This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.

There is a detailed Index arranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

29 September 2010

Jennifer Leitham (194? - ) bassist.

John Leitham grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, cross-dressing secretly. He had a clear high voice and was able to sing harmony. He taught himself the basics of playing bass and was in a rock band in the post-Bowie androgyny phase, except that he was sometimes too successful at being androgynous.

With the advent of Progressive Rock, he started four years of serious study of the acoustic bass. This led to a six-month gig with the Woody Herman Band.

He met a woman who was completely accepting of who he was and they married. His wife proposed that his name be Jennifer. In the mid-1980s they moved to Los Angeles and he became a regular with Mel Tormé until 1996. Then he joined the Doc Severinsen Band.

The Leithams divorced in 1996, and Jennifer found a good therapist who helped her to transition. She had surgery in July 2002 with Gary Alter. The gigs with Doc Severinsen continued but some of her other work dried up. She has worked more on her own music, and has started singing again after several decades. She has also started started standing to play and moves her body more with the music. She was a featured artist at Toronto Pride 2010.

26 September 2010

Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel (1694 - 1721) button maker, prophet, soldier.

Catharina Margaretha Linck (or Lincken) was born, after her father's death, at Glaucha, Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. After fourteen years in the orphanage, she had learnt the trades of button-making and of printing cotton. 

To preserve her chastity she started dressing in men's clothes, and was considering leading a holy life. He joined a group of Radical Pietists, and took the name of Anstasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel. For two years Anastasius travelled with the Pietists as a prophet. 

After losing his gift, he joined the Hanoverian troops as a musketeer using the name of Anastasius Beuerlein. After three years he deserted at Brabant, but was apprehended at Antwerp and condemned to be hung. He got out of this by revealing that he was female. This was supported by a letter from Professor Franken of Halle. 

Some time later he joined the Volunteer Company of Royal Prussian Troops in Soest, again using the name of Beuerlein. After he had been in the company for about a year, Professor Franken wrote to the company priest and Beuerlein was sent away. As Catharina, she returned to Halle and stayed one summer. 

Then Anastasius went to Wittenberg and joined the royal Polish troops as a musketeer with the name of Peter (or Lagrantinus) Wannich. On being captured by the French in a campaign near Brussels he ran away. He then served for a year with the Hessian troops in Rheinfels in Major Briden's Volunteers as Cornelius Hubsch, but ran away when after a fight he was to have run a gauntlet. 

During these period of military service, he had alternated between Catholicism and Lutheranism as circumstances dictated. He was also something of a woman chaser. Then again as Catharina she returned to Halle and made flannel, and spun and printed cotton. She stayed at this for almost four years, sometimes dressing as male, sometimes as female. Once in Halle she was arrested by soldiers, but because of Professor Franken and his disclosure of her sex, she was let go. 

On this occasion she was taken to the Rathaus to truly determine her sex. After this inspection he reverted to male. He got a job with a French stockingmaker in Halberstadt, and became acquainted with a Fraulein Muehlhahn, also called Catharina Margaretha. They wed despite the antagonism of Catharina’s mother. However Anastasius beat Catharina because she did not earn anything, and sold her goods. They lived as itinerant beggars, and converted back and forth between Catholicism and Lutheranism for Christening gifts as much as 25 reichstalers. 

His mother-in-law, assisted by a woman called Peterson, attacked him with a sword, ripped open his trousers, and detached the leather instrument that was attached to his groin. Catharina was charged with wearing men’s clothes, going with the Pietists, frequent desertions and perjuries, sodomizing her wife, stealing from her wife and converting for monetary gain. 

After a legal dispute about which method of execution was most appropriate, Anastasius was beheaded, and Catherina Margaretha was imprisoned.
  • The Prussian State Archives, Halberstadt, 13 October 1721.
  • F.C. Müller.  “Ein weiterer Fall von conträrer Sexualempfindung”  in Friedreich’s Blätter für gerichtliche Medizin und Sanitätspolizei. Heft 4. 1891.
  • Brigitte Erikksson (translation From The German). “A Lesbian Execution In Germany, 1721: The Trial Records”.   Journal of Homosexuality.  Vol 6(1/2) Fall/Winter 1980/81.  Reprinted in Salvatore J. Licata, & Robert P. Peterson (eds). Historical Perspectives On Homosexuality. 1981 
  • Angelika Steidele. In Männerkleidern. Das verwegene Leben der Catharina Margaretha Linck alias Anastasius Rosenstengel, hingerichtet 1721. Biografie und Dokumentation. Böhlau: Wien 2004.
DE.Wikipedia. ___________________________________________________________________________________

First contray sexual-feeling and then lesbian.  None of the commentaries propose FTM or trans man.  The de.wikipedia page was originally called "Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel" (see the URL) but has been renamed to “Catharina Margaretha Linck” which is going in the wrong direction.

    23 September 2010

    Dianna Boileau (1930 - 2014) secretary.

    A boy born in a Winnipeg home for unwed mothers was adopted by Mr Boileau, a forest ranger, and his wife, and named Clifford. They lived in Manitoba and then western Ontario. 

    In Fort Frances, Clifford consulted Dr Challis who realized that he was transsexual. Dr Challis had studied with Dr Robert Ernest Cowell in London. Dr Cowell was the father of Roberta

    Clifford acquired experience in office work by working for Dr Challis and a local Lawyer. At 17 Clifford, with his parents' approval, set out alone for Winnipeg. It was Dianna who got off the train. She stayed in a modest hotel and applied for secretarial work. However the police visited her because she had spent time in the lobby and talked to people. She confessed her male identity which quite confused the policemen. Her parents came to take her home. 

    Dr Challis explained the situation to them of having a daughter, and her parents moved to Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay) so that Dianna could start her new life. However her mother was uncomfortable in the big city of 30,000, and they went back to Fort Frances. 

    Dianna moved to Calgary. She obtained work as a stenographer and art-school model. She developed a friendship with Rosemary, a divorced elevator operator. She and Rosemary shared a home. After getting too close to a man, and not wanting him to find out her sex, Dianna persuaded Rosemary to move to Edmonton.
    She got a job as an instructor in a dance school. She got drunk for the first time with one of the other instructors, and they were arrested for petty vandalism. When her maleness came out she was sent to a mental hospital for an evaluation. The hospital outed her to Rosemary, but it made no difference. Dianna and Rosemary moved to Toronto. Dianna found employment as a stenographer in a law firm. 

    On a stifling June night in 1962, Dianna and Rosemary went for a midnight car ride to cool down, were sideswiped, and Rosemary died after the car hit the guardrail. Dianna's boss, being a lawyer, took charge. She told him that she was a transsexual. On the third day, she returned to work, and was arrested that afternoon, charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous driving. She was read by the prison matron, and transferred to men's facilities. She spent 4 days in the Don Jail for men, until her boss raised the bail amount. Her case also became a media sensation. She and her boss were bickering under the stress, and they mutually agreed that she should get another job. Dianna was arraigned as both Clifford and Dianna but was allowed to dress as Dianna. She was acquitted of criminal negligence at a trial in September. At the trial for dangerous driving in February, after 10 minutes the all-male jury also returned a verdict of not guilty. 

    Dianna started drinking, lost her job and used up all her savings, and attempted suicide. The attempt outed her at hospital, and the police informed her landlady. However the landlady took her in hand, stopped her drinking, and pushed her to get a new job. 

    She met other transsexuals, obtained leaflets from the Erickson Educational Foundation, and phoned Dr Leo Wollman in New York, which resulted in a prescription for female hormones from a local doctor. She started electrolysis. In 1969, she and a friend called Bambi, went to New York to be castrated by a doctor in Yonkers. They took four days to recover from this. In August she approached the gynecological department of Toronto General Hospital and was referred to Dr Betty Steiner at the new gender identity clinic that was being formed at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry

    She underwent several months of evaluation, which included two weeks as an inpatient at the Clarke Institute, and getting a local social worker to interview her parents. She was sent to the penile plethysmograph, but was allowed to exit in disgust. Dianna became the first transsexual patient to be approved for surgery by the GIC, the first to be financed by the Ontario Health Insurance Program.  Was hers the first transsexual surgery in Canada?  There were some others at about the same time at McGill University and one at Dalhousie University. 

    Her operation was on 20 April 1970 at the Toronto General Hospital. The Edgerton technique devised at Johns Hopkins was used. Dr Steiner gave her a kiss as she went under the anaesthetic. Dianna was kept in the hospital for three months before being discharged. She gave a press conference in mid-September, giving only her first name. However she was overshadowed by Leo Wollman who flew up for the event, and predicted that transsexual women would be able to become pregnant within 10 years. 

    Dianna wrote her autobiography in 1972, dedicated to Betty Steiner, with an Introduction by Leo Wollman, and has stayed out of the news ever since.
    • "Woman Driver, 32, Found to Be Male". The Globe and Mail. June 16, 1962.
    • "Man Dressed as Woman: Lawyer, Magistrate in Conflict". The Globe and Mail. July 21, 1962.
    • "Dressed as Woman, Man Acquitted, Sobs". The Globe and Mail. Sept 7, 1962.
    • "Dressed as Woman, Man goes on Trial". The Globe and Mail. Feb 8, 1963.
    • "All-Male Jury Acquits Driver in June Death". The Globe and Mail. Feb 12, 1963.
    • "Identity Concealed: Sex-change surgery is first for Canada". The Globe and Mail. April 23, 1970.
    • Kathleen Rex. "Canada's first sex-swapper asks for understanding: Doctor sees day coming when transplants will enable fathers to become mothers". The Globe and Mail. Sept 16, 1970.
    • Dianna as told to Felicity Cochrane, with an Introduction by Leo Wollman. Behold, I Am a Woman. New York: Pyramid Books, 1972. 
    •  "Dianna: Canada's first sex change patient".   All About Women.  With host: Margo Lane; guest: Dianna Boileau.  CBC 11 mins May 29, 1972.  www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/dianna-canadas-first-sex-change-patient.
    ___________________________________________________________


    Dianna seems to have been a bit naughty and practiced time compression in her autobiography.  She states that in 1962, the time of the trial, she was 15 years younger than Rosemary who was about to turn 40, which would have made her 24.  In addition the book leaves the impression that she was one year in Calgary and less in Edmonton, and my mental image while reading it was that she was in her early twenties when the car accident happened. However the Globe and Mail articles on her trial state that Dianna was 32 and Rosemary 45.  Hence Dianna must have been born in 1930, and will be 80 now.

    With the revised chronology, Clifford was a patient of Dr Challis in 1946-7.  So the statement, that he knew about transsexualism in that he had studied with Dr Robert Ernest Cowell, is odd in that Roberta had not started her transition then.

    Dr Wollman is an unreliable narrator as we know from his movie, Let Me Die a Woman, and his prediction of organ transplants so that trans women can have babies, is the same nonsense that he spouts in the 1978 film.  Ten years from 1970 is 1980.  We are 30 years further on and it is still not likely.

    If the Clarke GIC had continued the personal service that it gave to Dianna, it would have a much better reputation.


     

    19 September 2010

    Taff al-Khalifa (1978 - ) princess, soldier.

    Latifa al-Khalifa was Sheika Latifa, and niece to Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain who became Emir in 1999 and King in 2002. At 12 Latifa was sent to a girls’ boarding school in Gloucestershire, England.

    At 16, on return to Bahrain, she demanded to join the army, a normal step for princes, but unheard of for a princess. The king finally agreed, and Latifa was sent to Sandhurst for officer training – one of 90 women out of 400 soldiers. Later with the Bahraini army, she didn’t have the body strength to lift heavy weapons, and after a hip injury was medically discharged.

    She became part of Bahrain’s underground gay scene, but as it is transphobic, she pretended to be a lesbian. She was picked up by the police’s discipline squad but they saw from her ID card that she was royalty.

    As pressure to marry as a woman mounted she escaped during a family visit to London in 1999, and he became Taff. The family has tried to kidnap him. He has applied for asylum in the UK. 

    17 September 2010

    Alexander James Adams (196? - ) musician.

    Heather Alexander was raised in California, and was later based in Oregon. She performed Celtic and World music. She was an accomplished fiddler and also played the acoustic guitar and bodhran. She played in the groups Uffington Horse and Phoenyx and well as performing solo. She was known for performing at science fiction conventions.


    In 2007, after a 25 year career and 10 albums, Heather transitioned and became Alexander James Adams. He has continued performing in the same venues that Heather played in, and has played with Uffington Horse.

    In 2007 he released Wintertide which features duets between Heather’s and Adam’s voices.

      EN.Wikipedia     www.heatherlands.com


    15 September 2010

    John Henry Newman (1801-90) theologian, cardinal.

    The son of a London banker, Newman was educated at Great Ealing School and Trinity College, Oxford. He became a Christian at 15, and an Anglican priest at 24. He was a leader in the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, converted to Catholicism in 1845, and was created a Cardinal in 1879.

    Officially he was celibate all his life. However he had intense friendships with younger men, first with Richard Froude who died aged 33 in 1836, and then he lived with Ambrose St John from 1843, when St John was 28, until St John's death in 1875.

    Newman was not the most masculine of men. John Campbell Shairp described Newman as a woman’s soul in man's body. Lytton Strachey described his "soft spectacled Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence". Another contemporary described him:
    “Robust and ruddy sons of the Church looked on him with condescending pity as a poor fellow whose excessive sympathy, restless energy, and general unfitness for this practical world would soon wreck him. Thin, pale, and with large lustrous eyes ever piercing through this veil of men and things, he hardly seemed made for this world”.
    Another:
    “Early in the evening a singularly graceful figure in cap and gown glided into the room. The slight form and gracious address might have belonged either to a youthful ascetic of the middle ages or to a graceful high-bred lady of our own days.”
    Wilfred G. Ward, another English convert to Catholicism reported a dream that had had a strong impact on him:
    “He found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he exclaimed, ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford’. ‘I am John Henry Newman’, the lady replied, and raising her veil showed the well-known face."
    In his later years a similar impression remained. One colleague described him as 'white, frail and wistful', and another as 'delicate as an old lady, washed in milk'.

    His major writings were his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1866 and Grammar of Assent, 1870. His poem Gerontius was later put to music by Edward Elgar.

    He died in 1890 and in accordance with his wishes was buried in the grave of Ambrose St John. A joint memorial stone was erected: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

    In 1991 the Catholic Church proclaimed him as venerable, a first stage on the road to becoming a saint. In 2008 the Church, having obtained a special exception to UK law, opened the grave to separate the two men and to place the remains of Newman in a reliquary in the Birmingham Oratory, but his body had completely decomposed. Peter Tatchell condemned the separation as 'moral vandalism' in an article in The Times. Newman was beatified during the Pope's visit to the UK in September 2010.
    • Peter Gay. The Tender Passion. Oxford University Press. 1987 : 236n39.
    • Elaine Showalter. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture At The Fin De Siecle. Viking 1990: 149.
    • Geoffrey Faber. Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement. Faber & Faber. 1974 (1933) p32-4.
      EN.Wikipedia 
    _____________________________________________________________

    The argument for St John and Newman being a gay couple is as strong as that for Hoover and Tolson minus the evidence of Susan Rosentiel re the drag parties. As Peter Tatchell said:  "It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person's sexual orientation." 

    Newman certainly seems to have been more anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa than Karl Ulrichs was.


    Which of the ancient gods of England, Lugh perhaps or Yngvi, arranged it that his body was fully decomposed before the Catholics came looking for relics?



      13 September 2010

      Kiira Triea (1951 - 2012) intersex/HSTS activist, guitarist, Linux geek.

      Denise Magner has claimed that she was born at the US Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, but also that she was born in Finland. Either at birth or aged 2 she was assigned as a boy. He grew up in the Baltimore area. After puberty, as Denise, she became a lesbian-separatist, and also a hard rock musician. 

      She also tried living as a man for a while, and became a patient of The Johns Hopkins Hospital Psychohormonal Research Unit and of John Money, and was operated on in 1974 by Howard Jones.

      Later, in 1993, as Denise Tree she became editor of Linux News, and at this time was using a jhu.edu id (Johns Hopkins University). She was also a bicycle maker and metalworker. She took the name Kiira from the character in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

      Kiira Triea was an early member with Cheryl Chase (Bo Laurent) of the Intersex Society of North America, (ISNA) and had an article in the first issue, 1994, of Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and maintained their website. In 1997 she founded the Coalition for Intersex Support Activism & Education (CISAE). Her essay of that year, “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”, about her experiences at Johns Hopkins and being forced to be either male or female, was originally published by Dallas Denny in Chrysalis and reprinted in Dreger's Intersex in the Age of Ethics. The essay says that she was 14 when she went to Johns Hopkins. 

      She is credited with the design of the Phall-O-Meter, a useful tool for intersex activists to mock the doctors’ obsession that a clitoris must be less that 0.9 cm and penis more than 2.5 cm. 

      In her essay "Learning about transsexuality from transsexuals", Kiira explains that after she became an intersex activist, she was approached by supposed intersex persons, and claims that over 99% of them were lying. Many claimed to be true hermaphrodites or Klinefelter's but were obviously not.
      "Finally, I began to understand transsexuality, as it was expressed by socially privileged former men, in terms of being antithetical to my understanding of the underlying socio-political causes of intersex oppression and at odds with my goals as an intersex activist. Certainly there are many conceptual frameworks within which intersex can be understood but I found feminism to be useful because it addressed the core issues of what sexualities and what bodies are allowable by an androcentric technocracy and answered questions like why would doctors create non-functional female genitals in children, not bothering to determine the results of those interventions for decades. I also began to wonder why the natural biological variation of intersex, which did not actually result in socially expressed 'gender variance', was not allowed while the biological variation and socially obvious gender variance that resulted when adult men attempted to modify their bodies to become female was allowed."
      "I began then in 1997 to understand transsexuality and its supporting model of 'gender identity' not as medical syndrome but as a social instrument which eradicated understanding in order to preserve social privilege".
      On the other hand, she found that HSTS or trans-kids were quite different:
      "None of them had tried to write to me for several reasons, first was that they were not motivated to acquire any other legitimizing identity as were autogynephilic transsexuals because their social identities and personal identities were congruent. They simply seemed like normal feminine girls or women whose social ‘gender’ or what Suzanne Kessler calls ‘gender attribution’ was immediately obvious both in their appearance and behavior and required no theoretical explanation. They did not present themselves to me as intersex nor did they advocate for transsexuality to be classified as an ‘intersex condition’ because, in common with intersex children, they were a socially devalued population who were often medicalized harmfully as children."
      These persons she had invited to her intersex groups. Kiira herself was invited by Michael Bailey to join his closed SEXNET mailing list. She became an advocate for Bailey's variation on Blanchard's ideas. 

      In 2004 Kiira launched the transkids.us website which endorsed the Blanchardian concept of 'homosexual transsexual' in distinction to autogynephiles. It was very quickly linked to by the Anne Lawrence and Michael Bailey websites. Kiira became the one and only public HSTS, although people pointed out that if she were a lesbian intersex, she could hardly be an HSTS (= heterosexual trans woman). 

      Kiira died from cancer at age 61.
      ___________________________________________________________

      This is an overview of Kiira.  See the Andrea James pages for the details of her alternate autobiographies.

      Triea, Dreger, Kessler all moved from ISNA to the Bailey camp.

      Born in 1951, Triea was 61 when she died.  The only photographs available are from decades ago.

      Dreger’s first essay is a defense of Triea after what James wrote.  However it merely dismisses ‘loony things said about Kiira on certain sites’ and does not address the issues.  Nor does she give any explanation at all why an intersex woman would be running an HSTS site.

      Sophia Siedlberg has problems with intersex activism as radical-feminism.  Feminism is many things, not just trade-union activism for women.  One of the other things is a radical deconstruction of the sex-gender system.  Intersex activism also deconstructs the sex-gender system.

      11 September 2010

      Betty Steiner (1920 - 1994) psychiatrist.

      Betty married Andrew Conduit who worked for Reader's Digest from 1948-1979, eventually rising to Senior Vice president, and they lived in the upscale Castle Frank area of Toronto.

      Dr Steiner, MB, FRCP (C) was a general practitioner for several years, and then retrained as a psychiatrist. She was appointed psychiatrist at the Women's College Hospital, where she was included in a 1963 Globe and Mail article on women in the professions. In 1969 she became the first head of the newly created Gender Identity Clinic at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. "I wanted to do some clinical research, and as I knew nothing about transsexualism it seemed an interesting field to explore (Steiner, 1985: xi)".

      Later the same year she personally guided the Clinic's first client approved for surgery, Dianna Boileau, through the process, even giving her a kiss as she went under the anaesthetic. Dianna dedicated her autobiography to Dr Steiner.

      At the January 1973 meeting of the Ontario Psychiatric Association, Dr Steiner reported that six patients had been operated on, five of them in the previous six months.

      In 1981 she examined inmate Katherine Johnson and recommended female hormones but was ignored. She did not see Katherine again until 1989. In 1982 Dr Steiner and Dr Hucker wrote a report for Correctional Services of Canada that recommended that gender variant inmates be 'frozen' at the stage of feminization or masculinization that they were at when incarcerated. They were to be placed in accordance with their 'anatomical structures'. Hormone treatment but not sex-reassignment surgery could be provided.

      In The Globe and Mail in 1983, Dr Steiner reported that "between 1975 and 1983, the clinic had 111 surgical patients, of which 59 were biological males wishing to become females and 52 females wishing to become men" and "women who become men are much more stable as a group than their counterparts". In 1984 in the Toronto Star she attributed the social success of the 102 clients who had had surgical sex change through the Clinic in its first 15 years to the fact that only 1 in 10 'men' who request it are approved.

      Through the mid-1980s she apparently got on well with Susan Huxford, the leader of the peer-support group FACT, perhaps because they were both women of a similar attitude and of almost the same age. She was delighted to get gossip from Huxford re the activities of the transsexuals in Toronto and Hamilton. At the same time patients at the GIC were complaining more of how they were treated. Certainly the special treatment that Dianna Boileau had been given was not continued.

      In 1985 she edited the anthology Gender Dysphoria wherein the foundations of the Autogynephilia-HSTS binary are clearly laid out. She has her name with others on several of the foundation texts that had been published elsewhere, but in the essays in the book authored by herself alone the ideology is muted, although she still divides male-born transsexuals into homosexual and heterosexual (based on their birth body), insists that all female-born transsexuals are homosexual (i.e. gynephilic) and that only male-born persons are ever fetishistic. She regards a trans woman finding a husband as ‘unusual’. She feels that many transsexuals have poor impulse control. She was at first a follower of Robert Stoller, but having Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard on her staff, it is no surprise that she drifted to their conceptualizations. She echoes Stoller's claim that there have been only three female transvestites. She speculated that transsexual women (i.e trans men) differ from lesbians because of a "sustaining influence of the high level of aggression within the family of the' transsexual-to be' (Steiner, 1985: 420)".

      She retired as head of the clinic in 1986 and was replaced by Robert Dickey. However she co-edited a further anthology on the work of the GIC in 1990, and contributed a paper on Intake Assessment.

      In 1994 Mr & Mrs Conduit were overcome by fumes from a car that had been left running in the garage of their home. Steiner died at the time, and her husband 10 days later.
      • Eric Haworth. "The bright promise of the professions". The Women's Globe and Mail. May 9. 1963.
      • Dianna as told to Felicity Cochrane. Behold, I Am a Woman. New York: Pyramid Books, 1972.
      • Leone Kirkwood. "Work described with children having 2 sexes". The Globe and Mail. Jan 27, 1973.
      • Kurt Freund, E. Nagler, R. Langevin, A. Zajac, B. Steiner. "Measuring Feminine Gender Identity in Homosexual Males, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 3, 1974: 249-260.
      • C Nelson, D.Paitich and B. W. Steiner. “Medicolegal Aspects of Transsexualism.” Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 21(8), Dec. 1976: 557-564.
      • Betty W. Steiner, S.M. Bernstein, J.T.D. Glaister and C. Muir. "Metamorphosis: Cross-gender identity formation in females vs males". AGM. Canadian Psychiatric Association. Halifax. Oct 17-20, 1978.
      • Betty W. Steiner. "From Sappho to Sand: Historical perspective on crossdressing and cross gender". Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 26, 1981: 502-6.
      • Kurt Freund, Betty W. Steiner, & S. Chan, “Two types of cross-gender identity”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 49–63. 1982.
      • John Fitzgerald. “Transsexuals tread a path fraught with doubt, pain”. The Globe and Mail. Oct 27, 1983.
      • Ray Blanchard, Leonard H. Clemmensen & Betty W. Steiner. "Gender reorientation and psychosocial adjustment in male-to-female transsexuals". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 12, 1983: 503–509.
      • Ray, Blanchard, J. G. McConkey, V. Roper & Betty W. Steiner. "Measuring physical aggressiveness in heterosexual, homosexual, and transsexual males". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 12, 1983: 511–524.
      • Lillian Newbery. "Trans-Sexuals happier after operation, MD says". Toronto Star. Nov 27, 1984. Online at: www.tsroadmap.com/info/clarke-institute.html.
      • Betty W. Steiner (ed) . Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management. New York & London: Plenum Press. 1985.
      • Betty Steiner. "The Management of Patients with Gender Disorders", “Transsexuals, Transvestites, and their Partners”, "A Personal Perspective". In Steiner, 1985.
      • Ray Blanchard, Leonard H Clemmensen and Betty W. Steiner. “Social Desirability Response Set and Systematic Distortion in the Self-Report of Adult Male Gender Patients.”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 14(6),1985: 505-516.
      • Ray Blanchard, Betty W. Steiner and Leonard H. Clemmensen, “Gender Dysphoria, Gender Reorientation, and the Clinical Management of Transsexualism.”. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology 53(3), 1985: 295-304.
      • R. Blanchard, I. Rachansky & B. Steiner. "Phallometric detection of fetishistic arousal in heterosexual male cross-dressers". Journal of Sex Research, 22, 1986: 452-462.
      • Ray Blanchard, Leonard H. Clemmensen and Betty W.Steiner. “Heterosexual and Homosexual Gender Dysphoria.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 16(2), 1987: 139-152.
      • Ray Blanchard, Betty W. Steiner, Leonard H. Clemmensen & R. Dickey. "Prediction of regrets in postoperative transsexuals". Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 34, 1989: 43–45.
      • Ray Blanchard & Betty W. Steiner (eds.). Clinical management of gender identity disorders in children and adults. : American Psychiatric Press. 1990
      • Cal Miller. "Fumes kill psychiatrist, husband clings to life Car left running in garage of Rosedale home". The Toronto Star. Feb 17, 1994.
      • Alan Barnes. "Andrew Conduit, 80, held top post at Reader's Digest ". The Toronto Star. Mar 03, 1994.
      • Katherine Johnson and Stephanie Castle. Prisoner of Gender: A Transsexual and the System. Vancouver: Perceptions Press, 1997.
      Also see other patient experiences with Dr Steiner at Transsexual Road Map here and here.
      ___________________________________________________________

      Only an MB and “I knew nothing about transsexualism”.  So of course she got the top job in the Clinic.

      07 September 2010

      Carlotta (1943 - ) performer.

      Richard Byron from Balmain was illegitimate and abused by his stepfather. He ran away to Sydney, became Carlotta and joined Les Girls drag cabaret show in Sydney in 1965. The show, which had started in 1963 in a building, at the corner of Darlinghurst Rd and Roslyn St, then owned by gangster Abe Saffron. It struggled until it was featured on Channel 9's Australian Project '65 which had a dressing room interview with the then unknown Carlotta (see video below).  The show went on to great success and became a must-see for visitors to Sydney. 

      Carlotta stayed with the show for 26 years, rising to become its compere and most famous star. Carlotta styled herself "Queen of the Cross” (Kings Cross, Sydney, NSW). 

      She first appeared (with Edna Everage) on film in the pioneering Australian sex documentary, The Naked Bunyip, 1970. 

      She was featured in six episodes of the soap opera, Number 96, in 1973 under the actor pseudonym of Carolle Lea playing a character who admits that she is transsexual - this is the first time that a transsexual was cast as a transsexual on television. 

      She had previously had breast implants from Dr Lee in Hong Kong, and completed transition in 1972 with surgery at the Prince of Wales Hospital in the Sydney suburb of Randwick , and had one of the first three sex-change operations in Australia. Carol Bryon, as she now was, was introduced to her first post-op boyfriend, a television journalist, by Germaine Greer

      She was one of the inspirations for the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. She retired from Les Girls in 1992, and published her first autobiography two years later. For several years has been a panellist on the TV show Beauty and the Beast. In 2003 she was featured on the television biography show, This is Your Life, and published a second, more explicit, autobiography. In recent years she has toured Australia with her own shows.

      A dramatized biography of Carlotta aired on ABC television in June 2014, starring cis actor Jessica Marais.   
      • Carlotta with James Cockington. He did it her way: Carlotta, legend of Les Girls. Ironbark. 159 pp 1994. A biography.
      • “Carlotta”. Aussie Soap Archive. members.ozemail.com.au/~fangora/carlotta.html. 2002, 2001, 2003.
      • “Carlotta”. This Is Your Life. Sept 2003.
      • Carlotta with Prue MacSween. I'm Not That Kind of Girl. Pan Macmillan. 2003. 
      • Ken Johnson.  Kandy: What a drag!  Sydney 2009: 15,84.
      • Daphne Guinness. "The queen who makes a reluctant subject". The Sydney Morning Herald. Aug 30, 2003. www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/29/1062050659178.html
      • Samantha Lang (dir).  Carlotta.   With  Jessica Marais as Carlotta.   ABC television, 18 June 2014.  
      EN.Wikipedia     www.carlotta.com.au
      ___________________________________________________________

      The Wikipedia page for Balmain does include Carlotta among its notable residents.

      The Aussie Soap Archive says of Carlotta’s surgery: “She paid just $5 for the procedure - the figure was to cover the costs of the legal documents that Carlotta signed, waiving any right of recompense from the hospital should the operation go wrong. Carlotta happily went under the knife, the operation was a success, and she never regretted it.”

      It is ironic that Carlotta, who pioneered  trans playing trans in 1973, is portrayed by a cis actor in the 2014 biography.






      05 September 2010

      Eric Derk Crichton (1919 - ) gynecologist.

      Derk's father, Eric Cuthbert Crichton was Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at Cape Town University. Derk graduated from Cape Town University with an MD and a B.Ch in 1944. He was registered as a member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (M.R.C.O.G.) in 1952 and graduated from Oxford University with a D.Phil in 1953 and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh the same year. He was then appointed professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at Natal University (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal), and Head of the Division of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, King Edward VIII and McCord's Hospitals, Durban, South Africa. 

      In 1972 Dr Crichton was found guilty of providing safe abortions for unmarried white women in the Durban area. The trial was heavily covered in the South African press, and as a result the Apartheid government passed new laws in 1975 to restrict abortion for white women. 

      Crichton wrote a much cited paper on the value of Cephalo-Pelvimetry.

      In 1993, when he wrote a paper on gender surgery for the South African Medical Journal, he had done 58 such surgeries over the previous 24 years. His most famous patient in this regard was Lauren Foster.

      03 September 2010

      Lauren Foster (1957 - ) model, party promoter, marketing consultant.

      Foster was born and raised in Durban. She transitioned at the age of 18 with the support of her family, surgery by Derk Crichton.

      Lauren started working as a model in Johannesburg and then Paris and was featured regularly in magazines and advertisements. However she was disqualified from the Miss South Africa Pageant. Her big break was in 1980 when she was hired by Vogue to do a 6-page fashion editorial. She was outed by the tabloid Scope, when another model sold the story, which resulted in ignorant press attention. In 1984, when out transsexual Teri Toye had been marketed as the girl of the 1980s, Circulate magazine dedicated six pages to Lauren.

      She worked as tour manager for Grace Jones, and then for Boy George. Then she worked for 12 years as a party promoter. She had a cameo role in the film Circuit, 2001.

      She had an affair with Prince Egon Von Furstenburg and Arturo Durazo Moreno, the Mexican Chief of Police,  She has been married for over 10 years, and works as marketing consultant for a cosmetic surgery clinic.

      He has been writing her autobiography, Danse Sauvage.

      *Not the Financial Times journalist.

      01 September 2010

      Franciszek Neugebauer (1856 – 1914) gynecologist

      In the 1850s when gynecology was just emerging as a medical speciality, Ludwik Neugebauer was a Polish pioneer in the field. His son Franciszek decided to qualify as a gynecologist. He studied first in Warsaw and then in Dorpat (now Tartu, Finland) where he gained his medical doctorate. He further studied in Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, Paris, London and Vienna before returning to Poland in 1887. In addition to Polish, he was also fluent in English, French and German. In 1897 he became chief of the Gynecological Department at the Evangelical Hospital in Warsaw, a position that he would hold until he died. 

      He developed a reputation for his work with hermaphroditism and with inborn deformities of the spine. Patients with malformations were sent to him from all over Poland and beyond. Neugebauer himself travelled all over Europe and North America to investigate reports of such cases. He carefully documented what he found in writing, photographs and casts. He readily shared his collection with other doctors. He regularly attended meetings of medical associations in these countries and was elected to memberships of the British Gynaecological Society, the Warsaw Medical Association, the Warsaw Science Association, the New York Obstetrical Society, the Paris Academy of Medicine, the Association of Pathologists in Brussels and Belgian Royal Academy of Science. 

      His writings consist mainly of observations with very little theory. He published in medical journals in Poland, Germany, France and Britain. Like most doctors of his generation he was very concerned to establish a person's 'true sex' for otherwise “disastrous consequences may follow an erroneous declaration of sex, and that not merely for the individuals immediately concerned, their families and connections, but for others besides". Consequences would include unhappiness, marriage to the same sex, divorce and even suicide. The 'true sex' of course was established by finding hidden testicles or ovaries, not by asking the person which sex they felt that they were. He was a major voice in the then emerging consensus that it is the gonads above all that determine a person's true sex. Other doctors needed to be educated to recognize the condition. In 1903 he published in the journal of the British Gynaecological Society "Hermaphroditism in the Daily Practice of Medicine: Being Information upon Hermaphroditism Indispensible to the Practitioner". He maintained that in addition to grave consequences resulting from erroneous determinations of sex, the frequency of such was that the ordinary practitioner could expect to encounter them. He advised his colleagues to go beyond prodding and poking, and search for evidence of ejaculation or amenorrhea in an apparent girl, and of menstruation in an apparent boy. He many times insisted: "pseudo-Hermaphroditism in its essence is a paradoxical incongruity between the genital glands on the one hand and the genital ducts and external genitals on the other". 

      His major work is Hermaphroditismus beim Menschen, 1908, which summarizes 2000 cases of hermaphroditism across history and around the world. He had observed forty or so of the cases first hand. 

      He authored 391 professional works, and was a member of 33 professional societies. He died at age 58.
      • Franz Ludwig von Neugebauer. Hermaphroditismus beim Menschen. Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1908.
      • Krzysztof Boczkowski. "Franciszek Neugebauer (1856-1914)--Pioneer in the Study of Hermaphroditism". Polish Medical Science and History Bulletin. 9, no. 4: 155-7, 1966.
      • Alice Domurat Dreger. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, Ma, Harvard University Press. 2000: 49, 61-3, 75, 76, 79-80, 83, 85, 90, 96, 97-8, 117-8, 146, 223n103.
      PL.WIKIPEDIA.
      ___________________________________________________________

      It took 81 years before Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten was translated into English.  Neugebauer’s Hermaphroditismus beim Menschen is still untranslated.  While the social construction of sex has moved on and we no longer regard the gonads as the ultimate arbiter of which sex we are, his book is presumable a work of scholarship according to standards of the early 20th century and if so would be well worth reading alongside Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis.

      I have attached the category ‘sex-change doctor’ to Neugebauer in that based on a person’s gonads he told several who had been raised female, were happily so and even married as such that they were men and must switch, and vice versa.

      I use the term ‘hermaphroditism’ here as that was the term used during Neugebauer’s lifetime.