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28 January 2025

Claire Elgin - Part III: bibliography and comments

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

1953:

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

1954:

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

1955:

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

1956:

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

1965:

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

1966:

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

1967:

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

1968

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

1969:

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

1971:

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

1974:

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

1976:

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

1977

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

1995/6:

  • Connie Christine Wheeler & Leah Cahan Schaefer “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 24:1 Feb 1995. Online. Revised as the Afterword to Randi Ettner. Confessions of a Gender Defender: A Psychologist's Reflections on Life Among the Transgendered. Chicago Spectrum Press, 1996.

1997

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

2002:

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

2011:

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

2017:

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

2019:

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

2020:

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


FamilySearch(Claire LeVern Elgin)

Thank you to Jacob for the research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

27 January 2025

Claire Elgin (1905 - 1976) – Part II: business woman

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

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

Claire in Benjamin's book, 1977
October 3rd, 1963 Claire 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. She told him that she herself had removed her penis. She also gave him an alternate autobiography:

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

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

Dr Laub got to know Claire as a person:

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

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

Harry Benjamin’s seminal book on Transsexuals came out in 1966. He condensed his three years of meetings and correspondence 1953-5 and described Claire in three paragraphs, but, as she requested, without giving a reference name. No photographs were included in the book, but medical and other professionals could request them if they wrote in on medical stationary. Black stripes were placed over Claire’s face to prevent recognition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claire in later years
In 1976, Claire called Dr Laub complaining of severe pain in the rib when she coughed. After a preliminary examination, Claire was admitted to the Stanford Hospital oncology medical service. X-rays showed that her lung cancer had metastasized to the rib. Claire asked how long she had left and was told about six weeks. She asked for a glass of water, and took one of the cyanide pills that she had in her purse.

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

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

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

26 January 2025

Claire Elgin (1905 - 1976) – the first trans woman millionaire - Part I: beginnings

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

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

Original version: Archive.

Part I: beginnings

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

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

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

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

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

Herb Caen in The San Francisco Examiner

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

Annette, Louise, Janet, Claire
Through Bowman, and from having had her name in the local newspapers, Clair met and/or was introduced to Louise Lawrence, Alfred Kinsey and Harry Benjamin. She had a four-hour interview with Kinsey “in hopes that any information … may in its small way eventually be of help to others of my kind”. She took photographs of other trans women whom she met through Louise Lawrence, and mailed them in batches to Harry Benjamin. Some of the other trans women meeting with Lawrence were Annette Dolan (who also did a self-castration), Janet Story, Dixie MacLane.

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

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

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

The son was not heard of again afterwards.

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

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

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

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

14 January 2025

Harry Benjamin and the Fortean Society

Forteans

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

Thayer

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

Benjamin’s involvement

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

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

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

In 1944 Doubt 12 contained:

SEX IN UNIFORM

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

(MFS=Member of Fortean Society)

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

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

Trans persons known to be involved with the Forteans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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