Part I: beginnings
Part II: business woman
Part III: bibliography and comments
Clair(e) Elgin was this woman’s real name, however Joanne Meyerowitz calls her Caren Ecker; Annette Timm calls her Carla Erskine (the convention of pseudonyms with the same initials); and Connie Christine Wheeler & Leah Cahan Schaefer called her at first Janet, but in their revision for Randi Ettner’s Confessions of a Gender Defender, they call her Claire; Benjamin, at her request, does not give her any name, and some refer to her in his book as the ‘tattoo woman’; Laub uses her real name, although he spells Clair without an ‘e’. When in Mexico, Claire used the name Marie Ciel Campbell. Like some other trans persons, Claire’s pre-transition and post-transition names are almost identical.
Original version: Archive.
Part I: beginnings
Clair Elgin, a seventh generation American Moslem, was born in Casper, Wyoming. By her own account she left home in 1923. Clair’s mother died in 1927, and the father in 1936.
The 1940 US census records Clair Elgin still living in Wyoming, with a wife Ruth (1899-1949) and a 15-year-old son. However on registering for the draft in October that year, Clair gave a San Francisco address. Clair apparently was a radar technician during the Second World War, and later she said that she was serving on a submarine when it was attacked by friendly fire. This so unnerved Clair that it led to a medical discharge. Either while in the navy, or subsequently working in a carnival, Clair became heavily tattooed on the body, but not on the face.
Clair’s (first) wife Ruth died in early 1949.
Clair first lived as a woman in Mexico City using the name Marie Ciel Campbell, until one night a drunk touched her in just the wrong place. She then moved to the San Francisco area. She reverted to Claire, now with an ‘e’ at the end. As part of her transition, she volunteered to give a talk to the Mattachine Society on “What is Transvestism?”
At the age of 48 in August 1953, Claire, then working as female nurse in Palo Alto, using a local anesthetic, succeeded in removing her own testicles – an operation that no doctor would consent to do. However she was unable to staunch the bleeding, and took a taxi to the hospital, where she was treated for shock and loss of blood. A few of the local papers carried the story, giving Claire’s first and last names. The journalist for the San Francisco Examiner commented that she declined to give a male forename.
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| Herb Caen in The San Francisco Examiner |
Dr Karl Bowman, at San Francisco’s Langley Porter Clinic, took over the case and recommended further surgery to remove the penis - this was done 30 December 1953 at the University of California in San Francisco by Dr Frank Hinman, chief of urology services at San Francisco General Hospital – apparently this was the only such operation that Hinman ever did. A few newspapers heard rumors of the operation, but the hospital refused details, and gave out that her initials were L.C. One doctor was quoted as saying “A much truer case than Christine’s”. While recovering she gave offprints to the medical staff of Harry Benjamin’s "Transsexualism and transvestism as psychosomatic and somatopsychic syndromes". A diagnosis of ‘hermaphroditism’ had been used on the hospital entrance form.
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| Annette, Louise, Janet, Claire |
Over three years, she and Benjamin exchanged almost 100 letters. She told Benjamin that she had a genital anomaly (which Benjamin diagnosed as hypospadias), and had been raised as a girl for some years before a doctor explained to the parents that she was a boy. She had left home in 1923, and worked as a sailor for two years. She worked with a circus for a while, and then lived in Mexico City as female. Only after that did Clair marry Ruth - in Milwaukee, and they had a son. Clair divorced Ruth and moved to California, and served in the US Navy 1941-3 until discharged because of morphine addiction.
Claire pressed Benjamin to describe her as ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’, as several trans women at the time such as Betty Cowell and Georgina Turtle were doing. Benjamin declined as that was not actually the case. Claire wanted this as a term to give to her son who had not accepted her transition. Claire argued
“I realize my own condition perfectly but to quite some few people who have to know of this change, the idea of hermaphroditeism [sic] is easier to explain and understand than is transvestism”.
The son was not heard of again afterwards.
Claire and Christine Jorgensen did meet once, around this time. Claire did not want to go public as Christine Jorgensen had, in that she had no intention of being a performer. Her preference was to continue as a nurse. However she lost her nursing job, and she suspected that rumors had been passed to her employer.
In 1954 Frederick G Worden, psychoanalyst, and James T Marsh, clinical psychologist, both at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical Center, interviewed and tested five “physically normal men” (that is trans women): three of whom had already had transgender surgery, Claire, Annette, and Janet, and two hoping for it, Dixie Maclane and Carla Sawyer. They administered psychological tests, but did not actually listen to the five trans women as persons. Worden and Marsh published their paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April 1955. Their subjects, they wrote, had “an extremely shallow, immature, and grossly distorted concept of what a woman is like socially, sexually, anatomically, and emotionally”. They depicted them as attention-seeking, and even held their co-operation with the study against them as a “need for recognition”. Worden and Marsh were irritated by the two subjects who wanted surgery, and criticized their refusal to acknowledge “the possibility that the wish for surgery might be symptomatic of a disorder within themselves”. They, of course, did not provide the desired recommendations for surgery. Harry Benjamin immediately wrote to the journal to object that Worden and Marsh had “badly misunderstood or misinterpreted” his work. Four of the five interviewees wrote to Benjamin expressing outrage.
Bowman wrote up his 1953 experience with Elgin as Case 4 in his 1956 paper:
“CASE 4-In one case penotomy was performed. A man of 43, twice married, was referred because of a request for penotomy; a few months previously he had anesthetized and castrated himself. Although tall and ungainly, he worked as a female practical nurse; he stated that he felt his penis to be inconvenient, with his female dress, and most distasteful. He had been impotent in both marriages and spoke of homosexual wishes. He threatened further self-mutilation if penotomy was refused. Because the patient had no testicles, was wholly impotent and did not ask for a plastic vagina it was decided reluctantly to accept the patient’s legal right to request amputation of the penis. It was feared that the patient might again try self-emasculation and harm himself more seriously. Two years after penotomy the patient seemed more comfortable and was making a fair adjustment.”
. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 39-41, 48.