Phillips vs Brown, 1979 - a trans patient sues

Phillips, who then had a different name, grew up in Pennsylvania, where he was raped by his father and others, and placed in foster homes from age 13.

After moving to California, she met John Phillips, and, she living as female, they were married in Nevada in 1970, where she became Mrs Phillips.

February 2-4, 1973, was the occasion of the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome sponsored by the Divisions of Urology and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. A highlight was Dr Georges Burou‘s presentation of his techniques; John Brown made a presentation, which was also well received, doctors at that time not being aware of the idiosyncrasies of his practices. Vern Bullough later commented: “the case of John Brown, whom Zelda Suplee, my wife Bonnie, and myself at least halfway encouraged to do transsexual surgery, a recommendation we quickly regretted”.

In October Brown’s work was mentioned sarcastically in Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

John Brown had set up business as a doctor-surgeon in San Francisco. His assistant was James Spence who had served time for fraud in San Quentin, and had no medical training. He was mainly responsible for the business aspects of the practice.

Word of mouth in San Francisco’s gay community told Julie about Dr Brown. She was considering breast implants as a Christmas present for her husband.

Julie Phillips approached Brown and Spence about breast implants, and they, assuring her that she would be a ‘perfect woman’, talked her into three operations: breast enlargement, castration and then vaginoplasty, which were done December 1973-January 1974. They charged her $5,000 (approximately $36,000 today). This was one of Brown’s first vaginoplasties; he was assisted by Spence. Brown at this point did not have enough surgical experience and he certainly did not have operating room privileges. Brown also used her once to assist in a nose-reconstruction operation on another patient.

The vaginoplasty led to pain and infection, and she sought help at Stanford Hospital. She was working as a waitress when she filed a civil suit in July 1977.

Brown’s California medical license was revoked in December 1977 on a recommendation from the Board of Medical Quality Assurance. He was accused of violating medical standards, employing patients as medical assistants, and performing sex-change operations ‘on-demand’ without psychological evaluations. He was also found guilty of gross negligence in the cases of Mrs Phillips and three others.

 Later Brown began practicing in Mexico.

In February 1979 Phillips’ case came to court. She was suing for $5 million in punitive damages and $2 million in general damages ($7 million then is about $30 million today). The jury was of eight men and four women. Phillips was represented by the noted lawyer, Melvin Belli, who specialized in medical malpractice cases. Brown had engaged noted young lawyer Duncan Barr.

Julie

Belli described his client as a “homosexual male” who had been in a happy union with John Phillips. However, Brown’s surgery led to her suffering “profound and permanent physical and psychological injuries and damages and irreparable injury to her relationship”. He claimed that tests had found that Phillips was “psychotic and feeble-minded and can’t truly give any consent”. Brown was said to have separated the castration and vaginoplasty by a few weeks, not for medical reasons, but to defraud insurance companies which would not pay for sex-change operations.

Defense attorney, Barr, replied that Phillips had wanted a sex-change operation for years and “got it because she wanted it”, and had cancelled corrective surgery at Stanford because of the lawsuit.

Phillips wept on the stand as she described her life after Brown’s surgery. Under cross-examination she testified that she was confused after the unsuccessful operation and was afraid of undergoing another one. “I’m not ready. My doctor says I’m not mentally ready. I’m scared of the table. If you had someone cut you up the way they experimented with me, you’d be afraid too.” She said that the operation had left her neither male nor female.

Brown testified, under sharp questioning by Belli, that he was inexperienced “in the development stages” when he operated on Phillips.

Spence told the jury that the case was a farce, in that he had set it up to expose John Brown. Brown and Spence had fallen out in 1973. Spence’s wife Janie testified that she had helped talk Phillips into filing the lawsuit.

Psychiatrist Kathleen Unger testified that the patient would be a mental cripple for the rest of her life.

After Unger’s testimony, the parties settled out-of-court for significantly less than $7 million. The trial had lasted 3½ days. The judge approved the settlement – although the amount of compensation was not revealed.

Belli said that it was “enough for psychiatric care help for the rest of Julie’s life and a new operation”

– which was later performed at Stanford Hospital. 

Barr said that the settlement was well below $1 million. He also said that his client was adamant that he had done nothing wrong.

After the trial Brown was arrested and jailed on a complaint by the state Department of Consumer Affairs on 12 counts of issuing prescriptions in Los Angeles without a license and three warrants for traffic citations. Bail was set at $25,000.

* Not Julie Phillips the actress active in the 1970s and 1980s, nor the writer who wrote a biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr.

• Herb Caen. “Plastic, Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery”. San Francisco Chronicle, 26 October 1973.
• Jack Schreibman. “Sex change ‘neuter‘ suing“. Associated Press, Feb 21, 1979.
• “$7 million sought in sex change trial”. San Francisco Examiner, Feb 21, 1979.
• “Sex change operation a failure”. Associated Press, Feb 21, 1979.
• “Woman claims sex-change operation left her neuter”. Associated Press, Feb 22, 1979.
• “Sex change suit: Belli calls client ‘boy’ and ‘freak’ ”. San Francisco Examiner, Feb 28, 1979.
• “Sex change Medic Slated to Testify in his defense”. Santa Cruz Sentinel, Feb 28, 1979
• “Doctor Defends Decision to Perfoem Sex Change”. Los Angeles Times, Mar 1, 1979.
• “Witness in sex change cas admits she lied”. Camarillo Star, Mar 1, 1979.
• “Sex-Change Doctor Admits His and Aide’s, Inability. Sacramento Bee, March 1, 1979
• “Transsexual Accepts Suit Settlement”. San Diego Union, March 2, 1979. Online.
• “Case Settled in Sex Change”. The Town Talk, Mar 3, 1979.

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Melvin Belli’s clients included Mae West, Errol Flynn, Lenny Bruce, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Muhammad Ali, Jim Bakker, Sirhan Sirhan, Jack Ruby. He specialised in representing individuals in personal injury cases and in raising personal injury awards to then-unprecedented heights that earned him the title of “The King of Torts” by Life Magazine writer Robert Wallace in a 1954 profile. 

None of the newspaper accounts said so, but I assume that Belli was working on a no-win, no-fee basis.

Duncan Barr was the youngest person (32) ever to join the American Board of Trial Advocates. He became notorious in the 1980s when he defended a blood bank against hemophiliacs who had cought AIDS through blood transfusions.

John Ronald Brown: part II.

Continued from Part I.

John Ronald Brown was 69 when he got out of prison. After a period working as a taxi driver, he restarted his surgical practice in Tijuana, but this time also lived in Mexico for a while. He sometimes used the pseudonym of Juan Moreno, and as such had operating room privileges at Hospital Quintana in Playas de Tijuana, although he was not licensed to practice medicine in Mexico. By now he was favoring colon vaginoplasty. Patients would afterwards find that they smelt of rotting flesh. Many of these returned to Brown for revision (and extra billing); others ended up in emergency rooms.

Carrie, who had had vaginoplasty with a European surgeon in 1991, engaged Brown ln 1995 to enhance her labia so that she would be more in demand for nude modeling. He took a layer of skin from the inside of her mouth to sew onto her genitals. She was sent home without antibiotics or pain medicine, and it took three months to heal. A year later Brown came to her Los Angeles home to correct the results by injecting silicone.

Camille, previously an insurance underwriter, had vaginoplasty from Brown in 1997, and he punctured her rectum. Despite this she was sent home without medications or follow-up care. She then needed hospitalization for several days because of pain, complications and infections, and the recto-vaginal fistula continued to leak into her vagina. She became a stay-in, not able to go anywhere.

Mimi, who was also beautiful, was well pleased with her operation, and Brown featured her in a

Mimi

promotional video.

He had an advertising brochure:

The prettiest pussies are John Brown pussies.
The happiest patients are John Brown patients.
Because . . .
1. Each has a sensitive clit.
2. All (99%) get orgasms.
3. Careful skin draping gives a natural appearance.
4. Men love the pretty pussies and the sexy response.

Gregg Furth was a Jungian analyst who had worked with John Money on a body-modification yearning for which John Money had coined a term: apotemnophilia (the desire to have a leg amputated). They published a paper on it in 1977.

Furth experienced the yearning himself, as did his older friend, Philip Bondy, a retired satellite engineer. They built up a collection of photographs, slides and videos of male amputees.

Furth came across a newspaper article about John Brown, and flew to San Diego. He found Brown quite open-minded about a would-be amputee’s right to choose. In February 1997, Furth returned for the operation, but it was cancelled after the assisting doctor in Tijuana refused to participate when he realized just what was to happen. In 1999 they tried again. However on arrival, Furth found that his desire to be amputated had disappeared. Bondy stepped in to take the operation in his place. However he died two days later of gangrene in a motel in California. Brown was arrested and tried by the San Diego authorities, even though the operation had been done in Tijuana. 

The medical receipts showed that Bondy had paid Brown to do the amputation. This mystified the San Diego police, until trans activist Dallas Denny phoned in and suggested that they read up on apotemnophilia. This was confirmed by a police search of Furth’s apartment in New York.

The charge against Brown was upgraded from manslaughter to malice murder in the second degree, which means that the defendant does something that is dangerous to human life, knowing it is dangerous to human life and does it anyway. To make that charge stick, the prosecution needed to demonstrate that Brown had a history of being reckless. The video tapes in Brown’s apartment helped, but they also needed to find transsexuals who would testify against him.

Christina had mortgaged her house to pay for surgeries, 10 altogether, by Brown. However the skin grafts inside her vagina were so thin that they tore during intercourse. Also Brown had removed her lower ribs to give a more feminine waist: she developed an abscess there as big as a basketball. Her nose job resulted in different sized nostrils, one turned up. Brown felt bad enough that he phoned to offer a $500 refund. Her mother told him that her son had committed suicide.

Before the trial, brown pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license, relating to seven sex-change operations.

Carrie and Camille testified for the prosecution. Patrice Baxter was a witness for the defense. Brown was found guilty in October 1999 and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison, which he mainly served in Soledad State Prison.

Gregg Furth had met with Dr Robert Smith, a surgeon in Glasgow who had performed two elective amputations, but was then told to stop by his Hospital Trust. They wrote a book on the subject of apotemnophilia which came out in 2000.

Brown appealed in 2001, but unsuccessfully, his lawyer arguing that California was without

Brown in Soledad

jurisdiction to try him, and that the instructions on implied malice were inadequate.

For Camille, the pain got worse and worse until she died, shortly after Brown’s conviction.

Still in prison, aged 87, Brown died of health problems including pneumonia in 2010.

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John Brown did over 600 mtf sex-change operations over 25 years. Some of his ex-patients are still delighted with his work. Many others are not. The motivation to trust your body to him was the apparent low price, but if you had complications, and returned for repair work, this lower price quickly disappeared.

Dallas Denny’s “The Tijuana experience” starts with a quote from Canary Conn. This is unfair. Conn was operated on in Tijuana in 1972 but by Dr Barbosa (named as Dr Lopez in her book). Brown did not start doing sex-change surgery until 1973, and did not set up in Tijuana until 1982.

I like Wendy Davidson’s idea of a peer clinic run by trans persons. It would need to contract with surgeons who were consistently rather than only intermittently good.

Cutting off someone’s leg and leaving them to die is against the law in Mexico. In addition Brown was not licensed to practice medicine in Mexico. As the crime was committed there, they should have had the first shot at prosecution. For another example of US extraterritorial enforcement see Walter L. Williams.

The EN.Wikipedia article on Apotemniphilia does not even mention John Brown.

The Murderpedia article on John Brown says “Number of victims: 1”. Camille and Christina are known to have died as a result of Brown’s bad surgey, and there are certainly others not identified.

Nicole Spray put comments on this blog in 2010 hoping to contact other patients of John Brown. I hope that that worked out well.

There are two doctor characters in fiction who could be taken to be satires of John Brown – except that they predate his work as a surgeon:

1. Dr Montag who helps Myra Breckinrige come into being in Gore Vidal’s 1968 novel.
2. Dr Benway who recurs in William Burrough’s novels including Naked Lunch, 1959 and Nova Express, 1964. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Season 5, 2004, featured a surgeon called Benway who accidentally kills patients during back-alley transgender surgery.

Perhaps we should also mention the real-life Dr Emil Petersen in Copenhagen 1953 who did an orchiectomy on  Charlotte McLeod, but left her in pain and bleeding, had been a colaborator with the Nazis, was a drug addict and stole her passport.
________________

• Herb Caen. “Plastic, Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery”. San Francisco Chronicle, 26 October 1973.
• John Money, Russell Jobaris & Gregg Furth, "Apotemnophilia: Two cases of self demand amputation as a sexual preference". The Journal of Sex Research. 13 (2) 1977: 115–124.
• “Transsexual Accepts Suit Settlement”. San Diego Union, March 2, 1979. Online.
• Eric Nadler. “The Incredible Dick Doctor” Penthouse Forum, January 1986: 18-25.
• Veronica Jean Brown. “He’s Back !”. Twenty Minutes, September 1989: 3-4. Online.
• Dallas Denny. “The Tijuana experience”. Alicia’s TV Girl Talk, 4(9), 18, 1992. Online.
• Bill Callahan. “Ex-doctor who served time faces murder charge”. The San Diego Union-Tribune. May 23, 1998.
• Paul Ciotti. “Why Did He Cut Off That Man's Leg?: The Peculiar Practice of Dr. John Ronald Brown”. LA Weekly. Dec 15, 1999. Online.
• Dallas Denny. “Tabletop” John Brown gets his. Transgender Forum, 1999. Online.
• Michelle Williams. “Transsexuals Tell of Botched Surgeries by Former Doctor”. Associated Press, 29 September 1999. Online.
• “People v. Brown”. Findlaw, August 02, 2001. Online.
• Michelle Moore. “Butcher John Ronald Brown”. DallasDenny.com, 2002. http://dallasdenny.com/Writing/2013/11/01/butcher-john-ronald-brown-2002.
• Gregg Furth & Robert Smith. Apotemnophilia: Information, Questions, Answers, and Recommendations About Self-Demand Amputation. 1stBooks, 2000.
• Chuck Whitlock. MediScams: How to Spot and Avoid Health Care Scams, Medical Frauds, and Quackery from the Local Physician to the Major Health Care Providers and Drug Manufacturers. Renaissance Books, 2001: chp1; 23-34.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 234, 271-2.
• Vern L Bullough. “Introduction”. In J. Ari Kane-Demaios and Vern L. Bullough (eds) Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths. Prometheus Books, 2005: 21-2.
• Robin Marantz Henig. “At War With Their Bodies, They Seek to Sever Limbs”. The New York Times”, March 22, 2005. Online.
• World's Worst Sex Change Surgeon, dir & scr: Jonah Weston, narrated by Mark Bazeley. UK Channel 4, 10 Apr 2007, 45 mins
• Carol Anne Davis. Doctors Who Kill: Profiles of Lethal Medics. Allison & Busby, 2011. Chp 27.
• Bianca London. “Transgender woman left disabled and horrifically disfigured by her plastic surgery addiction warns of dangers of 'quick fixes' and backstreet doctors”. The Daily Mail, 20 August 2013. Online.
• Stephen. “John Ronald Brown: World’s Worst Sex Change Surgeon”. Stranger than Fiction, April 21, 2016. Online.

Murderpedia     Wikipedia

John Ronald Brown (1922 - 2010) surgeon - Part I

 I wrote a shorter version of this in August 2007.   This version goes into more details, about his legal troubles, his patients etc.   



John Brown was born in 1922, the son of a Mormon physician. He grew up in Arizona and Utah. He was drafted in the Second World War, and, excelling on the General Classification Test, was sent by the army to medical school. He graduated from the University Of Utah School Of Medicine in August 1947. His first wife ran off with his best friend; his second died of cancer. After twenty years as a general practitioner, he took a program in plastic surgery at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, passed the written exam easily, but failed the oral.

From 1966-8 almost all transgender surgery in the US was done in university gender identity clinics. Georg Burou’s penile inversion technique that he pioneered in Casablanca was becoming better known, and in 1968 Stanley Biber, a doctor-surgeon at the Mount San Rafael hospital in Trinidad, a mining town in Colorado, who had had extensive surgical experience with the US Army during the Korean War, started doing vaginoplasties, using diagrams that he had obtained from Johns Hopkins Hospital based on Dr Burou’s technique.

February 2-4, 1973, saw the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome sponsored by the Divisions of Urology and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. Its principal architect and chairman was Donald R. Laub, M.D., Chief of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. A highlight was the presentation of his techniques by Dr Georges Burou; John Brown also made a presentation, that was well received, doctors at that time not being aware of the idiosyncrasies of his practice. Vern Bullough: “the case of John Brown, who Zelda Suplee, my wife Bonnie, and myself at least halfway encouraged to do transsexual surgery, a recommendation we quickly regretted”.

John Brown set up business as a doctor-surgeon in San Francisco. His assistant was James Spence who had a criminal record but no medical training. Julie approached Brown and Spence about breast implants, and they, assuring her that she would be a ‘perfect woman’, talked her into a full operation. This was one of Brown’s first vaginoplasties; he was assisted by Spence. However unlike Dr Biber, Brown did not have surgical experience and he did not have operating room privileges. However he did network with trans activists.

Another trans woman, Wendy Davidson, who was attempting to organize peer clinics run by transsexuals, also worked with Brown for a while, as did Donna Colvin. Colvin later reported that he shot up valium before surgery, performed on kitchen tables and in hotel rooms. Brown also met with Angela Douglas, who later explained: “‘He wanted to help aid me and came up with several thousand dollars cash to help publish Mirage Magazine. In exchange, I promoted him considerably’.

In October Brown’s work was mentioned sarcastically in Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Journalist Paul Ciotti followed up and was invited to a dinner party where a pitch was made by James Spence to a group of urologists, proctologists and internists. Spence was hoping to establish what he projected to be the finest sex-change facility anywhere in the US. Dinner was served by several transsexuals, who were awaiting surgery. When asked how candidates would be selected for surgery, Spence replied: “It takes one to know one. We let other transsexuals make the decision. They can tell best when someone is a true transsexual — a woman trapped in a man’s body." His surgical method centered on using the glans penis to form a clitoris, and lining the vagina with scrotal skin. Ciotti says of Brown: “he came across as genial, knowledgeable and obviously quite proud of his technique. There was a certain naiveté (and even passivity) about him that struck me as surprising in a surgeon”.

However by January 1974 Brown and Spence were at odds.

In 1977 Brown performed vaginoplasty on Angela Douglas who paid around $600. She described him as one who "fed, housed, paid and helped hundreds, and gave free or nearly free surgery to at least two hundred of us". Another patient that year was Nicole Spray.

Later that year, the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance revoked Brown’s medical license for "gross negligence, incompetence and practicing unprofessional medicine in a manner which involved moral turpitude". This was partly based on his practice of doing vaginoplasty on an out-patient basis, not in a properly equipped surgical theater, and having patients work as medical assistants as part of their barter for their own surgery. He also misrepresented transgender surgery on insurance forms as "the congenital absence of a vagina". Despite this, the judge also filed a memorandum opinion that Brown was a pioneer making innovative contributions in transsexual surgery: perhaps a better resolution would be to include Brown in a medically recognized organization, with others selecting the patients and providing post-operative care.

In 1979 Julie sued, saying that the operation had left her neither male nor female. She sued for $7 million, but settled out-of-court for significantly less, but “enough for psychiatric care help for the rest of Julie’s life and a new operation”. Brown’s lawyer made the offer after psychiatrist Kathleen Unger testified that the patient would be a mental cripple for the rest of her life.

Brown worked and successively lost permission to practice in Hawaii, Alaska and St Lucia. In 1981, in St Lucia, he, then 59, contracted an arranged marriage to a 17-year-old, who did not speak English. He taught her the language, and they had two sons.

He then returned to southern California and began an underground practice operating in Tijuana. Tijuana was already a known destination for transsexual surgery. The most eminent surgeon was Jose Jesus Barbosa who worked with Harry Benjamin, and who was the surgeon for Canary Conn and Lynn Conway.

Most of Brown’s patients were trans women who could not afford Dr Biber or Dr Barbosa, or did not meet the requirements re time on hormones, psychiatrist’s referral etc. One patient at this time was Monique Allen, who had vaginoplasty at age 22, and came to Brown for enhancements. She would continue with various other doctors, and eventually had over 200 plastic surgeries.

Patrice Baxter, a cis woman, also had a surgery business in Tijuana. She met Brown, and became a long-time friend and business partner. She also went to Brown for a tummy-tuck, a face-lift and breast implants. Several of her friends and relatives were also operated on: her granddaughter had her ears fixed so that they did not stick out. Brown used Baxter’s home in Mexico for patient postoperative care. By this time he was charging $2,500 for a vaginoplasty – although many of his patients never paid. Baxter was quoted by Ciotti: “"He was brilliant, but he had no common sense. He would walk through plate-glass doors. He couldn’t balance his checkbook." Sometimes in the middle of a conversation he’d just pick up a magazine and begin to read. His bedside manner was no great shakes, either. "He tended to mumble. He didn’t hold your hand." But so what? She asks. "He wasn’t a general practitioner," he was a surgeon.

In 1985 a then-19-year-old had surgery that was so successful that her husband never guessed her past. She later became a manager for an airline. Ann, a traumatized Cambodian who had fled the Khmer Rouge was also pleased with her surgery and became a stripper in Las Vegas’ Chinatown.

On the other hand it was estimated that at least 70 of Brown’s transgender patients ended up with permanent colostomies. UC San Diego plastic-surgery professor Jack Fisher repaired 15 or so of Brown’s disasters: “"He’s a terrible, appalling technical surgeon. There’s just no other way to describe it. He doesn’t know how to make a straight incision. He doesn’t know how to hold a knife. He has no regard for limiting blood loss."

Brown started offering penis enlargements – he did this by cutting the suspensor ligament holding the penis root to the pubic bone. He ran advertisements in The Advocate, and in 1984 he held a seminar in San Francisco – entrance fee $25 per person. He was arrested for medical fraud. However it took four years to come to trial.

Meanwhile, in 1986 Penthouse Forum featured this as a cover story "The Incredible Dick Doctor”.  The article portrayed Brown as an inattentive driver who backed into other cars, and whose trousers fell down in the operating room. The television news magazine Inside Edition followed up with an investigative story on The Worst Doctor in America. Brown actually co-operated with the film crew.

Brown pleaded no contest to the fraud charges in 1989, was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in jail, but served only 30 days.


In transsexual circles Brown came to be known as 'Butcher Brown', but patients still came.

After the broadcast of the Inside Edition program, the San Diego District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation that led to Brown’s conviction in 1990, and a sentence of three years for practicing medicine without a license. Several trans woman, ex-patients, showed up to express support for previous work. His wife, the one from St Lucia, now divorced him, although they remained on good terms. He served 19 months.

Continued in Part II.

History of TAO: Part 2: 1972-80. TAO in Miami Beach

TAO and Angela Douglas

Angela Douglas (1943 - 2007) musician, activist

History of TAO: part 1: to 1971. USAF, music, GLF

History of TAO: bibliography

History of TAO: Part 2: 1972-80. TAO in Miami Beach

History of TAO: Part 3: aftermath

Kimberley Elliot (1953 - 1980) TAO, Neo-American Church

More on Angela Douglas

In July 2019 a Gender Critical Reddit thread  linked to the original 2007 posting.  Apparently some anti-trans women think that a letter, be it satirical or whatever, from 42 years ago, written by someone who died 12 years earlier, and who never worked well with other trans activists, is a relevant document in discussing trans activism today!!!!                         My Reply.

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Part II. 1972-82. TAO in Miami Beach

1972
Douglas and TAO move to Miami Beach. Publishes Moonshadow and later Mirage Magazine over next three years. Douglas: "Year of the Transsexual in Miami Beach: hundreds were there, from all over the nation, and many Puerto Ricans and Cubans. … the cha-chas became as thick as tourists; the Latin transsexuals were referred to as 'cha-chas'."

Transvestites are still no longer welcome as members.

Douglas and Colette Goudie meet during the protests against the Presidential conventions in Miami Beach.

Kilo, 22 and pre-op, is a TAO member and also a popular performer who had appeared at the Stonewall club in a production of Wild Side Story.

Miami Beach's anti-cross-dressing ordinance is declared unconstitutional and police threaten to rewrite it. Kilo calls for street protests. The police continue to enforce the old ordinance nevertheless.

Canary Conn has stage-one surgery with Dr Barbosa in Tijuana (named as Dr Lopez in her autobiography).

1973
Collette Goudie joins TAO, as do Kimberly Barreiro and Tara Carn, Puerto Rican-born, New York-raised. Douglas: Goudie and Carn were ‘both very beautiful and wild and hated each other with a hot passion. Getting them to work together was nearly impossible’.

Kimberly fully transitions with surgery in less than a year. She marries Steve Elliot and they became involved in Art Kleps' psychedelic Neo-American Church at Millbrook, New York.

Goudie & Carn are arrested on Twenty-first Street beach for disorderly conduct. Surprisingly they are well treated by the police.

TAO sets up a 'security force' to stop police and public abuse of 'transsexuals and gays'.

After a raid and arrests at the Stonewall Club on Twenty-first Street, Douglas files suit for discrimination.

Article in Mirage objects to the emphasis in mainstream media on the medical aspects of transsexuality. There are more severe problems including exploitation by surgeons, psychiatrists and gender identity clinics, as well as extortion and persecution by the police.

After the American Psychiatric Association announced that homosexuality would no longer be considered a mental illness, TAO called for transsexualism to be likewise removed (although technically it was not even added until the 1980 version of the DSM).

1974
Douglas steps down as president. Barbara Rosello becomes president of TAO: "Tao is an organization for transexuals only … We have many goals which can only be accomplished by our own efforts."

Rosella resigns due to family pressures and nerves. Goudie becomes 3^rd president in September.

Carn was to have her photograph in Mirage. Her boyfriend was terrified. Carn: 'I'm proud of what I am, and I want to help anyway I can.' She is also quoted saying that that she is lesbian, and likes girls and other transsexuals.

Carn passes well. However the Miami Beach police follow her around and tell men that she is a 'fag in a dress'. "To retaliate, the beautiful Tara sometimes went to a crowded beach, started dancing topless to music from a radio and after a crowd of applauding people surrounded her, would take off her bikini panties, display her male genitals and cause a near riot. Police would arrive and she’d shake her genitals at them, screaming ‘you say I’m a man’ ...She was taken to jail, fined, and sometimes went back and repeated the performance."

Goudie and 2 other TAO members appear on Marsh and Adams Show on WKID in Fort Lauderdale, and discuss housing discrimination, police harassment, difficulties receiving proper medical attention and difficulties with getting identification.

During June, the Miami News published a series on transsexual issues. Four trans women are featured including two TAO members: Tara Carn and Colombian-American Crystal Gresham.

Crystal Gresham is TAO Miami Beach director. She ‘lives fully as a female except when teaching ballroom dance to elderly women in Miami Beach’.

Douglas first meets surgeon Dr John Brown. ‘He wanted to help aid me and came up with several thousand dollars cash to help publish Mirage Magazine. In exchange, I promoted him considerably’.

Canary Conn publishes her autobiography, followed by appearances on television.

TAO had increasingly bad-mouthed the Erickson Educational Foundation, which indeed never mentioned TAO or other militant organizations in its newsletters. Despite this Zelda Suplee on behalf EEF offers $20,000 to 'place the TAO within the EEF's framework'. Douglas declines, in that 'every cent would have strings attached'.

A TAO press release suggests that the CIA is behind the transsexual program at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and that Donald Laub at Stanford's Gender identity Clinic was connected with a plot to transplant the brains of transsexuals.

1975
In February issue of Mirage Jennifer Otera 'third place winner in the Miss [Gay?] Universe contest held in Caracas’ reports on intense police harassment in Venezuela.

In the same issue, Goudie is asked about transvestites: "I have nothing against them. Some transsexuals say they are transvestites because it’s easier for the world to comprehend. But it’s not the same. A transvestite is a man who dresses up like a woman for a little while and then becomes a man again. A transsexual, like you and me and so many others, live as we are all of the time. It is so different ...I don’t think it’s good for both TVs and TSs to belong to the same groups, as the values are so different, the laws and problems are so different. In some ways the problems overlap, but not completely."

However units or associate memberships were set up for non-transsexual members. Lesbian and transvestite units were created. The police did not observe any distinction between transvestites and transsexuals, and Moonshadow and Mirage continued to report harassment of both groups.

Intersex persons were offered full membership.

"TAO also strongly relates to the problems and efforts of transvestites, gay men and women and feminists. However, we consider transexualist values of paramount importance and are not subject to the values of other sociosexual liberationist movements, such as the feminist and gay liberation movements. We prefer to meet members in person."

Goudie on August cover of Moonshadow. Contains article by Douglas & Goudie on trans Santaria deities, especially Santa Barbara/Shango.

Kilo dies in a house fire.

Gay Action Alliance – Miami sue the police in Miami Beach for brutality, but refuse to include transsexuals in the lawsuit, even though they were more often targeted. This leads to TAO breaking off relations.

A network of UK trans activists loosely affiliate themselves with TAO. The group in Birmingham was run by Brooklyn (ftm) and Leyla (mtf) who were a couple. They urged an "anarcho-transformative, transsexual-separatist agenda" such as protesting a National Front march. Stephen Whittle, for a short while ran a London TAO group. (Whittle in Ekins & King: 192).

Birmingham TAO put out a leaflet: "The T.A.O. is a national organization which is open to all transsexuals (whether they are presently undergoing sex change treatment or not) irrespective of their race, religion, politics or sexual orientation. The T.A.O. has no official membership at present and is not structured. All decisions as to the running of the organization are taken collectively."

Moonshadow reports that TAO has had chapters in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Orlando and Jacksonville as well as Miami Beach. Abroad it has chapters in Canada, England and Northern Ireland. Almost a thousand members in all.

++In this year, trans man Joe Carstairs sells his home, Whale Cay in the Bahamas, and buys a house in Miami.   There is no reason to assume that he ever contacted TAO.

1976
Canary Conn reportedly killed (reported by Douglas, however Kay Brown says that she met Canary at a later date).

TAO disbanded? Douglas travels in California and Hawai'i. Carn also leaves Miami, and has gender surgery. They meet again in Hawai'i, but Carn is unfriendly. Later she is arrested on a prostitution charge.

1977
Douglas has vaginoplasty with Butcher John Brown and paid around $600. She describes him as one who "fed, housed, paid and helped hundreds, and gave free or nearly free surgery to at least two hundred of us". Brown has his California license revoked later that year. Later Douglas claimed that she "helped get him arrested twice".

Goudie joins Douglas in Berkeley, they fall out, and Douglas sends Goudie back to Miami on a plane.

Angela Douglas in San Francisco becomes upset at the vitriolic, absurd, and transphobic comments broadcast on listener sponsored station KPFA and letters published in the feminist journal Sister. Especially the attack on trans woman Sandy Stone donating her skills at the feminist Olivia Records.

Douglas meets Kay Brown who is with her when she writes a letter. Brown attempts without success to dissuade her from sending it. It is published in Sister Aug-Sep, p7. As quoted by Raymond p xvii it goes: "Free from the chains of menstruation and child-bearing, transsexual women are obviously far superior to Gennys in many ways .... Genetic women are becoming quite obsolete, which is obvious, and the future belongs to transsexual women. We know this and, and perhaps some of you suspect it. All you have left is your 'ability' to bear children, and in a world which will groan to feed 6 billion by the year 2000, that's a negative asset."

The letter is generally regarded as satire, but in her 1997 email to Kay Brown, Douglas insisted: "The l997 letter as for women becoming obsolete is valid, not whimsical or tongue in cheek, women are becoming obsolete as evidenced by Islamic treatment of women, etc. The future of humanity is male homosexual. Women are becoming irrelevant. I despise all lesbians anyway, and applaud when they get killed. I don't give a shit about feminists."

photo by Kay Brown

Next day Brown and Douglas march in the SF Pride Parade, where leaders had demanded that 'drags should stay home'. They are welcomed to ride with the Mattachine Society. Douglas writes up the event for the Berkeley Barb.

1978
Douglas appears in a porn mag with pre- and post-op photographs of her genitals.

TAO formally dissolved.

Douglas reported to be participating in US Nazi politics.

1979
Janice Raymond. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male: xvii quotes part of the letter to Sister out of context attributing it to 'one transsexual' and giving Douglas' name only in the end notes. Douglas later claimed that the 13 direct interviews cited in the book were actually quotes from a letter that Douglas had written to her.

1980
Dave Potter, formerly of Euphoria, (and 86 others) dies in fire at MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

Kim Elliot is found dead at Miami Beach’s Midtown Plaza due to a drug overdose.  She is buried in North Miami Beach, and TAO people attend her funeral.

The Mariel Boatlift exodus from Cuba adds many trans women to the Miami population.

Angela Douglas (1943 - 2007) musician, activist

TAO and Angela Douglas

Angela Douglas (1943 - 2007) musician, activist

History of TAO: part 1: to 1971. USAF, music, GLF

History of TAO: bibliography

History of TAO: Part 2: 1972-80. TAO in Miami Beach

History of TAO: Part 3: aftermath

Kimberley Elliot (1953 - 1980) TAO, Neo-American Church

More on Angela Douglas

In July 2019 a Gender Critical Reddit thread  linked to this 2007 posting.  Apparently some anti-trans women think that a letter, be it satirical or whatever, from 42 years ago, written by someone who died 12 years earlier, and who never worked well with other trans activists, is a relevant document in discussing trans activism today!!!!                         My Reply.

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

Unlike some of the persons whom I have featured in this series, Angela Douglas had, before her recent death, been recently posting on the web, and has a new CD out. The last item may surprise those who have read the account of Angela Douglas either on Kay Brown's now defunct Transsexual, Transgender and Intersex History site, or in Joanne Meyerowitz: How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, neither of which mentions her musical career.

As an exercise, I am going to write a sketch of Douglas taking facts only from Brown and Mayerowitz, and then again from Douglas' web postings. The two versions are radically different.

Brown and Mayerowitz version:
Born: Carl Czinki. A hippie and aspiring rock musician who came out as transgender in 1969. She became the radical transy leader in Transsexual Action Organization (TAO)--the major US transgender group other than Reed Erickson's EEF at that time-- in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and then in Florida. She emphasized the importance of working with both Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation groups. She deplored the medical model and pathologization of transgenderism, and called on the American Psychiatric Association to remove transsexuality from its list of mental disorders. She was antagonistic to the Erickson Education Foundation which she found patronizing and too close to the medical establishment. Satire that Douglas wrote about the exclusion of transies from the lesbian community was recycled misleadingly and out of context by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire, and also by Catherine Millots in Horsex. She later won a lottery prize, obtained surgery, and moved back to Florida.

The contentious writing quoted in Raymond and Millots was originally published in Sister Aug-Sep 1977, p7. As quoted by Raymond p xvii it goes: "Free from the chains of menstruation and child-bearing, transsexual women are obviously far superior to Gennys in many ways .... Genetic women are becoming quite obsolete, which is obvious, and the future belongs to transsexual women. We know this and, and perhaps some of you suspect it. All you have left is your 'ability' to bear children, and in a world which will groan to feed 6 billion by the year 2000, that's a negative asset."


From Douglas's own postings we get a certainly different slant:

Born: Douglas Carl Czinki in Detroit in 1943 to Hungarian immigrants. Raised on US Air Force bases. He completed his education in Tokyo where he was in his first rock band. Served in the US Air Force. In the late 1960s, using the name Doug Delain, he briefly played guitar with Arthur Lee and Love, with Euphoria and then with Warren Zevon. He had a cameo as a pot smoker and did art work for the 1967 film The Trip. Provided his home for a Jimi Hendrix television special. His Cuban wife left him in 1967. Began transition in 1969. She ran TAO which had over 1000 members in 5 countries. She was frequently attacked, and was beaten unconscious 6 times. She dismisses the idea that the letter sent to Sister was satire, and has made comments that are homophobic, misogynist and anti-feminist. She has been an FBI informant since 1972. She had surgery courtesy of John Brown in 1977, which left her mutilated. She helped to get him arrested. She dissolved TAO in 1978. Douglas has lived as a man since 1982, homeless and celibate, except for two years after winning a lottery in 1991. The money ran out when he had a stroke. He also has diabetes. In 1998 he returned to performing as a man, Last Drop Douglas, and and issued a solo CD, Cosmo Alley, in 2003.

Emails and postings consulted:

Douglas Carl Czinki to Kay Brown- no date - included on Brown's site.  Archive. 

A.L. Douglas posting on Sympathy on Milli Vanilli Jul 7, 2000.
Angela Lynn Douglas posting on dev.greenspun.com November 10, 2002.
Angela Douglas 2 postings on "Transsexuals allowed in Olympics" Amorous Propensities May 21, 2004 and October 21, 2004.
A.L. posting on band family tree.com 5/28/2005.
Tanglehead posting on Messageboard for Love Fans 16/11/2005.
Angela Douglas posting on Arthur Lee Tribute June 27, 2006.
Angela Douglas (Tanglehead) posting on Yellow Swordfish>>Arthur Lee and Love 2006-08-26.
Angela Douglas posting on the Cindi Lauper web page. 14 March 2007.
Tanglehead posting on ufowatch no date.


Angela Douglas died in 2007.

Here is an obituary by Mark Hinson in the Tallahassee Democrat on August 24, 2007. It is no longer available on the original site:



Angela's ashes: Farewell to a wild pen pal

LET'S GO BLOG WILD: My mail box is a lot emptier now that self-described "notorious transsexual," rock musician, lottery-winner, lottery-squanderer and prolific letter-writer Angela Douglas has died.
Douglas, who lived in Sneads in Jackson County, died of complications from heart trouble earlier this month. She was 64. As she said in one of her last communiqués: "I am 64 and Paul McCartney doesn't care."
In the above photo are Stuttering John, left, from "The Howard Stern Show" and, right, Angela Douglas. The picture was taken in Panama City Beach, circa 2000.

When I was a young reporter in the '80s, Douglas used to phone me in the newsroom of the Tallahassee Democrat and launch into wild, rambling monologues that were part performance art and part paranoid fantasy. She was always convinced someone had stolen her life story.
When "Top Gun" became a monster box-office smash in 1986, Douglas wanted to sue Tom Cruise for pilfering her self-published autobiography "Triple Jeopardy" from 1982. (I don't remember many trannies flying fighter jets in that pic, unless Goose wasn't telling us something, do you?) Famous musicians such as Warren Zevon, she claimed, had stolen her songs without payment.
Mostly, I just let her vent. As I learned long ago in bartending class, you let the customer talk while you just wipe the bar with a rag and keep saying, "Yep, I know what you mean."
Getting flaky phone calls in a newsroom is nothing new. For a few months, a caller identifying himself as God would phone up to predict the day's weather. And, you know, most of the time he was more accurate than the professional meteorologists we paid to do the same job. (God says it's going to be hot this weekend, by the way.)
I was prepared to write Angela off as just another kook. But then I did a little research and found out she really had worked on the fringes of the music and movies industries in Los Angeles during the '60s and early '70s. She'd worked with Arthur Lee before he formed Love and really did know Zevon (in his starving-artist days). Jimi Hendrix may or may not have recorded one promo at her home in L.A. That house was also used as a set for Roger Corman's 1967 acid-dropping classic "The Trip" with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

Douglas started life as Carl Czinki - and played guitar under the name Doug Delain in the L.A. band called Euphoria - but decided to switch sexes in 1969. The transformation was complete by 1977, when Douglas had become an outspoken writer/journalist for the transgender community. This is the same time period she became convinced television and movie producers were stealing her life story.
I have no idea how or why Douglas ended up in rural Jackson County in the late '80s.She settled in dinky Grand Ridge near Sneads and lived in impoverished conditions. This made her very bitter and she often lashed out at gays and blacks when she called me with another rant.
When her phone calls from pay phones suddenly stopped, they were replaced by a stream of letters. I still have stacks of the things. Some are coherent, some are funny, some are hand-scrawled screeds that are impossible to read.
Then, in the summer of 1991, Douglas had a rare stroke of good fortune. She won $232,567 in the Fantasy Five lottery game. After taxes, the lottery cut her a check for $186,000.
In a newsletter published by the lottery, Douglas crowed that she was going to buy an electric guitar, a used red Corvette, tell everyone in Grand Ridge to kiss her you-know-what and move to Key West.
And that is exactly what she did.
A few months later, she was back in Jackson County living in poverty. Again. She'd found plenty of friends in Key West who were more than happy to help her spend her free money.

Occasionally, I'd get good news from Douglas. In 1997, she wrote a twisted little novelty song called "Andrew Cunanan" and it end up on Dr. Demento's nationally syndicated radio show. (She also penned parody tunes with titles such as "Ghost Eunuchs in the Sky.") In 2003, she released a CD called "Cosmo Alley" under the name Last Drop Douglas. She even played a few live shows at festivals around North Florida and drove to Panama City to meet Stuttering John from Howard Stern's radio show. Douglas both loved and hated Howard Stern.

Most of the Douglas letters, however, were depressing. Naturally, the FBI was after her. She railed against doctors (many of whom I knew personally in Marianna) who were allegedly conspiring against her by denying her treatment. Her surgery from the '60s and '70s had left her with many medical complications, which she discussed at length and I won't repeat. It wasn't pretty, I'll tell you that. I hope sexual-reassingment surgery has gotten a little better since the '60s.

Earlier this year, Douglas sent me a tape she'd recorded while she was in the hospital. It starts with the chilling intro: "This Angela Douglas and I am dying." The rest of the message is classic Douglas - nutty accusations, bold claims, too much personal information about her medical conditions, crazy tales of her musical past. All classic Angela.
As I listened to the tape, it suddenly dawned on me: "Hey, her life story really would make for an interesting movie or play. Wonder why anyone hasn't done it before?"

-----

PS The British actress Angela Douglas, whose first fame was in several Carry On films, is a different person.

PPS Kay Brown's page includes stories, "probably apocryphal" she says, about Douglas as a transactivist at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and at the Stonewall riot in 1969. These do seem implausible, and in writing the above, I have ignored them.


There was a British branch of TAO. Amazingly Stephen Whittle was involved in it. For details see p192-3 of Ekins & King The Transgender Phenomenon, 2006.


I certainly agree that someone should write a book about Angela Douglas and TAO.