Andréa Furet (2002 - ) actrice

Furet was rasied in Paris, father a communications manager, mother a journalist at the magazine Elle. Furet dreamed of acting, and at age 11 had a first film role, a small male part in La Vallée des mensonges/Meurtres à les Cevennes, which became part of the long running Meurtres à … series, each episode set in a different part of France.

At age 13 Furet was accepted at the Cours Florent drama school. Furet was in a few more films playing teenage males.

A year later Furet discovered the word ‘transidentité’ and immediately connected to it. However it was not until June 2019 when she turned 17 that she came out to her parents and other relatives – and was accepted. She chose the name ‘Andréa’ in homage to the protagonist in The Devil Wears Prada. She was able to start taking female hormones, although then still under 18. Then she did another course at Le Cours Florent, followed by threatre studies at Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle.

In 2020 Andréa was cast at the trans protagonist of Il est elle (He is she) IMDB, adapted from the graphic novel Barricades de Jaypee by Charlotte Bousquet (2018). It was first broadcast in November 2020 on Belgian television in two parts. Iin March 2021, Andréa won the best actress prize and the film script the best script prize at Luchon Television Creations Festival before the French broadcast in November 2021 as one part. The story tells of Juju in a small town whose mother moves her to another town where she is accepted – until social networking outs her.

In May 2022, Andréa Furet competed to be Miss Paris, was one of the twelve finalists, and came second (première dauphine) – the first trans woman to do so.

In 2026 Furet was again in Meurtres à …, in  Meurtres en Périgord vert , this time playing the lead police investigator, who is outed as trans 30 minutes in, but continues, and solves the case.

• Marie Quenet. “ ‘Il est Elle’ sur TF1 : l'artiste transgenre Andréa Furet interprète une histoire qui fait écho à la sienne”. fr, 2/11/2021. Online.

FR.Wikipedia      IMDB

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Meurtres à …, now in its 15^th season, is available in North America on the streaming service mhzchoice.com.

Jenny Moore (1887 - ?) keeper of a disorderly house

 Moore was born in the then slum area of Oakwellgate, Gateshead (just across the River Tyne from Newcastle), and raised as a boy called Robert. Moore and her siblings were raised by their mother. From an early age she had declared herself to be Jennie, a female, and attempted to live as girl. By 1901 13-year-old Robert was incarcerated at the Abbot Memorial Ragged and School, where children under 14 were sent after arrest for vagrancy, truancy and/or begging, or if vulnerable to abuse and neglect. This was an ‘industrial school’ where children were offered skill training and ‘moral education’. 

By 1911, when she was 24, Jennie, listed as Robert, was living at a seaman’s boarding house in South Shields and working there as a servant, and was so recorded in the Census of that year.

Daily Mirror 1913

By 1913 Moore was living as Jennie, and was convicted of keeping a disorderly house in Hartlepool, County Durham. She was taken to Durham for trial, and a street photograph of her was published in the Daily Mirror. Many so charged would have appeared in court in male clothing to mitigate the sentence, and claimed the transvesting as a lark or fancy dress. Jennie however was now confirmed in her gender, and appeared as her true self.

Jennie and her brother Fred Coulthard were in Gateshead in 1915. They were observed by the police, and charged with “being a reputed thief he did loiter in Gateshead for the purpose of committing a felony”. Jennie was, as usual, initially taken to be a cis woman, until she was examined at the police station. She explained that she had lived as female when she could since childhood. When asked why, made no reply. A search of Jennir’s home found no male clothes at all, but did find a well-kept neat flat with a piano and a gramophone, good curtains and carpet. The police also found correspondence with a soldier serving in the already ongoing war. Jenny was committed to a men’s prison for three months, and Fred was fined £1/7/-. 

In 1916 she was arrested in Liverpool charged with living an immoral life and ‘permitting a house to be used for immoral traffic’. She had been living as Mrs Jennie Gray, wife of James Gray – who was also charged with the same offence. Initially the arresting officers again accepted that she was a cis woman.

• “Man who dresses like a woman”. Daily Mirror, 16 December 1913 p9.
• "Man as a Woman: A Remarkable Masquerade: Gateshead Man Sent to Prison". Greenock Telegraph. 2 August 1915 p6.
• "Man dressed as a Woman: Charge of Loitering at Gateshead: Strange Disclosures". Newcastle upon Tyne Journal, 2 August 1915 p8.
• "Man-Woman at Gateshead: Extraordinary Case of Masquerading". The Darlington North Star, 2 August 1915 p5.
• “Man in woman’s clothes: Charge of Loitering at Gateshead: Remarkable evidence at the Police Court”. Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 2 August 1915 p9.
• “Man dressed as woman: Extraordinary Liverpool disclosures”. Liverpool Evening Express, 29 June 1916 p3.
• “Man and ‘Wife’: Male Prisoners sent to Assizes”. Liverpool Daily Post, 30 June 1916 p3.
• Nic Aaron & Jeanie Sinclair. "Remembering Jennie Moore" in Kit Heyam & Jon Ward (eds). New and Decolonial Approaches to Gender Nonconformity: Forging A Home For Ourselves. Bloombury Academic, 2025: 87-113.

Unfortunately all we have as primary sources are newspaper articles that give her male name, and treat her as a curiosity. We can however see past these and see a lone trans woman unable to get a regular job, and without information about other trans persons.

1913 was almost the last time that fashionable women wore ankle-length skirts/dresses.  The changes brought about by the 1914-8 war led to more practical shorter skirts, and in the 1920s the demands of fashion took this further.

The government had passed the National Insurance Act 1911. All workers who earned under £160 a year had to pay 4 pence a week into the scheme; the employer paid 3 pence, and general taxation paid 2 pence. This provided some sick care and a small income whilst ill. This was the beginning of the welfare state, and was copied from the system that had been introduced in Germany in 1883. This was obviously a good step forward, but the associated NI cards, which were required when starting a job, would have outed Jennie and other trans persons, and thus made it very difficult to get a legal job.

The 1915 conviction re loitering would have been under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, while the 1913 and 1916 convictions of keeping a disorderly house would have been under the 1751 Disorderly Houses Act.

In January 1916, military conscription was introduced for the first time in British history, despite the previous raising of one of the largest all-volunteer armies in history for the Great War. Presumably Jennie’s male persona was called. Did her female persona result in rejection? Did she serve, voluntarily or otherwise, and die on the Western Front (as did the trans protagonist of the novel The Scarlet Pansy)? We have no record of her after 1916.

Whatever happened to her after 1916, Jennie Moore is what we might call a primary transsexual, although she would not know the term. When she was asked in court why she lived as a woman, she did not answer, probably because she had not encountered any suitable jargon even though ‘travesty’ and ‘transvest’ as a verb had been in use in England since the beginning of the 18^th century, and 'Travestiment' was being used by 1832, and 'Travestier' by 1883. It is likely that Jennie did not associate herself with those terms in that they were mainly used for cross-dressing, and she did not voluntarily cross-dress as a man.

False positives

This is a partial list of persons who are sometimes are listed as trans, but closer inspection shows that they are not.

Francois-Timoléon de Choisy (cross dreamer, yes, but not the out transvestite depicted in the posthumous faux-autobiography)

Edward Hyde/Lord Cornbury Governor of New York and New Jersey (1702-1708) was defamed as cross-dressing by second-hand accounts. Patricia U. Bonomi. The Lord Cornbury Scandal The Politics of Reputation in British America, 1998, demonstrates the lack of substance in the claims.

Anne Bonny & Mary Read Pirates who switched between men’s and women’s clothes as appropriate. Wearing trousers allowed women pirates the freedom to climb, work with ropes, go up and down ladders. All the same reasons that a 21st century cis female sailor also wears trousers etc. At their trial 16 November 1720 in Jamaica, they “plead the belly”. Sentence was suspended so that their pregnancies could be verified.

Charles Edward Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, was on the run after the failure of the Jacobite uprising and the defeat at the Battle of Culloden, 1746, the last battle fought in Britain. The rumour was put out that he passed himself as Betty Burke, an Irish maid, and a painting of a young woman was said to be of him.

John Radclyffe-Hall, nepo-baby super-rich lesbian writer and author of The Well of Loneliness, a trans fiction partially based on the life of her associate Toupie Lowther. (Laura Doan: “[Radclyffe-Hall's] haircut was thought to be the most feminine of all the short cuts popular at the time, and she had her hair done at Harrods — not a barbershop. Even Hall’s famous sartorial choices were on the feminine side of what was known as the ‘severely masculine mode’… Nor did Hall and her partner Una Troubridge dress in a bizarre manner, wearing, as some biographers have claimed, clothing from a costume shop. The couple studied fashion magazines and built their wardrobes not from men’s tailors in Savile Row, but from the most chic of London’s department stores for women. [- unlike trans man Gluck who bought suits from the expensive men’s tailors]. Hall always wore a skirt and conducted herself in a completely womanly way - in short, Hall definitely didn’t model her protagonist, Stephen Gordon, after herself.”)

Herman Göring, commander of the Nazi Luftwaffe (fond of makeup, perfumes, fancy clothes - but fancy male clothes --> a homovestite)

Ernest Hemingway(Given the mild androgyny in The Sun Also Rises, 1926, and the cross gender play with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh which he used in his posthumously published The Garden of Eden. However he grew bored of the game and desisted.)

Bobbie Kimber (did a stage act as a woman, lived as female off-stage, but the claim to have had completion surgery from Dr Burou was disproved when her body was examined at her death).

Theodore Kaczynski (Unabomber) (In 1966 when sex changes were in the news as something new, Kaczynski - and many other cis men - played with the idea of being trans for a short period. When he spoke to a psychiatrist, he spoke of depression, and never about being trans.

Hope Stansbury (based on appearance and associates taken to be trans)

Andrea Feldman (Warhol superstar taken to be trans)

Kimberley Harrison (a cis psychedelist, associate of Timothy Leary, was confused with Kimberley Elliot of Miami's TAO in Susana Pena. "Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o Miami: Documenting Latina Transsexual Activists". Gender & History, 22,3,2010: 763.)

Lanah Pelley (a gender-bender punk who played some female roles in alternative films. Pelley played the male lead in Eat the Rich, 1987, and the advertising claimed, untruthfully, that Pelley had recently transitioned)

Michelle Obama & Brigette Macron. Transvestigation defamations

Marlow Moss (1889-1958) artist

We have already discussed Madeleine Pelletier and Violet Morris, who while dressing, looking, behaving like (trans) men and being taken as men, retained their female names and she/her (elle) pronouns. This was at a time when the social construction of transsexuality was still decades away in the future. Without role models, without the social construction and without external hormones, Pelletier and Morris made decisions about how to live that differ from the options available to trans men today. Likewise Marlow Moss.

Moss, born and raised in Kilburn by prosperous Jewish parents, studied piano as a child, but this was interrupted for a few years by tuberculosis and the death of the father. A new guardian offered the best teachers for dance and movement, but on the condition of remaining non-professional. This condition Moss refused, and studied at the St John’s Wood School of Art, later cutting off ties with the family to study at the Slade School of Fine Art (which was at that time opposed to any type of modern art). By then the Great War had just finished, and Moss withdrew down to Cornwall for a while. 

On return to London Moss shaved the head, switched to male clothes and took the male name of Marlow. Moss read Rimbaud and Nietzsche at the British Museum Reading Room and studied the paintings of Van Gogh and Rembrandt. In 1927, age 37, Moss went to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Moderne, the free art school in Montmartre that had been founded in 1924. Moss studied under the cubist artist Fernand Léger. Moss was one of very few English artists at that time to engage with European Modernism.

Moss was impressed by the early work of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and his non-representational art which he deemed Neoplasticism. They met in 1929 when Moss’ studio on Boulevard Raspail was only a few doors away from Mondrian’s, and there were lively discussions between them. Like Mondrian and others associated with Neoplasticism and Constructivism, Moss considered radical abstraction the ultimate art form for an increasingly fast-paced and technologically advanced society. 

Moss produced a variation on Neoplasticism by using a double line, to render ‘the composition dynamic instead of static’. Despite this criticism, Mondrian incorporated the innovation two years later. He nominated Moss for founding membership of the new Association Abstraction-Création which was to foster abstract art and counter the influence of Surrealism. Mondrian was a mystic, fascinated by the occult and the Theosophist Madame Blavatsky. Moss, on the other hand, was a theoretician, organising her compositions according to a set of mathematical and geometric rules.

Also in 1929 Moss met a Dutch writer, Netty Wind (1897-1971) also known by her married and professional name as Antoinette Hendrika Nijhoff. They became lovers and had a studio at Gauciel, Normandy, a commune to the north-west of Paris where they welcomed other artists. 

In 1933, the Swiss abstract artist, Max Bill, encountered Moss and Wind at an opening at a Paris gallery, pointed to a group of pictures on the wall and commented, "Thank goodness Mondrian has sent in such beautiful works!" There was a silence. Then Moss said quietly: "Those are my paintings".

Moss often wore jodhpurs (riding trousers) but sometimes a man’s suit. Many took her to be male, but others thought she was a Garçonne (many of whom wore male or near-male clothes). Despite this Netty and other close friends continued to refer to Moss as ‘elle’, and Moss accepted being addressed as ‘Mademoiselle Moss’.

In September 1938, given the changing political situation, Mondrian moved to London, and in September 1940 after Paris had fallen, he moved to New York City, where he was quite successful. He died in 1944. In recent years, his works have sold for tens of millions.

In 1939 Moss moved to the Netherlands, but when that country was invaded, Moss, being Jewish, quickly left for England, but without Netty who stayed to be with her son. Moss managed to talk her way onto a fishing trawler going to Cornwall.

During the war Moss failed to connect with the artists (some of them abstract) in St Ives. However Moss met a naval engineer, who helped train her to work in metal. Unfortunately in 1944, wartime shelling destroyed the commune in Gauciel, and much of Moss’ earlier work was lost.

After the war, Moss and Nijhoff-Wind reunited and lived alternatively in Den Haag (with Nijhoff-Wind’s husband Martinus Nijhoff) and in Cornwall where Moss had opened a studio in 1940 in the village of Lamorna, a short distance from Penzance. The marriage of Netty Wind and Martinus Nijhoff ended in 1950. He remarried to a Dutch actress, but died in 1953.

Moss’ second phase as sculpturist resulted in solo shows at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1953 and 1958, organised by the agent Erica Brausen, a lesbian: this work made no reference to Mondrian at all, although Moss did still do some Neoplasticist pieces.

Moss died in August 1958, in Penzance. Four years later Nijhoff-Wind published a book about Moss and her art. Moss's postwar work was left, at her death, to Nijhoff's son, Wouter Stefan Nijhoff, a Man Ray-trained photographer who worked under the name Stephen Storm and who died in 1986. He in turn left it to his partner, who has seldom lent or shown the work since.

Antoinette H. Nijhoff-Wind died in March 1971.

In 2014 there was tour of Moss’ work at Tate St Ives, the Leeds Art Gallery, the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings and Tate Britain in London. As a result the Dutch museum that lent two works to the first show was alerted to the fact that they owned Mosses at all. As a result, the paintings are now hanging on the museum's walls for the first time in half a century, and will not be shown at Tate Britain.

• A H Nijhoff. Marlow Moss. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1962.
• Germaine Greer. The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. Farrar Straus Girouxm 1979: 103.
• Randy Rosen. “Marlow Moss: Did she influence Mondrian’s work of the thirties?”. Arts Magazine, 53, 1979.
• Sarah Wilson. “Marlow Moss” in  Delia Gaze. Dictionary of Women Artists. Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.
• Alan Fowler. Constructivist Art in Britain 1913-2005. PhD Thesis University of Southampton, March 2006: 34-6, 37-9. Online.
• Lucy Harriet Amy Howarth, Marlow Moss (1889–1958). PhD Thesis University of Plymouth, 2008. Online.
• Élisabeth Lebovici translated by Lucy Pons. “Marlow Moss”. Aware Women Artists, 2013. Online.
• Charles Darwent. “Marlow Moss: forgotten art maverick”. The Guardian, 25 Aug 2014, Online.
• Lucy Howarth, ‘Marlow Moss: Space, Movement, Light’, in Marlow Moss, Tate Research Publication, 2014. Online.
• Alex Pilcher. “Marlow Moss” A Queer Little History of Art. Tate Publishing, 2017: 66-7. Also Online.
• Sabine Schaschl-Cooper. A forgotten Maverick: Marlow Moss. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2017.
• Lucy Howarth. Marlow Moss. Eiderdown Books, 2019.
• Lucy Howarth. “Queering Constructivism: the legacy of Marlow Moss”. ArtUK.org, 17 Feb 2021. Online.
• Gülce Özkara. “Space, Movement, and Body: Marlow Moss” Stedelijk Studies Journal. 11,2022. Online.
• “Marlow Moss and the quest for ‘space, movement and light’ “. Christie’s, 13 October 2022. Online.
• Nicole Lampert. “The transing of Marlow Moss: It is narcissistic to project our own ideas back through history” . co.uk, 19, May 2023. Online.
• Claudio Vogt. “Notes on an Overlooked Maverick”. Vonbartha, June 7, 2024. Online.
• Emily Snow. “Marlow Moss: The Queer Abstract Artist Who Influenced Mondrian”. Daily Art Magazine, 21 April 2025. Online.
• Florette Dijkstra. De sprong in het licht: Marlow Moss (1889-1958). Querido, 2025.
• Joanna Moorhead. “ ‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?”. The Guardian, 12 Jan 2026. Online.

EN.Wikipedia     The Tate      The Mayor Gallery       Kunstmuseum den Haag

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As with Madeleine Pelletier and Violet Morris, Halberstam's Female Masculinity has nothing to say about Marlow Moss.

Darwent comments: 

“Moss's prewar paintings do look like Mondrians, in the way that some early Mondrians look like Derains. There is a difference between influence and imitation. Moss's take on neoplasticism is mathematically based, Mondrian's instinctual. When Moss – always ‘Miss Moss’ to Mondrian – writes to explain her theories to him, he answers, stiffly, ‘Numbers don't make any sense to me.’ Her works look like his, but they also don't.”

Germaine Greer, who does not discuss Moss’ life or gender construction, does write: 

“The modern version of this calumny is the easy assumption that is made about closely related male and female painters, that the man led and the woman followed, which accords her the status of an imitator, and assumes that differences in outlook are evidence of inferiority or incompetence. A superficial judgment would place Marlow Moss as an imitator of Piet Mondrian, with whom she spent a great deal of time in Paris between 1929 and 1938, but in fact the relationship between them was one of equals, and in the case of double-line compositions, Mondrian followed the lead set by Moss. Their careers diverged when Moss began to use relief in her paintings with superimposed white slats and collage. She was, as many women have been, interested in constructivism and the boundaries of painting and moved eventually to plastic constructions. It is arguable that she had a greater influence on subsequent developments in twentieth-century painting than Mondrian did.”

Of course the Constructivist Art and Social Construction are completely different things.

Nicholas Stuart Gray (1912 – 1981) children's author, playwright, thespian

Gray was born in Sydenham. The father was a cork merchant with his own business, and in 1927 he patented a new rear-viewing system for cars. He had been active in amateur dramatics when young, and his sister was a violinist. The mother was born in Leytonstone, of Scots parents, but after being orphaned, grew up in Aberdeen with her maternal grandmother and became a nurse. They were married in Aberdeen, and then lived in north London close to Golders Green tube station, and later in Anerley close to the Crystal Palace, and then in the 1930s in Hove, Sussex, west of Brighton.

Grey was raised as Phyllis Loriot Hatch, the eldest child, and had a sister and two brothers. They had a large house and a nanny. As Nicholas remembered when interviewed in 1973: 

“About ten. I wrote stories, and then I would dramatize them. We had a very big nursery with an archway at one end. My mother arranged a curtain for this, and we did plays behind it. She gave us kitchen paper and a screen or two, so we could paint our sets and pin them up. We used to knock up a play in an afternoon and do it in the evening. We charged people a penny admission, and there was no talking.”

Phyllis became a pupil at the Progressive School of Music, Elocution and Dancing in Croydon, and in May 1928 came second in competitive elocution (in the category for ages 15 and 16) at the Croydon Musical Festival, and later that year acted in plays put on by the school’s Progressive Players. That November Phyllis played Bassanio in a Shakespearean medley. In January Phyllis played the lead in a playlet based on Tolstoy’s What Men Live By. In May 1932, Phyllis wrote and acted in a play at the Brighton Music Festival. In July 1933 Phyllis competed for the coveted Ellen Terry Cup at the annual BESS elocution contest. 

By that November Phyllis was listed as acting at the prestigious London theatres, Sadler’s Wells and the Old Vic. The Old Vic cast of Macbeth led by Charles Laughton and Flora Robson performed the play on the wireless 8 April 1934. Phyllis was listed as the second witch.

And then Phyllis Hatch disappeared.

In 1938 the seemingly unknown thespian Nicholas Gray talked his way into becoming director of the Try-Out Guild (a group formed to test the interest of theatre management in new plays) saying that he had been acting in repertory theatre in Scotland for ten years. He did this while also giving his birth year as 1922, that is that he was 17. When the war started in September 1939, he joined the local Home Guard, the unpaid armed citizen militia. It is said that he then registered as a Conscientious Objector, and was sent to do farm work. 

He still managed to fit in theatre work. In April 1940, Gray’s play Judgment Reserved was performed at the Lindsey Theatre Club in Notting Hill, with Gray playing one of the main parts.

In December 1940 The Slough, Eton and Windsor Observer reported that the female lead at the Theatre Royal, Windsor was indisposed and that Nicholas Gray stepped in to replace her. 

“When at the end of the performance, the audience were let into the secret, there was a general gasp of surprise, and an enthusiastic round of applause for Mr Gray. His movements and voice were perfect for the part, and despite the fact that he is not himself effeminate, his acting was quite feminine.” 

In August 1948 his play The Haunted, was the first at the re-opened Torch Theatre Club in Kensington. BBC television had been resumed in June 1946 after its closure during the war, and The Haunted was broadcast on television October 1948.

Gray had noticed that there were radio and television shows for children, and cartoon matinées at the cinema, but nothing in live theatre except pantomime. He said that he did not actually like children, but wanted to introduce children to live theatre while young in order to ensure an ongoing audience when they grew up. His first children’s play to be written was The Tinder Box, but the first performed was a variation on Beauty and the Beast which was performed at the Mercury in Notting Hill Gate at Christmas 1949 with set design by Joan Jefferson Farjeon, and ran for a week of sell-outs. Gray and Farjeon then founded the London Children’s Theatre.

Beauty and the Beast became a perennial favourite, revived Christmas after Christmas, And one success led to others, and Gray quickly became a famous children’s playwright. Many of the plays were based on well-known fairy tales, usually with a twist. The plays were usually with set designs by Farjeon – and the two had a life-long friendship. Farjeon also did set design for plays by Agatha Christie.

Gray continued to act not only in his own plays but also in Shakespeare plays as Hamlet, Richard II and Iago.

The Daily Telegraph columnist Winefride Jackson wrote, 3 January 1957: 

“I asked Mr. Gray how he assessed the appeal of his plays to children. ‘I write what pleases me. As I consider I have the IQ of an average child it seems to work.’ When I murmured that he was surely under-rating himself he replied, ‘Certainly not. The average child is very intelligent. One assumes that children grow cleverer as they grow older. Personally I think they grow more stupid. Young children have a merciless logic and are extremely critical.’ “

In 1959 Nicholas finally had gender surgery, although neither the doctor who prescribed testosterone, nor the surgeon are documented. Apparently no oophorectomy (removal of ovaries) was done, perhaps because Gray was close to menopause.

Nocholas acquired a retreat, a farm in Devon. He was strongly opposed to hunting foxes with hounds, and in October 1968 he was in the news when he warned a hunt away from his land while carrying an ancient blunderbuss. In November 1971 he wrote to the Western Daily Press “and also the national press, but they ‘regretfully’ would not print my letters” to mention the widespread distaste for hunting with hounds.

In 1973 Gray was interviewed for an anthology on children’s literature.

Overall Gray wrote twelve published plays for children; at least two unpublished plays for adults and two (plus one “scientific entertainment”) for children; eight novels, one novella and three collections of short stories for children; one adult whodunnit novel; one collection of poetry and one book of autobiography centred on his cats. Some of his later works were illustrated by his sister, Winifred May Hatch.

Gray died age 68 in March 1981. The death certificate stated: “a) Bronchopneumonia; b) Carcinomatosis; c) Ca Ovary (*NB Sex Change 1959)”, that is pneumonia after ovarian cancer. He left his royalties and copyrights to his siblings, and a niece, and Joan Jefferson Farjeon. His modest estate was reported as valued at £33,101 (£130,000 today),

Joan Jefferson Farjeon died age 93 in 2006.

• “The wireless performance of Macbeth”. The Guardian, 7 April 1934: 14.
• “Judgment Reserved”. The Kensington News and West London Times, 5 April 1940: 5.
• “ ‘Leading Lady’ who was a man: No-one realised it”. The Slough, Eton and Windsor Observer, 6 December 1940: 1.
• “Torch Theatre Club: The Haunted”. Kensington and Chelsea News, 14 Aug 1948: 4.
• “The Mercury Theatre”. The Kensington News and West London Times, 16 December 1949: 3.
• “Children’s film corner”. The Kensington News and West London Times, 16 January 1953: 3.
• Winefride Jackson. “Writing for children”. The Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1957: 5.
• D. “Puss in Boots, Lyric, Hammersmith”. The Kensington News and West London Times, 4 January 1957: 9.
• M.P. “You must take your imagination along”. The Sutton and Cheam Advertiser, 31 December 1959: 8.
• Stephen Amys. “Puss on Boots is cat of character”. The Eastern Evening News, 30 December 1967: 5.
• Douglas Slight. “A Blunderbuss stops the Hunt”. Daily Mirror, October 10, 1968:13.
• “Gunman farmer hunts a hunt”. Western Daily Press, 10 October 1968: 4.
• Nicholas Stuart-Gray. “Tally-Ho! The M5 Foxhounds”. Western Daily Press, 18 November 1971: 6.
• “Nicholas Stuart Gray Interviewed by Justin Wintle” In Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher. The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the influential creators of children’s literature. Paddington Press Ltd, 1974: 147-160.
• “Obituary: Nicholas Gray”. The Daily Telegraph, 19 March 1981: 16.
• “Beastly beginnings”. The Daily Telegraph, 19 March 1981: 18.
• “Actor’s estate”. Southern Daily Echo, 27 October 1981:2.
• “Nicholas Stuart Gray”, in Janet Podell (ed). The Annual Obituary 1981, St Martin’s Press, 1982.
• Rob Maslen. “Nicholas Stuart Gray, Down in the Cellar (1961)”. The City of Lost Books, March 24, 2020. Online.
• Ann Harvey. “Joan Frances Farjeon (Joan Jefferson Farjeon), scenic designer: born London 26 May 1913; died Northwood, Middlesex 8 August 2006”. The Independent, August 13, 2006.
• Claire Jordan. “The Performance of a Lifetime: the many roles of Nicholas Stuart Gray”. Old Tails for New Primates, Online.

EN.Wikipedia            IMDB       SF Encyclopedia

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This article is in part a precis of Claire Jordan’s much longer account based on her own research – which is excellent, and which I suggest if you want more detail.

When Gray transitioned in 1939, he gave his birth year as 1922 or 1923, and some publications say 1919.

Why did he choose ‘Gray’ as a surname? Jordan suggests: 

“Maybe because hatching is a way of making greyscale in art using black ink, which he would know because his sister Winifred grew up to be a commercial artist. Also, because he was using his new name to live as a man whilst still, for the moment, anatomically female, he might have been making a rather dark joke about the traditional saying ‘All cats are grey in the dark’, explained by Wiktionary as ‘Sex is enjoyable regardless of the physical attractiveness or social station of one’s partner.’ ”

Why did Gray reduce his age by 10 years? Almost certainly to look like an androgynous youth. Michael Dillon was prescribed testosterone at the end of the 1930s, and is generally taken to be the first trans man anywhere to receive such. However it is possible that Dr George Foss who prescribed to Dillon, also prescribed to Gray. If so it is not documented. Men of Gray’s actual age were of course being conscripted after the war started in September 1939. Jordan suggests that Gray was so called, but had to undergo the standard medical examination. The doctor rather than out Gray as trans, supported his assignment to the Home Guard, and later as a Conscientious Objector.

Jordan comments 

“ Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, has definite echoes of some of Gray’s work: the play The Other Cinderella revolves around a demon and a good fairy who are officially meant to be vying for control of human souls but are secretly friends and collaborators, a lot like Crowley and Aziraphale; and the episodic novel The Garland of Filigree features a demonic hound called Gytrash who decides that he is more dog than demon – again, decidedly reminiscent of the hell-hound called Dog in Good Omens”.

Jordan’s webpage includes a bibliography of Gray’s writings, but does not include the early plays under the name of Phyllis Hatch.

Rob Maslen's article is a good overview of the contents of Gray's fiction. 

A review of James I. Martin’s Sexual and Gender Minority History: A Counter-Narrative. Oxford University Press, 2025.

This is a LGBT+ history book. However I will be reviewing mainly the trans elements.

Despite the title, this book is a history of LGBT in the US only, apart from a quick foreshadowing in Weimar Germany. The one and only mention of England is the names of the last two men to be hanged for sodomy in 1830 - that is it, really. I am surprised that Martin’s English publisher, Oxford University Press, did not insist on adding the term “US” into the books title.

James I. Martin was an Associate Professor at the NYU Silver School of Social Work where he published several sociological and social psychological studies of sex and gender minorities. He did not publish as a historian.

In chapter 2 “Germany in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries” Martin gives quickie summaries of Károly Mária Kertbeny, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Adolf Brand etc. Of Hirschfeld (p 14-16) Martin tells us that he was a co-founder in 1897 of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee which applied three times to the Reichstag to decriminalise homosexuality, and in 1919 he founded the Institute for Sexual Science. As Martin tells it, he presumably did no work with trans persons in that none are mentioned. On p27 we are told of the destruction of the Institute. On p95, while discussing Virginia Prince, Martin says erroneously: “At the time, such men referred to themselves as transvestites, the English translation of a term invented by Magnus Hirschfeld more than 40 years earlier”. And equally erroneously “transsexuals, an identity label also invented by Hirschfeld”.

Having skirted around Germany’s trans history, Martin then totally ignores that of England, France, Italy, Brazil, India, Thailand, etc.

The first transvesting, anywhere, that he mentions is in Chapter 4 “Foundations in the United States” where there is a single paragraph on female-born persons who fought as men in the US civil wars of the 1770s and the 1860s such as Deborah Sampson and Albert Cashier. This is followed by a full page on Charlie Parkhurst, Mary Fields and other unnamed masculine women/trans men on the frontier. (p33-5) For male-born persons, he mentions only the gender social construction of ‘fairy’ particularly in New York (p40-1), drawing mainly on George Chauncey’s Gay New York - although one searches in vain in Martin’s book for the best known ‘fairy’ who published two books and many journal articles in this period, that is Jennie June/Ralph Werther/Mowry Saben. Nor is there any mention of the first sexological study of trans women in the US, that by Bernard Talmey, 1913-4.

In his chapter 4 summary, Martin writes: “Men developed devoted and sometimes sexual relationships in the all-male cowboy, railroad, mining, and logging communities of the frontier West before encroaching settlement extinguished their freedom to do so. Many women escaped their prescribed gender role by dressing and behaving as men in military service or by living independently in the rural West.” There is no mention of the few male-born persons who did socially transition such as Alice Baker and Mrs Noonan, army wife.

Chapter 5 “The Jazz Age” quickly summarises prohibition and the Harlem Renaissance. Cross-dressing singer Gladys Bentley (p47,60) is mentioned, as are the Hamilton Lodge Balls (p50,60), Julian Eltinge (p51) and The Pansy Craze, where only Gene Malin (p52) is mentioned. Strangely he mentions Radclyffe-Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, in The Pansy Craze section - John Radclyffe-Hall would not be amused. Pansies such as Frankie Jaxon, Valda Grey, Rae Bourbon are not mentioned.

Chapter 6 “The 1930s and the Great Depression ” tells of the post-Prohibition drag clubs in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. But not much else re trans persons.

Chapter 7 “The World at War” is almost all about gay man and lesbians in the military. It does not mention then-starting ball organizer Phil Black, nor the research by Jan Gay that included several biographies of trans women and was published as George W. Henry’s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, 1941, nor the arrival of the US’s first completed trans woman, Charlotte Charlaque, a patient of Magnus Hirschfeld who had been deported from Nazi Germany.

Chapter 8 “The 1950s and the Homophile Movement ” describes the Lavender Scare and state oppression on one hand, and the emerging gay and lesbian self-help organizations on the other: Mattachine, One Inc, Daughters of Bilitis - and then very quickly (p95) Virginia Prince and Christine Jorgensen. However the trans pioneer activist Louise Lawrence is not mentioned at all, and Harry Benjamin who introduced Prince and Jorgenson to each other is not mentioned until later.

Likewise: Claire Elgin, who would later become a successful business woman and the first trans woman millionaire, was creating waves in 1953-4 but is not mentioned, nor is Tamara Rees. In 1953 Harry Benjamin participated in a symposium with the Austrian neuro-psychiatrist Emil Gutheil. Benjamin’s paper, “Transsexualism and Transvestism as Psycho-Somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes” is in effect the first draft of what 12 years later will become his book The Transsexual Phenomenon. From the early 1950s, Dr Elmer Belt in Los Angeles started doing vaginoplasty for trans women at the urging of Benjamin. This predated the team led by Poul Fogh-Andersen in Copenhagen, and Belt was doing vaginoplasty using skin grafts from the thigh, buttocks or back while the Fogh-Andersen team was doing only orchiectomy and penectomy. In 1958 the 19-year-old trans woman we refer to as Agnes approached Dr Robert Stoller at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center and persuaded him that she was intersex, leading to successful vaginoplasty. These are major events in the history of transsexuality in the US, and yet Martin seems totally indifferent to them.

Chapter 9 “A Rising Tide of Resistance” opens with the general uprisings of the 1960s, by blacks, feminists and anti-war protestors. The gay/trans riots at Cooper Do-Nuts, Los Angeles; Dewey’s restaurant, Philadelphia and Compton’s Cafeteria, San Francisco are mentioned. After more details of gay/lesbian activism, there is a short summary of Virginia Prince and the creation of the Foundation for Personality Expression (FPE) and Reed Erickson and his financing of Harry Benjamin’s work. The Transsexual Phenomenon is mentioned. (all p111) Stryker is given as the sole authority for all three. Neither Docter’s nor my biographies of Prince are referred to.

However Donald Wollheim/Darrel Raynor’s influential book, A Year Among the Girls, is not even mentioned; nor is Susan Valenti’s Casa Susana’s trans getaway in the Catskills; nor Andy Warhol’s ‘superstars’, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis; nor Jane County; nor Rachel Harlow.

A major omission is the opening in the late 1960s of the university hospital gender clinics: Johns Hopkins, Minnesota; Stanford, UCLA. Even major sex-change doctors other than Benjamin, such as John Money at Johns Hopkins and Robert Stoller at UCLA are not mentioned as such, only as authors of one or two papers. Drs Stanley Biber and Marci Bowers are also not mentioned.

Chapter 10 “Stonewall and its Aftermath” briefly summarizes David Carter’s book, avoids naming any persons who may have been present at the riots, but does names journalists who wrote about them. The Queens Liberation Front founded by Lee Brewster and Barbara de Lamere is mentioned (p120-1), but Martin follows Susan Stryker in not naming Barbara correctly - but only by a short-lived stage name of ‘Bunny Eisenhower’. This is to refer to a trans woman only by one of her dead names. Barbara was one of very few New York trans women of the late sixties to eventually achieve completion surgery. Brewster’s Mardi Gras Boutique which lasted for 30 years, and was the place to shop for trans persons, impersonators and others, is not mentioned. Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and STAR house, both founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson are mentioned but we are not told what happened to Sylvia and Marsha in later years, not even that Marsha was murdered.

However trans activist groups in other US cities at the same time are not mentioned at all: such as TAO in Miami or COG in San Francisco, nor entertainment troupes like the Cockettes.

Martin writes (p124) “During the 1970s, Virginia Prince used the term transgenderist to refer to gender-variant people who did not consider themselves transsexuals, particularly those who were male bodied. However, it would take until the 1990s for transgender to become an umbrella term for most, if not all, gender-variant people”. This sentence has several difficulties. Prince did use ‘transgender’, ‘transgenderist’, ‘transgenderal’ but only a few times. She was by nature transgenderphobic, but the false attribution of her endorsing the word while being the most divisive of trans activists caused many to not adopt the term ‘transgender’ for a long time. For more detail see my The Myth that Transgender is a Princian Concept.

Chapter 11 “Turbulence and Visibility in the 1970s”. A lot happened re trans persons in the later 1970s: Lou Reed and Rachel; Benjamin’s practice was inherited by Jeanne Hoff who herself transitioned; the Diane Delia murder; DSM III removed homosexuality and added transvestism; Kim Kristy discovered Sulka and reverted to male and became editor of Female Mimics; Rachel Harlow dated the brother of Grace Kelly; the film Let Me Die a Woman was released; The Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic was closed; Dog Day Afternoon.

However the only trans event for this period mentioned by Martin is the Erickson Educational Foundation’s symposiums that later became the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) symposiums, and their first Standards of Care. He does not mention that HBIGDA later became WPATH.

Chapter 12 “The Deluge and Beyond”. This is the 1980s and the scourge of AIDS. Martin says nothing of trans women dying of AIDS although many did. He lists (p158-9) Leslie Feinberg, the adoption of the word ‘transgender’, states allowing birth certificates and driver’s licences to be changed, The International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, GenderPAC, Brandon Teena and Boys Don’t Cry, Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Here the book stops. Was a first draft written 35 years years ago, but only now published? That would certainly explain some of the omissions, although there are citations to much more recent books.

Why does Martin call this book a ‘counter-narrative’? “Counter-narratives are stories told from the perspectives of people who are marginalized in society, and thus they serve to resist the domination and marginalization perpetuated by the dominant narrative.” The problem is that such a counter-narrative has already been done many times in books by George Chauncy, Lillian Faderman, Florence Tamagne etc. These three are cited, and are mainly histories of gays and lesbians. Histories of trans people that are not cited and their contents not used in Martin’s bibliography: for Weimar Germany: Rainer Herrn, Raimund Wolfert; for the US: Michail Takach, Barry Reay.

Reay had previously named his book Trans America: A Counter-History. However I would deny the term ‘counter-history’ in both cases as they both draw on established and published histories. At this point in time, a counter history would draw on neglected sources and alter our perceptions of our own history.

Not that I have any problems with the books by Chauncey, Faderman, Tamagne etc. They are on my shelves and I do return to them now and then. But there is a new generation of historians who are looking at our history differently: Benjamin Kahan, Laurie Marhoefer, Ben Miller, Sabine Meyer and of course Rainer Herrn and Raimund Wolfert.

At £49.00/US$109.30/C$121.55/€76.99 Martin’s book is outrageously overpriced, without delivering quality content.

If you want a trans history of the US, despite much repeating of what is well known, I suggest Reay’s book, at a fraction of the price.

If you want a queer history of the US, mainly about gays and lesbians, but with a lesser part on trans history, I suggest (also at a reasonable price):

Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States - a review.

Elisa Menezes Duarte (1949 - 1980) performer, bombadeira, travesti boss, murdered

Original July 2023, revised and updated December 2025

During the 1970s travesti sex workers in Brazil became more accepted by some members of the public, if not by the police, and along with that there were two other developments:

1) the injection of silicone rather than the more dangerous oil or paraffin to feminise the body. Such pumping (bombadas) was first done in New York by competent doctors such as Dr David Wesser, but a few years later was being done by non-doctors (such as Jimmy Treetop in New York).

2) A few Brazilian travestis had managed to get to Paris, and returned rich enough to buy not one but two or more apartments. The first was almost always for their mother: a casa da minha mãe. Then greater numbers went. At the peak of the migration there were – for a short while – special charter flights for travestis (although in mufti). It was estimated that of 700 prostitutes in France, 500 were from Brazil – and they had taken over the main prostitution venues in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. They were treated somewhat better than in Brazil – they were addressed as Madame or Mademoiselle, but they were still living on the margin, subject to violence and having to pay both the police and a travesti boss for a place to stand. The French prostitutes’ union protested their presence, accusing them of unfair competition in that as illegal immigrants they did not pay taxes.

Elisa was from a relatively well-off family in Rio de Janeiro.  She participated in some Carnival balls, and performed in the Săo Paulo stage show Les Girls when it came to Rio

Elisa (in Et il voulut)

.  She had been able to afford to be pumped in New York. She learned how to do it, and after buying silicone in New York, she set up in business in Paris in 1973 as a bombadeira. She did have a gig at Chez Madame Arthur, but mainly controlled the prostitution ‘stands’ and was known as la Reine de Pigalle. If a Brazilian sex worker did not accept her terms, she could get the worker deported, as happened to Jaqueline Welch. 

Elisa was featured in the film  Et il voulut être une femme, about travestis and other trans women in Paris in the 1970s.  The film includes Elisa's surgery.

Competition came from Claudia Tavares, who was also a bombadeira, who sourced her silicone in Paris and had cheaper prices. Elisa put a lot of pressure on Claudia, to get her to leave France. Threats and violence mounted until Claudia killed Elisa.

Claudia in later years,

Claudia was convicted for the killing, served seven years in a men's prison, afterwards obtained completion surgery in France, found a husband and became a celebrity chef providing Brazilian cuisine.  She has written some books, giving her version of things. 

After the murder, many rivalries, envy, scandals, and threats surfaced among the immigrant travesti sex workers themselves. At the same time, the pressure from the French authorities grew: between 1980 and 1984, expulsions were multiplied because of irregularities in their visas. Migration of Brazilian travestis to Italy and other European countries commenced.

• Michel Richaud (dir).  Et il voulut être une femme, with Elisa.  France 76 mins 1978.  IMDB. Part 1 online. 
• “Reavesti brasileiro é assassinado em Paris”. Cidade de Santos, 1.11.1980: 7.
• "Elisa morreu na Praça Pigalle. Mataeam o maior travesti do mundo”. Diário da Manhã, 2.11.1980: 1.  
• Joao S Trevisan translated by Martin Foreman. Perverts in Paradise. Gay Men’s Press, 1986: 165.
• Don Kulíck. Travesti : Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Univeristy of Chicago Press. 1998: 178, 217.
• Julieta Vartabedian. Brazilian Travesti Migrations: Gender, Sexualities and Embodiment Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 : 89, 197.
• Igor Danin, research 2025.

A tentative list of Claudia's books:

• Claudia Tavares. A volta da gata. Livaria Editoria, 1983.
• --  La femme inachevée.  Editions R Deforges, 1987. *
• -- Circonstances atténuantes : Récit.  Nicolas Philippe, 2002. *
• -- A Rejeitada. Cia, dos Livros, 2011. 
• -- Claudia.  Faralonn éditions, 2022.
• -- La volonté d'exister. Nombre 7, 2023.

*=discusses Elisa.

-----

No surname is given by either Vartabedian or Kulíck. Vartabedian has no entry in her index for any Elisa. Kulíck has an index entry for a different Elisa, but not this one.

Vartabedian writes: “During the beginning of the 1970s, the first ‘pumped up’ (bombadas) travestis did it in the United States, in New York, with the practitioner Wesser.” Apparently she did not know that Wesser was a doctor, even though I wrote of him two years before her book came out.

The practice of pumping silicone spread across Brazil and south America during the 1980s. In 1983 there was a sort of epidemic in São Paulo where many travestis were dying painfully after industrial silicone was sold as filtered silicone. (Trevisan p165).

Claudia's books are very hard to find.   As is the film, Et il voulut être une femme.

Health warning:   estrogen is far better than silicone for feminisation.