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Showing posts with label Catholic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catholic. Show all posts

25 June 2015

Robert Allen (1914 - 1997) film maker, radiologist, teacher

Joyce Allen from Warrington, Lancashire was a masculine tomboy who frequently scrapped with both boys and girls. She resisted having to wear girls' clothes, and took pleasure in dressing in her father's trousers. She pilfered dad's cigarettes, and when he bought a car, she, although under age, borrowed it and drove around the streets.

She had learned the violin, but at her first public performance, of Luigi Arditi's Il Bacio, a string snapped, and it was many years before Allen picked up the violin again.

She left school at fourteen, and worked at a variety of jobs, but also became well known at the local labour exchange where she befriended one of the clerks. The most satisfying job was at a local cinema.

In 1933, Joyce had met a man with whom she enjoyed going to horse races and greyhound tracks. They married, but quickly realized that 'a normal marital relationship' was impossible. Bored and incompetent as a housewife, Joyce took up gambling and lost everything, even the furniture.

Afterwards, now usually wearing slacks and with a man's haircut Allen worked in the exhibition side of the entertainment industry. She continued to suffer from stares and comments while trying to pass as a girl/woman.
"The sadistic delight of strangers in making mocking remarks about my appearance perhaps called forth a sadistic response from me. I actually had visiting cards printed, bearing a false name and address, and when people were offensive to me in public, I would hand them a card with the remark: 'If there are any further details you would like to know, perhaps you would write to me.'"
With the start of war in September 1939, Allen immediately enlisted. She was assigned as a driver to First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), and after six months was made a sergeant. In December 1941 Allen was having difficulties in avoiding a woman's sexual advances, when her mother fell ill and she was given a compassionate release.

After some weeks of caring for her mother, Allen applied for work and found a job at the Ministry of Supply where she was working with men driving heavy lorries and tippers, wearing slacks beneath a boiler suit. One evening, returning home, tired on the bus after work, Allen was subjected to an extended tirade from a man who had known her since childhood. She chased him and they fought until both were exhausted.

That done Allen knew it was time to leave Warrington. A spate of letters to film companies, advertising firms etc. produced several offers (it being wartime there were many vacancies as staff were in the forces). As a masculine woman in slacks, Allen became a secretary at the Denham Film Studios just outside north-west London, which at that time was more used than the nearby Pinewood. She was part of the team under Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger which made The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and then The Volunteer, a short starring Ralph Richardson.

At this point, in late 1943, Allen received a directive from the Ministry of Labour and National Service with instructions to report as a woman porter at a London station. This provided the nudge needed and Allen went to the Ministry of Labour headquarters in person, where he was put in touch with Valentine Harvey, the Chief Press Officer who accepted Allen as a man, quashed the directive and guided him through the bureaucracy. Allen's doctor who had previously treated him only for influenza, did a thorough examination and sent samples for pathological analysis. Allen wrote to his parents explaining that they had a son and not a daughter, and received a strongly supportive letter from his father.

In 1944 Allen took a position with Halas and Batchelor, the film cartoon company.

In September that year Allen wrote to the Registrar General, and with the doctor's report and a declaration from his parents, Allen was invited to Somerset House at the end of October that year where his birth certificate was rectified. He was asked for his male name, and, unprepared, chose ‘Robert’ from a glance at somebody else's documents.

In December Robert received a legal opinion that his first marriage was void ab initio, and he was free to marry his love from the Warrington Labour Exchange who was now working at Denham. They married quietly two days before Christmas, and spent the holiday with Robert's parents.

Allen returned to Denham to be the second assistant director on the film Carnival, directed by Stanley Haynes based on the novel by Compton Mackenzie. He was then an assistant to David Lean on Great Expectations, based on the novel by Charles Dickens.

In 1946, the British film industry suffered one of its periodic crises with the end of wartime government subsidies, and Allen was out of a job. In March his father died. Allen suffered a few years of short-term employments and unemployment.

Valentine Harvey helped yet again, and in 1948, Allen was awarded a grant to train as a medical auxiliary, and in 1951 qualified as a diagnostic radiographer.

He developed a friendship with another radiographer who was a fervent Catholic, and promised to look into the religion after qualifying. Which he did, and at Christmas 1951 was baptised into the Catholic Church.

After a number of temporary radiography posts, Allen became a science teacher at a Christian Brothers run College in Liverpool.

++His marriage came to an end, and they were divorced.  In 1957 Robert remarried in a Congregational church

At the end of his life he was a resident in a nursing home in Cheshire.   He died age 83.

*Not the fabric designer, nor the finance writer, nor the composer. Alan Hart also used the name Robert Allen Bamford Jr in 1918. Also Laud Humphries was born Robert Allen Humphries. Robert Eads was in full Robert Allen Eads.
  • Robert Allen. But for the Grace: The True Story of a Dual Existence London: W.H. Allen 149 pp 1954.
  • "He was once a bride".  Daily Mirror, 30 August 1957: backpage.  See More on Robert Allen
_________________________________________________


This is one of the country's earliest officially recognized gender changes. He did not take hormones or have surgery. Obviously he had an intersex condition with anomalous genitals, but he does not say which.

There is no record of Robert Allen after the second marriage in 1957.  

25 April 2011

Gloria Gray (1970–) performer.

Gloria Gray is the stage name of a trans woman born in Zwiesel, Bavaria, child of a long-distance lorry driver and a restaurateur. She is a graduate of the Deutsche Schauspielakademie in Munich, and had surgery in 1992 with the support of her parents.

She became famous in 1993 in the television comedy Halli Galli. And then appeared in variety shows and moderated dinner shows working with celebrity chefs. She worked with Cliff Richard, Marianne Sägebrecht and Amanda Lear, and played Mae West in the film Marlene, 2000. The same year she performed at the German national final for the Eurovision Song Contest.

She has won several court cases for slander regarding her past, including one against a Munich newspaper that had claimed that she is a transvestite.

In 2004 and 2005 she was a presenter and singer on Spanish television for the gay pride broadcasts, and premiered her show, Lieder im Mieder, at Munich's 2006 Christopher Street festival.

In 2007 she was featured in the Magie der Vielfalt photography exhibition.

Her autobiography, Mit allem, was ich bin, (With Everything that I Am), was released in 2009.

In 2010 she opened a cafe named after herself in Zwiesel, and in 2011 attempted to run for the Green Party in the mayoral election there, but did not get enough signatures. In 2006 she announced her intention to marry her male lover of many years in a church wedding, but the Catholic Church refused, and it has not yet happened.


*Not the abortion activist in Alabama.

20 December 2010

Georges Marasco (1890–?) lion tamer, stigmatic.

Berthe Mrazek was born in Brussels of a Bohemian father and a Belgian mother. As a child Berthe exhibited psychic powers and dominated her parents.

At 13 she joined the circus of Van Been Frères as a lion tamer, and as a contortionist. She never had any problems with the lion, Brutus, which later killed a male tamer. She also sang at cafés-chantants, the Chat Noir and the Minerva in the rue Haut. In 1913 she gave birth to a daughter, Irène.

In the Great War she was a nurse for political prisoners held by the Germans at St Gilles Prison in Brussels. She escaped from the Germans and arrived at the Belgian headquarters in male attire. As Georges Masasco he performed several useful mission for the allies in the closing months of the war. Afterwards Georges became well-known and popular at dancing resorts and night cafés, where he was immaculately attired, usually in a dinner jacket. He had many lady friends.

In 1920 he fell sick, wasted away, became paralysed and blind. He became religious and expressed a desire to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. He could not afford this and was advised to pray at the statue of the black virgin at the nearby shrine of Notre Dame de Hal.  Georges was driven there and carried in, and on arrival, almost immediately, he arose and declared himself cured. He was able to walk and could see. And on his hands, feet and chest were the stigmata of the wounds of Christ. A French Abbé became for a time his director.

The Catholic Church investigated and accepted the miracle as fact, but forbade the administration of Sacraments to Georges until he stopped pretending to be a man, and the French Abbé was instructed to withdraw. Georges refused to stop. He declared that he was a man, and also an apostle sent by Christ to to heal the sick. He exhibited his stigmata, withdrew to a chapel of his own, soon had a large following, including many rich society women.

In 1924 he was arrested on a charge of obtaining money by a trick. He was examined by doctors and pronounced to be mad: "a marked case of schizofrenia complicated by acute mythomania". He was removed to an asylum near Mons.
  • "Priestess in Prison: Girl Lion-Tamer Who Became a Spy: Amazing Masquerade and Miracle Cure". The News of the World, 16 Nov 1924, reprinted in George Ives (ed Paul Sieveking). Man Bites Man: The Scrapbook of an Edwardian Eccentric. Penguin Books, 1981: 42.
  • Montague Summers. Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. London: Rider, 1950. Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2003: 198, 200-4, 208. Online at: www06.us.archive.org/details/physicalphenomen007373mbp.
____________________________________________________________

I can find no mention of what happened to Georges Marasco after the age of 34.

Montague Summers declares, having read the Belgian newspaper accounts, that the Stigmata are genuine, but that Georges, lacking humility, has been ensnared by ‘the fiend’ into spiritual pride.  Given that he had been a circus performer, it may have been a good idea to get a professional magician to investigate, as has now become standard procedure for all psychic phenomenon.

Hal (15 km SW of Brussels) is the major Marian shrine in Belgium.  Why is the statue black?  There are of course many black Madonnas across Europe.  In this case the following tale is told:
“In 1580 the deciding battle took place. An overwhelming Protestant army laid siege to the town, bombarding it with canon balls. But, legend says, the Queen of Heaven appeared on the city walls and intercepted the fiery balls in her lap. The gunpowder turned her black. The grateful population brought hundreds of canon balls that had landed inside the city walls to Our Lady, piling them under her bell tower. 32 of those are still kept in the church.”

15 December 2010

Luís Fernando Maria Zacarias de Orleans y Borbón (1888 - 1945) Infante.

Luís Fernando, cousin to Alfonso XIII Bourbon (1886 - 1941), King of Spain (1886 – 1931), was born in Madrid. Luís and his elder brother Alfonso were educated in England by Jesuits. In 1900 their parents divorced, which was a big scandal.

Luís Fernando was quite gay and liked to dress as female. He had natural advantages in passing being small, narrow-waisted and small-footed. He appeared in professional stage shows as a girl dancer.  Both he and his mother had an affair with the Portuguese nobleman, António de Vasconcellos.  When de Vasconcellos was seriously ill, both mother and son took care of him.

In 1914 The New York Times announced Luís Fernando’s marriage to a young British woman, but the newspaper was in error. In March 1924 Luís Fernando was expelled from France on the pretext of selling illegal drugs, but probably because of his homosexual activities. His cousin the King stripped him of his status of Infante, and exiled him from Spain. He moved to Lisbon.


In 1926 he was arrested, en femme, in a village in the Algarve, on the Portuguese/ Spanish border, and accused of smuggling.

In 1929 the press announced that he was engaged to a friend of many years, the US actress, Mabelle Gilman, (1880 – 194?).  She was eight years his senior, now retired and living in the Chateau de Vilgénis outside Paris, and rich after her 1923 divorce from William Corey (1866 – 1934) the steel magnate. Gilman converted to Catholicism in preparation for the marriage, but Luís Fernando was still unable to enter France, and his demands for money were becoming excessive.

In 1930, when he was 41, he did marry the 72-year-old Princess Marie Constance Charlotte Say, widow of Prince Henri Amédée de Broglie who had inherited a sugar fortune, despite a lawsuit from her nephew to prevent the marriage.  However the court ruled that a nephew has no such power over an aunt.  Marie owned the magnificent Chateau de Chaumont-sur Loire.  Luís Fernando managed to squander his wife’s fortune in only a few years, and she was forced to sell the Chateau.

In 1935, Luís Fernando was again expelled from France after being arrested in a vice squad raid.

Mabelle Gilman was interned by the Germans in 1940, but released in 1942 with all other female prisoners over 60.

Marie Say, once one of the richest women in Europe, died in ruin in a small apartment in German-occupied Paris in 1943. Luís Fernando then entered a nursing home, also in Paris, where he died two years later, aged 56.
  • "Seize Spanish Prince Disguised as Woman", The New York Times, March 26, 1926: 6.
  • C. J. Bulliet. Venus Castina: Famous Female Impersonators Celestial and Human. New York: Covici 1928. New York: Bonanza Books. 1956: 217-8.
  • Christian Gury. Proust et le "très singulier" infant d'Espagne ; suivi de, Sur Proust, notes, miettes et remarques. Collection "Détours littéraires". Paris: Kimé, 2005.
  • Mrs Astor.  Mrs Astor and The Gilded Age.  April 10, 2008.  http://mrsastor.com/2008/04/by-end-of-19th-century-almost-anyone.html
  • Eric Lowe.  “Re: Antonio de Orleans and Eulalia de Borbón, Infantes of Spain”. July 25, 2008.   http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.php?topic=2387.120
  EN.WIKIPEDIA     ES.WIKIPEDIA    
________________________________

William Corey was still alive in 1929, so would his divorced ex-wife be able to have a Catholic marriage, even after converting?

Cousin Alfonso, the King, was not the luckiest of monarchs.  He lost the last Spanish colonies: Philippinnes, Puerto Rico and Cuba, he lost his throne in 1931, he backed Franco's fascists in the Civil War, but they did not back him in turn, preferring the Carlist pretender. However he is the grandfather of the current king.




    25 November 2010

    Angel dela Vega (1977–) seer, actress.

    The seventh of eight children raised by market-stall traders in Agoo, La Union, Philippines, Judiel Nieva was known as a child to have special powers, and was consulted as a healer.

    At age 10 Judiel, first at home and then at a spring in the hills above Agoo, began receiving apparitions of the Virgin Mary, every Saturday and on Her Feast Days. This climaxed in 1993 when an estimated million persons gathered to witness the visitation, which included the aroma of roses and a dancing sun. Cardinal Sin officiated mass on the apparition site.

    However Judiel also received death threats, and accusations were made that the Nieva family were spending donations, supposedly for building a church, on personal consumption. The Virgin Mary left and began to appear to Allan Rudio in Murphy, Cubao, instead. In 1995, by which time Judiel had been seen cross-dressed, the Catholic Church condemned the Agoo Apparitions as Constat de Non Supernaturalitate.

    Judiel grew up to be Angel dela Vega. In 2002 she was in a car accident. In 2003 she was an actress in the film Siklo, playing a woman who has an affair with her neighbour.

    26 September 2010

    Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel (1694 - 1721) button maker, prophet, soldier.

    Catharina Margaretha Linck (or Lincken) was born, after her father's death, at Glaucha, Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. After fourteen years in the orphanage, she had learnt the trades of button-making and of printing cotton. 

    To preserve her chastity she started dressing in men's clothes, and was considering leading a holy life. He joined a group of Radical Pietists, and took the name of Anstasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel. For two years Anastasius travelled with the Pietists as a prophet. 

    After losing his gift, he joined the Hanoverian troops as a musketeer using the name of Anastasius Beuerlein. After three years he deserted at Brabant, but was apprehended at Antwerp and condemned to be hung. He got out of this by revealing that he was female. This was supported by a letter from Professor Franken of Halle. 

    Some time later he joined the Volunteer Company of Royal Prussian Troops in Soest, again using the name of Beuerlein. After he had been in the company for about a year, Professor Franken wrote to the company priest and Beuerlein was sent away. As Catharina, she returned to Halle and stayed one summer. 

    Then Anastasius went to Wittenberg and joined the royal Polish troops as a musketeer with the name of Peter (or Lagrantinus) Wannich. On being captured by the French in a campaign near Brussels he ran away. He then served for a year with the Hessian troops in Rheinfels in Major Briden's Volunteers as Cornelius Hubsch, but ran away when after a fight he was to have run a gauntlet. 

    During these period of military service, he had alternated between Catholicism and Lutheranism as circumstances dictated. He was also something of a woman chaser. Then again as Catharina she returned to Halle and made flannel, and spun and printed cotton. She stayed at this for almost four years, sometimes dressing as male, sometimes as female. Once in Halle she was arrested by soldiers, but because of Professor Franken and his disclosure of her sex, she was let go. 

    On this occasion she was taken to the Rathaus to truly determine her sex. After this inspection he reverted to male. He got a job with a French stockingmaker in Halberstadt, and became acquainted with a Fraulein Muehlhahn, also called Catharina Margaretha. They wed despite the antagonism of Catharina’s mother. However Anastasius beat Catharina because she did not earn anything, and sold her goods. They lived as itinerant beggars, and converted back and forth between Catholicism and Lutheranism for Christening gifts as much as 25 reichstalers. 

    His mother-in-law, assisted by a woman called Peterson, attacked him with a sword, ripped open his trousers, and detached the leather instrument that was attached to his groin. Catharina was charged with wearing men’s clothes, going with the Pietists, frequent desertions and perjuries, sodomizing her wife, stealing from her wife and converting for monetary gain. 

    After a legal dispute about which method of execution was most appropriate, Anastasius was beheaded, and Catherina Margaretha was imprisoned.
    • The Prussian State Archives, Halberstadt, 13 October 1721.
    • F.C. Müller.  “Ein weiterer Fall von conträrer Sexualempfindung”  in Friedreich’s Blätter für gerichtliche Medizin und Sanitätspolizei. Heft 4. 1891.
    • Brigitte Erikksson (translation From The German). “A Lesbian Execution In Germany, 1721: The Trial Records”.   Journal of Homosexuality.  Vol 6(1/2) Fall/Winter 1980/81.  Reprinted in Salvatore J. Licata, & Robert P. Peterson (eds). Historical Perspectives On Homosexuality. 1981 
    • Angelika Steidele. In Männerkleidern. Das verwegene Leben der Catharina Margaretha Linck alias Anastasius Rosenstengel, hingerichtet 1721. Biografie und Dokumentation. Böhlau: Wien 2004.
    DE.Wikipedia. ___________________________________________________________________________________

    First contray sexual-feeling and then lesbian.  None of the commentaries propose FTM or trans man.  The de.wikipedia page was originally called "Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel" (see the URL) but has been renamed to “Catharina Margaretha Linck” which is going in the wrong direction.

      15 September 2010

      John Henry Newman (1801-90) theologian, cardinal.

      The son of a London banker, Newman was educated at Great Ealing School and Trinity College, Oxford. He became a Christian at 15, and an Anglican priest at 24. He was a leader in the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, converted to Catholicism in 1845, and was created a Cardinal in 1879.

      Officially he was celibate all his life. However he had intense friendships with younger men, first with Richard Froude who died aged 33 in 1836, and then he lived with Ambrose St John from 1843, when St John was 28, until St John's death in 1875.

      Newman was not the most masculine of men. John Campbell Shairp described Newman as a woman’s soul in man's body. Lytton Strachey described his "soft spectacled Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence". Another contemporary described him:
      “Robust and ruddy sons of the Church looked on him with condescending pity as a poor fellow whose excessive sympathy, restless energy, and general unfitness for this practical world would soon wreck him. Thin, pale, and with large lustrous eyes ever piercing through this veil of men and things, he hardly seemed made for this world”.
      Another:
      “Early in the evening a singularly graceful figure in cap and gown glided into the room. The slight form and gracious address might have belonged either to a youthful ascetic of the middle ages or to a graceful high-bred lady of our own days.”
      Wilfred G. Ward, another English convert to Catholicism reported a dream that had had a strong impact on him:
      “He found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he exclaimed, ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford’. ‘I am John Henry Newman’, the lady replied, and raising her veil showed the well-known face."
      In his later years a similar impression remained. One colleague described him as 'white, frail and wistful', and another as 'delicate as an old lady, washed in milk'.

      His major writings were his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1866 and Grammar of Assent, 1870. His poem Gerontius was later put to music by Edward Elgar.

      He died in 1890 and in accordance with his wishes was buried in the grave of Ambrose St John. A joint memorial stone was erected: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

      In 1991 the Catholic Church proclaimed him as venerable, a first stage on the road to becoming a saint. In 2008 the Church, having obtained a special exception to UK law, opened the grave to separate the two men and to place the remains of Newman in a reliquary in the Birmingham Oratory, but his body had completely decomposed. Peter Tatchell condemned the separation as 'moral vandalism' in an article in The Times. Newman was beatified during the Pope's visit to the UK in September 2010.
      • Peter Gay. The Tender Passion. Oxford University Press. 1987 : 236n39.
      • Elaine Showalter. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture At The Fin De Siecle. Viking 1990: 149.
      • Geoffrey Faber. Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement. Faber & Faber. 1974 (1933) p32-4.
        EN.Wikipedia 
      _____________________________________________________________

      The argument for St John and Newman being a gay couple is as strong as that for Hoover and Tolson minus the evidence of Susan Rosentiel re the drag parties. As Peter Tatchell said:  "It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person's sexual orientation." 

      Newman certainly seems to have been more anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa than Karl Ulrichs was.


      Which of the ancient gods of England, Lugh perhaps or Yngvi, arranged it that his body was fully decomposed before the Catholics came looking for relics?



        13 May 2010

        Brenda Lee (1948 – 1996) sex worker, business woman, Aids activist.

        Cicero Caetano was born in Bodocó, Pernambuco, Brazil (map)and moved to Bexiga in São Paulo at the age of 14. Using the name Brenda Lee, she was one of the first travesties to work in Paris in the late 1970s as a prostitute.


        She returned to São Paulo in 1984 and bought a house in the Bixiga neighbourhood at rua Major Diogo, 779, which she decorated in gold and white, inside and out. Her car was also done in the same colours. She turned the building into a Casa de Apoio to care for those with HIV who were rejected by their relatives, as many were after a series of murders of travesties in the South Zone of Sao Paulo in 1985.

        It started with three patients and in 1988 an agreement was signed with the São Paulo Ministry of Health, and in 1992 was legally incorporated. She worked with the Emilio Ribas Hospital which took those who needed hospitalization. Brenda also had a car repair business and a hairdressers in the building.

        In 1987 she was featured in Pierre-Alain Meier’s documentary about São Paulo trans women.

        In 1996 she was brutally murdered and her body found in an abandoned VW van, after she went to sort out a cheque that had been altered after she signed it. She was given a full Catholic funeral with representation from the Cardinal-Archbishop.

        A Brazilian award for defending human rights was named the Brenda Lee Award.

        * Not the Country singer.

        20 April 2010

        Janice Raymond (1943 - ) feminist professor.

        ++ Name of Raymond's 1980 paper corrected.

        Raymond did a BA in English Literature at Salve Regina College, 1965, and an MA in Religious Studies at Andover Newton Theological School, 1971. She was then for a short time a member of the Sisters of Mercy, but left and did a PhD in Ethics and Society at Boston College, 1977. Raymond’s PhD thesis supervisor was Mary Daly of Boston College. Daly was writing Gyn/Ecology at the same time. Raymond’s dissertation became The Transsexual Empire, 1979, and it and Gyn/Ecology cite each other, and both were published by Beacon Press which is associated with the Unitarian Church. In 1978, Raymond became Professor of Women’s Studies and Medical Ethics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

        Raymond’s position is that transsexual women are not women, and she uses male pronouns for trans women throughout. The Transsexual Empire enthusiastically draws on Thomas Kando’s Sex Change; The Achievement of Gender Identity Among Feminized Transsexuals, 1972, and on Jan MorrisConundrum, 1974. Kando restricted his sample to recently-transitioned transsexuals, and Morris wrote within two years of surgery, and so Raymond was easily able to find examples of the gender enthusiasm of new women which she insisted was typical of transsexual women of whatever duration. Raymond says that she supplemented these with 13 direct interviews and found highly stereotypical notions of gender roles, and without the “role strain of normal women”. However Angela Douglas claimed that all the quotes from these 13 are in fact from a letter that Douglas wrote to Raymond. Raymond retells several of the transsexual tales that were in the US press in the 1970s: Angela Douglas’ notorious polemical letter that was a reaction to lesbian separatism; the fuss that some lesbians made about Sandy Stone being the sound engineer at the feminist Olivia Records; Paula Grossman being fired.

        She takes the position that sex is determined by the chromosomes and that if XY one is always male, and if XX always female, and secondly that the historical experience of being raised as a girl and menstruating determines a woman. A constructed-woman has only a history of wishing to be a woman. The primary cause of transsexualism is the sex stereotyping of patriarchal society (no biological, psychological or existential causation is considered), and the secondary cause is the professionals, the surgeons, psychiatrists, counselors, electrologists etc who provide services and persuade foolish persons to change (the opposition of the vast majority of male doctors to the first transsexuals is not considered). She never considers that transsexuals themselves regarded the gender-stereotyped requirements of the gender clinics as a problem. Transsexual men are “the tokens that save face for the transsexual empire”, and are barely considered. The patriarchy has introduced sex changes as a means of controlling gender stereotypes, which act in the interests of men. Once extra-natal conception is introduced, biological women will become redundant.
        “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, and appropriating this body for themselves. [...] Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive”.
        In various places she compares gender surgery to foot-binding, clitoridectomy and infibulation, corset mutilation, unnecessary hysterectomies and radical mastectomies. Several times she suggests but just stops short of saying that transsexuality was associated with the Nazis, and the death camps.

        Whilst Raymond maintains that male-to-constructed-females are more gender stereotyped than biological woman, worse still are those who attempt to be lesbian-feminists:
        "Transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists show yet another face of patriarchy. As the male-to-constructed-female transsexual exhibits the attempt to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have molded women, the male-to-constructed-female who claims to be a lesbian-feminist attempts to possess women at a deeper level, this time under the guise of challenging rather than conforming to the role and behavior of stereotyped femininity”.
        Raymond’s call to action:
        “I contend that the problem with transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence” .
        The book was endorsed in a review by Thomas Szasz which is quoted on both its front and back covers (“Raymond’s development and documentation is flawless”).

        Raymond also wrote a paper, Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery, for the US Government. This paper, which is less contentious and inflammatory in its language and thus more superficially plausible, resulted in the removal of US federal and some state aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexuals, and provided an example for insurance companies who were pleased to have a feminist telling them that transsexuality should not be covered. This non-coverage included breast or genital cancer where it could be deemed to be a consequence of transsexual activity.

        Carol Riddell wrote the first detailed and critical review of Raymond’s book, and it has been frequently reprinted, which I have drawn upon above.

        Through the 1980s gay academics endorsed Raymond’s book. It was admired by Wayne Dynes (“Impassioned radical-feminist critique”) and Jonathan Katz (“The most profound, extended critique of the medical concept of ‘transsexualism’ ”).   Liz Hodgkinson’s Bodyshock: The Truth About Changing Sex, 1987, while being pro-transsexuals, repeatedly returns to Raymond’s book for explanation.

        Along with Peter Ackroyd’s Dressing Up, also 1979, Raymond’s book became a de rigueur entry in the bibliography of any 1980s book on trans topics, even though many authors did not actually seem to understand what she was saying.

        In 1988, Sandy Stone wrote a manifesto defiantly responding to Raymond.

        Unlike the concept of autogynephilia, very few actual transsexuals identified with Raymond’s position, the one exception being Rachael Webb, a lorry driver cum London Councillor who regarded herself as a radical feminist and as a constructed woman.

        Raymond’s books in the early 1990s attacked sexual liberalism, contraception in the form of RU486, and the new reproductive technologies.

        In 1996, The Transsexual Empire was reissued by Teacher College Press, without any changes although by that time the excessive gender conformity required by gender clinics that she had initially criticized was largely a thing of the past. She expands her criticism in the new Introduction using the new word, ‘transgenderism’, she dismisses gender transgression as a new type of gender conformity, and has specific criticisms of RuPaul, Leslie Feinberg and k.d. lang. So non-surgical gender solutions are not acceptable either as some might have assumed from her book.

        In the late 1990s and 2000s there have been a number of trans writers who have used Raymond’s book as if it referred to other transsexuals whom they don’t seem to like, often referred to as ‘autogynephiles’ or ‘transgender’ or ‘men’, although there is no basis for this in Raymond’s writings: she is as critical of the lesbian-feminist constructed female as she is of the gender-stereotyped constructed female. Notable examples are by Margaret O’Hartigan and Cathryn Platine.

        From 1994-2007 Raymond was the Co-Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and is still on the Board. She retired as a professor in 2002, and is Professor Emerita. In CATW she is strongly against decriminalization of prostitution which has led several sex worker activists to take issue with her. She talks about prostitution as if trans women and men are never sex workers.

        *Not Janice Raymond, Playmate of the Month for December 1974.
        ______________________________________________________________________

        Raymond has kept her personal life quiet.   Her Wikipedia page has a ‘personal life’ section which says that she is a former Catholic and an open lesbian.  There is no mention of her having a wife.  There are two rumours relating to her private life.  I did not include them above because I could not confirm them, but they are very germane to her writings:  that she had a passion for a trans woman but was rebuffed (Denny, 2002);  and that she and Daly were lovers.  Both suggestions partially explain the intensity of her transphobia.

        My husband was raised a Catholic and is a graduate of the Jesuit Boston College.  On reading this, his major comment was to explain that many ex-Catholics and lapsed Catholics emphasize the one issue that affects them personally – with Raymond it is the non-ordination of women ( Johnson, 1973) – but continue to agree with the Church on other issues.  Raymond’s position is remarkably congruent with the Church of Rome:  trans woman are not women; abortion is wrong; the new reproductive technologies are wrong.

        For all her concern with the “role strain of normal women”, Raymond is indifferent to the role strain of those born male.  Other than feminist  consciousness raising, she rules out – this is made clear in the introduction to the 1994 reprint - any solution that such male-born persons may wish to try: in addition to her proscription of surgical gender change, she also condemns androgynous gender mixing for both men and women.  She denies that women wearing trousers is transvestity  and at the same time denies men any clothing freedom at all.    Like Virginia Prince and some of the HBS people she is insistent that other persons should follow her prescription only and is not interested in what they might think, or in allowing them to be themselves.

        I am a woman, therefore I am a feminist.  This is so obvious to  me.  The great expansion of opportunities and freedoms for all women, trans and cis, over the last 50 years is one of the great achievements of the 20th century.  Raymond attempts to present her flavour of feminism as Feminism, as if there were no others.  But of course there are many feminisms.  One of the best statements of how Raymond is an embarrassment to feminism is found in Califia’s book.   As a feminist I also find Raymond embarrassing.  But there are also trans women who say things that I do not like.

        12 April 2010

        Luana Ricci (1963 - ) musicista.

        Marco Della Gatta did a diploma in piano at the Conservatory of Lecce and in jazz at that of Bari. He worked with the Notte della Taranta and l’Orchestra della Pro­vincia di Lecce.

        In 1989 he married a woman, and they had a son and a daughter. From 1991 he was the organist at the Lecce Cathedral, but without a contract.

        After the death of his father, he could not die without being himself. In 2008 Della Gatte decided to transition to Luana Ricci. Luana was dismissed as the organist at Lecce Cathedral.

        in 2010, she helped trans woman Emily De Salvo in her audition for the Bari Tito Schipa Conservatory by providing piano accompaniment, and was the organist for the ordination of female priest Maria Vittoria Longhitano.

        02 April 2010

        Bruce Ivins (1946 – 2008) military virologist.

        Bruce Ivins was born and raised in Lebanon, Ohio. He was raised Presbyterian, but later became Catholic. He did a BS in 1968, an MS in 1971, and PhD in 1976, all at the University of Cincinnati. His dissertation was in the toxicity of disease-causing bacteria.

        He was a scientist for 36 years, and a senior biodefense researcher at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland for 18 years. He initially worked on legionella and cholera, and in 1979 turned to anthrax after the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk (now Yaketerinburg). He published over 44 scientific papers, many of them on anthrax. He was the co-inventor on two US patents for anthrax vaccine technology.

        He played keyboard instruments at his church and in a Celtic band, and was a keen juggler. He and his wife had two children and were staunch Catholics active in the anti-gay, anti-abortion American Family Association.

        At the same time he was allegedly a secretive cross-dresser who dressed in his basement, and corresponded to get photographs of women bound and blindfolded. It was also alleged that he was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority since being rebuffed by one of its members while a student, and broke into their sorority houses to steal ritual material.

        Following the aircraft attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, there were mailings of anthrax-contaminated letters to two pro-choice Catholic US senators and several news agencies. The letters proclaimed “Death to America .. Death to Israel … Allah is Great”.  Ivins was on the team that analyzed the letters to determine which did contain real anthrax. Results were announced on ABC News that a chemical found in the anthrax indicated that it came from Iraq. This was later confirmed to be untrue.

        In 2003, Ivins and two colleagues received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service for their work in developing an anthrax vaccine.

        The FBI investigations into the anthrax mailings focused on Steven Hatfil, also at USAMRIID, but exonerated him in 2008 and settled the lawsuit for $5.8 million that he had launched to defend his reputation.

        The leadership of the FBI investigation was changed in 2006, and Ivins became the main focus. They raided his home twice; he lost his security clearance; he became depressed and attempted suicide; the Los Angeles Times reported that he stood to gain from the attacks because of his patents for the vaccine (however his employer, the US Army, owned the patents). Ivins committed suicide in July 2008 by drug overdose and died in hospital.

        The FBI closed the case in 2010, and released documents pertaining to the case which contain the allegations of Ivins’ cross-dressing and bondage activities, and his KKG obsession.
         EN.Wikipedia
        _____________________________________________________________

        This account is the official version.   A quick search of the net will find many postings to the effect that Ivins was a patsy rather than a perpetrator, and maybe was murdered, and perhaps more so that he was murdered to cover up that he was acting on orders.  As the evidence of his cross-dressing comes only from the FBI, it could be invented assuming that it besmirched his character.

        11 February 2010

        Joseph Doucé (1945 – 1990) pastor, facilitator.

        Joseph Doucé was raised Catholic in Sint-Truiden, in Flemish Belgium. During his military service he chose to serve in a Francophone regiment.

        After a year of pastoral studies at the Catholic Europaseminär at Stenonius College, he converted to the Baptist faith. After studies in Switzerland, he became a pastor and served parishes in Lens, Belgium and Bethune, over the border in France,  from 1970-4. Aware of his own homosexuality he studied pastoral and psychological needs of sexual minorities at the Free University in Amsterdam 1974-6, partially supported by a grant from the World Council of Churches.

        In 1976 he moved to Paris and opened the Centre de Christ Libérateur (CCL) at first in a porn cinema. The World Council of Churches would have financed him, but was vetoed by the French Protestants. CCL had support groups for gays and lesbians, trans persons, S&M persons and pedophiles. It published ILIA (Il Libère, Il Aime=He Liberates, He Loves).
         
        He became a French citizen in 1982. He was a founding member of the International Gay Association (IGA later ILGA), a member of HBIGDA (now WPATH), active in Forum des Groupes Chrétiens Gais d’Europe and was one of the first in France to educate about the new AIDS disease. In 1986 he self-published La Question transsexuelle with an Introduction by Louis Gooren (soon to be Professor of Transsexology at the Free University in Amsterdam). He also published on pedophilia and sadomasochism and gay couples.

        There was a dinner-meeting for transsexuals the first Tuesday of every month, and a helpline every Monday evening. One of the more than 500 transsexuals who came through CCL was Tom Reucher (who later founded l’Association du Syndrome de Benjamin and l’ExisTrans).

        In the late 1980s Doucé and his lover, Guy Bondar, opened a bookshop, Autres Cultures, in central Paris. He became a member of the Commission des liberté au Sénat, and in September 1989 he was able to get the European Parliament to pass a Resolution condemning discrimination against transsexuals, and later the same month Recommendation 1117 to the Council of Europe to call on member states to permit legal changes of gender and first names for transsexuals.

        On 19 July 1990, two men showed police badges and asked him to go with them. In late October his decomposed body was found in the forest of Rambouillet outside Paris. It is claimed that he was taken by the political police, Renseignements Généraux (RG). RG section leader Jean-Marc Dufourg was questioned about Douce’s death, fired and convicted of misuse of a firearm, but never officially admitted to be Doucé’s murderer.
        • Joseph Doucé. La Question transsexuelle. Paris: Luminière et justice. 1986.
        • Françoise d'Eaubonne. Le Scandale d'une disparition: vie et oeuvre du pasteur Doucé. Paris: Éd. du Libre arbitre, 1990.
        • Bernard Violet,. Mort d'un pasteur: l'affaire Doucé. Paris: Fayard, 1994.
        • Matt & Andrej Koymasky.  “Joseph Doucé”.  The memorial hall.  Sept 2, 2002.  http://andrejkoymasky.com/mem/douc/douc1.html.
        • Tom Reucher. “Joseph Doucé” . Transidentité: le site de Tom Reucher. 04/12/2003. http://syndromedebenjamin.free.fr/accueil/joseph-douce.htm.
        • Maxime Foerster. Histoire des transsexuels en France. Paris: Harmatten 2003. Beziers: H&O 2006: Chapitre six : Le Centre du Christ : Libérateur.
        • “Joseph Doucé”. Religious Archives Network. 3/23/2007. www.lgbtran.org/Profile.aspx?ID=184.
        • “Le pasteur Doucé, assassinat ou « bavure » ? ”  Bakchick Info. 8 nov 2007. www.bakchich.info/article1866.html.
         FR.Wikipedia       EN.Wikipedia.

        28 November 2009

        Ray Blanchard (1945 - ) psychologist.

        Ray Blanchard’s father, an aviation metal smith died in the Japanese attack on the USS Franklin, just before his namesake son was born. The son was raised a Catholic in Hammonton, New Jersey.

        He did an A.B. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967, and PhD in psychology at Urbana University, Illinois, 1973, the year that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of diseases. He had a draft classification of 4-A, the sole surviving son of a service member killed in action, and so was exempt unless war was officially declared, which the US never did against Vietnam.

        He emigrated to Canada anyway. He did post-doctoral research at Dalhousie University investigating learning processes in animals (mainly rats) until 1976 when he became a clinical psychologist at the Ontario Correctional Institute in Brampton (now the Brampton Adult Training Centre). There he met Kurt Freund while working with sex offenders. They made plans to collaborate, and in 1980, Blanchard started working at the Clarke Institute in Toronto (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health).

        He did work on male birth order and sexuality and claims that the number of older brothers increases the chance of homosexuality in right-handed men, but not in left-handed men or in women at all. He claims that pedophiles have lower than expected IQs and higher rates of non-right-handedness. He hypothesizes that “these and other correlates of pedophilia reflect some perturbation of prenatal neurodevelopment in subsequently pedophilic males”.

        A lot of his work utilizes phallometric diagnosis. He is best known for his re-presentation of Kurt Freund’s ideas on fetishistic transsexualism which he re-labelled as ‘autogynephylia’. He insisted for many years that there are no gay trans men, and consistently ignored Lou Sullivan’s letters in the 1980s explaining that Lou and many others are indeed gay trans men. Further to this he does not acknowledge autoandrophilia, which is the term that his theoretical system should apply to such trans men. However he now claims to have published two of the earliest reports of gay trans men (but without using that terminology).  He also insists and persists in referring to heterosexual trans women as homosexual, and refuses to use the word ‘androphilic’.

        Blanchard is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto (despite being a psychologist not a psychiatrist), and in 1995, after Kurt Freund’s retirement, he became Head of Clinical Sexology Services in the Law and Mental Health Programme of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). He served on the gender dysphoria sub-working group for the DSM-IV, 1994, and is serving as Chair of the paraphilia sub-working group for the new DSM-V. He is an Associate Editor of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment and a member of the Editorial Board of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

        He supported Michelle Josef’s lawsuit in 1999 to get gender surgery relisted under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan. He supplied material to Lisanne Anderson for her Autogynephilia Site.

        He gave a paper at the Third International Body Integrity Disorder Meeting in 2003 comparing BIID (apotemnophilia=desire to have a limb removed) to Gender identity disorder, as did Anne Lawrence. This has fed the usage on the religious right of referring to sex changes as sexual-amputation fetishism.

        Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, 2003, recycles many of Blanchard’s ideas. Blanchard's favourable review of the book is the only review that he ever wrote for Amazon, and he resigned from HBIGDA (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now WPATH) when it criticized the book, an act which he called 'appalling'.

        In 2002 the CAMH GIC was awarded a Presidential Citation from Div 44 of the American Psychological Association.  Ray Blanchard accepted the award on behalf of CAMH.

        The population of Ontario being over 13 million, there should be around 200 trans persons completing transition each year.   Before the suspension of Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) funding for gender surgery in 1998 Blanchard's management had kept the number approved to around 10 per year, and it looks as if the numbers approved since the re-instatement in 2008 will be approximately the same.

        As Blanchard manages a clinic that rejects most of its applicants, and proclaims a universal theory based on the minority that it accepts, it is a reasonable assumption that the majority are rejected precisely because they do not fit the theory.  For this crime of contradicting the theory, they are denied OHIP funding.

        In 2004 he wrote: “This is not waving a magic wand and a man becomes a woman and vice versa.  It's something that has to be taken very seriously. A man without a penis has certain disadvantages in this world, and this is in reality what you're creating" (Jane Armstrong. “The Body within, the body without”. The Globe and Mail June 12, 2004 here).
        ______________________________________________________________________

        I am not discussing the concept of autogynephilia in any detail here as I have already done so here.

        As his insistence on calling heterosexual trans women ‘homosexual’ shows, Blanchard regards trans women as men, and trans men as women.  This was shown again in the 2004 article in The Globe and Mail.  Blanchard has tried to claim that he is not transphobic, but until he changes in his regard of which gender we are, it is inevitable that many, probably most, of us do regard him as transphobic.  This attitude will probably not change until the next generation take over the gender clinics.   It does appear that Blanchard and Zucker are attempting to solidify their position in the DSM-V, so that it will last for another generation.

        Of course Blanchard supported Michelle Josef’s lawsuit in 1999 to get gender surgery relisted.  The CAMH GIC is a stronger institution when it can offer the carrot of paid-for gender surgery on the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.

        Blanchard claims that pedophiles suffered “perturbation of prenatal neurodevelopment”.  The HBS people claim that the same thing happened to them, but don’t phrase it so well.

        Unlike Kurt Freund who was married to a woman and had had children, and unlike James Cantor who is openly gay, Blanchard has been very coy about his private life.  Andrea James’ article of November 2009 is by far the best on this particular topic, but I would maintain that his closetry denies him the right to claim to be gay.

        Being a right-handed eldest child with a heterosexual younger brother, I am not sold on the birth-order effect.

        Blanchard, Zucker and Cantor are all by upbringing American.  That is a bit too many to be all in one Canadian clinic, especially the dominant Canadian clinic on transsexuality.