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Sophie White (1957 - ) filmmaker, actress
Sophie, originally from Houma, Louisiana, was previously known as Rory, and under that name had been a motorcycle racer, a boxing promoter, and a chiropractor, at first in Roswell, Georgia, and then,...
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M J Bassett (196? - ) film director
Michael Bassett was raised in Newport in Shropshire. Aspirations of being a wildlife veterinarian were dashed by low grades. At 16 Bassett left school and worked as a wildlife filmmaker’s assistant....
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Carolyn Mercer (1947 - ) headteacher
Mercer was raised by working-class parents in Preston, Lancashire, and left school at 16 with minimal qualifications to work for a plastering and tiling contractor. Mercer also played rugby and did...
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George Traver Whittle (1927 – 2017) sex-change surgeon
George Whittle was raised mainly in New Jersey. His father, a Naval Commander, was in command at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 when the airship, the Hindenburg, crashed and burned. Ten-year-old George...
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Judy Bowen (1944 - ) business woman, activist
Judy Bowen was assigned male and so raised in Virginia and Tennessee despite feeling otherwise. The family was religious – church three times a week – and Bowen was a teenage reporter for the local...
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Wilhelmina Ross (? - ? ) performer
Tish Gervais (who many years later reverted to being Brian Belovich) was a friend when Wilhelmina chose her name, ‘Wilhelmina’ from a modelling agency active at that time and ‘Ross’ from the singer...
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Aleksa Lundberg (1981 - ) actress, author, activist
Original version May 2014.All quotes from Bögtjejen via Collmar via Google Translator. Lundberg’s father was a union organizer, but despite this the parents rejected her gender expressions. However...
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Pipás Pista (1886–1940) farm worker convicted of murder
Note1: In Hungarian/Magyar third person pronouns are not gendered. Ő is used whether the person is male or female, and will be used here for the protagonist, but, to avoid complication, only for the...
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Florence Hines (186? - 1924) male impersonator
It is quite possible to be famous and yet unknown. Florence Hines is one such.Hines, an African American, became known as a male impersonator at the beginning of the 1890s, and therefore was probably...
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San Quentin Prison, California
(All photographs within the prison via the Digital Transgender Archive)San Quentin is one of the world’s best-known prisons. It is the oldest and largest in California, and the only one in the state...
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Michelle-Lael Norsworthy (1964 - ) convicted of murder
After high school, as Jeffrey, Norsworthy became a police informer, joined the army national guard, ran around town inebriated, and carried a loaded gun.“I was an extremely aggressive, non-thinking...
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Anita Verig Sandor (1934 - ) usherette, housewife
As Anita later told her tale to the News of the World:Her parents in Hungary raised her as a girl, and sent her to school as such, even during the war. When she was 15 she found her birth certificate...
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La Paloma - a nighclub outside Miami
Miami was not very observant of the alcohol prohibition laws when they were in force, and when they ended in 1933, it was ready to expand and to entertain the tourists who were coming in greater...
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Szecsődi Kári (1992 - ) singer
Szecsődi was born in Balatonkenesén, Hungary at the northern end of Lake Balaton to a dynasty of circus performers and musicians, and was singing onstage with mother’s band before starting school. In...
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Remembering the Cockettes
The Cockettes, the way-out San Francisco performance troope 1969-1972 features lots of drag, cross-dressing and dressing up. Two of its members, Dahlia McGowan and Bobbi Cameron later transitioned....
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Two Snapshots
Some people are featured once in the press, and never heard of again.Lorraine Campbell-CraigLorraine, originally from New South Wales, met and was inspired by Coccinelle (presumably in Paris) in the...
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Chez Nous - Berlin Travestietheater
A nightclub in Berlin that was open 1958-2008, at Marburger Straße 14 in Charlottenburg, that was the oldest surviving Travestietheater in West Germany. It was a smallish bar with a capacity of only...
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Pamela Helen Bonert (1950 - ) military captain, medical officer, counsellor
Bonert was the first openly trans woman in the German military.After marriage and two daughters, Bonert, in 1999, then a captain in the Luftwaffe, completed surgical transition as Pamela Helen Bonert....
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Abby Sinclair (1938 - ) performer
Sinclair was raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn. By age 14 Sinclair was starting to be perceived as gender variant, and at age 17 left home and found work as a female impersonator at the Circus Bar in Miami....
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Fran Bennett (195?-) monk, spiritual guide
Francis Bennett did a BA in Philosophy at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, and then a two-year chaplaincy residency in the Ohio Health Hospital system. He then entered the...
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