Original July 2008.  Revised to include information from Rainer Herrn, Raimund Wolfert and Clara at Lili-Elbe-Bibliothek in particular.

- - - - - - - - - -

Rudolph Richter, the second of six children of a musician-farmer and his lace-maker wife, was born and raised  in Seifen (now Ryžovna in Czechia) (map), a village of some 600 persons in Bohemia close to the German border, which was then part of Austria-Hungary.  Germans referred to the high-altitude region on both sides of the border as Erzgebirge.

Dora, as she would become, once attempted to tourniquet her penis. She expressed a strong dislike of male clothing, and was permitted to live as female. She showed a preference for girls' clothes, girls' games and girls' company, as well as a deep aversion to everything rough, coarse and crude that was considered typical of boys. Her favourite occupations were typically feminine tasks such as cooking, cleaning and other household chores. Richter was brought up as and remained a Catholic.

After an apprenticeship as a baker, Richter moved to a city- probably the nearby Bohemian spa town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary) in 1909, and was able to dress as female in his spare time.  Later he was in a travelling theatre and moved to Leipzig in Germany and worked checking tickets in a cinema, and then in a chocolate factory.  Then she was able to find work as a woman – as a waitress.  She was successful in sexual contacts with men who in some cases did not realise her non-standard anatomy.

Called for military service, Rudolph was twice suspended because of his "feminism"– wearing female clothing.  By 1916 as the war dragged on, the authorities became more desperate and standards were lowered. Richter he was now "found fit""after some reservations" and was then drafted after all. But only two weeks later he was discharged “home” because of a severe fainting spell, and returned to Leipzig.

After the war, Richter returned to Seifen in the newly independent Czechoslovakia.  A friend, who hoped that Dora could also be "helped by an operation", told her of the 1922 Steinach film, a popular version of the scientific film Steinachs-Forscbungen. The film briefly featured images of trans women and mentioned the possibility of a change of sex and named the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, at In den Zelten 9A-10 in the Tiergarten area of Berlin. She registered there and in May 1923 was assessed at the Institut, where surgeon Heinrich Stabel suggested that she could be castrated [orchidectomy] by year’s end.  This was done.  Stabel was of the opinion that he always succeeded in:

“dissuading the patients concerned from their urgent desire for penile amputation, by insistent and serious references to the dangerous possible consequences. So far it has always turned out that after castration the patients always felt such a great relief and liberation of their condition that in time the desire for amputation of the penis disappeared completely”. 

He reported to Werner Holz that this was the situation with Dora also – although her life would be otherwise.

Having no other source of income, she worked as a maid at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.  Magnus Hirschfeld gave her the affectionate name of Dorchen, and arranged for her to gain a Transvestitenschein.

Werner Holz, at the time an assistant physician at the Oberlin district hospital in Nowawes near Potsdam,  had come to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft  to write what is probably the first dissertation on a trans topic.  It is mainly an individual case study and biography of one person, Dorchen, whom he refers to as “Rudolph R”.  His primary focus is on her desire for castration, and it is also the first major work to use Hirschfeld’s terms “extreme” and “total” transvestites.  Holz uses male pronouns for Dorchen throughout.

“From that moment [when as a child he became aware of the difference between male and female sexual organs] he had acquired a direct hatred of his genitals until the present day. [...] Since then, all his thoughts and efforts had been directed towards freeing himself from those genitals he hated so much, which did not at all want to fit his mental constitution. At the age of 13, he had once made warts disappear by cutting them off with a thread. He therefore had the idea of freeing himself from his genitals in the same way by tying them off with a strong thread. Since this intention failed, he is said to have been quite depressed and then several times seriously thought of cutting off his genitals with a razor. Only the fear of bleeding to death is said to have prevented him at the last moment from cutting off his genitals. Even today he would give anything if he could be freed from his genitals by an operation. He had also come to Berlin for this purpose.” (Holz 1924, p 8)

"In our patient, the mental feminism is so pronounced that in conversation with him, one completely forgets that he is a man.” (Holz p 27)

Dorchen working as a waitress

Hirschfeld had initially been opposed to surgical changes, but the castrations for Dorchen and others had gone well – in particular threats of suicide had declined. 

"In the beginning I was strongly opposed to these methods, which I judged to be very dangerous to health and, on the other hand, considered unnecessary" (Hirschfeld, 1933:6)

However Werner Holz, Felix Abraham and Heinrich Stabel gave positive reports and Hirschfeld changed his mind.

“But the more I got to know of these individuals, the more I realised that some of them were ready to commit suicide in the event that their desires for the transformation of their sexual identities were not satisfied. So I told myself that in view of this I must give up my hesitation.” (ibid.).

Arthur Kronfeld, psychoanalyst, co-founder of the Institut, left in 1926.   He was the major advocate of ‘curing’ queer people through psychoanalysis.  Such conversion therapy ceased with his departure.

In 1926 the Hamburg doctor, Otto Kankeleit, gave a paper on self-damage and self mutilation at the Internationalen Kongress für Sexualforschung, which was then organised by Albert Moll.  Kankeleit included photographs, and reported on ‘transvestites’ including cases which he had learned about at Hirschfeld’s Institut.  One of these was Dorchen referred to as “Rudolf Ri”. 

“His sexual attitude was passive female to the point of bondage. He turned to Dr Magnus-Hirschfeld to have his testicles removed, as otherwise he would have to do it himself.”

In January 1928, Toni Ebel’s wife Olga died, and Toni met Charlotte Charlaque.  They both came to the Institut, were employed and given room and board and 24 Reichsmarks a month.  They met Dorchen and the three became friends.

In spring 1930, the nascent Lili Elbe (actually Lili Elvenes) was sent by her doctor, Kurt Warnekros, to Magnus Hirschfeld for a second opinion.  In the waiting room, Elevenes encountered trans women, and it is highly likely that they included  Toni Ebel and Dörchen - Charlotte Charlaque was working as the receptionist.  All three had had a first operation by this date. Lili did not relate to them: “The manner in which they were conversing disgusted him; their movements, their voices, the way in which they were attired, produced a feeling of nausea.”  In addition, Ellen Bækgaard, a Danish dentist who stayed at the Institut, said later that Elbe expressed discomfort at being classed with Dorchen Richter.

Dochen, Magnus and one other

In 1931 at the latest, Dora Richter moved to the Kempinski restaurant at Kurfürstendamm 27 as a kitchen maid.

Dorchen was offered vaginoplasty that year, and so was one of the first persons to have a sex-change completion. The surgeons were Hirschfeld’s colleagues, Ludwig Levy-Lenz  who did the penectomy and Erwin Gohrbandt, the director of the Urbank Hospital in Berlin-Kreuzberg who did a vaginoplasty a few months later.  Felix Abraham wrote up two cases as "Genitalumwandlung an zwei männlichen Transvestiten" in the Zeitschriflfiir Sexualwissenschaft in 1931, naming the two cases as "Rudolph (Dora) R." and "Arno (Toni) E.".

Pierre Najac, a young French doctor who had spent an internship year at the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, also wrote a report on Dorchen and Toni Ebel, which was published in 1931.

An anonymous article "Operative Umwandlung von Männern in Frauen gelungen" („Operative transformation of men into women successful") appeared in the medical journal, Die Geburtenregelung in 1933 and discussed the operations on Dorchen, Toni Ebel and Charlotte Charlaque.

Toni, Charlotte & Dorchen in Mysterium des Geschlechts

In April 1933 the film was shown in Vienna cinemas for two weeks before it was banned. In Germany, it was not even shown in public, as it was banned by the censors.

Also that year, Magnus Hirschfeld, in exile in Paris, commented to Voila magazine:

“Dorchen, as ex-Rudolf now called himself, feels completely like a woman. He is very happy and works in a woman's profession, having modified his marital status. Dorchen shows no symptoms of mental disturbance, she is hard-working and intelligent.”(p6)

Norman Haire, the London sexologist and associate of Magnus Hirschfeld wrote an introduction to the 1933 English version of the Lili Elbe autobiography.  Therein he wrote:

“In Berlin in 1923, I saw, at the clinic of a colleague, an individual who was apparently male, but who felt himself to be a female just as Andreas did. This patient, too, had his male organs removed at his own request, and was given injections of ovarian extract. No operation was ever undertaken to determine whether ovaries were present in his body or not. I saw him—or her—again in 1926, after the removal of the male organs, and quite recently I received a report about the case. The individual is very unhappy, and has not succeeded in becoming completely a woman.”

Not the nicest comment, but some have taken this as a reference to Dorchen.  (See the note p 59 of Caughie and Meyer).

6 May 1933 the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organised attack on the Institut, followed by the Sturmabteilung (SA).  They destroyed many of the books and put an end to the Institut.

When Toni Ebel and Charlotte Charlaque fled Germany, they chose Karlsbad in Czechoslovakia, partly because it was a hub of German speaking emigrants, but also because they thought that was where Dorchen was from.  Charlotte, writing in 1955, said of Dorchen:

"Because she is an excellent cook, she soon took over a small restaurant in the town of her birth” - meaning Karlsbad.

In February 1934, Richter applied for a legal name change “Due to congenital intersexuality – established at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft  Berlin”, which was granted by the office of the president of Czechoslovakia in April 1934. At this time, her address was still listed in Berlin. From then on, her legal name was Dora Rudolfine Richter (in the Czech form: Dora Rudolfa Richterová).  The approval letter asks the parish office to correct the baptismal entry – although that was not done at that time.

By 1939 Dorchen was living in her parents’ house in Ryžovna and earned a living as a lace maker working at home.  

The correction in the Seifen/Ryžovna records was not done until January 1946 – perhaps Dorchen herself produced the approval letter from Prague.  There was an urgency for the Germans in Bohemia, the Sudeten Germans, to have their papers in order. 

With the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans (whose location had been used as an excuse for the German annexation of Czechoslavakia in 1938), Dorchen moved to Allersberg, Bavaria, where she lived until her death at the age of 74 on 26 April 1966.

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

Dorchen was played by Tima die Goettliche in Rosa Von Praunheim’s movie about Hirschfeld, The Einstein of Sex, 1999, IMDB.

Several sources claim that Dorchen was medically castrated in 1922 by Dr Erwin Gohrbandt at the Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin.   This is not the account in Holz, 1924 – the earliest account, which gives the surgeon as Heinrich Stabel.

Herrn says: “After Dorchen had been at the institute for assessment since May 1923, waiting for the doctors' decision, Heinrich Stabel held out the prospect of castration to her at the end of the year.” (p182). However Pierre Najac provided an exact date eight years later. According to this, the operation took place on 22 May 1923 (p184).

Richter was drafted, apparently, by the German army, although technically at that time he was an Austrian citizen. After 1918 Richter would of course be a Czechoslovak.  The EN.Wikipedia article simply declares Richter to have been German.

How did Dorchen get to Hirschfeld’s Institut?  I have gone with the version in Holz, 1924 based on interviews with Dorchen.  There is an alternate account:

She worked as a waiter or a cook in the fancy hotels in Berlin in the summer, and lived as a woman in the off-season. The police arrested her several times for cross-dressing, and she was sent to a male prison. Eventually a judge took pity on her and referred her to Magnus Hirschfeld who helped her obtain an official permit to dress in women’s clothes.

These two accounts are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  This other account was included in older versions of the EN.Wikipedia article and other secondary sources.  What is missing is a provenance, who first said or wrote that.  So I have not used that version in the account above.

It is not conceivable that Dorchen having returned to Seifen – a small village - at the end of the Great War could have seen the Steinach film there.   It must have been on a trip to Berlin.

Should ‘Dorchen’ be spelt with an umlaut: ‘Dörchen’?  EN.Wikipedia does so; DE.Wikipedia does not.  Neither does Herrn nor Wolfert, so I have not done so.

Bibliography

• Curt Thomella, Leopold Niernberger, Nicholas Kaufmann (dir). Steinachs-Forscbungen.  Germany BW silent 83 mins 1922.
• Werner Holz. Kasuistischer Beitrag zum sogenannten Transvestitismus (erotischen Verkleidungstrieb) mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Aetiologie dieser Erscheinung.  Diss. Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität zu Berlin, 1924.
• Otto Kankeleit. „Selbstbesch~idigungen und Selbstverstiimmelungen der Geschlechtsorgane“. Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 79, 1927: 431-2
• Felix Abraham. “Genitalumwandlungen an zwei männlichen Transvestiten”. Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, 18: 223-226. 1931. English translation as “Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites”. The International Journal of Trangenderism. 2, 1. Jan-Mar 1998. Case 1.   Archive.
• Pierre Najac. “L’Institut de la Science Sexuelle à Berlin” in Janine Merlet (ed). Vénus et Mercure, Editions de la Vie Modern, 1931 : 165-192.
• Felix Abraham, translated by Pierre Vachet. Les Perversions Sexuelles, d’apres les travaux de Magnus Hirschfeld. Paris: François Aldor, 1931:245-7.
• Lothar Golte (dir).  Mysterium des Geschlechtes.  Scr: Felix Abraham, Lothar Golte, Professor Peham, Hofrat Teilhaber & Serge Voronoff, with Charlotte Charlaque, Toni Ebel and Dorchen Richer (all three uncredited). Austria 63 mins BW 1933.  
• Magnus Hirschfeld. 'L'amour et la science'. Voila, 3, 199, 1 Juli 1933: 6.
• "Operative Umwandlung von Männern in Frauen gelungen"Die Geburtenregelung, 1, 4, 1933:33
• Norman Haire.“Introduction“ to Neils Hoyer (ed).  Man Into Woman. Jarrolds, 1933.
• Pierre Vachet. Psychologie du Vice : Les Travestis. Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1934: 216-9,
• Charlotte Charlaque writing as Carlotta, Baronin von Curtius. "Reflections on the Christine Jorgensen Case". One, the Homosexual Magazine, March 1955: 27-8.
• Rosa Von Praunheim (dir & scr). Der Einstein des Sex - Leben und Werk des Dr. M. Hirschfeld (The Einstein of Sex: Life and Work of Dr. M. Hirschfeld). Scr: Chris Kraus, Valentin Passoni, Friedl von Wangenheim, with Tima die Goettliche as Dörchen. Germany/Netherland 100 mins 1999.  IMDB 
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 19-20, 292n13.
• Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts. Transvestismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Giessen, 2005: 96, 176-7, 181-3, 201-4, 217.
• Elena Mancini. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom. A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010: 69-70.
• Heika Bauer. The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture. Temple University Press, 2017: 86-7.
• Pamela L Caughie & Sabine Meyer.  Lili Elbe : Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition.  Bloomsbury Acdemic, 2020: 59, 80.
• Raimund Wolfert. Charlotte Charlaque: Transfrau, Laienschauspielerin, „Königin der Brooklyn Heights Promenade“. Hentrich & Hentrich, 2021: 37-9, 42-8, 52-3, 56-8, 59, 63-7, 72-3, 76-7.
• Leah Tigers. “On the Clinics and Bars of Weimar Berlin”.  Tricky Mother Nature.  Nd.  Online.
• Clara. "A Puzzle Piece for the Trans* History".  Lili-Elbe-Bibliothek. 25. April 2023. Online. 
• Oliver Noffke. “Was wurde aus Dora?“.  rbb24-de, 01.06.23.  Online
• Oliver Noffke. "Pioneer of trans* history Dora went to Bohemia". rbb24-de, 02.04.24.  Online.  

  Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (1919-1933)        EN.Wikipedia     DE.Wikipedia

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

• Alison Li. Wondrous Transformations:A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 2023.
  
  

There are four biographies of Magnus Hirschfeld (by Charlotte Wolff, Ralf Dose, Elena Mancini and Heike Bauer), an autobiography and three biographies of Havelock Ellis (by Phyllis Grosskurth, Chris Nottingham, Arthur Calder-Marshall, John Stewart). Why has there been no book length biography of Harry Benjamin previously?

Li did a BSc in Biochemistry at McGill University and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at University of Toronto supervised by historian Michael Bliss, with the thesis J.B. Collip and the Making of Medical Research in Canada, which included Collip’s work 1921-2 contributing to the refinement of insulin and thereby saving the lives of many diabetics. Li taught at Toronto’s York University and more recently has been an independent historian and writer. She specialises in the history of hormones, their discovery and applications. She published a book based on her thesis, the biography, J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada, 2003. She was also a co-editor of Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945, 2003, to which she contributed an essay on the hormonal product Premarin. In 2008 she was a co-editor of Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss: Figuring the Social, in which she contributed the essay “Wondrous Transformations: Endocrinology after Insulin”. This essay covers Harry Benjamin and his rejuvenation treatment of the novelist Gertrude Atherton, her 1922 novel based on the experience and the subsequent film. This last is redone in the 2023 book.

Li did research in quite a lot of academic archives, including the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Haeberle-Hirschfeld Archives at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. She read Benjamin’s diary, his correspondence and his unpublished book The Winter of Our Discontent, 1941. Hence she is able to relate details not found in other accounts: what happened to his brother and sister; how his wife Greta became involved in his clinic as secretary and as nurse; how the mothers of both Harry and Greta came to stay. She also tells anecdotes about Benjamin’s sex life:

“He continued to be attracted to actresses and chorus girls. For a time, he saw patients in Los Angeles and mixed with the rich and famous. Jean Harlow’s initials appear in his address book, and colleagues would recall that he later reminisced about ‘dating’ her.” (p135)

However, a few matters must be discussed. 

Incidentally, Charlotte, back in the US in the 1950s, corresponded with Benjamin using the name Charlotte Von Curtius. Neither Meyerowitz nor Li, despite their reading of Benjamin’s correspondence at the Kinsey Institute realize that this is the same person, nor even mention a Von Curtius.

Li next gives a very ordinary account of “Lili Elbe”. Li made a decision to not include any accounts of Benjamin’s associates – such as Leo Wollman – and their trans patients – so why does she include Elbe, who was Kurt Warnekros’ patient? She does briefly mention Pamela Caughie in an endnote, but does not seem to have read the books and the extensive website by Caughie, Sabine Meyer and their team, not even to note that Lili’s post transition name was Lili Elvenes. 

In New York in the 1960s and 1970s, if you were trans and had money or contacts or were lucky, you went to Dr Benjamin. For less money you could go to Dr Leo Wollman located close to Coney Island. And if Wollman was too expensive, there were Drs David Wesser and Benito Rish at the Professional Hospital in Yonkers. Benjamin and Wollman sent patients to Wesser and Rish for surgery, but Wesser and Rish are mentioned not at all by Li. 

Wollman is mentioned only once – in a list of the members of the Harry Benjamin Foundation. Li three times mentions the Harry Benjamin Foundation, but fails to mention its major accomplishment, the 1969 anthology book Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment edited by Richard Green and John Money.

On p116, Li writes “A few years later Benjamin wrote Hirschfeld in alarm that an unauthorized, abridged translation of the first volume of Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie had been published by Julian Press in 1932 with ‘a most atrocious translation, utterly impossible”. Why not name the book? By the date and publisher, she is referring to Sexual Pathology: A Study of Derangements of the Sexual Instinct, translated by Jerome Gibbs, Julian Press, 1932. However, most readers will assume the much better-known Sexual anomalies and perversions, a compilation from Sexualpathologie by Arthur Koestler, revised for the English version by Norman Haire, an associate of both Hirschfeld and Benjamin, which came out a few years later. The Koestler-Haire book actually is not mentioned at all.

Benjamin and Virginia Prince were associated across several decades, he prescribed hormones to her, and whenever Prince was in New York they would have a meal together. In Transvestia # 12, December 1961, p14. Prince wrote: “I was chauffeured over to Dr. Benjamin's office for a nice but too brief visit and dinner with him. Those of you who have never met Dr. Benjamin have missed a real treat. People of our persuasion have no better professional friend.” It was from Prince that Benjamin adopted the expression: “Gender is located above, and sex below the belt”.

Prior to 1962 Prince’s magazine Transvestia frequently featured reprints and new articles by Benjamin, she is mentioned several times in The Transsexual Phenomenon (unlike Louise Lawrence who is surprisingly not mentioned at all) and most significantly Prince had a significant effect on Benjamin’s scale in that in accordance with her views it erases gay and female transvestites and gynephilic transsexuals. 

Li mentions Prince once only (p148): “Benjamin also began to work with Virginia Prince, a chemist, transvestite, researcher”. Her footnote chp9n49 shows that her one and only source is Meyerowitz (again) p181-2. She does not note the mentions in The Transsexual Phenomenon, and ignores the biographies by Richard Docter and myself.

The ongoing interaction between Benjamin and Prince is only partially documented. I was hoping that Li’s reading of Benjamin’s diary and correspondence would have provided more detail.

She says that it was “the first major text” on the topic. “Major” is of course an equivocal term, but there had been three previous books specifically about transsexuality, the first two, as it happened, by persons themselves transsexual: Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, 1946, by Michael Dillon, and Over the Sex Border, 1963, by Georgina Turtle. The third was Eugene de Savitsch’s Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex, 1958 which discussed the transition of the Swiss trans woman Arlette Leber who had surgery in 1941-2 . None of these are mentioned by Benjamin, although the latter two are included without comment in Richard Green's bibliography at the end of the book. And none of them are mentioned or are found in Li’s bibliography.

Charles Ihlenfeld was Benjamin’s assistant from 1969 to 1976 and had been expected to take over the practice, but chose otherwise. Li tells this, but does not tell of Jeanne Hoff who did take over, and was herself in transition. 

Obviously the strength of the book is in the history of endocrinology, and the reading in various archives of Benjamin’s diary and his correspondence with patients and associates provide interesting anecdotes of them as people. It would be a better book if she had not mainly retold the stories that we know so well from Meyerowitz, and had told of some less-well-known patients instead. However it is a book that will be an essential reading for future biographers of Harry Benjamin.

Louise was the illegitimate daughter of Marianne Michel, a domestic servant in Vroncourt-la-Côte, Haute-Marne. Marianne was seduced and then abandoned by Laurent Demahis, the scion of the estate, who quickly left after Louise was born. Unusually, the Demahis grandparents embraced Louise Demahis (as she was known), permitting her the run of the estate, giving her a good education and freedom to pursue scientific enquiries. When the grandparents died in 1850, Laurent’s widow claimed the estate forcing Louise and Marianne, who had received a small bequest, to leave, and forbade Louise from presenting herself any more as Mademoiselle Demahis. Louise studied in Chaumont, the prefecture of Haute-Marne, where she qualified as an assistant teacher. 

In 1851, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, and President of France, did a coup against himself and became Emperor as Napoleon III. It was now required that teachers and other civil servants swear an oath of allegiance. As a sincere Republican, Louise would not do this, and she was not able to teach in the regular schools, but she opened free schools where she taught. In 1856 she and fellow-teacher Julie Longchamps moved to Paris, where they shared accommodation, and where Michel did find work as a teacher. She wrote poems, became a member of the Union of Poets, corresponded with the writer Victor Hugo. 

She was frugal with female dress. It was said that if she had two dresses, she would give the better to one with a greater need. She also kept male clothing, which she would wear to attend evening lectures and meetings. 

In 1870, goaded by Otto von Bismark of Prussia, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, quickly lost, abdicated and went into exile. The established politicians, not agreeing who should be the next king, established the Third Republic as a compromise. After a further defeat by the German army in March 1871, the government retreated to Tours. 

Soldiers of the National Guard, which had defended the now abandoned Paris, seized control of the city and established the Paris Commune. Its policies included the separation of church and state, self-policing, the remission of rent, the abolition of child labour, and the right of employees to take over an enterprise deserted by its owner. All Catholic churches and schools were closed. Michel became part of the National Guard. When the Paris Commune was declared she was elected head of the Montmartre Women's Vigilance Committee, and as such was responsible for the day-to-day welfare of two hundred children. She was part of a project to reform the city’s education system, ran a soup kitchen and attended to the wounded. She also scolded Karl Marx for his failure to join the Commune. In addition to this, Michel – in the male uniform of the National Guard - fought on the barricades with the 61st Battalion of Montmartre in the battles of Issy, Montmartre and Clamar. To the Franch press, she became La Vierge Rouge (The Red Virgin).

In late May, the “semaine sanglante”, the national French Army suppressed the Commune – it had lasted 73 days. The army killed an estimated 15,000, and arrested 43,000. Michel surrendered after her mother Marianne was arrested.

15,000 were tried in court, 13,500 of whom were found guilty, 95 were sentenced to death, 251 to forced labour, and 1,169 to deportation – mainly to Nouvelle-Calédonie (New Caledonia). Michel was tried in December, charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, being a pétroleuse and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. The judges assumed that Michel, as they assumed for all the female Communards, was a “shameless slattern”, and that Michel was sexually involved with Theophile Ferré, of the Commune executive council. Her denials only led to later accusations that she had “tastes against nature”, that she was lesbian.

After twenty months in prison, during which Ferré was executed, Michel was loaded onto the ship Virginie on 8 August 1873, to be deported to New Caledonia where she arrived four months later. Also on the ship was the anarchist Nathalie Lemel who instructed Michel in the theory of anarchism. The two worked together in New Caledonia, and were calumnied as lesbian. 

Marie Ferré, Theophile’s sister cared for Michel’s mother while Michel was in prison, and then in exile.

Michel in New Caledonia befriended the indigenous Kanaks, and learned their culture and language. She supported the 1878 Kanak revolt, and acted as a teacher for the children of the deported. 

In 1880, amnesty was granted to all surviving Communards, and those deported returned to France. Michel became a public speaker, and writer. 

Marie Ferré died two years after Michel’s return, and Michel organised her funeral

In 1883 Michel was one of the leaders of a demonstration of unemployed workers. She was sentenced to six years of solitary confinement for inciting the looting, but released after three. 

In 1888, while speaking in Le Havre, Michel was shot at twice: one bullet was lost in her hat, the other wounded her behind the ear. After medical attention, she refused to press charges. 

In 1890, after an attempt to commit her to a mental asylum she moved to London, where she ran the International Anarchist School for the children of political refugees.

From 1890 onwards, Charlotte Vauvelle became Michel's almost constant companion, accompanying her on her international travels. In 1895 Michel met Emma Goldman at an anarchist conference in London.

Michel was on a speaking tour in Marseille in January 1905 when she died of pneumonia.

In 1937 the Collège Louise-Michel was opened in the 10th arrondissement. On 1 May 1946 the Paris Metro Vallier station in Levallois-Perret was renamed Louise Michel station. In 2004 the Square Louise-Michel in Montmartre was renamed after her. Michel was one of 10 French women honoured during the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Paris, where a gold statue of her was raised along the Seine river.

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

The first biography of Louise Michel was by Karl von Levetzow, an associate of Magnus Hirschfeld, and as such concerned to show that famous persons could be gay.  His article was published in Jahrbuch fiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen, in the same year that she died.  Levetzow emphasized her non-conformity with the 19^th-century ideas of gender and found lesbianism even in her  facial features. 

"A more virile character than hers cannot be found even among the most masculine of men” (p324). 

 He also quotes Theophil Zolling, who interviewed Michel in 1880 and called her “ugly” and 

“the wide-slit mouth, whose thick, pale, cracked lips by no means invite a kiss, and hide the small, icy eyes lurking behind bushy brows. A moustache, which would arouse the envy of a grammar school pupil, is shaded under the strong and not ignobly cut nose” (p327-8)  

This reading is not supported by the photographs that we have. 

This reinforced an idea that had already been proposed by her political enemies intended as a calumny., although this apparently was not Levetzow’s intention.

A year later a different biography appeared written by fellow anarchist Ernest Girault.  To protect her from insinuations of “tastes against nature” he emphasised her love for Theophile Ferré.  Her energy, courage, and "disgust with life" all stemmed, in his opinion, from Ferré's rejection of her affections.

A similar opinion was found the article on Michel in the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Hirschfeld, in his Die Transvestiten, 1910 in his chapter on Women as Soldiers, discusses her only in the context of the Commune, where he states that women soldiers can be just as ‘inhuman’ as their male comrades, and quotes Levetzow.

In 1923 Emma Goldman visited Hirschfeld’s Institut fuer Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin and saw Michel’s photograph on a wall amidst other well-known lesbians. She objected to this arguing that Michel was a woman who had rejected the 19^th century roles for women, but that this did not make her a lesbian.  This reply was published in Jahrbuch fiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen.

Hirschfeld’s reply: 

“that even what appears to be the best circumstantial evidence can be based on error [...]. The various views of Levetzow and Mrs. Goldmann about Louise Michel, whose admirers and admirers are both to the same extent, is new evidence of this old experience. And yet there is also a bridge over the seemingly unbridgeable gap, namely where Ms. Goldmann speaks of Louise Michel in the following statements as a 'new type of femininity‘, a 'complicated nature‘. Individual psychology is not limited to a classification, no matter how sophisticated. Every scheme is shadowy.  The differentiation of human individualities is inexhaustible, unlimited.” (Hirschfeld 1923: 71 f).

Havelock Ellis in his Sexual Inversion, 1927 added a sentence on Michel to his third edition: “Great religious and moral leaders, like Madame Blavatsky and Louise Michel, have been either homosexual or bisexual or, at least, of pronounced masculine temperament” and a footnote referring his readers to Levetzow.

The major biography of Michel is by Edith Thomas, after she broke with the French Communist party.  She again continued the heterosexualisation by speculating a possible sexual relation with Victor Hugo also.  She portrayed Michel as an 

"unhappy woman who had lost the man she loved and admired” (p143-4)

Andrew Hussey has a paragraph on Louise Michel in his Paris: The Secret History, in which he makes a claim not found anywhere else, and without giving a source: 

“Michel was called the ‘Red Virgin’ because she refused to marry, but this did not stop her enjoying a long list of lovers, whom she took in the name of total freedom”.

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

Pétroleuse – a term of abuse aimed at female participants in the Commune, suggesting that they used petroleum to burn down buildings during the semaine sanglante (in later years lit bottles of petroleum were called Molotov cocktails). The EN.Wikipedia and FR.Wikipedia articles are strongly in disagreement. The latter says that recent research shows that actually there were no proven incidents of arson committed by women, and that no woman was afterwards convicted as an arsonist. The former lists some who were so convicted.

Caledonia is of course the Roman name for what we call Scotland. “New Caledonia” was named by British explorer James Cook during a quick visit in 1774. It became a French colony, but they kept the British name, merely revising it to Nouvelle-Calédonie. Not to be confused with Nova Scotia. To the indigenous Kanaks, it is Kanaky.

Republican parties across Europe are generally left-wing, anti-clerical, anti-monarchy, anti-aristocrats and anti-oligarchs. In the US of course it is the reverse. And the new French Party, LesRépublicains, founded by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2015, is more like the US party as it was pre-Trump.

---

So, was Louise Michel in any way trans? Remember that several French trans men such as Violette Morris and Madeleine Pelletier lived and dressed as male but never took a male name. Remember also the common practice of claiming that politicians etc are gender or sexually deviant. This has recently happened to Brigitte Macron and Michelle Obama. 

I see Louise Michel as gender fluid. She was not determined enough to be transgender – her passions lay within anarchism. But she was not uptight about being a lady or a woman either. When convenient she dressed as male – and it was no big deal at all. It is unfortunate that the debate about her private life centres on whether she had “tastes against nature” for which there is no definite evidence either way. It would be better to ask whether anarchists should be gender conformists? Are not gender roles part of the oppression that anarchy is fighting against? Louise is a model of non-conforming.

• Theophil Zolling. Reise um die Pariser Welt. Verlag von W Spemann, 1882: 52.
• Karl von Levetzow, "Louise Michel,"Jahrbuchfiir sexuelle Zwischenstufen 7, pt. 1 (1905): 307-70.
• Ernest Girault, La Bonne Louise. Bibliothèque des Auteurs modères, 1906.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Materia Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910: 532-3. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Transvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991: 404-5.
• Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 3^rd vol. 2, Sexual Inversion. Random House, 1927): 197.
• Emma Goldman, "Offener Brief an den Herausgeber der Jahrbücher uber Louise Michel,"Jahrbuchfur sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 23 (1923): 70-92.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. „Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers“. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 1923; 23: 70–72.
• Alistair Horne. The Fall of Paris: The Seige and the Commune 1870-71. Macmillan, 1965, 1989: 28, 57, 237-8, 270-1, 278, 298-9, 319, 357, 379, 408, 413, 423, 425 ,
• Edith Thomas, translated by Penelope Williams. Louise Michel. Black Rose Books, 1980 – French original 1971.
• Marie Marmo Mullaney. “Sexual Politics in the Career and Legend of Louise Michel”. Signs, 15, 2, 1990:300-22.
• Bonnie Haaland. Emma Goldman: Sexuality and the Impurity of the State. Black Rose Books, 1993: 149, 155, 156, 166-170.
• Nic Maclellan (ed). Louise Michel. Ocean Press, 2004.
• Andrew Hussey. Paris: The Secret History. Bloomsbury, 2006: .
• Sidonie Verhaeghe. « Should we still call Louise Michel the Red Virgin? ». Cahiers d’histoire: Revue d’histoire critique, 148, 2021: 19-32.

EN.Wikipedia                FR.Wikipedia

Phillips, who then had a different name, grew up in Pennsylvania, where he was raped by his father and others, and placed in foster homes from age 13.

After moving to California, she met John Phillips, and, she living as female, they were married in Nevada in 1970, where she became Mrs Phillips.

February 2-4, 1973, was the occasion of the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome sponsored by the Divisions of Urology and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. A highlight was Dr Georges Burou‘s presentation of his techniques; John Brown made a presentation, which was also well received, doctors at that time not being aware of the idiosyncrasies of his practices. Vern Bullough later commented: “the case of John Brown, whom Zelda Suplee, my wife Bonnie, and myself at least halfway encouraged to do transsexual surgery, a recommendation we quickly regretted”.

In October Brown’s work was mentioned sarcastically in Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

John Brown had set up business as a doctor-surgeon in San Francisco. His assistant was James Spence who had served time for fraud in San Quentin, and had no medical training. He was mainly responsible for the business aspects of the practice.

Word of mouth in San Francisco’s gay community told Julie about Dr Brown. She was considering breast implants as a Christmas present for her husband.

Julie Phillips approached Brown and Spence about breast implants, and they, assuring her that she would be a ‘perfect woman’, talked her into three operations: breast enlargement, castration and then vaginoplasty, which were done December 1973-January 1974. They charged her $5,000 (approximately $36,000 today). This was one of Brown’s first vaginoplasties; he was assisted by Spence. Brown at this point did not have enough surgical experience and he certainly did not have operating room privileges. Brown also used her once to assist in a nose-reconstruction operation on another patient.

The vaginoplasty led to pain and infection, and she sought help at Stanford Hospital. She was working as a waitress when she filed a civil suit in July 1977.

Brown’s California medical license was revoked in December 1977 on a recommendation from the Board of Medical Quality Assurance. He was accused of violating medical standards, employing patients as medical assistants, and performing sex-change operations ‘on-demand’ without psychological evaluations. He was also found guilty of gross negligence in the cases of Mrs Phillips and three others.

 Later Brown began practicing in Mexico.

In February 1979 Phillips’ case came to court. She was suing for $5 million in punitive damages and $2 million in general damages ($7 million then is about $30 million today). The jury was of eight men and four women. Phillips was represented by the noted lawyer, Melvin Belli, who specialized in medical malpractice cases. Brown had engaged noted young lawyer Duncan Barr.

Julie

Belli described his client as a “homosexual male” who had been in a happy union with John Phillips. However, Brown’s surgery led to her suffering “profound and permanent physical and psychological injuries and damages and irreparable injury to her relationship”. He claimed that tests had found that Phillips was “psychotic and feeble-minded and can’t truly give any consent”. Brown was said to have separated the castration and vaginoplasty by a few weeks, not for medical reasons, but to defraud insurance companies which would not pay for sex-change operations.

Defense attorney, Barr, replied that Phillips had wanted a sex-change operation for years and “got it because she wanted it”, and had cancelled corrective surgery at Stanford because of the lawsuit.

Phillips wept on the stand as she described her life after Brown’s surgery. Under cross-examination she testified that she was confused after the unsuccessful operation and was afraid of undergoing another one. “I’m not ready. My doctor says I’m not mentally ready. I’m scared of the table. If you had someone cut you up the way they experimented with me, you’d be afraid too.” She said that the operation had left her neither male nor female.

Brown testified, under sharp questioning by Belli, that he was inexperienced “in the development stages” when he operated on Phillips.

Spence told the jury that the case was a farce, in that he had set it up to expose John Brown. Brown and Spence had fallen out in 1973. Spence’s wife Janie testified that she had helped talk Phillips into filing the lawsuit.

Psychiatrist Kathleen Unger testified that the patient would be a mental cripple for the rest of her life.

After Unger’s testimony, the parties settled out-of-court for significantly less than $7 million. The trial had lasted 3½ days. The judge approved the settlement – although the amount of compensation was not revealed.

Belli said that it was “enough for psychiatric care help for the rest of Julie’s life and a new operation”

– which was later performed at Stanford Hospital. 

Barr said that the settlement was well below $1 million. He also said that his client was adamant that he had done nothing wrong.

After the trial Brown was arrested and jailed on a complaint by the state Department of Consumer Affairs on 12 counts of issuing prescriptions in Los Angeles without a license and three warrants for traffic citations. Bail was set at $25,000.

* Not Julie Phillips the actress active in the 1970s and 1980s, nor the writer who wrote a biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr.

• Herb Caen. “Plastic, Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery”. San Francisco Chronicle, 26 October 1973.
• Jack Schreibman. “Sex change ‘neuter‘ suing“. Associated Press, Feb 21, 1979.
• “$7 million sought in sex change trial”. San Francisco Examiner, Feb 21, 1979.
• “Sex change operation a failure”. Associated Press, Feb 21, 1979.
• “Woman claims sex-change operation left her neuter”. Associated Press, Feb 22, 1979.
• “Sex change suit: Belli calls client ‘boy’ and ‘freak’ ”. San Francisco Examiner, Feb 28, 1979.
• “Sex change Medic Slated to Testify in his defense”. Santa Cruz Sentinel, Feb 28, 1979
• “Doctor Defends Decision to Perfoem Sex Change”. Los Angeles Times, Mar 1, 1979.
• “Witness in sex change cas admits she lied”. Camarillo Star, Mar 1, 1979.
• “Sex-Change Doctor Admits His and Aide’s, Inability. Sacramento Bee, March 1, 1979
• “Transsexual Accepts Suit Settlement”. San Diego Union, March 2, 1979. Online.
• “Case Settled in Sex Change”. The Town Talk, Mar 3, 1979.

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

Melvin Belli’s clients included Mae West, Errol Flynn, Lenny Bruce, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Muhammad Ali, Jim Bakker, Sirhan Sirhan, Jack Ruby. He specialised in representing individuals in personal injury cases and in raising personal injury awards to then-unprecedented heights that earned him the title of “The King of Torts” by Life Magazine writer Robert Wallace in a 1954 profile. 

None of the newspaper accounts said so, but I assume that Belli was working on a no-win, no-fee basis.

Duncan Barr was the youngest person (32) ever to join the American Board of Trial Advocates. He became notorious in the 1980s when he defended a blood bank against hemophiliacs who had cought AIDS through blood transfusions.

Mansel Vardaman Boyle was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California. As a boy soprano, Boyle had been in demand for school entertainments. He played light juvenile parts with the Alcazar Theater Company,

Around 1896, the family moved to Butte, Montana when his father and brother found work there as miners. Mansel, then 19, worked as a clerk, and then as a stenographer and bookkeeper. Mansel was interested in theatre, especially music and singing, and was a member of the entertaining Overland Club, where his affinity for female clothing, a high singing voice and a natural proclivity as a performer were appreciated. An article in the local press in June 1902 commented: 

“Mr. Boyle impersonated a young danseuse, and his make-up, actions and singing barred to many the thought that he was not a woman”. 

The family moved back to California in 1903, this time to Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco. Mansel developed his female impersonation act, and was able to break into the Vaudeville circuit. He returned to Butte in April 1904 playing his solo act. He used his middle name as a stage name, and toured across the US, sometimes billed as the ‘celebrated French impersonator’. As was the custom at the time, Vardaman ended the act by removing his wig and thus revealing that was not the woman that many in the audience had taken him to be. In 1913-14 Vardaman made a world tour, that is Australia, South Africa and Britain. By 1916 he was billed as “Vardaman: The Gay Deceiver”, starred in a burlesque show with comics and female dancers where he was the only female impersonator. 

By 1920 Boyle was 43, and no longer able to pass as a young woman. For a while he was unemployed and lived with his sister in Alameda. His last performance was in 1925. In the late 1930s. Boyle was living with the gay silent-film star J. Warren Kerrigan.

He died in May 1945, age 68.

• “Appreciates the Wit”. The Butte Daily Post, June 6, 1902: 10.

• “The Hit of the Season: Entertainment given by the Overland Minstrels”. The Anaconda Standard, June 6, 1902:1.

• “How I Came to Enter Vaudeville” Daily Arkansas Gazette, Feb 23, 1909: 12.

• Trav S.D. “Vardaman: The Gay Deceiver. Travalance, January 17, 2014. Online

• “Vardaman: The Gay Deceiver”. BellingHistory, February 2023. Online.

• Tracy Thornton. “Butte men donned dresses and wowed crowds”. Montana Standard, Jun 28, 2024.

• Tracy Thornton. “Butte man in drag wowed the crowds”. The Billings Gazette (Montana), June 30, 2024.

Gay History Wiki    Find a Grave

Hermann was born in Vienna and raised as Hermine Gartner. The father was a government councillor, and the elder brother was Theodor Gartner who became a noted linguist and philologist specializing in the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) language.

Hermann studied painting under Josef Hoffmann and Joseph von Fuhrich. Using the excuse that male attire made for easier working conditions, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Antonius Hermann’.  Hermann succeeded in being admitted at the  Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Vienna Academy of Fine Arts) to study even though no women were then admitted.

As Hermine Gartner, Hermann was engaged to the painter Carl Hofman in 1871, but that did not work out. Gartner became known as a painter of religious motifs and of portraits, taught painting in Munich, and carried out restorations in Kremsmünster Abbey in Upper Austria.

In 1899 Hermann retired to the Italian Riviera, and bought a house in Sori, south of Genoa. Hermann now dressed as male consistently, and often wore a black moustache – although he was sometimes spotted without it, and once it came off while he was in church. He worked as a language teacher.

Hermann died age 59, possibly of cancer. He was outed on his death-bed, which created quite a stir and was reported in Italian and German-language newspapers. Theodor Gartner, summoned by telegraph, came from Innsbruck and registered the death of his sister Hermine Gartner.

• Magnus Hirschfeld: Die Transvestiten: eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb. Mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Material. 2. Auflage. Verlag Wahrheit Ferdinand Spohr, Leipzig 1925: 404–405.

• Hanna Hacker. Frauen und Freundinnen: Studien zur "weiblichen Homosexualität" am Beispiel Österreich 1870-1938. University of Virginia, 1987: 146.

Wien Geschichte Wiki         Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon        Wikipedia

Trans AutoBiography

• Lakshmi Ajoy. From 'Ka' To 'Ki'- Biography Of A Transgender Woman:: A 'Trans'formation Through Strength And Resilience. Kindle, 2024.

• James Bennett. Spilling the T: Gender Transition, Beyond the Physical. River Grove Books, 2024.

• Avi Ben-Zeev. Trans Bear Diaries: Calling My Deadname Home. Muswell Press, 2024.

• R Derek Black. The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism, Abrams Press. 2024. Written under her male name, but she has since clarified that she is a trans woman.

• Sophie Grace Chappel. Trans Figured: On Being a Transgender Person in a Cisgender World. Polity, 2024.

• Jennifer Edwards. Being Transgender in a Hateful Society. 2024.

• Jake & Hannah Graf. Becoming Us: The inspiring memoir of transgender joy, love and family. Coronet, 2023.

• Debbie Hayton. Transsexual Apostate: My Journey Back to Reality. Forum, 2024.

• Ash Jackson. Beyond Trans. Ingram Spark, 2024.

• Julia James. World's First Transgender Married Couple "Open". 2024.

• Jennifer Marie. Ask Me Anything: My Transparent Transition Story. Reflek Publishing.

• Robyn McCutcheon. Queer Diplomacy: A Transgender Journey in the Foreign Service.
  Westphalia Press, 2024.

• Scott Newgent. The Lesbian Devil to the Straight Man Saint: - A trip through trans Hell & back!#SCREAMLouder Publishing, 2024.

• Alex Rainbow. Trans Atlas. 2024.

• Geena Rocero. Horse Barbie, Dial Press 2023.

• Lucy Sante. I Heard Her Call My Name: a memoir of transition. Penguin Books, 2024.

• Micah Schwader. Stumbling Into Grace: The Adventures of a Transgender Shaman. Inspired Life Publications, 2024.

• Silvia Sicore. Mi mejor versión ...es femenina: autobiografía de mi transición. 2024.

• Aria Avery Sterling. My Trans Way Forward: Becoming Me. 2024.

• Marina Leonie Stiglmayr. Transzendente Schritte: Eine Lebensgeschichte zwischen den Welten. 2024

• CeCé Telfer. Make It Count: My Fight to Become the First Transgender Olympic Runner. Grand Central Publishing, 2024.

• Grayson Lee White. Dotson: My Journey Growing Up Transgender. West Margin Press, 2024.

Media

• Riki Wilchins. Bad Ink: How The New York Times Sold Out Transgender Teens. Riverdale Avenue Books, 2024.

Religious

• Royal Cravens. Yes Gawd!: How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States. Temple University Press, 2024.

• Jason Evert. Male, Female, Other?: A Christian Guide to Understanding Gender. 2024.

• Ashley Hardingham & David P Gushee. Discerning Inclusion: How an Evangelical Church Had the Conversation about LGBT+ Inclusion. Resource Publications, 2024.

• James Hosie. 50 Reasons Why Transgender People Should Be Embraced and Accepted in the Church. 2024.

• Cate Montana. Gender, Patriarchy & Sexual Mind Control: Breaking Free. Cate Montana, 2024.

• Megan Rohrer. Trans Thelogy Without Apology: Using art, narrative and historical-critical exegesis to celebrate transfiguration and trans aesthetic in the Bible. 2024.

• Sunayana Shivangi Pande. Eternal Mother, Sacred Gender: Yellamma's Empowerment of the Transgender Soul. 2024.

• David Franklin Sparks. Queering Shantideva's the Way of the Bodhisattva: A Buddhist Classic in Contemporary Queer Vernacular. Dfrae Media Publishing, 2024.

• Ursula Wollasch. trans und katholisch: Für eine Kirche, in der trans Menschen dazugehören. Patmos-Verlag, 2024.

Legal & Activism

• Judith Butler. Who's Afraid of Gender? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.

• Laurel Westbrook. Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism. University of California Press, 2021.

• $£¥ € Flora Renz. Gender Recognition and the Law: Troubling Transgender Peoples' Engagement with Legal Regulation. Routledge, 2024.

Crime & Imprisonment

• Shelley Clevenger, Shamika Kelley & Kathleen Ratajczak (eds). Queer Victimology: Understanding the Victim Experience. Routledge, 2023.

• Matthew Maycock, Saoirse O’Shea & Valerie Jenness (eds). Transgender People Involved with Carceral Systems: International Perspectives. Routledge, 2024.

Health, Medical and Social Work

• Diane Ehrensaft & Michelle Jurkiewicz. Gender Explained: A New Understanding of Identity in a Gender Creative World. The Experiment, 2024.

• $£¥ € Christy Newman et al (eds). Social Perspectives on Trans Health. Routledge, 2024.

• $£¥ € Michael Toze, Paul Willis & Trish Hafford-Letchfield (eds). Trans and Gender Diverse Ageing in Care Contexts: Research into Practice. Policy Press, 2024.

Education

• $£¥ € Jesus Cisneros, TJ Jourian, Ryan A Miller & Antonio Duran (eds). Queerness as Doing in Higher Education: Narrating the Insider/Outsider Paradox as LGBTQ+ Scholars and Practitioners. Routledge, 2024.

• Becki Cohn-Vargas & Debbie Zacarian. Identity Safe Spaces at Home and School: Partnering to Overcome Inequity. Teachers College Press, 2024.

• $£¥ € Antonio Duran, Ryan A Miller, TJ Jourian & Jesus Cisneros (eds). Queerness as Being in Higher Education: Narrating the Insider/Outsider Paradox as LGBTQ+ Scholars and Practitioners. Routledge, 2024.

• $£¥ € Kia Darling-Hammond & Bre Rvans-Santiago (eds). T Is for Thriving: Blueprints for Affirming Transand Gender Creative Lives and Learning in Schools. Myers Education Press, 2024.

• $£¥ € Dennis A Francis. Queer Activism in South African Education: Disrupting Cis(hetero)normativity in Schools. Routledge, 2024

• Alex Myers. Supporting Transgender Students, Second Edition: Understanding Gender Identity and Reshaping School Culture. University of New Orleans Press, 2024.

• $£¥ € Bishop Owis. Towards a Queer and Trans Ethic of Care in Education: Beyond the Limitations of White, Cisheteropatriarchal, Colonial Care. Routledge, 2024.

• Lj Slovin. Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity. New York University Press, 2024.

• Perry Zurn. How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University. Duke University Press, 2025.

Arts & Photography

• Luciana Ferrara. I femminielli. Nelle fotografie di Luciano Ferrara. Nuova ediz. (Quaderni di fotografia). Nomos Edizioni, 2024.

• Flora Dunster & Theo Gordon. Photography – A Queer History. Ilex Press, 2024.

Music

• Lisa Barg. Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration. Wesleyan University Press, 2023.

• Bettina Papenburg & Kathrin Dreckmann (eds). Queer Pop: Aesthetic Interventions in Contemporary Culture. De Gruyter, 2024.

• Andrew Sutherland. Queer Opera. Lexington Books, 2023.

Drag

• Micheal Kean. Biography of RuPaul: The Unstoppable Rise of a Drag Icon and Cultural Trailblazer. 2024.

Theatre & Cinema & Television

• $£¥ € Traci B Abbott. History of Trans Representation in American Television and Film Genres. Springer, 2022.

• Tolly Bridges. Begin Transmission: The Trans allegories of The Matrix. Bearmanor, 2023.

• Willow Maclay & Catelyn Maclay. Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema Repeater, 2024.

• Patrice Oppliger. Transmasculinity on Television. Routledge, 2024.

• $£¥ € Emily A Rollie. Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities, Routledge, 2024.

Sports

• Abby Barras. Transgender and Non-Binary People in Everyday Sport: A Trans Feminist Approach to Improving Inclusion. Routledge, 2024.

• Michael Carter. Transgender Athletes: Fair Play or Unfair Advantage? Montecito Hot Springs, 2024.

• Ilse Hartmann-Tews. Sport, Identity and Inclusion in Europe: The Experiences of LGBTQ People in Sport. Routledge, 2024.

• Williams Hemby. The Story of Caitlin Clatk: The Inside Story Of How She Was Accused Of Being Transgender And What Happened Aftermath. 2024.

• Helen E Parker, Beth Hands & Elizabeth Rose. Women's Sport and Transgender Inclusion: The Counter Biological Argument. Common Ground Research, 2024.

• Valentina Petrillo. Più veloce del tempo. Il viaggio della prima atleta transgender verso la felicità. Capovolte, 2024.

• Paul Refuge. Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Paris 2024 Olympics: The Balance between Inclusivity and Competitive Fairness in Sports. 2024.

• Michael Waters. The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports. ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.

Guidebooks

• Evelyn Beacham. Embracing Authenticity: Building Meaningful Relationships with Trans Women. 2024.

• Layla Bennett. Empower Your Journey: Navigating Identity for Queer and Transgender Lives. 2024.

• Elena Bravo. CÓMO MANEJAR LA DISFORIA DE GÉNERO. 2024.

• Jimmy Fajardo. Ethics and Gender Diversity: A Comprehensive Approach. 2024.

• Rachael Fickarz. Transgender Woman: A journey of identity. 2024.

• A C Fowlkes. Transgender Inclusion: All the Things You Want to Ask Your Transgender Coworker but Shouldn't. Wiley, 2024.

• Echo Heath. Trans Women Transition Guide: A Comprehensive Guide For Trans Women. 2024.

• Robin A Hudson. Gender: A Complete Barfing of Facts For Parents and Those Questioning. 2024.

• Dannisha Jenkins. Emotional Self Care For Black Trans Women: Liberating Your Mind, Body and Spirit from Shame, Judgment and Microaggressions. 2014.

• Kenny Ethan Jones. Dear Cis(gender) People: A Guide to Allyship and Empathy. DK, 2024.

• Skylar Thorne Knight. Already Trans: What Next? 2024.

• Grace Felicia Lawrence. Stayin Alive Vol 2, A Transgender Safety Guidebook. Parker Publishers, 2024.

• Nillin Lore. How Do I Sexy?: A Guide for Trans and Nonbinary Queers. Thornapple Press, 2024.

• Alice Palmer. Resilient Paths: Skills for Embracing Queer and Transgender Identity. 2024.

• Jamie Raines. The T in Lgbt: Everything You Need to Know About Being Trans. Sourcebooks, Inc, 2024.

• Frances Reed. Healthy Chest Binding for Trans and Non-Binary People: A Practical Guide. Jessica Kingsley, 2024.

• Tim Schneider. Drogenkonsum und Queer-Sein aus Sicht des Hilfesystems: Eine empirische Analyse. Tectum Verlag, 2024.

• Mrs T. How To Be A Woman: A Compassionate Transgender Guide. 2024.

• Erica Vogel. Advice From Your Trans Aunty. Publish Your Purpose, 2024.

• Philip Spencer Williams. True Story of Becoming Me: Navigating Your Personal Transgender Journey with Actual Steps and Personal Insights: Guiding You with Care, Support, and Real-Life Experience Every Step of the Way. 2024.

Trans Children & Youth

• Isabelle E Camille. Sole's Mom: A Transgender Journey of Love, Loss, and Letting Go. Platypus Publishing, 2024.

• Michael Devitt & Angie Devitt. Finding Eve: Raising a transgender teen in Idaho. Lulu, 2024.

• Alexandros M Emery. Unlocking Your Child's Gender Potential: A Comprehensive Guide: Empower Your Kids to Embrace Their True Gender Identity. 2024.

• Roxy E Ford. Empower Your Child: A Comprehensive Gender Identity Handbook.: Raising Confident Kids: Empowering Parents with Gender Identity Tips and Strategies. 2024.

• Kurtis D Galindo. Empowering Your Child's Gender Identity: Actionable Tips: Raising Confident Kids: Practical Strategies for Supporting Their Authentic Gender Expression. 2023.

• Ben Greene. My Child Is Trans, Now What?: A Joy-Centered Approach to Support. Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.

• Benjamin Hanckel. LGBT+ Youth and Emerging Technologies in Southeast Asia. Springer, 2024.

• Cristina Olivetti. About Bliss: Fighting for My Trans Son's Life, Joy, and Fertility. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024.

• Greg M Nolan. How To Understand The Transgender Child: History of the Trans Girl and Her Father on Their Way to Acceptance and Love. 2024.

• Holly G Roche. Easy Tips to Help Kids Express their Gender Freely: Empowering Your Child to Embrace Their Gender Identity: Essential Strategies for Parenting with Acceptance and Understanding. 2024.

• Faraz N Mellor. Gender Identity Guide for Empowering Kids.: Empower Your Children: A Comprehensive Guide for Parents on Understanding and Supporting Gender Identity. 2024.

• Rimsha M Potter. Effortless Gender Expression Tips for Children: Simple and Effective Ways to Help Kids Express Their Unique Gender Identity with Ease. 2024.

• Roberta Rosin & Valentina Cincotto. Noi genitori di ragazzi transgender. Quello che non sapete e forse non volete sapere. Il Poligrafo, 2024.

• Sam Stiegler. Going Along with Trans, Queer, and Non-Binary Youth. State University of New York Press, 2024.

• Jack Turban. Free to Be: Understanding Kids & Gender Identity. Atria Books, 2024.

Couples & Family

• Janna Barkin. A Grand Love: Stories for Grandparents of Transgender Grandchildren. Jessica Kingsley, 2024.

• Victoria Defraigne. Les transidentités expliquées à mes parents (et à tous les autres). Maedaga, 2024.

• Maureen Rise Muldoon. Trans-Parent Love.2024.

HBS & Autogynephilia

• Debbie Hayton. Transsexual Apostate: My Journey Back to Reality. SWift Press, 2024.

• Phil Illy. Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex. Houndstooth Press, 2023.

Intersex

• Nuria Grgori Flor. Intersexualidades: Emergencias y debates en torno a personas con características sexuales diversas. Los Libros de la Catarata, 2024.

• Magnus Hirschfeld translated by Carl Hermesson. Sex Changes (Errors in Gender Determination): Six Cases from Forensic Practice. 2024.

Cis-Heterosexuality

• Rebecca L Davis & Michele Mitchell (eds). Heterosexual Histories. New York University Press, 2021.

There are a lot of self-published guide books this year.  This is of course not new.   The classic guide books by Virginia Prince, Yvonne Sinclaire and Michael Salem were in effect self-published in that the stated publisher was an organization under their own control.  It is good that Amazon and Lulu enable any of us to self-publish, to not be barred by publisher gate-keepers.  However with so many guidebooks how does someone starting transition decide which one to read?

A reminder of my list of guidebooks 1957-2017: 

Advice Manuals I: 1957-1979 
Advice Manuals II: 1980-2000
Advice Manuals III: 2001-2017

We are warned about AI generated books.   Amazon does not identify them.

I found a whole bunch that appear to be AI generated.  Some examples purporting to be trans biographies: 

•Khadija Gonzalez. Desislava Petrova: Pushing LGBTQ Change in Bulgaria - Unauthorized. Preteen Chaos United, 2025. 

•Hana Ramirez. Emily McTavish: Fighting for Trans Equality in Academia - Unauthorized. Dork Dictionaries, 2025. 

•Ahmed Raj. Christine Burns: The UK's Trans Rights Pioneer. Fat Chance Fanny, 2025. 

•Khadija Bello. Luca Leggieri Exposed: The Story Behind Toronto's Trans Wellness Movement. Wookers So Wonky, 2025.

•Kofi Kim. Jordan Li: From Margins to Mainstream in Trans Rights. Babycakes Pancakes, 2025.

•Kwame Rodriguez. Julien Picciotto: Toronto's Trans Organizer Defying the Odds - Unauthorized. Total Bellbottom Books, 2025.

•Ming Mustafa. Alina Kosta: The Legal Advocate for Trans People of Color - Unauthorized. Press for Play Books, 2025.

And loads, loads more.   They are expensive, US$119 and up, some but not all have ‘unauthorized’ as a suffix to the title, and they often have funny-name publishers.

Transphobic books are also proliferating.   I deliberately put them last.   I think in most cases they are listed as a warning, so that you do not buy them by mistake.  It is often said that one should read one’s enemies – a sentiment with which I agree.  However there is no need to drown in transphobia.  There is enough of it in the New York Times and the Daily Mail, enough to know which untruths, non-sequiturs, bad research and fanatical hatreds are repeated again and again.

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

Reminder:  I have been doing these year-end book lists since 2009.

Original version May 2013

Galiaci grew up São Paulo state, in the village of Bocaina which at that time had only 10 streets. Father was a cattle drover. At age seven Galiaci attempted suicide after considering that he might be a ‘viado’ (similar to ‘queer’). The school mates and others did treat Galiaci as such, who was afraid that the father would find out. When Galiaci was 14, he did so, threatened his son with a machete, and then threw both mother and child out of the house. Young Galiaci was in the city of São Paulo the next day.

Jacqueline & Antonio

She was arrested several other times. After the military coup in 1964, she was raped by four agents from the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS), the Brazilian secret police. She tried filing a habeas corpus petition to be allowed to walk the streets in women's clothing. Journalist José Magalhães published an article in the magazine Fatos e Fotos claiming that Jacqueline had had a surgical sex change. This news was a scandal, but it was a lie. She hadn't had it yet. Yet.

Jacqueline was registered with the Order of Musicians as an actress and singer. Through the 1960s she performed in all the concert halls of São Paulo, and many others across Brazil. She was written about in the press. Antonio often travelled across Brazil with her.

Finally in 1969 she went to Casablanca, to Dr Burou for completion surgery. She found the experience very painful, but one thing was certain in her mind: it was either that or die. Thus she was the first known Brazilian to have transgender surgery. This was two years before the first surgery in Brazil itself, that on Waldirene Nogueir by Dr Roberto Farina.

After a trip to Paris, Jacqueline returned to São Paulo in December just after the death of Artur da Costa e Silva (Brazil's seventh president and the second of the military regime), and the airport was swarming with military. Jacqueline was recognised, they told her she couldn't be dressed as a woman, and she was arrested. A female police officer took her into a room and checked inside her panties. The officer then reported that Jacqueline was indeed a woman. For a while there was confusion, but then Jacqueline was released.

On television, gay fashion designer Clodovil Hernades, known for his inappropriate comments about other people, said on the Flávio Cavalcanti show that Galiaci was neither a man nor a woman. She demanded a public retraction. She had a good lawyer, Giulio Bartolucci, and through him was able to gain the addition of 'Jacqueline' in the margin of her birth registration. The Magistrate authorized both this and the registration of her female sex.

Jacqueline’s love with Antonio lasted 32 years. She discontinued her stage career, and became one of the most respected breeders of Chihuahua dogs in São Paulo. “I have puppies in Germany, Italy, Bolivia, the United States, Portugal, in the hands of the consul of the USSR, in the family of General Couto e Silva, Nelson Gonçalves, Biro-Biro, etc,” she was quoted.

She died in 1992, age 58, of a heart attack, just after being interviewed by the Brasilian edition of Marie Claire magazine. She had exclusively granted Marie Claire two testimonials and an unpublished memoir.

Jacqueline's entry was deleted from the PT.Wikipedia in 2008, for no good reason.

• Adriano Fernandes Ferreira. Transexual como sujeito passivo de crime contra a liberdade: sexual: estupro ou atentado violento ao pudor. http://www.diritto.it/archivio/1/20258.pdf, 10.

• “Transexuais estranhos no próprio corpo”. Marie Claire, 1993.Copy Online.

• Neto Lucon & Astrid Beatriz Bodstein. “Conheça a Emocionante História de Jacqueline Galiaci, a 1ª brasileira transexual a passar pela redesignação genital” Identidade Mandacaru, 9 de marco de 2017. Online

• “Transcestrality, Travestiland, Traviarchy: the stage and gender dissidences in Brazil”. www.scielo.br, 2024. Online.

PT.Wikipedia(deletion)

Original version August 2010

Čháŋ Óhaŋ (c1840-1877) a Lakota Sioux, was given his father’s name of Tȟašúŋke Witkó on reaching maturity. He became a resistance fighter and war chief defending his people’s land against the invading Euro-Americans. He was one of the commanders at the victory of the Little Bighorn in 1876. He is known to the invaders as Chief Crazy Horse.

One of his grandchildren was Jacob Goodshot/Big Elk who was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. He served as a military policeman at the National Airport in Washington and the Port of Embarkation in Boston. He married Maude Dowd of the Passamaquoddy/Peskotomuhkati nation in Maine, and they had one child who was born in 1937. Jacob died when the child was 13, and Maud and her child moved to Miami, where the young Goodshot’s ability as a comic strip artist was recognized and the Miami News ran the strip.

By 1954 Maud’s child was living as female, and had taken the name Jela St John Murphy. By 1956 they were living in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, near a naval construction station. Jela met a Navy Seabee from Michigan by the name of Cox. They fell in love. Cox soon realized that Jela was pre-op, but still wanted to marry her – which they did September 1, with the bride’s mother as a witness. The Navy recognised Jela as Mrs Cox and paid her a dependent wife’s allowance. All was going well.

However, in 1958, Maud declared that she was ‘fed-up’ with Rhode Island and wanted to live in the Mid-West. She insisted that Jela go with her. Which left Cox alone without his wife. So he deserted, and went to find her – which he did in Denver, Colorado. The Navy called in the FBI to find Cox, and their investigation discovered that Jela was not legally female. She was arrested in Denver. After a secret indictment by a Federal Grand Jury, Cox was arrested at his home in rural Michigan. Mr and Mrs Cox were both charged with conspiracy to defraud the Government over the wife’s allowance, a total of $548.40. Jela was charged under her male name. When released on bail, Jela told reporters that she had half-completed an autobiography. She also said:

Jela, 1958, after cutting her hair

“I’ve been posing as a woman nearly four years. Before that, my life was miserable. Everybody made fun of me. Then when I changed over, nobody said anything. They accepted me as a woman”.

Cox was given a suspended two-year prison term, four years of probation and was ordered to repay the $548.40. Jela was given two years’ probation and ordered that she ‘undergo psychiatric treatment to bring out his masculine qualities’. She expressed a desire for genital surgery, but this was ignored. They were also ordered to separate.

What happened afterwards is not documented, apart from a few snapshots.

Maud and Jela moved to the San Francisco Bay area. Jela presumably completed transition. She married and changed her name with the US Social Security system in December 1962 to Jela Hicks.

In February 1967, Jela was arrested for drunken driving in Mill Valley, California and fined $100. Her past apparently was not discovered.

Maud Goodshot, described in her obituary as ‘beloved mother of Jela Goodshot-Hicks” died in San Francisco, June 1976.

In December 1980, the Hicks were injured but survived when their car stalled on a rail line and was hit by a six-engine freight train.

Jela died April 1989, age 52.

Thank you Bianca Zell for the research.

• “Chief Jacob Goodshot”. The Boston Globe, September 10, 1950: 18. Obituary.
• “Indian Youth Will Draw Comic Strip for Roundup”. The Miami News, Feb 9, 1951:31.
• “Arrests disclose Navy fraud case: He ‘wed’ female impersonator”. The Saginaw News, Oct 23, 1958: 12.
• “Impersonator Awaits Sentence; His life used to be ‘miserable’ ”. The Saginaw News, Oct 27, 1958.
• Barrie Harding. “John Got Married – to a Sailor”. The Sunday Pictorial, November 2, 1958: 19.
• Bill Jones. “Impersonator to take Psychiatric Treatment”. Denver Rocky Mountain News. Nov 22, 1958.
• “Judge Blasts Men’s Hoax of Marriage”. Spokane Spokesman Review, Dec 9, 1958.
• “Male ‘Bride’; Hubby Placed on 2-Year Probation”. Jet, 25 Dec 1958: 47.
• “Drunken Driver is fined”. San Rafael Daily Independent Journal, April 15, 1967: 30.
• “Goodshot, Maud Esther”. The San Francisco Examiner, June 15, 1976:32. Obituary.
• “Woman in good condition after car rammed by train”. Reno-Gazette-Journal, Dec 15, 1980: 3.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 87.

Some accounts say that Jela was born and raised in Boston; others say a reservation in South Dakota.

The US average male wage in 1958 was just under $100 a week. So the secret indictment by a Federal Grand Jury was for only a few weeks wage.

What happened to Jela’s autobiography?

Forteans

Charles Fort (1874-1932) was a writer and researcher who specialized in anomalous phenomena, such as fish falling from the sky, unknown animal species, spontaneous human combustion, levitation and what later became called UFOs. He wrote four books which challenged various scientific consensuses: The Book of the Damned, 1919, New Lands, 1923, Lo!, 1931 and Wild Talents, 1932.

Thayer

The Fortean Society was initiated at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City on January 26, 1931, organized by Tiffany Thayer and attended by some of Fort's friends, including such significant writers as Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, John Cooper Powys. There were no further meetings. Five years after Fort’s death, Tiffany Thayer restarted and took over the running of the Fortean Society, and continued to do so until his death in 1959. The first six issues of the Society’s newsletter Doubt were each edited by different members, but thereafter all by Thayer.

Benjamin’s involvement

Harry Benjamin seems to have become associated with the Fortean Society by the early 1940s. How this happened is undocumented. Benjamin knew the German-American George Sylvester Viereck who had met Benjamin as an advocate of Eugene Steinach and rejuvenation in the 1920s, and worked with Benjamin to organize Magnus Hirschfeld’s US visit in 1930. Viereck specifically admired Germanic Jewish scientists such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin, but had championed Germany in the 1914-18 war and through the 1930s spoke up for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. It was Viereck who first referred to Hirschfeld as ‘The Einstein of Sex”. Blu Buhs suggests that Viereck introduced Thayer to Benjamin. This must have happened prior to 1942 when Viereck was convicted of failing to register with the Department of State as a Nazi agent and sentenced to 2 to 6 years in prison.

However Thayer and Benjamin seem to have been associated a few years earlier. Theodore Dreiser had suggested in 1931 that the English sexologist Havelock Ellis be a member of the Fortean Society. Just after Thayer restarted the Fortean Society in 1937, Benjamin visited Ellis, and suggested that he and Thayer correspond. Ellis died two years later.

Despite these connections, Benjamin never wrote anything about Forteanism. Blu Buhs wrote: “It is possible that Benjamin had some sympathy for Fort, both standing against orthodoxy of one sort or another. But it is just as possible that Benjamin became a member of the Society as a sign of his friendship with Thayer.”

In 1944 Doubt 12 contained:

SEX IN UNIFORM

That section of the book, Sex in Wartime, which was authored by MFS Harry Benjamin, M.D., has been extracted, amplified, and put up by itself in wraps. The Sex Problem in the Armed Forces, is the title, reprinted from The Urologic and Cutaneous Review. From the Society—50c.

(MFS=Member of Fortean Society)

In 1950, Benjamin was present at a Fortean Society dinner arranged to entice peace activist Garry Davis to join.

In 1953 after Christine Jorgensen returned to the US and was contacted by Dr Benjamin by mail, they then met in person at a dinner party at the home of Tiffany Thayer.

Trans persons known to be involved with the Forteans

Alexander Woollcott, known for his transvesting at parties and on stage, was a founding member while Fort was still alive. He missed the inaugural meeting of the Fortean Society as he was travelling in Asia at the time, but he wrote it up for McCall’s magazine as of he had been present.

Donald Wollheim, who in 1964 wrote the transvestite classic A Year Among the Girls, had 22 years earlier written a science fiction story gently mocking Fort’s cosmology.

Caitlin Kiernan, novelist, was born 5 years after Thayer’s death and thus never a member of the Fortean Society, but she is strongly influenced by both Fort and HP Lovecraft.

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

• Alexander Woollcott. “Fair, Fat and Fortean”. McCall’s. June 1931, 8, 59. Reprint.

• Harry Benjamin. The Sex Problem and the Armed Forces. 1944

• Christine Jorgensen. Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography. Paul S Eriksson, Inc, 1967:191. Bantam paperback: p173. Reprinted by Cleis, 2000: p180.

• Joshua Blu Buhs. “Harry Benjamin as a Fortean”. From an Oblique Angle, 9/12/2014. Online.

• Joshua Blu Buhs. “Francoise Delisle (and Havelock Ellis) as Forteans”. From an Oblique Angle, 12/14/2015. Online.

• Alison Li. Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. The University of North Caroline Press, 2023: 156.

• Joshua Blu Buhs. Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and his Followers. The University of Chicago Press, 2024. (Alexander Woollcott p31, 38-40, 50, 55, 57-8,77; Donald Wollheim on p116; Caitlin Kiernan p288-292, the book’s coda; No mention of Benjamin despite Blu Buhs’ web page on Benjamin.)

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

While both Jorgensen and Li mention the Thayer-Benjamin-Jorgensen meeting, neither uses the word ‘Fortean’. Jorgensen wrote: “a meeting with Dr. Benjamin, at the home of his good friend, the author, Tiffany Thayer”. Li wrote: “Mutual friends arranged for Benjamin and Jorgensen to meet for the first time at a dinner party at the home of the actor and author Tiffany Thayer and his wife, Kathleen”. 

Thayer’s acting career was limited to a secondary role in The Devil on Horseback (1936). 

Richard Docter’s biography of Jorgensen does not even mention either Thayer or the first Benjamin-Jorgensen meeting.

Part I: beginnings 
Part II: business woman 
Part III: bibliography and comments

Clair(e) Elgin was this woman’s real name, however Joanne Meyerowitz calls her Caren Ecker; Annette Timm calls her Carla Erskine (the convention of pseudonyms with the same initials); and Connie Christine Wheeler & Leah Cahan Schaefer called her at first Janet, but in their revision for Randi Ettner’s Confessions of a Gender Defender, they call her Claire; Benjamin, at her request, does not give her any name, and some refer to her in his book as the ‘tattoo woman’; Laub uses her real name, although he spells Clair without an ‘e’. When in Mexico, Claire used the name Marie Ciel Campbell. Like some other trans persons, Claire’s pre-transition and post-transition names are almost identical.

Original version: Archive.

Part I: beginnings

Clair Elgin, a seventh generation American Moslem, was born in Casper, Wyoming. By her own account she left home in 1923. Clair’s mother died in 1927, and the father in 1936.

The 1940 US census records Clair Elgin still living in Wyoming, with a wife Ruth (1899-1949) and a 15-year-old son. However on registering for the draft in October that year, Clair gave a San Francisco address. Clair apparently was a radar technician during the Second World War, and later she said that she was serving on a submarine when it was attacked by friendly fire. This so unnerved Clair that it led to a medical discharge. Either while in the navy, or subsequently working in a carnival, Clair became heavily tattooed on the body, but not on the face.

Clair’s (first) wife Ruth died in early 1949.

Clair first lived as a woman in Mexico City using the name Marie Ciel Campbell, until one night a drunk touched her in just the wrong place. She then moved to the San Francisco area. She reverted to Claire, now with an ‘e’ at the end. As part of her transition, she volunteered to give a talk to the Mattachine Society on “What is Transvestism?”

At the age of 48 in August 1953, Claire, then working as female nurse in Palo Alto, using a local anesthetic, succeeded in removing her own testicles – an operation that no doctor would consent to do. However she was unable to staunch the bleeding, and took a taxi to the hospital, where she was treated for shock and loss of blood. A few of the local papers carried the story, giving Claire’s first and last names. The journalist for the San Francisco Examiner commented that she declined to give a male forename.

Herb Caen in The San Francisco Examiner

Dr Karl Bowman, at San Francisco’s Langley Porter Clinic, took over the case and recommended further surgery to remove the penis - this was done 30 December 1953 at the University of California in San Francisco by Dr Frank Hinman, chief of urology services at San Francisco General Hospital – apparently this was the only such operation that Hinman ever did. A few newspapers heard rumors of the operation, but the hospital refused details, and gave out that her initials were L.C. One doctor was quoted as saying “A much truer case than Christine’s”. While recovering she gave offprints to the medical staff of Harry Benjamin’s "Transsexualism and transvestism as psychosomatic and somatopsychic syndromes". A diagnosis of ‘hermaphroditism’ had been used on the hospital entrance form.

Annette, Louise, Janet, Claire

Over three years, she and Benjamin exchanged almost 100 letters. She told Benjamin that she had a genital anomaly (which Benjamin diagnosed as hypospadias), and had been raised as a girl for some years before a doctor explained to the parents that she was a boy. She had left home in 1923, and worked as a sailor for two years. She worked with a circus for a while, and then lived in Mexico City as female. Only after that did Clair marry Ruth - in Milwaukee, and they had a son. Clair divorced Ruth and moved to California, and served in the US Navy 1941-3 until discharged because of morphine addiction.

Claire pressed Benjamin to describe her as ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’, as several trans women at the time such as Betty Cowell and Georgina Turtle were doing. Benjamin declined as that was not actually the case. Claire wanted this as a term to give to her son who had not accepted her transition. Claire argued

 “I realize my own condition perfectly but to quite some few people who have to know of this change, the idea of hermaphroditeism [sic] is easier to explain and understand than is transvestism”. 

The son was not heard of again afterwards.

Claire and Christine Jorgensen did meet once, around this time. Claire did not want to go public as Christine Jorgensen had, in that she had no intention of being a performer. Her preference was to continue as a nurse. However she lost her nursing job, and she suspected that rumors had been passed to her employer.

In 1954 Frederick G Worden, psychoanalyst, and James T Marsh, clinical psychologist, both at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical Center, interviewed and tested five “physically normal men” (that is trans women): three of whom had already had transgender surgery, Claire, Annette, and Janet, and two hoping for it, Dixie Maclane and Carla Sawyer. They administered psychological tests, but did not actually listen to the five trans women as persons. Worden and Marsh published their paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April 1955. Their subjects, they wrote, had “an extremely shallow, immature, and grossly distorted concept of what a woman is like socially, sexually, anatomically, and emotionally”. They depicted them as attention-seeking, and even held their co-operation with the study against them as a “need for recognition”. Worden and Marsh were irritated by the two subjects who wanted surgery, and criticized their refusal to acknowledge “the possibility that the wish for surgery might be symptomatic of a disorder within themselves”. They, of course, did not provide the desired recommendations for surgery. Harry Benjamin immediately wrote to the journal to object that Worden and Marsh had “badly misunderstood or misinterpreted” his work. Four of the five interviewees wrote to Benjamin expressing outrage.

Bowman wrote up his 1953 experience with Elgin as Case 4 in his 1956 paper:

“CASE 4-In one case penotomy was performed. A man of 43, twice married, was referred because of a request for penotomy; a few months previously he had anesthetized and castrated himself. Although tall and ungainly, he worked as a female practical nurse; he stated that he felt his penis to be inconvenient, with his female dress, and most distasteful. He had been impotent in both marriages and spoke of homosexual wishes. He threatened further self-mutilation if penotomy was refused. Because the patient had no testicles, was wholly impotent and did not ask for a plastic vagina it was decided reluctantly to accept the patient’s legal right to request amputation of the penis. It was feared that the patient might again try self-emasculation and harm himself more seriously. Two years after penotomy the patient seemed more comfortable and was making a fair adjustment.”

Part I: beginnings
Part II: business woman
Part III: bibliography and comments

In 1962 Claire encountered Yugoslavian immigrant Franz Kolterer who founded Micro Science Associates, a precision etching firm. Claire provided skill in micro-photography, and was manager of the art and photo department and a director of the company until 1967.

Claire in Benjamin's book, 1977

“She explained it to me. She told me further that she was born in Arabia, the son of a Scottish trader who ran a ship between Arabia and England, and was educated aboard ship by specialized tutors. She was genetically XY, a male born with a grade 3 hypospadias, a birth defect in which the urine comes out just above the scrotum. The mistake was made that Clair was a female because the genitalia resembled a clitoris and labia in appearance. The diagnosis was plausible, since no genetic karyotype was available in Arabia in 1900. When puberty came along she developed an ample penis, which was upsetting to her, having been raised for 15 years as a female. For many years, she sought medical advice but there was no one who would help her. Unable to live as the woman she felt she was, she removed the penis and the rest of the male apparatus with a sharp knife and presented herself at the University of California emergency room. She was taken care of there by urologist Dr. Goodwin, who was sympathetic to her plight and fixed her up as well as possible at the time.” … “I asked her about her body art, and she told me she’d once traveled with a circus as a tattooed lady and sword swallower.”

The surgery to fix the hernia went well. However follow-up tests revealed adenocarcinoma of the kidney cells, and the left kidney had to be removed. Again the surgery went well.

Dr Laub got to know Claire as a person:

“Well, Clair had some idiosyncrasies, as you might have suspected by now. Having been raised Muslim, she had good habits; she abstained from drinking coffee or alcohol. Despite being female, Clair had retained some of her male spirit, owning a motorcycle, a gull-wing Mercedes, and a 300 Savage telescopic rifle. She had a fondness for Japanese architecture. Her profession was photography, which she had been taught on the ship during her schooling years, and during the birth of Silicon Valley she was able to make microphotography negatives of the plans for a computer chip; the manufacturing process utilized silver salts in the negatives of her microphotos to etch silicon into chips.

“Clair was rewarded for her efforts and gained a large number of shares in one of the more prominent laser and computer companies in the Silicon Valley. With her money she built a Japanese home, a five-sided pagoda on the top of one of the highest hills in a most exclusive suburb, Los Altos Hills. She included koi fish tanks where the fish were able to swim from outside the home into the inside for Clair’s pleasure. The five alcoves of the pagoda each had a wind-generated musical organ, insulated so that there was no sound of blowing air during the playing of the pipes.”

“One patient who is now, several years after the operation, a decidedly masculine-looking 'woman,' with tattoos all over her body, is getting along well in an active business and is unrecognized as a former male. She is merely considered eccentric by her associates.

“Under no circumstances, she assured me repeatedly, would she ever go back to living as a man. 'This way I am at least myself and can relax,' were her own words.

“A couple of times she was arrested under the suspicion of 'impersonating.' When she was taken to a police station, examined and declared to be a woman, the arresting officers apologized and in one instance, bought her a dinner. Not all patients in such situations fared equally well”.

In his introduction to the 1969 anthology, Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment edited by Richard Green and John Money, Benjamin wrote, probably with Claire in mind:

“These few instances of attempted self-castration by definitely non psychotic individuals impressed me greatly. Their desperation as well as the entire clinical history with their vain search for help, often from childhood on, made me realize that the medical profession truly treated these patients as ‘stepchildren’. Educational and medical lectures and scientific publications were urgently needed.”

In 1967 Micro Science had merged with Alloys Unlimited. That was the year that one of the company’s acid tanks sprang a leak in March, and a fire captain had to be rushed to hospital. There was a further incident in October 1971 when there was fire in a tank of nitric acid.

The firm was sold to the British Plessey Group and became Plessey Micro Science Inc in 1974, and then Kolterer set up Koltron Corp. By now Claire was no longer involved, but she had invested in shares of Micro Science Associates, Alloys Unlimited and then Plessey Micro Science Inc, and had become a millionairess.

However, by the end of the 1960s, with age, the many lines in her face made her look more male than female. Laub and his team did a face-lift, which went very well. By this time, Dr Laub had started doing transgender surgeries – his first trans patient (other than Claire) was Ella in 1968. In 1969 Donald Laub founded Interplast to provide necessary reconstructive surgery for persons in developing countries. Claire became the official Interplast photographer, and travelled to central and south America and chronicled surgeries for cleft lip, cleft palate, and burn scar deformities. She was greatly appreciated for the excellence of her photography and her compassion toward patients, even though she was not passing that well. The patients – affectionately – referred to her as “Señor Clair”.

Vernon Gregory, an organist who played the mighty Wurlitzer organ, took over the Avenue cinema in Oakland to install the Wurlitzer that his son had found in Chicago. They moved it to Oakland, installed it and started a program of films accompanied by the organ, but were deeper and deeper in debt until Claire – who played a smaller organ at home – came in to rescue the project in 1972. She also bought a plane that year and learned to fly.

Claire lost most of her money in the recession of the 1970s, and was for a while bankrupt. She developed a working 3-D television and patented it, but it was the alternate model by Matsushita Electric (now Panasonic) that was more successful.

Claire in later years

The next year Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon was reprinted as a Warner Books Paperback. This time the photographs were included within the book, and the black strips hiding Clair’s face were removed.

Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, 2002, included 5 short mentions of Claire disguised under the pseudonym of Caren Ecker. These mentions were based solely on documents in the Kinsey archives, mention her auto-castration and surgery in 1953, her contact with Louise Lawrence and with Worden and Marsh, but say nothing about Claire’s subsequent career as a business woman and photographer.

Both Claire’s only son, age 82, and her business partner, Frank Kolterer, age 76, died in 2007.

Part I: beginnings
Part II: business woman
Part III: bibliography and comments

1953:

• “Fails to be New Christine”. The Times (San Mateo). Aug 15, 1953.
• “Sex Operation Fails; Wanted To Be Like Christine”. The Register (Santa Ana) Aug 16, 1953.
• “Sex Operation of Self Fails”. The San Francisco Examiner, Aug 19, 1953.

1954:

• Herb Caen “Medical Insidem”. The San Francisco Examiner, Jan 20, 1954.

1955:

• Frederick G Woden & James T Marsh. “Psychological Factors in Men Seeking Sex Transformation: A Preliminary Report”. Journal of the American Medical Association, 157, 15, April 9 1955: 1292-4, 1297-8.

1956:

• Karl M Bowman & Bernice Engle. “Medicolegal Aspects of Transvestism”. Read at the 112th annual meeting of The American Psychiatric Association, Chicago, Ill., April 30-May 4, 1956. Printed in American Journal of Psychiatry, 113, 1957: Case 4 p597.

1965:

• Ira B Pauly. Male Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism: A Review of 100 Cases. Archives of General Psychiatry, 13,2, 1965: Case 48.

1966:

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. photographs by request on medical stationary only.

1967:

• “Mt. View acid Tank springs leak”, The Peninsula Times Tribune (Palo Alto), Mar 24, 1967.

1968

• Who's who of American Women and Women of Canada 1968 p354.

1969:

• Elinor Hayes. “Old Films. Organ Revived”. Oakland Tribune, July 6, 1969.
• Harry Benjamin. “Introduction” to Richard Green & John Money. Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment. The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.

1971:

• “Chemical fire in Mt. View”. The Peninsula Times Tribune (Palo Alto), Oct 22, 1971.
• Herb Caen. “You know the Avenue Theatre”. Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Nov 18, 1971.

1974:

• Myron K Myers. “Koltron shaking specialized world of precision etching”. The Peninsula Times Tribune (Palo Alto), Oct 8, 1974.

1976:

• “Claire Elgin – firm founder, scientist, teacher – died”. The Peninsula Times Tribune (Palo Alto), Nov 22, 1976: 3.
• “Claire Elgin: A long, varied career”. The San Francisco Examiner, Dec 1, 1976: 46.

1977

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, Warner Books Edition 1977: p137 & last 4 photographs. Online. Online. A close rereading. (Claire’s photographs not in PFD)

1995/6:

• Connie Christine Wheeler & Leah Cahan Schaefer “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”. Archives of Sexual Behavior24:1 Feb 1995. Online. Revised as the Afterword to Randi Ettner. Confessions of a Gender Defender: A Psychologist's Reflections on Life Among the Transgendered. Chicago Spectrum Press, 1996.

1997

• Susan Stryker. “Don Lucas Interview”. The Gay and Lesbian Society of Northern California, June 12, 1997: 10-11. Online.
• Susan Stryker. “Aleshia Brevard Crenshaw Interview”. The Gay and Lesbian Society of Northern California, August 2, 1997: 67-8. Online.

2002:

• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 143, 145, 155, 165, 167.

2011:

• Donald Laub. “The Claire Elgin Story”. Many People, Many Passports, April 11, 2011. Online.

2017:

• Penney Lewis, ‘The lawfulness of gender reassignment surgery’, American Journal of Legal History,57, 2017: n139, n152.

2019:

• Donald R Laub, MD. “The Cast of Characters (and Characters in Casts)” in Second Lives, Second Chances. ECW Press, 2019: Chp 12.

2020:

• Annette Timm. “ ‘I am so grateful to all you men of medicine’: Trans Circles of Knowledge and Intimacy” in Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories. University of Calgary, 2020: Chapter 3 p103-118.

FamilySearch(Claire LeVern Elgin)

Thank you to Jacob for the research.

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

We have a collision of two different spheres of discourse. For Bowman and Benjamin, and Meyerowitz and Timm, the accounts of Claire are those of a patient, and thus patient confidentiality applies. For Laub, while Claire was initially a patient, she became a friend and colleague, a noted photographer and businesswomen and a philanthropist. He wrote of her as an admired citizen of the San Francisco area. He mentions in passing that she was trans, as he also mentions that she was raised Moslem – these are passing details, mentioned but not dwelled upon. She was also mentioned in San Francisco area newspapers as a businesswoman – especially in her obituaries. These latter did not mention that she was trans. Claire was first and foremost a photographer, a business woman, a musician. She was in the Who's who of American Women and Women of Canada. She was a successful trans woman whose history has been neglected. To reduce her to a medical patient, as do Meyerowitz and Timm is not at all satisfactory.

Meyerowitz worked with Stryker for the two interviews listed above, and thus knew that people in the trans community knew who Claire was. Timm wrote later than Laub, when his account of Claire’s story, with a passing mention that she was trans, was already in the public domain. Timm knew of the pseudonym used by Meyerowitz, and weirdly used a different pseudonym – and went so far to alter the title of Laub’s blog post to remove Claire’s name.

Benjamin’s account of Claire could have been quite different. Connie Christine Wheeler & Leah Cahan Schaefer’s “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”, written in 1995, but based on Benjamin’s file notes, give her the pseudonym ‘Janet’, and tell the story somewhat differently:

“Janet fought her transsexualism bravely and desperately all her young life: she ran away from home, joined the Navy, tattooed her entire body, jumped ship, attempted two unsuccessful marriages, became both an alcoholic and a morphine addict. After jumping ship in Mexico, Janet lived the happiest year of her life being courted by a young man until he accidentally discovered her ‘secret,’ forcing her to give up her ‘girlhood’ to return to the United States and to continue unhappily trying to live the male life. Eventually Janet began a correspondence with Benjamin, who replied sympathetically, ‘I understand the difficult situation you're in but I do believe a way can be found to help you lead a happier life than you are doing now.’

“Janet finally met Benjamin in person at age 48, after the last of many self-castration and mutilation attempts in order to get a surgeon to complete the operation she had desired for so long. With Benjamin's encouragement and the inspiration of Jorgensen's story, Janet took a more scientific and intelligent path toward fulfilling her dream. As with Inez, despite her generally masculine appearance and the late age at which she completed her surgery (in her late 50s), Janet's is a genuine success story. Freed from her lifelong gender struggle, her brilliant talent emerged. Janet and a business partner developed an invention sufficiently valuable to be sold eventually for millions of dollars.

“Except for her closest and most intimate friends, no one in Janet's life knew that this loved and wonderful woman was not a genetic female. Although she died at 72 of lung cancer, Janet lived her last 25 years in great wealth and contentment.”

The Warner Books The Transsexual Phenomenon came out in May 1977, only months after Claire’s passing. It contains the photographs missing from the Julian Press Hardback, including five of Claire, including a full-frontal nude to show her tattoos, with her face clearly visible. One wonders if they would have done so were Claire still alive.

Claire was a self-made millionaire. She was not a nepo baby like Reed Erickson who inherited the majority of the family businesses, Schuylkill Products Co., Inc. and Schuylkill Lead Corp. Having made money Claire was then generous as a philanthropist – although she no longer donated time or money to trans activism, as she had done in the 1950s.

As the 1940 census records Clair and Ruth as having a 15-year-old son, the child would have been born circa 1925 when Clair was 20 years old. Neither the autobiography given to Benjamin, nor that given to Laub allow for marriage and fatherhood at this date. Bowman records Clair has having two marriages, but also claims that Clair was impotent, and implicitly not the biological father of the son.

There is no mention that either Banjamin or Laub prescribed estrogen.

It is generally assumed that ‘Claire’ is a female name, and ‘Clair’ a male name. However there are women called Clair and men called Claire. See Wikipedia. The gender ambiguity of the name is lost when it is replaced by a pseudonymous Caren or Carla.

Elgin is usually taken to be a Scottish name, Gaelic Eilginn, perhaps meaning ‘little Ireland’. There is an 18^th century Lord Elgin (of the Elgin Marbles), and there are many Elgin place names across Canada and the US. It is also Turkish for ‘stranger’.

There are mentions of a second pre-transition marriage to a woman, and a post-transition short-lived marriage to a man. However I could not document these.

There has never been a comprehensive bibliography of writings by Harry Benjamin. I did a partial in previous writings, and found partial bibliographies in Bullough, Legg et al., and Wikipedia, Richard Ekins and Alison Li. In addition I found more publications in Google Scholar, and elsewhere.

1911

• Anwendung des Antifirminverfahrens fur den Tuberkelbazillennachweis. MD dissertation, Eberhard-Karl-Universitat, Tubingen.

1923

• Introduction to Paul Kammerer. Rejuvenation and the Prolongation of Human Efficiency. Experiences with the Steinach-Operation on Man and Animals. Boni and Liveright.

• “The Steinach Method as Applied to Women: Preliminary Report”. New York Medical Journal and Medical Record,18.

1925

• “New Clinical Aspects of the Steinach Operation”. Medical Journal and Record, 21, November.

1927

• “The Control of Old Age; with Special Reference to Gonadal Therapy”. American Medicine, 22, June.

1930

• “The Reactivation of Women”. Read by Peter Schmidt (in Benjamin’s absence) at the 1929 Sexual Reform Congress in London, and published 1930 in the Proceedings thereof.

1931

• “ Das männliche Sexualhomon”. Read in his absence at the 1930 Sexual Reform Congress in Vienna, and published 1931 in the Proceedings thereof.

• “For the Sake of Morality” Medical Journal and Record, 15, April.

1933

• “The Male Hormone: A Summary of Laboratory and Clinical Experiences”. Presented at the Sacramento County Medical Society, 21 November.

1941

• The Winter of our Discontent. A book - never published. An account of glandular reactivation, mixed with advice on how to age gracefully, and with autobiography.

1944

• The Sex Problem and the Armed Forces. Publisher not recorded,

1945

• "A contribution to the endocrine aspect of the impotence problem; a report of thirty-nine cases". Urologic and Cutaneous Review. 50: 139–43.

• “Eugene Steinach, 1861-1944: A Life of Research”. Scientific Monthly, 61, December.

1946

• "Endocrinology in the aged". Interne. 12, July: 465–9.

• “Endocrine gerontotherapy. The use of steroid hormone combinations in male patients”. Journal of Insurance Medicine, 6, 1.

• “A contribution to the endocrine aspect of the impotence problem; a report of thirty-nine cases”. Urologic and Cutaneous Review, 30, March: 139-43.

• “A case of of fatal air embolism through an unusual sexual act (medical and legal implications)”.Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychopathology, 7: 815-20.

• review of Roy G Hoskins, The Biology of Schizophrenia. W W Norton, in American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1, 4.

1947

• "Biologic versus chronologic age". Journal of Gerontology. 2, 3, July: 217–27.

• “The Mental Hygiene of Aging”. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1, 1: 122-123.

1948

• “Introduction to the Second Printing” in René Guyon. The Ethics of Sexual Acts. Alfred A Knopf.

• review of Lee Van Dovski. Genie und Eros. Delphi-Verlag, 1947, in American Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, 1.

• review of Edward J Stieglitz. The Second 40 Years. J B Lippincott, 1947, in American Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, 2.

• review of The Kinsey Report, in American Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, 3: 398.

1949

• "Endocrine gerontotherapy; the use of sex hormone combinations in female patients". Journal of Gerontology. 4, 3, July: 222–33.

• "Two years of sexology". American Journal of Psychotherapy. 3, 3, July: 419–27.

• "Outline of a method to estimate the biological age with special reference to the role of the sexual functions". International Journal of Sexology. 3, 1, August: 34–7.

• review of George W Henry. Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. Paul B Hoeber, Inc., in American Journal of Psychotherapy. 3, 3, July: 477-8.

• "Endocrine Gerontotherapy The Use of Sex Hormone Combinations in Female Patients."Journal of Gerontology4, 3, 1949: 222-233.

1950

• "Endocrine gerontotherapy. The use of steroid hormone combinations in male patients". Journal Insurance Medicine. 6, 1: 12–7.

• “A Humane Necessity” The Nation, 28 January.

• review of Arthur Wormhoudt. The Demon Lover. The Exposition Press, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 4, 2.

• review of E Elkan. “Sex Guidance in Sweden”. International Journal of Sexology, 3, 2, 1949, in American Journal of Psychotherapy, 4, 2.

• review of Gertrud Isolani. Der Doner. Helios Verlag, 1949, in American Journal of Psychotherapy, 4, 1: 546-8.

1951

• “Prostitution Re-assessed”. International Journal of Sexology, 4,3.

• “Meaning and Content of Sexual Perversions”, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 5, 1.

• “Sex and You”, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 5, 2

• “Problems of old age and their treatment”. Journal of Dental Medicine, 6, 3, July: 79-87.

• review of George Sylvester Viereck writing as Stuart Benton. All Things Human. Sheridan House, 1949, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 5, 3.

• review of Fred Brown & Rudolf T Kempton. Sex: Questions and Answers. A Guide to Happy Marriage. Whittlesey House, 1950, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 5, 4.

1952

• review of Albert Ellis. The Folklore of Sex. Charles Boni, 1951. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 6, 1.

• review of Donald Webster Cory. The Homosexual in America. Greenberg, 1951, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 6, 2.

1953

• Transvestism and Transsexualism”. International Journal of Sexology, 7, 1, August: 12-14. Reprinted in One Institute Quarterly, 1, 3, Fall 1958: 102-4.

• "Transsexualism and transvestism as psychosomatic and somatopsychic syndromes". A paper given at the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy December 1953, and published in American Journal of Psychotherapy April 1954, 8, 2:219-30. Reprinted in Transvestia #6, November 1960.

• review of Frank Caprio. The Sexually Adequate Male. The Citadel Press, 1952, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 7, 3.

1954

• with Albert Ellis. “An Objective Examination of Prostitution”. International Journal of Sexology. 8, 2.

• review of Albert Ellis. The American Sexual Tragedy. Twayne Publishers, in American Journal of Psychotherapy, 8, 3.

1955

• “Beiheft zur Schweizerischen Zeitschrift für Psychologie und ihre Anwendungen”. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 9, 1.

• “Sex Transformation”. Letter to Editor. Journal of theAmerican Medical Association, 158, 3, May 21: 217.

1957

• preamble to C.V. Prince.“Homosexuality, Transvestism and Transsexuality: Reflections on Their Etiology and Differentiations”. The American Journal of Psychotherapy, 11, 1957: 80-5. Reprinted in Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds) Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Transgendering. The Haworth Medical Press, 2005: 17-20 and the International Journal of Transgenderism, 8,4, 2005: 17-20., and in Transvestia # 2, March 1960.

• “In Time--We Must Accept”. Mattachine Review, 1957.

1958

• "Transvestism and transsexualism,"InternationalJournal of Sexology, 7:1, 12-14, Aug 1953; reprinted in ONE Institute Quarterly1:3, Fall,102-104.

1959

• "What is adjustment?,"Mattachine Review5, 7, July, 9-11, Jul 1959.

1961

• "Transsexualism and transvestism as psycho-somatic and somato-psychic syndromes,"Mattachine Review 7:1, 12-23, Jan 1961.

• “Sex Censorship in Medicine”. Transvestia # 12, December 1961. An introduction to an autobiographical account by a patient. Previously published in Sex and Censorship.

• “7 Kinds of Sex”. Sexology, 27,7, February 1961. Reprinted in Transvestia #22, August 1963, and revised as “The Symphony of Sexes”, Chp 1 of The Transsexual Phenomenon, 1966.

1962

• Introduction to Robert E.L. Masters. Forbidden Sexual Behavior and Morality: An Objective Re-Examination of Perverse Sex Practices in Different Cultures. Julian Press.

1963

• “The Role of the Physician in the Sex Problems of the Aged”. Advances in Sex Research, 1,October: 143-150.

• "Advice to a male transsexual," Photocopy. April, 1963: 4.

• Reply to "I want to change my sex,"Sexology 30:5, Dec: 292-295; reprinted in Transvestia, 24, Dec : 68-71, and in The Transsexual Phenomenon, (1977 paperback: 132-6/61-3).

1964

• "Nature and management of transsexualism, with a report on Thirty-One operated cases". Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology. 72, Mar/Apr: 105–11.

• "Clinical aspects of transsexualism in the male and female."American Journal of Psychothery18, 3:458-467.

• “Sex and the Single Man”. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 18, 3.

• "Transsexualismus, Wesen und Behandlung". Nervenarzt. 35, November: 499–500.

• with Robert E.L. Masters. “A New Kind of Prostitute”. Sexology, 27, 7, February.

• with Robert E.L. Masters, Prostitution and Morality: a Definitive Report on the Prostitute in Contemporary Society and an Analysis of the Causes and Effects of the Suppression of Prostitution. Julian Press.

1965

• “The Pathology and Treatment of Sexual Deviation: A Methodological Approach”. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 19, 3.

1966

• "Sexual problems at the consultation hour of the general practitioner". Landarzt. 42, 20, July: 885–90.

• The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966.

1967

• Introduction to Christine Jorgensen; A Personal Autobiography. Paul S Eriksson.

• “The Transsexual Phenomenon; a Scientific Report on Transsexualism and Sex Conversion in the Human Male and Female”. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences. 29 February (4 Series II): 428–30.

• “Comment on Doe, J.C. Autobiography of a Transsexual(10 Years as a Woman)”, Diseases of the Nervous System (Suppl.)28, April: 251-5.

• “Transvestism and Transsexualism in the Male and Female”. Journal of Sex Research 3: 107–27.

1968

• "Comments to E. Sagarin's Article". The Journal of Sex Research, 4,2, May 1968: 95.

1969

• "Newer aspects of the Transsexual Phenomenon,"Journal of Sex Research, 5:2, May: 135-144.

• “Introduction” in Richard Green & Money (eds). Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment. The Johns Hopkins Press:1-10.

• “Appendix to Chapter 20 – For the Practicing Physician:Suggestions and Guidelines for the Management of Transsexuals”, in Richard Green & Money (eds). Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment. The Johns Hopkins Press: 305–7.

• “Reminiscences”. 12th Annual Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, November 1st, 1969. Printed in Journal of Sex Research, 6,1, February 1970.

• with Ira Pauly. “The Maturing Science of Sex Reassignment”,Saturday Review52: 72–8.

1970

• "The nature and treatment of transsexualism,"Medical Opinion and Review6, Nov: 24-30, 31-35.

• "Should surgery be performed on transsexuals?" Presented at the 230th Scientific Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, 19 March 1970. Printed in American Journal of Psychotherapy. 25, 1, 1971: 74–82.

• with Charles L Ihlenfeld. ‘The Nature and Treatment of Transsexualism’, Medical Opinion and Review, 6, 11: 24–35.

1971

• “The Silent Majority of Transsexuals”. transaction, 8, 12. Letter in reply to article implying that most trans women are sex workers.

1973

• with Charles L Ihlenfeld. "Transsexualism,"American Journal of Nursing, 73, March :457-461.

1974

• “In Re: Trans(s)exualism”. The Journal of Sex Research, 10, 2, May:173-5.

1977

• The Transsexual Phenomenon. Warner Books Edition (paperback with the previously missing photographs) 1977. Online. Online. A close rereading.

• Foreward to Mario Martino with harriett - Emergence: a Transsexual Autobiography. A Signet Book.

1978

• “Response”. Archives of Sexual Behavior,7,4.

1979

• interview with Garrett Oppenheim. “Sex Change: Do the Benefits Last?” Transition, 10: 1, 12, 14–15.

1985

• interview with Erwin J. Haeberle. “The Transatlantic Commuter”. Sexualmedizin, 14,1, January. Online.

1999

• interviews with Ethel Spector Person. “Harry Benjamin and the Birth of a Shared Cultural Fantasy” in The Sexual Century. Yale University Press, 1999: 347-366.

2008

• Darryl B Hill. “Dear Doctor Benjamin: Letters from Transsexual Youth (1963–1976)”. International Journal of Transgenderism, 10, 4, 2008.

Compiled from:

• Vern L Bullough, W Dorr Legg, Barrett E Elcano & James Kepner. “Transvestism and Transsexualism” in An Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality, Volume II. Garland Publishing, Ins., 1976.

• Richard Ekins. “Science, Politics and Clinical Intervention: Harry Benjamin, Transsexualism and the Problem of Heteronormativity”. Sexualities, 8,3, 2005: 306-28.

• “Harry Benjamin”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Benjamin#Bibliography.

• Zagria. bibliography in “Harry Benjamin. Part 4: transsexualism since 1966” GVWW, 11 October 2012. Online.

• Zagria. “Harry Benjamin in Transvestia Magazine”. GVWW, 01 December 2022. Online.

• Alison Li. “Bibliography” in Wondrous Transformations:A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

Others with similar names

Harry Benjamin, ND (author of Better Sight Without Glasses, 1929, and Everybody's Guide to Nature Cure, Your Diet in Health and Disease, Commonsense Vegetarianism, How to become 100% Healthy)

Harold Benjamin

HRW Benjamin

HR Benjamin

HC Benjamin

HB Benjamin

Rod Fleming, raised in Scotland, cis, attended Edinburgh School of Art in the 1980s – where he first met some trans women – and became a journalist and photographer. He married a woman; they had four children. He also wrote fiction and non-fiction.

Fleming’s mother died in 2005 and he and his wife separated in 2009. He took a year off, did a masters degree at Dundee University, and lived in Paris.

In 2012, he went to the Philippines on a standard 3-week visa in response to Crissy, a trans woman whom he had met online. “She surprised me. She was tall, not lightly built, not really graceful, but quite beautiful in her face. She had been taking hormones for years and this had softened her skin and smoothed her features; but she did not really look like a girl. She was striking rather than pretty.” (see Palawan; Transsexualism: A position statement)

He encountered the Canadian K Burkowski, on the Facebook site for the World Pantheist Movement where they were both liking the same comments. They never met in person but collaborated in a book on religion which was published as Why Men Made God, 2015, in which among other aspects they consider trans priestesses and two-spirit cultures, drawing in particular on the writings of Amara Das Wilhelm, author of Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex.

“My ideas about gender in particular were formed by the research and writing of The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train. Although it is a breathlessly-paced romantic adventure, it required me to dig deep into the natures of gender and sexuality, something I had never done before.” 

His major influence at this time was Kulick’s book, Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Also, using a Portuguese translator, he did telephone interviews with Brazilian trans women, both in France and in Brazil.

Becoming more and more conscious that some trans women were somewhat different from how he imagined them, that is as “small, lightly built, cute, pretty, incredibly feminine and extremely retiring”, Fleming discovered Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would be Queen. 

“The first time I read it I was discouraged. I could respond to much of the book but there was something about it that pushed me away and at the time I could not really figure out what that might be”. (see “Transsexualism: A Position Statement”)

He blogged against Bailey. As Kay Brown put it: “Flemming started out his blogging career dissing Blanchard until I (yes me) convinced him of the reality of the Two Type Taxonomy. He later called me ‘friend’ when someone else mentioned me. He also invited me to write for his blog on the topic. I declined.”

“The penny dropped. Western observers, and even Dr Winter, had failed to see it: there were two types of transsexualism in SE Asia. There was one type that was clearly defined and who, within their group, were all remarkably similar, and another type that was totally disparate in every way. They were tall, they were short, they were somewhat feminine, they were very masculine; many did not seem to date men at all whereas others did; some even had girlfriends. Most surprising was the latter’s attitude towards sex. Remember, none of the girls I met were active prostitutes. They were just being themselves. The small pretty ones were forward in their desire to get into bed with me; the others…well, they wanted to date me, but they were cool about sex. It just didn’t seem to be very important to them. … In SE Asia, non-homosexual transsexuals, or AGPs, tend to transition in their teens after puberty, whereas HSTS will have been displaying Gender Non-Conformity (GNC) before puberty. Thus the groups conform to the APA’s fudged and misleading classification of ‘early’ and ‘late’ onset. This is valid in the case of HSTS but many people, wrongly, assume that ‘late’ means middle age, as was typical of Blanchard’s AGP sample. But the APA is clear: ‘late’, here, means ‘at puberty or later’ while ‘early’ means ‘before puberty’.” (Most of the above taken from Fleming’s Transsexualism: A Position Statement).

In October 2015 Fleming responded on Quora to the question 'Is transgenderism natural?' by giving the usual citations of the worldwide occurrences of trans women. He then continued:

“The other type of MtF transgender, Blanchard's autogynephile, is much more problematic. It does not occur in many parts of the world at all. ('Zero percent' in Singapore, for example and similarly in a large study done in Thailand by Sam Winter; it is, as far as I can see, unknown in the Philippines to the point that transwomen there have difficulty grasping the concept.) AGP appears to be concentrated in the West, particularly the Anglo-Saxon West and especially the UK and the USA. Although there is evidence of AGP in persons of colour in these areas, it is predominantly experienced by white, middle-class individuals. Given these factors, it seems likely that AGP is not an innate part of human variation but instead a culturally-induced condition.”

This has since been removed from Quora.

As Fleming put it: 

“I looked at Bailey’s major source, Blanchard, and there found reasoned and well- constructed scientific papers that dealt with the matter in very detached terms, relying on statistics.” Aware of the controversial nature of this position, he endorsed it. He dismissed Andrea James and Lynn Conway as ‘histrionic agitators’. (Transsexualism: A Position Statement”)

In May 2016 he gave a positive review of Bailey’s book on his blog, and he and Kay Brown exchanged compliments.

Over the next two years Fleming posted several accounts of his position, and repeated that the second type trans women in the Philippines are different from Western Autogynephiles, but still referred to them using that term.

In October 2017, Key Brown commented – that is to say corrected – on “Transgender, transsexual and transvestite”. Fleming responded: 

“What you are actually doing is saying that you don’t like my findings because they challenge your own, and instead of going to Asia and finding out for yourself how things are, you’d rather I just shut up. I have no intention of so doing. You are patronising and demeaning towards me in an attempt to suggest that you — a person who has done precisely no field research in Asia– are more qualified than I am to discuss that which I have been studying. I don’t think so.”

Also that month Fleming published “Not Men: bekis in the Philippines” explaining Filipino gender roles using the concept “not-men” taken from Kulick’s studies in Brazil: 

“Traditional Filipino society is divided into two social groups: men, and everyone else. Borrowing from Kulick, I call the latter ‘not men’. This group is formed of women, children, female and gender non-conforming adolescents, and older ‘not men’ including gay males and transsexuals. Kulick goes as far as to define gender in Brazil as ‘men’ and ‘not men’ and, again, I agree with him. Gender conforming adolescent males form a ‘proto-men’ group, where they learn the social skills needed to join the ‘men’ group. Typically these include playing basketball, football and similar sports (but not volleyball); learning how to chase girls; learning how to talk about girls as sexual objects; often, learning to smoke and crucially, learning to drink. As they grow into adulthood, boys like this will be accepted into the ‘men’ group. So the ‘proto-men’ group is an extension of the ‘men’ group, not distinct from it. Any gender non-conforming (GNC) boy, teenage or adult male is automatically placed in the ‘not men’ group. The reasons for this are complex but devolve to showing ‘unmasculine’ character traits. These include things like being somewhat nervous; being a pretty boy; having crushes on men and boys, liking to dance; liking flowers; liking to wear feminine clothes; the desire to be a woman and feeling ‘like a woman inside’.”

Later that month when Fleming published “Autogynephilia: Sex as a woman”, Brown commented: 

“I have met a few Asian AGPs… and they are EXACTLY the same as Western AGPs… and while there are fewer of them as a percentage, as has been shown in study after study, it is NOT correlated with tolerance, as the data clearly shows that the cultural property that is key is that of individuality vs. collectivism (at the family level), as shown by two separate studies (and thus we have replication, the hallmark of good science. This essay is disturbing and wrong… in that it fails to note that at least 50% of HSTS make strong statements of experiencing extreme gender dysphoria at BEFORE puberty. And Yes, like gay men, they were extremely feminine BEFORE puberty, but remained so after age 10 or so, the age when gay men start to defemininize. Thus, their gender issues are not directly mediated by a desire to have sex with men… which is a secondary issue related to their core issue that gender and sexual orientation are indeed correlated.”

Fleming quoted some Asian AGPs that he had met, and replied: 

“Can you explain to these statements, both from Asian transwomen, in terms other than those I have outlined? In fact, the rewards discussed in Blanchard, leaving aside cross-dressed masturbation, are very much alike for both types of MtF TS/TG, as I detailed. The fact is that the Asian model is current throughout most of the world, with only certain parts of the West, notably the Anglo-Saxon and particularly USican ones, being different. Do I detect a sense of white cultural entitlement? That would be disappointing. … AS to ‘defeminisation’ of gay men, I am interested to see how you explain this in a social milieu where young TS/TG of both types are taking hormones from the age of 13 or 14. This is replicated in Latin America, where, as in Asia, contraceptive pills are available, over the counter, very cheaply, without prescription. The fact is that if an MtF trans person wishes to feminise, or not to masculinise, in any of these territories, they can, and do, achieve this very cheaply using birth control pills. … This supports the suggestion that AGPs in the West are remaining hidden for far longer. What do you think could cause that, other than social intolerance? And further, how do you account for the fact that, as social intolerance reduces, we are seeing a rapid increase in young TS/TG? Are you saying they are ALL HSTS? If you are, you just torpedoed your argument about gay men ‘defeminising’.”

Fleming then added an extra comment: 

“When I first responded to this comment by Kay Brown, I assumed that Brown was HSTS. This is an impression that Brown has spared no effort to cultivate. But it is not supported by observation. This is Brown’s self-penned bio page. It is quite clear from the pictures contained in it that Brown is most unlikely to be HSTS. It is common for AGPs to try to colonise HSTS identity, but this example shocks me, I must admit. This likely explains Brown’s clear rage response.”

In 2016 Fleming had met transpinay Samantha Villasencio, “one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever met” and they became lovers. He stayed with her after she was diagnosed as HIV+, and until her death in October 2023.

In February 2022, Fleming revived his speculation re his former mentor and posted “Kay Brown: an example of appropriation?”. He cited her activist record as a Blanchardian, and her self-identification as HSTS. The latter he rejects: 

“However even cursory examination of her body morphology and career indicates that this diagnosis would be unlikely”. 

Brown of course rejected this, but on the grounds

“but I really was 'early onset' as my mother confirmed to Dr. Norman Fisk at Stanford in early '75, when at 17”.

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

My reading here is that Fleming is approaching an important question, but I suspect that many of you, as I am, are put off by the Blanchardian language. Let us rephrase it. If gender identity and sexual orientation are both biologically determined, then the proportion of trans women who are androphilic or gynephilic should be roughly equal in quite different cultures. However this is not the case. The majority of trans women in northern Euro-America are gynephilic and late transitioners, while in South East Asia 95%+ are assumed to be androphilic, and almost all have transitioned by the mid 20s. So why this difference? Fleming’s answer is that a second type of trans women is indeed there, but was not noticed by Winter et al. So the question becomes why did Winter not see them? It would be very useful if either Filipino or Western academics or both specifically addressed the question.

Brown was of course missing the point. Fleming had identified ‘early onset’ AGPs as common in the Philippines, but not recognised in North America/Europe. Brown says that she had transitioned by age 17, and therefore could not be compared to Fleming’s second type even though they generally transitioned as teenagers, that is at the same age or younger than she did.

In my article, “What is Autogynephilia?”, I criticized Blanchardism for conflating independent variables. An AGP is taken to be: 1) A late transitioner 2) Gynephilic, usually a husband and father 3) Well employed. The stereotype is to work with computers. This is opposed to HSTS which is a conflation of 1) An early transitioner 2) Androphilic 3) Living on the margins of society without a regular job. Many are assumed to be prostitutes, performers or working in gay bars. Kay Brown, tech entrepreneur, engineer and patent holder, would be by her own account HSTS 1 and 2, but AGP 3. Not that this is in any way a criticism of any person; it is a criticism of the Blanchard Binary. See also Andrea James’ profile of Candice Brown Elliot aka Kay Brown.

Fleming is adding body morphology to the three independent variables. He more than once uses the phrase “small, lightly built, cute, pretty, incredibly feminine and extremely retiring”. This is a set of criteria that only a few cis women attain. Why should trans women be measured by this any more than cis woman are? Likewise Fleming claims that Brown is obviously autoandrophilic in that she does not meet his specifications in appearance. Does he regard most cis woman as also failing to meet these criteria? There are plenty of cis woman, like Brown in their 60’s, who look kind of similar to her.

If body morphology is taken as a criterion, we open the door to the concepts of HSTS trapped in the body of an AGP, and AGP trapped in the body of an HSTS.

Actually, where is the ‘autogynephilia’? Blanchard’s definition is: “a man's paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman". Fleming does not even discuss such paraphilic arousal in his second type who generally transition after puberty, but as teenagers. The paraphilic tendency that is supposed to be a defining aspect of Autogynephilia is presumably a result of not having transitioned earlier. The gynephilic early transitioners who are becoming more common in North America and Europe as more loving parents are accepting seem not to be autogynephilic either. Anne Vitale, for her G3 type patient – the equivalent of autogynephilic – regards the pathology as Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD): that it is this deprivation, not a person’s gender identity, that she seeks to treat. And she regards G3 patients as mature, probably middle-aged or older. Like other trans persons, they did have female yearnings from childhood, but did not transition earlier. Fleming’s second type do transition earlier.

“The fact is that the Asian model is current throughout most of the world, with only certain parts of the West, notably the Anglo-Saxon and particularly USican ones, being different. Do I detect a sense of white cultural entitlement?” I am with Fleming on this point. It was inadvisable for Brown to pontificate on the situation in the Philippines to someone actually living there. It is a problem that gay and trans history is Euro/US centric. It would be good to have a world history that takes the east and south Asian (and the American two-spirit) tradition as the norm, and explain why Europe was different. Between the 4^th century and the appearance of the mollies in the early 18^th century you can almost count known trans persons in Europe on your fingers. Christian oppression was a major factor, although it is the case that Filipino transpinay and Brazilian travestis are living in strongly Catholic societies.

One of the objections to the term ‘autogynephilia” is that it has become a simple insult term, particularly as used by TERFs etc who are delighted to have a semi-academic term that implies that trans women have a mental illness. It is therefore ironic that when Fleming was irritated by Brown, ‘autogynephiliac’ was the term that he flung at her. This is further ironic in that Brown who shared an apartment with Joy Shaffer whom she described as “ best friend, point of stability, and sister”, later described her as ‘autogynephilic”.

Andrea James reads Fleming thus: “Some trans-attracted people who engage in “autogynephilia” activism wish to distance their own attractions from trans women they consider “autogynephiles.” In some cases, it is because they see “AGP” trans women as a threat to their “heterosexual” identity. They often brag about how “heterosexual” they are and how the “homosexual transsexual” people they desire are extremely feminine and only interested in masculine “heterosexual” partners like them. Trans-attracted people who use the terms “homosexual transsexual” or “HSTS” are among the most obsessed with “autogynephilia” and creator Ray Blanchard’s taxonomy of “HSTS” and “AGP,” because it’s so important to their own sexual identities.” This is of course armchair psycho-analysis, but it is a hypothesis that needs more work.

Comparing lovers of seropositive trans women: Rod Fleming did stay and comfort his Samantha to the end, unlike Lou Reed who broke off with his Rachel and left her to die in poverty and loneliness.

By Rod Fleming:

• “Palawan, Philippines, 2012”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2013-06-28. Online.

• The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train. Rare Rose Press, 2015.

• with K. Burkowski. Why Men Made God: Redefining the Sacred. Redefining the Sacred, PlashMill Press, 2015.

• “Explaining transsexualism”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2016-7-14. Online.

• “The Man Who Would be Queen”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2016-5-17. Online. (positive review)

• “Transgender, transsexual and transvestite”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2017-1-10. Online.

• “Autogynephilic and HomoSexual MtF in Asia”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2017-10-16. Online.

• “Not Men: bekis in the Philippines”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2017-10-22. Online.

• “Transsexualism: A Position Statement”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2017-10-29. Online.

• “Autogynephilia: Sex as a woman”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2018-9-19. Online.

• “The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train transsexual lives”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2018-9-26. Online.

• “Kay Brown: an example of appropriation?”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2022-2-14. Online.

• “Sam and Rod: How it all began”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2023-10-21. Online.

WordPress     Rod Fleming’s World      Amazon Author Page

By Others:

• Don Kulick. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

• Don Kulick. The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. American Anthropologist, 99, 3, Sep 1997.

• Sam Winter. “Thai transgenders in focus: demographics, transitions and identities”. International Journal of Transgenderism, 9, 1, 2006: 15-27.

• Sam Winter, Sass Rogando & Mark King. “Transgendered Women of the Philippines”. International Journal of Transgenderism, 10, 2, 2007: 79-90.

• Zagria. “What is Autogynephilia?”. GVWW, 22 March 2011. Online.

• Zagria. “Joy Shaffer (1955-) doctor”. GVWW, 19 January 2016. Online.

• Zagria. “Anne Vitale (1938 - ) gender therapist”. GVWW, 12 May 2016. Online.

• Siobhan O’leary. “A misogynist by any other name would smell just as putrid”. Medium, Nov 15, 2017. Online.

• Andrea James. “Rod Fleming vs. transgender people” Transgender Map, Online.

• Andrea James. “Candice Brown Elliott / ‘sillyolme’ and transgender people”. Transgender Map, Online.

Balitzki was born in the then German city of Stettin, the illegitimate, later legitimate, child of a railway man and a nurse. Although raised as a girl, Balitzki had no interest in dolls or cooking, and when playing family with other girls was usually given the role of ‘father’. Comments by others re a lack of femininity were defiantly taken as a complement. At the age of 17 Balitzki was supposed to learn bookkeeping, but not liking arithmetic, gave up this occupation after half a year, then learnt floristry at the age of 19, in the belief that there was more ‘manly work’ to be done. 

With the outbreak of war in August 1914, Balitzki obtained a Transvestitenschein and was able to work as a postal clerk. From 1917 Balitzki was a patient of Magnus Hirschfeld, who presented Balitzki in his Sexualpathologie, 1918 as an example of a ‘hermaphroditic preliminary stage’ and showed the patient in a series of specially produced photographs. 

In October 1919 the Berlin Chief of Police permitted a change of first name from Amanda to Amandus, and the birth certificate was amended accordingly. This was based on an expert opinion by Hirschfeld and Arthur Kronfeld, psychiatrist and co-founder of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, that although born female, the ambiguity of the adult's sexual characteristics now justified assigning him to the male sex. 

However Balitzki’s mother, not only a nurse, but a midwife whose profession required the sexing of babies, did not agree. She applied for a further medical examination of her ‘daughter’ in February 1921. Amandus was then examined by the district physician Dr Schreber, who alleged fraudulent intentions, as ‘the applicant was undoubtedly of the female sex and she had led the doctors to a false opinion by providing incorrect information’. The following April, Balitzki’s authorization to use the name ‘Amendus’ was withdrawn, and his Transvestitenshein was revoked. 

Walther Niemann, a lawyer with close ties to the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (WhK), had campaigned for name changes for several trans persons. In November 1921 he applied again for Balitzki to be allowed to be Amandus: “correction of the birth certificate [...] to the effect that a child was not born of the female sex, but of the male sex”. Niemann enclosed with his application a copy of the cited decree of the Minister of Justice on the change of first name as well as a new expert opinion by Hirschfeld who attested - without mentioning Schreber's expert opinion - that Balitzki had ‘a certain discrepancy in the physical and mental sexual characteristics’, whereby Amandus ‘was to be attributed to the male sex for predominant reasons’. It was therefore ‘medically justified and better suited to the facts to correct his sex designation in the civil register to that of the male sex’. Niemann also referred to an analogous case, namely Berthold Buttgereit, in which ‘the correction order had been issued in the same situation’. 

Niemann followed this up in January 1922 enclosing a ‘certificate of recognition’ dated 1 December 1921, in which Amandus Balitzki declared that he was ‘the father of the illegitimate child born to the seamstress Erna Blumenthal on 24 May 1921’. As such Balitzki was obliged by law to provide the child with the support ‘corresponding to the mother's position in life’. However this was too much, and the authorities did not buy it. The manoeuvre was too transparent. Balitzki was threatened with being charged with Falschbeurkundung, (false certification). In May the Ministry of Justice stated that there was no reason to grant the ‘authorisation to use the first name Amandus’ and that the ‘applicant’ should continue to use the female first name. However the letter was returned with the note ‘moved on 29 April 1922 [...] unknown’. Amandus was not accepting the result.

• Magnus Hirschfeld. „Hermaphroditismus“. Sexualpathologie Volume 2: Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, A Marcus & E Webers Verlag, 1918: 21-3.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Geschlechtskunde, Volume 4, Bilderteil. Julius Puttman, 1930: 471.
• Rainer Herrn. Der Liebe und dem Leid: Das Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft 1919-1933. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2022.

A.C. (a name assigned by the psychologist) was the ninth of 12 children. The father, who was mean and beat all the children, ran a cotton gin and store in Arkansas. A.C. was assigned female, but even as a small child refused to wear dresses, even when starting school, where it was required for the girls. A.C. was so embarrassed and hid under a desk. The mother was able to arrange a transfer to another school where all the farm children, male and female, wore overalls. In 1932, when A.C. was 12, the father age 53 was shot to death by a drunken employee, which A.C. experienced as a relief. A.C. suffered earaches and headaches, and attributed them as nervous strain in not being accepted as male, and also suffered from malaria. A.C. was a loner, and would go to movies alone, read the Bible and attended church, although expressing the opinion that "preachers are merely money crazy”.

When A.C. was 17 there was an operation for appendicitis, and A.C. later reported that the attending physician had said that he found "internal male sex organs but they were in some way diseased or injured, and were removed". 

The mother died of cancer age 66 when A.C. was 23 years. A.C. said that the mother "was ignorant and did not understand my situation. She stated over and over again it was her fault for bringing me into the world". 

A.C. married a woman who had a daughter from a previous marriage. However their marriage was unhappy, and ended after A.C. found out that his wife was doing sex work on the quiet. At age 26, he attempted suicide by slashing his wrists, and was admitted to a mental hospital, and underwent shock treatments. He was discharged after a week with the diagnosis of “a psychopathic personality, with homosexual complications”.

He had a discontinuous relation with another woman six years younger than himself, who likewise had a child from an earlier marriage. They were ‘legally married’ in 1952, despite hostility and threats from the bride’s parents. The new wife had a few hundred dollars saved, and they invested that in a clothing business – but the business failed. A.C. sought work as a day laborer in farms, but was not always engaged. They sought a loan from the wife’s parents, although the daughter stayed away concerned that her parents would trap her in their home. A.C. went to visit them having sent a telegram to himself referring to the financial need to provide for the health of his wife’s child. The mother-in-law intercepted the telegram, and did give some money for the child’s benefit. However she then thought again, and accused A.C. of obtaining money under false pretenses in that he did not pass the money to his wife. Despite the wife’s statement that she had been given the money, A.C. was arrested, and by court order was committed to the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock where he was assessed by psychologist Robert S Redmount, who applied a battery of psychological tests.

The wife was by then with her parents in that she had nowhere else to go. Redmount’s final question to A.C. was: If you were granted three wishes in life, what would you want most?

(1) I want to see that professor in New York, to see if he can help me.

(2) I want them to leave me alone after I serve my time.

(3) I want my wife and I to live together and be happy, and everybody keep their mouths shut and leave us alone.

Redmount wrote up the case and published it in a psychology journal in 1933. His conclusion:

 “Underlying psychologic factors indicate that the patient's problems are of a more complicated nature. Her life-long adjustments seem to represent less an attempt to accept reality and more of a protest against it. … The process of maturation in the male role was additionally complicated by the patient's apparent underlying motivations for marital status as a husband. She needed the utilization of her marriage and her marriage partner predominantly in order to gain the support, acceptance, and protection that she originally sought in her mother. Her own immature and incomplete psychologic growth process seems to preclude the possibility of devoting herself to the role of a husband in terms of any value or goal beyond her own passive- receptive needs. That the marriage was able to maintain itself at all attests to the needs of both the patient and her wife to escape from shattering, unkind realities.

It is quite possible that, unless society provides the patient the opportunity for a social or a psychologic solution to her problems, she will culminate her protest in a fantasied retribution on society through her own self-destruction.”

-------

Redmount leaves the story hanging: was there a trial?; was A.C. convicted?; did he restart his marriage or did the mother-in-law keep them apart thereafter? What happened to A.C. later in life?

Of course a middle-class cishet person in 1933 Arkansas would not be subjected to a court-ordered psychological evaluation following such a dispute over money. Was the mother-in-law ever so evaluated?

Incidentally, was electro-shock treatment followed by being told that one is a 'psychopathic personality'  the standard reponse to suicide survivors in 1946?

Was the 1946 suicide attempt brought on by the break-up of the first marriage? Redmount’s account does not clarify this, but the dates fit. Lothstein attributes it to the mother’s death from cancer, although that was three years earlier.

“professor in New York”. Harry Benjamin? Was Benjamin sufficiently well-known in 1953?

-------

Redmount’s paper is included in Richard Green’s Bibliography addendum to Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon, 1966, but is not mentioned in the text.

Joanne Meyerowitz’ How Sex Changed, 2002: 130, 136, 137, 159, 314n1, 315n15n19, 319n86 has disconnected quotes from Redmount’s account, but in such a way that the reader will not realize that they are from the same case.

Lothstein, 1983: 

“This case history is a pivotal one in that most of Redmount’s conclusions about the dynamics of the case have been accepted and supported by other investigators (oftentimes with little or no mention of Redmount’s contribution to our understanding of female transsexualism). … The importance of this case focused on two factors. The first factor was Redmount’s recognition of the psycho-dynamic triad in female transsexualism: an abusive father with whom the patient identified; a warm supportive mother who needed to be rescued (the patient reported that mother ‘was the only friend I had. When I lost her I had none.’); and a daughter who attempted to rescue her mother and protect her from the father’s onslaughts.” Lothstein’s position was that [intrafamily] “dynamics involved the transsexual-to-be identifying with a physically assaultive father who was unavailable to his weak, emotionally withdrawn wife, and having a need to rescue the mother from him (playing the role of a surrogate husband). In effect, the family dynamic, first reported by Redmount, has remained unchallenged up to the present time.”

!!!

Henry Rubin, 2003: 

“This choice, between viewing the patient’s claims as delusional or strategic, is found in many of the accounts, but nowhere as starkly as in the aforementioned report on an FTM criminally accused by his mother-in-law of fraudulent financial affairs. Dr. Robert Redmount concludes his remarks on this case with this pithy summary: ‘Her life-long adjustments seem to represent less an attempt to accept reality and more of a protest against it’ (110; emphasis added). Redmount hardly concurs that this protest is viable. His ultimate aim would be to help the patient avoid ‘her own self-destruction’ (111). The use of the female pronoun throughout these cases, plus the ubiquitous comments on the normal physiological condition of these patients, indicates the psychologists’ beliefs that these patients are delusional. Endocrinologists might defer to the patient’s desire for treatment based on the likelihood that a physiological etiology for their condition would eventually be uncovered. The psychologists could only view their patients as at worst deluded, and at best strategic.”

• Robert S. Redmount. “A Case of a Female Transvestite with Marital and Criminal Complications”. The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychopathology, 14, 2, 1953:95-111.

• Leslie Martin Lothstein. Female-to-Male Transsexualism: Historical, Clinical and Theoretical Issues. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983: 23-4, 37.

• Henry Rubin. Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men.Vanderbilt University Press, 2003: 56-7.

 A US visitor present at the burning of Hirschfeld's library, asks what is happening:

Part 1:  3 misconceptions

Part 2: 2 more misconceptions

Hirschfeld’s other Books

Misconception #1: the claim that DieTransvestiten is Hirschfeld’s definitive work on trans topics.

The Bulloughs, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, 1993 describe the book as “may well be the key work on cross dressing, even to this day”.

Most accounts of Hirschfeld on trans topics rely only on this 1910 book, DieTransvestiten, and sometimes the 1912 pictorial supplement, Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb. This is especially so with writings in English, in that these two are the only ones from Hirschfeld with a proper translation.

A list of Hirschfeld’s writings on trans and other Zwischenstufen persons (intermediaries) – the last two are in French as Hirschfeld spent his last years in exile in France:

• 1899. „Die objektive Diagnose der Homosexualität“. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1.

• 1905. Geschlechtsübergänge: Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtscharaktere (Sexuelle Zwischenstufen). Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygiene, W. Malende, Leipzig.

• 1906. Berliner Tageblatt, 11. December, cited from Monatsbericht des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, VI, 1,

• 1910. Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb, mit umfangreichem kasuistischem und historischem Material. Verlag Alfred Pulvermacher, Berlin.

• 1912. with Max Tilke. Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb: Die Transvestiten. Verlag von Alfred Pulvermacher & Co., Berlin.

• 1912. with Ernst Burchard. „Zur Kasuistik des Verkleidungstriebs“. Ärztliche Sachverständigen-Zeitung, 18(23).

• 1913. with Ernst Burchard. „Ein Fall von Transvestismus bei musikalischem“. Neurologisches Centralblatt, 52.

• 1918. Sexualpathologie. Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende. Bonn. Volume II: Sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Das Mannlicher Weib und der Weiblicher Mann. (5 Sections: Hermaproditismus, Androgynie, Transvestitismus, Homosexualität, Metatropismus)

• 1926.„Ein Transvestit“ in Ludwig Levy-Lenz (ed). Sexualkatastrophen. Bilder aus dem modernen Geschlechts- und Eheleben. A H Payne.

• 1930. Geschlechtskunde, auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet. Stuttgart. Volume IV Bilderteil.

• 1933.'L'amour et la science'. Voila, 3, 199, 1 Juli.

• 1935. translated by W R Fürst. Le Sexe Inconnu. Éditions Montaigne.

For his more considered thoughts, it is essential to consult Sexualpathologie, Geschlechtskunde and Le Sexe Inconnu.

------

Hirschfeld’s opinions, jargon and influence also appear in publications by his associates, which should also be considered.

Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts 2005:73:

“Hirschfeld's construction of transvestitism initially found its way into the discourse of sexual science and psychiatry only hesitantly. In 1911, the psychiatrist Theodor Ziehen was the first to use Hirschfeld's term in a textbook (Ziehen 1911, p. 622-3). Primarily due to the lack of published case studies, Hirschfeld tried to convince some of his sexually scientific colleagues of his new discovery through direct contact with transvestites. To this end, he invited sexologists who were friends or well-disposed towards him to a meeting. The renowned psychiatrist Paul Näcke reports on this:

'I myself had not yet seen such a case [...] and was therefore very grateful to Hirschfeld when he introduced me and several colleagues to about ½ dozen transvestites in his flat on 19 October 1911, two of whom appeared in very elegant ladies' clothes.' (Näcke 1912, pp. 237-238)

Following this presentation, which was attended by “several sexologists” - Näcke only mentions "Dr. Burchard and Dr. Merzbach" - a dialogue developed between the scientists and the transvestites, who, with one exception, were heterosexual. After this meeting, Näcke, who had already written several reviews, wrote the above-mentioned approving report on Hirschfeld's transvestite concept, but with the reservation that not all transvestites were heterosexual, but that bisexual, homosexual and asexual ones also existed. Hirschfeld came back to this later.

A total of eleven reviews were found for the text volume Die Transvestiten (The Transvestites), and a further eight for the book published two years later (Hirschfeld & Tilke 1912) in leading medical, legal and criminological journals. The majority of the reviewers report approvingly on Hirschfeld's separation of transvestites from homosexuals, their assignment to the intermediate stages, and on his proposal to make the official legitimisation of wearing clothes of the "other" sex dependent on medical certificates.” (DeepL translation)

• 1911. Theodor Ziehen. „Psychiatrie für Arzte und Studierende“. Vierte, vollständig umgearbeitete Auflage.

• 1912. Ralph Pettow. „Zur Psychologie der Transvestie“. Archive für die gesamte Psychologie, XXII.

• 1912. Paul Näcke. „Zum Kapitel der Transvestiten nebst Bemerkungen zur weiblichen Homosexualität“. Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie und Kriminalistik, 47 (3/4).

• 1913. Ossian Oehmig. „Beitrag zur Lehre vom Transvestitismus“. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 15.

• 1916. Max Marcuse. „Ein Fall von Geschlechtsumwandlungstrieb“. Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und medizinische Psychologie, VI.

• 1920. Hans Abraham. „Einige Bemerkungen über den weiblichen Transvestitismus“. Mitteilungen aus dem Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, X(4).

• 1921. Hans Abraham. Der weibliche Transvestitismus. Dissertation at Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, Berlin.

• 1930. Felix Abraham. „Transvestiten!”, Die Aufklärung 2: 165.

• 1931. Felix Abraham. „Genitalumwandlungen an zwei männlichen Transvestiten”. Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, 18: 223-226.

The translations that we do have :

• 1931. French translation by Pierre Vachet. Perversions sexuelles, d’après l’enseignement du docteur Magnus Hirschfeld, par son premier assistant le docteur Félix Abraham. Paris: François Aldor. Discussion.

• 1932. English translation by Jerome Gibbs. Sexual Pathology: A Study of Derangements of the Sexual Instinct, Julian Press. Some extracts from Sexualpathologie, but no trans content.

• 1936. Magnus Hirschfeld, edited and translated by Dr Costler (Arthur Koestler), revised by Norman Haire. Sexual Anomalies and Perversions: Physical and Psychological Development and Treatment : a Summary of the Works of the Late Magnus Hirschfeld. Francis Aldor. The closest that we have to a translation of Sexualpathologie. Discussion.

• 1991. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Prometheus Books.

• 1998. Anonymous English translation. Felix Abraham. “Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites”. The International Journal of Trangenderism. 2, 1. Archive

• 2022. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress Illustrated Part (Supplement to Transvestites). Urania Manuscipts.

• English translation by Ericka Christie & Anne M Callahan of “Chapter XII: Androgyne Mania” from Le Sexe Inconnu. Online.

The Title

Misconception # 2: the assumption that the title is accurate

The full title is Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb which translates as The Transvestites: An Investigation into the Erotic Disguise Drive. Michael Lombardi-Nash slightly revised this for his 1991 translation: Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress.

An ongoing problem was and is created by the word Erotischen.

It is generally accepted that being trans* is not a sexual orientation. Trans persons may be androphilic, gynephilic, asexual, hypersexual. None of these is part of the definition of being trans. For sure some persons do find cross-dressing arousing, but it is a severe distortion to put it in the title. Trans persons, however dressed, at work, shopping, walking in the street, visiting others etc, are not doing something erotic. Transvestitenscheins were issued to enable working in the desired gender – not an erotic activity.

Initially, Hirschfeld had complied with the general opinion at that time that Geschlechtsverkleidung (German for cross-dressing) was a type of homosexuality. However among his patients and elsewhere he encountered trans women who were not at all androphilic, and objected to the assumption. For 1910’s Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld overcompensated, and for the 17 case studies that comprise Part 1, he systematically excluded gay trans persons. This created a problem re ‘female transvestites’, almost none of whom went with men or had a husband. Only one such case was included: his 15^th case, Helene N, who alternated between men and women.

Rainer Herrn: (Schnittmuster des Geschlechts 2005:57-8)

“Hirschfeld had described cross-dressing as a characteristic typically associated with homosexuals around 1900, and in 1906 he distinguished for the first time between homosexual and heterosexual cross-dressers. And although there were enough homosexual men in the environment of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee who presented themselves in women's clothes - not only at balls - including Hermann von Teschenberg and Willibald von Sadler-Grün - Hirschfeld chose for his casuistry of seventeen cases exclusively those who neither exhibited same-sex inclinations nor had corresponding experience. At the same time, he also knew other homosexual transvestites personally, as can be seen in Volume II of his Sexual Pathology” (DeepL translation)

Hirschfeld of course reverted back in Sexualpathologie, 1918. As quoted in Koestler-Haire’s Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, p197 hard copy, p167 ecopy:

“From the comprehensive data at our disposal we find that about 35 per cent of transvestites are heterosexual and an equal percentage homosexual, while about 15 per cent are bisexual. The remaining 15 per cent are mostly automonosexual, but also include a small proportion of asexuals”.

Hirschfeld had altered the meaning of ‘transvestism’ by making it by definition an erotic activity. The Transvestitenscheinen were issued - at least nominally - for mainly vocational reasons. They were not regarded as erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (erotic urge to dress up). They were issued so that the trans person could live, work and get on with life - the frequency or lack of a sex life did not come into it.

Darryl Hill questions just how heterosexual, the 16 male-born cases studies in Die Transvestiten were? He writes (p324)

“Despite the fact that Hirschfeld wanted to differentiate transvestites from homosexuals, a minority of the cases described homosexual experiences and fantasies. Vern and Bonnie Bullough [p210] observed homosexual fantasies in six of the cases: Messrs. C, D, F, I, J, and P. Including Mr. J, however, is a mistake, since he did not relate any homosexual fantasy. Only one case study, Mr. F, clearly desired men and had had both previous experiences and fantasies. Hirschfeld recorded this: "At twenty-one, on vacation in the Orient, he consented to anal intercourse by Arabians" (51).

Even more problematic for Hirschfeld's contentions was the fact that many of the male cases entertained sexual desires for men but only when presenting themselves as women. Since the man-to-woman crossdressers largely see themselves as women, this desire is probably best understood as heterosexual, but even in that day it was probably partly seen as homosexual. Following this rationale, Messrs. B and M expressed desires to be with men when dressed as a woman. Mr. B indicated a willingness to flirt with men only when dressed as a woman: "I have never had an inclination toward men; only when dressed as a woman do I like to flirt and play with them" (27). Mr. M, who desired to be the passive partner in a heterosexual encounter, said that he was willing to give sex with men a try but only as a woman.

…

Hirschfeld's contemporaries criticized him for not seeing the latent homosexual tendencies in most of his respondents, mainly because he failed to use deep psychoanalysis, but these tendencies are obvious even without psychoanalysis.”

Some may see most of Hirschfeld’s 16 case studies in Part One of the book as Autogynephiles or something similar (this is not my opinion) and therefore Erotischen as an appropriate label. Even if this were the case, it would apply to Part One of the book only, and not to Part Two “Criticism (Differential Diagnosis)” or Part Three Ethnology and History”. So Arguably Erotischen could be acceptable in the subtitle for Part One, but is definitely inappropriate in the title of the entire book.

However, it is Die Transvestiten that is mostly read, and Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard in the 1980s, as they developed their concept of Autogynephilia, were able to cite Hirschfeld as a pre-cursor.

• Kurt Freund, Betty Steiner & S. Chan. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 1982:49–63.

• Ray Blanchard. “Origins of the Concept of Autogynephilia”. Feb 2004. 

• Darryl B Hill. “Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten: A Case of the ‘Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary’”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14, 3, 2018.

Trans words in German

Misconception # 3: the claim that Hirschfeld ‘coined’ transvest* words.

Book after book after book claims that Hirschfeld ‘coined’ Transvestiten, etc. The earliest claim that I have found re Hirschfeld supposedly coining Transvestiten (not Transvestitismus) is in Charlotte Wolff’s 1986 biography where she simply says on p107 that he coined it, but gives no support to the claim. The problem of course, as I have pointed out several times, is that one cannot coin a word, or group of words, that already exist. It seems that he did introduce the transvest* words unto German, and they quickly did replace the rather cumbersome Geschlechtsverkleidung. He also altered the meaning to make transvesting an erotic activity.

However various transvest* or travest* words had existed in Italian, French and English since the 17^th century, sometimes but not always meaning gender crossing. Those who claim that Hirschfeld ‘coined’ the terms implicitly imply that he was so badly read that he was unaware of the various forms of these words. For a man of his education, who had travelled in the US, England, France and Italy, this is unlikely.

Then there is the word Transvestitenschein, the licence or permission to transvest. The Paris Préfecture de Police had been issuing Permissions de Travestissement since 1800, and Transvestitenschein is a translation of Permissions de Travestissement (altering the emphasis from the permission to the actual licence). Hirschfeld rendered the French word travestissement into German as Transvestismus, and travesti/e as Transvestiten.

Hirschfeld had an extended stay in Paris in 1892 while studying for his medical exams, and would have become aware of the French practice. He made contact there with the eminent Jewish physician Max Nordau. In 1910 just before finishing DieTransvestiten, Hirschfeld spent a few months in London and then Paris.

Hirschfeld was also an active nudist, and German and French nudist groups had joint meetings. We know that it was at such a meeting that Hirschfeld met the French future sexologist Pierre Vachet. Vachet was still a teenager in 1910 (he was born in 1892) but as he was training to become a doctor, he would have talked about medical practices in Paris.

Hirschfeld mentions the French Permissions de Travestissement in his Die Transvestiten, although he does not give the French expression.

P274-5 in the Lomabardi-Nash translation, “There are cases in which women work in bricklayers’ suits and driving uniforms, and the police overlook that. At the governor’s office they said that strictly speaking the present question could only be decided by a police regulation dated November 7, 1800, that made the authorization of the many frequent masquerades at the time subject to a physician’s certificate that the male or female applicant needed the special clothing for reasons of health. Exceptions to this have occurred from time to time, for example, Aurore Dupin (George Sand), Rosa Bonheur and Marguerite Bellanger, the Margo of Napoleon III, who made the empress jealous. In earlier days there were more applications for permission to wear men’s clothing, but since the introduction of clothing that easily reminds a person of the stronger sex, for example, for women who ride bicycles, the desire of women for other manly apparel appears to have decreased.”

P384: “A French farmer from the suburbs of Paris went to the police for permission to wear women’s clothing and received it, for “business reasons” no less. He said that a woman’s dress was necessary as a part of his equipment to do his kind of work at a nursery garden. Permission for the same thing was granted to a Paris potato merchant.”

P385: “Rosa Bonheur, too, in her petition to the government for permission to wear men’s clothing, gave as her reason that dresses prevented her from finding artistic motifs in nature.”

Part 1:  3 misconceptions

Part 2: 2 more misconceptions

Hirschfeld as trans.

Misconception #4: the assumption that Hirschfeld was himself a transvestite.

The first such claim seems to be Vern Bullough’s Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research, 1994:62 where he starts his 14-page essay on Hirschfeld with “Undoubtedly influenced by his own homosexuality and transvestism ….”. However, in the digital version of the book obtainable from Archiv für Sexualwissenschaft, (online) the words “and transvestism” have been removed. Nor did Bullough claim a transvestite Hirschfeld in his 11-page biography in Sexuality and Culture 7 (1) Winter 2003. Bullough had not given any footnote or other reason for his claim, and in effect withdrew it. However those two words in the 1994 hardcover version of the book seem to be the basis of claims elsewhere.

->Find a Grave’s Magnus Hirschfeld page says: “As a Jew living in a historically anti-Semitic country, and as a gay man and transvestite”, and of its nature gives no citations.

-> Tim Armstrong in his Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study, 1998, page 167, writes of Magnus Hirschfeld “Himself homosexual (like Haire) and transvestite, he was less dogmatic than Krafft-Ebing had been”. Armstrong gives no citation or quote to support this. 

->Marta Vicente. "The Medicalization of the Transsexual: Patient-Physician Narratives in the First Half of the Twentieth Century". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 76 (4), Oct 2021: 10, says “Hirschfeld, who also cross-dressed and was known among Berlin transvestites as ‘Aunt Magnesia’ ” and gives a footnote citing Charlotte Wolff’s 1986 biography of Hirschfeld, which does record his distaste at being referred to as “Aunt Magnesia” but no transvesting.

-> Patricia Gherovici, in her “Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change”, p4, says “He was also an occasional cross-dresser himself” – her only citation is Bullough, 1994, p68 - not p62. 

->Daniel Brook’s The Einstein of Sex, p96, says “When Magnus researched drag bars and balls, he reputably sometimes went in drag himself as ‘Auntie Magnesia’. A dowdy feminine version of his rumpled self, Auntie Magnesia presumably favored frumpy dresses…”. Endnote p276n96 cites only Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin which talks of the balls but says nothing of Hirschfeld in drag. Brook actually then mentions that Hirschfeld found the practice of men doing female drag while “boasting moustaches or full beards” ‘distasteful and repellant’. This is Magnus Hirschfeld, famous for his bushy moustache, whom Brook has just suggested did transvest. There is no record of a Hirschfeld without his moustache.

Christopher Isherwood lived in Hirschfeld’s institute and has no such gossip in his autobiography Christopher and his Kind: A Memoir, 1929-1939, published 1976. And of course, if there had been any such rumours, the Nazis would have delighted in repeating them.

The canard is repeated in the EN.Wikipedia article.

We might also note that a gay man who does drag once or twice for a party or a ball, is not thereby a transvestite. Despite what Virginia Prince and the DSM have ignorantly claimed, there are indeed gay transvestites. However being a transvestite does require more than dressing up once or twice for a social event. The soldiers who put on drag shows for fellow soldiers and in prisoner of war camps – with a few exceptions – are not taken to be transvestites, nor are rugby players who drag up for a laugh.

Modern commentaries:

Misconception #5: the advertising pitch that Hirschfeld and Die Transvestiten are an untold tale.

The blurb for Shillace’s book says they are “the forgotten story”; the blurb for Brook’s book says “Today, he’s been largely forgotten”; a review of Brook on Amazon says: “Hirschfield comes up in many contexts but this is the first book I’ve found specifically about him.” And Bullough in his 2003 paper for Sexuality and Culture, wrote “For most of the last half of the twentieth century, however, Hirschfeld was more or less ignored in the English speaking world, despite the fact that two of his works, Die Transvestiten (1910) and Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), were the most significant and authoritative works written on the subjects before Kinsey and his data and are still of importance to the current generation of researchers.” 

Er, No!

While there are no way as many books about Hirschfeld, as about Sigmund Freud, there are more books about Hirschfeld than about each of Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Albert Ellis, August-Henri Forel, Bernard Talmey, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Norman Haire and even Richard von Krafft-Ebing.

In my personal memory there were discussions with trans, gay and cishet persons where they knew at least of the book burnings, and often more. This is going back to at least the 1970s. However more importantly there have been many books, journal articles and magazine articles starting with Wolff’s biography in 1986, and then more and more.

A partial list:

• Charlotte Wolff. Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. Quartet Books, 1986: 107-6
• Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. University of Pennsylvania Press 1993: 207-13. 
• Geertje Mak. ,Passing Women': im Sprechzimmer von Magnus Hirschfeld. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 9,3, 1998.
• Vern L Bullough. "Magnus Hirschfeld, an often overlooked pioneer". Sexuality and Culture. 7(1) Winter 2003: 62–72.
• J Edgar Bauer. “Magnus Hirschfeld's Doctrine of Sexual Intermediaries and the Transgender Politics of (no-) Identity” in Gert Hekma (ed). Past and Present of Radical Sexual Politics. Mosse Foundation for the Promotion of Gay and Lesbian Studies at The University of Amsterdam, 2004.
• Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005.
• Ralf Dose. Magnus Hirschfeld: Deutscher – Jude – Weltbürger. Verlag Hentrich & Hentrich, 2005.
• Ibon Zubiaur. Pioneros de lo homosexual (Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, K M Kertbeny, M Hirshfeld). Anthropos, 2007.
• Elena Mancini. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement. Palgrave Macmillan. 2010.
• Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) Une Pionier du mouvement homosexual confronte au nazisme. Le Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, 2010.
• Patricia Gherovici. “Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change”. Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, 7(1), 2011. 
• Jack Molay. “Magnus Hirschfeld's Theory of Transgender Intermediaries”. Crossdreamers, 19/12/2014.
• Ralf Dose. Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement. Monthly Review Press, 2014 (translation of Dose’s 2005 book)
• Wouter Egalmeers. Magnus Hirschfeld’s exposition of ‘universal’ fetishism in his 1930 Bilderteil zur Geschlechtskunde. Research Masters Thesis, Radboud University, 2016.
• Ken Plummer. „Hirschfeld, Magnus (1868-1935)”. In George Ritzer (ed) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016.
• Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture. Temple University Press, 2017.
• Manfred Herzer. Magnus Hirschfeld und seine Zeit. Gruyter, 2017.
• Emma Heaney. „’I am not a friend to men’: Embodiment and desire in Magnus Hirschfeld's Transvestites case studies”. Journal of Lesbian Studies,
• Wissen schafft Akzeptanz: Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld. Tätigkeitsbericht 2017.
• Darryl B Hill. “Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten: A Case of the ‘Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary’”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14, 3, 2018.
• Rainer Herrn. Der Liebe und dem Leid: Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919-1933. Suhrkamp, 2022.
• Brandy Schillace. The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story. W W Norton & Company, 2025
• Daniel Brook. The Einstein of Sex: Dr Magnus Hirschfeld Visionary of Weimar Berlin. W W Norton & Company, 2025

Koranyi was born and raised in Budapest. During the Holocaust Koranyi was compelled into slave labour, and his wife had been arrested and was in a holding camp before transit to Auschwitz, when they – and thousands others- were saved by the intervention of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. 

Lici emigrated to Sweden where she became a physician. Erwin was able to complete his medical studies in Innsbruck, Austria. After some time in Israel, he emigrated to Canada, where he became a psychiatrist at Montreal's McGill University. Dr. Koranyi married Edie Rosenbaum, also a Holocaust survivor. In 1970, he moved to the University of Ottawa, and joined the Psychiatric Outpatient Unit at the Ottawa General Hospital. 

Later he transferred to the Royal Ottawa Hospital, where he became Director of Education and later head of a Neuropsychiatric Unit. Among the patients who came to see him were some transsexuals. 

In 1976 Koranyi published "Sex Change Surgery in a Male Transsexual" in the Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottawa, which included some dubious comments:

“Sometimes deceived by their intense fantasy and desire to be a female, they indulge in self- administered or prescribed estrogen therapy, but as soon as they become impotent as a result of this practice, they stop. …Only some, feminized to an extreme, may ask for a sex change operation. In the face of otherwise good ego strength, if the desire is sufficiently intense and the narcissistic pleasure surpasses the loss of orgastic satisfaction, they may be considered reasonable candidates for the operation. … The transvestite is a part-time cross-dresser, essentially a fetishist, whose 'turn ­on' is the act of dressing itself. Secretly, or sometimes in trusted company, not infrequently with so-specialized prostitutes, rarely with their consenting wives, they cross-dress in order to bring about erection and sexual excitement. … Their actual appearance is frequently of secondary importance, even grotesque, as they do not really wish to convince anyone of their femininity, except themselves, in their sexual fantasies.”

Inevitably, these comments caused kerfuffles.

Linda Stephens, editor of The Journal of Male Feminism, wrote and asked Koranyi for permission to reprint the article. Koranyi declined: 

“this is a topic which may well be easier misunderstood than understood. In our gender clinic we often run into problems with certain patients who have built false hopes and who are therefore exposed to disappointments or worse. We wish to avoid such situations as much as possible.” 

Stephens printed the reply and commented 

“I believe a considerable portion of Dr. Koranyi's article consists of misinformation and unsupported and unsupportable opinion. Nevertheless, we had wished to publish his article and to allow our readers to draw their own conclusions.”

The TVIC Journal printed significant quotes from the article without asking.

The Ottawa gynaecologist Bernard Barwin did an emergency vaginoplasty that year for a trans woman who had done a self-penectomy. Barwin and Koranyi then worked together re trans patients.

In 1980 Koranyi published Transsexuality in the Male: The Spectrum of Gender Dysphoria, with a chapter on trans surgery by Norman Barwin, and a chapter on the legal implications and complications by psychologist Betty Lynch and psychiatrist Selwyn Smith, both also of the Royal Ottawa Hospital. He defined homosexuality, transvestism and transsexuality. 

“The clinically clearly delineated and easily separable cases of these three conditions are the ones that remain in the majority. However, these neatly packaged definitions often collapse, particularly when applied to cases having overlapping characteristics. Therefore, some of these cases are more accurately regarded as manifestations of a spectrum of disorders that defy unambiguous distinction.” 

He did agree with surgery for those whom he sees as true transsexuals:

“Surgery, so fervently desired by transsexuals, should currently be considered an effective, palliative, symptomatic treatment in well-selected cases, particularly because other treatment modalities are not really available. Psychological treatment forms, be they analytical or behavioral in orientation, are effective therapeutic tools in many other instances but fail as a rule with transsexuals, who are rarely, if ever, interested in what these treatments can offer.”

However his definition of Transvestism was still reactionary:

“TRANSVESTISM. In its pure clinical form, this form of fetishism is typified by periodic crossdressing accompanied by sexual excitement. This is relieved by autoerotic means or by the services of specialized prostitutes. The usual sexual orientation is heterosexual, sometimes homosexual.” 

He cited Stoller more than Benjamin. As this book predated The Clarke Institute’s Gender Dysphoria, 1985, there is no suggestion of Autogynephilia.

In 1983 he gave a paper at the 7th World Congress of Psychiatry (W.P.A.) in Vienna, which was printed in the Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences.

“The rationale for this surgery was the notorious failure of all forms of psychotherapies, the intention to reduce the high suicide rate and self-castration and to enhance the potential for social adaptation among transsexuals. … In our gender clinic forty-one male transsexuals were assessed. Seven of them are expecting surgery and in 12 cases the surgery has been completed. Of these 12 transsexuals, four are married; we have indirect information on three who are prostitutes, at least one with a drug addiction problem. We have also seen three female-to-male transsexuals; surgery was performed on two, one of whom lives in a steady relationship, the other conducts a promiscuous lifestyle. On the third. female-to-male transsexual surgery is pending.”

Koranyi retired in 1990, but continued some teaching assignments.

He died aged 88 in 2012.

• Erwin K Koranyi. "Sex Change Surgery in a Male Transsexual". Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottawa, 1, 3, November 1976. Excerpt in TVIC Journal, 6, 55, May 21 1977 p5 Online.
• Erwin K Koranyi. Letter, and Linda Ann Stephens “Are We in The Middle Ages or Approaching The 21st Century?”. The Journal of Male Feminism, 77, 4 & 5, 1977 p7-8, Online.
• Erwin K Koranyi. Transsexuality in the Male: The Spectrum of Gender Dysphoria. Charles C Thomas Pub Ltd, 1980. With a forward by Ralph Slovenko of Wayne State University, and contributions by Norman Barwin of Ottawa General Hospital and Betty Lynch and Selwyn Smith, both of the Royal Ottawa Hospital.
• Alfred J Koonin. Review of Transsexuality in the Male. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, September 1981.
• Erwin K Koranyi. Physical Illness in the Psychiatric Patient. Charles C Thomas Pub Ltd, 1982.
• Erwin K Koranyi. “Transsexuality Revisited”. Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences, 16,1, 1983. Reprinted as “Transsexuality of the 80s” in P Pichot, P Berner, R Wolf & K Thau (eds) Psychiatry The State of the Art:6 Drug Dependence and Alcoholism, Forensic Psychiatry, Military Psychiatry . Springer, 1985.
• Erwin K Koranyi. Dreams and Tears: Chronicle of a Life. General Store Publishing House, 2006.
• Erwin K Koranyi. Echo of Edith. ‎ General Store Publishing House, 2012.
• Myrna & Norman Barwin. “Remembering Erwin Koranyi 1924-2012”. Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, July 23, 2012: 4.

Legacy.com         The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation

Quotations, mainly from the 1980 book, in writings by others:

• Carole-Anne Tyler. “The Supreme Sacrifice?: TV, ‘TV’ and the Renee Richards Story”. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 1,3, Fall 1989. Republished as Chapter 5 in Carol-Anne Tyler. Female Impersonation. Taylor & Francis, 2013: 195-6n22.
• Morris Meyer. “I Dream of Jeannie: Transsexual Striptease as Scientific Display. The Drama Review, 35, 1, 1991:34-6.
• Alex Sharpe. “Anglo-Australian Judicial Approaches to Transsexuality: Discontinuities, Continuities and Wider Issues At Stake”. Social & Legal Studies, 6,1, 1997: 29, 38-9.
• Alex Sharpe. Transgender Jurisprudence: Dysphoric Bodies of Law. Cavendish Publishing Limited, 2002: 33, 34, 97.
• Moe Meyer. An Archeology of Posing: Essays on Camp, Drag, and Sexuality. Macater Press, 2010: 25.

 Buzz feed a few days ago ran a list of 19 trans persons who had achieved something in life. I have two problems with it.

• It is a list of the usual suspects. Why are such lists almost always aimed at readers who have been off-grid for years and are unaware of trans persons? These days even most cishet persons, old and young, are aware of Lili Elbe, Billy Tipton, Coccinelle, Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards, Sylvia Rivera. Why not devote more of the list to the lesser known?
• The inclusion yet again of Roberta Cowell, referred to by those who knew her as Betty. Yes, Betty was one of the first trans women in Britain (preceded by Norma Jackson and Dorothy Medway– who unlike her were not nepo-babies and had far fewer resources), but she refused to consider herself as one of us – and in fact was quite transphobic. She insisted that Christine Jorgensen was a transvestist. She declined Michael Dillon’s advances, as she said later: “But as far as I was concerned, it would have been two females getting married (p87 in Hodgkinson’s book)”. On p101 of her autobiography she wrote: “One thing was certain. I had not the slightest desire to swell the ranks of the gentlemen of no particular gender. It is true that I had become a little more tolerant in this direction than I had been in the past; this meant, however, that had I met one I would have refrained from actually kicking his spine up through the top of his head.” When interviewed for the Sunday Times in March 1972 the interviewer commented: “She doesn’t approve of the Permissive Society and she doesn’t welcome Women’s Lib. She certainly hopes the trend towards Unisex has stopped. It’s unhealthy, unnatural.” And quoted her: “My experience shows that men and women are so completely different as to be almost different species. …. I was a freak. I had an operation and I’m not a freak any more. I had female chromosome make-up, XX. The people who have followed me have often been those with male chromosomes, XY. So they’ve been normal people who’ve turned themselves into freaks by means of the operation.” And of course, Cowell totally abandoned the two daughters that she had fathered. And indeed how could she have fathered children were she not XY?

Cowell is not at all a positive role model.

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

Here are 15 other trans persons worthy of more attention. I could easily list 50 or more.

The sort is by birth date.

John de Verdion (1744-1802)

German book dealer and language teacher. De Verdion, after some embarrassment re his sex, emigrated to London, where he taught German to Edward Gibbon, and English to the Prussian ambassador. He lived 30 years in London, despite suspicions about his sex. GVWW

Toupie Lowther (1874-1944)

Wilmer Broadnax (1922-1992)

Lucy Salani (1924-2023)

Compulsorily inducted into the Wehrmacht, in German-occupied Italy, the Repubblica di Salò, Salani from Bologna deserted twice. She survived in Bologna as a sex worker with even German officers as clients, until she was recognised and sentenced to a forced labour camp working on parts for the V-1 rockets. With another inmate, Salani escaped. On recapture, she was deported to the Dachau concentration camp, and had to wear a Pink Triangle. As allied troops approached, Salani was in a group that was lined up and machine-gunned. Salani was hit in the leg but was found alive under some dead inmates. After the war she worked in a drag show, and then became an upholsterer. She had completion surgery in London in the 1980s. In the 2010s she was discovered by LGBT groups and became an advocate for concentration camp survivors criticising how they were ignored and forgotten. She lived till age 98. GVWW.

Anne Vitale (1938 - )

Vitale transitioned while doing a psychology PhD. She opened a clinic in San Rafeal, California in 1984, and has treated many trans persons. She treats older transition persons for what she calls Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD). It is this deprivation, not a person’s gender identity, that she seeks to treat. GVWW

Dolly Van Doll/Carla Follis (1938 - )

From Turin, Dolly performed at Madame Arthur and then Le Carrousel. She had completion surgery from Dr Burou in Casablanca in 1964. . In 1971 she accepted a contract in Barcelona. She rose to become a star performer in Franco’s Spain, and also met the love of her life. After Franco’s death she revamped her act and opened her own club in Valencia. GVWW.

Roberta Perkins (1940-2018)

Janine Roberts (1942-2016)

Roberts was ordained a Catholic priest, and did degrees in theology, philosophy and sociology. Roberts then resigned from the priesthood and married a woman. They moved to Australia where they had two daughters. Roberts started working with Australian Aboriginals, and in 1976 published a book on their culture and institutional racism. She worked with aboriginal groups in resisting mining on their territory, and researched Granada TV’s World in Action program on the issue. By this time she had transitioned. In the late 1980s Janine was working on a documentary on the diamond industry for Australian, US and UK television. The Sun newspaper outed her to attack her credibility. In 1992, when The Diamond Empire was two-thirds shot, her home was invaded and she was seriously beaten and was in hospital for two months. While she was on the critical list, the BBC took control of the project away from her. The program was shown on the BBC and in the US with her name on it. Pressure from the diamond monopoly, De Beers, resulted in its showing on Australian Broadcasting Company being cancelled, and in the BBC not selling it abroad, especially to South Africa. GVWW.

Sonia Burgess (1947-2010)

Brenda Lee (1948 – 1996)

She lived in São Paulo from age 14. Brenda was one of the first Brazilian travesties to work in Paris in the late 1970s as a prostitute. She returned to São Paulo in 1984 and bought a house in the Bixiga neighbourhood. She turned the building into a Casa de Apoio to care for those with HIV who had been rejected by their relatives, as many were after a series of murders of travesties in the South Zone of Sao Paulo in 1985. It started with three patients and an agreement with the São Paulo Ministry of Health, and in 1992 was legally incorporated. She worked with the Emilio Ribas Hospital which took those who needed hospitalization. Brenda also had a car repair business and a hairdressers in the building. She was brutally murdered in 1996. She was given a full Catholic funeral with representation from the Cardinal-Archbishop. A Brazilian award for defending human rights was named the Brenda Lee Award. GVWW.

Ajita Wilson (1950-1987)

From Brooklyn, Ajita Wilson moved to Europe where she appeared and often starred in almost 50 films, mainstream, porno and Euro-trash. She died from the complications from a road accident. GVWW.

Anna Grodzka (1954 - )

After marriage and raising a son, Anna transitioned in 2010. She was co-founder and then president of Trans-Fuzja, she was also vice-president of the Commission for Social Dialogue Committee for Equal Treatment under the President of the Capital City Warsaw. She was list Member of Parliament 2011-2015. GVWW.

Helen Savage (1955 - )

Yasmene Jabar (1956 - )

A farmer’s daughter from North Carolina, she had completion surgery at age 20. She married two Moslem men (sequentially). She set up Cafe Trans Arabi and the International Transsexual Sisterhood, thefirst to help trans women in the middle east, and then expanded to help trans women wherever they are. In 2005 she was involved in the Trans Eastern Conference (TEC) in Istanbul. GVWW.

Karine Espineira (1967 - )

Born in Chile. The family fled to France after the US-backed Pinochet coup in September 1973. In the early 1990s Karine was involved in the Association du Syndrome de Benjamin that had just been founded by Tom Reucher; She and her life-partner Maud-Yeuse joined the anti-essentialist, anti-psychiatry, queer-theory group organized by University of Lille sociologist, Marie-Hélène Bourcier. In 2008 Karine published La transidentité: de l'espace médiatique à l'espace public; in 2012 Karine, Maud-Yeuse and Arnaud Alessandrin published La Transyclopedie: Tout Savoir Sur Les Transidentites, a history-cum-encyclopedia of transgender in France. GVWW.