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Showing posts with label Fantasia Fair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantasia Fair. Show all posts

24 January 2018

Dana J Bevan (194?- ) bio-psychologist. Part I: life.


Part I: Life
Part II: Theory
Part III:  7 factors that are not causes

Thomas Bevan’s father was a wildlife manager, and his mother a school teacher. Thomas was an only child, and was soon trying on his mother’s clothing. He tried to tell his parents that he was not really a boy, but quickly learned that his gender identity was something that should be kept a deep secret, and concentrated on science and on sports. Partly because they did not live in town, Bevan did not make male friends, and his female friends withdrew as puberty developed. Loneliness led to depression.

The football coach got Bevan an award in the senior year. He picked Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, for its football team and its Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). Bevan graduated AB in psychology in 1969, and spent the next four years at Princeton University.

Thomas, like so many others, married a woman thinking that it would ‘cure’ the urge to cross-dress. However the graduate student housing provided the privacy to do so when his wife was at work.

Bevan was able to talk freely with “a somewhat mysterious lecturer” (p73).  This was Julian Jaynes, who was working on the ideas that he would publish as The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1978. Bevan later described Jaynes as a mentor.

Bevan gained a PhD in physiological psychology at Princton 1973 with a thesis on Experimental Dissociation of Hypothalamic Finickiness and Motivatonal Deficits from Hyperphagia and from Hyperemotionality.

After graduation Bevan served as a Captain in the Army Medical Service Corps, and was involved in developing antidotes to chemical weapons and agents. After leaving the army, Bevan became a civilian contractor. One of the projects that he worked on was aircraft sensors.

The Bevans had two daughters.

Bevan's job involved near continuous travel, and the associated hotel stays provided opportunities for cross-dressing. Sometimes there would be a local transvestite group that provided dressing facilities at its meetings. Bevan accumulated enough female clothing – between purges -- that a second bag was being checked on air flights.

Bevan found Jan MorrisConundrum, and later some books by Vern Bullough in libraries, but being in the closet hid the book in the stacks rather than check it out. By the 1990s Bevan had rented a post-office box, and bought books and Tapestry magazine from IFGE.
“I particularly studied Virginia Prince How to Be a Woman though Male, information I use to this day”.
With the end of Cold War I, Bevan felt that he could come out a little. However most transvestite groups met on weekends only, and he was not prepared to tell Mrs Bevan. So he went instead to a BSDM group that met on a weeknight. Using the listings in Tapestry Bevan did find cross-dressing groups in different cities to attend.

The Bevans separated.

Bevan also started taking testosterone by patches, hoping that it would ‘cure’ the cross-dressing.

Thomas found another wife using the new invention tele-conferencing. This wife knew from the beginning that Thomas was a cross-dresser. Bevan found a job in Atlanta where she lived, and moved in with her:
“she panicked when she saw all the ‘junk’ that I had, which consisted mostly of professional technical files, electronic junk and all my carpentry and metal working tools”.
From 2000-2005, Bevan was an Associate Lab Director at Georgia Tech Research Institute, and did work for Department of Defense customers.

Using the name 'Dana', Bevan found a therapist who was experienced in Transgender issues, although Bevan continued to pretend that it was marriage counseling.

From 2005-2011, Bevan was a Research VP at KFORCE Government Services in Atlanta, working on artificial intelligence algorithms for Homeland Security.

In 2007 Dana gave a paper at the IFGE conference held in Philadelphia. Dana started transition in 2011. She gave presentations at the Southern Comfort Conference in 2011 and 2012, and to WPATH in 2012.

In 2013, as Dana Bevan, she published The Transsexual Scientist: The Causation and Experience of Transgenderism and Transsexualism, a mixture of autobiography and the science of TSTG as she named her condition. The next year, reverting to her male name, Thomas Bevan, she published a 280 page exposition, The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism: A New View Based on Scientific Evidence.

She gave a workshop at the 2015 Fantasia Fair.

In the title of The Transsexual Scientist, Bevan refers to herself as ‘transsexual’, tells of taking hormones, electrolysis but says nothing of surgery. In the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, 2017, Dana says:
“I still present as male at family gatherings, primarily because of in-laws and friends of my children. The trend seems to be that younger people are more accepting, so we’ll see what happens with my grandchildren’s generation.”
Dana ends her autobiography, The Transsexual Scientist with
“Knowing what I know today, I should have chosen transsexuality earlier in my life and fought for being my authentic self, no matter what the cost. The delay has cost me time, friends and productivity. I had several good opportunities to choose correctly but I passed them up, choosing to fight another day.” (p. 155)







Dana’s theoretical position will be discussed in Part II.
  • Thomas E. Bevan, Experimental Dissociation of Hypothalamic Finickiness and Motivatonal Deficits from Hyperphagia and from Hyperemotionality. PHD, Princeton,1973.
  • Thomas E Bevan. “Physiological correlates of information processing load-ongoing research and potential applications of physiological psychology”. The Role of Behavioral Science in Physical Security Proceedings of the Second Annual Symposium, March 23-24, 1977. US DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE: National Bureau of Standards.
  • Thomas E Bevan. “Biosensor for Assessment of Defender Performance Capability”. The Role of Behavioral Science in Physical Security Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium, May 2-4, 1978. US DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE: National Bureau of Standards.
  • Dana J Bevan. The Transsexual Scientist: The Causation and Experience of Transgenderism and Transsexualism. Bevan Industries Inc, 2013.
  • “An Interview with Dana Bevan ’69”. Dartmouth Gay, Lesbian,, Bisexual & Transgender Alumni/ae Association, May 2, 2013. https://dgala.org/2013/06/28/an-interview-with-dana-bevan-69/
  • Thomas E. Bevan. The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism: A New View Based on Scientific Evidence. Praeger, 2014.
  • Dana Bevan. “Transgender Science Recap”. Sisterhouse, Mar 2, 2015. www.sisterhouse.net/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2014/12/Transgender-Science-Recap.pdf.
  • William Ray. “The Science of Gender”. The Wireless, 6th August 2015. http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-science-of-gender
  • Thomas E. Bevan, Being Transgender: What You Should Know. Praeger, 2016.
  • Dana Bevan. Thea Peach State Conference. Thea, 2/22/2016. www.thea-plus.com/blog/thea-peach-state-conference-by-dana-bevan
  • Allison Tate. “5 Transgender Myths...Busted: In the wake of Trump repealing transgender protections, scientist Dana Bevan is here to bust your misconceptions”. Advocate, February 24 2017. See below.
  • Lisa Furlong. “Dana (Thomas) Bevan ’69: A transgender bio-psychologist on embracing her true self”. Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, May-June 2017. https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/dana-thomas-bevan-69
TGForum   WebPage   Bloomberg   LinkedIn
___________________________

TGForum says that “Thomas E Bevan” is a pen name; Dartmouth Alumni Magazine says that it is her professional name. It is the name on her PhD.

In Bevan’s 2013 and 2014 books she uses the term TSTG as a collective noun, for individual trans persons, for the phenomenon and as an adjective. E,g: “Many TSTG suffer from depression”; “TSTG behave as they do”; “Although TSTG is no longer regarded as a disorder”. Fortunately the usage has not caught on. She does not use the acronym in Being Transgender, 2016, but does still use it on her LinkedIn page and elsewhere.

“For the purposes of research I treat transgenderism and transsexuality (TSTG) as one phenomenon. Many transgendered people become transsexuals. Most important, there is no scientific evidence to distinguish between the two, other than the frequency of TG presentation.” (2013 interview with Dartmouth GLBT Alumni)   This statement will of course alienate many transsexuals.   While the DNA and epigenetic triggers may be indistinguishable between transvestites and transsexuals, they do not constitute the totality of causality, and a scientific approach that does not examine the wider picture is not the best of science.   See more in part II.

The text of The Transsexual Scientist disguises the names of the universities that Thomas attended, but then openly names them on and only on the back cover. Likewise the text hides the name of the mentor at Princeton, but gives his name in a dedication at the front of the book.

On p30 of The Transsexual Scientist Bevan says “I gradually put aside my love of music and art lest these be seen as ‘feminine’”. This was in the mid 1960s when the Beatles and the Stones were changing music. The feminist criticism of ‘60s music is that it was far too masculine.

Bevan is yet another writer who repeats the misinformation that ‘transvestism’ was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld (p38). However she does not like the term: “Today, transvestite is regarded as a pejorative word and is used primarily in degradation of transsexuals and transgender people” (Psychobiology: 42).  This may be so in the Tri-Ess culture, but despite Prince's efforts, Tri-Ess never did own the word.

Is Bevan a Princian?   In addition to her statement: “I particularly studied Virginia Prince How to Be a Woman though Male, information I use to this day”, let us look at the appendices to The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism.    The only autobiographies listed are her own, Jan Morris,  Jennifer Boylan's She's Not There, and for some strange reason, the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.  The only self-help books are two by Prince, Crossdressing with dignity by Peggy Rudd and Identity Management by Dallas Denny.  The only support groups are Beaumont Society, Seahorse Society, Renaissance, Tiffany Club,  Transgender Educational Association, Tri-Ess and Susan's Place.    So she certainly looks like a Princian.



05 November 2017

Andrea Susan Malick (1939 – 2015) photographer, cinematographer.

Jack Malick, a photographer, was a regular participant from the age of 21 in Susanna and Marie Valenti’s Chevalier D’Eon Resort and later Casa Susanna. Malick’s femme name was at first Jacqueline, but when he and his first wife Bonnie, endowed that name on their daughter, Malick took the name Andrea Susan. Andrea, who had a developing room, became the official photographer for the resort - this was at a time when commercial film developers might react unfavourably.

David/Gail Wilde, one of the richer members, bought Andrea an expensive Roleiflex camera (which cost over $1,000) with the request that Andrea learn how to process color film. Gail also requested a copy of each photograph taken. Gail collected them in expensive albums.

When in 1964 Susanna wanted to make movies, Andrea stepped up with a professional 16mm camera. Two films were shot in the same weekend in Marie’s wig store in New York.

When David Wilde and Joan Bennett decided to move out of Manhattan, it was Jack, already living in Scarsdale, who introduced them to a local real-estate agent. As part of the move Joan insisted that David’s femme persona, including the photograph collection, be left behind. After a night of drinking, Gail’s photograph collection was put out on the garbage, and disappeared overnight.

Andrea 1993
Malick was the cinematographer on Leo Wollman and Doris Wishman’s groundbreaking Adam or Eve, 1971, which was later recut with additional material and rereleased as Born a Man ... Let Me Die a Woman, 1978, (although Malick is uncredited on the actual prints). He was lighting director or cinematographer on mainly television films through the 1980s and 1990s.

Andrea was a regular at Fantasia Fair in Provincetown. She hosted the Fashion Show many years from 1976.

In 1985, Jack was briefly in the news when his Scarsdale home was burgled and he shot the intruder, wounding him.

In 1991 Andrea was the director and cameraperson on the video Bridges to Beauty which apart from the two producers had a totally trans cast and crew. As the airlines would not insure the camera equipment, Andrea drove from New York to Los Angeles for the gig and then back.

Andrea was nominated Ms Fantasia Fair in 1994, and in the newsletter for that year was described: “Andrea passes very well and travels extensively as her girl self, and has been just about everywhere from Disney World to virtually every city (and supermarket ) in the world”.

In 2013 Andrea visited fellow Fantasia Fair director, Miqqi Alicia in Toronto and was shown the 2005 book Casa Susanna complied by Robert Swope and Michel Hurst containing photographs from the 1960s. Andrea recognized many of them as her own work. She announced herself as the photographer at Fantasia Fair, 2013.
Andrea at the premier of the play

The next April Dallas Denny met with Andrea, and with permission identified her online. Jack’s daughter Jacqueline contacted Harvey Fierstein who was producing the play Casa Valentina. Jack and Jaqueline were invited guests at a preview, and then Andrea and Jaqueline at the premier of the play, April 1, 2014. A presentation re Andrea’s work was prepared for Fantasia Fair, 2014. However a medical emergency forced Andrea into hospital instead. Dallas interviewed her on video in hospital.

Andrea/Jack died at age 75. The 2015 Fantasia Fair was dedicated to her.


  • Doris Wishman (dir). Born A Man... Let Me Die A Woman. Hosted by Leo Wollman, camera by Andrea Susan Malick (uncredited) with trans persons Leslie, Lisa Carmelle, Deborah Harte, Ann Zordi, and porn stars Harry Reem, Angel Spirit and Vanessa del Rio. Scientific and medical advisor: Dr Leo Wollman. US 78 mins 1978.
  • “Scarsdale Man Wounds Intruder”. New York Times, January 11, 1985. Online.
  • Bridges to Beauty. Dir & camera: Andrea Susan Mitchell, with Vicki Vargas, Virginia Prince, Diahanna Taylor, Melissa Foster. US 1991.
  • “JoAnne Roberts Service & Product Reviews: Bridges to Beauty Video”. En femme magazine, 24, June 1991: 8-9. Online.
  • “Behind the Scenes: Making the “Bridges to Beauty” Videos. International Tran Script, 1,1, October 1991: 19-22. Online.
  • Ladylike, 16, 1993: Cover, 40, 42. Online.
  • Fantasia Fair Newsletter 96. Online.
  • Michel Hurst & Robert Swope. Casa Susanna. PowerHouse Books, 2005.
  • Kate Cummings. Katherine's Diary- the Story of a Transsexual. Beaujon Press, 2008: 131.
  • Dallas Denny. “The Historical Roots of Casa Valentina”. Chrysalis, May 10, 2014. Online.
  • Dallas Denny. “Identified! Casa Susanna Photographer Comes Forward”. Chrysalis, May 13, 2014. Online.
  • Andrea Susan Malick & Dallas Denny. “In the Beginning: How My Photos of 1950s Crossdressers Inspired a Hit Show on Broadway”. Chrysalis, Nov 24, 2015. Online.
  • Dallas Denny interviews Andrea Susan Malick. Video. Part I. Part II.
  • Dedication. Fantasia Fair Participants’ Guide, 2015. Online.
  • Isabelle Bonnet. Les Photographies des Travestis de La Casa Susanna. Mémoire de Master 1, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 2015 : 10-11, 48, 73.
  • Katherine Cummings email to Zagria. 2 Nov 2017.
Obituary IMDB

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

The Fantasia Fair Newsletter 96 says “She was one of 37 who attended the first unofficial gathering of CDs in Hunter, N.Y. in 1967”. However under the name Jack/Jacqueline she is mentioned in Katherine’s Diary as being at the Chevalier D’Eon Resort in 1962.

Bonnet p48 says that Jack Malick told her that he was a friend of Stanley Kubrick and worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. The credits for the film, which was made in the UK and Spain, mainly at Borehamwood and Shepperton studios, list a team of 11 for Special Photographic Effects, one of whom is ‘John Jack Malick’. IMDB treats this John Jack Malick as a separate person from Jack Malick. Jack’s full name was Jack John Malik (see the Obituary), so if they are the same person, the credits scrambled his name. This site on Jack’s son Gary, claims that Jack won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for 2001. However that Oscar, the only one won by the film, went to Stanley Kubrick.

There is no mention of Jack Malick in Brian Kellow’s The Bennetts: An Acting Family, which has sections on the marriage of David and Joan Bennett.

Jack in the video interview says that when the Wildes moved to Scarsdale, Gail’s photograph collection was put out on the garbage, and disappeared overnight. He assumes that these are what were found by Roberts Swope decades later. Katherine Cummings says that Gail left her books and publications with a friend. Katherine is ‘100%’ sure that the Robert Swope's find is Susanna’s collection, not Gail’s.

07 February 2016

Vicky West (1935 - 2005) artist.

Dirk Luykx was born in New Jersey, the youngest of four boys, and wanted to be a girl since childhood. He went to Cornell University to do Civil Engineering. In 1955 he interrupted his studies to serve in the US Army. He was in Japan and Korea for three years, and then five years in the Army Reserves. He returned to Cornell and completed his engineering degree in 1961.

Dirk moved to California and worked in engineering design, city planning, and public works. He was also the art director of The Los Angeles Youth Theater. During this time Dirk as Vicky discovered and participated in Virginia Prince's Hose and Heel Club.

Preferring art to engineering, Dirk returned to New York, and studied Fine Arts and Graphic Design at Cooper Union. In 1967, while still a student, Dirk was hired by publisher Henry N. Abrams, Inc. where he continued to work until retirement. In addition to the books listed below, Dirk later worked on behalf of the publisher on Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, The Art of Walt Disney, Windows at Tiffany’s, The History of Modern Art, Impressionism.

At this time Vicky was living with a woman, but also investigated the homophile  Mattachine Society. Here he met Lee Brewster who had been organizing drag balls as fund raisers, and also Chris Moore, the Jewel Box Revue performer. When Lee grew tired of the Mattachine Society's disinterest in drag issues, and founded the Queens Liberation Front, Vicky was a founding member.

Lee initiated a newsletter which evolved into Drag magazine with Vicky doing the covers and illustrating stories in the magazine. The first issue credited Dirk for the cover, but from the second issue, Vicky was listed as Art Director. Initially the cover illustrations were Vicky's versions of herself in different situations, but then she started doing other people. “I was hoping for another Vogue – images of transvestites enjoying themselves, trying on clothes. All the expression was positive.”

Drag Magazine also evolved into Lee's Mardi Gras store. Vicky was often to be found there, but always as Dirk. After a while, Lee became bored with editing the magazine and Bebe Scarpinato took over.

At Mardi Gras 1978 in New Orleans, Vicky was with a Lee's Mardi Gras contingent when she met cis photographer Mariette Pathy Allen who was impressed by her posture: “who focused straight back at me. As I peered through the camera lens, I had the feeling that I was looking at neither a man nor a woman but at the essence of a human being”. As it turned out they lived 20 blocks apart in New York. Together they went to parties at Lew Brewster's Mardi Gras Boutique, to various clubs that put on drag shows, and to Fantasia Fair in Provincetown.

In the early 1980s, Vicky was an extra in a film, maybe New York Nights, 1984, in a scene in a drag bar with International Chrysis.

Vicky was featured in Mariette's 1989 book, which was brave of her in that Dirk was still working at Henry N. Abrams. Like Bebe Scarpinato, Vicky sometimes did a striptease on stage. Vicky's female lover became uptight about the parties, imagining all sorts of sex, and after ten years they separated.

Later, in the AIDS-ridden 1980s, Vicky lived with gay lovers. “With the AIDS epidemic, guys are doing drag as something else to do.” “I'm not political, but I very much admire those who are, and I believe that transvestites should be proud and should be honored for what they've accomplished.”

When he retired from Henry N. Abrams, Inc in 2000, Dirk Luykx was the Executive Art Director. Dirk died at age 70 of cardiovascular disease, and was interred at the US Military's Arlington National Cemetery.

The Winter 2006/7 issue of Transgender Tapestry was largely dedicated to Vicky with several reminiscences and reproductions of her art: “to remain completely faithful to her work, we decided to print this tribute issue of Tapestry in black and white. We didn’t want the rich subtlety of Vicky’s charcoal sketches to be drowned out in a cacophony of color.”
  • Marc Edmund Jones, with charts and diagrams by Dirk Luykx. How to Learn Astrology. Sabian, 1970. Webpage.
  • Drag, 1,1, 1971. editor: Lee G Brewster, Cover: Dirk. Online
  • Drag, 1,2, 1971. editor: Lee G Brewster, Art Director: Vicky West. Online
  • Darlene Geis, Margaret Donovan & Dirk Luykx. Walt Disney's Treasury of Children's Classics. Henry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1978.
  • Lory Frank, Darlene Geis & Dirk Luykx. Walt Disney's EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow. Harry N Abrams, 1982.
  • Anne Edwards, with design by Dirk Luykx and photographs by Louise Kerz. The Demilles: An American Family. Harry N Abrams, 1988.
  • Mariette Pathy Allen. Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them. New York: Dutton, 1989: no pagination – Introduction and penultimate profile.
  • Cena Williams. “Vicky West – An Icon is No More”. Transgender Tapestry, 110, Fall 2006: 25. Online
  • Mariette Pathy Allen. Vicky West: Full Circle” Transgender Tapestry, 111, Winter 2006/7: 25-9. Online.
  • Veronica Vera interviews Bebe Scarpe about the late Vicky West. “Forever Mardi Gras”. Transgender Tapestry, 111, Winter 2006/7: 32-43. ibid
  • Mariette Pathy Allen. “Momentum: A Photo Essay of the Transgender Community in the United States Over 30 Years, 1978–2007”. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 4,4, December 2007: 92. Online at: http://www.deanspade.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/pathyallen.pdf.

10 May 2012

Ariadne Kane (1936 - ) teacher, activist.

Of Greek descent, Joseph DeMaios was raised in New York City. The only time that he cross-dressed as a child, he was discovered by his parents, and did not repeat the activity again for four years.

In 1958 Joseph completed a Bachelor of Science in Biophysics, Mathematics and Chemistry at City College, New York, and undertook graduate work in biophysics at New York University and University of Buffalo. He had a short marriage with a fellow student. When that collapsed, he worked for five years as a Math and Physics teacher in Boston.

In 1966 he moved to Europe, where he taught at St. Stephen’s School in Rome, from 1966-67, and at the American College of Switzerland in Leysin, from 1967-68. He was able to cross-dress for Fastnacht in Munich and Mardi Gras in Naples. He moved from teaching to curriculum design.

On return to the US he did educational consulting, developed a travel company, and worked as a realtor.

Kane & Prince at Fantasia Fair, 1981, by Patty Allen
He joined the Boston Gamma chapter of Tri-Sigma, and when the leader discontinued on obtaining surgery, DeMaios stepped forward using the name Ariadne Kane. He and others restructured and relocated the group which was renamed the Cherrystone Club.

From 1975 Kane was one of the initial organizers of Fantasia Fair, the annual week for cross-dressers in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Also from 1975 he ran the Human Outreach and Achievement Institute, later the Outreach Institute of Gender Studies (OIGS) dedicated to educating the public and working with health professionals. He married his girlfriend of nine years after explaining cross-dressing to her, and introducing her to the group.

In 1978, the year that the Cherrystone Club split into the Mayflower Club and the Tiffany Club, Kane was interviewed by Boston’s Gay Community News, and used the term ‘transgenderist’ which was catching on at that time. It seems that it was he who introduced Virginia Prince to the term as Prince used it briefly in the next year and then stopped doing so. Kane himself preferred the term ‘androgyne’.

Kane appeared on many radio and television shows, notably The Phil Donahue Show in 1980 and The David Susskind Show in 1982, and in classrooms in the Boston area. Kane gave seminars at the annual meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the American Society for Criminal Justice Professionals, the American Society of Sociology, and the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists.

IFGE (International Foundation for Gender Education) was founded by Merissa Sherill Lynn in 1986, initially as an outgrowth from the Tiffany Club. IFGE instituted a Virginia Prince Award, and, apparently with no sense of irony, actually awarded the first one to Virginia Prince. The next went to founder Merrissa Sherrill Lynn and the third to Ariadne Kane.

Kane completed an Ed.D. from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco in the early 2000s.

In 2006 Kane, as J. Ari Kane-Demaios, edited with Vern Bullough Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths, a collection of autobiographical essays by 18 trans women and two trans men. Kane described it to Helen Boyd: “We tried to involve contributors from all sectors of the gender spectrum, including androgynes, non operative and post-operative, individuals, spouses and close friends of T people” but the editors carefully restricted the sample to middle-class white persons, and, with only one exception, to US citizens, and excluded sex workers and any who had a male spouse. (See review)

Ariadne Kane prefers male pronouns. He identified as androgyne and bigender since first active in the 1970s, and has identified as bisexual since the late 1990s.
 MEMORY.BC 
 _________________________________________________________________________________

The Fantasia Fair site says:  “ 'Fan Fair' is the oldest and longest-running event of it's [sic] kind".  Depending on how you define 'of its kind', it may be.   However Koovagam in Tamil Nadu has been running for centuries, and the Auténticas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro in Juchitan in Oaxaca for many decades (despite being censored from the Wikipedia article on the town).

In his interview with Helen Boyd, Kane with all due modesty says: "The two most important milestones in TG history are the seminal studies on CD/CG behaviors, done by M. Hirschfeld in the early part of the 20th Century (1920's) and Fantasia Fair".

01 July 2010

Dallas Denny (1949 - ) psychologist, writer, activist.

++Revised September 2012 with feedback from Dallas.

Dallas was raised in an army family and as a child lived on and near military bases all over the world. When he was 13 the family settled in Tennessee. At age 22 he married, and at 28 was divorced. After college and graduate school he worked for the state government of Tennessee as a child protective worker and then as a psychological examiner. He held a license to practice psychology in Tennessee from 1980 until the mid-1990s, retiring it after moving to Georgia.

In his teens, Dallas started going out in public dressed as a girl. He was ready to transition gender roles, but had no idea how to go about it.

At age 30 he paid $500 to apply to the gender identity program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. After evaluation he was told he was not dysfunctional enough to receive sex reassignment services. Determined to transition with or without the help of the clinic, he immediately began to research transsexualism at the university’s medical library

At that time no physicians in Nashville would prescribe hormones to him and the drag bars wouldn't grant entry when he was crossdressed. With no legal avenue for hormones, and having never met even one other transsexual, Dallas stole part of a prescription pad and self-prescribed Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a medication now prohibited because of carcinogenic properties. He feminized over the next ten years.

The same year--1979-- Dallas reached out for support, but found only The Society for the Second Self (Tri-Ess) , the national group for crossdressers with a no-gays-no-transsexuals policy. After corresponding with co-founder Virginia Prince, he declined to join. Ten years later he looked for support once again, and once again found only Tri-Ess. Dallas lied about his transsexuality and joined. Through Tri-Ess he soon learned of a transsexual support group in Atlanta and contacted it, letting his membership in Tri-Ess lapse.

Dallas completed electrolysis in 1989, and had surgery with Dr Seghers in Brussels in 1991. She resigned her position as a psychological examiner and moved to Georgia, transitioning en route. Her female lover was not able to accept the change, and their long-term relationship ended. She kept the same first name, Dallas, it being androgynous.

She immediately found a job as a behavior specialist in Metro Atlanta, working with adults with developmental disabilities. She held that position until her retirement at age 60.

At the request of her family, Dallas did not call, write or visit for more than ten years. One of her sisters re-established contact in the late 1990s, but she didn't see or correspond with her other family members until her mother phoned her six months after her father's passing in 2001.

In 1990 Dallas founded the American Educational Gender Information Service (AEGIS) and the journal Chrysalis: The Journal of Transgressive Gender Identities. She was Executive Director of AEGIS and Editor-in-Chief of Chrysalis from 1990 until 1998. In 1993 she founded the US National Transgender Archive and Library, which now resides in the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan. She was director of Montgomery Foundation for a year.  Atlanta Gender Explorations, an open support group she founded in 1990, still meets monthly. She was a principal in the founding of the transgender conferences Southern Comfort Conference and FTM Conference of the Americas.  Also in 1990, Dallas, after much persistence, was one of the first trans professionals permitted a membership in HBIGDA (now WPATH).

Dallas was editor of IFGE's Transgender Tapestry magazine from 2000 until 2008 and director of the transgender conference Fantasia Fair from 2003 until 2007. She has written many booklets and articles on transsexualism, many of them published by AEGIS, nearly 20 chapters for textbooks, and the texts Gender Dysphoria: A Guide to Research and Current Concepts in Transgender Identity, acknowledged by Richard Green as the first books on transsexuality by a transsexual. In 2003 she and many others spoke out against Michael Bailey’s The Man who Would be Queen

She is now a resident of the village of Pine Lake, Georgia, the world’s smallest municipality with a transgender non-discrimination ordinance.

Virgina Prince Award For Lifetime Achievement, 2007.

In her essay for The New Goddess, she wrote: 
My betwixt and between financial status has helped me see the full panorama of transgender behaviors, for I've commingled with the rich and the poor, cross-dressers and transsexuals, the passable and the impassable. I know transsexual people who have managed to hold onto their jobs during transition and those who have been fired, and transsexual people who have deliberately walked away from their old lives to forge new ones. 1 know those whose middle-class lives fell apart when they started to deal with their gender issues, and who now live in reduced circumstances. And 1 know those who ... have never had and never will have a middle-class life, who have wound up on the streets because they were courageous enough to deal with their gender issues at an early age, and because, with their early experiences and upbringing, there was no other place to go other than the street.
In their youth, transgendered people have a terrible choice: they can be true to themselves, for which they will be at grave risk for winding up dead; or they can keep others happy by stifling their innermost selves. The choice they make will determine the path they walk through life: marginalized, rejected, harassed by others, forced into low-paying jobs or into sex work, but able to be themselves; or comfortably middle-class, with all the privileges pertaining thereto, but having to keep the closet door firmly closed as their bodies become progressively more masculine - or, for FTMs, more feminine.  Neither choice is satisfactory; either has grave consequences. Who could be blamed for walking either of these roads? (p113-4)
... 
I don't think there are two different types of transsexual people, as a number of clinicians have reported; I think there are only people who, at the fork in the road, have made different choices, and who have been shaped by those choices. Some face the risks and pains associated with transitioning early, and some delay their choice and inherit the risk and pain associated with transitioning later in life. Often, these choices are made out of consideration for others, by the circumstances of their lives and relationships, or by happenstance. I know my own life has been influenced by chance. (p115)

*Not the Country singer.



  • ·  Dallas Denny. Gender Dysphoria: A Guide to Research. Garland 653pp 1994. 
    ·  Dallas Denny (ed). Current Concepts in Transgender Identity. Garland 452pp. 1997.
    ·  Helen Boyd. “Five Questions With … Dallas Denny”. en|Gender: helen boyd’s journal of gender & trans issues. October 5, 2005. www.myhusbandbetty.com/?p=427.
    ·  Dallas Denny. “My Transsexual Autobiography”. In J. Ari Kane-Demaios & Vern L. Bullough (eds). Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths. Prometheus Books. 2006: 118-128.
    ·  Dallas Denny.  "Down and Out at the Ross Fireproof Hotel: An Essay on Class in the Transgender Community". In Gypsey Teague (ed). The New Goddess: Transgender Women in the Twenty-First Century. Waterbury, CT: Fine Tooth Press, 2006: 106-117.