Judy Bowen (1944 - ) business woman, activist

Judy Bowen was assigned male and so raised in Virginia and Tennessee despite feeling otherwise.  The family was religious – church three times a week – and Bowen was a teenage reporter for the local evangelical paper, The Daily Beacon.

This led to a journalism scholarship at the University of Tennessee. Bowen became involved with the civil rights movement where she found greater acceptance as a trans woman. There were several transsexuals at a racially mixed party when three white men came in and started stabbing people. Judy escaped through a window. However they could not call the police because racial mixing was then illegal in the State, and those who were stabbed had to be taken to hospital in separate cars.

A male friend was moving to New York to be a teacher, and Judy went with him. They lived on Long Island. Judy started going to transsexual clubs and one night won a contest at the Queen of Hearts club in Garden City, Long island, when it was raided and they were all arrested. As her friend was a teacher, he would have lost his job if seen with her.

She and three others found a third floor studio apartment at Christopher Street and Gay Street in Greenwich Village, a short walk from the Stonewall tavern. In 1967 Judy became a patient of Harry Benjamin. For a while she worked, as a bookkeeper in male guise, always keeping her jacket on to hide her newly grown breasts. Then she found that she could make good money as a taxi-dancer in the Times Square mafia establishments.

“I started in the dance clubs, like the Tango Palace. It was usually 60/40; 60 percent cis female and 40 percent trans. It was a place where lonely men with problems would go, and they would pay to sit with a girl for an hour. They had to buy champagne and we’d drink water. From there, I graduated to a gentleman’s club in the Times Square area. I was the only transgender person, that I knew of, who worked in that place.” 

She also had a wealthy benefactor.

Judy was not at the Stonewall riots in July 1969 because she was working, but she was part of the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade a year later. Afterwards she organized two short-lived groups. Transvestites and Transsexuals (TAT) was formed in 1970 but lasted only a couple of months. Bowen was quoted as saying that she found the transvestites “too politically radical”. Transsexuals Anonymous had its inaugural meeting in the office of surgeon Benito Rish in early 1971. About twenty attended, the most prominent of whom was Deborah Hart.

“I started Transsexuals Anonymous because we needed to talk and we had to be anonymous or we might be murdered if someone found out. As transsexuals we were motivated to become as close to genetic females as possible. Transsexuals were living, working, and transitioning into female roles. That's what made us different from transvestites. Some transsexuals go through with the surgery, and some don't. In that group [TA] we basically gave each other confidence. We helped each other with jobs and school. That sort of thing. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson had STAR. They had no desire to become female.” 

Judy had surgery from Drs George T Whittle and John Clarke at the Jersey Shore Medical Center in 1971. There were complications and then litigation that continued for many years. The Jersey Medical Center discontinued transsexual surgery in response.

Judy in 1974

In 1974 the Gilded Grape announced a Miss Gilded Grape Contest. The most sensational contestant was Judy who spoke for ten minutes about her operations. However her operations seemed to count against her. Drag Magazine commented that rules against surgery should be spelt out clearly in advance. The winner was Eddie, a bartender at the Grape, in drag for the first time.

The FBI were going after the mafia dance halls, and Judy was warned by a lawyer to get out. She had been buying property since before Stonewall:

“I ended up owning an Italian restaurant in Queens for 35 years. I added an art gallery. Eventually I had four buildings on the block and started publishing the Western Queens Gazette, a community-based paper which is still going today, and the Long Island City News. I raised money for youth and senior programs and I got appointed to the community board. I worked to get a gymnasium converted into a youth center to keep the kids off the street. I was and am very community minded.” 

During this period she was mainly non-disclosing of her gender history.

In the late 1970s Judy became a regular at Studio 54, and met Andy Warhol, and was an extra in a couple of Woody Allen films. In the mid-1980s she met the man who became her husband.

In 1998 Judy’s mother passed on, and Judy and her husband decided to move to Las Vegas.

Today, in her 70s, she is an active member of The Center in Las Vegas, which supports the needs of LGBTQ people, as well as a champion of the Safety Dorm for transgender individuals at The Salvation Army, which houses and provides professional support for homeless transgender people in Las Vegas.

• “Drag Drops in on New York’s Drag Oasis: Beauty at the Gilded Grape”. Drag: The International Transvestite Quarterly, 4, 14. 1974: 32, 38. 
• “Transsexual nears trial in malpractice suit”. Drag: The International Transvestite Quarterly, 7, 26. 1978: 4. 
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 236.
• Brendan Zachariah O’Donnell. Definition and Redefinition: Alliance and Antagonism in Homosexual and Trans Communities in the U.S. BA Thesis, Wesleyen University, 2014: 59. Online. 
• Owen Keenen. “Trans pioneer Judy Bowen looks back at community changes”. Windy City Times, 2016-11-30. Online. 
• Zackary Drucker. “Transgender Activist Judy Bowen Recalls the Stonewall Riots”. Vice: Identity, Nov 29 2018. Online.
• Daniel Villarreal. “This trans activist recently shared her memories of the Stonewall uprising and early life in NYC” LGBTQNation, December 2, 2018. Online. 
• Enzo Marino. “Local transgender woman recounts experience during Stonewall Riots”. Fox5Vegas, Jun 28, 2019. Onine. 
• “Judy Bowen: Center Legacy Award”. The LGBTQ Center of Southern Nevada, 2020. Online.

Who was Dixie MacLane?

On page xxii of C Jacob Hale’s introduction to Richard Docter’s biography of Christine Jorgensen, we find:

“During the 1950s, others who claimed to be seeking or to have obtained surgical alteration of the genitals – Ray/Rae Bourbon, John ‘Bunny’ Breckenridge, Dixie MacLane, Charlotte McLeod and Tamara Rees, for example – were in the news”.

Bourbon, Breckenridge, McLeod and Rees are well documented and are found in this encyclopedia. But who is Dixie MacLane? There is no mention of her name in Joanne Meyerowitz’ How Sex Changed, which is a thorough account of transsexuality in the US in that period.

On page xxiv, Hale tells us a bit more. She was one of the trans women included in the Worden & Marsh project.

“Dixie MacLane, who had been inspired to seek surgical transformation by the news about Jorgensen, had a more pragmatic goal: she hoped that her participation might lead to surgery at UCLA.”

Meyerowitz admits that the five names that she gave for the participants in the Worden & Marsh project were all pseudonyms. It is quite likely that Dixie MacLane is the real name of Meyerowtz’ Debbie Mayne: same initials, both waiting for surgical approval that never came.

Hale says that Dixie was in the news.   This was in February 1956, when she was 32, two years after the Worden & Marsh project.   Apparently she had obtained completion surgery in Mexico, and successfully applied for a legal name change. The Los Angeles Times reported that a Los Angeles police officer, G.H Nelson of the Pershing Square beat, took her existence as a personal affront. He made threats and made sure that she lost her office job. He then charged her with masquerading as a man, masquerading as a woman and outraging public decency. In a hearing at a municipal court, the judge accepted written testimony from Dr Harry Benjamin of New York, Dr Lyman Stewart of the Elmer Belt Medical Group and Dr Marcus Crohon of the LA County Jail. The judge refused attempts to determine Dixie’s actual sex, and dismissed the charges.

--------------

This was 1956, so Dixie was lucky to get a reasonably enlightened judge.   However justice would have required that Officer Nelson be sanctioned for unprofessional conduct, and that Dixie be re-instated in her job.

• “Office Clerk Cleared of Charge of Masquerading”. Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1956.
• Dal McIntire. “News & Views”. One: the Homosexual Magazine, 3/1/1956. Online.
• C. Jacob Hale. Introduction to Richard F Docter. Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christinr Jorgensen. The Haworth Press, 2008: xxii, xxiv.
• Scott De Orio. Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights. PhD Thesis University of Michigan, 2017: 59. Online.

Beverly-Barbara (1943 - ) restaurant worker

Beverly-Barbara*, from the Los Angeles area, was definitely a transkid expressing girls’ interest and dressing as a girl from an early age. Her parents hoped that she would grow out of it.

At age 15 she found work as a cocktail waitress, and saved up enough money to go and see Harry Benjamin. She claimed to be 18, although only 16, and Benjamin prescribed female hormones. Beverly-Barbara followed up with breast implants and electrolysis. Her voice had not changed much at puberty.

She found a boy-friend and in early 1967 they were married in Reno. She was able to do presenting her drivers license only. Beverly-Barbara was by then working as a receptionist at a prominent restaurant, but still not able to afford completion surgery. Benjamin suggested that she get in touch with Richard Green who, after two years with Benjamin in New York and a year in London with John Randell, had returned to the University of California Los Angeles Gender Identity Research Clinic (UCLA GIRC).

When Beverly-Barbara approached Green, he initially failed to understand why she was doing so.

“On the phone I did not suspect that she was transsexual. In person I saw no clue either.’ (Green, 2019: 144)

The GIRC had been active since 1962 but had not actually provided transgender surgery to any one, and Green thought that it was time to do so. Robert Stoller, the head of the GIRC was cautious about permitting such surgery, but was open to it being used as a research technique.

“Patient selection was crucial. It should be limited to those males who had been very feminine in childhood, had never lived acceptably in a masculine role, and who had not derived pleasure from their penis. He termed these ‘true transsexuals’.” (Green, 2010:1459).

Beverly-Barbara met these requirements. Green also endorsed John Money’s proposal that transsexual patients should undergo at least 12 months ‘real-life test’. Beverly-Barbara had in effect undergone 10 years real-life test.

Green enquired about the likelihood of being charged with mayhem. The University of California legal counsel in Berkeley quickly replied that such was a possibility, but that the University would pay the legal bill.

Green presented Beverly-Barbara to the GIRC at a Saturday morning conference in November 1968. Stoller gave a qualified approval. A second opinion was obtained from UCLA psychiatrist Larry Newman, and urologist Willard Goodwin (Elmer Belt's ++nephew who had argued against the continuation of transgender surgery by his uncle in 1954) agreed to do the operation.

All went well, and Beverly-Barbara co-operated in follow-up interviews. Then she disappeared into private life.

• Robert Stoller,. Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, Science House,1968: 251..
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 214.
• Richard Green. “Robert Stoller’s Sex and Gender: 40 Years on”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 2010: 1459.
• Richard Green. Gay Rights, Trans Rights: A psychiatrist/lawyer’s 50-year battle. 2018: chp 19.

---------


*Green 2010 calls her Barbara; Green 2018 calls her Beverly.  Meyerowitz does not give her a name.

Beverly-Barbara will now be 75 years old.

Other clinics refused to start the clock on the real-life test until after they had interviewed the patient – as Holly Woodlawn had found when she approached Johns Hopkins in 1966.


Of course Beverly-Barbara is very similar to Agnes, who had been approved for surgery with Elmer Belt by Stoller 10 years earlier. There has been a lot of commentary about Agnes, but very little about Beverly-Barbara.

Two early pioneers in Los Angeles

Annette Dolan

Annette Dolan had been told by doctors that “there was no ‘help’ for me, and I accepted this [as] gospel”.  After the news about Christine Jorgensen in 1953, she consulted with Harry Benjamin who suggested that she go abroad for castration, after which a US surgeon would be willing to complete the operation.

 However she could not afford such a trip. She decided to perform the operation herself. She read medical texts and bought the appropriate equipment.  "I learned to ligate, suture and anesthetize. I studied the surgical procedure step by step and memorized its sequence”.

She presented her doctor with the successful result and in 1954 she went to the UCLA medical center for completion surgery with Elmer Belt. However she was disconcerted to see her confidential records left open on the business manager’s desk.

Annette sent an account of her self-surgery to Harry Benjamin and it was later published in Sexology magazine, under a different pseudonym.

In 1955 she participated in the Worden and Marsh project, and like other participants was angered by the way that they used her words to cast transsexuals in a negative light. She wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Elmer Belt and Harry Benjamin as well as to Frederick Worden. “In general my words were twisted to suit their purpose.” She spoke of how she could sense the ridicule in their words.

• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 145-6, 157, 162, 166.

Tom Michaels

At age 16, in the late 1940s, Michaels, then still living as a girl, discovered the lesbian scene, and was initially elated to find other similar people, but then realized that they were not so similar. Michaels lived as a man, but then went back to living as a woman for a while.

As a man, Tom had difficulties being accepted, and for some years lived in a criminal subculture, the one place where he was accepted on his own terms.

Eventually he moved elsewhere and did a bachelor’s degree in zoology. He again reverted to living as a woman, and did a year at a medical school. In the mid-1960s he contacted Robert Stoller at UCLA and was able to start taking testosterone.

• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 143, 144, 195.

The geography of Charlotte McLeod in New York, 1957

Charlotte McLeod:
Part 1: Youth and Copenhagen
Part II: fame and marriage
Part III: The geography of Charlotte McLeod in New York, 1957

1.   45 East 68th Street.  The home of Dorothy Kilgallen and Richard Kollmar.  “I got tired of Dorothy Kilgallen chasing me around and writing things about me that I have never thought of doing. And I went to her house one day and knocked on her door and the butler recognized me, it was strange, he said, ‘aren’t you Miss Charlotte?’ And I said, yes. And he said, don’t go away. I said, well I have no intention, that’s why I’m here. So I met Dorothy. And I said, well Dorothy, I’m tired of this, this business and I need a job. If you’ll help me get a job, I’ll tell you anything you want to know."

2.  44 East 67th Street.  The then office of Harry Benjamin. 

3.  318 51st Street.   The Washington-Jefferson Hotel where Charlotte lived.   This is still in business. Its rooms are now $126 a night and up. Charlotte says: it “was a place for retired show people who lived there” which probably means that even after adjusting for inflation it was cheaper in 1957, particularly if you paid by the month. 

4.  723 7th Ave.   Maxie's.  A restaurant close-by that Charlotte sometimes visited.   There she ran into Ralph Heidal, whom she had met in Bergen, Norway, and had stayed in touch with by mail. They married in 1959.

5.  309 West 50th Street.  The West Bank Club, owned by Richard Kollmar, where Charlotte worked as a hostess and hat-check girl.   It was there that she met Harry Benjamin, who came in as a customer.   

A miscellany of unknowns

The Garden of Allah, a gay-owned cabaret was open in Seattle 1946-56. It featured mainly female impersonation, though some male impersonators also performed.

Bill Plant took the name Peewee Nattajon in homage to an older performer called Nattajon (born 1895, died late 1960s). The elder Nattajon had been a character actor. Bill Plant says that he was in 13 Hollywood movies, including Beauty and the Beast and The Picture of Dorian Gray. However there is no Nattajon listed in IMDB. He is probably listed under another name – but which?
____________________________

Finocchio’s, the famous San Francisco nightclub that featured female impersonators, was owned by Joe and Marjorie Finocchio. Marjorie died in 1956, and Joe remarried to Eve. Rachel Harlow in Philadelphia was also born with the Finocchio name. No relationship has been established between them.

Concetta Finocchio Jorgensen (1941 – 2012) daughter of Joe and Eve Finocchio had a short failed marriage that left her to raise four children alone. She worked doing publicity for her parents’ nightclub, but later was afflicted by MS, and became a disability activist. The husband who left was called Jorgensen. Surely not a relative of Christine? Probably not, but it is intriguing to find two of the most famous names in TG history born by the same person.

____________________________

Who is Gregory G Bolich?

The Amazon Author Page lists only the following:

Karl Barth and Evangelicalism, 1980
Authority and the Church, 1983
Christian Scholar: An Introduction to Theological Research, 1985
God in the docket: The problem of good and evil, 1992
Psyche’s child: The Story of Psychology, 2000
12 Magic Wands: The art of Meeting Life’s Challenges, 2002

WorldCat tells us that Bolich did a Ed.D, at Gonzaga University in Spokane in 1983: On dating James : new perspectives on an ancient problem, and a PhD at the Union Institute in Cincinnati in 1993: Serving human experience : the boundary metaphor.

He also has several book published through Lulu, but not listed in Amazon.

Scripture Study and Scholarship, 2015
Brick by Brick on the Road through OZ: Recovery from Sexual Abuse Trauma, 2007

Transgender and Religion, 2009
Transgender Realities, 2009
Transgender and Mental Health, 2013
Crossdressing in Context (5 volumes) 2007-2010
Asaph’s Dream (a US Civil War novel), 2011
Conversing on gender: a primer for entering dialogue, 2007

There is no web site for GG Bolich, and no reviews of his books. The transgender books are much more expensive than the theological ones. His books are not in the library. If I were to purchase his transgender works it would cost me hundreds of dollars. I cannot find any reason why I should do so. Does he have anything original to say, or are his books a regurgitation of the usual stuff? I do not know. How would I find out?

------------------------------------

Toni Ebel, post-op Hirschfeld patient in Berlin, fled Germany in 1934 after the Nazi takeover. She arrived in Czechoslovakia, claiming to be a Jewess. She settled in Prague using the name Antonia Ebelová. In 1937 she moved to Brno. Karl Giese, Hirschfeld’s lover, had also fled to Brno.

In October 1938, Nazi Germany occupied the Sudetenland; in March 1939 Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Giese killed himself before the Germans got him. Somehow Toni Ebel survived the war, and in 1949 became a citizen of the newly created German Democratic Republic (DDR). She was able to claim compensation from the DDR as a victim of Nazism. She was a minor painter and was recognized at the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin. She died in 1961 at the age of 80.

We do not know how she survived the Nazi occupation.

_____________________

In the photographs included in Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon, 1966, the 6th and 7th pages (not in the PDF version) are the before and after of an actor, both in a stereotyped pose more typical of silent films than of the 1960s. This actor has never been named. How an actor can transition in stealth and keep working is intriguing.

The US trans actors of the 1960s such as  Candy Darling were non-op (however, of course, several of the stars of Le Carrousel in Paris were in films in at that time). The first US trans actor known to have surgically transitioned was Ajita Wilson who did so in the mid-1970s. The unnamed actor in the photograph is the true pioneer in her field, and we know nothing of her.

____________________

Charlotte McLeod (1925 - 2007) Part II: fame and marriage

Part 1: Youth and Copenhagen
Part II: fame and marriage
Part III: The geography of Charlotte McLeod in New York, 1957

Charlotte was offered night-club appearances. A reporter, who worked at the National Press Club and normally wrote religious articles, proposed to do a book on her, and put her up in a hotel in Washington, DC while they worked on it, but it was never finished, and he ran out of money.

She took a gig in New Orleans, but found that the contract was with a strip club.

“And right across the street was a very, well the nicest club on the street. No hard bumps and grinds and strips and all that kind of thing. And to get me out of the verbal contract the owner paid for me going to court. And the next thing I am sitting up in front of the judge. I never will forget, I had a great big felt cart wheel hat on. Couldn’t sit on the seat because the cart wheel hat hit the back and I had to take my hat off. I don’t know why I should remember that. In that day and time ladies wore their hats. And he released me from the contract and I went across to the Show Bar, which was the nicest club on the street.” (Stryker:26)

A dancer-comedienne called Cupcake wrote material for Charlotte:

“ I’ve been to many places, environments strange, and then I went to Denmark, just for a little change”.

Then she moved on to the Casino Royal in Washington where she was backed by a band. She had become a member of the American Guild of Variety Artists, and was represented by Miles Ingles who was also the agent for Cyd Cherise and Polly Bergen. One time she appeared on stage in between Gypsy Rose Lee and Mae West. She also did modeling. Charlotte met Christine Jorgensen once when they were both appearing in New Orleans.

In August 1955, Charlotte had breast implants with New York plastic surgeon, Else La Roe (1918 – 2006).

In 1956 she wrote a brief autobiography for the Mr Annual, in which she claimed that her condition was physically caused, and that 95% of transsexuals should have psychiatric treatment.

Dorothy at the all-night beauty salon

Charlotte worked as a secretary and then as a receptionist at an all-night beauty counter.

She was becoming annoyed by star reporter and television personality, Dorothy Kilgallen.

“I got tired of Dorothy Kilgallen chasing me around and writing things about me that I have never thought of doing. And I went to her house [45 E 68^th Street] one day and knocked on her door and the butler recognized me, it was strange, he said, ‘aren’t you Miss Charlotte?’ And I said, yes. And he said, don’t go away. I said, well I have no intention, that’s why I’m here. So I met Dorothy. And I said, well Dorothy, I’m tired of this, this business and I need a job. If you’ll help me get a job, I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Her husband is Dick Kollmar a Broadway producer, and he owned the Left Bank Club. He owned a little French restaurant and bar right across the street from Madison Square Garden. And in that day and time, the hat check and cigarette concession could make you a decent living. So they were most pleased to get me to be the hostess and hat check girl. The main thing that’s fun, I met everybody that ever was in show business.” (Stryker: 28)

This was 1957. It was while working at the Left Bank Club that Charlotte met Harry Benjamin, who came in as a customer. He became her physician, and also would take her out to lunch and introduce her to such conservative activists such as William Buckley as well as film stars.

Charlotte was living at the Washington-Jefferson Hotel on West 51^st Street.  Ralph Heidal, whom she had met in Bergen, had stayed in touch by mail. They ran into each other in Maxie’s, a bar close by. He offered to take her away.

In 1959, Christine Jorgensen had been denied a marriage license by a clerk in New York City, on the basis that her birth certificate listed her as male; Jorgensen did not pursue the matter in court.

Charlotte in Miami 1959

Charlotte had been working in Miami, first as a secretary, then demonstrating cosmetics. After some months, Charlotte and Ralph, having become regulars at a Miami church, were married there in November. She did not mention her birth gender, however, or the fact that she was still legally a male. Press interest was aroused, but the Florida authorities confirmed that the marriage was not in violation of state law.

Dorothy Killgallen had contacts in Miami as everywhere, and their wedding was featured in her column.

A few months later, Mr and Mrs Heidal moved to California. They lived in Berkeley, then Oakland and then Marin County. Charlotte reconnected to Harry Benjamin who spent his summers in San Francisco. He introduced her to trans women Aleshia Brevard and Kathy Taylor who had been friends since their days at Finocchio’s nightclub, where Kathy performed as Stormy Lee.

Mrs Heidal’s marriage to her husband lasted seven years.

“And bless his heart, he couldn’t do a darn thing but drive a steamship around the world. Never did teach that rascal to drive a motor car. In fact, that’s why we broke up. I had visions of a little cottage on the side of Mt. Tamalpias. And oh how we did love it. But Ralph didn’t find a job. Everything he knew was diesel, whatever made steamboats run. I took him to every plant in Northern California trying to find a job for him. And finally, I got the proverbial Dear John letter. He said it was how it is every year we had to write but unless I was willing to go back to New York, where he was perfectly happy. And we would have to part company and I wouldn’t go back to New York.” (Stryker:31)

Dorothy Kilgallen died in November 1965 at age 52 after ingesting alcohol and barbituates. Some say that she was murdered (more) for digging into the Kennedy assassination – her folder of documents on the case had disappeared and was never seen again.

After her divorce, Charlotte moved to Laguna Beach, south of Los Angeles, because she had friends there. She got a job as a receptionist at a beauty salon. Charlotte arranged to have vaginoplasty:

“I was living at Laguna Beach. And a little Japanese doctor did it. And there was some instrument that he had to have, I think. He was under the impression that he could use the same instrument on me that he could on a normal woman that needed that surgery done. Well he did and perforated my colon. And I had to go to Stanford to have the colostomy to repair his work and while I was there I stumbled on Dr. Donald Laub [head of the Sexual Identity Unit]. Oh, me. What a to-do that was.” (Stryker:22)

One of the beauticians mentioned that her brother-in-law had lost his wife to suicide. They were introduced and started dating. He was a military officer with two children, eleven and twelve. The kids started calling her Mom.

On 8 August 1969 she was visiting Kathy in Los Angeles where they could see a commotion across the canyon that turned out to be the aftermath of the murder of Sharon Tate and 3 others by members of the Manson Family.

The military officer asked Charlotte to marry him, but something had to be explained first.

“In fact, it was Cathy who went to him and explained to him the situation because we had debated. He hadn’t the vaguest idea. And I knew, if he hadn’t already asked me to marry him, Cathy said, let me see if I can help. And she went and talked to him. And Cathy’s husband did not take it so well. In fact, he was very belligerent when he did find out.” (Stryker:41) [Cathy=Kathy of course.  Aleshia Brevard, who knew her, spells it with a 'K'.   The transcription of the interview spells it with a 'C'.]

Charlotte and the military officer were married in Las Vegas in 1970 – this time with no press attention. Again the marriage lasted seven years.

Return visits to the Stanford clinic and Dr Laub created problems when her husband went with her.

“And that really ruined my marriage with my second husband. We were going up and stopped by for a chat with him. And we went in and Donald had started, he was so very selective, very selective. He had a Gorgeous George sitting in there with tattoos all over him.” (Stryker:44) “He did ruin my marriage. My husband saw me in a different view from what he had in mind.” (Stryker:45)

After the end of her second marriage Charlotte moved back to Dyersburg, Tennessee to look after her ageing mother. She stayed in touch with her step children. The son died in middle age without finding out about Charlotte’s past; at the turn of the century, Charlotte was very sick and wrote to tell the daughter on her own terms in that it would come out if she died.  That daughter has had children, and thus Charlotte became a grandmother.

++Charlotte remained in Dyersburg, and died at age 82.   Her passing was not noticed by the press, which probably would have been to her liking.

*Not the mystery writer, nor the character in the television show, McLeod’s Daughters.
_________

The Washington-Jefferson Hotel is still in business. Its rooms are now $126 a night and up. Charlotte says: it “was a place for retired show people who lived there” which probably means that even after adjusting for inflation it was cheaper in 1957, particularly if you paid by the month.

Aleshia Brevard in The Woman I Was Born to Be, 2010, p48 writes:

This is quite different to what Charlotte said, whereby the wedding was after the confrontation at Kilgallen’s apartment, and the husband was certainly aware of Charlotte’s past before he married her.

Tina Thranesen gives the name of the New York plastic surgeon as Rachael LaRoe; Joanne Meyerowitz gives it as Else La Roe. I have gone with the latter.

In the Stryker interview it sometimes becomes confusing about when things are happening. I have placed the vaginoplasty operation just before Charlotte met her second husband because she says that she was living in Laguna beach at the time, and Donald Laub was not at the clinic at Stanford until 1968.

Charlotte says that she was already married when she observed the Tate killings from a distance, but that happened in August 1969, and she also says that the wedding was in 1970. Time does affect our memories. (Stryker: 38-9)

The Wikipedia page on Dorothy Kilgallen says nothing at all about Charlotte. Likewise Lee Israel’s 1979 biography, Kilgallen. Likewise Mark Shaw’s The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What's My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen.

There is something missing from the source documents:  Dorothy Kilgallen's articles about Charlotte are not online.  The collection of newspaper articles found at TransasCity is very good, but does lack this component.

Trivia: Dorothy Kilgallen was at 45 E 68^th Street; Harry Bemjamin’s office was only a block away at 44 East 67^th St.

• “Sex-Shifter Wants to be Charlotte”. Boston Daily Record, June 15, 1954: 4. Online.
• “Charlotte Seeks Night Club Job”. New Orleans Times Picayune, June 24, 1954: 8. Online.
• “Charlotte Halted by Court Action”. New Orleans Times Picayune, July 4, 1954: 11. Online.
• “Charlotte M’Leod Suit Lost by Badon”. ”. New Orleans Times Picayune, July 10, 1954:1. Online.
• “Sex-Changed Ex-GI Becomes Miami Bride. UPI, Nov 13, 1959. Online.
• “Bride Revealed as Forner GI”. San Diego Union, 11/14/1959: A3. Online.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 82-3, 84, 89, 91, 148, 304n93.
• Susan Stryker interviews Charlotte McLeod, transcribed by Loren Basham. GLBT Historical Society, August 22, 2002. PDF.
• Aleshia Brevard. The Woman I Was Born to Be. A Blue Feather Book, 2010: 5, 48.
• Brittany Shammas.  “Five Moments in Miami’s LGBTQ History, From 1937 to 2015”.  Miami New Times, March 12, 2019.  Online.  

TransasCity Collection       Vidensbanken om konsidentitet

Phoebe Smith (1939–) Part II: state worker, activist

Continued from Part I.

Back in Atlanta early 1969 after a first visit to Dr Barbosa, Phoebe Smith was taken shopping by an aunt who bought her three dresses. Phoebe made an appointment with Harry Benjamin in New York for a hormone prescription. Two aunts and a cousin went to New York with her.

Phoebe attempted to return to work at Rich’s Department Store, but a few co-workers objected, and the supervisor said no. Phoebe appealed up two levels but without success.

A gay former co-worker gave a big party to introduce Phoebe to the local gay scene – but she did not feel that she belonged there.  She was interviewed for a local television news program.

In November Phoebe returned to New York to see Harry Benjamin, and was told that she was ready for the final surgery. She immediately wrote to Dr Barbosa, but he did not reply – and then by telegram – until March 31 giving an appointment for April 11. She was in the hospital for two weeks, and even when she left was in considerable pain.

At first she wanted to be open about her past when applying for jobs, but quickly found that that was not going to work. She took the Georgia State Merit test, and got a position in Disease investigation. In May 1971 she transferred to Medicaid.

She was now undergoing electrolysis, and for a short while worked with a local transsexual support group before it discontinued.

Phoebe several times met persons who knew someone who knew her previous self, but it did not become a problem. One man threatened to out her if she did not date him. In spring 1974 a trans woman whom Phoebe had spoken to with the support group applied to Medicaid in the hope of having her surgery paid for. They met at the elevator, and the woman introduced herself. This made Phoebe think that everyone was talking about her. A close work friend told her that “we all know and we still love you”.

In 1975 Phoebe transferred to Family and Children Services. One day a co-worker rushed in and exclaimed: “Y’all, there is a transsexual that works for the State!”. Again it turned out that most of the co-workers already knew, and never said.


By June 1979 Phoebe had written her first autobiography, Phoebe. She self-published it and advertised in trans newsletters. A thousand copies were printed, and a New York bookstore bought four hundred. Reactions at work were mixed. People she had not previously known became friendly; no man at work ever asked her out again.

In 1980 she put together a brochure, “The Journey from One to Forty was Difficult but Successful”. It included a photograph of herself at age one with father, and a photo at age 40. It criticized the report from Jon Meyers of John Hopkins of the previous year that had been used as an excuse to close its Gender Identity Clinic.

“I have worked for the State of Georgia for almost ten years. During my fourth year of employment, knowledge of my surgery became widespread. It was upsetting, but also a big relief to get it in the open.”

Later that year a new communications office was established, and Phoebe became its supervisor, but with a pay cut.

The sale of the autobiography resulted in mail, much of it from persons seeking information. This led to the idea of a newsletter, The Transsexual Voice. The first two issues were complimentary, and 30 copies were printed. Within a few months there were over 100 subscribers.

A subscriber contacted her wanting to find someone to train in electrolysis. Phoebe jumped at the chance and for the next 15 years they worked on each other.

By the mid-1980s there were over 300 subscribers including Leo Wollman, Rupert Raj and Michelle Hunt. Phoebe mailed packets of transsexual-related material to newspaper editors, television news programs, talk show hosts etc. Very few responded.

Through the 1980s Phoebe’s family health problems deteriorated. Her younger brother was diagnosed with cancer, and died at age 40. Her father died age 74 in 1989 after various health problems. Her mother needed daily care such that Phoebe had to discontinue The Transsexual Voice in 1995. Her mother died in 1998, when Phoebe was 59.

She retired in in 2000. She had worked for the State of Georgia for almost 30 years.

• Phoebe Smith. Phoebe. P Smith Pub Ind, 1979.
• Phoebe Smith. “FMI Forum: The Transsexual Voice”. Female Mimics International, 14,6, 1985. Online. This is the 1980 brochure, which is also found p106-8 in Phoebe’s 2015 book.
• Rupert Raj. “Tribute to Phoebe Smith”. Twenty Minutes, August 1989:3. Online.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002:158.
• Phoebe Smith. From Sharecropper's Son to Who's Who in American Women. CreateSpace, 2014.
• Eve Shapiro. Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age: Second edition. Routledge, 2015: 158.
• Dallas Denny. “Creating Community: A History of Early Transgender Support in Atlanta”. dallasdenny.com, Nov 7, 2015. Online.

_____________________

Dr Barbosa’s $4,000 fee in 1969 would be $26,600 now!

Phoebe arrived for the first time at Dr Barbosa’s office only two months after Lynn Conway had completed surgery there.

There is no mention at all of Phoebe in Wesley Chenault, Stacy Lorraine Braukman, Gay and Lesbian Atlanta, Arcadia Pub 2008. Come to that, there is no mention of Jayne County or Dallas Denny either.

Phoebe had started electrolysis in 1971, after her two surgeries. In 1981 she trained as an electrologist and then for 15 years she and one other worked on each other. That is 25 years of electrolysis. I was done and complete in less than two years in the mid-1980s. Presumably there was not an electrologist in the Atlanta area at that time who knew how to do it on transsexuals.

It is striking in Phoebe’s autobiography that there is no mention at all of other trans people in Atlanta other than the trans woman who attempted to apply for Medicaid. The famous Atlanta trans women – Jayne County, Diamond Lil, Lady Bunny, RuPaul – were of a performance persuasion, and mostly took off for New York. However, apart from that there was trans man Jerry Montgomery, and Dallas Denny, who arrived in Atlanta in 1989. AEGIS and Southern Comfort Conference were established in Atlanta shortly afterwards.

Dallas Danny says: “With the Louisiana-based Erickson foundation no longer in operation, Phoebe’s Transsexual Voice was so far as I know for many years the only peer-produced transsexual-specific support publication in the world. Phoebe produced the last issue in 1995. It was an astonishing run, and helped thousands of people”.

Otto Spengler (1876? – 194?) businessperson.

(I wrote a less detailed version of this in April 2009. This revision incorporates details from sexologists Talmay, Henry and Benjamin.)

Otto’s family were German. Otto was the 13^th of 14 children. The first five died of cholera. The youngest also died young. His father died when he was four, and from then he slept with his mother in her bed until he was 14. He was her Nesthäckchen, the youngest living. He was girlish in appearance and his dressmaker sister used him as a dress model. He often wore girls’ shoes and dresses as a child.

A first experience with a woman at age 18 resulted in a gonorrhea infection. He emigrated to the US at age 19 (1895?).

A casual gift of theatre tickets to a young woman led to him being approved by her mother, and to marriage. They had two daughters and a son. Otto wore female clothing at all opportunities and wore female underwear under his male clothing at other times. He built up a wardrobe of 70-100 dresses. All the family knew of his dressing. He went to many masquerade balls in female dress. The younger daughter called him her papa-lady. He kept his hair long, but pinned up. He did not go to a barber for over twenty-five years, despite his wife’s urging. Nevertheless he became a successful businessman.

Back in Berlin Otto applied to the police for a permit to transvest, but without success. He transvested in public anyway. Magnus Hirschfeld said that he was an inverted lesbian, and he joined a Berlin lesbian club that tolerated transvestites.

He was a member of Hirschfeld’s Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), and corresponded with Hirschfeld. In May 1906 Spengler gave a lecture on sexual intermediates to the German Scientific Society in New York – this is the earliest known lecture on the subject in New York.

In 1912 Otto was propositioned by a friend who found him in female clothing. He did not get any satisfaction from the encounter, but found it interesting.

An account of Spengler and a few other transvestites was the first such to be presented to doctors in the US. This was in a lecture by the sexologist Bernard Talmey to the New York Society of Medical Jurisprudence in December 1913, and published the next year in the New York Medical Journal. Spengler is not named, but simply referred to as ‘Mr S” and “first patient”.

In 1916 the five-year-old daughter of Otto’s neighbor was sent out to buy milk and was raped and murdered. The janitress tattled to the police about Spengler’s dress habits and he became the prime suspect. A search found blood-stained clothing (from his wife’s most recent period) and for four weeks he was under constant supervision. He had an alibi from a servant, and the police offered the servant $2,000 to change her story, but she remained loyal. It was established that the blood was menstrual, and the investigation was discontinued. The crime was never solved.

Spengler had corresponded for many years with the Oswego, New York transvestite doctor, Mary Walker, and attempted to secure her collection of pictures and letters when she died in 1919.

He had become a medical patient of Harry Benjamin who in 1928, at Spengler’s request , prescribed the newly developed progynon (later known as estradiol), an estrogenic hormone, and x-ray sterilization of the testicles. This was Benjamin’s first transgender case.

Shortly afterwards, Otto’s wife and son left him. The son had become the youngest press agent on Broadway, but died of tuberculosis at age 21.

Spengler suffered a financial loss in the Depression, but continued with a mail-order business and press-cutting service. He boasted that he had sold to the Prince of Wales, and to the Soviet Government.

In 1931 when Magnus Hirschfeld visited New York, Otto was noted in the audience and was pleased to be referred to as a typical transvestite. Spengler himself quoted Talmey’s article in a letter about himself to the New York Evening Post in 1933.

Spengler is one of the transvestites profiled in George W Henry’s Sex Variants, 1941, where he is given the pseudonym Rudolph von H. Shortly after that Otto was in a street accident, and was taken unconscious to hospital. When his underwear was discovered, the examining physician wrote into the hospital record: “patient is obviously a degenerate".

When George Henry (or one of his assistants) interviewed Otto, he was 64, blind in one eye because of a cataract and glaucoma, and living alone in a small dingy apartment cluttered with figures and portraits of women and with forms to display dresses. There is no record of his passing.

*Not the German political philosopher.

• Otto Spengler. Monatsberichte des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, 5, 1906. Reprinted in 151. Jonathan Katz. Gay American History: Lesbians And Gay Men In The U.S.A. A Discus Book, 1978: 575.
• Bernard Simon Talmey. "Transvestism. A contribution to the study of the psychology of sex", New York Medical Journal, 21 Feb 1914, pp.362-368.  Incorporated into his Love, a Treatise on the Science of Sex-Attraction: For the Use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence. New York: Practitioners' Pub. Co, 1915: 298-307. Partially reprinted in Jonathan Katz. Gay/Lesbian Almanac. Harper & Row. 1983: 344-8.
• Otto Spengler. Letter to the Editor. New York Evening Post, February 15 1933.
• George W. Henry. Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. New York: Paul B. Hoeber 1948: 487-98.
• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Warner Books Edition 1977/PDF: 51/23,29.
• Harry Benjamin. “Introduction”. In Richard Green & John Money. Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969: 1-2.
• Leah Cahan Schaefer & Connie Christine Wheeler. “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 24:1 Feb 1995: 3. Online at www.helen-hill.com/pdf/hbfirst10cases.pdf.
• Jennifer Terry. An American Obsession: Science, Medecine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. University of Chicago Press, 1999: 111-2, 259-260,
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 46, 298n105.
• Pierre-Henri Castel. La métamorphose impensable: essai sur le transsexualisme et l'identité personnelle.Gallimard, 2003: 51, 54, 465, 466, 472.

-----------------

There seems to be no record of Spengler’s birth year. I am using the 1948 edition of George W Henry Sex Variants. However the first edition was 1941. In the undated interview with ‘Rudolph von H’, it is stated that he ‘is now sixty-four years old’. For the book to be published in 1941, the interview cannot be later than 1940. Therefore I have presumed a birth year of 1876.

Various books on homosexuality, more than listed, mention Spengler’s May 1906 lecture in Chicago, and some treat him as a gay-rights pioneer (despite the lack of homosexuality in his life), but do not at all mention his transvestity. Of particular note is Terry’s book which writes about Spengler’s lecture in one chapter, and then about Rudolph von H in another, but does not mention that it is the same person.

Spengler would seem to be the first recorded trans person to take artificial hormones.

Did Spengler have a female name for himself? At a guess, yes. However it is not recorded by Talmey, Henry or Benjamin.

Benjamin discusses Spengler within the section The Fetishistic Transvestite. Except for Progynon, Otto seems to have stayed as such until old age. Like many trans persons in the early 20^th century, the question arises: if modern technology were then available, would he have progressed into womanhood? That could be argued either way, but despite being the first patient to receive external estrogen, he never started living as female, unlike say Danielle O’L also in New York in the 1930s.

Castel says that Benjamin first met Spengler in 1938, Wheeler & Schaefer say that they met in the 1920s, but that HB became his doctor only in 1938; in Sex Variants, Spengler says that he was then 52, which would seem to be 1928. Benjamin in Green & Money, 1969, says the ‘early 1920s’. As Progynon was developed by Adolf Butenandt and his future wife, and was first on the market in 1928, 1928 or 1929 is the most likely date for Spengler’s treatment by Benjamin.

Harry Benjamin, 1965: 51, knows of Talmey’s discussion of Spengler, but does not seem to know of Henry’s.

Wheeler & Schaefer say that Spengler married at age 26, but Spengler interviewed by Henry says 19.

Wheeler & Schaefer say: “Magnus Hirschfeld informed Otto that he, Otto, was in fact also the inspiration for his famous work published in 1910, Transvestism (English translation, 1991)”. They give no page reference. I have looked in both the 1991 translation and the German original and fail to confirm this.

Wheeler & Schaefer say: ” Otto's transvestism was described by Talmay in his medical book entitled Love as a "sexo-aesthetic inversion of a pure artistic imitation, occurring in highly artistic, honorable, moral, inconspicuous, nonoffensive individuals who would never commit wrong when masquerading". Actually, speaking not of Spengler in particular but transvestism in general, Talmay says that it “is a sexo-esthetic inversion of pure artistic imitation. Hence it occurs mostly in artists and in men of letters, i.e., in persons endowed with a highly developed artistic taste. Such persons are, as a rule, disgusted at the sight of the organs of the sex to which the individual by anatomical configuration belongs, while such sights offer to the homosexual individual additional charm and piquancy.”

Books in which one would expect to find at least a mention of Otto Spengler, but is disappointed:

• Charlotte Wolff. Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. 1986
• George Chauncey. Gay New York. 1994

The original version of this article was 18 April 2009. A few weeks later, a blogger by the moniker of Tianewu stole my text and posted it as her own work.

Harry Benjamin’s first 10 cases: a disambiguation

• 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 at www.helen-hill.com/pdf/hbfirst10cases.pdf. 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.

Wheeler & Schaefer use pseudonyms to refer to 8 of the 10 patients. However most of the patients are now discussed in trans histories either under different pseudonyms or by their real (ie. post-transition) name. In their revision for Ettner’s book, they used quite different names in some cases. These are marked CGD. Names used in Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon are marked HBTP. The usage in How Sex Changed by Joanne Meyerowitz is marked JMHSC, and that of Susan Stryker’s Transgender History as SSTH.

(Page references to HBTP: eg p32/13 mean p32 in the 1977 Warner edition and p13 in the PDF)

Actually Benjamin’s first trans case was Carla van Crist in the mid-1920s. Apparently Benjamin simply suggested that she go to Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin, which she did. She was half-German. Presumably Benjamin never started a file on her, and later, in the 1950s, when asked about her was unable to remember. The lack of a file meant that Wheeler and Schaefer did not know about her.

1. Otto Spengler

Otto, whom Benjamin regarded as a Type II Fetishistic Transvestite, made a hobby of meeting sexologists and being mentioned, but not always named, in their publications. He met Magnus Hirschfeld, and was described in Bernard Talmey’s 1913 article "Transvestism: A contribution to the study of the psychology of sex", where he is referred to “Mr S” and “First patient". George W. Henry, in his Sex Variants, 1948, also discusses Otto, but under the name of Rudolph von H. HBTP discusses Otto anonymously on p51/23, but mentions that Talmey had described the case, which permits identification. JMHSC and both versions of Wheeler and Schaefer use the name Otto Spengler.

2. Sally Barry

Sally was Benjamin’s first case that he helped through to surgery. She was discovered by Alfred Kinsey who referred her to Benjamin. In HBTP Sally is discussed anonymously p106-7/49 and in detail p299-307/141-2 where she is referred to as “H.”. Wheeler & Schaefer refer to her as Barry (as a forename) and then as Sally. JMHSC refers to her as Val Barry (Barry as a surname). SSTH denies her the dignity of a name and refers to her as the “mayhem” case (referring to a legal provision that prevented surgery in the US). In CGD she is called Van for the male phase and Susan afterwards.

3. Carol

Real name Barbara Ann Richards, and then Mrs Barbara Wilcox. JMHSC refers to her by both these names; Richard Doctor’s biography of Virginia Prince simply calls her Barbara Ann Wilcox. In CGD she is renamed to Barbara. She was an early pioneer who petitioned the Superior Court of California to change her name and legal gender - in 1941!!

4. Christian

Real name Lauren Wilcox. Barbara’s spouse: first wife and then husband. Barbara took the media spotlight, and Lauren transitioned quietly. JMHSC refers to him as Lauren Wilcox. In CGD he also became Lauren.

5. Doris

This person’s real name was Louise Lawrence. She published under the pseudonym of Janet Thompson. She is surprisingly not mentioned, except as the writer Janet Thompson, in HBTP, despite all the work that she and Benjamin had done together. Wheeler & Schaefer call her Doris. JMHSC and SSTH refer to her by her real name. CGD calls her Louise.   April Ashley calls her Louise.

6. Frank

Frank saw Benjamin in 1951 at age 35. Two years later Benjamin referred him to Albert Ellis, and did not see him again until 1972. “after 20 years of vacillating, I am no longer interested at all in a sex-change”. In CGD he is referred to as Emory.

7. Christine Jorgensen

Everybody calls her Christine Jorgensen.

8. Harold

Christine Jorgensen's first referral to Benjamin. Harold saw Benjamin on only three separate occasions, over a period of 26 years, 1953-70. It is not known if Harold ever did transition.

9. Inez

This seems to be Clara Miller, one of the autobiographies in the appendix to HBTP by REL Masters, and called C in the Biographical Profiles. In CGD she is renamed Vera.

10. Janet

This person appears in HBTP paperback as the last four photographs, and is discussed anonymously p137/63. She is sometimes referred to as the tattoo woman because Benjamin did not give her a name. CGD renames her as Claire.

Two California pioneers

Carla Sawyer (192? - ?)

In 1949, Carla was arrested in Los Angeles under the 1922 municipal anti-masquerading law. This was a year before two lesbians, in separate cases, challenged the Los Angeles anti-masquerading law, and in both cases the courts declared that cross-dressing alone did not constitute guilt under the ordinance unless there was further intent to conceal one's identity. However the police force and the local politicians simply ignored these two rulings.

Carla later wrote “I didn’t think there were any other transvestites in the world, until after my arrest”. Because of publicity in the press she received letters from and met others. From these she learned of the possibility of changing sex.

A few years later Louise Lawrence encouraged her to write to Harry Benjamin.

This led to her being involved in a study of transsexuals by Federick G Worden & James T Marsh. In 1954 Carla participated hoping that it would lead to approval for her surgery. However they interviewed her without bothering to read the six-page letter she had provided, and did not provide the desired approval.

Carla then had an encounter with Robert Stoller, then new to the field, who attempted to reverse her ‘sexual tendencies’.

Finally Benjamin helped her obtain surgery in Mexico.

• Federick G Worden & James T Marsh. “Psychological Factors in Men Seeking Sex Transformation: A Preliminary Report”. Journal of the American Medical Association, 157, 15, April 9 1955: 1292-8.
  
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 156, 157, 163, 187.

__________________

On p187 Meyerowitz says that Sawyer had surgery in Mexico, but on p163 she talks of the difficulty of her surgery with Elmer Belt.
_________________________________________

 

Caren Ecker (1905? - ?)

Caren first lived as a woman in Mexico City, until one night a drunk touched her in just the wrong place.

In the late 1940s, Caren gave her life story to Alfred Kinsey, “in hopes that any information … may in its small way eventually be of help to others of my kind”.

At the age of 43, then living in northern California, using a local anesthetic, and succeeded in removing her testicles. Dr Karl Bowman, at San Francisco’s Langley Porter Clinic, then recommended further surgery to remove the penis - this was done late 1953 at the University of California in San Francisco. While recovering she gave offprints of Harry Benjamin’s "Transsexualism and transvestism as psychosomatic and somatopsychic syndromes".

She worked with Louise Lawrence, and was involved in the study of transsexuals by Federick G Worden & James T Marsh, in a vain attempt to show “the true idea that I’m happy with my new life, and that for suitable subjects it is right to make these changes”.

She pursued a career in nursing.

• 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.

Benjamin’s TS Phenomenon – comments

Harry Benjamin's book is now 50 years old.

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. Warner Books Edition 1977, with a bibliography and appendix by Richard Green.  PDF (with different pagination). 

Part I:  intro and the Scale
Betty (?1938 - ?) female impersonator, salesgirl, model. --- 2nd entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part II:  transvestites
Clara Miller (1899 - ?) fur merchant, office worker ---  3rd entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part III: trans women
Joe (1920 - ?) cattle breader, art dealer ---  4th entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part IV: photos, legal, trans men, conclusions
Comments


See also my biography of Harry Benjamin:
Part 1 - beginings
Part 2 - rejuvenation.
Part 3 - transsexualism to 1966.
Part 4 - transsexualism since 1966
Harry Benjamin's other books
The other Harry Benjamin

 
 
When I wrote my 4-part biography of Harry Benjamin in October 2012, I had intended to finish with a review of his major book. However it turned out to be a bigger task than I had realized, and I put it aside until now. As this year is the 50^th anniversary of the book's publication, this is certainly a good time to reread it.

A close reading reveals that the book is composed of segments that were written at different times. Sometimes this is openly admitted. Such that chapter 1 was published in Sexology in 1961, and part of chapter 7 in Sexology in 1963. Sometimes this is deduced such as at the beginning of chapter 6 where Benjamin writes: “Although this volume does not deal with transvestism specifically, a few remarks as to the therapy of this less serious deviation, in comparison with TSism, may be in order” as if chapters 2 and 3 do not exist. The grumpy bits at the beginning and end of chapter 4 were probably written at a different time from the rest of the book, including the middle parts of the same chapter.

Textual analysis as a tool well developed in literature and Bible studies (e.g. we know the text of TS Eliot’s Waste Land before Ezra Pound edited it, and gave us the version that is best known; The Epistle to the Philippians contains a kenotic hymn at 2:5-11 whose theology is quite at odds with the rest of the document). The tool is only just beginning to be used in transgender studies. The obvious document for such analysis is Neils Hoyer’s autobiography of Lili Elvenes (Elbe), where Sabine Meyer has made a good start.

The Harry Benjamin Archives at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana (a US State where trans persons are not allowed to use the toilets) is quite vast. Does it contain the initial drafts that became The Transsexual Phenomenon? A comparison with the published version would be a useful PhD thesis for somebody to write.

________________________

Some parts of the book do not seem to know about Benjamin’s Scale, suggesting that it was developed after the book was partly written. The big problem in the scale is the assignment of Kinsey Scale numbers which led inevitably to erasures, of gay transvestites and gynephilic transsexuals. In a couple of cases Benjamin attempts to get around this by declaring a person to be a Kinsey 3 or 4 while being a husband and father, but a 6 after deciding to transition. As Kinsey and his team based positions on the scale on a person’s sexual history this would be an innovation by Benjamin.  In Kinsey's usage a person who was 3 or 4, and then became exclusively androphilic, would have become a 5, not a 6.   Your previous history becomes part of your current history.

_______________________

Other problems with the scale are the lack of real difference between Type III and Type IV and the lack of a type for full-time non-ops. This would seem to have grown out of Benjamin’s previous three-part typology 1) those who merely want to ‘dress’ and be accepted as women. 2) those who waver, who want breast development but shy away from surgery. 3) ‘fully developed’ transsexuals. Hence he mainly sees a Type IV more as wavering, rather than choosing to live without surgery (despite the name).

Type I (pseudo-transvestites) is not really thought through. Three subtypes are quickly mentioned:

1. “Nonaffective dressing” is Type 0 (cis) doing drag for non-existential ends.
   
2. Those who cross-dress when young and then desist.
   
3. Those who never actually cross-dress, but enjoy transvestic films and literature.

_______________________

Type II is quite muddied by being labeled ‘fetishistic’ while not understanding fetishism, a practice performed by a few transvestites, a few transsexuals, and mainly cis persons. Type III is ‘true transvestite’, implying that type II is sort of ‘false transvestite’. In what way false? This is not addressed, other than talking about ‘fetishism’. Some trans women who are into fetishism, or go through a period of fetishism, appear otherwise to be true transvestites (Johnny Science, Kim Christy),  and some complete the transsexual journey (Lana Wachowski). In this, as in much else, Benjamin paid too much attention to Virginia Prince who was obsessed that her femmephilics not be regarded as fetishistic.

As I wrote: “Two years after Benjamin’s book, Transvestia columnist Sheila Niles popularized the concept ‘whole girl fetishist (WGF)’ for FPE members who did not pass well enough, particularly if it were for lack of trying. Over the next few years it came to be that those who failed or didn’t bother to fashion themselves as truly feminine were ‘fetishistic’. Susanna Valenti even estimated that the majority of members were WGFs”. I think that here we have the key to what Type II should have been: those who don’t attempt to pass, especially those who get off on being read. Those who want to pass are often uncomfortable around those who don’t care to. This division, into true=wants to pass and false=doesn’t want to pass, can also be applied to female impersonators, as they were then called - as long as we do not insist that they are Kinsey 0-2.  Some female impersonators were women offstage (the pre-op Coccinelle, April Ashley etc) but others were definitely men offstage.

Those who relish attention, on or off stage, are sometimes called drag queens (of whatever sexual orientation) or attention whores. But only a small percentage of them may reasonably be called ‘fetishistic’. So would genderqueer and non-binary be false transvestites in this meaning? Mixing up 1960s questions and ways of thinking with 21st century concepts is an interesting game, but of limited validity.   Nobody in 1966 was  genderqueer or non-binary, and so we need not pursue the question. Today very few people want to declare any one group ‘true’, and another ‘false’. That does not get us anywhere.

________________________

The HBS crowd made a big deal of being followers of Benjamin while execrating Virginia Prince. This is intellectually nonviable as Prince and Benjamin were long time associates and Prince is repeatedly mentioned in The Transsexual Phenomenon. She is mentioned 5 times in the first three chapters, and in addition Benjamin also repeats opinions that we know had earlier been expressed by Prince. From chapter 4 onwards, transvestism has been left behind, and perhaps you hope that Prince is also left behind. However she is mentioned another three times.

Prince also deformed the work of Richard Docter and Vern Bullough. I certainly think that Benjamin should have been advised to pay her less attention, and more attention to Louise Lawrence and Patricia Morgan. He should perhaps have also paid more attention to those trans women who could not afford his fees and went to Leo Wollman, Benito Rish or David Wesser instead.

_________________

So is a change of sex possible? The Warner Books cover promises: “All the facts about the changing of sex”. Chapter 1 (written 1961) affirms that chromosomes are only one of seven aspects of what is sex. I think that most of us go with this. It is really disconcerting that Benjamin reneges in chapter 3 and declares that “No actual change of sex is ever possible”. And then again in chapter 7 (written 1963): “Furthermore, the operation, even if successful, does not change you into a woman”.

Editor Brooking Tatum did not feel that this inconsistency was something that should be resolved.

_______________________

Benjamin lists four motives for the conversion operation (p140-2/65-6):

1. Sexual. “It concerns particularly the younger transsexuals. Their sex drive is not that of a homosexual man but that of a woman who is strongly attracted to normal heterosexual men.”
   
2. Gender. “Especially for the older transsexuals, the urgent need to relieve their gender unhappiness can be powerful and impressive”.
   
3. Legal. “The constant fear of discovery, arrest, and prosecution when ‘dressing’ or living as women is a nightmare for many. They want to be women legitimately and have a legal change of their sex status.”
   
4. Social. “applies only if the transsexual patient happens to have a conspicuous feminine physique, appearance, and manners” [while still presenting as male] 

I will leave (2) until last.

1. This became a standard criticism that androphilic trans women were really gay men in denial.  This, of course, is not so, not only because many 'gay transsexuals' first explored the gay scene, but found that they were something different from gay men.

Furthermore there are  men who do want to have sex as a woman, but without being a woman, who seek to acquire a vagina, but otherwise continue living as men. They are rarely discussed. They are not what Benjamin meant here.
3. Fortunately – in most of Europe and North America – it is no longer a crime to dress or live as a woman without surgery. However in many parts of Asia, Africa and South America it still is. And in many of these countries, a conversion operation is not recognised. However even where such legal hassles are present, is the fear of discovery really a greater motivator than the desire to be fully a woman?
4. As it happened there were three outstanding transsexuals in the 1960s who were frequently taken to be women even when dressing as male: Coccinelle, April Ashley, Rachel Harlow. Most of us are not so beautiful. However surely all three became women because they wanted to be women, not that they became women involuntarily to avoid hassles. In the 1990s we had the example of Jaye Davidson who was cast as Dil in The Crying Game because of his beauty. However he is not transsexual, and continued living as a man.
2. “Especially for the older transsexuals, the urgent need to relieve their gender unhappiness can be powerful and impressive”. This sounds like Anne Vitale’s G3 with Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD). Should we assume that Vitale’s G1 has been split between 1 and 4?

What is missing is that persons want the conversion operation for existential reasons, in that they want to be women, have always felt that they are women, being a woman is what feels right, being a woman is who they are. There are other ways of saying it. But the overwhelmingly dominant reason for wanting a conversion operation is not mentioned by Benjamin.

One could use this section on the four reasons to argue that Benjamin did not understand at all why trans women asked for and sometimes got the conversion operation.   You could otherwise argue that his support and empathy showed that he did understand, or at least sympathised.   Speaking as a writer I know that sometimes I write something that seems quite dumb on rereading.    A good writer does reread and takes out what jars with the overall theme of the book.   This was not done re the four reasons, but should have been.

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Benjamin states clearly that, except for the frequency of hypogonadism, pre-op, pre-hormone trans women are physiologically indistinguishable from cis males - except for their assertion that they are/want to be women.   And likewise for trans men and cis females.    But what about intersex persons who likewise seek a sex/gender change? 

Benjamin worked with John Money and must have been aware of the work that he was involved in with those who at that time were referred to as 'hermaphrodites'.   He would have been aware that most intersex stick with the gender of rearing, but that a few do not.  And some transsexuals discover that they have xxy or mosaic DNA and then announce that they are not therefore transsexual, even though e.g. the vast majority of xxy boys grow up to be xxy men.

It is perhaps a pity that Benjamin did not comment on this.

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Female-to-male persons get pretty short shrift. Not only are trans men confined to one chapter, but female transvestites, and implicitly female fetishists, are erased.

There are four autobiographical accounts in Appendix D. Only the first Ava/Harriet is properly discussed in Benjamin’s text, there is also a very quick mention of the fourth, Joe.