The Autogynephilia Project

Thomas Hubbard (Wikipedia) was previously a classicist at the University of Texas-Austin who wrote/edited several important books on sex in ancient Greece and Rome, until some students took his discussions of ancient man-boy sexuality as a defence of modern pederasty and vandalised his house. This led to his retirement. He is now President and Executive Director of the William A Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies.

William A Percy (Wikipedia) is best known for The Age of Marriage in Ancient Rome (2003) and was a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (1990). The articles in the Encyclopedia on ‘Transvestism (Cross-dressing)’ and ‘Transsexualism’ were pretty bad generally, totally ignoring writings by trans persons, and also admiring the pioneering transphobe Janice Raymond - but they were written by the other two co-editors, not by Percy. See my “More on Wayne Dynes”. I did meet Percy in person. He asked me various questions re trans matters, but showed no conscious interest in autogynephilia as such - although he did offer to sponsor me to go to Fantasia Fair (which I declined).

Percy, before his death in 2022, maintained an extensive web site williamapercy.com but the Foundation set up in his name has allowed it to die.

The Foundation web page lists 14 projects, almost all related to male homosexuality. The odd one out is The Autogynephilia Project.

Let us start with the image on the Autogynephila Project page:

This is a 1841 painting of a cis woman admiring herself in a mirror by the Danish painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg.

Now the point of Autogynephilia is that it is a diagnosis of a type of boy or man who is sexually aroused by the idea of himself as female. Autoandrophilia is a girl or woman who likewise is sexually aroused by the idea of herself as male. One of the criticisms of the idea of Autogynephilia is that if there is actually such a thing, its most common occurrence is in post-pubertal teenage cis girls who are delighted by the changes in their maturing bodies. Some cis women continue to be autogynephilic well into maturity, as some cis men do continue to be autoandrophilic. If so, autogynephilia is a normal variation, not a mental illness. It occurs in mature trans women to the extent that transition is a sort of second puberty.

Very little research has been done on cis female autogynephilia, and thus there is no baseline against which to measure trans female autogynephilia.

However the Blanchard-Bailey-Zucker clique do not go with this interpretation.

The picture is definitely not an image of an autogynephilic trans girl.

So why this image? Does it imply that Hubbard etc do not understand what autogynephilia is supposed to be? Or is it a sly subversion of their own project?

What is Autogynephilia (AGP)?

Prior to 1910 the words ‘transvestite’ and ‘tranvestism’ had been used without specific reference to sexual arousal or orientation. The Paris police had been issuing permissions de travestissement since 1800 mainly to female-born persons living and/or working as male without reference to sexuality. In 1910 Magnus Hirschfeld published his Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb,(Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress) and two years later a pictorial supplement, Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb (Erotic crossdressing).

The inclusion of “erotischen Verkleidungstrieb” in the title misled later writers although we may note that many of the actual case studies in the former book do not report anything sexual as such. Due to criticisms that he had conflated homosexuality and transvestism in earlier writings, Hirschfeld had overcompensated, and for the 17 case studies that comprise Part 1, he systematically excluded androphilic transvestites. Eight years later in his Sexualpathologie he reversed this and reported 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 what he called automonosexual, but also include a small proportion of asexuals. Hirschfeld also arranged police permissions, translating the French permissions de travestissement as Transvestitenscheinen, and, as in Paris, the document was with reference to work, not to sexuality.

Various psychiatrists, notably Emil Gutheil and Wilhelm Stekel, mainly working as Freudian psychoanalysts, picked up on the erotic slant, and analysed their trans patients as needing to be cured. (Stekel apparently coined the term ‘paraphilia’.)

Kurt Freund, in Toronto in the 1980s was a pioneer in the application of penile plethysmography. This tool claimed to measure penile arousal when a ‘man’ was shown various pictures of adults and children or listened to descriptions of such. The results of this research were such that Freund was never able to identify anyone as bisexual, and so, rather than see this as a defect in his methodology, he claimed that there are no bisexuals. Despite this deficiency, he used penile plethysmography, to divide trans women into two groups whom he designated as ‘homosexual’ and ‘non-homosexual’. For both types, the term ‘homosexual’ for heterosexual trans women denies that we are women.

Ray Blanchard, who replaced Freund at Toronto’s Clarke Institute (now CAMH=Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) coined the term ‘autogynephilia’ for the ‘non-homosexual’ group. In his “Origins of the Concept of Autogynephilia” he defines it as “a male’s propensity to be erotically aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman”. Blanchard was criticised for dismissing exceptions to his model as either misreportings or even lies.

Other approaches

Of course the word “autogynephilia” is simply “love of oneself as a woman” using Greek roots. Apparently most of the cross-dressers and gynephilic trans women who do use the term “autogynephilic” for themselves use it in this sense without the baggage of fetish or erotic arousal. Indeed an actual erotic arousal while out shopping or on public transport is very likely to be problematic.

Anne Vitale proposed a 3-type division: G1 the high intensity trans person who often starts to transition in childhood; G2 persons who spend some years as a lesbian or gay man before transition; G3 persons who conform to society’s gender expectations, often marry and have children - they typically suffer increasingly painful and chronic gender dysphoria and live secretive lives. G1 and G2 transition without trauma, requiring medical assistance only for hormone prescriptions and gender surgery. G3 need help dealing with what she calls Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD) which seems to be similar to AGP but offers a healthier solution.

There is a cultural problem in that AGPs seem to be found only in North America and Europe. Rod Fleming claims to identify AGPs in the Philippines and wrote about his affair with Samantha whom he presents as AGP. He sees Filipino AGPs as not androphilic, but like androphilic trans women they transition before maturity although after puberty. In which case they do not go through the fetishistic (GEDAD) phase - and therefore do not meet Blanchard's definition.

Charlotte Goiar proposed the concept of Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) as opposed to autogynephiles. To many, HBS and Blanchard’s Homosexual Transsexual (HSTS) appear to be almost the same, but HBS and Blanchardianism are two solitudes not talking to each other.

Jack Molay took what is useful in the concept of autogynephila and came up with Crossdreamer - ‘transvalued’ as he says. “The act of dreaming about being one’s target sex or getting aroused by the idea of being one’s target sex. Crossdreamer is a subcategory under the wider umbrella term ‘transgender’ … Crossdreamers may be assigned male or female at birth. Their sexual orientation varies. There is no clear and distinct boundary between crossdreamers and other transgender people.” Crossdreamer is not a synonym for autogynephilia in that it does not require erotic arousal.

The anti-trans people, TERFs, Trump’s Maga people, and various religious groups, are delighted by the concept of Autogynephilia. They see all transsexuality as inauthentic, and a mental condition to be cured. Blanchardism feeds their prejudices and they see even HSTS as autogynephilic. “Autogynephilia” has become a strong insult term applied without discrimination.

Meanwhile out in the trenches of living as AGP, Rosey Bloomflower, a self described autogynephilic wrote comments on my encyclopedia two years ago: “Interestingly, the majority of the soi-disant autogynephiles in my generation (bear in mind I am quite young, going on 20 right now) seem to be exclusively attracted to other trans women. I have a boyfriend at the moment, but sometimes a relationship with a non-op trans woman does seem appealing. I am not attracted to genetic females or anyone with a vagina even if surgically constructed”. This is way beyond Blanchard. “It is my belief that the majority of "AGP" trans women are primarily attracted to other trans women, and only force themselves to sexually interact with cis women out of heteronormativity and internalized homophobia. You can see many cases where they divorce their cis wives if they had one, and partner with another trans woman after transitioning.”

I commented in reply: “Two trans women attracted to each other is a type of homosexuality. 'homo' = 'same' not 'male'. If they also self-id as AGP then they are homosexual AGPs, but Blanchard's definition of AGP (bi, hetero and asexual) is that AGPs are non-homosexual. So here we have an interesting contradiction of terms. Blanchard is a closeted gay man who has made comments outside his theoretical works that are even more anti-trans. His whole schema is a cisplaining using insulting terms/exonyms derived from the dubious concept of 'fetishism', and he has even refused to restate it in more polite terms.”

Recently, psychologist James Morandini has proposed that as many as 1 in 3 bisexual men may be autogynephilic. So much for Freund’s erasure of bisexuality.

Conclusion

Of course the problem with any Typology is human beings are idiosyncratic, they are human. Some appear to fit into one of the boxes of the Typology; others are re-interpreted until they appear to fit; others read the Typology as an instruction manual; and many just do not fit in any way at all. See my The Game of Typology. Blanchard proposed only two types of trans woman; Vitale proposed three; Harry Benjamin proposed six (and, as has been noted, he erased gay transvestites and gynephilic ‘true transsexuals’ ); in my expansion of Benjamin’s scale I propose nine. One could easily come up with many more - especially when indigenous and Asian variations are considered.

Hubbard writes: “The Percy Foundation is funding further study of this marginalized identity by an international team of prominent sexual scientists, led by Prof. J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern, and including Blanchard, Ken Zucker … and the evolutionary psychologist Paul Vasey, as well as several others.”

This team can hardly be objective in that Bailey, Blanchard and Zucker have built careers by assuming that AGP is a real thing. For them to find that AGP is a valid diagnosis is like a defence lawyer also being the judge and jury.

Hubbard shows no discomfort at the misuse of the word “homosexual” for heterosexual trans women, as if we were still in the 1980s. It is long past the time when Blanchardians should have proposed a less contentious terminology. Alice Novic proposed the terms Love-to-be-femme and Act-femme. Phil Illy has proposed AutoHeterosexual. Neither of these have been accepted. The only alternate term that has gained traction is Cross Dreamer with its significant revision of what AGP is.

It may not be a real thing, but in the last 40 years, different writers have taken different approaches to the conceptual nexus that encompasses AGP, GEDAD and cross dreaming. There is no indication that The Androphilia Project will absorb any of that, or even discuss the absence of AGP in Africa and Asia, or in previous centuries. The sociology or social psychology of identity formation is not even mentioned.

The Androphilia Project needs a rethink, and should be done by other more neutral people, not those who invented the concept and built their careers on taking it as fact.

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

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

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

• Wilhelm Stekel. Der Fetischismus, vol. 7, Störungen des Trieb- und Affektlebens. Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1923. Translated by S Parker: Sexual Aberrations: The Phenomena of Fetishism in Relation to Sex. John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd, 1930.

• Kurt Freund, Betty Steiner & Samuel Chan. “Two types of cross-gender identity”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 1982.

• Kurt Freund. “Cross-Gender Identity on a Broader Context”. Chp 9 in Betty Steiner. Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management. Plenum Press, 1985.

• Ray Blanchard, J G Racansky & Betty Steiner. “Phallometric Detection of Fetishistic Arousal in Heterosexual Male Cross-Dressers”. The Journal of Sex Research, 22, 4, November 1986.

• Ray Blanchard. “Origins of the Concept of Autogynephilia”. Feb 2004. Previously online at www.autogynephilia.org/origins.htm.

• Anne M. Vitale. Gendered Self: Further Commentary on the Transsexual Phenomenon. Flyfisher Press/Lulu, 2010.

• Jack Molay. A Creative Crossdreamer Vocabulary: Reflections on Transgender. Amazon Digital & Blurb, 2015.

• Charlotte Goiar. The Original Harry Benjamin Syndrome Book. Self published, 2021.

• Phil Illy. AutoHeterosexual: Attracted to being the other sex. Houndstooth, 2023.

• “The Autogynephilia Project”. William A Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies. Online.

• Andrea James. “Thomas K. Hubbard vs. transgender people”. Transgender Map, November 3, 2025. Online.

• James Morandini. “One in Three Bisexual Men May Be Autogynephilic. Understanding Their Experience Matters”. QueerMajority, November 18, 2025. Online.

Shadows in the Irish Independent

This image accompanied an article on trans persons in the Irish Independent, 26 September 1987.  Readers of this encyclopedia will of course recognise the anguish of being trapped in the wrong gender.

Anyway I put the picture into Google App to see if the picture had been used elsewhere.

Google App totally failed to get it: -

"This puzzle requires matching the visual elements of the long shadow in the foreground to the correct person standing in the background.

The shadow belongs to the second woman from the left (the one wearing the sleeveless V-neck dress and a headband).

Visual Evidence Breakdown

• The Hair: The shadow shows long, wavy hair flowing backward with a distinct thick headband across the top of the head. Only the second woman is wearing a headband.
• The Dress/Sleeves: The shadow features sleeveless, bare arms connecting directly to the shoulder line. The woman on the far left has puffy short sleeves, and the woman on the right has long sleeves with a high collar.
• The Hands: The shadow's hands are clasped together tightly right in front of the waist. This matches the exact posture and hand placement of the second woman.

If you enjoy visual brainteasers, I can provide more puzzles. Would you prefer a logic grid puzzle, a lateral thinking riddle, or another spot-the-difference challenge?"

 

The Global Christines: surgical transition in the 1950s

 See also Timeline of transgender surgery to 1975.

The term is Howard Chiang’s and refers to the sequence of publicised transgender surgeries in the first half of the 1950s when Christine Jorgensen became the most publicised, and some of the other pioneers, especially in Mexico and Taiwan, were referred to as ‘Christines’.

The trans women in this period were usually regarded as the ‘first’. Claims in any field to be ‘first’ are often contentious, and act as a kind of rhetoric that brings out competing claims.

As readers of this encyclopedia know well, the surgical transitions in the early 1950s were not at all the first - although they were the first after hormonal therapy became available. Earlier, there had been: patients of Dr Il’ia Golianitski in Moscow in 1926; several of Magnus Hirschfeld’s patients in the late 1920s/early 1930s (Toni Ebel, Charlotte Charlaque, Dorchen Ritcher, Hertha Wind etc); Kurt Warnekros’ patient, Lili Elvenes; the patients of Charles Wolf in Switzerland in the 1940s.

Xie Jianshun was genuinely intersex, unlike Roberta Betty Cowell and some others who dubiously claimed to be intersex. Correction surgery on intersex adults, of course, dates back to the 19th century. In this article I will not distinguish between actual intersex, pretend intersex and straight-forward transsexuality.

This is a chronology, or, if you like, a time-entanglement, of the Global Christines. It is basically the Trans women who were featured in the press 1950-7 for having what was in those days called a ‘sex-change’. The stories of these women are continued as they publish autobiographies etc, and their deaths are mentioned when known. Georges Burou in Casablanca started doing ‘sex-change’ operations in 1956, and a new era developed. The first few of Burou’s patients are mentioned.

To simplify somewhat, I use the persons’ final names (or best known pseudonym where actual name is not publicly known). Note that Roberta Elizabeth Marshall Cowell, put her name as Roberta Cowell on her 1954 book, but to her acquaintances she was Betty. Georgina Turtle became Georgina Somerset by marriage.

Note on Mayhem: The common law crime of mayhem was committed by inflicting a wound that reduced a man's ability to fight. The crime was committed against the king also in that he required the use of fighting men. While implicitly the crime of Mayhem as threatened against trans women and their surgeons in the 1950s meant that a lack of a penis would prevent a soldier from raping women, in practice in the doctors were persuaded by the Mayhem law from orchiectomies only. If a trans woman did her own auto-orchiectomy, or obtained one in another country, the surgeons were then quite willing to to perform a penectomy and a vaginoplasty - these by twisted logic were not considered ‘mayhem’.

1937

Dr Stanley, Chief Surgeon of the California State Prison, St. Quentin, while examining an apparently male prisoner, discovered that the prisoner had been surgically transformed into a woman.

1941

Barbara Wilcox, Los Angeles, who had gained access to female hormones, was featured in the press as she petitioned the Superior Court of California to change her name and to become legally a woman. Her story was that two years earlier changes to feminine had occurred spontaneously, that she was a hermaphrodite. An endocrinologist, Marcus Graham, presented her case at a medical conference, attributing the change to an hormonal imbalance resulting from a childhood illness.

Betty Cowell, as a man, married, and they had daughters in 1942 and 1944.

1942

US citizen Charlotte Charlaque, Magnus Hirschfeld’s translator, who had had surgery in Berlin in 1929-30 from Erwin Gohrbandt, was deported from the Third Reich via Lisbon to New York.

1943

A 13-year-old boy, an inmate in the Auschwitz concentration camp, was subjected involuntarily, by doctors under the command of Josef Mengele, to a series of operations that turned him into a woman.

1944

Cowell, by then an RAF pilot, was shot down over Germany, and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner-of-war in Stalag Luft 1.

1945

November - there were rumours that an unnamed serving Sergeant (a full-time soldier and not a conscript) assigned to Hamburg was allowed to travel to Denmark for male-to-female surgery, after extensive medical evaluation by the Medical Officer and a psychologist.

Another rumor was that Pussy Katt, performer at Finnochio’s in San Francisco was taken up by Howard Hughes, and flown to Mexico City for castration/sex change. She was paid $50,000.

1948

Sally Barry, 22, Wisconsin, had been accepted for surgery, but the state attorney general’s office vetoed the decision as constituting mayhem.

Cowell separated from wife, and later secured a consultation with a Harley Street sexologist who gave a reference to a woman endocrinologist, who prescribed oestrogens.

Christine Jorgensen met with endocrinologist Harold Grayson in New Haven, Connecticut, but he merely sent her to a psychiatrist.

Charlotte Charlaque, made a living coaching young actors in “English diction”, and she also acted in several Off-Broadway productions. She met and corresponded with Harry Benjamin.

• Alfred Kinsey, WB Pomeroy and C E Martin Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, W.B. Saunders, 1948, uses the word ‘transsexual’ for a kind of homosexual considered as an intermediate sex.

1949

Sally Barry met and was interviewed by Alfred Kinsey in San Francisco as part of his research on sexual variance. Kinsey referred her to Harry Benjamin, who was staying in the same hotel, for help – this was Benjamin’s first transsexual patient - and he prescribed female hormones, x-ray castration and x-ray treatment to remove facial hair.

• David O. Cauldwell. ‘Psychopathia transexualis’. Sexology, 1949. 16: 274-280. A case study of a girl who wanted to be a boy, but had not transitioned. This paper was not much noticed. Harry Benjamin later commented: "Whether I had ever read that article and the expression remained in my subconscious, frankly, I do not know". Note the one ‘S’ spelling.

1950

May - Christine Jorgensen went to Denmark.

July - Jorgensen’s first meeting with endocrinologist Christian Hamburger in Copenhagen.

Nagai Akiko, a hostess and cabaret singer in Tokyo, had surgery 1950-1 at the Nippon Medical School Hospital 日本医科大学.

John Randell was appointed Physician for Psychological Medicine at Charing Cross Hospital, and later worked with trans patients.

Trans man Michael Dillon, medical student, performed an orchidectomy on his beloved Betty Cowell.

1951

May 15 - Betty Cowell’s vaginoplasty by Harold Gillies & Ralph Millard.

September 24 - Christine Jorgensen’s first operation, an orchiectomy.

Elmer Belt and his nephew Willard Goodwin in Los Angeles had quietly started doing vaginoplasties for trans women, mainly referred by Harry Benjamin. They got around the Mayhem restrictions by preserving the testicles, pushing them into the abdomen. While Belt was associated with the UCLA School of Medicine, he did not perform his operations there. They were usually done at the Good Samaritan Hospital. He predated the team led by Ehrling Dahl-Iversen in Copenhagen, and he was doing vaginoplasty using skin grafts from the thigh, buttocks or back while the Dahl-Iversen team was doing only orchiectomy and penectomy.

1952

November - Marta Olmos suffering from chronic amoebic colitis was treated at the Mexico City clinic of Rafael Sandoval Camacho and his team. They treated the colitis, but quickly realised that there was another issue to be addressed.

Tamara Rees and a Los Angeles psychiatrist consulted Dr Frederick Hartsuiker in Haarlem in the Netherlands by mail. Rees was already on hormones and dressing as female.

November - Christine Jorgensen’s second operation, a penectomy, by surgeon Ehrling Dahl-Iversen, chief surgeon at Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet.

December 1 - New York Daily News carried a front-page headline, “EX- GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth”.

1953

• Irmis Johnson with Christine Jorgensen. “The Story of my Life”. The American Weekly, February 1953.

• Christian Hamburger, Georg K Sturup & Ehrling Dahl-Iversen. “Transvestism: Hormonal, Psychiatric, and Surgical Treatment”. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 152, 5, 1953.

February, February 13 - Return of Christine Jorgensen to New York.

• Edward D Wood (dir & scr). Glen or Glenda, with Edward D Wood, Dolores Fuller, Bela Lugosi & Tommy Haynes as Alan/Anne. US 65 mins US April 1953. One segment re Alan who transitions as Anne. The first film about transsexualism, and the uses the word ‘transsexual’ before Harry Benjamin did. Jorgensen had been approached to appear in the film, but declined.

April - Charlotte Mcleod read about Christine Jorgensen and her operation in Copenhagen, and quickly took ship from New York to Denmark using a minor inheritance from a grand aunt. As a new Danish law restricted sex-changes to Danish nationals, Mcleod turned to a drugged-up renegade doctor, Dr Emil Petersen, for an orchiectomy. Then in great pain and hemorrhaging, and without her passport, she was admitted to Bispebjerg hospital. The first operation being already done, it was now legal to complete the transition. The Danish doctors led by Dr Jens Foged (1897 – 1956) agreed to do a penectomy and relocate the urethra. Christian Hamburger, who had attended to Christine Jorgensen, was the endocrinologist, and explained to Charlotte about the need for external hormones. She was unable to pay for the medical attention, and so the medical team worked free of charge.

Georgina Turtle was seeking professional help, and had mixed feelings when the Christine Jorgensen story broke:

"it immensely distressed me as I felt no one would believe that my own case had not been influenced by hers and that I might be different".

May - Marta Olmos’ first surgery, a penectomy.

The pioneering Mexican pharmaceutical company, Syntex, provided oestrogen and progesterone, and in effect Marta was a test subject for their untested product. Syntex later marketed the product as Norethisterone - which was used for birth control and menopausal therapy.

August - Claire Elgin using a local anesthetic, succeeded in an auto-orchiectomy – 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. Dr Karl Bowman, at San Francisco’s Langley Porter Clinic, took over the case and recommended further surgery to remove the penis.

August - Xie Jian Shun was suffering recurrent abdominal pains, and went to hospital in Tainan, Taiwan. Dr. Lin Chengyi, a graduate of the Tokyo Zhaohe Hospital and the external medicine department of the Jingjing Medical School, diagnosed the case carefully and found that Xie had a mixture of male and female organs. The details were discussed in the Taiwanese newspapers. The first operation, observed by out-of-town doctors and reporters, was an exploratory laparotomy (the opening of the abdominal cavity) to detect the presence of female organs. As reported in the press, Dr Lin assumed that Xie was a biological woman trapped inside a male body, whose feminine-like features gradually revealed themselves. The press compared Xie Jianshun to Christine Jorgensen, and noted that Jorgensen strongly wanted to be a woman, while Xie wanted to remain a heterosexual man. While the doctors were quite aware that actually Xie was intersex (yinyang ren 陰陽人), they talked of the coming operations as sex-change operations.

October - Francis Marie Jefferson moved to Toronto, and was admitted to the General Hospital for a minor operation, and was diagnosed using dated jargon as a ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’. Vaginoplasty was at the Hotel Dieu, Windsor, Ontario, by Dr Walter Percival.

November - Tamara Rees sailed on a Holland American steamship to Rotterdam. She took a train to Haarlem, and quickly had an appointment for the following Monday with Dr Hartsuiker. A second opinion was obtained from Dr Carp of the Psychiatrische Cliniek in Leiden, and one other, and then, as required by law, the opinion was submitted to a court of magistrates which reviewed the decision, decided it was correct and approval was granted.

Dorothy Medway, as no British doctor would do an orchiectomy because of the mayhem laws, had to go to the Netherlands instead, where she had successful surgery at the end of 1953.

December 18 - Harry Benjamin contributed a paper to a symposium organised by Emil Gutheil at the New York Academy of Medicine. He proposed three types of trans women: The principally psychogenic transvestite; The intermediate type; The somatopsychic transsexualist. Benjamin has now introduced the word ‘transsexual’ for doctors and sexologists.

December 30 - Claire Elgin had a penectomy 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. One doctor was quoted as saying “A much truer case than Christine’s”. Benjamin’s second use of the word ‘transsexual’.

Annette Dolan consulted with Harry Benjamin who suggested that she go abroad for castration, after which a US surgeon would be willing to complete the operation.

1953-8 Sally Barry with encouragement from Harry Benjamin had surgeries in Sweden.

1954

January 5 - Tamara Rees’ first operation was by Dr Nauta in the Diaconessenhuis in Haarlem. Rees then rented an apartment. As required by law Tamara registered with the Aliens Police (Vreemdelingendienst) and afterwards was followed and observed. She was to wait six months for the second stage operation (penectomy). Tamara learned some Dutch, and adjusted to their then lifestyle. With the changes from the female hormones, and given that Tamara was small framed and only 5’4” (1.613m) she was able to pass. She had frequent appointments with Hartsuiker, Nauta and a study group at the University of Leiden.

Mid January - Xie transferred to hospital in Teipei. Xie had initially objected and this caused a delay re the second operation. The new surgeon Jiang Xizheng was in charge, and female hormones were prescribed.

• “Ny amerikansk Chris Jørgensen skjult her I byen efter operation”. Aftenbaldet. 24 feb 1954. PDF. Text.

• Bent Rosenwein. Da Karl blev Karla: En dansk læges bedrift. Self published, 1954. Re Charlotte McLeod.

March 6 - Press disclosure re Betty Cowell carried by most British papers.

March 13 - Picture Post exclusive re Betty Cowell after payment of £20,000. Continued for 7 weeks.

March - Marta Olmos’ final surgery, a vaginoplasty.

March 19 - Francis Marie Jefferson had some minor operations with Dr Stuart Wilson in Welland. He semi-outed her to the Toronto Telegraph as Josephine Jefferson and claimed that she had surgery in the US. However Ron Kenyon of that newspaper searched for the real person, found Frances Marie Jefferson and interviewed her and some members of her family.

March 20,22,23 - a 3-part series in the Toronto Telegraph by Ron Kenyon on Francis Marie Jefferson based on interviews.

April 16 - Charlotte McLeod arrived at New York’s Idlewild airport.

April - Xie Jianshun’s second operation. Male gonads removed.

May - the Marta Olmos story was in the press, at first the Mexican, and then internationally. Excélsior interviewed Marta and published restrained reports, an editorial cartoon and a letter to the editor, but the articles in its tabloid Últimas Noticias, supplement Magazine de Policía, were splashy, front-page and with lots of photos.

May 19 - Christine Jorgensen’s vaginoplasty performed in New York by Dr Joseph Angelo, with Harry Benjamin as medical advisor.

June - Tamara Rees was seriously ill, which was attributed to the hormonal regime. After recovery and several weeks of testing, the second operation was arranged. A more experienced surgeon was required, and the services of a professor of medicine who had come to Holland as a refugee from the concentration camps of the previous decade. The surgery was done in a small secluded hospital in early June, and Tamara was 15 days in the hospital afterwards.

August - Xie’s third operation: a penectomy.

November - Tamara Rees had annoyed the Dutch Aliens Police who did not know where she was. After receiving a “very disturbing letter” from her parents in November, Tamara took an overdose of sleeping pills and was unconscious for three days. The Aliens Police then arrested her as an attempted suicide, and put her on a ship for New York. Her gender history was supposed to be private, but she discovered that the ship's officers had been told, and they had passed it on to the crew.

November - Nagai Akiko, in accordance with Article 113 of the Family Register Law, had her civil status changed.

Annette Dolan did an auto-orchiectomy, and then had surgery with Elmer Belt.

Elmer Belt and Willard Goodwin were persuaded to cease doing trans vaginoplasties after a committee of doctors at UCLA, including Frederick Worden, had decided against the practice. Annette Dolan was one of the last patients.

Frederick G Worden, psychoanalyst, and James T Marsh, clinical psychologist, both at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical Center, interviewed three trans women of whom had already had transgender surgery, Annette Dolan, Claire Elgin and Janet Story; and two hoping for it, Carla Sawyer and Dixie MacLane.

• Roberta Cowell. “Roberta Cowell’s Own Story”. Picture Post, 13 March 1954.

• Roberta Cowell. Roberta Cowell's Story. British Book Centre, 1954.

• Dorothy Medway. “He-She: A moving personal story to help you to understand the front page dilemma”. Sunday Pictorial, 14 March 1954: 13.

1955

Dixie MacLane had completion surgery in Mexico.

• 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.

Woden & Marsh wrote that the five women 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”. Harry Benjamin immediately wrote to the journal to object. Worden and Marsh had “badly misunderstood or misinterpreted” his work. Four of the five interviewees wrote to Benjamin expressing outrage.

August - Charlotte McLeod had breast implants with New York plastic surgeon, Else La Roe.

August - Xie had a third surgeon, Zhang Xianlin. A vaginoplasty was done; the Ministry of National Defense awarded Xie one thousand New Taiwan dollars to help buy feminine clothing.

Georgina Turtle was introduced to the urologist Kenneth Walker. A psychiatrist proposed that Turtle enter a mental hospital and be treated with electro-convulsive therapy. Turtle’s father strenuously objected, and an appointment was arranged with the Greek-born Professor Alexander Panagioti Cawadias, the prominent sexologist who is credited with coining the word 'intersex' (Hermaphoditus the Human Intersex, Heinemann Medical Books, 1943) who conducted a proper examination and declared Turtle to be a hermaphrodite, prescribed oestrogen and advised a change of sexual role.

Surgeon Poul Fogh-Andersen, Copenhagen, reported on a foreigner who attempted to castrate himself, forcing the surgeons to complete the orchiectomy. He further did a vaginoplasty using a full-thickness skin graft harvested from the penile skin to line the neovagina.

• Tamara Rees. "Reborn": a factual life story of a transition from male to female. Irene Lipman, 1955.

• Hedy Jo Star. I Changed My Sex! Allied Books, 1955. A slight exaggeration as she did not have surgery until 1962.

• Poul Fogh-Andersen. “Transvestism and trans-sexualism; surgical treatment in a case of auto-castration”. Acta medicinae legalis et socialis, 9, 3, 1955.

• Charlotte Charlaque writings as Carlotta Baronin von Curtius: “Reflections on the Christine Jorgenson Case”. One. The Homosexual Magazine. Band 3, Nr. 3, 1955, S. 27–28.

1956

Barbara Wilcox had vaginoplasty from Elmer Belt.

Jenny, a nightclub electrician in Nice approached several gynecologists seeking a correction of her birth sex, but with no success until she approached and pestered Dr Georges Burou in Casablanca. Burou developed a technique to create a vagina using a live graft taken from the penile skin, and was able to give Jenny what she needed. As it was the first time that he had done such an operation, it was pro bono.

Kenneth Walker arranged an appointment for Georgina Turtle with Harold Gillies, but it went badly as Turtle came directly from dental work clad in a black morning coat and pinstripe trousers. Gillies, who was already on the carpet with the General Medical Council for having operated on Michael Dillon and Betty Cowell, was dismissive: “I do not really think you look or could be made to look like a woman".

April Ashley socially transitioned.

• Charlotte Mcleod. “I Changed My Sex”. Mr Annual. Winter 1956. Claimed that her condition was physically caused, and that 95% of transsexuals should have psychiatric treatment.

1957

January - Georgina Turtle had a 'corrective procedure' which was performed by Mr Patrick Clarkson, a Harley-Street consultant plastic surgeon and colleague of Harold Gillies. She had bought her first female clothes in which to leave the clinic.

X, unnamed Scots woman, having undergone surgery, petitioned in 1957 to have her sex corrected on birth certificate etc. as Ewan Forbes had done two years earlier, but was refused.

Jeannette Jiousselot, a carpenter, had surgery with Dr Burou.

Carla Sawyer had surgery in Mexico.

58-year-old Clara Miller had surgery.

• Harold Gillies & D Ralph Millard, Jr. The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery. Butterworth, 1957. Discusses the 1951 surgery on Roberta Betty Cowell.

1958

Jacqueline Dufresnoy (Coccinelle) and Barbara Buick had surgery with Dr Burou.

The trans woman we refer to as Agnes started Saturday morning interview sessions with psychiatrist Robert Stoller and sociologist Harold Garfinkle. She was accepted as having “testicular femininization”, a supposed Intersex condition.

• William J O’Connell. “The Unfree”. Sex and Censorship Magazine, 1,2, 1958. An account by a trans woman who was admitted to a US hospital for sex-change surgery, which was then cancelled because of protests from ‘religious elements’. No refund. The person’s real name (female) is not given. Harry Benjamin added a note in his 1966 book that the person did successfully have surgery a few years later, but abroad.

1959

Syntex re-located to California.

Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Soong Mei-ling, and a number of celebrities visited Xie, who was working at a relief institute for women and children.

Agnes’ vaginoplasty was done in 1959 by a team of doctors including Elmer Belt.

• John B. Randell. "Transvestitism And Trans-Sexualism: A Study Of 50 Cases". The British Medical Journal. 2, 5164, 1959: 1448-1452.

1960

Marie-Pierre Pruvot (Bambi), April Ashley and Capucine had surgery with Dr Burou.

The press discovered Georgina Turtle, her home was besieged and the phone never stopped ringing. She agreed to an 'exclusive' with The News of the World, and was paid £100. A local paper gave the name of her road and stated that she intended to start a dental practice. This led to difficulties with the General Dental Council, which in those days was very strict against advertising. Turtle threatened to sue the newspapers, apologised to the Council, and was given a reprimand.

Surgeon Harold Gillies died, age 78, of a cerebral thrombosis whilst operating.

• John B. Randell. Cross Dressing and the Desire to change Sex, MD Thesis, Prifysgol Cymru/University of Wales, 1960.

• Georgina Turtle. “At last I’m a woman”. The News of the World, 17, 20,27 July 1960.

1961

Patricia Morgan had surgery with Elmer Belt.

1962

Barbara Wilcox died of a coronary, age 50.

Wedding of Georgina Turtle and Christopher Somerset.

Hedy Jo Star had surgery in Memphis.

Aleshia Brevard had surgery with Elmer Belt.

• Noyes Thomas and April Ashley. “The April Ashley Story”. The News of the World. May-June 1962

• A.D Schwabe, David H. Solomon, Robert J. Stoller & John P. Burnham. “Pubertal Feminization in a Genetic Male with Testicular Atrophy and Normal Urinary Gonadotropin”. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. 22, 8 Aug 1962: 839-845. Re Agnes.

1963

October 3 - Claire Elgin was admitted to Stanford Hospital with an incarcerated hernia. Her doctor there was Donald Laub (1935-2024), then an intern but who later became known for transgender surgery. They became friends.

• Georgina Turtle. Over the Sex Border. Victor Gollancz. 1963. Not an autobiography but a study based on those transsexuals who had contacted her.

1965

• Hedy Jo Star. My Unique Change Chicago: Novel Books, 1965.

1966

Agnes tells Dr. Stoller that her secondary sex characteristics had been the result of her taking Stilbestrol – an estrogen replacement drug that had been prescribed to her mother.

The Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic started taking transsexual patients. Dancer Phyllis Wilson was the first to have surgery.

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. Popularised the term ‘transsexual’. In effect the ur-text on the subject.

1967

• Christine Jorgensen with Lois Kibbee. A Personal Autobiography. Bantam Books, 1967.

• Harold Garfinkel and Robert Stoller. “Passing and the managed achievement of sex status in an ‘intersexed’ person”. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice Hall, Inc 1967: 117-185. Re Agnes.

1969

January - a medical article in the doctors' weekly newspaper, Pulse International, compared Georgina Turtle Somerset to Christine Jorgensen as being transsexual,

"implying that I was homosexual, would have had breast implants, electrolysis and was probably not legally married, I had no choice but to instigate libel proceedings for, indeed, all these premises were totally false" (p44).

The proceedings continued for two years, during which Justice Roger Ormrod ruled in Corbett v. Corbett against the femaleness of April Ashley. However Georgina was not deterred, and even sent a copy of her book to Justice Ormrod, and he wrote back:

"you and I have arrived independently at the same conclusions as to the legal position".

1970

• Irving Rapper (dir). The Christine Jorgensen Story, with John Hanson as Christine Jorgensen. US 98 mins 1970.

1972

December 29 - Marta Olmos died, age 41.

1973

Some doctors were dissatisfied with the word 'transsexualism' because it had lost its medical connotations, and so Norman Fisk in 1973 proposed 'gender dysphoria syndrome' to remedicalize the concept.

Claire Elgin, age 71, took her life after her lung cancer metastasized to the rib.

1978

Ehrling Dahl-Iversen died, age 85.

1986

Patricia Morgan died, age 46.

1987

December - Surgeon Georges Burou, the keen water-skier, drowned under his boat at age 77.

1989

May 3 - Christine Jorgensen died, age 62.

1992

October - Christian Hamburger died, age 88.

• Georgina Somerset, with a Forward by Grant Williams. A Girl Called Georgina: An Illustrated Autobiography, with Study Update. Lewes: The Book Guild, 1992. Includes a reprint of Over the Sex Border.

1995/6

• Connie Christine Wheeler & Leah Cahan Schaefer “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 24:1 Feb 1995. Online. GVWW. 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. Includes Janet=Claire Elgin, Sally Barry, Carol=Barbara Anne Richards, Christine Jorgensen, Janet=Claire Elgin.

2000

Tamara Rees dies, age 76.

2007

Charlotte McLeod died, age 82.

2011

Surgeon Ralph Millard died, age 92.

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

2013

Georgina Turtle Somerset died, age 90.

Aleshia Brevard died, age 79.

2019

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