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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.

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