, January 1986: 18-25.
- Veronica Jean Brown. “He’s Back !”. Twenty Minutes, September 1989: 3-4. Online.
- Dallas Denny. “The Tijuana experience”. Alicia’s TV Girl Talk, 4(9), 18, 1992. Online.
- Bill Callahan. “Ex-doctor who served time faces murder charge”. The San Diego Union-Tribune. May 23, 1998.
- Paul Ciotti. “Why Did He Cut Off That Man's Leg?: The Peculiar Practice of Dr. John Ronald Brown”. LA Weekly. Dec 15, 1999. Online.
- Dallas Denny. “Tabletop” John Brown gets his. Transgender Forum, 1999. Online.
- Michelle Williams. “Transsexuals Tell of Botched Surgeries by Former Doctor”. Associated Press, 29 September 1999. Online.
- “People v. Brown”. Findlaw, August 02, 2001. Online.
- Michelle Moore. “Butcher John Ronald Brown”. DallasDenny.com, 2002. http://dallasdenny.com/Writing/2013/11/01/butcher-john-ronald-brown-2002.
- Gregg Furth & Robert Smith. Apotemnophilia: Information, Questions, Answers, and Recommendations About Self-Demand Amputation. 1stBooks, 2000.
- Chuck Whitlock. MediScams: How to Spot and Avoid Health Care Scams, Medical Frauds, and Quackery from the Local Physician to the Major Health Care Providers and Drug Manufacturers. Renaissance Books, 2001: chp1; 23-34.
- Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 234, 271-2.
- Vern L Bullough. “Introduction”. In J. Ari Kane-Demaios and Vern L. Bullough (eds) Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths. Prometheus Books, 2005: 21-2.
- Robin Marantz Henig. “At War With Their Bodies, They Seek to Sever Limbs”. The New York Times”, March 22, 2005. Online.
- World's Worst Sex Change Surgeon, dir & scr: Jonah Weston, narrated by Mark Bazeley. UK Channel 4, 10 Apr 2007, 45 mins
- Carol Anne Davis. Doctors Who Kill: Profiles of Lethal Medics. Allison & Busby, 2011. Chp 27.
- Bianca London. “Transgender woman left disabled and horrifically disfigured by her plastic surgery addiction warns of dangers of 'quick fixes' and backstreet doctors”. The Daily Mail, 20 August 2013. Online.
- Stephen. “John Ronald Brown: World’s Worst Sex Change Surgeon”. Stranger than Fiction, April 21, 2016. Online.
Murderpedia Wikipedia
↧
Nicole Vonlee Titlow (1967 - ) convicted of murder
By her 30s, Nicole in Tennessee had been living as female for many years, was generally accepted by her family with whom she still lived, and had spent $15,000 on breast enhancements, but could not afford genital surgery.
Her aunt, Billie Jean, then 60, had married a Michigan millionaire, Don Rogers, who had made his money in car parts. Billie Jean offered that Nicole should come and visit in Troy, Michigan. Don also openly welcomed her.
Nicole and Billie Jean lived an expensive life, often in the casinos in Detroit. Billie Jean lost tens of thousands of dollars gambling. This led her husband to berate her and to threaten divorce. Don, who was 74, drank seriously, both in public and at home before bed.
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In the late evening of August 12, 2000, Don was passed out on the floor, next to his bed. The two women returned home, and called the emergency services, but he was found to be dead. The police report listed his death as asphyxiation, a fatal side-effect of alcohol poisoning. He had a blood-alcohol count of .44. This was highly plausible, and he was quickly cremated. Billie Jean gave Nicole a new car and $70,000, and Nicole moved to Chicago.
Nicole had a sort-of boyfriend, and she confessed to him that she had poured vodka down Don’s throat and that Billie Jean had suffocated him with a pillow. Billie Jean, she said, had offered $100,000 for her co-operation. She also mentioned that she had been born male, and was still pre-op. The boyfriend demanded that she strip to prove the last point. The boyfriend went to the police, and they had him wear a wire and record Nicole repeating the claims. Nicole was arrested and extradited to Michigan in January 2001.
The only evidence against Billie Jean was Nicole’s account, and she was not arrested until June. Nicole’s first attorney obtained a plea bargain that she would be charged with manslaughter rather than first-degree felony murder in exchange for her testimony – this on the expectation of 7-15 years in prison. However while awaiting trial, a sheriff’s deputy advised that she should not plead guilty if she did not believe herself to be guilty. Apparently Nicole did not understand the concept of felony murder where an accomplice can be guilty even without harming the victim. She then got a new attorney who attempted to negotiate for a lower sentence, but without success. Titlow then withdrew her plea and her testimony, and Billie Jean Rogers was acquitted and released.
Billie Jean died from cancer shortly after.
This left Nicole as the only accused. She was tried for second-degree murder, convicted and sentenced to 20-40 years.
Titlow appealed citing bad advice and counsel from her second lawyer. She lost her appeal in the State and District Courts, but won in the Appeals Court. It found that Titlow’s decision to withdraw her plea and testimony was based on the offered sentence being much higher than Michigan’s guidelines for second-degree murder. Also there was no indication that the lawyer had informed Titlow of the consequences of withdrawing her plea. The Court ordered that the case be remanded and that the prosecution reoffer the original plea bargain, or that she be released.
Michigan then appealed and the case went to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that as the defendant adamantly asserted her innocence, the plea withdrawal was reasonable.
Nicole is serving her time in a men’s prison, and has been deprived of female hormones. Her health deteriorated to the point that her breasts were bleeding. She was taken to hospital for a double mastectomy, but refused the reconstruction that a woman would normally receive after such an operation.
However Nicole’s attorney managed to get her moved to a different prison which has a history to taking care of transgender prisoners.
EN.Wikipedia (Burt v. Titlow)
Her aunt, Billie Jean, then 60, had married a Michigan millionaire, Don Rogers, who had made his money in car parts. Billie Jean offered that Nicole should come and visit in Troy, Michigan. Don also openly welcomed her.
Nicole and Billie Jean lived an expensive life, often in the casinos in Detroit. Billie Jean lost tens of thousands of dollars gambling. This led her husband to berate her and to threaten divorce. Don, who was 74, drank seriously, both in public and at home before bed.
In the late evening of August 12, 2000, Don was passed out on the floor, next to his bed. The two women returned home, and called the emergency services, but he was found to be dead. The police report listed his death as asphyxiation, a fatal side-effect of alcohol poisoning. He had a blood-alcohol count of .44. This was highly plausible, and he was quickly cremated. Billie Jean gave Nicole a new car and $70,000, and Nicole moved to Chicago.
Nicole had a sort-of boyfriend, and she confessed to him that she had poured vodka down Don’s throat and that Billie Jean had suffocated him with a pillow. Billie Jean, she said, had offered $100,000 for her co-operation. She also mentioned that she had been born male, and was still pre-op. The boyfriend demanded that she strip to prove the last point. The boyfriend went to the police, and they had him wear a wire and record Nicole repeating the claims. Nicole was arrested and extradited to Michigan in January 2001.
The only evidence against Billie Jean was Nicole’s account, and she was not arrested until June. Nicole’s first attorney obtained a plea bargain that she would be charged with manslaughter rather than first-degree felony murder in exchange for her testimony – this on the expectation of 7-15 years in prison. However while awaiting trial, a sheriff’s deputy advised that she should not plead guilty if she did not believe herself to be guilty. Apparently Nicole did not understand the concept of felony murder where an accomplice can be guilty even without harming the victim. She then got a new attorney who attempted to negotiate for a lower sentence, but without success. Titlow then withdrew her plea and her testimony, and Billie Jean Rogers was acquitted and released.
Billie Jean died from cancer shortly after.
This left Nicole as the only accused. She was tried for second-degree murder, convicted and sentenced to 20-40 years.
Titlow appealed citing bad advice and counsel from her second lawyer. She lost her appeal in the State and District Courts, but won in the Appeals Court. It found that Titlow’s decision to withdraw her plea and testimony was based on the offered sentence being much higher than Michigan’s guidelines for second-degree murder. Also there was no indication that the lawyer had informed Titlow of the consequences of withdrawing her plea. The Court ordered that the case be remanded and that the prosecution reoffer the original plea bargain, or that she be released.
Michigan then appealed and the case went to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that as the defendant adamantly asserted her innocence, the plea withdrawal was reasonable.
Nicole is serving her time in a men’s prison, and has been deprived of female hormones. Her health deteriorated to the point that her breasts were bleeding. She was taken to hospital for a double mastectomy, but refused the reconstruction that a woman would normally receive after such an operation.
However Nicole’s attorney managed to get her moved to a different prison which has a history to taking care of transgender prisoners.
- Rick Hepp. “Chicagoan To Be Extradited To Michigan In Murder Case”. Chicago Tribune, January 08, 2001. Online.
- “Widow charged in cash-for-sex-change murder plot”. USAToday, 06/19/2001. Online.
- John Turk. “Prison sentence of Troy transgender murderer upheld in Supreme Court”. Oakland Press, 11/05/13. Online.
- M. William Phelps. If You Only Knew. Pinnacle, 2016.
- Chelsea Crosby. Killer Transgender: The True Story of Nicole Vonlee Titlow. CreateSpace, 2017
EN.Wikipedia (Burt v. Titlow)
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Thoughts while reading (about) Colin Wilson
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Over the years I have read many of the books by Colin Wilson – one of those whom the newspapers in the 1950s designated as Angry Young Men - on existentialism, motiveless murder, Jack the Ripper, the occult, ancient civilizations etc, etc., although I never read either of his two autobiographies. There is a new biography out by Gary Lachman, previously Gary Valentine who played bass with Blondie and guitar with Iggy Pop, and then moved to London where he has published a whole slew of books on consciousness and the occult.
I have recently read his biography of Colin Wilson. Reading, as I do, lots of LGBT history it is useful and refreshing to read books in other areas. However trans history does seem to pop up everywhere these days. On page 7 we find:
“another example of what Wilson called his early ‘sexual perverseness’ was one he shared with other creative individuals, like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As a young boy Wilson loved to dress up in his mother’s clothes, including her underwear. Authorities such as the pre-Freudian sexologist Havelock Ellis suggest that such behaviour ‘indicates a tendency to homosexuality’, as did, for Ellis, Wilson’s attachment to his mother and dislike of his father. But Wilson never observed any trace of homosexuality in his makeup.”
This perhaps sounds rather old-fashioned. Most writers today would relate child transvestity to either Richard Green’s contentious Sissy Boy Syndrome, or, more productively, cross-dreaming. Lachman gives no indication of being aware of either of these approaches. He does, later, page 262-9 summarize Wilson’s interaction with the trans activist and theorist Charlotte Bach, but a check on his footnotes shows that it is simply a repetition of what Wilson says about her in his book, The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. There are a couple of attempts to compare Wilson to Bach’s theoretical schema: p265 “According to Bach’s system, he was a ‘normal’ male, and should therefore not be creative”; p383n27 “Wilson disagreed that the male sexual drive was to become the female, as Charlotte Bach argued. It was rather to possess her, which ultimately is an expression of will”.
Reading from a trans perspective, several other trans persons appear or almost appear. Kenneth Tynan– also an Angry Young Man – pops up several times, but his fondness for dressing female, and especially as the silent film star Louise Brooks is never mentioned. In 1960, Wilson and his wife went on a cruise to Leningrad. There, they sought out the palace of Felix Yusupov (where Rasputin was put to death) but there is no mention of Yusupov as transvestite. Kenneth Walker, Gurdjieffian and Harley Street urologist gave a positive review of Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, 1956 and they became friends. This was the very same time that Walker was introducing Georgina Turtle to surgeons – she had correction surgery in 1957, and then became Georgina Somerset by marriage. Walker wrote the Foreword to her 1963 book, Over the Sex Border. None of this is mentioned.
Let us turn to Wilson’s The Misfits. Lachman tells us:
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“Following Charlotte Bach’s story, Wilson runs through a gauntlet of practices that some readers may find surprising, if not disturbing. What may also be surprising is that the people engaging in these ‘perversions’ are not anonymous case studies from Krafft-Ebing or Magnus Hirschfeld, although material from these and other sexologists appears. Wilson’s case studies involve some of the most famous creative individuals of the past two centuries. Among his sexual Outsiders we find philosophers, novelists, composers and poets, and we are treated to analyses of the intimate lives of, among others, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, Marcel Proust, Lord Byron, Algernon Swinburne, Yukio Mishima, Ludwig Wittgenstein, TE Lawrence, Paul Tillich, Percy Grainger, and aptly enough, the pre-Freud sexologist Havelock Ellis.”
Readers of this encyclopedia will quickly realise that all the persons on this list are men. On the other hand I would contend, even if it is based on anecdotal evidence, that 45-50% of persons indulging in heterosexuality are female. Wilson seems to have almost no interest in the female experience of sex, although there is no shortage of such persons writing about it. Off the top of my head, what about Anaïs Nin, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Erica Jong, Leah Schaefer, Anne Rice, the pre-transition Pat Califia, Kathy Acker (more).
In 1971 Wilson wrote a book on Abraham Maslow, the US psychologist who developed ideas about hierarchies of need, and peak experiences. They agreed enough with each other that each referred to the other in several books. Here is Lachman’s summary of Maslow on women: [Maslow] “discovered that women could be divided into three dominance groups: high, medium and low. The level of dominance influenced their sexuality. High-dominance women enjoyed sex and were promiscuous and experimental, medium-dominance women were romantics looking for ‘Mr Right’, and low-dominance women were shy and afraid of sex.” Could a woman have written that sentence? We have a 21st century word ‘mansplaining’ – does this apply? I think so. I went googling to see if any woman writer had ever done anything with this typology. While almost all women writers did in fact fail to find any use in the typology, one writer does discuss it and use it: Betty Friedan in her foundational feminist text, The Feminine Mystique.
In reading Wilson’s The Misfits, one can see that Wilson’s readings in sexology are Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. That is: nothing after the Second World War – no Benjamin, Green, Stoller, Money; no Butler, Halberstam, Faderman etc. And certainly no queer theory. He reports at second hand that Hirschfeld wrote a book on transvestites and found that most were not homosexual. However he did not read it. His book was 1988, and the English translation of Hirschfeld’s Transvestites did not come out until three years later. Wilson’s source was Charlotte Wolff’s biography of Hirschfeld and the volume Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, attributed to Hirschfeld but written/edited by Arthur Koestler and Norman Haire, which Wilson found for sale in what passed for a sex shop in the 1950s. He finds it an amazing source of sexual ‘perversions’ including ‘transvestism, sadism, masochism, necrophilia’. He continued to use the word ‘perversion’ even after John Money had persuaded most sexologists that ‘paraphilia’ was less offensive.
Despite the reservations that I have expressed here, I am intrigued with Wilson’s suggestion that in the later 18th century and afterwards there was an ‘imaginative explosion’ that we can trace in sex novels and this was accompanied by a greater variety of sexual and gender activity. He is therefore arguing for a social construction approach – although he never uses the term, nor does he mention Foucault or Trumbach who have developed competing social construction models. (In a later book, Below the Iceberg, 1998, Wilson did engage with some of the ideas of Faucault, Barthes and Derrida – he denounced Foucault as an ‘intellectual con-man’ out to deceive his readers).
- Colin Wilson. The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. Grafton, 1989.
- Gary Lachman,. Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. Tarcher Perigee, 2016.
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↧
Jackie Shane (1940- ) musician
Originally from Nashville, Jackie Shane, like Jimi Hendrix, spent time with musical house mother, ‘Queen of the Blues’, Marion James, and in late teenage started touring.
In 1960 Jackie was picked out of the crowd by fellow-American Frank Motley at a gig in Montréal. Jackie became part of the band, The Motley Crew, which was based in Toronto, where they frequently performed at at the Sapphire Tavern. Jackie was a soul/R&B singer whose appearance was androgynous, often wearing makeup, and sometimes an evening gown. This at a time when homophobia was rife and taverns and clubs in Toronto had to close before midnight on Saturday as required by the Lord’s Day Act. Jackie’s type of show was new in Canada where the US black tent shows and the Chitlin Circuit with their traditions of drag performance were unknown. A rumour developed that Shane was cousin to Little Richard, but this was unfounded.
Carl Wilson comments:
Between songs Jackie would talk to the audience:
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Jackie was listed in the 1964 Etta James Revue as ‘female impersonator’.
In 1965 Jackie appeared on the WLAC television show, Night Train, in Nashville performing “Walking the Dog”.
Frank Motley discontinued The Motley Crew in 1966, and formed a new band, The Hitchhikers. Jackie was performing in clubs across North America, and released a couple of live albums.
On the back of her 1967 LP Jackie Shane Live, it said
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After moving to Los Angeles, Jackie turned down an offer to be part of the band Funkadelic. Jackie began caring for an aged aunt.
After her mother’s death she and her aunt returned to Nashville. By now Jackie was living as a woman. Shane had become a legend, and it was even rumoured that she had been murdered in 1998.
After the airing of a CBC Radio documentary in 2010, renewed efforts were made to contact Jackie. A double CD is about to be released. The 2017 anthology about queer Toronto is named Any Other Way after her single.
The Saphire Tavern from YZO on Vimeo.
__________
*Jackie was a unisex name in the 1960s. Jackie Robinson was a baseball player; Jackie Kennedy was a presidential spouse.
Some of the sources say that Jackie was in drag for the 1965 Nighttrain performance.
In 1960 Jackie was picked out of the crowd by fellow-American Frank Motley at a gig in Montréal. Jackie became part of the band, The Motley Crew, which was based in Toronto, where they frequently performed at at the Sapphire Tavern. Jackie was a soul/R&B singer whose appearance was androgynous, often wearing makeup, and sometimes an evening gown. This at a time when homophobia was rife and taverns and clubs in Toronto had to close before midnight on Saturday as required by the Lord’s Day Act. Jackie’s type of show was new in Canada where the US black tent shows and the Chitlin Circuit with their traditions of drag performance were unknown. A rumour developed that Shane was cousin to Little Richard, but this was unfounded.
Carl Wilson comments:
“Jackie Shane wasn’t bringing his act to Toronto so it could be better understood. Instead he was taking it out of context, to someplace where it seemed more alien and strange. Maybe he liked it better that way. By coming to Toronto he was escaping segregation and getting to perform to white people with presumably deeper pockets, who had never seen anything like him before. You could cross over in the States, but then you’d have to pull a Little Richard and turn your ‘freak’ show into a clown act, taking out the gay innuendo.”Shane had only one hit record, “Any Other Way” which was released in April 1962, and reached No. 2 in Canada. (Listen)
“Tell her that I’m happy/ Tell her that I’m gay/ Tell her I wouldn’t have it any other way.”The words and emphasis were somewhat changed from that of the original versions by William Bell (video) and Chuck Jackson (video) which use the words as a man’s face-saving lie after being dumped. The new version reads like a gay woman's confession to a female friend, and in fact many listeners assumed that the singer was a woman.*
Between songs Jackie would talk to the audience:
Toronto’s gossip tabloid, Tab, told how Jackie was invited to a local radio station CHUM for an on-air chat, but they were so upset by Jackie’s makeup and attire that they cancelled the interview and did not play the record until it was at the top of the charts."You know, when I'm walking down Young Street, you won't believe this, but you know some of them funny people have the nerve to point the finger at me, and grin, and smile, and whisper ... but you know that don't worry Jackie because I know I look good. You what my slogan is? Baby, do what you want, just know what you're doing. As long as you don't force your will and your way on anybody else, live your life because ain't nobody sanctified and holy."
In 1965 Jackie appeared on the WLAC television show, Night Train, in Nashville performing “Walking the Dog”.
Frank Motley discontinued The Motley Crew in 1966, and formed a new band, The Hitchhikers. Jackie was performing in clubs across North America, and released a couple of live albums.
On the back of her 1967 LP Jackie Shane Live, it said
“Warning: This Album is not meant for squares! You’ve got to be down with it and can’t quit it, baby. … What are Jackie’s likes and dislikes? Well, you know Jackie likes ‘chicken’. Even when food is concerned Jackie likes chicken. The only problem is when Jackie suggests, ‘let’s go out, and get some chicken after the show’, you can’t be too sure what he has in mind. … You’ll feel energetic and ambitious when you here ‘Money’. You’ll be inspired as Jackie tells you his life story in ‘Any Other Way’.”Talking in the live version of ‘Any Other Way’, Jackie says:
“You know what my woman told me one night? She said, ‘Jackie, if you don’t stop switchin’ around here and playing the field and bringing that chicken home, you gonna have to get steppin’.’ I said, ‘Uh huh,’ and I grabbed my chicken by one hand, baby, and we been steppin’ ever since that night.”That year a woman wrote to the Toronto Star:
“My friend and I saw a group called Jackie Shane and the Hitchhikers, and she says Jackie Shane is a girl. I thought he was a boy.”Shane’s last singles were released in 1969, which was also the last time that Jackie worked with Frank Motley; and she left Toronto in 1971, maybe because of problems with immigration officials, maybe because the club scene was changing.
After moving to Los Angeles, Jackie turned down an offer to be part of the band Funkadelic. Jackie began caring for an aged aunt.
After her mother’s death she and her aunt returned to Nashville. By now Jackie was living as a woman. Shane had become a legend, and it was even rumoured that she had been murdered in 1998.
After the airing of a CBC Radio documentary in 2010, renewed efforts were made to contact Jackie. A double CD is about to be released. The 2017 anthology about queer Toronto is named Any Other Way after her single.
- Jackie Shane. “Any Other Way”. Single Sue, April 1963
- Jackie Shane. Jackie Shane Live. LP Caravan, 1967. Listen at JunoRecords.
- Kimdog. Comment on MataFilter. July 27, 2009. Online.
- Elaine Banks. "I Got Mine: The Story of Jackie Shane". CBC Radio, February 28, 2010. Online. Geo-restrictions in effect.
- Carl Wilson. “I Bet Your Mama Was a Tent-Show Queen”. Hazlitt, April 22, 2013. Online.
- Sonya Reynolds & Lauren Hortie. Whatever Happened to Jackie Shane? 2014
- Elio Iannacci. “Searching for Jackie Shane, R&B’s lost transgender superstar”. The Globe and Mail, May 19, 2017. Online.
- Steven Maynard. “ ‘A New Way of Lovin’’: Queer Toronto Gets Schooled by Jackie Shane”. In Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer. Coach House Books, 2017.
The Saphire Tavern from YZO on Vimeo.
__________
*Jackie was a unisex name in the 1960s. Jackie Robinson was a baseball player; Jackie Kennedy was a presidential spouse.
Some of the sources say that Jackie was in drag for the 1965 Nighttrain performance.
↧
Ethel Person (1934-2012) psychoanalyst: Part I Life
Part I: Life
Part II: theory
Unless otherwise noted, page references are to The Sexual Century.
Ethel Jane Spector was raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother was a mathematician, and her father owned a bar. He died when she was twelve. She completed a first degree at the University of Chicago in 1956, and then a medical degree at the New York University College of Medicine four years later. She became Mrs Person when she wed an engineer. The marriage ended after ten years, although she kept his name for her professional life. She married her second husband, a psychiatrist, in 1968, and became Mrs Sherman.
Soon after joining the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Person was invited to work with Lionel Ovesey (1915-1995), the author of The Mark of Oppression: A Psychosocial Study of the American Negro, 1951, and Homosexuality and pseudohomosexuality, 1969. His concept of ‘pseudohomosexuality’ concerned `homosexual anxieties' in heterosexual males who were concerned about dependency and lack of power. Ovesey was one of the psychiatrists strongly opposed to the delisting of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973.
Ovesey’s proposal was that he and Person would write a textbook on sex and gender. They quickly realized that neither of them had any experience with transvestites or transsexuals. An acquaintance in the psychoanalytical world was Harold Greenwald, the founder of the Professional School for Humanistic Studies (where Anne Vitale qualified as a psychologist). Greenwald introduced Person to the then 88-year-old Harry Benjamin and his assistant Charles Ihlenfeld in 1972. She spent time in Benjamin’s office interviewing some of his patients.
One person that Person met at Benjamin’s offices was Ed/Edna, 60, a retired tugboat captain who had become the superintendent of a rental building. He fell in love with Clair, one of his tenants, a completed transsexual. He detransitioned to become her lover, and was devastated when she left him for a truck driver. To cope with the resulting depression, Edna restarted hormones and dressing full-time. Again he rented to a completed trans woman, Janet. Again he reverted to male, and became her lover. After Ed’s original wife died, he married Janet, and lived happily with her until she also died ten years later. He was then 85. (By Force of Fantasy p 131-4)
Edna subscribed to Transvestia magazine, and through that discovered transvestite social groups. Edna introduced Person to these socials: “it was at these events that I gained some of my deeper insights into the subjective meaning to transvestites of their participation in that world”. Person and Ovesey also sought confirmation for their work by visiting pornography shops and reading trans publications.
Person and Ovesey proposed a typology of trans persons assuming that a child's separation-individuation anxiety produced a fantasy of symbiotic fusion with the mother which the transsexual tries to resolve by surgically becoming her mother. Papers to this effect were published 1973-85. (See part II for details).
One of the transsexuals included in the Person-Ovesey study was Elizabeth – author of the Notes from the T Side blog. She writes:
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Person was director of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research 1981-91. She did an “epidemiological study of sexual fantasy” which she contrasted to Alfred Kinsey’s study of sexual acts.
Her best known book is By Force of Fantasy: How We Make Our Lives, 1995, where she argues that we shape our lives by trying consciously or otherwise to live out our fantasies.
In 1987 Person had paired the film critic Molly Haskell with an appropriate analyst, and became a friend. In 2005 when Haskell’s sibling was starting transition, she spoke to Person about the situation. Apparently Person said nothing to her about primary or secondary or separation anxiety. Only: “Transsexuals are the best, the kindest people I know, maybe because they have to learn compassion the hard way” and “He longs for validation,” Ethel says, and spoke of transsexualism as being “a passion of the soul”. Later in the Haskell’s book, Person is quoted: “The worst thing about it is you discover you don’t know the person you thought you knew.”
In 1997 Person gave a presentation to the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Barcelona on her life of Harry Benjamin, and used it to illustrate the origin of shared cultural fantasy. In 1999 she collected her works on sex and gender, including her biography of Harry Benjamin, and published them as The Sexual Century.
Person’s third husband died in 2009. Ethel Jane Spector Person Sherman Diamond, her final name, incorporating the surnames of all three husbands, died at age 77 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Part II: theory
Unless otherwise noted, page references are to The Sexual Century.
Ethel Jane Spector was raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother was a mathematician, and her father owned a bar. He died when she was twelve. She completed a first degree at the University of Chicago in 1956, and then a medical degree at the New York University College of Medicine four years later. She became Mrs Person when she wed an engineer. The marriage ended after ten years, although she kept his name for her professional life. She married her second husband, a psychiatrist, in 1968, and became Mrs Sherman.
Soon after joining the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Person was invited to work with Lionel Ovesey (1915-1995), the author of The Mark of Oppression: A Psychosocial Study of the American Negro, 1951, and Homosexuality and pseudohomosexuality, 1969. His concept of ‘pseudohomosexuality’ concerned `homosexual anxieties' in heterosexual males who were concerned about dependency and lack of power. Ovesey was one of the psychiatrists strongly opposed to the delisting of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973.
Ovesey’s proposal was that he and Person would write a textbook on sex and gender. They quickly realized that neither of them had any experience with transvestites or transsexuals. An acquaintance in the psychoanalytical world was Harold Greenwald, the founder of the Professional School for Humanistic Studies (where Anne Vitale qualified as a psychologist). Greenwald introduced Person to the then 88-year-old Harry Benjamin and his assistant Charles Ihlenfeld in 1972. She spent time in Benjamin’s office interviewing some of his patients.
“The work that I did with Lionel would have been well nigh impossible without the cooperation of Harry Benjamin, who was hospitable to me despite his major bias against psychoanalysts. In fact we became great friends.” (p xiii)Indeed Benjamin asked her to write a biographical portrait of him to be published after his death. She formally interviewed him to this end a dozen times.
One person that Person met at Benjamin’s offices was Ed/Edna, 60, a retired tugboat captain who had become the superintendent of a rental building. He fell in love with Clair, one of his tenants, a completed transsexual. He detransitioned to become her lover, and was devastated when she left him for a truck driver. To cope with the resulting depression, Edna restarted hormones and dressing full-time. Again he rented to a completed trans woman, Janet. Again he reverted to male, and became her lover. After Ed’s original wife died, he married Janet, and lived happily with her until she also died ten years later. He was then 85. (By Force of Fantasy p 131-4)
Edna subscribed to Transvestia magazine, and through that discovered transvestite social groups. Edna introduced Person to these socials: “it was at these events that I gained some of my deeper insights into the subjective meaning to transvestites of their participation in that world”. Person and Ovesey also sought confirmation for their work by visiting pornography shops and reading trans publications.
Person and Ovesey proposed a typology of trans persons assuming that a child's separation-individuation anxiety produced a fantasy of symbiotic fusion with the mother which the transsexual tries to resolve by surgically becoming her mother. Papers to this effect were published 1973-85. (See part II for details).
One of the transsexuals included in the Person-Ovesey study was Elizabeth – author of the Notes from the T Side blog. She writes:
Harry Benjamin “in 1970 -71 asked me to talk to a Dr. Ethel Person as part of a study and I agreed although I am inherently distrustful of shrinks but I found her pleasant and quite nice and we became friendly. When the study was published I was stunned to be honest. I was part of the study and I knew two others who were part of it and friends of mine. We never talked about anything mentioned in the study directly. We talked about our lives as children until the current time and at the time I was 24 and had close to enough money for surgery. In point of fact Harry might have been more upset by the study than anyone. I am posting this to refute what they found because as one of the participants in the study I walked into her office and asked her where I fit in late 1974 and she said Secondary because I liked boys so I was a homosexual transsexual where by Harry's definition I was a Type VI high intensity transsexual and according to Harry the study was bogus.”Ethel Person’s second husband died in 1976. She married a lawyer in 1978 and became Mrs Diamond.
Her best known book is By Force of Fantasy: How We Make Our Lives, 1995, where she argues that we shape our lives by trying consciously or otherwise to live out our fantasies.
In 1987 Person had paired the film critic Molly Haskell with an appropriate analyst, and became a friend. In 2005 when Haskell’s sibling was starting transition, she spoke to Person about the situation. Apparently Person said nothing to her about primary or secondary or separation anxiety. Only: “Transsexuals are the best, the kindest people I know, maybe because they have to learn compassion the hard way” and “He longs for validation,” Ethel says, and spoke of transsexualism as being “a passion of the soul”. Later in the Haskell’s book, Person is quoted: “The worst thing about it is you discover you don’t know the person you thought you knew.”
In 1997 Person gave a presentation to the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Barcelona on her life of Harry Benjamin, and used it to illustrate the origin of shared cultural fantasy. In 1999 she collected her works on sex and gender, including her biography of Harry Benjamin, and published them as The Sexual Century.
Person’s third husband died in 2009. Ethel Jane Spector Person Sherman Diamond, her final name, incorporating the surnames of all three husbands, died at age 77 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
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Ethel Person–Part II: theory
Part I: Life
Part II: theory
Unless otherwise noted, page references are to The Sexual Century.
Person and Ovesey follow the old psychoanalytic tradition of referring to trans persons by their birth gender, and thus a heterosexual trans woman is in their terminology a ‘male homosexual’.
1 Primary - functionally asexual and who progresses resolutely toward a surgical resolution without significant deviation toward either homosexuality or heterosexuality, no evidence of effeminacy in childhood.
2a Secondary, homosexual - effeminate from earliest childhood, preferred girls as playmates, avoided boyish pursuits and were "mother's helpers." Crossdressing began in childhood, initially for narcissistic satisfaction, but later at puberty to attract male sexual partners. Cross-gender fantasies were frequently tied to identification with movie actresses and drag queens. The authors note that the homosexual cross-dresser wants to be noticed and to this end often wears flamboyant and colorful clothing and engages in theatrical endeavors.
2b Secondary, transvestic - appropriately masculine, and occasionally exceedingly hyper-aggressive and hyper-competitive. They neither played with girls nor engaged in female pursuits. They fantasized about being girls when cross-dressed, but valued their assertiveness and maleness.
This typology was in contradistinction to Stoller’s writings where the homosexual early transitioner was regarded as primary.
a) passive effeminate homosexuals who
(p 127-135)
______________
Surely the non-homosexual transsexual group should have been called ‘heterosexual transsexuals’ or even better ‘gynephilic trannsexuals’. To put ‘transvestic’ in the type name predisposes to a negative interpretation just as much as calling them ‘autogynephilic’.
I have previously commented on similar attempts at typology. See Kay Brown androphilic and gynephilic, and Anne Vitale. I still think that 3-part typologies of transsexuals are better than Blanchard’s 2-part – but I am certainly not recommending the Person-Ovesey model. Vitale’s model regards the pathology as gender deprivation anxiety - non-standard gender identity as such not being a pathology. Thus Vitale’s approach is preferable if we are to continue with typologies. Those who transition as soon as possible, those who spend some time living as gay before transition and those who marry and have children before transition are intuitively three different types. However to define the three types by adding psychoanalytical interpretations and to ignore the great variety within each type ends up defaming all and sundry. The intuition of three types does lead to some valuable insights, but to reify the three types leads to severe distortion.
In part I, I mentioned Elizabeth who writes Notes from the T Side. Apparently she is a Benjamin VI (High Intensity True Transsexual), a Vitale G1 and a Stoller Primary; but a Person-Ovesey Secondary and a Prince Pseudo-transsexual. This is an excellent example of how typologies should not be taken literally.
I am not aware of any trans persons who actually identity with the Person-Ovesey model. Rachel Webb identied as a ‘constructed woman” as per Janice Raymond; Kay Brown and Kiira Triea identified as Blanchardian HSTS; Anne Lawrence, Willow Arune, and probably Maxine Petersen self identify as autogynephiliacs. But no-one has in public identified as a Person-Ovesey secondary transsexual. This despite the fact that the Person-Ovesey papers came out over a decade before Blanchard's.
It is difficult to reconcile the portraits of all three types of transsexuals as described by Person-Ovesey with the range of creativity and achievement of individuals featured in this Encyclopedia. Apparently Person was charming and easy to get on with face-to-face. However when you read the descriptions of trans persons in her book, then obviously she was not so nice.
Furthermore, the typology that Person-Ovesey come up was far from original. In its basic structure adheres closely to street stereotypes current at the time. All Person-Ovesey really did was revise the psychoanalytic dialectic to support the model. This despite Person being credited for doing field work in porn shops and transvestite parties! How come she never saw those of us who do not fit into the model - and I strongly argue that those of us who do not fit are the majority. She must have worked at ignoring those of us. This is later called erasure. Yes, there are some trans people who are like those described. There are some who have the separation-anxiety neuroses described. There there are even more who do not.
I have not found any record of Benjamin’s reactions to the 1974 Person-Ovesey papers on Primary and Secondary Transsexuals.
We should remember that two decades earlier, Benjamin had provided a few of his patients to Federick G Worden & James T Marsh who quite disappointed the volunteers and in effect refused to listen to them, because they knew in advance what transsexuals were.
The New York Times obituary says: “Her work, upsetting the conventional thinking, found that many transsexuals and transvestites did not perceive themselves as homosexuals but rather saw themselves in many different lights — sometimes, for example, as a woman trapped in a man’s body, and sometimes as a heterosexual who preferred a feminine demeanor.” Surely this and more had been established by Magnus Hirschfeld over 50 years before.
Molly Hacker commends Ethel Person in her book about her trans sibling. But did she never read Person’s book? Does she actually regard her sibling as a ‘transvestic transsexual’, in effect a fetishist? If she does not, how can she commend Person in her book?
This is Anne Vitale’s summing up of Primary and Secondary Transsexualism:
See also A Blanchard-Binary Timeline.
Part II: theory
Unless otherwise noted, page references are to The Sexual Century.
Person and Ovesey follow the old psychoanalytic tradition of referring to trans persons by their birth gender, and thus a heterosexual trans woman is in their terminology a ‘male homosexual’.
Development model
Person and Ovesey were influenced by the development model of psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler, and from this proposed that a child's separation-individuation anxiety produced a fantasy of symbiotic fusion with the mother which the transsexual tries to resolve by surgically becoming her mother.“The male transsexual is defined by most workers as having a female core gender identity. From our experience, it seems more accurate to say that transsexuals have an ambiguous core gender identity. … [this] permits the disorder to be conceptualized psychodynamically in conflictual terms as a neurosis. In our opinion, transsexualism originates in extreme separation anxiety occurring early in life, before object differentiation has been accomplished. To alleviate the anxiety, the child resorts to a fantasy of symbiotic fusion with the mother. In this way, mother and child become one and the danger of separation is nullified. We believe that this reparative fantasy is the psychodynamic basis for transsexualism in the male and that the transsexual phenomena can be understood clinically as attempts to ward off threats to psychic fusion with the mother.” (p 107-8)
Typology
They proposed a typology of transsexuals as follows (as summarized by Vitale):1 Primary - functionally asexual and who progresses resolutely toward a surgical resolution without significant deviation toward either homosexuality or heterosexuality, no evidence of effeminacy in childhood.
2a Secondary, homosexual - effeminate from earliest childhood, preferred girls as playmates, avoided boyish pursuits and were "mother's helpers." Crossdressing began in childhood, initially for narcissistic satisfaction, but later at puberty to attract male sexual partners. Cross-gender fantasies were frequently tied to identification with movie actresses and drag queens. The authors note that the homosexual cross-dresser wants to be noticed and to this end often wears flamboyant and colorful clothing and engages in theatrical endeavors.
2b Secondary, transvestic - appropriately masculine, and occasionally exceedingly hyper-aggressive and hyper-competitive. They neither played with girls nor engaged in female pursuits. They fantasized about being girls when cross-dressed, but valued their assertiveness and maleness.
This typology was in contradistinction to Stoller’s writings where the homosexual early transitioner was regarded as primary.
Trans men
With regard to trans men, Ovesey and Person write:“we have concluded from a study of female transsexuals that there is no female equivalent of primary male transsexualism. In our opinion, the transsexual syndrome in women develops only in homosexuals with a masculine gender role identity. Female transsexualism, therefore, can be classified as another form of secondary (homosexual) transsexualism.” (p 112)
Homosexual transsexuals
Of male homosexuals, Person and Ovesey write:“The vast majority of male homosexuals lack the propensity for a transsexual regression. The propensity exists almost entirely in cross-dressing effeminate homosexuals who comprise a very small segment of the homosexual population.”They divide homosexual transsexuals into two subgroups:
a) passive effeminate homosexuals who
“in many ways present a caricature of typical female norms. They are interested in such things as cooking and decorating, but most of all, they seek a love relationship with another man where they can assume the female role. … on the surface they are passive and dependent, but they often dominate their mates through oversolicitousness. In this respect they, they tend to duplicate the close-binding behaviour frequently ascribed to their mothers. Often a relationship is terminated because the lover feels suffocated.”b) the more aggressive, though equally effeminate, drag queens. They
“are usually involved in a community of other queens. They treat each other as ‘sisters’, and sexual relations within the group are rare. …. Narcissism is institutionalized in an endless series of drag balls and parties. … The queen claims that he wants involvement with a hypermasculine man who will overpower him …[however] he frequently prefers to be the active partner in anal intercourse. … These queens are quick to violence, both verbal and physical.”Two examples are given: C. a 33-year-old who lives with mother and has worked only two years in his life. He met a man in Spain while on holiday and maybe the man would marry him if he had the operation. D. works as a drag queen and also turns tricks. His family know that he is gay, but not the rest. He has lost interest in sex, but hopes that post-op he would find a ‘real man’.
(p 127-135)
Transvestic Transsexualism
“transvestic transsexuals have the typical personality structure of their parent group, transvestites. The personality is organized on an obsessive-paranoid axis with attenuation of both tender affectivity and sexuality. These patients are hypercompetitive, may be hypermasculine, and engage in endless struggles for power with other men. … The relationship with the wife is essentially dependent. As such, its success is determined by the personality of the wife and her capacity to tolerate both cross-dressing and minimal sexuality. … Mental life is characterized not only by irritability and preoccupation with power struggles but also by bouts of depression. … they are countered most frequently by cross-dressing and many instances by resort to alcohol. … Suicide attempts are common, as we would expect in a patient population so prone to depression.” (p135-142)
Transvestism
Person and Ovesey went with the definition that transvestism is done by male heterosexuals (not gay men nor women) for fetishistic sexual arousal, although they concede that it may also be done ‘to relieve anxiety about gender role identity’. They divide transvestites into masochistic and non-masochistic. The psychoanalyst Milton Jucovy had proposed the concept of ‘initiation fantasy’ as a central part of male transvestism. Person elaborated that there are two versions: forced initiation by a dominant, big-breasted, booted phallic woman, and also initiation by a kindly woman who dresses the man to save him from ‘Mafia killers’ or some such.DSM III
In 1978 the Archives of Sexual Behavior published Virginia Prince's "Transsexuals and Pseudotranssexuals" in which she proposed that the only true transsexuals are asexual, socially-inadequate men who would function better as women, as "less is expected of women". She presumed that bisexuals (2,3,4 on the Kinsey scale) of their nature do not become transsexuals. She also proposed two kinds of 'pseudotranssexual' based on sexual orientation."The preoperative homosexual group (Kinsey 5,6) gave much higher scores on all questions dealing with sex and lower scores on those questions dealing with gender, while those in the heterosexual group (Kinsey 1,2) gave high scores to gender type questions and much lower scores on the sex type questions".The third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III) 1980 added transsexualism for the first time, and subdivided it into asexual, homosexual, heterosexual and unspecified. Thus it was roughly congruent with Stoller, Person-Ovesey and Prince. Furthermore ‘transvestites’ was defined as done by a heterosexual male. Again congruent with Stoller, Person-Ovesey and Prince. However to the chagrin of Prince (who had been insisting on a differentiation from fetishism) it was defined as done for sexual excitement.
- Robert Stoller. Sex and Gender. Science House, 1968.
- Ethel S. Person. “Some Differences Between Men and Women: We think and behave different for biological and psychological reasons, not just cultural ones”. The Atlantic, March 1988. Online.
- Ethel Person & Lionel Ovessey. “The transsexual syndrome in males I: primary transsexualism”. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 28, 1974: 4-20.
- Ethel Person & Lionel Ovessey. “The transsexual syndrome in males II: secondary transsexualism”. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 28, 1974: 174-193.
- Ethel Person. “Initiation fantasies and transvestism: discussion”. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 24, 1976:547-551.
- Lionel Ovesey & Ethel Person “Transvestism: A disorder of the sense of Self”. International journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 5, 1976: 219-235.
- Virginia Prince. "Transsexuals and Pseudotranssexuals", Archives of Sexual Behavior, 7, 4, 1978: 263-272. Reprinted in Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds) Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Transgendering. The Haworth Medical Press, 2005: 33-7 and the International Journal of Transgenderism, 8,4, 2005: 33-7.
- Ethel Person & Lionel Ovessey. “Psychoanalytic Theories of Gender Identity”. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. 11, 2 (Apr 1, 1983): 203.
- Ethel Spector Person. “Harry Benjamin and the Birth of a Shared Cultural Fantasy”. In The Sexual Century: 347-366.
- Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. University of Philadelphia Press 1993: 219-220..
- Ethel Spector Person. By Force of Fantasy: How We Make Our Lives. Penguin, 1996.
- Anne Vitale. “Primary and Secondary Transsexualism--Myths and Facts”. www.avitale.com, January 22, 2000. http://www.avitale.com/PrimarySecondary.htm
- “Initiation Fantasy” in Salman Akhtar. Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Karnac Books, 2009: 146.
- Ethel Spector Person. The Sexual Century. Yale University Press, 1999.
- Elizabeth. “The Person Ovesey Transsexual Study”. Notes from the T side, October 3, 2010. http://ben-girl-notesfromthetside.blogspot.ca/2010/10/person-ovesey-transsexual-study.html.
- Leslie Kaufman. “Ethel Person, Who Studied Sexual Fantasies, Dies at 77”. New York Times, Oct 20, 2012. Online.
- Irene Silverman. “Ethel S. Person, Psychoanalyst”. The East Hampton Star, October 25, 2012. Online.
- Stephen Burt. “Ethel Person”. The New York Times, December 30, 2012. Online.
- Molly Haskell. My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation. Penguin, 2014: 15, 73.
______________
Surely the non-homosexual transsexual group should have been called ‘heterosexual transsexuals’ or even better ‘gynephilic trannsexuals’. To put ‘transvestic’ in the type name predisposes to a negative interpretation just as much as calling them ‘autogynephilic’.
I have previously commented on similar attempts at typology. See Kay Brown androphilic and gynephilic, and Anne Vitale. I still think that 3-part typologies of transsexuals are better than Blanchard’s 2-part – but I am certainly not recommending the Person-Ovesey model. Vitale’s model regards the pathology as gender deprivation anxiety - non-standard gender identity as such not being a pathology. Thus Vitale’s approach is preferable if we are to continue with typologies. Those who transition as soon as possible, those who spend some time living as gay before transition and those who marry and have children before transition are intuitively three different types. However to define the three types by adding psychoanalytical interpretations and to ignore the great variety within each type ends up defaming all and sundry. The intuition of three types does lead to some valuable insights, but to reify the three types leads to severe distortion.
In part I, I mentioned Elizabeth who writes Notes from the T Side. Apparently she is a Benjamin VI (High Intensity True Transsexual), a Vitale G1 and a Stoller Primary; but a Person-Ovesey Secondary and a Prince Pseudo-transsexual. This is an excellent example of how typologies should not be taken literally.
I am not aware of any trans persons who actually identity with the Person-Ovesey model. Rachel Webb identied as a ‘constructed woman” as per Janice Raymond; Kay Brown and Kiira Triea identified as Blanchardian HSTS; Anne Lawrence, Willow Arune, and probably Maxine Petersen self identify as autogynephiliacs. But no-one has in public identified as a Person-Ovesey secondary transsexual. This despite the fact that the Person-Ovesey papers came out over a decade before Blanchard's.
It is difficult to reconcile the portraits of all three types of transsexuals as described by Person-Ovesey with the range of creativity and achievement of individuals featured in this Encyclopedia. Apparently Person was charming and easy to get on with face-to-face. However when you read the descriptions of trans persons in her book, then obviously she was not so nice.
Furthermore, the typology that Person-Ovesey come up was far from original. In its basic structure adheres closely to street stereotypes current at the time. All Person-Ovesey really did was revise the psychoanalytic dialectic to support the model. This despite Person being credited for doing field work in porn shops and transvestite parties! How come she never saw those of us who do not fit into the model - and I strongly argue that those of us who do not fit are the majority. She must have worked at ignoring those of us. This is later called erasure. Yes, there are some trans people who are like those described. There are some who have the separation-anxiety neuroses described. There there are even more who do not.
I have not found any record of Benjamin’s reactions to the 1974 Person-Ovesey papers on Primary and Secondary Transsexuals.
We should remember that two decades earlier, Benjamin had provided a few of his patients to Federick G Worden & James T Marsh who quite disappointed the volunteers and in effect refused to listen to them, because they knew in advance what transsexuals were.
The New York Times obituary says: “Her work, upsetting the conventional thinking, found that many transsexuals and transvestites did not perceive themselves as homosexuals but rather saw themselves in many different lights — sometimes, for example, as a woman trapped in a man’s body, and sometimes as a heterosexual who preferred a feminine demeanor.” Surely this and more had been established by Magnus Hirschfeld over 50 years before.
Molly Hacker commends Ethel Person in her book about her trans sibling. But did she never read Person’s book? Does she actually regard her sibling as a ‘transvestic transsexual’, in effect a fetishist? If she does not, how can she commend Person in her book?
This is Anne Vitale’s summing up of Primary and Secondary Transsexualism:
“It is with dismay that I continue to encounter individuals with gender identity issues using the terms Primary and Secondary Transsexualism as diagnostic indicators. The terms show up repeatedly in Internet chat rooms, in the Internet news groups, in my email, and by individuals presenting to me in my private practice. The individuals who self-identify as Primary Transsexuals are usually using the term to mean that they are "Benjamin Type VI, true transsexuals." Those who self-identify as Secondary Transsexuals are usually trying to diminish their condition and to find some way to deal with their gender dysphoria without having to face the possibility of transitioning. As we shall soon see, neither term has ever had anything to do with severity or prognosis. There is no hierarchy of transsexualism. There are no Primary Transsexuals or Secondary Transsexuals. There are only gender dysphoric individuals who need help.”
See also A Blanchard-Binary Timeline.
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More Pages to Explore .....
