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Showing posts with label IFGE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IFGE. Show all posts

14 October 2013

Melanie Anne Phillips (1956 - ) film-maker, story-software designer.

After a degree at the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California,  directing two feature films before the age of 30: Brothers of the Wilderness, 1984, and The Strangeness, 1985, recording many hours of music, marrying as a man and fathering two children,  Melanie became involved with the International Foundation for Gender Education and worked with them to produce a VHS Tape on developing a female voice which focuses on voice resonance rather than pitch.

In 1991, Melanie took a break from film-making and, with her long-time writing partner Chris Huntley, developed the Dramatica Theory of Story, for which they had first laid the foundations while still at college together.


She also began her three-year transition that concluded with surgery with Dr Biber in Trinidad, Colorado. She kept a daily journal during transition which is available online. In 1994 she set up the first online transgender support site, and became one of the most cited advisors on developing a female voice.

After three years of full-time effort, the first version of Dramatica (Amazon reviews, WIKIPEDIA) was released. It is one of the most sophisticated software packages for fiction writers, which included a long manual, and supporting videos. Melanie also teaches courses in Dramatica theory through UCLA.

In October 2006 in an essay on her Heartcorps site, and reprinted on Gender Life Forum, she wrote:
"I've unintentionally perpetrated a great disservice.  I've given the impression the anyone can learn to sound completely female in voice as I have.  That's why I created the voice video I've been selling for about ten years.  Now, I'm not so sure. And in my diary, without ever considering an alternative, I've presented myself as just another transsexual and documented my story in the hope it might smooth the way for others.  But now I wonder if it doesn't really foster false hope. … out of all those who have sex reassignment surgery, only a very few have female minds.  All the rest, no matter how feminine they have become, have male minds - they don't just think like men, then think as men. ... After all, those who speak in a female voice are as rare as those with female minds, in my experience.  Sure, anyone can learn to be more feminine in their speaking, but to actually alter the timber of the voice so it is rich and full but female in resonance, that may be beyond the ability of the rank and file transsexual."
However she does insist:
"Now, granted, a woman born into a male body is no more entitled to sex change surgery than any man who wanted it.  And the standards that they use to determine if you can receive surgery are ignorant, outdated, and laughable, if they weren't so cruel. Honestly, SRS should be available to anyone who wants it, as long as they are certified sane.  No RLT should be required.  I don't know of a single individual (though there must be some) who determined to have the surgery and then changed their mind because of problems with RLT.  And I don't know of anyone who had the grit to go through with the surgery who didn't have what it needs to get through RLT. … Again, there is nothing better or worse about having SRS if you are of male or female mind.  And the achievements of anyone from that community who has a female mind and a collection of female physical traits may not be as heroic or laudable as it first appears.  They simply may have had more to start with and an easier path because there was less to alter. Ultimately, I think of female minded post-ops as intersexed women rather than transsexual.  In some, they are close enough to the range of normal male physical form with fully functioning testicles and no ovaries that no medical professional would class them as hermaphrodites.  And yet, possessing many of the traits above, they are truly intersexed in all ways except the reproductive organs."
On her web site Melanie describes herself as "parent of two, still married to my spouse of thirty years but living with another woman, my soul mate, for the last eight years".

Andrea James' TS Roadmap is dedicated to Melanie for her inspiration.


*Not Melanie Phillips the Daily Mail journalist who was nominated bigot of the year.
*There is no connection between Dramatica and the rude and satirical Encyclopedia Dramatica.
IMDB    AMAZON    WORLDCAT    LINKEDIN


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WorldCat dates the IFGE tape to 1980 which cannot be right as IFGE was not founded until some years later.

Melanie in 2006 seems to be proposing 2 types of transsexuals like either HSTS/Autogynephilia or HBS. However I could not find any discussion of her proposal compared to HSTS/Autogynephilia or HBS.
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15 July 2013

Tony Barreto-Neto (1945 - ) musician, activist, cop.

Barreto-Neto, raised in Tampa, Florida, knew he was a boy by age 5.

After puberty, Barreto-Neto ran off to New Orleans where, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a lesbian, s/he did a degree at Louisiana State University Medical Center while being openly gay, dropped out of graduate school, ran a gay disco, played drums in several bands, especially Original Bleus, became active on lesbian issues, was the first female co-chair of the Louisiana Gay Political Action Coalition (LAGPAC) and spent time in Colorado, Belgium and California. He was arrested many times in the 1960s and ‘70s for being ‘disguised’ in male clothing.

In his 40s Barreto-Neto became a cop back in Hillsborough, Florida and became a decorated police officer with numerous awards. He transitioned to Tony on the job. Hillsborough Sheriff Cal Henderson told the St. Petersburg Times: "This deputy was good as a female, and I'm sure will be just as good as a male". He completed this with phalloplasty from Dr Dan Greenwald in Tampa in 1995.

Tony founded and was Director of TOPS (Transgender Officers Protect and Serve), was a director of IFGE, and chair of Gender PAC. He is also a Eucharistic minister in the Catholic Church. He lobbied in Washington, protested outside courthouses, appeared in a documentary film and on ABC's "20/20." He attempted to visit the Michigan Women’s Music Festival on the grounds that if trans women are excluded, trans men should be welcomed. But he was asked to leave.

Some of his fellow officers became hostile after his transition, and his home was shot at. In 2002, Tony moved to Vermont with his wife and adopted daughter. He joined the Hardwick, Vermont, Police Department.

However the Town Manager became aware of a website that described Tony as transsexual following
an anonymous phone call from Tampa, and urged a newly hired police chief to harass Barreto-Neto until he quit. The newly hired chief quit after two weeks. However no-one talked to Tony any more. Other officers did not respond to his calls for backup. He sued. The Attorney General’s Office found the complaints credible, and in 2004 Hardwick settled, paying Tony $90,000, and requiring that the town adopt a formal policy of non-discrimination and train its employees on transgender issues. This established for the first time that trans persons are protected under Vermont law.

Tony was thereafter unable to obtain work as a police officer until 2012.

++He has since been working internationally as a rights activist.  He currently lives in England with his British wife.
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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 
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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".
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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.
    ·   http://dallasdenny.com.
    ·  pinelaketheblog.blogspot.com.
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    20 May 2009

    Jean Marie Stine (1945 - ) writer, publisher.

    Henry Eugene (Hank) Stine, who also has written as Allan Jorgenson, Robert Randall, Victor N. Davich, Janice Morgan Stevens and Sibly Whyte, is most famous for the novel Season of the Witch, 1968, in which a man, accused of rape, is punished by having his consciousness transferred to the woman’s body. Still having a male consciousness, s/he hopes to regain his original body, but has to kill the body to kill the personality now occupying it. Finally she realizes that she is pregnant from her original male body, and accepts her femaleness. The story was filmed in 1996 as Memory Run (also released as Synapse).

    Stine was editor of Galaxy science-fiction magazine from 1979, and transitioned to Jean Marie in the 1980s.

    Jean Marie is also a writer of self-help books, and is the publisher of Renaissance E Books.

    She was a board member of the transgender groups IFGE and the Tiffany Club of New England; a contributing editor for both the online magazine International TG and the print zine Transformation.

    She has also written biographical material about Ed Wood, the filmmaker.

      • Charles Platt. “Hank Stine”. Who Writes Science Fiction? London: Savoy Books 1980. New York: Berkley Books as Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction. 1980.
      • Jean Marie Stine. “Ed Woods” Fetish Alliance. www.fetishalliance.net/Stories/Other_Stories/edwoodsbyjeanmariestine.htm.
      • Allen A. Goldstein (dir & scr) Memory Run/Synapse. Scr: David N. Gottlieb & Dale Hilebrand, based on the novel Season of the Witch by Hank Stein, with Chris Makepeace as Andre Fuller and Karen Duffy as Celeste/Josette. US 90 mins 1996.
      • Jean Marie Stine. Ed Wood – The Early Years Renaissance E Books. 112 pp 2001.
      • Jean Marie Stine. Trans-Sexual: Transgressive Erotica for Gender Queers. Renaissance E Books. 2002.
      • Janice Morgan Stevens. Everything you wanted to know about sex changes ... and were afraid to ask: a primer for male to female transsexuals. Renaissance E Books. 2002.
    EN.Wikipedia.       
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