Not Oscar Wilde

Unlike his co-accused, Alfred Taylor, there is no evidence that Oscar Wilde had any interest in cross-dressing, on stage or off.

Despite this, a photograph purporting to be Wilde appearing as the lead role in his play Salome appeared in a book review in Le Monde in 1987. Richard Ellman, already terminally ill, was finishing his seminal biography of Oscar Wilde, when his editor was in Paris and saw the issue of Le Monde. He sent it to England where Ellman’s publishers, sensing a literary scoop, included the photograph and labelled it “Wilde in costume as Salome”. A French photo-archive was credited, but there was no discussion of the photograph in Ellman’s text. It was placed immediately after a caricature drawn by Alfred Bryon that depicted Wilde as Lady Windermere smoking a cigarette.

The photograph from France was widely reproduced in the 1990s, taken to be Oscar in drag. Such was Ellman’s reputation that no one checked the provenance of the photograph. This was a ‘fact’ that seemed to confirm then current ideas of sex and gender.

 Alice Guszalewicz as Salome in Strauss' opera

Elaine Showalter in her Sexual Anarchy, 1990, wrote

“[Aubrey] Beardsley’s conflation of Wilde and Salome, of female corrosive desire and male homosexual love, brings to the surface the play’s buried and coded messages. There is a mystery here as well. In the late Richard Ellman’s massive biography of Wilde, there is a remarkable photograph taken in Paris inthe 1890s of Wilde himself posing as Salome.”

Marjorie Garber in her Vested Interests, 1992, wrote of the photograph:

“The drag Salome is not a send-up but a radical reading that tells the truth. For the binary myth of Salome – the male gazer (Herod), the female object of the gaze (Salome), the Western male subject as spectator (Flaubert, Huysman, Moreau, Wilde himself) and the exotic, feminized Eastern Other – this myth, a founding fable of Orientalism, is a spectacular disavowal. What it refuses to confront, what it declines to look at and acknowledge, is the disruptive element that intervenes, the scandal of transvestism. It is no accident that the Salome story conflates the myths of Medusa and Narcissus, the decapitated head and the mirror image. … The story of Salome and her mesmerizing Dance of the Seven Veils has become a standard trope of Orientalism.”

On the other hand , Alan Sinclair in his The Wilde Century, 1994, wrote:

“Consider, again, the wide acceptance of a supposed photograph of Wilde, bewigged and bejewelled, in costume as Salome.. John Stokes [in a letter to the London Review of Books 27 Feb 1992] points out that this is almost certainly not Wilde, and when you look again, is is not very much like him. It is part of the modern stereotype of the gay man that he should want to dress as a woman, especially a fatally gorgeous one. Our cultures observe the Wilde they expect and want to see.”

Other people also looked more closely at the photograph and realized that the face did not actually look like that of Oscar Wilde. In particular, Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, worked with Dr. Horst Schroeder of Braunschweig University, and they were able to identity the photograph as of the Hungarian singer Alice Guszalewicz appearing in a 1906 production of Strauss’s opera version of Salome. They were also able to correct other errors in Ellman’s biography such as the claim that Wilde suffered from syphilis.

James Campbell comments:

 “This misidentification of Wilde as theatrical cross-dresser is, I think, more than just an error. … The fact that Wilde’s cross-dressing seemed to fit so seamlessly (as it were) into the biography and required no explanation indicates both that inversion remains operative in later, mostly unarticulated understandings of homosexuality, and that the distinction between effeminacy and inversion is potentially quite important to Wilde’s sexuality.”

• Richard Ellman. Oscar Wilde. Random House, 1988: plate facing p429.
• Elaine Showalter. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. Viking, 1990: 156-7.
• Marjorie Garber. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Routledge, 1992: 339-40, 342-5.
• Alan Sinfield. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. Cassell, 1994: 6.
• Horst Schroeder. Alice in Wildeland. Braunschweig, 1994: 33.
• “Wilde as Salome?“. Times Literary Supplement, 22 July 1994.
• Merlin Holland. “Biography and the art of Lying“. In Peter Raby (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge University Press, 1997: 10-12.
• Steven Morris. “Importance of not being Salome”. The Guardian, 17 Jul 2000. Online.
• James Campbell. Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen and Male Desire: Begotton, Not Made. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015: 85-6.
• Clair Rowden. Performing Salome, Revealing Stories. Routledge, 2016: 15-20.
• Helen Davies. “The Trouble With Gender in Salome” in Michael Y Bennett. Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Rodopi, 2011:56-69.

Judith Jack Halberstam (1961 - ) academic. Part 1

Halberstam's grandfather was the Rabbi in the town of Most in the Sudetenland. He died of a heart attack in 1936.   After the Nazi occupation, it was permitted that some Jewish children be allowed to leave without their parents.  The Rabbi's widow put their child Heini on a Kindertransport train to London in 1939.  She herself was later deported to a Nazi work camp, where she died.

Encouraged by his English foster parents, Heini pursued his education and did a PhD in mathematics at the University of London. He specialised in the distribution of prime numbers, and taught at Trinity College Dublin 1962-4, and the University of Nottingham 1964-80. He and his wife, Heather had four children, of whom Judith was the second. Heather died in a car accident in 1971.

Judith was frequently taken to be a boy:

"Nearly every day. I didn't go around correcting people. … [I] just though I was a boy. I thought that eventually somebody would figure that out." (Gambone: 139)

This created problems with school classmates. She kept her hair as short as possible and fell into the punk rock scene.

Heini Halberstam took a position as head of the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1980 and emigrated with his second wife. Judith followed, and ended up in the San Francisco area:

"the New Agey, leftover stuff from the hippie era and the intense focus on gay men, was so not my scene" (Gambone:141).

But she did find and appreciate the dyke-bar scene. On a whim she applied to the University of California at Berkeley and was accepted. She earned a BA in English at in 1985. She followed this with an MA, 1989, and PhD, 1991, at the University of Minnesota. In Minneapolis she found a vibrant butch-femme scene.

"I suddenly got what I thought my role was. I could be queer, interested in women and masculine. The word 'butch' was a lifesaver. Even though 'butch' was already being vilified by the feminists, I took it up anyway because there was no other term"(Gambone:141).

She began to see more female-to-male persons.

"The difference between me and a trans man is not much. I just never pursued the surgery and the hormones." (Gambone:141)

Halberstam's thesis was Parasites and perverts: anti-Semitism and sexuality in nineteenth-century gothic fiction, and she found a position as Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, San Diego, and became the film reviewer for Girlfriends magazine.

In 1994 she contributed an essay "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity" to Laura L. Doan's anthology, The Lesbian Postmodern, which contains the paragraph:

"We are all transsexuals except that the referent of the trans becomes less and less clear (and more and more queer). We are all cross-dressers but where are we crossing from and to what? There is no 'other side' , no 'opposite' sex, no natural divide to be spanned by surgery, by disguise, by passing. We all pass or we don't, we all wear our drag, and we all derive a different degree of pleasure – sexual or otherwise – from our costumes. It is just that for some of us our costumes are made of fabric or material, while for others they are made of skin; for some an outfit can be changed; for others skin must be resewn. There are no transsexuals."(Doan:212)

The article was criticized by trans men who insisted on the difference between themselves and butches who were women, and many butches wanted to deny that difference in order to suggest that there exists an element of choice in relation to the question of whether or not to transition. Jamison 'James' Green, the editor of FTM Newsletter, took Halberstam to task for speaking for trans men, and a writer, Isabella, suggested that Halberstam was a lesbian feminist who wanted transsexuals to disappear within a postmodern proliferation of queer identities.

"I took this criticism very seriously, if only because I had been trying to do the very opposite of what she accused me of doing." (p147)

Jordy Jones, the performance artist, supported Halberstam in the newsletter pointing out that transsexual experience cannot be represented in any one totalizing or universal way.

In 1995 Halberstam temporarily left UCSD to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, and a visiting professorship of gay and lesbian studies at Yale.

Her first book was Skin shows: gothic horror and the technology of monsters, which does a queer reading of gothic fiction and horror movies, and posits post-human bodies. The latter idea was further explored in the anthology Posthuman bodies, which she co-edited.

The same year she and Jenni Olson created a documentary, Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film, a compilation of images of butch women from the earliest days of Hollywood, including tomboys from the '60s and recent transgender FTMs. And asked why are they less common now that we have a lesbian cinema?

By 1998 she was able to publish the seminal Female Masculinity, which gained two Lambda Book Award nominations. Halberstam is open about her own masculinity, and introduces her other persona, Jack. She asks about female-born persons who are not really lesbian or trans:

"female-born people who think of themselves as masculine but not necessarily male and certainly not female". (Gambone:142)

Halberstam provides the hitherto hidden history of masculine women: Anne Lister, Radclyffe Hall, stone butches, drag kings and transgender dykes. Furthermore:

"I claim in this book that far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity."(p1) “This study professes a degree of indifference to the whiteness of the male and the masculinity of the white male and the project of naming his power. Male masculinity figures in my project as a hermeneutic, and as a counterexample to the kinds of masculinity that seem most informative about gender relations and most generative of social change”. (p3) “Female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders". (Back cover).

It also considers the border wars between butch and FTM, and butches in films. As Adams says in her review of the book:

"One valuable lesson of Halberstam’s work is that granting white men ownership of masculinity has elided more progressive versions of the masculine and has enabled the condemnation of female masculinity by both straight and lesbian feminists". (p468) "Drawing examples from the early nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, Halberstam demonstrates the unacknowledged contribution of female masculinity to modern understandings of masculinity. Moreover, she shows how previous scholarship, eager to secure the historical foundations of lesbianism, has oversimplified, misunderstood, or elided a wide range of gender-deviant behaviors." (p469)

Continued in Part II.

A re-reading of Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors.

I have already written about Leslie Feinberg’s life.

There are two editions of this book, both Beacon Press, 1996: Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul (hardback) and Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (paperback). It is the former that I have in front of me, which makes no mention of Rodman, now best known for his bromance with Kim Jong-un, so neither will I.

The book was published by Beacon Press, Boston, owned by the Unitarian Universalist Association, which had been out of favour with trans people after publishing both Janice Raymond and Mary Daly.

The book title uses 'transgender' and in the preface, Feinberg proclaims: "The word I prefer to use to describe myself is transgender". Transgender, not transgendered. In more recent years this distinction has become heated, and as I re-started the book I hoped that ze was anticipating the then future resolution, however as the book proceeds, transgendered is used more. Ze also uses transgender as a noun as well as an adjective – a practice that is nowadays disputed. Ze does the same with intersexual.

Feinberg frequently uses the term bigender (bi-gender) which is popular with the FPE/Tri-Ess people but does not mention the joke form also popular with them: big-ender.

Two paragraphs below we find the mission statement of the book: "I asked many self-identified transgender activists who are named or pictured in this book who they believed were included under the umbrella term. Those polled named: transsexuals, transgenders, transvestites, transgenderists, bigenders, drag queens, drag kings, cross-dressers, masculine women, feminine men, intersexuals, androgynes, cross-genders, shape-shifters, passing women, passing men, gender-benders, gender blenders, bearded women and women bodybuilders who have crossed the line of what is considered socially acceptable for a female body." If a similar list were put together today, it would of course include gender queer and non-binary. The list sort of fits with the last chapter which is a portrait gallery, where there is a woman bodybuilder and a bearded woman performer. But I cannot but think that the vast majority of bearded women and female bodybuilders would object to being located under transgender. However the real issue here is inclusiveness: the dabblers and the part-timers along with the committed.

The tone changes dramatically in the next paragraph. "But the word transgender is increasingly being used in a more specific way as well. The term transgenderist was first introduced into the English language by trans warrior Virginia Prince. Virginia told me, ‘I coined the noun transgenderist in 1987 or ’88. There had to be some name for people like myself who trans the gender barrier’ “. This claim is factually incorrect. I have already written extensively on this, and so I will not repeat the detail here, other than to mention that this endorsement by Feinberg strengthened the myth that Prince had coined the term, and led to very heated refusals of the term transgender, and thus undermined Feinberg's mission. This is my most negative comment about Feinberg's book.

There is no further mention of Prince except for a photograph in the end portrait gallery of her, Ariadne Kane and Maxine Miller attending church at Fantasia Fair. (For some reason the photograph has been flipped left-to-right – see the original in Mariette Pathy Allen's Transformations.)

On the next page, Feinberg comments: "the word trans is being used increasingly by the gender community as a term uniting the entire coalition". Memory of course always deceives, and in retrospect I was surprised to find this in 1996. There is no mention at all of the older forms of trans: tranny or transy.

Twice, pages 7 and 123, there are photographs of arrests being made at the National Variety Artists Ball, Halloween 1962. This was the night before the gathering at Susanna Valenti's Chevalier D’Eon Resort that became a major event in Prince's organizing. Neither the irony of this nor the Chevalier D’Eon Resort gathering are mentioned.


Feinberg has a chapter on the North American Two-Spirit tradition, but without the criticism of the gay male writers such as Walter Williams who regarded Two-spirit as gay rather than trans that we find for example in Pat Califia's Sex Changes. Ze has a whole chapter on Joan of Arc arguing for Joan as transgender. Personally I do not buy that argument, but Feinberg's chapter is one of the best arguments for Joan being so. Ze adds other female-born warriors (in the conventional sense) and monarchs to the chapter: Catalina de Erauso, Angélique Brûlon (Liberté), Nzinga Mbandi, Qiu Jin, Franklin Thompson. However ze also adds the Albanian sworn virgin of Rapsha who was a farmer.

Some of the persons featured are more thought of as gay or feminists. While Feinberg argues for Joan of Arc being transgender, ze merely presents Luisa Capetillo, Assotta Saint, Quentin Crisp, Craig Hickman as being so. Charles Stuart, the young pretender to the British throne is also included despite being a thorough reactionary with no sympathy at all for anything queer.

Page 86 is a full page photograph of a man in an expensive suit working on a 1920s car. The person is Violet Morris and Feinberg comments: "Morris sued the French Federation of Feminine Sports for 100,000 francs for withdrawing her license to wear trousers".  Feinberg does not mention that Morris, an all-round athlete, used the excuse of fitting into a racing car to have her breasts removed. Licences to wear trousers were issued by the  Préfecture de Police, but Morris never bothered to apply for one. Morris was rejected for the 1928 and 1936 Olympics on grounds of being too masculine. She was accused of being a collaborator and assassinated by the French Resistance in 1944. Several books, none of them translated into English, argue whether or not she was a Gestapiste.


RuPaul, Joan of Arc's partner in the book title, appears very briefly on pages 96-7, but there is only a photograph and the best known quotes from RuPaul's book, such as "You're born naked and the rest is drag". There is nothing about RuPaul's life or career, and no anticipation to the recent brouhaha (but see below on drag queens in general).

On the next page is a call for gay-trans solidarity: "I understand that many heterosexual transsexual and transgender people have been justly angered by a lifetime of accusations that their sex-change and or gender expression is merely a result of being ashamed to admit that they are gay. No one wants the identity they are willing to live for – or to die for – to be invalidated or misunderstood. But while not all lesbian, gay, and bi people face trans oppression, all trans people experience anti-gay bigotry. To the bigots and bashers, all trans expression is 'queer'. Distancing ourselves from the lesbian, gay, and bi movement will not make us safer."

On page 115, ze writes about drag performance: "I've heard women criticize drag queens for 'mocking women's oppression' by imitating femininity to an extreme, just as I've been told that I am imitating men. Feminists are justifiably angry at women's oppression – so am I! I believe, however, that those who denounce drag queens aim their criticism at the wrong people. This misunderstanding doesn't take gender oppression into account. … There is a difference between the drag population and masculine men doing cruel female impersonations. The Bohemian Grove, for example, is an elite United States club for wealthy powerful men that features comedy cross-dressing performances. Many times the burlesque comedy of cross-dressed masculine men is as anti-drag as it is anti-woman. In fact it's really only drag performance when it's transgender people who are facing the footlights. Many times drag performance calls for skilled impersonations of a famous individual like Diana Ross or Judy Garland, but the essence of drag performance is not impersonation of the opposite sex. It is the cultural presentation of an oppressed gender expression."

Like most books, Transgender Warriors, was a product of its time, the mid-1990s. However it was a book needed at that time, and many of the issues within are still being argued over. A re-reading is certainly fruitful.

Riki Anne Wilchins (1952 - ) computing, activist.

(S/he and hir are Riki's preferred pronouns.)


Wilchins grew up in Cincinnati, his father a surgeon, and transitioned to Riki Anne in the late 1970s. S/he did a bachelors degree in Psychology & Communication at Cleveland State University in 1980 where s/he also attended the gender clinic. Hir transition resulted in a breakup with hir girlfriend of seven years. Wilchins later did a masters in Clinical Psychology at the New School for Social Research 1981-94.

In 1981 s/he moved to New York where s/he found work on Wall Street doing computer consulting in banking and brokerage despite being openly transsexual.

S/he approached lesbian archivist, Joan Nestle, asking to be included in the archive, but fearing rejection, and they became friends.

Wilchins was an early supporter of Nancy Burkholder after she was ejected from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF) in 1991. Wilchins was one of the founders of Camp Trans across the road from MWMF from 1994. Wilchins argued strongly that pre-op and non-op should be included in MWMF as much as post-op women. Also in 1994 Wilchins and Denise Norris co-founded Transexual Menace to follow on from Transgender Nation. Later that year, after the murder of Brandon Teena, Wilchins organized a demonstration against New York's Village Voice which had printed an article by Donna Minkowitz on the murder which used only female pronouns for Teena. Later still Wilchins confronted Janice Raymond at the New York bookstore Judith's Room:

"You say we want to 'pass' as women. Well, I don't pass. I wear this Transexual Menace logo every place that I go. Between the two of us, only you pass as a woman. If, as de Beauvoir held, 'One is not born a woman, but becomes one,' if femininity is an invention of men foisted on women, if feminine behavior is a learned cultural performance of hair, clothing, voice, gesture, and stance so one is perceived as a female, then by presenting yourself as a woman it is you who have been co-opted into traditional sex roles, you who serve their institutions, and you who are performing here." 

photo by Mariette Pathy Allen

In 1995 Wilchins worked with Phyllis Frye and Karen Kerin on National Gender Lobby Day, a largely successful attempt to lobby every member of the US Government. Riding the excitement from the lobbying effort, Riki gave a rousing speech at that year's Be-all convention in Chicago on the need for a transgender organization to press for political change. In 1996 representatives from most US transgender organizations (but not Phyllis Frye after Wilchins took over the leadership of Lobby Day) met to charter the new organization GenderPAC. The paperwork was signed and Wilchins was named Executive Director.

A split quickly developed between those who wanted to keep the organization transgender specific and those who followed Wilchin's lead in addressing the gender expression of everybody. Policy Advisor JoAnn Roberts and President Angela Gardner resigned over this issue. That same year Riki wrote an article for TGForum with the ironic title '…Only a Crossdresser', in which s/he wrote:

"Once crossdressers ever *really* come out, and begin to enunciate the politics of the direct, head-on challenge their very existence poses to gender regimes, I think we have a truly revolutionary force on our hands, a potent force. The only question is, how long will they think of themselves, and allow so many of us to think of them, as '…only crossdressers?' "

Also that year, when Sean O'Neill in Colorado was sentenced to 90 days for statutory rape after consensual sex but without revealing his gender history, Wilchins commented:

"If you look androgynous and someone wants to claim that you're passing yourself off as the other gender, you've just committed a felony".

Riki also campaigned with Hermaphrodites With Attitude and Lesbian Avengers.

MWMF 1994 - photo by Mariette Pathy Allen

In 1997 hir book Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender came out, and became one the iconic books of 'transgender' as it was then conceived, and along with Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg, Wilchins was one of the 1990s iconic transgender persons. It was also a kickstart to the burgeoning Gender Queer movement. The book is a mixture of gender theory a la Judith Butler and Michel Foucault mixed with Riki's personal experiences. It also includes photographs by Mariette
Pathy Allen. Amongst other things s/he says:

"I have no interest in being part of a transgender or transexual movement whose sole purpose is to belly up to the Big Table and help ourselves to yet another serving of identity Pie, leaving in our wake some other, more marginalized group to carry on its own struggle alone. What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate and contain what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do. The point of a gender liberation movement for me … is also about the seventeen-year-old Midwestern cheerleader whose health is destroyed by anorexia because 'real women' are supposed to be preternaturally thin. It's about the forty-six-year-old Joe Six-pack who wraps his car around a crowded school bus on the way home from the bar because 'real men' are supposed to be heavy drinkers. It's about the unathletic and fat little boy who's physically attacked by his classmates everyday after school. It's about the two lesbian lovers stalked and killed on the Appalachian trail in Virginia. It's about the aging body succumbing to an unnecessary hysterectomy because certain kinds of gendered bodies simply don't matter as much. And it's about the sensitive, straight young man who is repeatedly raped his first year in prison because, within that environment, he's received as genderqueer, genderdifferent, or simply gendervulnerable".

Also:

"Academics, shrinks, and feminist theorists have traveled through our lives and problems like tourists on a junket. Picnicking on our identities like flies at a free lunch, they have selected the tastiest tidbits with which to illustrate a theory or push a book. The fact that we are a community under fire, is irrelevant to them. They pursue Science and Theory, and what they produce by mining our lives is neither addressed to us nor recycled within our community … Our performance of gender is invariably a site of contest, a problem which – if we could but bring enough hi-octane academic power to bear – might be solved".

The same year GenderPAC produced The First National Study on Transviolence, with 402 respondents the most extensive study on violence against gender variant persons. Later in 1997 Wilchins and GenderPAC made a tactical agreement with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) that 'gender identity' and 'gender expression' be dropped from that year's version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to improve its chance of passing. In exchange both groups would lobby for gender variance to be added to the Hate Crimes Statistics Act. This of course infuriated the various trans activists groups – the more so as both acts failed to pass.

Wilchins was on the cover of the Summer 1999 Transgender Tapestry. By that time Wilchins had managed to push out of GenderPAC most representatives of the founding transgender organizations with the exception of Tony Barreto-Neto from TOPS and Carrie David from IFGE, and converted the supposedly political campaigning organization into a non-profit educational charity. GenderPAC started recruiting state and campus co-ordinators. In December 2000, Gina Reiss, GenderPAC Managing Director was quoted:

“I’m tired of the fact that 85% of the people calling the office are transgender people
seeking help”.

In a speech that year Wilchin said:

"A transgender struggle is an important thing, but it is not my fight. In fact I personally have no interest in being transexual or transgender… What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do".

In 2001 Tony Barreto-Neto was forced out. Later that year, Time Magazine selected Wilchins as one of "100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century." Wilchins was a featured columnist on gender issues for The Advocate.

In 2002, Riki with Joan Nestle and Clare Howell edited GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary which included essays by Sylvia Rivera, JT Leroy, Cheryl Chase, Gina Reiss, Rusty Mae Moore and many others. It includes four essays by Wilchins: A Certain Kind of Freedom: Power and the Truth of Bodies. In the fourth, "Deconstructing Trans", s/he wrote:

"It's fair to say that 'transgender' was created by the gay and feminist movements. Its emergence became practically inevitable from the day those movements began moving away from gender. … Genderqueerness would seem to be a natural avenue for feminism to contest Woman's equation with nurturance, femininity, and reproduction: in short to trouble the project of Man. Yet feminists have been loath to take that avenue, in no small part because queering Woman threatens the very category on which feminism depends."

In 2004 Riki published hir primer of theoretical concerns, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. However at $63 it was priced not to sell. S/he worked with anthropologist David Valentine. He helped hir edit Read My Lips, they wrote a paper together on violence against gender variant people, and s/he is frequently mentioned in his Imagining Transgender. They both critique the obligatory identity requirement for being transgender.

In 2006 Riki and hir wife adopted a baby girl.

In 2009 s/he closed GenderPac, and founded TrueChild which promotes "'gender transformative' approaches to philanthropy and policy that challenge rigid gender norms and inequities in order to improve life outcomes for at-risk youth".

• Riki Anne Wilchins. “ '…Only a Crossdresser': Notes on the More Radical Identity" TGForum, 1996, reprinted Mar 13, 2012. http://www.tgforum.com/wordpress/index.php/only-a-crossdresser.
  

• Pat Califia. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997: 222, 226-9, 232, 236, 242, 266.
  
• Riki Anne Wilchins. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1997.
  
• David Valentine & Riki Anne Wilchins, "One percent on the burn chart: Gender, Genitals and Hermaphrodites with Attitude". Social Text, 52/53, 1997: 215–222.
  
• Carey Goldberg. "PUBLIC LIVES; Issues of Gender, From Pronouns to Murder". The New York Times, June 11, 1999. www.nytimes.com/1999/06/11/nyregion/public-lives-issues-of-gender-from-pronouns-to-murder.html.
  
• Riki Wilchins. "Disposable People". Transgender Tapestry, 87, 1999.
  
• Dallas Denny. "We’re from GenderPAC: We’re Here to Help You". Transgender Tapestry, 93, Spring 2001: 12-14. http://dallasdenny.com/Writing/2013/10/05/were-from-genderpac-were-here-to-help-you-2001.
  
• Dallas Denny. "A word from the editor: GenderPACs implosion". Transgender Tapestry, 93, Spring 2001: 6. http://dallasdenny.com/Writing/2013/10/05/genderpacs-implosion-2001.
  
• Joan Nestle, Clare Howell & Riki Wilchins (eds). GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary. Alyson Books, 2002.
  
• Pauline Park. "GenderPAC, the Transgender Rights Movement And the Perils of a Post-Identity Politics Paradigm". 5^th Annual Georgetown Symposium on Gender & Sexuality:Crossing Boundaries, Redefining Gender: A New Front on Equality, February 27, 2002. http://www.paulinepark.com/2003/04/genderpac-the-transgender-rights-movement-and-the-perils-of-a-post-identity-politics-paradigm.
  
• Riki Anne Wilchins. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2004.
  
• David Valentine. " 'The Calculus of Pain': Violence, Anthopological Ethics and the Category Transgender. Ethnos, 68,1,2003: 27-48. Reprinted in Melissa Checker & Maggie Fishman. Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 2004: 89-110.
  
• Viviane K Namaste. Sex Change, Social Change Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism. Toronto: Women's Press, 2005: 8,9,11,13,64,65,70.
  
• "100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century". Time Magazine, June 2005.
  
• David Valentine. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007: xi, 25. 34, 44, 148, 176, 179, 181, 184, 204, 205, 209, 212, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 254, 270, 272, 274, 275, 291, 295, 297, 302.
  
• "Riki Wilchins is my Hero". Beyond Bryn Mawr, February 11, 2011. http://beyondbrynmawr.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/riki-wilchins-is-my-hero/#more-1354.
  
• Pauline Park. "Why GenderPAC Failed". PrettyQueer, April 21, 2012. Online at: http://prettyqueer.tumblr.com/post/21502797604/why-genderpac-failed.
  
• Riki Wilchins. "Op-ed: Transgender Dinosaurs and the Rise of the Genderqueers: Why the traditional concept of transgender is slowly fading away.". Advocate, December 06 2012. www.advocate.com/commentary/riki-wilchins/2012/12/06/transgender-dinosaurs-and-rise-genderqueers.
  
• Riki Wilchins. "Op-ed: 'But You Can’t Really Be Her Mom': Transgender activism in the age of parenting.". Advocate, December 18 2012. www.advocate.com/commentary/riki-wilchins/2012/12/18/you-can%E2%80%99t-really-be-her-mom.
  
• Quinnae Moongazer. "My Transsexual Menace: A Response to Riki Wilchins". Nuclear Unicorn, December 22, 2012. http://quinnae.com/2012/12/22/my-transsexual-menace-a-response-to-riki-wilchins/.
  

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In earlier days Riki prefered to spell 'transexual' with one 's' to avoid the medical implications.   However more recently she has been spelling it 'transsexual'.

This site is called 'gender variance who's who' and so of course we welcome those who speak up for other forms of gender variance in addition to transgender and transsexual.

However Wilchins did upset many trans activists by downplaying the trans aspect of GenderPAC.  S/he should have made it clear from the start what GenderPAC would be doing, and relied much less on donations from trans groups.

Vern Leroy Bullough (1928 – 2006). Historian and sexologist.

Original February 2008. Revised September 2013. 

Vern Bullough was born and raised in Salt Lake City.  He and his high-school sweetheart, Bonnie Uckerman (1927 - 1996), left the Mormon Church as teenagers in protest against its then exclusion of black people.  Bonnie's mother left her family to live with a woman, Berry Berryman.  Vern found this fascinating and asked many questions and met their gay and lesbian friends.  Vern and Bonnie married in 1947, and had two children. 

After being in the US Army, Vern did a BA in history at the University of Utah and an MA and PhD in 1954 at Chicago University, using GI Bill Benefits. He specialized in the Middle Ages and did a dissertation on medical education.  He was hired the same year to teach at Youngstown University in Ohio. 

In 1959 he became a professor of history at San Fernando Valley State College  (which later became California State University at Northridge), and Bonnie, already a nurse, completed a PhD in Sociology.  Shortly afterwards Vern became associated with Virginia Prince.   He also became involved with the homophile organization, ONE, Inc and became head of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). 

Vern and Bonnie became friends with Prince and visited Virginia and his wife Doreen at home.  They attended the second meeting of the Hose and Heel Club in 1960.  Having published several articles and books on the early history of medicine and nursing, Vern felt that he could look at sex, and published The History of Prostitution in 1964.  Working with ONE, Inc, where he came to know Harry Hay, Jim Kepner and Don Slater, Vern was successful in getting the San Fernando Valley chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to adopt a policy of protection of homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals.  He was chairman when the local ACLU was very involved in the struggle to desegregate Los Angeles City schools.

In 1965 ONE, Inc split into two competing factions, and Vern Bullough was one of only two people who were able to maintain working relationships with both sides.  In 1966 the national ACLU adopted a national policy re homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals based on Bullough's draft.

He rode in an early gay parade in Hollywood in 1966 that Slater organized to demand that gays be drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Bullough opposed the war but supported gays' rights to serve in the military.  That same year Vern was able to visit West Asia on a Fulbright scholarship.   However the trip was marred when his son David was killed in a hit-and-run accident in Jerusalem.  The Bulloughs subsequently adopted three children of different races, two of whom are gay.

Vern allied himself with gay causes, and was a founder of gay caucuses in the American Historical Association and the American Sociological Association. He was a charter member of the original Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), which was founded in Los Angeles.  He established the Vern and Bonnie Bullough Collection on Sex and Gender, housed at the campus' Oviatt Library.  He “halfway encouraged” John Brown to do transsexual surgery, as he admits with chagrin. In 1974 Vern and Bonnie organized a conference in Los Angeles under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR, associated with ONE and sponsored by Reed Erickson) which brought together Virginia Prince, Christine Jorgensen, Zelda Suplee, Laud Humphries, Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Hooker.  The same year he and Bonnie published, The Subordinate Sex, 1974. This was his first book sponsored by the millionaire trans man Reed Erickson, and the one in which he made the claim that Islam is a sex-positive religion.

In 1976 Vern Bullough, Dorr Legg and other members of ONE, Inc finally published their An Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality: In Two Volumes, which also contained the largest bibliography of transvestite and transsexual material available at that time.  His Sexual Variance  of the same year was again sponsored by Reed Erickson.  It contains many examples of gay and transgender behavior showing that it differs across time and between cultures.

Bonnie progressed from sociology instructor to professor of nursing, chair of primary care and coordinator of the graduate nursing program.

In 1979 Virginia Prince gave a talk at Northridge and Vern introduced her to his colleague, Richard Docter.  Vern published his Homosexuality, a History, the final book sponsored by Reed Erickson.  Chapter 10 is called “Cross-Dressing: Transvestism, Transsexualism, and Homosexuality” in which only one real transvestite is named: his friend, the avowed non-homosexual, Virginia Prince. He also mentions the Chevalier d’Eon, Lili Elvenes (Elbe) and Christine Jorgensen who were not homosexual either. But only these few. For some reason, even at the price of damaging the logic of his book, he chose not to mention at all any of José Sarria, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Bunny Breckinridge, Jimmy Donahue, Miss Destiny, Tamara Rees, Patricia Morgan, Norma Jackson, Hedy Jo Star, Candy Darling, Minette, Rachel Harlow, Rae Bourbon, Francis Renault, Dawn Langley Simmons, Abby Sinclair, Angela Douglas, Perry Desmond, Lee Brewster, Liz Eden, Holly Woodlawn, Carlotta. This was the first sign that he was censoring the existence of gay/androphilic trans women.

Later that year Vern and Bonnie Bullough moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo where Vern was dean of natural and social sciences, and Bonnie was dean of nursing.  In 1981 Vern earned a Batchelor of Science in Nursing from California State University, Long Beach, and proudly put his Registered Nurse license number on his CV.    In 1992 he was honored by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and was their chairman 1995-6.  He was also on the editorial board of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia. 

In 1993 Vern and Bonnie Bullough returned to Los Angeles after their retirement. Vern again taught at Northridge as an adjunct professor until 2003. That year Vern and Bonnie published Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, specifically on trans people and their doctors. In the chapter “Transsexualism” they discuss (only) 6 known transsexuals: Lili Elbe (surgery 1931), Alan Hart (1918), Roberta Cowell (1951), Michael Dillon (1949), Christine Jorgensen (1953) and Jan Morris (1972)– none of whom, incidentally, had a male partner. He does also mention Coccinelle (1958), who had three husbands after her operation, but he puts her in the “Drag Queens and Cross Dressing on the Stage” chapter rather than the “Transsexualism” chapter, and omits all mention of her husbands. There is no mention at all of April Ashley (1960) whose divorce by her husband set such an unfortunate precedent, but then she could not be mentioned without admitting that she had a husband. Almost all the people that I mentioned in a previous paragraph are still apparently unknown to the Bulloughs, as are the extra people who were in the news in the additional 14 years. Of those mentioned, only Jan Morris and Coccinelle transitioned later than Jorgensen in 1953. Thus in the 40 years prior to writing their book, the Bulloughs seem to have become aware of only two more transsexuals, although they knew of Michael Dillon from Liz Hodgkinson's 1989 biography rather than from the media kerfuffle in 1958. In the “Organized Transvestism” chapter, again, only his friend Virginia Prince is mentioned, and the equally important work by Louise Lawrence, José Sarria and Sylvia Rivera is totally ignored.  And one more thing: The Bulloughs ignore completely the organizations for female-to-males. Surely they would not omit Reed Erickson, his former sponsor? Actually they do. But the next major ftm organizer is Louis Sullivan. Okay, he is briefly mentioned (p306) as a female cross-dresser who finds men's clothing erotic. They suppress the fact that he transitioned to male, and – this fits the pattern - that he became a man to be a gay man, a role that he tragically embraced to the point of dying of Aids.

Bonnie Bullough died in 1996, just before the publication of the anthology Gender Blending edited by herself, Vern and James Elias.  Vern quickly re-married.

In 2004 Vern encouraged Richard Docter to write and publish his biography of Virginia Prince and provided a Preface.
Helen Boyd asked Bullough to comment on rumors that he must be a cross-dresser because of his strong interests in the transgender community. Others assumed that he was gay and were disappointed to learn that he was an avowed heterosexual.

"If I was everything I wrote books about, I would probably be a very screwed-up person," he said, mentioning his works on sadomasochism, pedophilia, masturbation and other forms of sexual expression. I consider myself a sex researcher, and I will admit to having a strong interest in the way people sexually express themselves."

In his final book with Ariadne Kane, Crossing Sexual Boundaries, 2006, Bullough's Introduction again - as we now expect - fails to mention any transsexuals with male lovers/husbands, as does the book itself which contains 18 mtf and 2 ftm autobiographical essays, but not a single one in which the person has a male spouse. As Kane has said: "We tried to involve contributors from all sectors of the gender spectrum, including androgynes, non operative and post-operative, individuals, spouses and close friends of ‘T’ people" --- and they could not find a single trans person with a male partner!!!

Bullough died later in 2006, of cancer.  He was 77.  

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Apparently Bullough was uncomfortable with transsexuals or transvestites who have male partners. This would explain why he was unable to name any gay transvestites or transsexuals in his 1979 book, and why Coccinelle is put in the other chapter in the 1993 book.  However this is odd in that he worked so well with gay organizations as well as with Virginia Prince.  He is even critical of Prince for proclaiming that transvestites are necessarily heterosexual.  And yet the omission is plainly there in his books.  I suspect somehow the influence of Prince, who apparently also had input into the non-presence of gay transvestites in Harry Benjamin's book and scale. 

Photo of Bullough, Prince, and Docter from Docter's book.

In his Preface to Richard Docter’s biography of Virginia Prince Bullough makes the claim – that surprisingly has been ignored in the debate about social construction - that “there is no evidence in Western culture of what might be called a heterosexual transvestite consciousness before the twentieth century”, and probably not before Magnus Hirschfield modified the term 'transvestite' in 1910.

Michel Foucault is associated with the claim that there were no homosexuals before that term was coined in 1869, and this claim is wrongly taken to represent the social constructionist position. The historian Rictor Norton has written extensively against social constructionism largely by demonstrating the many homosexuals who existed and had sex before 1869.

What a shame that Bullough made this claim only in a Preface to someone else's book. Could someone pay attention to the claim and either refute it or develop it?
---------

• Vern L. Bullough. Sexual Variance in Society and History. New York: Wiley 1976.
• Vern L. Bullough. Homosexuality, a History. New York: New American Library 1979.
• Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press 1993. 
• Vern L. Bullough.  "In Memory of Bonnie Bullough".  The Journal of Sex Research, 33,3, 1996: 179-181.   
• Vern L. Bullough, Bonnie Bullough & James Elias (ed). Gender Blending. Amherst NY: Prometheus Books 1997. 
• Raj Ayyar.  "America's Foremost Historian of Sexuality: Vern L. Bullough, RN, PhD ".  Gay Today, 01/01/03.  http://gaytoday.com/interview/010103in.asp.
• Vern L. Bullough. “Preface” in Richard F Docter. From Man to Woman: The Transgender Journey of Virginia Prince. Docter Press xiv, 149 pp 2004. 
• Helen Boyd.  "Five Questions With… Vern Bullough".  en|Gender, November 16, 2005.   www.myhusbandbetty.com/2005/11/16/five-questions-with-vern-bullough.
• J. Ari Kane-Demaios (Ariadne Kane) & Vern L. Bullough (eds) Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths Prometheus Books, 365 pp, 2006. 
• Elaine Woo.  "Vern Bullough, 77; Prolific Author Was Scholar of Sex History".  Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006.  http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/02/local/me-bullough2.
• Wayne Dynes.  "Vern Bullough, 1928 - 2006".  Dyneslines, July 02, 2006.   http://dyneslines.blogspot.ca/2006/07/vern-bullough-1928-2006.html.
• Jeremy Pearce.  "Vern Leroy Bullough, 77, Noted Medical Historian, Dies" The New York Times, July 3, 2006.  www.nytimes.com/2006/07/03/us/03bullough.html.
• www.vernbullough.com. 

 EN.WIKIPEDIA     AMAZON.COM     WORLDCAT   PHILOSOPEDIA    PHILOSOPEDIA(Bonnie Bullough)  BOYWIKI  

Camille Paglia (1947 - ) academic, media pundit.

Camille Paglia is the elder daughter of Italian Immigrants to the US. Her father eventually became professor of Romance Languages at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York. Camille was a tomboy who enjoyed dressing as male, and considered for a while that she had been born the wrong sex.  She read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, while still in high school. She graduated with a BA from Binghamton University in 1968, where she wrote her final thesis on Emily Dickinson.

She did a PhD at Yale 1968-72 where she was openly lesbian, and was mentored by Harold Bloom. Paglia taught at Bennington College, Vermont from 1972. One of her students was Judith Butler.

In 1973 Carolyn Heilbrun issued her tepid Towards a Recognition of Androgyny. Paglia, then an unknown, reviewed it anonymously in the Yale Review:

"Heilbrun's book is so poorly researched that it may disgrace the subject in the eyes of serious scholars".

She defended her thesis, Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, in December 1974.

She fell out with her colleagues at Bennington College. After a standoff with the administration, she accepted a settlement and resigned in 1979. She supported herself with part-time positions, and some journalism. She completed the book version of Sexual Personae, but could not get it published. In 1984, she was hired to teach humanities by the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, which merged in 1987 with the Philadelphia College of Art to become the University of the Arts.

In 1990 Sexual Personae was published by Yale University Press. In it she analyzes Western art in terms of the contrast between Dionysos and Apollo, an approach that had been pioneered by Friedrich Nietzsche. Unlike Nietzsche she contrasts masculine, phallic sky religion with feminine, chthonic, earth religion, and portrays culture as a struggle between the two. She find paganism undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, androgyny, sadism and the aggressive Western eye in both classical art and pop culture. Against the feminism of the 1980s she stresses the biological basis of gender differences. She identifies 23 sexual personae which she labels:

Amazon, androgyne of manners, android, beautiful boy, court hermaphrodite, dandy, Decadent aesthete, drag queen, Epicoene, Gorgon, Great Mother, Khepera, lesbian, male heroine, manufactured object, Mercurius, Pythoness, Teiresias, transsexual, twin, vampire, Venus Barbata, virago.

All 23 are androgynous in different ways. The power of androgyny comes through in three key concepts:


Charisma, the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love (p521);

Psychoiconicism, the literary phenomenon where a dominant androgyne so dominates a text that both the plot and other characters lose fictive energy and fade into the background. She specifies the examples of Geraldine in Coleridge's poem 'Christabel'; Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It; Virginia Woolf's Orlando; Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. Wuthering Heights and Orlando in particular weaken in their second half once the authors Sexual Metathesis, expressed in a fascination with the central character, is completed and there remains a struggle to complete the plot (p345 );

Sexual Metathesis, the special erotic thrill produced by a change in gender. Several of the literary examples disguise a gay relationship, but the public evasion is no more than a small part. 'An ampler spiritual economy is at work. Sexual metathesis is a metaphysical advance, an expansion of identity through a mentally prolonged erotic sensation’ (p350,455).

All this of course refers to the androgyny inherent in our culture. She says very little about real-life trans persons. The major statement is on p368:

"We are still untangling the legal and and moral problems caused by the invention of a new sex, the transsexual, produced by chemical and surgical manipulations of the body. The transsexual is a technological androgyne whom we are happy to call 'she' out of the courtesy owed to all inspired makers of fiction. Close to transsexual is my favorite technological androgyne, Luciana Avedon, formerly the Princess Pignatelli, who radically resculpted face and body in her quest for beauty."

The book drew strong criticisms, both pro and con. Sexual Personae was nominated for a National Book Award and after being released as a paperback became a best-seller. She said that a second volume focused on popular culture had also been written, but the book has never appeared.

Two years later she released Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays which contains her critical review of Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests, and "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf" in which she tackles Foucault, Halperin and their ilk for their ignorance of earlier theorists and their ignorance of culture in general. This essay was much discussed even by classical historians.  She expresses enthusiasm for drag queens:

"I sensed then, and now know for certain, that Madonna, like me, is drawn to drag queens for their daring, flamboyant insight into sex roles, which they see far more clearly and historically than do our endlessly complaining feminists. (p9) ... The castrated, tranvestite priests of Cybele, honored in disco-like rites of orgiastic dance, survive in today's glamourous, flamboyant drag queens. (p23) ...The drag queen has emerged in America in the Nineties as a symbol of our sexual crisis.  A pagan priest whose ancestry is in the ancient cults of the Great Mother, the drag queen defies victim-centered feminism by asserting the dominance of woman in the universe. (p99) ...You know, I'm really happy there wasn't all this talk about sex changes back then, since I probably would have gotten this fantasy that I was a man born in a woman's body, and I think that I might very well have become obsessed with the idea of a sex change, which would have been a terrible mistake.... I've acclimatised myself to to my sex role -- thanks to gay men and drag queens!  Drag queens have influenced me enormously.  Their analysis of the mythology of male and female  and the theater of gender and so on, I've absolutely taken into myself.  (p256)"

She became a media celebrity known for her disagreements with other feminists and media pundits. Because she would not conform to the left-wing party lines, she was dismissed as a conservative, but regards herself as a libertarian Democrat, with pro-choice positions on abortion, pornography, euthanasia etc.

Her first movie was Female Misbehavior, 1992, where she is profiled along with Annie Sprinkle and trans man Max Valerio. In It's Pat, 1994, a street gang have a battered copy of Sexual Personae and accuse Pat of being an androgyne, which s/he is. Paglia has appeared in 38 films, usually playing herself. In 2001 she recorded a commentary track for the DVD of Basic Instinct. She wrote regular columns for Interview Magazine and Salon.

She was partnered with Allison Maddex 1993-2007 and legally adopted Maddex' son.

In 2009 (although the segment was not released until May 2011), in an interview with Xtra, Paglia confirmed the suspicion that she does not really understand what transsexuality is by opposing Chaz Bono's decision about himself, by referring to him as 'she' and 'Chastity', and repeating that when she was young that she was convinced that she was the wrong gender and if it were allowed that she might have done the same.

• Anonymous (Camille Paglia). "Review of Towards a Recognition of Androgyny".  The Yale Review, LXII, 4, 1973.  
• Camille Paglia. Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art. PhD Yale 1974.
• Camille Paglia. Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale University Press, 1990.
• Camille Paglia. Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays. Vintage, 1992.
• Joan Smith. "Book Review / Madonna of academe: 'Sex, Art and American Culture' - Camille Paglia: Viking, 18.99". The Independent, 10 Jan 1993. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review—madonna-of-academe-sex-art-and-american-culture--camille-paglia-viking-1899-1477762.html.
• Camille Paglia. Vamps and Tramps: New Essays.Vintage, 1994.
• Camille Paglia. The Birds. BFI Film Classics, 1998.
• Camille Paglia. Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems. Pantheon, 2005.
• Robert M. Stewart. "Paglia, Camille (1947 - )". In Alan Soble. Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press, 2005
• "Camille Paglia". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_paglia.
• "Sexual Personae". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Personae:_Art_and_Decadence_from_Nefertiti_to_Emily_Dickinson.
• "Camille Paglia Biography". Biography Finder. www.biographyfinder.com/s1721-Camille-Paglia-biography.html.
• "Camille Paglia". Biographicon. www.biographicon.com/wiki/dpivu.
• "Paglia, Camille (b. 1947)". glbtq: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, & queer culture. www.glbtq.com/literature/paglia_c.html. 

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Sexual Personae is enormously better than Towards a Recognition of Androgyny.  There is probably an eternal dialectic between transsexuality and androgyny, as there is between gender identity and sexual orientation, and Sexual Personae is still the best book about androgyny. 

Sexual Personae also has a rare enthusiasm not usually found in books on literature, that sends you to read the original texts.  I at least dug out the poems and stories that she discusses to either read them for the first time, or to re-read them.

It was a bit naughty of Xtra in May 2011 to put up the clip of Paglia talking about Bono without mentioning that it had been filmed two years previously.

Richard Ekins (194?–) jazz musician, sociologist, psychoanalyst.

++ updated August 2012, March 2014

++Teenage Richard Ekins was a fan of New Orleans jazz.  Inspired by the legendary trumpeter DeDe La Croix Pierce (1904 - 73), he played the same instrument in New Orleans-style jazz bands mainly in and around Birmingham, firstly with the Burgundy Street Stompers in 1964, before teaming up with pianist Bob Barton to co-lead the Crescent City Stompers from 1966 to 1968.  On his first visit to New Orleans in 1966 he encountered Joseph 'Kid Twat' Butler, bass player with the Kid Thomas Band, who had never seen such a tall, long-haired and heavily-bearded man, and bowed down proclaiming: Here come de Lord!".  The moniker stuck.  Lord Richard set up his own record label,  La Croix Records, and released seven LPs by both British and New Orleans musicians. The famous Kid Thomas Band recorded live in 1968 at Kohlman’s Tavern in New Orleans was one of his projects.
  

Richard also did a Ll.B Hons in Law at the University of Birmingham in 1966, and then a PhD on the work of philosopher and social psychologist George Mead at the University of London where he was influenced by Margaret Coulson & Carol Riddell's pioneering introductory textbook on sociology. ++He fathered two sons named after his record label and a jazz hero:  Matthew La Croix Ekins (1974-) and Luke Baptiste Ekins (1977-) - named for Willie Baptiste, the banjo player++.  Richard completed his PhD in 1978 after an extended period with Mead disciple David L. Miller at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the Mead Archive at the University of Chicago.


Ekins chose transvestites and transsexuals as the empirical domain to which he would apply his theoretical training.

"As a student of the sociology of knowledge, I approached the area in terms of the interrelations between the various ‘knowledges’ in the area, conceptualized in terms of three principal ‘knowledges’: those of ‘science’, those of ‘members’ (of transgendered people), and those of ‘everyday life’."

Ekins and Dave King first met at the British Sociological Conference on Gender in Manchester in 1982.

"My work was based upon observations of what later became several thousands of transgendered people, extended interviews with several hundred informants, and detailed life-long life history work with several dozen informants from a number of different continents. From the outset I took care to follow selected informants in the full range of their social settings. This often entailed detailed observational and interview work with medical and related professionals, with the families of my transgendered informants, and with the various service providers to trans people, such as beauticians and hair care specialists. At the same time, I immersed myself into the full range of transgender ‘community’ events such as private meetings, drag balls, erotic networks, and so on. (2006:8)"

He started at the University of Ulster at Coleraine as a senior lecturer in sociology in 1984, by which time he had developed his signature jargon of 'femaling'. In 1986 he established the Trans-Gender Archive with himself as director. This is probably the earliest textual use of 'transgender' in the collective sense, although the term had been used orally with that meaning in Britain as early as The First National TV.TS Conference in 1974 at Leeds, and was so used on BBC Radio in 1979. Ekins contributed towards the definition of Transgender in the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 1989 Ekins obtained a M.Med.Sc in psychotherapy from Queen's University, Belfast. In 1995 he switched to being a senior lecturer in psychology. In 1996 he completed his training as a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society and International Psychoanalytical Society.  In 1996 Ekins and King edited a collection of papers, Blending genders: social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing, with contributions from both trans persons (Mark Rees, Phaedra Kelly, Rachel Terri Webb, Stephen Whittle) and from academics (Neil Buhrich, Janice Raymond).  The next year Ekins published Male Femaling: a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing. (Review) Ekins also published books on psychoanalysis. 

In 1999 Ekins and King published "Towards a sociology of transgendered bodies" in The Sociological Review, where they summarized their position:

"Transgendering refers both to the idea of moving across (transferring) from one pre-existing gender category to another (either temporarily or permanently), and to the idea of transcending or living ‘beyond gender’ altogether. Following Plummer’s (1995) work on sexual stories, we distinguish a number of contemporary transgendering body stories which we consider in terms of four major modes or styles of body transgendering: those we identify as ‘migrating’, ‘oscillating’, ‘erasing’ and ‘transcending’. We give illustrative examples of each mode with reference to the binary male/female divide, the interrelations between sex, sexuality and gender, and the interrelations between the four main sub-processes of transgendering, which we identify as ‘substituting’, ‘concealing’, ‘implying’ and ‘redefining’."

Also in 1999, Ekins and King met Anne Lawrence at the 6th Biennial Harry Benjamin Conference in London. They sort of incorporated her ideas into Ekins' concept of erotic femaling, and in 2001 published “Transgendering, Migrating and Love of Oneself as a Woman: A Contribution to a Sociology of Autogynephilia”. Unlike the Blanchardians they see autogynephilia in MTFs as very similar to that in cis women.

“In our judgement, our framework provides the conceptual wherewithal to unpack such issues in a way denied to the taxonomic, typological and diagnostic approach followed by Blanchard.”

Ekins was Reader in Cultural and Media Studies from 2002, and Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies from 2006.

In 2009 Ekins and King published The Transgender Phenomenon, which expanded the program that they had proposed in "Towards a sociology of transgendered bodies", 2006.   The book heavily features Virginia Prince, to the point of including an extensive biography, and is one of the very few books to discuss Charlotte Bach.  And the same year they published a book devoted exclusively to Prince and her writings.

Since retirement, Ekins  has completed an MA in Popular Music Studies at the University of Liverpool and is currently working for a PhD in Musicology at Goldsmiths, University of London. and has returned to recording jazz-revival CDs.

++The Trans-Gender Archive had never been inventoried.  After retirement Ekins offered the collection to the London School of Economics’ LGBT Hall-Carpenter Archive, but was told it would not be accepted because of a lack of an inventory listing what it contained.  They also insisted that they would need him to get rid of any items subject to copyright or containing personal information like addresses.  He then accepted an offer from Aaron Devor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, who arranged for it to be shipped to Victoria.  Other possible UK sites were not consulted.  

*not the Oxford law tutorial fellow

• Richard Ekins. ‘G. H. Mead: Contributions to a Philosophy of Sociological Knowledge’, PhD thesis, University of London, 1978.
• Richard Ekins.‘Male Transsexualism, Sociological Analysis and Some Problems of the Double Hermeneutic’, Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, Manchester. 1982.
• Richard Ekins. (1983) "The Assignment of Motives as a Problem in the Double Hermeneutic: the Case of Transvestism and Transsexuality, Annual Conference of the Sociological Association of Ireland, Wexford, 1983.
• Richard Ekins. "Facets of Femaling in Some Relations Between Sex, Sexuality and Gender", Annual Conference of the Sociological Association of Ireland, Drogheda. 1984.
• Richard Ekins. "News from Around the World - In Their Own Words: Interview with Dr. Richard Ekins of the Trans-Gender Archive, University of Ulster". Renaissance News, The Chrysalis Interview, 1 (5), 1987: 4-5.
• Richard Ekins. "Building a Trans-Gender Archive: On the classification and framing of trans-gender knowledge". Beaumont Trust International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester, 1990. www.gender.org.uk/conf/1990/90ekins.htm.
• Richard Ekins. ‘On Male Femaling: A Grounded Theory Approach to Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing’, The Sociological Review, 41 (1): 1–29, 1993.
• Richard Ekins & Ruth Freeman (ed). Centres and Peripheries of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Psychoanalytic Studies. Karnac Books, 1994.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds). Blending genders: social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing. London and New York: Routledge. 1996.
• Richard Ekins. Male femaling: a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing. London & New York: Routledge. 1997.
• Richard Ekins (ed). Selected Writings of Anna Freud. Penguin, 1998.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Towards a sociology of transgendered bodies". The Sociological Review, 47:580–602, 1999.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Telling Body Transgendering Stories". In Kathryn Backett-Milburn & Linda McKie (eds). Constructing Gendered Bodies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. “Transgendering, Migrating and Love of Oneself as a Woman: A Contribution to a Sociology of Autogynephilia”. International Journal of Transgenderism, 5,3, www.wpath.org/journal/www.iiav.nl/ezines/web/IJT/97-03/numbers/symposion/ijtvo05no03_01.htm.
• Richard Ekins. Unconscious Mental Life and Reality. Karnac Books, 2002.
• Dave Senior. "Dan Pawson's Artesian Hall Stompers in the 60's - The Forgotten Recordings". Jazzgazette, 2004. Online at: http://home.scarlet.be/davesenior/AHS%20in%20the%2060.htm.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Rethinking 'Who put the 'Trans' in Transgender?" GENDYS 2004, The 8th International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester. www.gender.org.uk/conf/2004/04ekins.htm.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Transgendering, Men, and Masculinities". In J. Hearn, M. Kimmel and R. Connell (eds). Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. London & New Delhi: Sage, 2005: 379-394.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. The Transgender Phenomenon. London: Thousand Oaks; California: Sage. 2006.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds), with a forward by Susan Stryker. Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Transgendering. Haworth Press Inc., Paperback: 65 pages 2006. Essays about and by Virginia Prince.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Pioneers of Transgendering: The Life and Work of Virginia Prince". GENDYS 2k, The Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester Eng. www.gender.org.uk/conf/2000/king20.htm. 2006.
• David Valentine. Imagining Transgender: an ethnography of a category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007: 262n2.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Transgender, Transvestism, and Transsexualism". In G. Ritzer (ed). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007: 5037-5043.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "The Emergence of New Transgendering Identities in the Age of the Internet". In S. Hines and T. Sanger (eds). Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity. London: Routledge, 2010.
• Amy Smart.  "University of Victoria transgender archive gets a European boost".  Times Colonist, July 12, 2013.   www.timescolonist.com/news/local/university-of-victoria-transgender-archive-gets-a-european-boost-1.523095.
• Alice Hutton.  "Unique transgender archive sent to Canadian university after offer to LSE is rebuffed".  Camden New Journal, 18 July 2013.   www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2013/jul/unique-transgender-archive-sent-canadian-university-after-offer-lse-rebuffed. 
•  Catherine Baker.  "The ethics of archive acquisitions: why couldn’t an important collection of British trans history stay in the UK?".  22 July 2013.  http://bakercatherine.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/the-ethics-of-archive-acquisitions-why-couldnt-an-important-collection-of-british-trans-history-stay-in-the-uk.

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The OED definition of transgender which Ekins contributed to is

“Of, relating to, or designating a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender, but combines or moves between these; transgendered.  Although often used (esp. among participants in transgender lifestyles) as a generic and inclusive term which deliberately avoids categorizations such as transsexual or transvestite, in wider use transgender is sometimes used synonymously with these more specific terms.”

The books by Ekins and King are not just sociology, they are also history.  There are incidents recorded in their books that  I have not found elsewhere.  The use of 'transgender' on BBC radio mentioned above;  Stephen Whittle being active in the UK branch of Angela Douglas' TAO.  Anybody like myself researching history and biography will find the books essential for this alone.

While Ekins and King have taken Blanchardian ideas into their theorizing, I cannot find any examples of reciprocation. 

In fact I cannot find any critical discussions of Ekins' work outside the circle around Kenneth Plummer.

Ekins seems to be quite insensitive to the fact that many, perhaps most, trans persons find the term ‘male femaling’ to be offensive.  He also uses ‘transgendered' which is now rejected by many, probably most, transgender persons, but that point was not not commonly made back in 2006.

On the last page of Male Femaling, 1997, he mentions the lack of studies of male maling and female femaling.   We are still waiting. 

The Transgender Phenomenon give an  amazingly uncritical account of the Blanchardian ideas, and dismisses the  opposition in merely a few words:  "a concerted campaign has been fought in an attempt to discredit this book alongside the work of Blanchard and Lawrence (see Conway, 2004; James, 2004)".   What happened to the interrelations of the the three knowledges?  Surely, against what Ekins had promised us, this is a privileging of professional knowledge.

Likewise the book is weak on criticism of Prince, and does not consider the damage that her homophobia and transgenderphobia did.  The book was published in 2006 and therefore does not mention HBS which started only in that year.  Prince was as much against transgender diversity as the HBS people are, and Ekins does not make this clear.  See the comparisons here.


Fortunately the term ‘male femaling’ has not taken off.  It is not the case that he uses the American single l rather than the British double ll (compare modeling and modelling).  The dropped ‘e’ requires a single l or else the pronunciation changes.

Why 'Trans-Gender'?  ""The use of the hyphen was in homage to ‘psycho-analysis’. ‘Psycho-analysis’ as opposed to ‘psychoanalysis’ represented, until very recently, commitments to purity, integrity and authenticity in some quarters. Indeed, the British Psycho-Analytical Society still retains the hyphen. (2006:14-15)".

Richard Ekins has been hanging around trans events etc since 1979.  He says not a word about whether he ever did participate, whether as sociological participant observation, for the simple fun of it, as an exercise in performativity, or to understand better what he was watching.


In Surya Monro's GenderPolitics, which was published in 2005, a year before The Trangender Phenomenon, on the second page of the introduction, we find: "I keeping with the usual norm, I shall identify myself at this stage as a female-bodied bisexual, who does not identify as trans in any substantial way at present, but who has explored some trans identities in the past."  Despite his higher rank, Ekins does not feel that he can be as open about himself.   Maybe it is a difference of generations.          

Note to US readers:  what is called a professor in the US is a lecturer in the UK.  A UK professorship is top rank in the department.                                                                                                                                                                                                

Usually when I profile a musician I include a video of them performing, or, failing that, a link to a site where the person's music can be sampled.  I found neither.