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Channel: A Gender Variance Who's Who

Arnold Wyss (1878 - ?) office worker - first Transvestitenschein in Switzerland.

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 We know of Wyss only from the police file in Zurich. We do not know Wyss’ female name.

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Arnold Wyss was born and raised in Bern, Switzerland. At the age of eight he found a suitcase belonging to a deceased women, and was able to dress as female secretly. As a teenager he visited a coffee house with a female impersonater show, and then encounted the performer on the street in female dress. Wyss married a woman, Maria in 1902, hoping that marriage would cure his inclinations. They adopted a daughter. However after a while, when alone at home he cross-dressed. In 1910 Wyss read an account in a newspaper of a ‘man’ dressed as female who appeared in court, but had a permit, a Transvestitenschein. After a second such newspaper article, Wyss wrote to Dr Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. The reply introduced him to the term ‘Transvestiten”, and as a law-abiding citizen, he decided to apply to the Zurich authorities for a permit. A later letter to Hirschfeld asked how to apply, but no answer was received. However he was able to obtain and read Hirschfeld’s 1910 book, Die Transvestiten.

After first moving to Zuring in December 1911 where Wyss worked as a porter in a factory, the family had moved to Geneva and then to Brig in southern Switzerland. In January 1914 they returned to Zurich and Wyss was employed as an office clerk. Maria worked from home as a dress-maker. Wyss mentioned to his work supervisor that he was an hermaphrodite and legally entitled to dress as female. Wyss was forbidden to do so at work, however some of the employees had seen him so dressed. Maria had not previously known of her husband’s dress preferences, until this time when he became more and more depressed and she sought to talk to him. After a while she accepted the situation in that dressed as female, Wyss was good-humoured, efficient and capable, but otherwise was suicidal. 

Wyss sought help from a Dr Frank, and applied for a permit from the Zurich Police and Justice Department in 1914 to live as a woman. In addition an anonymous letter signed ‘Bertrand’ denounced Wyss’ cross-dressing as it could only be mischief. The police explained that there was no Swiss law specifying how men and women must dress, and referred Wyss to the psychiatrist Dr Müller. Müller was acquainted with Hirschfeld’s book, but apparently did not understand Hitschfeld’s distinction between transvestism and fetishism in that he described Wyss as an ‘extreme fetishist who not only has an item of clothing as the object of his worship, but the entire female wardrobe”. Müller also interviewed Maria and the daughter, and conducted a physical examination. He concluded: Wyss was a clothes fetishist belonging to the subgroup of transvestites; heterosexual; did not move in an unethical milieu; he was ethically superior, since he had never received financial compensation for his adopted child. Müller considered a permit to be necessary, since Wyss was very depressed and unpredictable consequences might ensue if the permit was refused.

On 30 June 1914, Wyss was granted the requested permit, signed by Heinrich Mousson, Director of Justice, Police and Military.

  • Herbert Benedikt Stieber. Einleitung Transvestismus Cross-Dressing Was bedeutet. Silo.Tips, August 11, 2016. Online.

Zhao Yede 赵烨德 (1965 - ) sex-change surgeon

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It is said but not confirmed that the first transgender operation in China was performed in secret in 1983.

In 1992 Zhao Yede, from Zhejiang province, was working as a resident in a hospital in Beijing, where one of his duties was replying to letters from patients.  When newspapers reported transgender surgery there, the hospital received many requests for similar surgery.  Zhao researched the topic, and decided to move to Shanghai to learn from Dr He Qinglian, known for performing China's first female-to-male transgender surgery that year. 

By 1999 Dr He had performed 11 male-to-female and 39 female-to-male operations – the most by a single doctor at that time.  He had by then received over 4,000 letters requesting such surgery.  He’s major innovation was to use skin from the patient's inner thigh to create the penis, which leaves minimal scarring (other surgeons doing phalloplasty used skin from the patient’s stomach or forearm).

Zhao practicing in Shanghai continued using He’s methods.  He has operated on trans persons from all over China (although not from Xinjiang), and from all occupations. 90% of his patients are trans men desiring phalloplasty.  By his method, it takes at least three surgeries for a trans man, and the price is correspondingly higher: ¥ 80,000-100,000 as opposed to ¥30,000-50,000.


Chinese regulations stipulate that candidates for transgender surgery must not have a criminal record, and must have a certificate from a psychiatrist and a letter of consent from family members.  Since one of his patients returned after a few months demanding a reversal, Dr Zhao asks several probing questions.  He accepts only 10% of those who apply to him.

He argues that whether we think of ourselves as a man or a woman is dependent on directives from the brain: Everything is dependent on these directives.   And likewise for trans persons: “There’s a directive anomaly. It’s not something you can change.”

Graduation diplomas are the only official document in China that cannot be revised after being issued, and thus students, wanting to transition, want to have the operation before graduation.


Zhao has 40-50 consultations on a busy day, and he and his team do up to five operations a day.

Many patients are now coming from abroad, from Malaysia, Singapore and Japan.

In 2012, there was media attention to Zhao’s work when twins becoming men were his patients.

*not Zhao Yide, Party Secretary of Shaanxi.

*Not Dr Lee Zhao who is part of the transgender surgical team at NYU Langone in New York.

  • "China's Sex Change Master”. Shanghai Daily. 2 September 1999. 
  • “China: Treatment of transsexuals who have undergone a sex change operation, particularly in Hong Kong (1997-2000)”. Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 4 April 2000. Online.
  • Xu Junqian. “Helping women find their inner man”. China Daily, 2017-03-24.  Online.
  • Cao Xi. “Being true to yourself: LGBT in China”.  CGTN. 01-Feb-2018.  Online.
  • Piper Weiss. “Twins Undergo Sex Change in China. Go from Sisters to Brothers Together”. Yahoo, March 28, 2012. Online.
  • “Identical twins first to undergo gender surgery in China”. Out News, 28th March 2012.  Online.

Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay (1990) author, actress

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Boulianne-Tremblay was born and raised in Saint-Siméon, down river from Quebec City, on the north shore of the St Lawrence River.

Gabrielle came out as trans in 2012. Her first volume of poetry, Le Ventre des volcans, was published in 2015. After appearing in a couple of short films, she was cast in : Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n'ont fait que se creuser un tombeau, 2016, and was nominated for best actress in a supporting role at the Canadian Screens Prize


Her second volume of poetry, Les secrets de l'origami, was published in 2018. Her autobiographical novel, La fille d’elle-même came out in 2021 and was awarded a Prix des libraires du Québec, The next year she published a young adult novel, La voix de la nature.

FR.Wikipedia           EN.Wikipedia         IMDB




Tara O’Hara (195? – 198?) performer.

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Original June 2011, revised November 2023.

Tara's male persona was raised by a Jehovah's Witness family in New Orleans. In the early 80s, he was working in Berlin as an English teacher.

Tara and Jayne, from Jayne's book.
When he discovered Romy Haag's drag club he came back again and again, and started wearing drag to the club. This lead to a part in the show and Tara gave up both teaching and the Jehovah's Witnesses.

She was in Rosa von Praunheim's 1983 film, Stadt Der Verlorenen Seelen (City of Lost Souls) along with Jayne County and Angie Stardust where they all play versions of themselves.






Some sites including IMDB say that Tara was murdered in 1983, but some say that she was encountered later than that. 

Jayne County writing in 1995 said:
 "Ten years later [after 1983] I heard the tragic story of Tara's passing on. Tara was found in the ladies' room in the Berlin Tiergarten area with her head bashed in. They took her to the hospital and she lay there for weeks and weeks in a coma. Finally the doctors decided that enough was enough and pulled the plug on her. I guess they thought that Tara would never recover, but they should have consulted someone. It caused a stink in the Berlin press. She was dying slowly anyway, but leave it to Tara to go out with a bang!" (p155-6)

However there was in the 2010s another Tara O'Hara  resident in Berlin.  She lived with Edeltraut P., and they were gay and community activists.


IMDB  


Broden Giambrone (1982 - ) activist.

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++Original April 2014; revised December 2023.

Giambrone grew up in the West End of Toronto.  The family are of Italian descent and moved to Canada from the US to avoid the Vietnam War.

Broden transitioned before doing a BA in Sociology, 2006, at McGill University, Montréal.  In 2007 he was part of G/B/Q Trans men HIV Prevention Working Group (now QueerTransmen.org) which wrote the health guide GettingPrimed: The Back Pocket Guide for Transmen and the Men Who Dig Them. From 2006-8 he was a volunteer with the social justice organization OPIRG at York University, Toronto. He then worked with Trans Pulse on HIV health issues, and in 2010 completed a Master of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Limerick 2016
Broden did an advanced course in International Health at Brighton, UK, and settled in Dublin, where he became the Chief Executive at Transgender Equality Network of Ireland (TENI) 2010-2017.

He expressed concern about the then lack of provisions for trans persons in Ireland.  He and TENI lobbied to change the proposed Gender Recognition Act/ An tAcht um Inscne a Aithint, following concerns that the initial draft had been put together without any consultation with trans or LGBT groups, or medical specialists.   The Act was passed in 2015 incorporating changes proposed by TENI.  In its final version it permitted self-determination and did not require medical intervention. .  However the situations of intersex persons was not addressed, nor those of persons under the age of 18 - although thr latter was adjusted in 2017.

In 2016 Broden was Grand Marshall at Limerick Pride.

In 2017 Broden returned to Toronto and became director at at the International Trans Fund, which is run by trans activists and gives grants to trans organizations world-wide.

  • Francine Kopun.  “Youth no barrier to gender change: New guidebook offers support as decision to `transition' being made earlier in life”.  Toronto Star, May 21, 2007.  Online
  • A.Adams, M. Lundie, Z. Marshall, R. Pires, K. Scanlon, A.I.M. Scheim, B. Giambrone, N. Redman, S.M. Ware, T. Smith. Getting primed: informing HIV prevention with gay/bi/queer trans men in Ontario. AIDS 2008 - XVII International AIDS Conference. Abstract. PDF.
  • Louise Hannon, Orlaith O'Sullivan, Lydia Foy, Broden Giambrone. Trans Voices in Ireland. TENI, 2012.
  • "Almost four-fifths of transgender people have considered suicide – survey". The Journal, Oct 4 2012. Online.
  • Orlaith O'Sullivan (ed). Equality & Identity: Trans and Intersex Experience in Ireland. Essays by Louise Hannon, Broden Giambrone, Orlaith O'Sullivan. TENI, 2013.
  • Scott De Buitléir. "A Very Irish Solution to Transgender Rights". Huffington Post, 07/22/2013. No longer available.
  • Lindsay Kopit. "Ireland in Transition". Metro Éireann, August 1, 2013. No Longer available.
  • Broden Giambrone. "Gender Recognition Bill is concrete progress, but there are 3 key roadblocks". Public Interest Law Alliance, November 2013. No longer available.  
  • Michael K Lavers. "Irish transgender rights law takes effect: Statute does not include intersex people, minors". Washington Blade, September 9, 2015. Online
  • Aidan Quigley.  "Broden Giambrone Steps Down As Chief Executive Of TENI".  GCN, 14 March 2017.  Online
  • Heather Cassell.  "Ireland's emerging trans movement". Bay Area Reporter, April 5, 2017. Online
TENI (2015)     LINKEDIN     WorldCat      International Trans Fund    Research Gate   rdrama.net
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Yes, Toronto politician and transit consulatnt Adam Giambrone (Wikipedia) is Broden’s elder brother.  He dropped out of the 2010 Toronto Mayoral election because of revelations about his private life.   But it was old-fashioned philandering, and Broden was not even mentioned.   He was running second in the polls at the time.   So it is a shame that he did not stay in and defeat the much more scandal-plagued Rob Ford.




Jeanne Hoff (1938 – 2023) psychiatrist

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++original Septemeber 2013, revised February 2019 to include extra detail from Gill-Peterson's book, and December 2023 to acknowledge Jeanne's passing.

Eugene Hoff  was born in in St Louis.  Hoff did an MD at Columbia University, College of Physicians And Surgeons 1963 followed by a doctorate in solid state chemistry at University College, London (where he also converted to Catholicism), followed by training and a residency as a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

Hoffinitially thought of himself as homosexual, but in exploring homosexuality found out that he was not. He was introduced to the Harry Benjamin practice, possibly by Wardell Pomeroy of the Kinsey Institute.

Hoff was a guest on the NBC television program Not for Women Only where he (as she was still) explained transsexualism from a medical viewpoint referring to trans women as 'men' as was the then practice.
"You can say that you know that you are a woman, therefore you want to be one. But no woman I have ever asked has been able to tell me what that means, and I doubt that transsexuals will be the first to define it."
Harry Benjamin's successor Charles Ihlenfeld resigned the practice in 1976 to begin a psychiatric residency in the Bronx, and Hoff took over.  This was Hoff's first clinical practice other than the residency in St Louis.  The practice was being managed under the aegis of the Orentreich Medical Group, a dermatology and hair restoration practice, which was located at in the same building as the Benjamin practice at 1 East 72nd St. It was then still administered by Benjamin's office manager and assistant Virginia Allen.

Hoff fired Virginia, the nurse, Mary Ryan, and the physician, Agnes Nagy, and pleased Dr Orentreich by moving the practice downtown to a townhouse behind the Chelsea Hotel, at 223 West 22nd Street.

In this period Dr Hoff confronted the homophobic psychiatrist Charles Socarides in a television debate and challenged his reactionary views that homosexuality can be cured by psychoanalysis. 

Hoff was starting her own transition.
 
Her best known patient was the punk musician Jayne County, who wrote in her autobiography: 

"When I walked into the consulting room for my appointment, I nearly fainted: Dr Jean Hoff was a man who was going through the sex change himself. She looked like a woman in man's clothes, she wore men's clothes and no make-up, and she had short hair that was just beginning to grow out. Later on she went through the full change, changed her name to Janine Hoffand got her own practice.   
The best thing about Dr Hoff was that she kept asking me questions about myself over and over again, to make sure that I really knew what I wanted. She'd say things like, 'Do you think you'd ever go back to wearing men's clothes?' and I'd say, Yeah, sometimes I see a jacket I like and think it might be fun to wear.'  At the time I was talking to her about the full sex change, but I was really quite afraid, and I thought it would cut me offfrom all my folks. She said to me, 'Look, there are different degrees of transsexualism. You are a transsexual, but not all transsexuals have a full sex change. Some people are better offjust taking hormones and dressing as a woman. There are some transsexuals who go back to dressing as men. There are so many different degrees, and you shouldn't just assume that because you are transsexual you have to have a sex change. You should only get a sex change if you are one hundred and twenty five per cent sure about it. If you have the least hesitation about it, don't do it.'  That was one of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me. Dr Hoff also said that, given the kind of circles I was moving in, there really wasn't much need for me to have a sex change." 

Becoming Jeanne, 1979



Hoff completed her transition to Jeanne with surgery with Dr Granato in 1977. She was interviewed at home by Lynn Redgrave and Frank Fields immediately before surgery and two months afterwards. The resulting television program "Becoming Jeanne" won the prestigious Ohio State Broadcasting award in 1979.





It was now the case that for the first time a trans psychiatrist was in charge of a practice for trans persons. Gill-Peterson comments:
"Though the medical model was still based in gatekeeping and an unacknowledged racialization of gender, Hoff cared deeply about the well-being of her clients to a degree that is viscerally embedded in the archive she gifted to the Kinsey Institute. Her work demonstrates a level of empathy entirely absent from transsexual medicine since its advent—not to mention its predecessors in the early twentieth century— an ethic of care that, although greatly constrained by the material circumstances and history of psychiatry and endocrinology, was also entangled with her situated perspective as a trans woman. It is important to underline that Hoff represents yet another trans person who took an active and complicated role in medicine, rather than being its object."
Gill-Peterson has read Hoff's interview notes in her archive papers at the Kinsey Institute, and comments:
"Because she took the time to interview them without only reducing what they said to standard diagnostic biographies, her notes offer comparatively richer glimpses into trans boyhood than those of her predecessors." 

 

In 1978 Hoff became aware of a young black trans woman, then 30, who had been committed to a psychiatric Institution in New Jersey for 15 years.  Initially labeled  ‘schizophrenic’, her gender identity issues were taken as evidence of ‘delusion’, ‘mental retardation’ and ‘sexual perversion’. Hoff interviewed her, and petitioned for her release.
“Through all the florid language of the [psychiatric] reports there is an unmistakable moralistic disapproval of her effeminacy and homosexuality but not the slightest hint that the diagnosis of transsexualism was suspected, even though it was quite evident from the details provided. . . . She should be placed in the community, preferably living by herself” and “she should be permitted to explore the various problems that arise from cross-gender living, hormonal therapy, and surgical gender reassignment.” (quoted in Gill-Peterson)


However by 1980 there were few patients left in the practice, and Hoff had already taken a job in a psych ward in Brooklyn. The next year she sold the building on West 22nd St and moved away, first to Massachusetts and then California.

She became a psychiatrist at San Quentin prison. She was in the news in April-May 1998 when she was the only one of three psychiatrists to testify that murderer Horace Kelly might be competent to be executed, and the defense attorney attempted to impeach Hoff.

She retired after being assaulted during a counseling session by a death-row inmate.

In 2013 she donated her archives to the Kinsey Institute.

Jeanne Hoff died at age 85. 
  • "Masculine, Feminine or Androgynous?" Not for Women Only. WNBC 1976  hosted by Polly Bergen and Frank Fields, produced by Madeline Amgott.  Archive 
  • Becoming Jeanne…A Search for Sexual Identity. NBC 30 June 1978. Jeanne Hoff interviewed by Lynn Redgrave and Frank Fields.
  • Kathleen Casey.  "Gay Catholics Hear Transsexual's Story".  Asbury Park Press, October 10, 1978: 23. 
  • Jeanne Hoff. "Multiple personality disorder?"The Journal of clinical psychiatry, 48(4), Apr 1987. 
  • Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995: 99-100.
  • Michael Dougan. "Killer's mental records turn up". SFGate, April 17, 1998. Online,
  • Maria L LaGanga. "Killer Understands He Faces Execution, Prosecutor Says". Los Angeles Times, May 01, 1998. Online.
  • Michael Dougan. "Sanity trial outcome rests with minutiae". SFGate, May 5, 1998. Online.
  • Sara Catania. "The Alienists: Where experts divide, jury must decide". LAWeekly, May 13 1998.  Archive.
  • Andy Humm. "Socarides, Leading Anti-Gay Shrink, Dies". Gay City, 4,52 Dec 29-Jan 4, 2005. 
  • "Jeanne Hoff Archive". The Kinsey Institute. Online
  • SJ Parker. Emails to Zagria, 15,17 September 2013.
  • Julian Gill-Peterson. Histories of the Trangender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018: 159-160, 171, 174, 192-3, 248n105, 251n32, 252n45, 253n79-82, 254n84-5.
  • Andy Humm.  "Jeanne Hoff, first trans psychiatrist to serve trans people, dies at 85".  Gay City News, December 5, 2023.  Online
____________________________________________________________________________

Although Horace Kelly's lawyer subpoenaed Hoff's prison personnel file in an attempt to impeach her, he presumably hadn't heard rumours that she was transsexual, didn't find it in the file and didn't read her.   Otherwise he probably would have used it to defame her.   She had been in the 1978 television special under the same name, but that was 20 years earlier.   Before the Internet it was much more difficult to make connections.

Jeanne was also, in effect, outed in Jayne County's 1995 autobiography, but presumably the lawyer didn't read punk biographies.  

+++ Other sources led me to write that Hoff left New York in 1981, having sold her building at 223 West 22nd Street.  Gill-Peterson writes that she stayed in practice through the 1980s.  ??


    James Bidgood/Terri Howe (1933-2022) 1950s drag performer

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    James Bidgood was born and raised in Wisconsin. He moved to New York City in 1951.

    He found work at the drag nightclub Club 82 when it opened in 1953 as a set and lighting designer, and then as one of the drag performers, performing under the name of Terri Howe. 












    He also graduated from the Parsons School of Design, and then worked professionally as a window-dresser, costume designer and free-lance photographer. He desisted as a drag performer. 

    Through the 1960s he became a photographer of male nudes, often working in his own small Hell’s Kitchen apartment. His masterpiece is taken to be the 1971 film Pink Narcissus, IMDB, with male actress Charles Ludlam, again mainly filmed in his apartment over a period of seven years, although he was not credited with the film until almost 30 years later in that he took his name off the film after the financers became exasperated by his perfectionism, and imposed their own edit and soundtrack. For many years it was incorrectly assumed that Andy Warhol was behind the film.

    In 1999 Bruce Benderson, having researched Bidgood’s life and work, published a large coffee-table book of Bidgood’s photography, and put the record straight re Pink Narcissus

    In 2005 Bidgood was honored with a Creative Capital grant, which financed his return to art photography. He was recognized in the last years of his life as pre-cursor of camp. and is now spoken of along with Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. 

    He died of complications from COVID at age 88.

    • Bruce Benderson. Bidgood, Tashen, 1999.
    • Jesse Dorris. “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Camp”. Aperture, May 15, 2019. Online.
    • David Noh. “James Bidgood’s Sexy Phantasmagorical World”. Gay City News, June 25, 2019. Online.
    • William E Jones. “AGAINST NATURE: William E. Jones on the art of James Bidgood”. ArtForum, Summer, 2019. Online.
    • Trudy Ring. “James Bidgood, Creator of Film Pink Narcissus, Has Died”. Advocate, February 01 2022. Online.
    • Patrik Sandberg. “Elegy for a Packrat: Remembering James Bidgood: Patrik Sandberg on his years of friendship with the legendary filmmaker”. Frieze, 23 May 22. Online.
    • Miss Rosen. “How James Bidgood Inspired a Generation of LGBTQ Artists”. Blind-Magazine, October 24, 2022. Online.

    EN.Wikipedia    IMDB

    Books on Gender Variance in 2023 - Part 1: (auto) biographies

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    Trans AutoBiography

    • Cyrus Dunham. A Year Without a Name: A Memoir. Back Bay Books, 2021.

    • Diana Goetsch. This Body I Wore: A Memoir. Picador, 2023.

    • Gigi Gorgeous. He said, she said : lessons, stories, and mistakes from my transgender journey. Harmony, 2019.

    • Porpora Marcasciano. AntoloGaia: Queering the Seventies, A Radical Trans Memoir. Rutgers University Press, 2023.

    • Toshioa Meronek & Major Griffin-Gracy. Miss Major Speaks: The Life and Times of a Black Trans Revolutionary. Verso, 2023.

    • Elliot Page. Pageboy: A Memoir. HarperCollins, 2023.

    • Raquel Willis. The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation. St. Martin's Press, 2023.

    Biographical sketches

    • Katherine Locke and Shanee Benjamin. Gender Rebels: 30 Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender Expansive Heroes Past and Present. Running Press Kids, 2023.

    Trans Biography

    • Ian Buruma. The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II. Penguin, 2023. One of the three is Kawashima Yoshiko. GVWW.

    • Jens Dobler. You Have Never Seen A Dancer Like Voo Doo: Das unglaubliche Leben des Willi Pape. vbb Verlag, 2022. GVWW.

    • Charles Elton. Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision. Abrams Press, 2022.

    • William F Halloran. William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”A Life. OpenBook Publishers, 2022.

    • Moisés Lino e Silva. Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

    • Pilar Matos. De Niño a Mujer. Biografía De Dolly Van Doll. Arcopress Ediciones, 2007.
      GVWW.

    • Karen McKie. Amy Schneider: Dual Life as Writer and Game Contestant. 2023.

    • William Grey Pete. Janet Mock: A Trans Woman’s Memoir of Identity, Gender, and Sexuality. 2023.

    • Meeg Pincus. Door by Door: How Sarah McBride Became America's First Openly Transgender Senator. Crown Books, 2023.

    • Gabriella Romano. Il mio nome è Lucy: L’Italia del XX secolo nei ricordi di una transessuale. Donzelli Editore, 2009. GVWW.

    • Albert Tanquero and Lewis Rawlinson. Remember Me, Vicki Starr: The Visual History of a Trans Renegade. 2021. GVWW.

    • Niki Trauthwein. Das Leben von Antonio de Erauso: Die geschlechtliche Identität einer baskischen Person in den frühen Kolonien Südamerikas. Eine vergleichende und kommentierte Ausgabe. LIT Verelag, 2021.

    • Niki Trauthwein. Peter Pan in Hamburg: Gert-Christian Südel: Transpionier, Aktivist und Überlebenskünstler. LIT Verlag, 2020. GVWW.


    • Carolyn Whitzman. Clara at the Door with a Revolver: The Scandalous Black Suspect, the Exemplary White Son, and the Murder That Shocked Toronto. On Point Press, 2023.




    Spouse Autobiography

    • Lynette Reini-Grandell. Wild Things: A Trans-Glam-Punk-Rock Love Story. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2023. By the wife of Venus de Mars.

    Doctor Biography

    • Alison Li. Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. On Harry Benjamin. Li is also an endocrinologist.

    Changeback

    • Oli London. Detransition: a memoir. Skyhorse Publishing, 2023. GVWW.


    Books on Gender Variance in 2023 - Part 2

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    $£¥ €=Excessively overpriced books. 

    Media

    • $£¥ € Ana Horvat, Orly Lael Netzer, Sarah McRae & Julie Rak (eds). Trans Narratives: trans, transmedia, transnational. Routledge, 2023.

    Religious

    • Joe W Gresham. LGBT, Society, The Church & the Bible. Kindle, 2023.

    • Austen Hartke. Transforming: Updated and Expanded Edition with Study Guide: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians. John Knox Press, 2023.

    • Lori Anne Holt. Embracing Androgyny: Androgyny in Faith and Society. Kindle, 2023.

    • Joseph Plaster. Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin. Duke University Press, 2023.

    • Bryce E Rich. Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy: Beyond Male and Female. Fordham University Press, 2023.

    • Rubel Shelley. Male and Female God Created Them: A Biblical Review of LGBTQ+ Claims. College Press Publishing Company, 2023.

    • Max K Strassfeld. Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature. University of California Press, 2022.


    • Ken Summers. Weirdly Queer: Exploring the LGBTQ Perspective of the Paranormal, Occult, and Mysterious World. 2023.

    Legal & Activism

    • $£¥ € Aileen Kennedy. Law, Gender Identity, and the Brain: Exploring Brain-Sex Theories in Judicial Decisions on Trans and Intersex Minors. Routledge, 2023.

    Crime

    • $£¥ € Abbie Goldberg, Danielle Slakoff & Carrie Buist (eds). The (Mis)Representation of Queer Lives in True Crime. Routledge, 2023.

    Biology

    • Daphna Joel & Luba Vikhanski. Gender mosaic : beyond the myth of the male and female brain. Little, Brown Spark, 2019.

    Music

    • Will Hermes. Lou Reed. Farrar, straus and Giroux, 2023.

    • William Sauerland. Queering Vocal Pedagogy: A Handbook for Teaching Trans and Genderqueer Singers and Fostering Gender-Affirming Spaces. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.

    • Sylvan Song. Queering the Western Art Music Canon: A Call for Inclusivity and Representation. Self Publishers, 2023.

    • McKenzie Wark. Raving. Duke University Press, 2023.

    Drag

    • Jacob Bloomfeld. Drag: A British History. University of California Press, 2023.

    • Mark Edward & Stephen Farrier (eds). Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers. Methuen, 2020.


    • Elyssa Maxx Goodman. Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City. Hanover Square Press, 2023.

    • Craig Seligman. Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?: Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag. Public Affairs, 2023.

    • Janet Tennant. It's a Drag: Cross-Dressing in Performance. Applause, 2022.

    • Sasha Velour. The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag. Harper, 2023.

    Theatre & Cinema

    • Tre’vell Anderson. We See Each Other: A Black, Trans Journey Through TV and Film. Andscape Books, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Lucy J Miller. Distancing Representations in Transgender Film: Identification, Affect, and the Audience. State University of New York Press, 2023.

    Sports

    • Sharron Davies & Craig Lord. Unfair Play: The Battle For Women's Sport. Forum Press, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Rogs Martins. Finding Fairness: Transgender Athletes in Women's Sports. Lulu, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Amy M West. The Transgender Athlete: A Guide for Sports Medicine. Academic Press, 2023.

    Guidebooks

    • Sage Buch. The Transmasculine Guide to Physical Transition Workbook: For Trans, Nonbinary, and Other Masculine Folks. Microcosm Publishing, 2023

    • Jeannie Gainsburg. The Savvy Ally: A Guide for Becoming a Skilled LGBTQ+ Advocate. Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

    • B Hayes. The FTM Handbook. 2023.

    • Laura Jacobs (ed). Surviving Transphobia. Jessica Lingsleu, 2023.

    • Alo Johnson. Am I Trans Enough?: How to Overcome Your Doubts and Find Your Authentic Self. Jessica Kingsley, 2023.

    • Kiley May. How to Love a Trans Girl: On Romance, Dating and Men Who Adore Us. Dundurn Press, 2023.

    • Rae McDaniel. Gender Magic: Live Shamelessly, Reclaim Your Joy, & Step into Your Most Authentic Self. Balance, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Matthew Mills &Sean Pert. Working with Trans Voice: A Guide to Support and Inspire New, Developing and Established Practitioners. Routledge, 2023.

    • Matthew Waites. Transition to Success: A Self-Esteem and Confidence Workbook for Trans People. Jessica Kingsley, 2023.

    Couples & Family

    • Minou Bahrami. Transcultural. 2023.

    • Peggy Gillespie (ed). Authentic Selves: Celebrating Trans and Nonbinary People and Their Families. Skinner House Books, 2023.

    • Brynn Tannehill (ed). My Child Told Me They're Trans...What Do I Do?: A Q&A Guide for Parents of Trans Children. Jessica Kingsley, 2023.

    Non-Binary

    • $£¥ € Jai Ajar. Breaking the Binary: A History of Non-Binary Activism. Lulu, 2023.

    • Ocean Atlas. Nonbinary For Beginners: Everything you’ve been afraid to ask about gender, pronouns, being an ally, and black & white thinking. 2022.

    Intersex

    • François Soyer. The 'Catalan Hermaphrodite' and the Inquisition: Early Modern Sex and Gender on Trial. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

    • Amanda Lock Swarr. Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine. Duke University Press, 2023.

    Clinics

    • $£¥ € Sandra Eder. How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

    • $£¥ € Mick van Trotsenburg, Rixt AC Luikenaar &Maria Cristina Meriggiola (eds). Context, Principles, and Practice of Transgynecology. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

    Trans/GLBT history

    • Bettina Aptheker. Communists in Closets” Queering the History1930s-1990s. Routledge, 2023.

    • Elspeth H Brown. Work!: A Queer History of Modeling. Duke University Press, 2019.

    • Emily Cousens. Trans Feminist Epistemologies in the US Second Wave. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

    • Jens Dobler. Polizei und Homosexuelle in der Weimarer Republik: Zur Konstruktion des Sündenbabels . Metropol-Verlag, 2020.

    • Jennifer V Evans. The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship after Fascism. Duke University Press, 2023.

    • Benno Gammerl. Queer: Eine deutsche Geschichte vom Kaiserreich bis heute. Hanser, 2023.

    • Kit Heyam. Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. Little Brown, 2023.

    • Magnus Hirschfeld (ed) translated by Michael Lombardi-Nash. Annual of Sexual Intermediaries. Urania manuscripts, 2023. 5 volumes.

    • Adam Johnson. Transcending Boundaries: A Journey Through Transgender History. 2023.

    • Grace Elisabeth Lavery. Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques. Princeton University Press, 2023.

    • Ina Linge. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing. University of Michigan Press, 2023.

    • Hannah McElhinney. Rainbow History Class: Your Guide Through Queer and Trans History. Hardie Grant Books AU, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Douglas Pretsell. The Correspondence of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, 1846-1894. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

    • $£¥ € Douglas Pretsell. Queer Voices in the Works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, 1883–1901. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

    • Nino Strachey. Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England. Atria Books, 2022.

    City and province Histories

    • Geoff Alexander. We Weren't Angels: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs and Crime in Boston's Combat Zone. McFarland and Company, Inc., 2023.

    • William Burton & Barry Loveland. Out in Central Pennsylvania: The History of an LGBTQ Community. Penn State University Press, 2020.

    • Kelley Matthew Coures. Out in Evansville: An LGBTQ+ History of River City. History Press, 2023. Evansville, Indiana.

    • Justin Guess. The Little Book of Queer Tennessee History: A Journey through Newspaper Articles between 1790 and 1996. 2023.

    • William Lipsky. LGBTQ+ Trailblazers of San Francisco. History PR, 2023.


    • Andrea Rottman. Queer Lives across the Wall: Desire and Danger in Divided Berlin, 1945-1970. University of Toronto Press, 2023.

    Countries and minorities

    • Rustam Alexander. Red Closet: The Hidden History of Gay Oppression in the USSR. Manchester University Press, 2023.

    • B H Bashir. Pakistan and LGBTQ+ Issue. Transcending Empires: Khwaja Saras, Hijras, and Pakistan's Transgender Tapestry. 2023.

    • $£¥ € Danila Cannamela, Marzia Mauriello & Summer Minerva (eds). Italian Trans Geographies. State University of New York Press, 2023.

    • Omar Kasmani. Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere. Duke University Press, 2023.

    • Wilfred Labiosa. The LGBT Cuban Revolution. Deletrea, 2023.


    • Ruth Loe Malloy (ed). Hijras: Who We Are. Collections Canada, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Veerendra Mishra. Transgenders in India: An Introduction. Routledge, 2023.

    • Noah Riseman. Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910. Melbourne University Press, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Lopamudra Sengupta. Human Rights of the Third Gender in India: Beyond the Binary. Routledge India, 2022.

    • Jeffrey Schneider. Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany. University of Toronto Press, 2023. Both cisvestism and transvestism.

    • Katie Sutton. Sexuality in Modern German History. Bloombury, 2023.

    Race and Gender

    • Ronnie Gladden. White Girl Within: Letters of Self-Discovery Between a Transgender and Transracial Black Man and His Inner Female. October Publishing, 2023.

    • Jennifer Dominique Jones. Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality after World War II. The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

    Internet

    • Avery Dame-Griff. The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet. New York University Press, 2023.

    Written by a trans person  

    • Edward D Wood. When the Topic is Sex. BearManor Media, 2022.

    Fiction

    • Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay (translated by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch). Dandelion Daughter. Espalnade Books, 2023.

    • Daniel A Cohen (ed). The Female Marine and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and Urban Vice in America's Early Republic. University of Massachusetts Press, 2022. First published in 1815, The Female Marine purported to be the autobiography of a woman who, in order to escape the shame of having a child out of wedlock and subsequent work as a prostitute, disguised herself as a boy and joined the Marines. The popularity of this narrative led to its being reprinted 19 times in 3 years and gave rise to a series of sequels.

    • Hazel Jane Plante. Any Other City. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023.

    • Alan Lopez. When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent. University of Arizona Press, 2023.

    • Andrew Joseph White. Hell Followed with Us. Peachtree, 2023.

    Poetry

    • Eleanor Rosewood. Trans Love Poems: Illustrated Transgender Poems. 2023.

    Transphobic

    • Miriam Grossman. Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist's Guide Out of the Madness. Skyhorse, 2023.

    Miscellaneous

    • Eleonor Adler. Exploring Gender Diversity: Understanding the Spectrum of Genders. 2023

    • K J Cerankowski. Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming. Pinctum books, 2021.

    • Helen Dale. Understanding Gender Variance: Transgender, Intersex, Non-Binary & Gender Fluid Individuals. Tranzcare, 2023.

    • Debanuj Dasgupta , Joseph Donica & Margot Weiss (eds). Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002-2020. The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2023.

    • K Allison Hammer. Masculinity in Transition. University of Minnesota Press, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Jennifer Ingrey. Rethinking School Spaces for Transgender, Non-binary, and Gender Diverse Youth: Trans-ing the School Washroom. Routledge, 2023.

    • Michelle Miller. What Is A Woman? Answers From A Transgender Perspective. 2023.

    • Miguel Missé. The Myth of the Wrong Body. Polity, 2022.

    • Tash Oakes-Monger. All the Things They Said We Couldn't Have: Stories of Trans Joy. Jessica Kingsley, 2023.

    • $£¥ € Candace Moore. Marginal Production Cultures: Infrastructures of Sexual Minority and Transgender Media. Routledge, 2023.

    • Adrián Sánchez. La Patologización del colectivo Trans como una política de control de población: Derechos Humanos. Identidad de género y la Nueva Eugenesia. 2023.

    • Shon Faye. The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice Is Justice for All. Verso, 2023.

    • Eric A Stanley. Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. Duke University Press, 2021.

    • $£¥ € J E Sumerau. The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Transgender Studies. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023.

    • Natalia P Zhikhareva. On Your Terms: Gender Transition Redefined for Adults. DR Z Consulting LLC, 2023.






    Some recent obituaries, trans and others

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    Lucy Salani (1924-2023) concentration camp survivor, upholsterer, discovered by Bologna LGBT groups in 2010s. Biography: Il mio nome è Lucy, 2009. GVWW.

    Katherine Cummings (1935 -2022) Australian librarian, who, working in US, met many of the pioneering trans women. Completed transition at age 52. Autobiography: Katherines Diary, 1992. Elder at Sydney’s Gender Centre. TSsuccesses.   


    Jeanne Hoff (1938-2023) first trans person to be a psychiatrist helping other trans persons - she took over Harry Benjamin’s practice. Later a prison psychiatrist in San Quentin. GVWW.

    Rusty Rae Moore (1941-2022) professor of international business, dean at Hofstra University, transitioned in her 50s, bought a house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which became Transy House (Sylvia Rivera lived there at the end of her life). GVWW.

    Transy House

    Mark Rees (1942-2023) Applied to the ECHR for trans rights, founding member of Press for Change, member of the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council. Autobiography: Dear Sir or Madam, 1996, 2009. GVWW.


    Rachel Pollack (1945-2023) novelist, poet, Tarotist, had been London Gay Liberation Front TV/TS Group contact person in 1971. GVWW.

    Georgina Beyer (1957-2023) Maori. drag queen, stripper, prostitute, actress, radio host, social worker, Mayor, Member of Parliament, Justice of the Peace, Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. GVWW.


    Loren Cameron (1959-2022) brother to Bobbi, nephew to Marjorie, photographer and trans activist. Book: Body Alchemy, 1996. Suicide at age 63. GVWW.

    Shinta Ratri (1963-2023) took over Indonesia’s first Islamic school specifically for waria in Yogyakarta, after Maryani died. Died of a heart attack. HRW.

    Sam Villasencio (1992-2023) Filipina lover of Rod Fleming, died of pulmonary tuberculosis. Rod Fleming.

    Brianna Ghey (2007-2023) trans schoolgirl in Warrington, Cheshire killed by two 15-year-olds, one of whom admits to fantasies of killing people. Wikipedia, Pink News, Guardian.



    Cis Persons:

    Peggy Rudd (1933-2023) cofounder of Houston’s Tau Chi chapter of Tri-Ess, wife to Melanie. First wife of a Tri-Ess cross-dresser to write about it. Author of My Husband Wears My Clothes, 1989 and 4 others. OutSmart.

    Volkmar Sigusch (1940-2023) German sexologist, director of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Frankfurt, author of 51 books, edited the cultural magazine Sexualität konkret, coiner of ‘cissexual’. Wikipedia,  Spiegel,  WDR.

    Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-2023) poet, academic, LGBT activist, wife to Leslie Feinberg.  Wikipedia, https://minniebrucepratt.net

    Norah Vincent (1968-2022) lesbian writer noted for the 18 months living as a man 2004-5 and the book she wrote about it: Self-Made Man, 2006. . She died in a Swiss euthanasia clinic July, 2022. GVWW, Wikipedia.



    Drag performers:

    James Bidgood/Terri Howe (1933-2022) performed at 82 Club in the 1950s. GVWW.

    Barry Humphries/Edna Everage (1934-2023) Australian heterosexual who made his name as Everage in London in the 1960s in the Barry McKenzie films (in the second of which then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appeared and fictionally made Everage a Dame). Later Everage and Humphries toured in one-person satirical revues. More recently Humphries damaged his legacy by terfy-style support of Germaine Greer and JK Rowling. Wikipedia, Pink News.

    Lily Savage/Paul O’Grady (1955-2023) drag star in ‘80s and ’90s. eight-year residency at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, award at Edinburgh Festival, MBE. GVWW.


    Stefan Grygelko/Heklina (1967-2023) San Francisco’s legendary drag queen, creator of the transgressive drag show Trannyshack, the Miss Trannyshack Pageant. Wikipedia, Vulture.


    -------------------------------------------

    For other victims of murder etc see:

    https://tdor.translivesmatter.info/reports


    Amber McLaughlin (1973-2023) convicted of murder

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    McLaughlin was born in Missouri and given the name Scott. The mother abandoned the child who was placed in the foster care system: one foster parent rubbed feces in his face, and an adoptive father tasered the child. Severe depression resulted in multiple suicide attempts, both as a child and as an adult.

    McLaughlin became a registered sex offender in 1992 after a conviction for sexual assault against a 14-year-old girl. In 2003 McLaughlin was arrested for the rape and fatal stabbing of an ex-girlfriend in Earth City, an ex-urb of St Louis, whom he had been stalking. In 2006, the jury found McLaughlin guilty of first-degree murder, but was deadlocked at the punishment phase of the trial. The trial judge intervened and imposed a death sentence. Missouri and Indiana are the only two US states that allow judges make such a decision. 

    In 2016, a federal judge ordered a new sentencing hearing after finding that the defense had not used an expert witness on penalty mitigation to discuss the accussed’s mental state after finding that he had falsified data 17 years earlier. In 2021 a three-judge panel of the 8th US Court of Appeals ruled that earlier falsified date was irrelevant, and that the expert should have testified. However, they also found that the testimony was unlikely to change the outcome, and reinstated the death penalty.

    On death row at the state prison in Potosi, McLaughlin announced in 2019 that she was trans, and was allowed to transition. She took the name Amber, but her legal name was never changed, nor was she allowed to start on estrogen.

    3 January 2023, Amber Mclaughlin was executed by lethal injection.

    • Robert Patrick. “Federal appeals court reinstates death penalty in 2003 St. Louis County rape, murder”. St Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug 18, 2021. Online.
    • Kevin Held. “Missouri executes convicted murderer Amber McLaughlin”. Fox2now, Jan 3, 2023. Online.
    • Riya Teotia. “Who was Amber McLaughlin, the first transgender woman executed in the US? Know about the 2003 case”. Wionews, Jan 04, 2023. Online.
    • Emily Chudy. “Trans prisoner Amber McLaughlin set to be executed today unless governor grants clemency”. PinkNews, Jan 03 2023. Online.

    EN.Wikipedia

    ------------------------

    Some sites claim that Amber was the first openly transgender woman executed in the U.S. This of course ignores the many two-spirit shamans executed by white colonialists. It also ignores Frank Spisak executed 17 February 2011.

    From arrest to execution was almost twenty years. So in effect McLaughlin served a life sentence in addition to being executed.

    In Britain, prior to the abolition of the death penalty, it was judges, not juries, who decided between a life sentence and a death sentence.

    Stella Angel (1870 - ?) tailoress

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    This is the same person that I wrote about as a Patient of Austin Flint in August 2023.

    The 1890s were a difficult time to be a trans woman. The first books on ‘transvestism’ would not be published until 1910 (Hirschfeld) and 1928 (Ellis). Nor were there any mutual support groups - although the secretive Cercle Hermaphroditos is said to have started in New York in 1895. There is no mention that Stella Angel met any other trans person, although the press several times compared her to the trouser-wearing Mary Walker.  And of course external estrogens were not available until over 40 years later.

    She was arrested several times in various cities simply for being herself. The stories that she gave to authorities and to doctors vary and some are obviously falsifications – which is understandable for a person in her situation. 

    She also gave different names: Mary Cullen, Miss Logan, Stella Angel, Estelle/a Angel, Estelle Date, Estelle Culton, Estelle Lawrence, Stella Lawrence, Viola Estella Angell. In addition she claimed that she had performed on stage as Violet Dell or Violet Deacon. Moreover, when arrested she was pressed for her male name, and gave variously Thomas Cullen (her actual birth name), Reginald Culton, Cullin or Cullon, Theodore Lawrence or Laurence.

    I will most often refer to her as Cullen or Stella.

    ------------

    Special thanks to Ashley Sinnis and Walter Delong whose research in family and provincial records in Nova Scotia and in online newspaper files I am greatly indebted to for this account.

    -----------

    Thomas Cullen and his wife Mary née Turnbull of Little Habour, Pictou County, later of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, had 13 children. The child they had in 1870, they named after the father. The child had eight sisters and was frequently dressed by them in girl’s attire – to the extent that wearing men’s clothes came to feel awkward. He was also bullied at school as a sissy, even though dressed as male.

    In November 1893, young Thomas visited Halifax – in male attire – and was hassled by members of the public on suspicion that he was female and the police had to intervene.

    The next May, that person was again in Halifax, this time as Mary Cullen, and she was able to open a music shop. She attracted the attention of various young men, including a ‘city clubman’ who paid her rent for several weeks. However by August it had come out that her sex was maybe not as assumed, and the police became involved. Mary Cullen admitted that she had moved around the Maritimes the previous two years. She had attracted the romantic attentions of a police officer in St John, New Brunswick, and had worked as a servant girl or nurse in other towns in Nova Scotia.

    Cullen acquired counsel, a Mr Bulmer, who instructed her to strike any doctor or officer who dared to inspect her body, and was asserting the right to dress as she pleased “as long as he does not shock public morality”. The counsel cited law that there was no code of dress, and that if there were “the bicycle girls on our streets can be arrested”.

    Some of the young men who had expressed interest in Mary Cullen urged a cessation of the investigation, and Cullen was be sent away quietly, perhaps to Boston.

    According to her later testimony, Cullen arrived in Boston 2 October that year. She enquired at police headquarters if there were any law re how to dress, and again was informed that if there were women cyclists would be stopped. Again she was popular with young men. She found lodging and work in a tailoring shop in Boston’s Back Bay as Miss Logan where she sewed coats. There was no problem at work, but a man at a neighboring business got it into his mind that she was a man after she winked back at him, and insisted that a patrolman escort her to a police station. There she was touched and bullied until she confessed to being a man, and was then taken to police headquarters. She explained that she was from Nova Scotia, and that if in men’s clothing she was hooted at and taken to be a woman. However there was no charge on which she could be held and she was allowed to leave.

    On ruturning to work he was immediated dismissed for going away with a strange man, and leaving a coat half finished.  When she returned to her lodgings, the police story had preceded her and she was evicted.

    In court Dec 1894, Boston
    The stress of that arrest was followed by a period of sickness.  In December, on the advice of a fellow lodger, Stella entered the Temporary Home for Women, a Florence Mission, on Shawmut Avenue. She stayed four nights and was given three pounds of bread, one pound of beef and one pound of butter – to the value of 35 cents. This led to her being charged with intent to cheat and defraud in that the mission was for women only. She gave her profession as ‘tailoress”. It was put to her that she was really Reginald Cullen. She explained her position: “If I dress up in man’s garb, I am liable to arrest; if I assume a woman’s my chances are no better. I cannot see what I am to do.” The judge asserted that the case was one of fraud in taking a donation from a charity that was for women only. Bail was set at $200, which Cullen did not have. She was passed to the State Board of Lunacy and Charity for three days, then to have her hair cut short, be furnished with male clothing and sent back to Nova Scotia.



    In May 1895 Cullen was on a train from Halifax to New York, but got off in Lowell, Massachusetts. She found lodging for the night, but suspicions as to her sex were roused, and the police put her in a cell for the next night. In court the day after it was established that there was no complaint against the accused, and she was sent on her way.

    O’Dell’s Employment Agency in Manhattan placed Cullen, under the name of Estelle Lawrence, as a chambermaid in a hotel in the resort town of Mountaindale, Sullivan County. New York. References were supplied to the effect that Estelle had been a lady’s maid for three years to a fashionable mistress, Mrs Henry Paul, in Boston’s Back Bay or maybe Newton Heights. This went well, but Estelle found Mountaindale a dull place and went back to New York.

    Estelle took to loitering in the Rambles in New York’s Central Park, flirting with any men who passed – even lifting her skirt. This attracted the attention of a park policeman who noted the unladylike nature of her behavior and arrested her. She was arrested and sent to the Mount Sinai hospital for an opinion on her sex. She then gave the name of Reginald Coulton, and repeated the claim that she had given to the O’Dell’s Employment Agency of being a lady’s maid in Boston. She also claimed to be from Ohio.


    Photograph in Flint's paper
    She was sent to Bellevue hospital and placed in what would later be called the Psychopathic Ward, where she was compelled to wear masculine clothes. Austin Flint, the noted Professor Emeritus of Physiology visited Bellevue and examined her. He found a scanty beard, the manner of “a silly girl”, a feminine voice and a good singing voice. He noted her disinterest in sex with either men or women. Flint returned the next day intending to make a laryngoscopic examination, but found that she had been discharged and sent to her home “in the West”. 




    Stella was arrested in Columbus, Ohio, where, in the police jail, she was examined by Dr Schueller, who noted that her ‘parts’ were ‘covered with condylomata’ (warts). Again she was released.

    In May 1896 Cullen travelled from Columbus to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was again arrested, gave a male name of Theodore Laurence and spent five days in jail.

    Stella was briefly in Philadelphia, and then returned to New York City, where she was presumably destitute, for – despite her conviction for fraud in Boston – she applied to a New York Florence Mission giving her name as Viola Estella Angell. She was examined by Dr Charles W Allen, formerly genito-urinary surgeon to the City Hospital. He decided “that the applicant was not a suitable subject for the mission; but, being destitute and friendless, and seemingly desirous of having the question of sex definitely settled, he was taken to Dr. Sherman's sanatorium”, which was in Yonkers. There he and a Dr Grandin saw her together “in consultation“, and a number of physicians who it was thought would be interested were invited to be present and take part in the subsequent examination”.

    He later presented a paper on his inspection of her. His summary of her life prior to his meeting her is at variance with the account given above. His version states:

    “In Boston he was engaged for a long time as a machine operator with a large number of girls in a factory, until, casually meeting in the streets one day a man from his native town, he was denounced as a man masquerading in female attire, and was placed under arrest. He states, however, that after he had told his story to the police, despite an examination made by the matron of the prison, he was released and went to Philadelphia, where he was employed as a female domestic and associated with women.” 

    There is no mention of Stella being charged with fraud, of her arrest in New York and examination by Dr Flint, or of the arrest and examination by Dr Schueller in Columbus. Nor of the warts.

    In his account:

    “Fearing that he was to be compelled to put on male attire before leaving the sanatorium, he absented himself in the night, leaving behind a note, in which he promised at the earliest opportunity again to resume men's clothing and get along in the world as best he can”.

    In March 1897 Dr Allen presented the case to a medical meeting, and wrote up an account for the Journal of Cutaneous and Genito-Urinary Diseases. Two months later Medical Record contained a longer account.

    After that, it appears, that Stella managed to stay out of the press.

    Dr Flint wrote up his 1895 examination of her for the New York Medical Journal in December 1911 but made no mention of C W Allen’s 1897 paper.

    • “Neither Man nor Woman”. Halifax Herald, 24 Aug 1894:6.
    • “Cullen as a Woman: He was so much of a success that he got all the young men in love with him”. Boston Daily Globe, August 24, 1894: 2.
    • “He used paint. Man in Woman’s Dress Puzzled Police. Objected to being searched and at last confessed sex. Worked Beside women in a tailor’s shop. None suspected identity but neighbor caught on. Culton says he has toyed with the affections of many”. Boston Daily Globe, Oct 24, 1894.
    • “Mr. or Miss? Man in woman’s dress works havoc as Station 4”. Boston Post, Oct 25, 1894.
    • “May wear what he chooses: But Reginald Culton must not masquerade for fraud”. Boston Herald, Dec 11, 1894.
    • "Mary Walker's Rival: An effeminate Nova Scotian Masquerades as a woman".  Montreal Daily Herald, October 27, 1894:5.  Online.
    • “Broke Hearts. Reginald Culton had a gay time. Had many devoted lovers while dressed as a woman. Boston policeman and doctor among them. Looked like a charming girl of 20. Received rich presents from susceptible youths”. Boston Daily Globe, Dec 11, 1894.
    • “No garb for him: As man or woman Stella gets arrested”. Boston Post, Dec 11, 1894.
    • “Stella Angel”. National Police Gazette, Jan 12, 1895 : 7.
    • “A man in skirts. Masquerades as a Woman with little success. Bluffs women but lands in the station house. How he fared in court – his antics”. Lowell Sun, May 4, 1895:1.
    • “Years in masquerade. Man arrested in New York City for wearing dresses. Had worked as a lady’s maid”. Waterbury Evening Democrat, Aug 10, 1895. Online.
    • “Reginald Culton’s woe: Magistrate Simms sends to the workhouse the man to whom no attire is proof against arrest”. New York Herald, Aug 11, 1895.
    • “Was flirting: and dressed as a woman when taken in by a heartless copper”. Saint-Paul Daily Globe, Aug 12, 1895:3.
    • “In woman’s attire: Nova Scotia arrested in New York”. Halifax Evening News, Aug 14, 1895.
    • “Stella, the new woman. Lawrence again arrested on masquerading charge. Pittsburg Officials puzzles when he told then the old story. ‘Sissy,’ as he was called in school, claimed a home in Boston”. Boston Sunday Globe, May 10, 1896: 1.
    • “In woman’s attire. This Montaindale maid turned out to be a man. Brought up as a girl – served three years as a lady’s maid, but his ex was not suspected”. Sullivan county Record, Aug 16, 1895.
    • “This man a mystery. He masqueraded as a woman and was arrested in Pittsburg. His strange story”. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 10, 1896.
    • “Theodore’s woe. Once more arrested while in female attire. Said his name was Stella. Told same old story of life-long misery. Arrested several times”. Boston Post, May 11, 1896:16.
    -------
    • C W Allen. “A case of Psycho-sexual Hermaphroditism”. Journal of Cutaneous and Genito-Urinary Diseases, March 9,1897 :235, Online.
    • C W Allen. “Report of a Case of Psycho-Sexual Hermaphroditism”. Medical Record, 51,9, May 8, 1897. Online.
    • Elizabeth Reis. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009: 63-6.

    Reis summarises the account in Medical Record, but nothing at all about Flint’s paper.

    -----

    • Austin Flint. “A Case of Sexual Inversion, Probably with Complete Sexual Anaesthesia,” New York Medical Journal, 94, 23, December 2, 1911: 1111.
    • Edward Podolsky. “Transvestism” in Encyclopedia Of Aberrations - A Psychiatric Handbook. Philosophical Library, 1953: 531. Revised as “Introduction” to Transvestism Today: The Phenomena of Men Who Dress as Women. Epic Publishing Co Ltd, 1960: 12.
    • George Chauncy. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, , and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Basic Books, 1994: 98.
    • Leila J Rupp. A desired past : a short history of same-sex love in America. The University of Chicago Press, 1999: 82-4.

    Podolsky, Chauncy and Rupp mention Flint’s paper, but say nothing about either of Allen’s papers.

    ----------------

    Stella’s lawyer in Halifax in 1893, a Mr Bulmer, was likely John Thomas Bulmer (1845-1901) a lawyer, librarian and social reformer who started as a Conservative, but later advocated for prohibition, female suffrage, equal pay and a fairer distribution of wealth; and successfully fought against the exclusion of black children from Halifax public schools and mentored James Robinson Johnston, the first black lawyer in Nova Scotia. Dictionary of Canadian Biography

    ------------------

    Knowing of her arrests in 1894 and 1895, we can be sure that Stella’s claim of being a lady’s maid to Mrs Henry Paul (apparently a real person) was not true. In addition, either she equivocated or the journalists fumbled – in either case Boston’s Back Bay is right down town while Newton is a suburb to the west of the city.

    In several news articles the male name is given as Reginald Culton rather than Cullen. Culton and Cullen are different names, and different families, although I am informed by Ashley that later there was intermarriage between the two.

    While it seems that Stella was actually born in 1870, she often claimed 1874.

    I presume that Dr Schueller gave Stella an ointment for the warts as they are not mentioned by Dr Allen.

    Stella claimed that she left Mountaindale as it was ‘dull’. There is another possibility. Some male guests regard chambermaids as fair game, and so it is quite possible that Stella left before a persistent guest revealed her sex.

    Columbus, Ohio passed a municipal law against cross-dressing in 1848. Was Stella arrested there under that law?

    Halifax, Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia – unlike many US municipalities - did not have local laws against cross-dressing.

    Gina Chua (1960 - ) journalist

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    Chua was born in Singapore, educated in the Philippines, did a bachelors’s degree in mathematics at the Universityof Chicago and a master’s in journalism at Columbia University in New York. Chua worked at the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation and the Straits Times, was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Manila and Hanoi, and later served as editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal Asia and the South China Morning Post. Chua served as a senior editor for The Wall Street Journal in New York, and began working for Reuters in 2011, where Chua introduced new tools and built top-class data and graphics teams.

    After earlier confiding in her boss and a few others, she transitioned, at age 60, in late 2020 while working at home during the Covid lockdown. She informed her colleagues by email, and Reuters changed her profile photo and gender on their website. Chua changed her English name from Reginald to Gina, but left her Chinese name, which she chooses to keep private, unchanged.

    Following new reports about her transition, Chua has been getting emails from parents about their trans children, about themselves, and from colleagues themselves thinking about transition.

    She was appointed executive editor of Reuters in April 2021, a newly created role. A year later she left Reuters to become the executive editor of Semafor, a new media startup.




    In December 2023 she wrote:

    If 2023 is anything to go by, 2024 will see a continued wave of attacks on trans people, driven by politicians who believe they can weaponize our existence as a wedge issue to electoral success and victory in the “culture wars.”

    And if 2023 is anything to go by, I predict 2024 will continue to see many mainstream news organizations unwittingly and unquestioningly accept and adopt those right-wing frames and talking points in their coverage, contributing to falling public support for trans rights, and more broadly for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized communities.

    I hope desperately that I’m wrong. But I fear I’ll be right.”

    • “Reuters appoints Gina Chua as executive editor”. Reuters, 21 April 2021. Online.
    • Jillian Eugenios. “At the helm at Reuters, this trans executive says she's finally living in the light”. NBC News, June 1, 2020. Online.
    • Katie Robertson. “A Top Editor Becomes Her ‘True Self’ “. New York Times, June 4, 2021. Online.
    • Juwan Holmes. “Reuters’ Gina Chua is hoping to stage a future where trans people flourish in media”. LGBTG Nation, July 21, 2021. Online.

    Singapore LGBT encyclopedia Wiki     EN.Wikipedia     Thomson Reuters    ginachua.me    LinkedIn

      Muck Rack    Twitter   

    Martine O'Leary - gay liberation activist.

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    Original: May 2011.

    Martine was a member of Leeds Gay Liberation Front and also of the International Marxist Group. In 1974 she was active at the Third Gay Marxist Conference in Leeds and also at the First National TV.TS Conferencesponsered by Leeds GLF.

    She was mentioned in The Guardian report on the Conference where she was described as
    "a radical drag queen at Leeds, says that he buys old dresses from Oxfam shops, wears neither make-up nor substitute breasts, and tries to shake people out of their preconception of what a man is, a woman is, or more important, what he is."

    At the conference those in attendence divided into separate discussion groups, but before they dispersed, two documents were handed to each delegate:  "Competition" by Martine O'Leary and "Attitudes to homosexuality" by N S Love (about the Beaument Society's exclusion of gay persons).  It was considered that the content of these documents was so thought provoking and so excellently set down that as time did not permit the use of them as 'Discussion Topics', they should be reproduced in their entirity in the Conference report.

    O'Leary in her document wrote:

    " The only way in which our society can cope with us is by treating us as products - as entertainers, as drag contest entrants. It has been frequently enough observed that once a transvestite has got past the stage of only being dressed at home and wants to go public, then practically the only possible outlet is some form of participation in a commercialised scene. This, ultimately, is disastrous. I do not say it is disastrous because I am opposed to commercialism. I say it is so precisely because the commercial situation frustrates and inhibits the essence of transvestism. The transvestite pushes out her feelings, and her public situation promptly pushes them back. In the ensuing conflict, humanity starts to flow away."

    and 

    "Transsexuals, who by their very nature, are forced to break the magic circle of commercialism, find their lives full of harassment and difficulties. It is important to understand that those attacks are defences of the economic system and that defending the economic system entails such attacks.  Transvestites, on this understanding, face the appalling dilemma of 'Shall I stay in the trap or shall I sink in society's hate?'" 

    O'Leary also published a 16-page pamphlet that was originally a paper for the London School of Economics Gay Culture Society the same year entitled, Gay Liberation, reformism and revolution.  It is mainly a call to reclaim the revolutionary impetus of GLF which was already in 1974 being replaced by reformist groups such as Gay News and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality(CHE):
    "We have to reclalm our movement from the reformists. A large critically aware Gay Movement has to come in to being out of the shambles that is GLF. This aim needs to be energetically pursued both within the existing groups and outside them.  The sort of GLF needed must have a firm social base founded perhaps on discos and so forth.  Most importantly women must play a central, indeed a determining role.  Transvestism and transsexualsm are very much part of the issue whether we like to face up to it or not, and much heightening of consciousness over that could profitably be done."
    *not the Montréal choreographer.
    • Michael Parkin. "Mixed Feelings". The Guardian, 4 March 1994. Reprinted as Appendix F(i) of Conference Report: First national TV/TS Conference, Leeds, 1974: 36
    • Conference Report: First national TV/TS Conference. Leeds 1974.  Online.
    • Martine O'Leary. "Competition" included in Conference Report: First national TV/TS Conference:26-8.
    • Martine O'Leary. Gay Liberation, reformism and revolution. LSE-Gay Culture Society. Isophile Pamphlets, 16pp 1974. Online.
    • Richard Ekins & Dave King. The Transgender Phenomenon. London: Thousand Oaks; California: Sage. 2006: 3.
    • Charles Smith.  The Evolution of the Gay Male Public Sphere in England and Wales, 1967-c.1983. PhD Thesis, Loughborough University, 2014: 154. Online.
    • Rob M. "Gay Marxist". Splits and Fusions, July 21, 2023.  Online.
    ____________________________________________________________

    A forgotten pioneer.  I wonder what happened to her?

    the person who rejected the White Goddess

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    In 1948 Faber and Faber published an adventurous book by Robert Graves, poet and mythologist: The White Goddess: A historical grammar of poetic myth. Graves had been working on the book since 1944. The book, although perplexing to many readers, quickly became one of the the century’s classics of creative mythology.

    The Faber and Faber director, one T.S. Eliot wrote a blurb for the first edition: “This is a prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book; the outcome of vast reading and curious researches into strange territories of folk-lore, religion and magic”.

    In February 1957, Graves gave a lecture in New York in which He said:

    “I offered The White Goddess in turn to the only publishers I knew who claimed to be personally concerned with poetry and mythology.

    The first regretted that he could not recommend this unusual book to his partners, because of the expense. He died of heart failure within the month.

    The second wrote very discourteously, to the effect that he could not make either head or tail of the book, and could not believe it would interest anyone. He died too, soon afterwards.

    But the third, who was T. S. Eliot, wrote that it must be published at all costs. So he did publish it, and not only got his money back, but pretty soon
    was rewarded with the Order of Merit, the Nobel Prize of Literature, and a smash hit on Broadway. 

    Very well. Call these coincidences. But I beg you not to laugh, unless you can explain just why the second publisher should have dressed himself up in a woman's panties and bra one afternoon, and hanged himself from a tree in his garden. (Unfortunately, the brief report in Time did not specify the sort of tree.) Was that a blind act of God, or was it a calculated act of Goddess? I leave the answer to you; all I know is that it seemed to me natural enough in its horrid way.”

    This was generally dismissed by biographers as Graves perhaps spinning some magical promotion for the book. 

    However Graves scholar Grevel Lindop who also wrote a book on Charles Williams (who was an Inkling along with J RR Tolkein and C S Lewis, and also an editor at Oxford University Press) noticed that Williams’ unexpected death in 1945 would fit as that of the first publisher. He died during an emergency operation for stomach complaint 15 May 1945 – the operation presumably having caused heart failure. 

    This was just ten months after he had declined Graves’ book: “thrilling description of the way the poetic mind works, and very valuable on that account…I do very profoundly regret that we can’t do it. I have said all this here, and pressed it as far as I can”.

    Lindop was intrigued and wondered if the second editor could also be discovered. He considered that Graves may have confused Time and the New York Times. He asked a friend to search the New York Times archives. 

    The following was found in the 20 July 1946 edition:

    "PUBLISHING EXECUTIVE FOUND DEAD

    IRVINGTON ON HUDSON NY July 19—Alexander J. Blanton, 45 years old, a vice president of Macmillan Company, publishers, was found this afternoon hanging from a tree behind his home on Riverview Road here. Dr Amos O. Squire, Westchester medical examiner, listed the death as a "suicide while mentally disturbed."

    Lindop used another personal connection who had a son who is an attorney to file a Freedom of Information request to obtain the medical examiner’s report re Blanton’s death.

    This did confirm that Blanton was dressed, not in ‘panties and bra’, but fully dressed in his wife’s clothes.

    Lindop and his associates thought to consult the New York Times, but missed the account in the New York Daily News.



    • “Publishing executive found dead”. New York Times, July 19, 1946.
    • “Hangs Himself in Wife’s Garb”. New York Daily News, Jul 20, 1946.
    • Grevel Lindop. “The White Goddess: Sources, Contexts, Meaning”. In Ian Firla & Grevel Lindop. Graves and the Godess: Essays on Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Associated University Presses, 2003: 35-8.
    • David Holzer. “Vengeance of The White Goddess?”. charlesmarlow.com, 2024.. Online.
    -------------------

    If we allow the idea that the White Goddess may have smited the two editors for impiety, then - as gods often do - she mis-aimed in that it was Charles Williams' boss who had rejected the book.

    Blanton seems to be on the trans spectrum with the misfortune of having lived slighty too soon.  Seven years later Christine Jorgensen was in the news; a few years after that Virginia Prince had started organizing.  If Blanton had been 20 years younger there would have been the options of  socializing in meetings in New York organized by Susanna Valenti or Siobhan Fredericks.

    I wonder if Blanton ever met Donald Wollheim who became an editor at Avon Books in the mid-1940s.

    Bernard Norman Barwin (1939 - ) doctor serving trans persons

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    Barwin was raised in South Africa by parents of Russian and Lithuanian descent. He and his wife left in 1962 after the Sharpeville massacre:

    “We were just so much opposed to the whole concept of apartheid. In fact the thing that made us finally leave was when Sharpeville happened. I was in university, and I saw literally hundreds of people lining up to fight against the blacks. I felt, ‘Gee: this is not a country I want to bring my children up in. Maybe I can make a better contribution from outside.” (quoted in Kennedy, 1993)

    He completed his medical education at Queen’s University Belfast, where he also did a PhD in women’s medicine. He worked there in the Department of Physiology. The Barwins had four children, became involved with the Alliance Party which sought to unite Ulster’s Protestants and Catholics, and sheltered women from the Republic of Ireland who – those days – were not able to get fertility treatment at home. In 1969 he took over the fledgling fertility clinic. He initiated freezing of human sperm after working with veterinarians who had been doing it for cattle for some time.

    However after a bomb went off near their children’s school, the Barwins decided to leave.

    In 1973 the Barwins and their children emigrated to Canada, and he was hired by the Ottawa General Hospital to manage the High Risk Pregnancy Clinic and to co-direct its fertility clinic. He set up the hospital’s sperm bank (with donations by medical students), and the first sexual health clinics in Ottawa’s high schools. He was noted as a pro-choice advocate, and supportive to same-sex couples wanting children. Many heterosexual couples specifically thanked Dr Barwin in birth announcements in the Ottawa Citizen.

    He was known for his experience in reconstructive surgery on children with incomplete genitals. In 1976 he was called to the hospital’s emergency ward to help with a desperate trans woman who had cut off her male genitals. After a long talk with her that persuaded him that she really was transsexual, he proceeded to construct a vagina for her using skin from the inner thigh. He did another five transgender operations over the next six years. He quickly became a go-to doctor noted for providing counselling, hormone therapy and gender surgery for trans persons. 

    He was Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Ottawa. He was also one of the founding members of Fertility Self-Help Group, which later became the Infertility Awareness Association of Canada. He also founded Canadians for Choice and was President from 2004. He was on the board of the International Society for the Advancement of Contraception and the Bereaved Families of Ontario. He was a gynecology consultant at Ottawa’s Royal hospital and the Childrens’ Hospital of Eastern Ontario. He was the President of the Canadian Fertility Society, the Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada and Planned Parenthood Ottawa. In addition he was active in the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation.

    The hiring had come with an understanding that, as is standard for immigrant physicians, he would, within three years, take and pass the gynecology certification exam administered by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. 

    He presented a paper, “Vaginoplasty – A simple approach to vaginal agenesis” at the Proceedings of Symposium on the Human Vagina and Health Disease, Wayne State University, Oct 28-30, 1976.

    Four years later he contributed a chapter, “The Surgical Treatment of Transexuality”, to Erwin Koranyi’s 1980 book Transsexuality in the Male.

    Also that year, one of the trans women whom he operated on was in the news re being cut off welfare, but being a known transsexual was not able to find work either. In 1979 a letter from Dr Barwin had fixed the situation, but in 1980, the letter was rejected.


    He did take the required Canadian exam, but failed – perhaps because he was too busy to prepare. This despite being voted the best clinical professor at the University of Ottawa medical school in 1976 and 1977. He was also FRCOG (Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists) and FACOG (Fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists). Lacking the required qualification, Barwin left Ottawa General Hospital in 1984 to set up his own clinic, but he no longer had gynecological privileges at area hospitals – not only was he no longer able to do vaginoplasties, he was not allowed to deliver babies either.

    In 1995 a female couple sued Barwin in that their child had been born from the wrong sperm. They settled out of court.

    In 1997 Barwin was named to the Order of Canada for having a "profound impact on both the biological and psycho-social aspects of women's reproductive health”.

    A fitness enthusiast, Barwin ran in the Boston Marathon in 2000 – however there was no record of his passing through the multiple checkpoints, and he was officially disqualified. Again a year later in the National Capital Marathon in Ottawa he did not complete the second lap, but rejoined the race one kilometre before the finish. The full-page account of this in the Ottawa Citizen brought in letters supporting the doctor. “We should laud, not lash, Dr, Barwin”.

    The GLBTQ Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity at Carleton University was the organizer for 2008’s Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR), and Dr Barwin was one of the speakers. The trans support group Gender Mosaic celebrated its 20th anniversary and gave out three plaques – one of which was to Dr Barwin for continued work with and support for the trans community. Carleton University, Ottawa, awarded Barwin a honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in 2009.

    In 2010 two trans women filed suit against Ontario re non-funding of laser hair removal, voice therapy and breast augmentation. Dr Barwin provided an expert report letter supporting the plaintiffs, and attached a copy of his 1980 chapter in Erwin Koranyi’s book, Transsexuality in the Male

    In 2013 Barwin admitted to professional misconduct re three clients inseminated with the wrong sperm. He agreed to permanently end his fertility practice – he was now 73. He also formally resigned his appointment to the Order of Canada. 

    He closed his transgender practice in August 2014, and retired.

    Two years later a paternity test confirmed that Barwin is the biological father of one of the children of one of his patients. The child’s DNA was used to link Barwin to 10 other cases. In 2016 a class action lawsuit was started that involved 150 of his former patients. Barwin’s medical licence was revoked in 2019. The class action resulted in 2021 with a settlement of $13.375 million.

    Publications by Norman Barwin

    • B N Barwin. “Cervical Mucus Glucose Content in the Assessment of Ovulation”. Irish Journal of Medical Science, 140, 9, 1971. 
    • B N Barwin, D M Brennan & T A McCalden. “The Effect of Oestradiol-17- β and Progesterone on the Contractile Behaviour of Ureteric Muscle”. In Dublin Journal of Medical Science, 142, 1, 1973.
    • B N Barwin. “Intrauterine Insemination of Husband’s Semen”. Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, 36,1, 1974
    • B N Barwin. “Vaginoplasty – A simple approach to vaginal agenesis”. In Proceedings of Symposium on the Human Vagina and Health Disease, Wayne State University, Oct 28-30, 1976.
    • B Norman Barwin, Anthony Dempsey & Gilles D Hurteau. “Graphic Monitoring of Labour”. Obstetric and Gynecolic Survey, 32,7,1977.
    • B Norman Barwin, Sheena Tuttle & Elaine Jolly. “The Intrauterine Contraceptive Device”. Obstretrical & Gynecological Survey, 33,8, 1978.
    • Roberto Narbaitz, George Tolnai, Elaine Jolly, Norman Barwin, David McKay. “Ultrastructural Studies on Testicular Biopsies from Eighteen Cases of Hypospermatogenesis”. Fertility and Sterility, 30,6, 1978.
    • B Norman Barwin. “Psychological Factors: Counseling and Motivation of the Contraceptive Patient”. International Journal of Gynecology and Obstretrics, 16,6, 1979.
    • Norman B Barwin. “The Surgical Treatment of Transexuality”. In Erwin Koranyi. Transsexuality in the Male. Charles C Thomas Publisher, 1980.
    • B N Barwin & S Belisle (eds). Adolescent Gynecology and Sexuality. Masson, 1982. Papers presented a meeting of the Canadian Fertility Society.
    • B Norman Barwin. “Transmission of Ureaplasma urealyticum by artificial insemination by donor”. Fertility and Sterility, 41,2,1984.
    • M C Devlin & B N Barwin. “Barrier contraception”. Advances in Contraception, 5, 1989.
    • S L Douma, C Husband, M E O’Donnell, B N Barwin & A K Woodend. “Estrogen-related Mood Disorders: Reproductive Life Cycle Factors”. Advances in Nursing Science, 28, 4, 2005.

    Other publications

    • Pauline O’Connor. “Welfare won’t buy sex change ‘excuses’ “. The Ottawa Journal, Jul 15, 1980.
    • Cathy Nobelman. “PMS: Local doctor helps women waging war with their bodies”. The Ottawa Citizen, August 16, 1991.
    • Janice Kennedy. “Doctor in Demand”. The Ottawa Citizen, Jan 25, 1993. Online.
    • Shelley Page. “Dr. B and the Women”. The Ottawa Citizen, April 1, 2001.
    • Glan McGregor. “Prominent MD caught cheating in marathons”. The Ottawa Citizen, Nov 16, 2002.
    • “We should laud, not lash, Dr. Barwin”. The Ottawa Citizen, Nov 20, 2002.
    • Rosie Dimanno. “Wrong-sperm doctor Barwin took shortcuts in career and races, too: DiManno”. Toronto Star, February 4, 2013. Online.
    • Bradley Turcotte. “Trans community supports Dr Barwin: Doctor who mixed up sperm an invaluable resource, trans Ottawans say”. Xtra, February 7, 2013. Online.
    • Brodeur v. Ontario (Minister of Health and Long-Term Care). 2010. Online.
    • Alison Motluk. “Fertility doctor used own DNA, suit claims”. The Globe and Mail, Nov 2, 2016.
    • Elizabeth Payne. “Timeline: A look at the story of Dr.Norman Barwin”. Ottawa Citizen, May 03, 2018. Online.
    • “$13.375 Million Settlement in Norman Barwin Class Action”. Nelligan Law, December 6th, 2021. Online.
    • Juanne Nancarrow Clarke. “Dr. Norman Barwin: The Story of Mixed-Up Sperm”. In When Medicine Goes Awry: Case Studies in Medically Caused Suffering and Death. University of Toronto Press 2022.

    EN.Wikipedia

    ---------

    The Wikipedia article says not a single word about Barwin’s work with and for trans persons, and does not list his publications.

    Shelley Page in her April 2001 article for the Ottawa Citizen says that she asked for Barwin’s CV. “When the 26 pages were printed, it included 30 chapters in books and 79 journal articles he had written, 181 lectures he’d delivered”. Such a list I was unable to find. Above I do list the ones that I found.

    Michael Cimino (1939 – 2016) film director and author

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    Cimino grew up in Long Island, New York. He was educated in private schools and then attended first Michigan State University and then Yale. At the latter he took a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 1961 and an MFA in 1963. He was also in the US Army reserve where he did a month of medical training. 

    He found work in New York City with a small company that made documentary and industrial films, and from there progressed into making commercials. He then attempted scriptwriting, and created Thunderbolt and Lightfoot which was at first about outlaws in Ireland, but he was persuaded to revise it as a contemporary heist movie set in the US. It was shown to Clint Eastwood, who wanted to direct it himself, but Cimino insisted. Eastwood also asked him to revise the John Milius script for the Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force. Then Eastwood let him direct Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, although Eastwood was in charge. (The film includes a scene where Jeff Bridges’ character is in drag to distract a security guard and deactivate the alarms). Cimino also worked on the revision of the script for Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976.

    Cimino’s next film as director was Deer Hunter. It had started as a spec script called The Man Who Came to Play, about going to Las Vegas to play Russian Routlette. Cimino was hired to develop the script so that it could be filmed. He in turn hired Deric Washburn to do most of the writing, to be completed within a month. It became a script about steel workers in Pennsylvania sent to Vietnam, and tortured by Russian Roulette (despite there being no record of the Viet Cong ever using such methods). The original protagonist was split into three characters. On completion Washburn was fired, and his name taken off the script, although it was restored in a Writers’ Guild arbitration. The resulting film went over budget and over schedule and cost $15 million. However it grossed $49 million, was nominated for nine Academy Awards and took five.


    Cimino then made Heaven’sGate for United Artists. It was filmed in Montana, budgeted as $12 million but cost $44 million and on release in 1980 grossed less than $4 million. The original version was over 5 hours, but the main cinema release was cut to 2½ hours. It was said that Heaven’s Gate caused the collapse of United Artists, and ended the run of director-auteur films that had typified 1970s Hollywood – however there were other factors such as management infighting.



    Most of the projects that Cimino was involved in for the next few years never got as far as filming. However he did then direct another four films – albeit without the freedom that he had earlier: Year of the Dragon, 1985; The Sicilian, 1987; Desperate Hours, 1990; The Sunchaser, 1996. 

    Cimono still had a vision and kept writing sceenplays – but they were no longer filmed. One of these was adapted into a novel, Big Jane, set in 1951, about a butch woman who travels by motorcycle across the US and ends up in a women’s brigade in the Korean War. It was translated and published in France in 2001, but never published in English. He was honoured for this in 2001 at Deauville Film Festival with a Prix littéraire. This was followed by the autobiographical Conversations en miroir, which again was published only in France.

    Eastwood and Cimino in 2015

    Cimino had became a recluse in his house in Beverly Hills, rarely seeing anybody. He lost weight and his face changed – the latter was assumed to be because of cosmetic surgery. There were rumours that Cimino had been seen presenting as female, of an application to the directors’ union for a name change to ‘Michelle Cimono’. Journalists and others actually asked him to his face if he were transitioning. Cimino denied being trans and suggested confusion with Gene Simmons of the band Kiss who lived next door. Cimono’s previous personality had been solemn, abrasive and without any humour. Now, especially at appearances in Europe, Cimono was charming. This was helped by the discovery of the original four-hour version of Heaven’s Gate, the DVD rerelease on Criterion of a director’s cut by Cimono, and the re-evaluation of the film as a masterwork. He was feted at film festivals across Europe. 

    Since the early 1990s Valerie Driscoll had owned and run Hair To Wear Wigs in Torrance, a suburb close to the Los Angeles airport. Among other trades she had been a cosmetologist, a masseuse, a commodities trader and a dominatrix at S&M parties.  She contributed to the Cross-Talk newsletter for trans persons with articles on hair and makeup, and also advised her customers re cross-dressing.  She described one of her customers who used the name Nikki as “sweet, soft, and particularly naïve”.  Nikki claimed to be “a caregiver to an elderly couple in Beverly Hills and lived in their guesthouse”. Slowly they developed a friendship and talked.  Meeting with biographer Charles Elton may years later, Driscoll said: “We each knew things that helped each other. I think she grew to like me due to my strength and independence as a woman. I was drawn to her softness, sweetness, and uncharacteristic naivety.”  She felt that she gave Nikki the confidence to change.   “As time passed, I began to notice subtle changes to her face, and soon his masculine features softened. I don’t know at what point he decided he was done with being a guy. I just don’t know. Michael became Nikki.”  Valerie gave up her shop in 1996, and moved  to Yucca Valley in the Mohave Desert, where she ran a massage and spa business.  Nikki and Valerie continued their relationship by telephone, and sometimes would meet halfway at a hotel.  But the makeover magic worked less well as Nikki aged.  Nikki stopped calling so often.  Valerie missed her, and as she had Nikki's cellphone number she was able to find out that Nikki was Michael Cimino.  She mentioned to Nikki that she knew who he was, and then their relationship was strained, and then it was over.

    Cimino died alone at home at the age of 77. Forest Lawn cemetery set up an online memorial page.  Three women in the film world added tributes, as did Valerie Driscoll whose comment was: 

    "Every day I think I’ll hear his unmistakable voice on the other end of the phone. We had become friends through my retail business in Torrance over 12 years ago and I must say that he became my BEST friend. I love him so much and miss his intelligence and humor.” 

     This led to Charles Elton, the biographer discovering her existence.

    • Michael Cimino. Conversations en miroir.  Gallimard, 2004.
    • Steven Bach. The Final Cut: Dream and Disaster in the Making of "Heaven's Gate". William Morrow, 1985
    • Steve Garbarino. “Michael Cimino’s Final Cut”. Vanity Fair, March 2002. Online.
    • Charles Elton. Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate and the Price of a Vision.  Abrams Press, 2022.
    • Bret Easton Ellis. “How Hollywood destroyed Michael Cimino”.  com.  Online.
    • Richard Brody. “A New Biography of Michael Cimino Is as Fascinating and Melancholy as the Filmmaker Himself”.  New Yorker,  May 22, 2022.  Online.
    • Juan Sanguino translated by Xanthe Holloway. “The tragic life of Michael Cimino Hollywood’s most notorious failure”. El Pais, Jun 14,2022. Online.

    EN.Wikipedia   IMDB    

    Here is a list of movies that made a big lossHeaven’s Gate is only moderate in this list.

    Peggy Deauville (1899 -? ) performer

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     Tom’s father, Benjamin Davies, was the minister at Caersalem Baptist Chapel in the coal-ming village of Abergwynfi, Naeth Port Talbot, South Wales, and was a prominent figure in the local temperance movement. However by age eleven, young Tom was drinking beer with a next-door neighbour. He was also transvesting. 

    “I was awfully interested in ladies clothes, and always dressing up as a woman, before I left school really. So now, and if my sisters had anything new, a hat, a coat, or a dress … I wasn’t happy until I tried it on.” 

    He avoided the cricket and football that the boys played, and preferred hopscotch and skipping with the girls.

    At age 14 he left school and found work in the drapery department of Glyncorrwg Co-operative Stores where he enjoyed working with fabrics and fashion. After war was declared in August 1914, Tom saw a newspaper advertisement for performers to join the army entertainment corps. He was auditioned in London and accepted. After several months at the dancing school run by John Tiller (famed for the Tiller Girls) – his natural singing voice was good enough to be professional – he was assigned to a YMCA-funded concert party led by the actress and suffragette Lena Ashwell, which performed in France close to the Western Front doing as many as forty concerts in a fortnight. Tom found Ashwell’s format too serious for his taste and wanted something less formal and where he could talk to the audience.  He transferred to other troups. He worked in Dieppe, Deauville and Paris. He also performed in the hospital on Saint-Pol-sur-Mer, the first hospital from the front line where many of the patients were badly injured soldiers, some groaning in pain. The act was basically what would be found in any music hall with risqué songs. Tom performed en femme

    “I’d come out in this beautiful sequin gown you know, and then I used to take my gown off, and I had sequin briefs and a sequin bra, and I was naked then but for my tights.  And I had these two big ostrich feather fans, and I had learned to manipulate them … they wouldn’t see anything, and I could hear them saying, Jock, how would you like her in the bunk tonight …. There were many who wouldn’t believe I was male, you know, because I was so dainty.” 

    By now Tom’s nom d’étage was Peggy Deauville.

    After the Armistice Peggy stayed on in Paris, working in the Folies Bergères for five years and the Casino de Paris for two. The act featured impersonations of well-known women of the period such as the nurse Edith Cavell, Jane Renoir and the actress Gaby Deslys. The French press was fascinated in that Peggy was a woman off-stage also, and as such she travelled around France. 

    Tom/Peggy worked in Germany for a while, and after returning to Britain worked with Bud Flanagan - a fellow performer from the war years - at the Victoria Palace and the London Palladium, and then four years in Malta with the John Bull Music Hall Company.

    By 1939 Tom was back in south Wales and working again at the Glyncorrwg Co-operative. However with the outbreak of the next war, he returned to army revue shows.

    After 1945 Peggy mainly performed at British Legion and working men’s clubs. Peggy assisted Roger Baker with his research for Baker’s 1968 book, and performed in the London show associated with the book.

    Tom remained a regular church-goer, and never drank on Sundays.

    • Roger Baker. Drag: A History of Female Impersonation on the Stage. A Triton Book, 1968: 173.
    • Cliff John. “What a Man is Peggy Deauville”. Neath Guardian, 29 January 1970:7.
    • Roger Baker, Peter Burton & Richard Smith. Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. Cassell, 1994: 191-2.
    • Daryl Leeworthy. A Little Gay History of Wales. University of Wales Press, 2019: 24-7.
    ------------

    All quotes from Leeworthy.

    New York's Radio City Rockettes were an offshoot from the Tiller Girls.

    David Martin (1946 – 1984) burglar.

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    Original version: December 2009

    David Martin was born in Paddington, London, and was educated at the Finsbury Park comprehensive school. He was trained as a motor mechanic. However he also started stealing things. By 1968 he was in a borstal serving time for 30 cases of theft. There he studied electronics, to better understand alarm systems. He managed to spring a lock, and escaped. In 1972 he was on remand for more burglaries. In the prison van he picked the lock of his cubicle, and then did the same for the other prisoners. In 1973 he was in Brixton Prison. He and 20 others hijacked a dustcart and used it to ram the prison gates. Martin was one of the few to actually get outside, but was apprehended hailing a taxi. In 1974 and 1975 he made near attempts to escape from Parkhurst Prison and then Gartree.

    Martin was also gender fluid switching genders socially and also to case premises or to commit crimes.

    In 1982 he had decided to get into the then expanding businesses of video (VHS) piracy and also pornography. To get the required equipment he burgled film recording and processing firms in London and took what he needed. On other times he broke in with a master tape of a recent Hollywood film, and used the equipment to make multiple copies. Later that year he used his knowledge of alarm systems to break into the gunsmiths Thomas Bland & Sons in Covent Garden and took 24 handguns, ammunition and holsters. A few weeks later he and others stole £25,000 in the City of London where he shot a security guard in the leg. One of the security guards said that he thought one of the gang was a woman dressed in motorcycle clothing. A week after that he shot a police constable in the leg when challenged in a film processing firm in Marylebone. 


    The police spoke to their informants and were given the name David Martin. A gun dealer came forth about an attempt by a David Martin who wanted to sell guns, and who had left an address in Crawford Place, Marylebone. For several days armed undercover officers watched Martin’s flat wondering why there was no sign of him. Only then did they realise that the tall blonde woman who came and went was, in fact, Martin. An informant explained to them that Martin was a transvestite. They were waiting for Martin on the seventh floor when she stepped out of the lift. This became a fracas, Martin’s gun was knocked away but she pulled out a second gun, and a detective constable fired. Martin was hit in the back of the neck. Martin was taken to hospital where the bullet was removed, and then held in remand at Brixton Prison. On Christmas Eve 1982 Martin was taken to Marlborough Street Magistrates Court (now the Courthouse Hotel) and charged with attempted murder, armed robbery, theft of guns and other offences. He was then taken to the court cells to await the prison van for the return journey. However his lock-picking skills served him well. He made his way to a skylight, and then over the nearby roofs to the London Palladium theatre. A service door was open, and Martin walked out through the foyer and into the Christmas crowds.

    Martin’s (major) girlfriend was the 25-year-old Sue Stephens. They raided her flat in West Hampstead, but to no avail. They put her under surveillance and listened to her phone.

    A yellow Mini.

    Stephen Waldorf, a 26-year-old film editor, vaguely resembled the male David Martin. His sister’s boyfriend, Lester Purdy, was acquainted with Stephens. Waldorf and the boyfriend picked up Stephens in a yellow Mini. With the police following, the Mini got stuck in traffic in Kensington. Armed police surrounded the car and opened fire. Waldorf fell out of the car door face down and was shot again. Only when they turned him over, did the police realize that it was the wrong man. The other man in the car fled in terror, but later went to the police.

    Waldorf had suffered five bullet wounds—which damaged his abdomen and liver—as well as a fractured skull and injuries to one hand caused by pistol whipping. Stephens was grazed by a bullet. Both were taken to St Stephen's Hospital. Within an hour, a senior officer at Scotland Yard issued a public apology and promised an immediate investigation by the Metropolitan Police's Complaints Investigation Bureau (CIB). Waldorf went into full cardiac arrest, but doctors managed to restart his heart. He was in hospital for six weeks. When he regained consciousness, a senior Met officer visited him to apologise.

    Stephens had been grazed by a bullet, was paid £10,000 for her story by the Daily Mail, but was also charged with receiving stolen property. Out on bail she worked with the Flying Squad. Martin phoned and they arranged to meet “at the last place we met”, which was a restaurant in Heath Street, Hampstead. Many police were waiting, but Martin fled down an emergency spiral staircase at Hampstead Underground Station, then the length of a stationary train, jumped from the drivers’ cab and onto the rails. Station staff immediately switched off the electricity. Some police followed while others waited at the two adjacent stations. They caught him at Belsize Park station – he had no gun with him.

    His trial was at the Old Bailey, September 1983. He refused to plead to any of the charges, and the judge ruled that a plea of not guilty be entered. The trial ended 11 October and Martin was sentenced to 25 years. He vowed that he would escape or die! 

    Waldorf eventually made a full recovery. He sued the police, who did not contest the case, and was awarded £150,000 in an out-of-court settlement early in 1984. Stephens also sued the Met and was awarded £10,000, but she, Purdy and one other were sentenced to six and nine months respectively for receiving stolen goods after police found property including £15,000 of security equipment, body armour and holsters and medical equipment.

    Three officers were suspended; two were charged with attempted murder. They were tried at the Old Bailey in October 1983, pled that they had a genuine, albeit mistaken, fear for their lives, and were acquitted of all charges. They were returned to duty, though their firearms authorisations were withdrawn.

    Martin was sent to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, where he met celebrity prisoners such as the gay serial killer Dennis Nilson. Sue Stephens stopped answering his letters, and refused to visit him. 

    He succeeded in killing himself 13 March 1984.

    The police regulations regarding guns were tightened.

    The story was filmed as a television movie in 1994 with Rupert Graves as Martin. 

    *Not the Scottish, nor the English, nor the Nebraska politician, nor the poet, nor the Governor of New South Wales, nor the musician, nor the gymnast, nor any of the footballers, nor the Texas axe-murderer, nor the Ottawa humourist, nor the casting director, nor the Dr Who scriptwriter, nor the CBC news correspondent, nor the sociologist/priest, nor the jazz pianist, nor the chef, etc. Nor the author of Rewriting Gender?: You, Your Family, Transgenderism and the Gospel, 2018.

    • Nick Davies & Stephen Cook. “Yard apologises for shooting”. The Guardian, 17 January 1983. 
    • Pat Clarke. “The gunman who like to dress aa a woman”. Daily Post, October 12, 1983: 3.
    • Roger Beam. “Two faces of the transvestite gunman” and “Waldorf: ‘Shot five times and pistol whipped’. Model’s brush with death”. Daily Mirror, October 13, 1983: 1,7.
    • Ian Henry. “Six Month’s Jail for ‘Infatuated’ Sue Stephens’. Daily Telegraph, 22 November 1983.
    • “David Martin, the transvestite burglar who became Britain's most wanted...”. UPI, 14 March 1984. Online.
    • “David Martin: No prison will hold me!” Real-Life Crimes … and how they were solved, 38, 1 Jan 1993. archive
    • Paul Greengrass (scr & dir). Open Fire. With Jim Carter as DCS Young, Rupert Graves as David Martin and Eddie Izzard as Rich. UK London Weekend Television 105 mins 1994. IMDBYouTube.
    • Duncan Campbell. The Underworld. Penguin Books, 1996: 160-2.
    • James Morton. Gangland Soho. Piatkus, 2008: 6.
    • Dick Kirby. “London police opening fire: 1983 to now”. The History Press. Online.
    • Dick Kirby. The Wrong Man: The Shooting of Stephen Waldorf and the Hunt for David Martin. The History Press, 2016. 

    EN.Wikipedia  

    -------------

    There is no indication that Martin ever went to any of the trans support groups available in London in the late 1970s-early 1980s: The London TV/TS Group, the Beaumont Society or SHAFT. 

    Real-Life Crimes includes the paragraph: “One detective who dealt with him said: He turned to homosexuality in prison. He liked the idea of being in drag, but he was such a chameleon, so good at disguise, that he found a brilliant device to help him in crime, too.” Kirby mentions “an acquaintance who was a homosexual lorry driver. Apparently, he and Martin had shared an interest in yoga, wholefoods and the occult while the driver was waiting for a sex-change operation.” Real-Life Crimes says that they were dating. Other writers claim that Martin had an affair in prison with Dennis Nilson. 

    I see only a heterosexual cross-dresser. In the early 1980s many still confused trans and being gay.

    This is the arial view (from Google maps) of the block containing the Magistrates Court and the London Palladium.  To get from one to the other across the roofs seems quite feasable.




    Patricio Manuel (1985 - ) boxer

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    Manuel was raised by a single mother in Santa Monica, California, and was five times the women’s national amateur boxing champion, and also competed in the 2012 Women’s US Olympic Trials until forced to withdraw with a shoulder injury. 

    “I’ve never really felt any sort of relation to being a girl or a woman or really being female. I would identify myself as a boy or a man in my head even if I didn’t say it out loud to other people.”

    He began hormone therapy in 2013, and had top surgery in Salt Lake City in 2014.

    “I don’t really think of it as difficult because it’s been so fun. People may think it’s been difficult but it’s also given me these amazing experiences. I feel like I’m more in control of self-identifying as a man the way I want because I’m able to actually consciously construct it as opposed to it having been enforced on me since birth.”

    He had to leave his longtime gym and trainer of nine years because the gym was church affiliated and insisted that he keep his story quiet – which he could not do. However he became a coach at a LGBTQ center in Long Beach.

    He lost a year recovering after surgery, and then waited three more months before being officially declared eligible to box as a man. USA Boxing now make no mention that he once fought as a woman, but his story is no secret given his championship wins. And because his name is only one letter different from his dead name.

    His first fight in the amateur male division was in May 2016 – which he won.

    In September 2018 the California State Athletic Commission gave him a professional boxing license – making him the first trans man in the world to be so approved. He won his first bout as a pro boxer in December 2018. A fight was arranged in 2019, but Manuel had to withdraw because of a hip injury. And then there was COVID. But there was also uneasiness that a trans man was not only fighting but winning against a cis man. Manuel’s coach, Victor Valenzuela, commented: 

    “a lot of the guys and coaches didn’t want to fight him. They think they have nothing to gain by it: Win, and you beat somebody that was a female. Lose, you got beat by somebody that was a woman.”


    His next pro fight was in March 2023 – again a win. And again in June 2023. Although he was finding it difficult to find opponents.

    In December 2023 the World Boxing Council floated the idea of a separate league for trans boxers.

     “The WBC completely rejects any boxing activity between people born male against born female, regardless of their current sexuality; so the creation of a Committee to create a competition manual was approved with the possibility of having a transgender league welcoming those who wish to participate in our sport.”

    Unsurprisingly, Manuel demurred. 

    “It is heartbreaking to me to have the WBC, a leader in my sport, argue that I don't have a place in the ring as a man.

    Given the WBC’s stated values of sportsmanship, diversity and respect (via their philanthropic arm WBC Cares), I trust this intended new policy was made with the best of intentions to be inclusive of transgender boxers. 

    Yet, in reality, the WBC is inherently dehumanizing transgender people by implying that trans men aren’t men and trans women aren’t women. 

    This rhetoric flies in the face of both existing policies at the highest level of governing bodies in the world of sports and my own lived experience.”

    A trans league is almost impossible because of lack of numbers alone. The WBC’s position rests on a report that has never been shared publicly, and that remains contested among neurologists and medical experts.

    • Jim Buzinski. “ 'Proud, butch lesbian' aims to make U.S. Olympic women's boxing team ”. Outsports, Feb 14, 2012. Online.
    • Kylie Krabbe. “Pat Manuel Poised to Blaze Trail as Transgender Amateur, then Pro”. The Ring, Dec 3, 2015. Online.
    • Karleigh Webb. “Trans boxer Patricio Manuel wins first match in four years, improves to 2-0”. Outsports, Mar 22, 2023. Online.
    • Patrick Djordjevic. “Transgender male boxer Patricio Manuel picks up a THIRD straight victory to continue his unbeaten record... 11 years after competing in the women's U.S. Olympic trials”. Daily Mail, 23 June 2023. Online.
    • Ben Wyatt. “Trans Boxers Are Stepping Into the Ring. Will the Sport Let Them Stay?”. Rolling Stone, Sep 23, 2023. Online.

    EN.Wikipedia             patriciomanuel.com

    Mikki Nicholson (1978-2014) Scabble champion

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    Mikki started playing Scrabble in 2005 after discovering the game online. By 2010 she was coming first in 
    tournaments including the British National Championship, which provided her with £1,500 so that she could compete in Malaysia later that year. In 2012 she was the clear winner at the 4th European Open Championship held that year in Malta. She was ranked as the fourth best Scrabble player in the world.

    Mikki was living in social housing in Carlisle, Cumbria (population 74,000), where she was receiving psychiatric treatment, and had spent time as an inpatient at Carlisle's Carleton Clinic. After she was discharged, she was supported by a psychiatric nurse. 

    She was subjected to transphobic abuse, and hoped to move to Newcastle, a city where people are more accepting. However she was warned that she would probably not be eligible for social housing there and she could not otherwise afford it.

    She ended her life by stepping in front of a train.

    • “Mikki does it again”. Being Drusilla, 9 12 2010. Online. Online.
    • “Mikki Nicholson is 2012 European Open Champion”. Scrabble Malta, 2012. Online.
    • “Transsexual Scrabble player crowned as British national champion”. The Guardian, 2 November 2010. Online.
    • Stephanie Linning. “Transgender Scrabble champion killed herself after daily stigma and abuse”. Daily Mail, 22 April 2016. Online.
    • Mikki Nicholson. Remembering Our Dead, 7 November 2014. Online.

    WESPA

    ------

    Scrabble is one of very few sports that does not separate the genders.

    Lyn Raskin (1928 - ) aspirant playwright, bookkeeper, secretary

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    Part I: life until first visit to Benjamin clinic

    Part II: Transition

    Part III: comments


    (Citation dates refer to entries in Raskin's book,  Diary of a Transsexual)

    Edward Raskin, originally from Pennsylvania, was the fourth child of a father who became a Miami hotel keeper. He did an accounting degree at the University of Miami, where he was seduced by one of the professors. He then slept with many of the other students, and also with guests in his father’s hotel.

     In 1950 with dreams of making it as a playwright and lyricist for musicals, Raskin spent three months in New York before admitting defeat. 

    In 1953 when the Christine Jorgensen story was in the press Raskin realized that she was more trans than gay, and went to see a doctor in Miami. The doctor said that Raskin was a perfectly developed male, and a sex change woule be possible only if she already had ovaries. 

    Later that year the 25-year-old Raskin tried again to make it in New York. Shortly after arrival Raskin decided on the name ‘Lyn’ for her other self, and from then wrote her diary as if to Lyn. Edward left copies of his plays with agents and producers, and worked as a bookkeeper. There were false starts re producing his plays, but nothing came to fruition. Edward did get lots of gay sex, but was frustrated in that she really wanted to be made love to as a woman. 

    “My frustration was not curbed by sleeping around as l have been doing, so I went to Bellevue Psychiatric Clinic for a free consultation with a Dr. Cassity, who I call Hopalong Cassity. He was always jittery, even when I was relaxed. I had about a dozen visits with him. He felt that of all his patients I was the one who accepted his homosexuality more than the others. Most of his other patients were latent homosexuals. However, he also knew my desire to be a woman. During my last visit, the receptionist said to go into his office, but the doctor wasn’t there when I walked in. They attempted to locate him, for he had just stepped out of his office moments before I arrived. They looked for him in vain. They never found him. I have a feeling he was an inmate in their psycho ward. He was probably nuttier than I was.” (September 24, 1955)

    Raskin completed actor training at theatre school in 1964 but was unable to get cast as an actor. In 1966 he was working as a secretary. 

    “l have been working as a secretary since last November. You know, it’s interesting being a secretary. I’m in competition with all women and I enjoy it. I feel more comfortable competing with women than I ever did with men. Being a part of the female world as I have been these past years, working as a secretary, I realize how much we have in common. I find I think very female. I envy their clothing.” (February 9, 1966). 

    But the job lasted only a few months, although afterwards he did temporary secretarial work.

    January 19, 1969 Raskyn ran into an ex-trick who told of a friend who was transitioning, and finally Raskin realized that the Miami gynecologist 16 years before may have been wrong saying that internal ovaries were required for a sex change. The next day Raskin phoned around and for the first time found out about Dr Harry Benjamin who had been actively aiding transsexuals since 1957. Benjamin’s secretary said that he was not practicing at that moment as he was writing, but gave Raskin an appointment for the next day with “Dr Len William” (actually Leo Wollman) at Benjamin’s office. This was shortly after trans philanthropist Reed Erickson had terminated his subsidy of Benjamin’s practice, which had therefore returned to smaller premises at 44 East 67th St. Raskin commented: 

    “Walking into Dr. W.’s office today was like walking into a chamber of horrors. It is a Park Avenue address but it is a dingy office. You have to walk down a long dimly-lit corridor to get to his office. When I entered the waiting room several other patients were already there. It looked like a movie set for a quack doctor's office.” (January 21, 1969). 

    Wollman approved Raskyn for the operation, and said that it would take a full year. Each visit to Wollman cost $15, the initial physical was $35, the urine/blood tests were $43, and the operation would be $750. After her next unemployment check, Raskin purchased two copies of Benjamin’s 1966 book– one for her brother, and started dreaming about selling an exclusive about herself to a magazine such as Life. She also read Christine Jorgensen’s autobiography. Being unemployed, Raskin was reliant on monies from her brother and father, and so had to explain what she was doing. They spoke to their doctor in Miami who could find no listing for Drs Benjamin and Wollman, and suggested tests at Johns Hopkins. Drs Wollman and Rish (whom Raskin had seen about a nose job) pointed out the long waiting list at Johns Hopkins, but Raskin wrote to John Money anyway. The long waiting list was confirmed by a two-page article in the New York Sunday News that a friend clipped and sent. 


    ·         Jack Metcalfe. “They Change Men into Women”.  New York Sunday News, February 9, 1969:106-7.



    Lyn Raskin: Part II - transition

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     Part I: life until first visit to Benjamin clinic 

    Part II: Transition

    Part III: comments

    Raskin was looking for a writer to write her biography, and a friend suggested Irmis Johnson, a noted journalist whom the Hearst company had sent to Copenhagen in 1953 to meet Christine Jorgensen. This had resulted in five consecutive weekly articles in the the American Weekly, actually written by Johnson but attributed to Jorgensen. Johnson expressed interest and even gave Jorgensen’s contact details. Raskin as Edward phoned several times starting the next day, and Christine told Raskin that her autobiography was being filmed. During this period Raskin continued attempting his theatre career as Edward. Wollman told Raskin that she should start to live in female clothes

    In May Raskin got a reply from Dr Money at Johns Hopkins. Money said that “I had to prove my capacity to earn, dress and live as a female before undergoing irrevocable surgery” (May 3, 1969). Raskin and Wollman dismissed this as ridiculous as thry thought that drag was illegal in New York State (unlike Maryland – where Johns Hopkins is – where it was legal).

    After feedback from possible publishers re an advance or not, Irmis Johnson bowed out from the project.

    The next appointment at the Benjamin clinic was with Dr Benjamin himself, as Wollman would in future be seeing his patients at his Coney Island practice – although Raskin did visit him there to have a mole removed. Benjamin revealed that a) Wollman had her down as a “Type 4 – Transsexual, nonsurgical” b) the pills that Wollman had prescribed were not estrogen but Dilantin. In Jan Wälinder’s 1967 Transsexualism: a study of forty-three cases, he had reported finding an abnormal EEG in 28% of a group of transvestites and transsexuals, and that an anti-convulsive drug had led to a cessation of the desire to cross-dress in some cases. Benjamin had tested this on a few volunteers, but Wollman had prescribed surreptitiously. 

    Raskin asserted strongly that she was a “Type 6 – Transsexual, true, high intensity” and that the Dilantin had not decreased her urge to transition. Benjamin asked whether Raskin would still want to become a woman if she could not have sex afterwards. Easkin replied: “I said I wouldn’t but I understand once the vagina is created you can have fulfilling sexual relations”. Benjamin gave a subscription for real estrogen. (May 3, 1969)

    The visits to Benjamin were $20 and the estrogen was $3.75 for fifty capsules.

    At a final visit to Wollman’s office in Coney Island to finish the warts treatment Raskin expressed her displeasure at being classified as a Type 4, and over the Dilantin.

    Benjamin transferred Raskin to his new associate Charles Ihlenfeld, and Raskin went in for hormone shots every second week. Benjamin wrote a letter to excuse Raskin from jury duty. Raskin finally started electrolysis having found an electrolysist who would do it for $10 per hour (most charged $20), and also started to let her hair grow. In September she bought dresses for the first time, and tried wearing them in the apartment. She finally had her nose job with Dr Rish. She spoke to Rish re sex change operations, and he claimed that he did not do them, but mentioned a Dr Jones who required a record of cross-living. A week later she wrote to Dr Burou in Casablanca to ask his prices.

    In her diary she wrote: “I have definitely decided against having any New York doctors perform the sex operation on me. They require you to come to their office and have a castration done there — with only a local anesthetic. Then a month later they complete the surgery in a hospital.” (October 8, 1969). 

    Two weeks after her letter, she received an answer from Dr Burou: 

    “I received your letter of October 9. The cost of surgery and 15 days of hospital is $4000. You must send it before you arrive to the enclosed address. [It was a Swiss bank.] If you can come with another patient I can do the two operations for $7000. I have not a brochure or the itinerary for transportation, but you can find that in any travel office in New York City. You have not need to bring many things. Only your clothes. You can make operation of breast implant here, but is necessary that the Doctor see you before — and difficult for me to tell you what is the cost of the operation.

                                                Sincerely yours,

    PS. Please if you think coming in April send to me a confirmation for reservation.” (October 20, 1969). 

    In November Raskin wrote back and said that she could afford only $2000. 

    For the first time, through a common friend, Raskin met with another transsexual, and compared notes. In January 2000 Look Magazine had a feature on transsexuals. Raskin felt chagrin in that she had approached them a year previously – however Look specifically featured transsexuals who had already transitioned.

    Finally Raskin started wearing female clothing outside, but only after make-up sessions and shopping with female friends. Edward told the building superintendent that his sister Lyn would be staying in the apartment. Lyn met several transsexuals at a party given by her electrolysist. She was doing electrolysis as much as six hours a week. A friend suggested Maurice GirodiasOlympia Press to publish Lyn’s autobiography. Girodias was in New York after being pressured out of Paris in 1963. Lyn presumably did not know of his practice of not paying his writers.

    Both Lyn and Edward had a joint bank account, and the manager, citing a possible discrepancy, insisted that both Lyn and Edward come in together. (May 7, 1969)

    Edward had met Zelda Suplee twenty years earlier in the town of Homestead, Florida. Lyn encountered her again as she was now the director of the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF). Zelda was due to return to Florida, and said that she would visit Lyn’s father and explain things – although when there she was unable to do more than phone him. Zelda, Lyn, Dr Wollman, Constance (who had met Lyn at their electrologist, and had recently returned from completion surgery in Casabalanca) and cis actress Pamela Lincoln (who was purportedly seeking information about transsexuals and ten years later would be in the film Tootsie) were in a 28 minute filmed discussion sponsored by EEF. By this time Raskin had a job as Lyn, working from home doing sales promotion for a music company.

    Constance had reported unhygienic practices at the clinic in Casablanca. However she had a history of lying; Zelda introduced Lyn to Bonnie, also back from Casablanca, who gave a much more positive account, and had negative accounts of three friends who had had problems after gender surgery in New York.

    In June one of Lyn’s aunts supplied a check for $2500 (which Lyn suspected actually came from her father). She wrote to Dr Burou saying that she could afford only $1500, and that a flight was booked. This was accepted. Only then did Raskin apply for a passport – as Edward as stated on her birth certificate.

    Lyn Raskin arrived in Rabat, Morroco and then Casablanca July 7, 1970. Three days later all was complete. She returned to her apartment in New York. She still had appointments with Dr Ihlenfeld, and also with Dr Rish as she wished to increase her vaginal depth. Rish sent her to Dr Roberto Granato, who found the urethra and vagina infected. She was in Rish’s Yonkers Professional Hospital several times: for an operation on the urethra, to have her ears pinned, breasts implanted and a facial skin-peel. She started having sex with straight men, usually without mentioning her past.

    Lyn’s book, Diary of a Transsexual, was published by Olympia Press in 1971. We don’t know if Maurice Girodias did pay any royalties. 

    Later that year the agony aunt Ann Landers was on the tail-end of the Dick Cavett television show following a pre-op trans woman enthusing about designing her wedding dress. Landers felt that that particular trans woman was inauthentic, and resented having to comment on her performance. When Patrick M McGrady, Jr wrote this up in his 1972 book, The Love Doctors, he added a comment from Raskin as a footnote: “They should not have had that sort of person. Ann Landers had a perfect right to be upset. It was like having a guy in drag.”

    Nothing is known of Lyn Raskin after that.

    • Roland Berg. “The Trans-sexuals: Male or Female”. Look Magazine, January 1970. Online.
    • I Am Not This Body, with Zelda Suplee, Leo Wollman, Lyn Raskin, Constance and Pamela Lincoln. EEF, US 28 mins 1971.
    • Lyn Raskin. Diary of a Transsexual. The Olympia Press, 1971.
    • Patrick M McGrady, Jr. The Love Doctors. Macmillan, 1972: 165-6, footnote.

    Trans Singapore: Comments & Mediagraphy

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    Part 1: to the first sex-change operation in 1971

    Part 2: 1972-now

    Comments and Mediagraphy


    The new Bugis Junction

    Comments

    Is there a Chinese original of Cries From Within? Leana Lo calls it “Cries in the Dark” and the Swan Project interviewers call it “Voices from Within”.

    As the Chinese practice is to place the family name first and the English language practice to place it last, e.g. Tsoi Wing Foo is sometimes Wing Foo Tsoi, I was not sure for some persons which is their surname.

    Most mentions of money I take to be in Singapore dollars.

    The rise of Singapore from being an exploited colony to being the 3rd richest country in the world by GDP (PPP) per capita is an amazing story. In the 1950s and 1960s the Singapore trans women were almost all non-op in that they could not afford the travel and medical costs to go elsewhere. Nowadays they have choices that they can afford.

    National Service to be fair should be for both genders. Better still it should not exist, and the armed forces should be all-volunteer.

    Mediagraphy

    • F D Ommaney. Eastern Windows. Longmans, 1960.

    • James Clavell. King Rat. Martin Joseph, 1962.

    • Noel Coward. Pretty Polly Barlow and other stories. Heinemann, 1964.

    • Bryan Forbes (dir & scr). King Rat, with George Segal, Tom Courtney, James Fox, Denholm Elliot, John Mills. US 134 mins BW 1965. IMDB

    • Guy Green (dir). A Matter of Innocence/Pretty Polly. Scr: Keith Waterhouse & Willis Hall from a story by Noel Coward, with Hayley Mills and Trevor Howard. UK 102 mins 1967. IMDB

    • Yeo Toon Joo, Betty L Khoo & Lee Chiu San. “They are Different”. New Nation (Singapore), July 24-31, 1972.

    • Paul Theroux. Saint Jack. Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

    • Rolf Olsen (dir) Shocking Asia, with Ingeborg Steinbach and S S Ratnam. Hong Kong/West Germany 94 mins 1974. Includes footage of a Singapore sex change operation. IMDB

    • Peter Bogdanovich (dir). Saint Jack. Scr: Howard Sackler, Peter Bogdanovich based on the novel by Paul Theroux, with Ben Gazzara & Denholm Elliot. US 112 mins 1979. IMDB

    • Tsoi Wing Foo & Kok Lee Peng. “Female Transsexualism in Singapore: A Report on 20 Cases”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 14, 1980.

    • Michael Blakemore (dir). Privates on Parade. Scr: Peter Nichols, with John Cleese, Dennis Quilley. UK 107 mins 1983. IMDB.

    • Tsoi Wing Foo. “Sex reassignment surgery in the male transsexual” Journal of Hospital Medicine, 38, 1987.

    • Tsoi Wing Foo, "The prevalence of transsexualism in Singapore”. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 78, 1988.

    • W. F. Tsoi, E. H. Kua, L. P. Kok. Handbook of clinical psychiatry : a guide for medical students and family physicians. P G Publishing, 1989.

    • Tsoi Wing Foo. “Parental influence in transsexualism”. Singapore Medical Journal, 31, 1990.

    • Tsoi Wing Foo. “Developmental profile of 200 male and 100 female transsexuals in Singapore”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 19, 1990.

    • S. S. Ratnam, Victor H. H. Goh & Tsoi Wing Foo . Cries from Within: Transsexualism, Gender Confusion and Sex Change. Singapore: Longman, 1991.

    • Tsoi Wing Foo. “Male and female transsexuals: a comparison”. Singapore Medical Journal, 33, 1992.

    • Tsoi Wing Foo. “Follow-up study of transsexuals after sex-reassignment surgery”. Singapore Medical Journal, 34, 1993.

    • Yonfan (dir) Bugis Street /Yao jie huang hou妖街皇后 with Hiep Thi Le as Lien, Ernest Seah as Lola and Greg-O as Drago. Hong Kong 101 mins 1995. IMDB.

    • Yonfan. Bugis Street : a movie book. Hong Kong: Far-sun Film co., 1995

    • Koh Buck Song Koh. Bugis Street: The novel. 1995

    • Roy Tan. “Bugis Street (film)”. The Singapore LGBT encyclopaedia Wiki. Online.

    • Bob from Australia. “The sailor’s birthday present”. Yawning Bread, August 2002. Archive.

    • “UK sailors visited singapore's bugis street for sex”. Fridae.asia, 1 Nov 2002. Online.

    • Eric Lim, Suresh Menon & Ajay Singh (dir). Hidden Genders. Scr: Adrian Ong, with Nong Tum and others. Singapore National Geographic TV 47 mins 2003.

    • Leona Lo. My Sisters, their Stories. Select Books, 2003.

    • a reader. “Singapore transgender resources”. Transgender Map, December 2004. Online.

    • Alex Au. “Singapore: A Woman With A Past.” Yawning Bread, July 2005. Archive.

    • Russell Heng. “Where queens ruled! - a history of gay venues in Singapore”. Yawning Bread, August 2005. Archive.

    • James Eckardt. Singapore Girl: A True Story of Sex, Drugs and Love on the Wild Side in 1970s Bugis Street. Monsoon Books, 2007.

    • Jason Lundberg. “review: singapore girl by james eckardt”. Lundblog, Nov 18th, 2007. Online.

    • Leona Lo. From Leonard to Leona. Lulu, 2007.

    • Wong Kim Hoh. “Trans Singapore”. Straits Times, 6 September 2008. Online.

    • Teh Yik Koon. “Excerpts from ‘Factors Determining Identity and the Status of Male-to-Female Transsexuals in Malaysia’ ” The Singapore LGBT encyclopaedia Wiki, 2008. Online.

    • Icemoon. “The Real Shophouses of Bugis Junction”. Second Shot: Same place just different time, Jan 27, 2011. Online.

    • Hun Ping. “ ‘Round About Midnight, Bugis Street”. The Hunter: location scouting in singapore’s filmic history, 14 Nov 2013. Online.

    • Ben Slater. “Coming of Age: ‘Hollywood' in Singapore: Pt. 1 Pretty Polly AKA A Matter of Innocence, Guy Green, 1967/1968”. Clearly you've never been..., May 18, 2013. Online.

    • “Our Interview with Dr Tsoi”. The Swan Project, October 14, 2014. Online.

    • Alain Soldeville. Bugis Street. André Frère Éditions, 2015. 

    • Paul Gallagher. “The Transgender Women of Singapore’s ‘Boogie Street’ ”. Dangerous Minds, 01.28.2015. Online.

    • Kenneth Chan. Yonfan’s Bugis Street. Hong Kong University Press, 2015.

    • Quen Wong (dir & scr). Some Women, with Quen Wong, Lune Loh and Sanisa. Singapore 71 mins 2021. IMDB.

    EN.WikipediaSporeLGBTpedia

    The Singapore LGBT encyclopaedia Wiki(Transgender people in Singapore)

    The Singapore LGBT encyclopaedia Wiki(Bugis Street: Transgender aspects)

    The Singapore LGBT encyclopaedia Wiki(Singapore gay terminology)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u8uNHRJ1HM

    Lyn Raskin: Part III - Comments

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    Part I: life until first visit to Benjamin clinic 

    Part II: Transition

    Part III: comments

    If Lyn Raskin is still alive she will be 93/4.

    One hopes that she did not come to a bad end, but overestimating how well ones passes and having sex with straight men is a dangerous game. We know of other trans women who were murdered in such circumstances.

    ----

    January 1969-July 1970. That is certainly a fast-track transition. Several surgeons would not accept her as she had not done a 12-month real-life test – “capacity to earn, dress and live as a female” as Money put it. Burou did not insist on such.

    ----

    I do not start referring to Raskin as Lyn until she started dressing as female. She gave the same name to her diary, which she addressed as ‘Dear Lyn’ – so it was confusing. In addition even after starting transition she was using the name Edward. It was Edward who contacted Christine Jorgensen. I use ‘he’ or ‘she’ to signify whether Raskin is doing whatever as Edward or as Lyn.

    ----

    Irmis Johnson was a noted journalist. Much of her work can be found in newspaper archives, but there is no webpage – and especially not Wikipedia page devoted to her. There should be,

    ----

    Reviews of Diary of a Transsexual are almost non-existent in either the press or in academic journals. The only one I found was by Una Nowling on the Transas City site. Una writes: 

    "Lyn, as she writes of herself, is a broken person. She has no real career over the course of the book, stuck in the doldrums of being a multiply-failed scriptwriter and lyricist for the stage, living on handouts from her father and menial jobs here and there." 

    In Los Angeles they speak of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams after the 1933 hit song, as many thousands flock to Hollywood with dreams of making it in movies, but only a few succeed. Two films that capture this well are Sunset Boulevard, 1950 and The Day of the Locust, 1975. Likewise there are many broken dreams in New York, London, Paris and Rome. The failed aspirant is an inevitable, indeed an integral part of show-biz. Lyn Raskin was part of this demographic. It is not an easy life.

    ----

    In Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States there are two (only two) mentions of Lyn Raskin. On p162 in a paragraph about negotiations to reduce the cost of surgery we find: 

    "In 1970, Lyn Raskin convinced Georges Burou to reduce his $4000 fee to $1500". 

    And on p201 we find 

    "The new trend in autobiographies continued in later publications, although none surpassed Take My Tool in pornographic content. In 1972 Olympia Press published Lyn Raskin’s Diary of a Transsexual, in which she, too, described her sex life as a gay man and later as a woman." 

    That is all. Raskin's book is much more than that. Unlike Benjamin's other patients she gives little details of the doctors’ offices and the prices they charge.


    Jeffrey Escoffier mentions Raskin in his Sex, Society, and the making of Pornography. He writes 

    “In 1972, Olympia Press, the Paris-based publisher of erotic and sexually provocative books by Henry Miller, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Vladimir Nabokov, published Lyn Raskin’s Diary of a Transsexual, which described her sex life as a gay man and as a woman, after her operation.” 

    That is all.

    ----

    $20 for an appointment with Benjamin in 1969. Using this inflation calculator, $20 in 1969 would be $169 now. $4000 for surgery in 1969 would be $33,800 now; $1500 would be $12,700.

    ----

    Raskin dismisses Dr Money’s requirement that she must “earn, dress and live as a female before undergoing irrevocable surgery” as ridiculous in that drag was illegal in New York State. Was it?

    In March 1964, Felicity Chandelle/John Miller was arrested in New York near her home by an officer of the West 128th Precinct for a violation of Section 887, Subdivision 7 of the New York Code of Criminal Procedure which designates as a vagrant any person who 'having his face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or being otherwise disguised in a manner calculated to prevent his being identified, appears on a road, lot, wood, or enclosure'. The law dates back to the 1840s when farmers were disguising as 'Indians' to harass Dutch landowners in the Anti-Rent Movement. Despite having no criminal intent John Miller was sentenced to two days, suspended. This resulted in losing his job with Eastern Airlines after 25 years, because such behavior ‘signaled homosexuality’, even though an Eastern Airlines manager actually phoned Harry Benjamin and was reassured that the conviction in no way impacted on Miller's competence as a pilot.

    In April 1967, Mauricio Archibald, en femme, having been to a masquerade party, was on a New York subway platform waiting for a train. He winked at a passing police officer who then approached and asked if he were a boy or a girl, Archibald replied: "I am a girl". The officer charged him as being a vagrant in violation of subdivision 7 of section 887. He was tried and convicted.

    Section 105 of chapter 681 of the Laws of 1967, which repealed section 887, came into effect as of September 1, 1967, "provided that the newly enacted sections were not to apply or govern the prosecution for any offense committed prior to the effective date of the act".

    However it was still the case that a bar or club could be closed and patrons arrested, simply because a single person, deemed to be cross-dressed, was present. The Queens Liberation Front was founded in 1970, and they campaigned and hired lawyers to de-criminalize cross-dressing in New York, which was achieved in 1971. The words "homosexuals, lesbians, or persons pretending to be ..." were also struck, thus decriminalizing gay clubs and parties. In addition, the still extant 1965 Anti-Mask: New York Penal Law criminalizing "the wearing of mask or disguises by three or more persons in a public place" was found inapplicable to those in drag.

    On the streets before September 1967 and in bars and clubs before 1971 there were many trans persons dressing as who they really were. See my The four years leading to Stonewall – a New York timeline for a partial list.

    ----

    In September 1969 Dr Rish spoke of a Dr Jones who required a record of cross-living before gender surgery. This was presumably Howard Jones at Johns Hopkins who did the operations on Phyllis Wilson and Dawn Langley Hall.

    ----

    Many of us do not fit into the typologies that are proposed for trans women. Raskin was definitely androphilic, but as a late transitioner was not a Blanchard ‘homosexual transsexual’. She insisted that she was a Benjamin Type 6 - Transsexual, true, high intensity”. But she was not. A type six would not have done nothing for 16 years after being fed a line by the doctor in Miami. Raskin did not dress as female, did not seek out other trans women, did not seek out trans social activities, didn’t grow her hair in the late sixties when even men were doing so. She wrote: “I’ve always loved ladies’ clothing. I love the feel of silk next to my body. I've been wearing women’s panties for more than five years. They give me a sexy feeling.” (September 14, 1969). So did Cary Grant and Al Capone apparently – that alone does not constitute transsexuality.

    I think that Wollman was right to initially assign Raskin as Type 4. After 16 years of not doing anything, the onus was on Raskin to demonstrate that she was trans.

    ----

    Some of the trans happenings in New York in the 1960s that Raskin was apparently oblivious of prior to January 1969:

    • The opening and growth of Harry Benjamin’s practice with transsexuals.
    • Harry Benjamin’s 1966 book.
    • The opening of the gender clinic at Johns Hopkins
    • The fuss when the press discovered Phyllis Wilson, Johns Hopkins first trans operation.
    • Rachel Harlow winning the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, 1968.
    • Siobhan Fredericks’ Turnabout
    • The Casa Suzanna events (although Raskins would probably have rejected them for their heterosexualism).
    • Darrell G Raynor’s A Year Among the Girls. (again heterosexualist)
    • The Lee Brewster organized drag balls for the Mattachine Society.
    • The drag performances at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.
    • The Gilded Grape.
    • Female mimics magazine.
    • Carlson Wade’s She-male: the amazing true-life story of Coccinelle.

    And in June 1969, The Stonewall riots.

    However she does mention the Mattachine Society and The Boys in the Band– of which she read the script.

    -----

    ·         Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 162, 201.
    ·         Una Nowling. “Book Review – Diary of a Transsexual [Lyn Raskin]”.  Transas City.Archive.
    ·         Jeffrey Escoffier. Sex, Society, and the making of Pornography.  Rutgers Univerity Press, 2021: 171. 






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