Hoax biographies

Hoax biographies can be considered a genre, although those that are most successful are accepted at face value and not designated hoaxes.

The concept of hoax does not have clear boundaries, nor is there an established typology (see the various bits and pieces in Wikipedia).  Debate continues over the founding documents of religions and which terrorist events are false-flag events.   Some writers include women who wrote under male names.   Most annoying to us are the anthologies of hoaxes which include the lives of trans persons as if to be trans were in itself a hoax.  This issue is confused of course by a small number of trans persons who are indeed fraudsters (eg Charlotte Bach, Alice Baker, Storme Aerison, Celeste Tate, Elizabeth Young, Tito da Paixao Gomes, Lechane Bezuidenhout, Desiré Dubounet). 

Some examples of cis hoax biographies:

• Edmund Backhouse & JOP Bland. China Under the Empress Dowager. JP Lippincott, 1910.
• Anonymous (Beatrice Sparks). Go Ask Alice. Prentice Hall, 1971.
• Howard Hughes (Clifford Irving). The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. Terrificbooks, 1999.
• Forest Carter (Asa Earl Carter) The Education of Little Tree, Delacorte Press, 1976.
• Adolf Hitler (Konrad Kujai) The Hitler Diaries. 1983.
• James Frey. A Million Little Pieces. Random House, 2003.

Authors writing as an other gender, who are not otherwise trans (are these people cross dreamers?)

• Maria Monk(William K Hoyte). Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. 1836.
• Penelope Ashe (Mike McGrady et al). Naked Came the Stranger. L. Stuart, 1969.
• Rahila Khan (Toby Forward) Down the Road, Worlds Away. Virago Upstarts, 1987.
• Anthony Godby Johnson (Vicki Johnson). A Rock and a Hard Place: one boy's triumphant story. Signet, 1993.
• Wanda Koolmatrie (Leon Carmen & John Bayley). My Own Sweet Time, 1994.
• JT Leroy (Laura Albert) published several novels claiming that JT was a young trans woman.
• Wanda Tinasky (Tom Hawkins) Letters, 1983-8.
• Yasmina Khadra (Mohammed Moulessehoul Moulessehoul), Algerian, wrote a series of novels about being female in Algeria, published under his wife's name to avoid militray censorship.

Books that appear to be biographies of trans persons, but on a closer look appear to be something else.

Juliet Griffiths.GVWW Eric Oakley, hack writer and sometime drag performer, published this implausible account of what would be Britain's first surgical transsexual who was also a famous performer, but who has otherwise been lost to history.

•  Eric Gilbert Oakley. Man into Woman: The Amazing account of a male’s change into female, with full psychological and medical Case History and Personal Analysis Questionnaire. London: Walton Press, 1964.

Margo Howard-Howard. GVWWEN.WIKIPEDIA If Margo Howard-Howard is a not a performance piece by Penny Arcade who is otherwise Susana Ventura, he is a New York drag artist and sex worker who had encounters with James Dean, Truman Capote. Judy Garland, Andy Warhol, Jackie Curtis, Tallulah Bankhead, Madonna and Elizabeth Windsor.

• Margo Howard-Howard with Abbe Michaels. I was a White Slave in Harlem. Four Walls Eight Windows. 1988. Reissued in 1991 with an Introduction by Quentin Crisp.

John White. EN.WIKIPEDIA Don Akensen insisted when his book was published that the story of Irish-Canadian John White, MP made more sense if we assumed that John died young and that his sister Eliza had taken over his identity. More recently Akensen has said that this was a hoax, and the book is now listed as fiction.

• Donald H.Akenson. At Face Value: the life and times of Eliza McCormack/John White. Montréal. McGill-Queen's University Press, xiii, 245pp. 1990.