Frances Marie Jefferson (1929- ?) truck driver, domestic

 Jefferson was born in the village of Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, seventh in a family of 10 living children. The attending practitioner was undecided as to the child’s sex, and called in 12 other doctors for advice. They decided the child was a boy, and he was raised as such. 

In the poverty of the Great Depression, the child was admitted to Children’s Aid. With puberty, Jefferson was made to go to school wearing a tight sweater. Jefferson was sent to Victoria General Hospital in Halifax for an ‘exploratory’. The doctors were almost sure that Jeffertson had both male and female organs, but advised against any operations. Soon after, when 14, Jefferson ran away, and returned to the parents who had moved to Saint John, New Brunswick. The mother advised a mastectomy – which was done in Saint John. 

Being 14, Jefferson was old enough to work as an adult – and for six months worked for a construction company building a theatre until fired for not being strong enough, Jefferson then took off for Texas and worked on a ranch, herding cattle from horseback. By age 16 Jefferson was a truck driver in the Yukon. After a fight while nightclubbing, Jefferson was in the army hospital for two weeks, where his non-standard body was noticed. Moving on to Edmonton, Jefferson found work as a lumberjack until a fall from a tree led to an injured kidney and hospitalisation. 

Then there was a job driving trucks between Vancouver and Calgary. Jefferson gave a ride to a young woman in need, and in Calgary they rented an apartment together. They never made love, and Jefferson could not get to telling her what the problem was. They actually arranged to get married, but Jefferson could not go through with it, and on the day flew to Regina, and sent a letter telling the truth. Jefferson saw a psychiatrist in Regina, and was advised that if he could not live as man, she should become a woman.

In October 1953, now aged 24, 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’. 

Jefferson then went to Windsor, Ontario. There Frances Marie– as she was becoming - wore female clothing for the first time. As she walked down Windsor’s Ouellette Avenue she felt that all were staring at her, but it went well. She registered at the Hotel Dieu Hospital, the Catholic Hospital in Windsor, and consulted Dr Walter Percival, who had done a vaginoplasty for a cis woman. Five doctors came to Jefferson’s bedside, and made it clear that there was no going back – that if she had the operation, she would die a woman. Dr Percival created a vagina using skin from her stomach. The operation took two hours, and she was then moved to the Metropolitan Hospital for a month. Afterwards she was started on female hormones.

The Jefferson family had moved to Port Colborne, Ontario and Francis Marie joined them. She had some minor operations with Dr Stuart Wilson in nearby Welland, mainly to remove scar tissue. There had been rumours that a ‘Miss X’ had had a sex change, but she was not identified until Wilson spoke to the Toronto Telegraph – with her permission he said. He gave her name as ‘Josephine Jefferson’, falsely gave her male name as “Kenneth Jefferson”, and claimed that she had had surgery in the US, with no mention of Dr Percival or even Windsor, and that she was only 21. This version was picked up by Associated Press, and repeated in newspapers across the US and Australia. The Ottawa Journal also ran this version 20 March 1954. 

However Ron Kenyon of the Toronto Telegraph, who had written up the “Josephine” version, March 19, searched for the real person, found Frances Marie Jefferson and interviewed her and some members of her family. 

That story was published in three issues, on page 3 in each case, March 20, 22 and 23.

Other than that, 1954 was not a good year for Marie Jefferson:

A week after the publication, Jefferson was charged by the police after failing to stop at a stop sign and damaging the rear of a car. She was fined $24.50 and the damaged was estimated at $400 to her own car and $200 to the other.

May 24, she was arrested in Buffalo, USA, on hit-and-run and drunken-driving charges, and referred to immigration authorities. They checked their records and realised that she and her male persona were the same, and that as a man she had been deported from Detroit in 1950. She was confined in the women’s wing of Erie County Jail. She pleaded guilty, was given a two-year suspended sentence, and she was deported again.

And in August Marie, back in Canada, was robbed of $37 and attacked by two men said to be US tourists who quickly fled across the border. She was treated for cuts and bruises. 

After that she managed to stay out of the press.

* Not Josephine Jefferson, the actress.

• “Doctor Identifies Port Colborne Man Changed to Woman”. Associated Press, March 19, 1954.
• Ron Kenyon. “Pt Colborne Man Changes His Sex”. The Toronto Telegram, March 19, 1954 p1,3.
• “Ontario Man Now Woman – First Canadian Sex-Change”. The Ottawa Journal, March 20, 1954 p36.
• Marie Jefferson as told to Ron Kenyon. “ “I Felt Guilty Living as a Man’ … Marie: People who think I’m Amusing Don’t know the horror …”. The Toronto Telegram, March 20, 1954p3.
• Ron Kenton. “Doctors Detail the Operations”. The Toronto Telegram, March 20, 1954p3.
• Richard Hayward. “Marie was his Girl Friend, and a Truck Crash was their bond”. The Toronto Telegram, March 20, 1954p3.
• Beth Balcom. “Man now Woman‚ Loved to knit” The Toronto Telegram, March 20, 1954p3.
• Marie Jefferson as told to Ron Kenyon. “ ‘Now Men whistle at me …’ I like that, too – Yet I ran out on my wedding“. The Toronto Telegram, March 22, 1954p3.
• Richard Hayward. “Operations amazed her friends”. The Toronto Telegram, March 22, 1954p3.
• “Liked to Knit, Sew long before Sex Change”. The Ottawa Journal, March 22, 1954 p30.
• Marie Jefferson as told to Ron Kenyon. “ “Sex switch aids understanding: Has escaped depths of horrible despair: Home, family her aim”. The Toronto Telegram, March 23, 1954p3.
• “Marie Jefferson in Auto Mishap”. Welland Evening Tribune, March 26, 1954 p12.
• “Marie Jefferson Fined for Careless Driving”. The Hamilton Spectator, Mar 31, 1954 p31.
• “Canadian woman faces jail terms if she returns”. The Buffalo News, May 29, 1954 p4.
• “Woman, once deported as a man, jailed”. The Buffalo News, June 9, 1954 p9.
• “Officials seek to end sex change confusion”. Buffalo Courier Express, June 23, 1954 p15.
• “Marie Jefferson is Deported”. Niagara Falls Review, June 25, 1954 p16.
• “Woman once Man treated here after assault: Marie Jefferson attacked in Motel”. The Hamilton Spectator, Aug 18, 1954 p18.
• Maélys McArdle. “’The first trans person in Canada’”. maelys.bio, January 23, 2022. Online.

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Jefferson’s work history while male was very masculine. Over-compensation perhaps. However Jefferson had left school at age 14, and perhaps could not do office-style work.

Canada did not introduce a European-style health system until 1966. So who paid for the operations? Jefferson says nothing about saving up while working as a truck driver. Did the doctors work pro-bono as the case was experimental?

I have gone with the second Toronto Telegram version as it is an interview with Frances Marie herself, and not a second-hand account. 

If Wilson changed her name to protect her privacy, it would have been better to change her family name. In the 1950s, the population of Port Colborne was just over 8,000. Any competent journalist would enquire after/speak to all the Jefferson families in the town and find the real person – as Ron Kenton in fact did.

Wilson also said that such an operation had been done thousands of times – but had been kept quiet before.