Babette Ellsworth (1928 – 2002) academic

Albert Ellsworth was born in Yakima, Washington State, to a teenage mother, Mildred Sweet (1911-1955) and her husband Albert Ellsworth (1906-1990). They were told that the child was not expected to live, and relocated to Redmond, Washington. Subsequent enquiries to the hospital re the child went unanswered.

Neglected, the baby was cared for by a French aristocrat, Germaine Bonnefont (1894-1983) a teacher of French and Spanish, and her US husband, Robert Brown, and in the 1930 census he was listed as their son Bobby Brown. They took the young boy to France, although without the formality of adoption.

The Bonnefonts - Albert on left

Brown returned to the US alone in 1932, and to his work in the forestry service, but came down with liver damage, and died.

Albert was raised in Narbonne close to the Spanish border and grew up tri-lingual. He was educated as a Catholic and lived at the Chateau du Lac south of Narbonne. The Bonnefont clan were acquainted with exiled Russian aristocracy, including  Felix Yusupov (1887-1967) transvestite and assassin of Rasputin. They had connections with the Francoist regime in Spain and were supporters of the Vichy regime during the German occupation: some joined the Waffen SS and died defending France from the Allied invasion in 1944; others were killed after the Liberation of France.

In the ensuing chaos, Albert came to the attention of the new government in Paris, and after scrutiny of his documents, it was determined that he was a US citizen and he was sent back to Yakima on the SS Argentina in 1946. He was upset that US customs confiscated his portrait of Hitler.

He was then 17, and had no memory of his birth mother who was still only in her mid-30s. They had sex and a sister-daughter Rosalyn was born, although by then Albert had left and did not know about the child. After living rough, Albert was saved by the Portland, Oregon Catholic charity, Blanchet House. They arranged educational scholarships and Ellsworth was able to do a BA and a masters at the Catholic University of Portland (not to be confused with the Methodist Portland University or with Portland State University).

Germaine reinvented herself as a veteran of the French Résistance, and arrived in Portland in 1947. She later lived in British Columbia.

Ellsworth did a doctorate at the University of Bordeau. He was employed to teach history, French and Spanish at Portland State University. He took a wife, Helen, and they had three daughters. In 1964 Ellsworth was hired at the newly formed Portland Community College, and stayed the rest of his life.

Albert was cross-dressing in private.

One of his students was Billie, the wife of the progressive judge Raymond Shoemaker. They fell in love and Albert abandoned Helen. The Judge and Mrs Shoemaker welcomed him and the three lived ménage a trois, and traveled together until the Judge died in 1977. Billie came down with cancer in 1990. Albert and Billie married so that he would inherit the house.

Shortly after Billie’s death, Albert married Sandra, a close friend whom he had known for decades, who worked in administration at Portland Community College. However Ellsworth started talking about changing sex, and in 1994, transitioned on the job at the age of 66. She was one of the first patients of surgeon Toby Meltzer who had started performing vaginoplasty in Portland, only the year before. Her legal name became AJ Bobbie Ellsworth, but she was from then generally known as Babette.

Sandra could not relate to this and they were divorced shortly afterwards.

In 1998, Babette made an arrangement with one of her students, Ross Eliot, food and board in exchange for chauffeuring and other assistances.  Bills and other mail arrived addressed to Albert Ellsworth. "My professor smiled mischievously when I asked about this. Albert? Oh, he was my husband. Some people suspected I had him murdered. This suggestion made her laugh."

In 2002 Babette was contacted by the long lost Rosalyn, who came to visit her sister-father. While she was there, Babette died of a massive heart attack while entering a bus for a student tour that she was to lead. She was 74.

• Ross Eliot. "The Enigma of Dr. Ellsworth".   TGForum, Jun 17, 2013.  www.tgforum.com/wordpress/index.php/the-enigma-of-dr-ellsworth. 
• Ross Eliot. Babette: The Many Lives, Two Deaths and Double Kidnapping of Dr. Ellsworth. Heliocentric Press, 2014.  

Profelleworth.com      rosseliot.wordpress.com    ancestry.com     ccsnyder.com

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AJ Ellsworth is not listed among the Notable alumni of the University of Portland, nor among people from Portland nor among the faculty at Portland Community College.

Ross Eliot does not find out until p118 that Albert Ellsworth is Babette rather than her dead husband.  "Oh please! Ross?  You've seen her without a wig.  Ladies don't go bald that way.  And you know how deep her voice is.  Plus, come on, no real woman her age has tits that perky."

According to Ross Eliot, Ellsworth had three wives:
Helen, 195?
Billie, 1990
Sandra, 1992

Craig Snyder apparently omits the middle wife, and gives a different name for the 3rd.


Craig Snyder’s page on Germaine Bonnefont says that she and Robert Brown adopted two sons, the other named as Robert John Pierre. Ross Elliot in his blog entry on Ellworth’s FBI file (http://profellsworth.com/news: May 4, 2015) gives this name as an alias of Babette.

I cannot find any account of Judge Raymond Shoemaker.

Jamie Clayton (1978 - ) actress

Clayton was raised in San Diego, with a defense attorney and an event planner as parents. At age 19 she moved to New York to transition and to work as a make-up artist. She had completion surgery with Dr Toby Meltzer in Scottsdale in 2003, one of his first patients after he moved from Oregon.

In August 2008 Jamie was dating a man who knew a columnist at the New York Observer. This led to her coming out to the columnist and story was repeated in Gawker, and then elsewhere on the web. She became an internet sensation and got emails from all over. She was invited to go on The Tyra Banks Show, and CBS News’ Logo Channel did a segment on her. After a few months of acting classes, and meeting Laverne Cox, they co-hosted VH1's first makeover show TRANSform Me, where three transsexual fashion professionals came to the aid of cis women.

For a while Jamie had a problem in that known as trans, she could not get cis parts, and yet when she went to auditions for transgender roles she would be rejected in that she did not look the part. In December 2010 she was featured in an article in the New York Times about an acting class for gay actors. This led to her being cast as a secondary character in Hung, 2011, which was primarily about a male prostitute.

She played the role of "Michelle" in the interactive web series Dirty Work. Clayton is also a member of the performance art–rock group Roma! She now works regularly in movies and television, and was featured in Sense8, 2015-now (directed by the Wachowskis) and the Neon Demon, 2016.

• Spencer Morgan. "Has Fame Changed Jamie Clayton?" New York Observer, 7/20/10. http://observer.com/2010/07/has-fame-changed-jamie-clayton.
• Erik Piepenburg. “Helping Gay Actors Find Themselves Onstage” The New York Times, December 12, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/theater/13actout.html?_r=1&ref=arts.
• Jillian T Weiss. “Why I'm Impressed By Jamie Clayton”. The Bilerico Project, November 07, 2011. http://bilerico.lgbtqnation.com/2011/11/why_im_impressed_by_jamie_clayton.php.
• Laverne Cox. "Hung Up on Our Bullies: Internalized Transphobia ". Huffington Post, 11/08/11. www.huffingtonpost.com/laverne-cox/hung-up-on-our-bullies-in_b_1079271.html.

IMDB      EN.WIKIPEDIA

Ellie Zara Ley (1974–) surgeon

Eleazer Ley was born in San Luis, Sonora. His mother was Chinese, and his father half-Chinese. Shortly after birth he developed a medical complication that the local doctors did not know how to deal with. Despite not having the correct papers, his mother was able to take the child across the US border to a hospital in Yuma, Arizona, purely with a doctor’s letter.

Ley grew up to be a doctor. He did undergraduate work in the US as a foreign student, returned to Mexico for medical school, and immigrated to the US. He worked at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY and in the general surgery program at the University of Arizona. He then completed a fellowship in pediatric craniofacial plastic surgery at Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City. At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles he received fellowship training in hand and microsurgery, and then returned to the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, to complete a fellowship in plastic and reconstructive surgery.

He considered extending his skills into gender surgery, and researched how it was being done in Thailand. He had also married, and they had two daughters. He took a position in Tucson where his wife is from. Approaching 40, Ley had 14 years of medical school, residency, and three fellowships. He opened the Ley Institute of Plastic & Hand Surgery, LLC and the Arizona Craniofacial & Pediatric Plastic Surgery. He also did work in Nogales, Sonora, for the border community.

Then Ley had a damascene moment. Helping the two daughters with nail polish, it was suddenly apparent what was missing from life.

“It just stirred something inside of me that wouldn’t stop, this force. It was relentless after that. My feminine side just completely came out.”

Ley transitioned and was divorced in 2015. Ellie Zara Ley had surgery from Dr Toby Meltzer, who

Drs Meltzer & Ley

continued discussions with her for several months and then asked her to join his practice. She closed her Tucson practice, and moved to Scottsdale. She shadowed Meltzer’s surgeries, and is now taking on her own patients.

• “Border experience has profound impact on Dr Eleazar Ley”. Tucson Medical Center, October 23, 2013. https://tmcaznews.com/2013/10/23/border-experience-has-profound-impact-on-dr-eleazar-ley.
• Amy Saunders. “Change/MD”. Phoenix, April 2016. http://www.phoenixmag.com/lifestyle/change-md.html
• “Dr. Meltzer is excited to welcome a new talent, Ellie Zara Ley MD to his practice!”. Tmeltzer.com. http://www.tmeltzer.com/news_events.html.

Toby Meltzer (1957–) gender confirmation surgeon.

Toby Meltzer graduated in medicine and did his residency at the Louisiana State University Charity Hospital, and then did a plastic surgery residency at the University of Michigan. He became clinical professor of plastic surgery at the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU), in Portland, where he completed a fellowship in burn injuries.

He was a year out of plastic surgery residency when two doctors, a plastic surgeon and a urologist, about to retire, suggested that he take over their transgender surgeries. Meltzer accepted the challenge of learning. However because the two doctors performed such surgery only a few times per year, Meltzer’s training consisted of observing only one surgery by each doctor. He also traveled to Trinidad, Colorado to observe Stanley Biber. In addition, he interviewed pediatric urologists who had worked on intersex children.

He almost gave up after his first transgender surgery discovering how much he did not know. The patient required additional surgery, but sent a thank-you note. He persevered, and began performing vaginoplasty at OHSU in 1993.

“Previously, my patients came to me in terrible condition after something like a car accident, and after I had literally put the pieces of their face back together, all they could focus on was the way they used to look, and would complain about the little scar they had right above their lip. GRS patients are always extremely grateful that someone is finally helping them, and it is refreshing to feel so appreciated in my work.”

Anne Lawrence describes the technique that Meltzer was using from May 1994:

“creation of a neovagina lined with inverted penile skin, and construction of a sensate neoclitoris from the glans penis using a dorsal neurovascular pedicle”.

He also performed Cricothyroid approximation (CTA) surgeries to raise the vocal pitch, and facial feminization surgery. He is also one of just a few surgeons in the U.S. who performs metiodioplasty (clitoral release). Unlike many other plastic surgeries, GRS with Meltzer requires a team of several professionals and patients are required to undergo a lengthy process, which adheres to the WPATH standards for GRS and ancillary procedures. Patients must see a psychologist or psychiatrist, an endocrinologist and a social worker in addition to their work with Meltzer. They must also spend one year in therapy, receive medically-supervised hormone therapy, and spend one year in a “real-life test,” passing as the other gender. Meltzer will perform surgeries only after patients have passed this “test” and have obtained a letter from a psychiatrist saying that they are prepared for the operation.

Anne Lawrence had been able to observe Meltzer do a transgender operation. The next year, 1995, she returned to Dr Meltzer as a patient for her own operation, only six months after social transition. Later she published photographs of his work on her site.

There were sometimes problems finding beds for his patients at OHSU, and in 1996, Meltzer opened his private practice at the Eastmoreland Hospital, a 100-bed medical center also in Portland, and over the next few years expanded to take more than 50% of the surgical workload. In the early days of the internet word about his work spread in transgender chat rooms.

In 2002, Eastmoreland Hospital was purchased by Symphony Healthcare, a for-profit hospital company founded in Nashville Tennessee in late 2001. Meltzer received a certified letter advising that he would not be allowed to perform any type of gender transition surgery after July 2002 (this was extended to December 2002), and that his patients must leave the hospital after three days. Meltzer asked around Oregon, at hospital after hospital, but was unable to get the hospital privileges that he required. A former patient, a doctor, suggested Scottsdale, Arizona, and in 2003 Meltzer, his wife and three children, and four members of his office staff, relocated there.

In 2003, Anne Lawrence published the results of a survey of 232 MtF transsexuals who had undergone SRS with surgeon Toby Meltzer during the period 1994–2000 (Lawrence, 2003).

“I observed that about 86% of respondents had experienced one or more episodes of autogynephilic arousal before undergoing SRS and 49% had experienced hundreds of episodes or more. Two years later, in a second article based on data from the same survey, I reported that 89% of the respondents classified as nonhomosexual on the basis of their sexual partnership history reported one or more experiences of autogynephilic arousal before undergoing SRS, vs. 40% in the small number of respondents classified as homosexual (Lawrence, 2005); there was evidence that some of these supposedly homosexual participants had misreported their partnership histories and were actually nonhomosexual.”

By 2004, Symphony Healthcare was bankrupt and they sold the entire site to Reed College for $52 million, and auctioned off everything inside the hospital. After acquiring the property, Reed College razed the buildings.

In 2010 Rhiannon G O'Dannabhain, who had had surgery with Meltzer in 2001, won in court against the US tax authorities to the effect that the cost of transgender surgery was tax deductible.

A 2015 patient, Ellie Zara Lay, also an experienced surgeon, joined Meltzer’s practice in 2016, and it is hoped will continue the practice after Dr Meltzer retires.

Meltzer has kept a low profile in Scottsdale. He does not promote his practice, and rarely grants media interviews, but his patients find him on the internet. It can take up to seven months for a first meeting with him. Dr Meltzer has done over 3,000 sex change operations. Out-of-town and out-of-country patients account for more than 85 percent of his caseload. He operates Monday through Thursday, with two 12-hour days, he does at least five male-to-female and two to four female-to-male procedures each week.

Patients include:

Babette Ellsworth 1994
Anne Lawrence 1995,
Andrea James 1998,
Robyn Walters 2000
Rhiannon G O'Donnabhain 2001
Christine Beatty 2002,
Jamie Clayton 2003.
Donna Rose 2005
Kaitlin Sine Riordan 2007
Sheela-Marie Padgett 2008,
Andreja Pejic 2013
Ellie Zara Ley 2015

• “Interview with Toby E Meltzer, MD”. In Dean Kotula (ed). The Phallus Palace: Female to Male Transsexuals. Alyson Books, 2002: 173-7.
• “Portland Gender Reassignment Surgeon Plans To Move”. National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, August 22, 2002. Online.
• A A Lawrence. “Factors associated with satisfaction or regret following male-to-female sex reassignment surgery”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 32, 2003: 299–315.
• A A Lawrence. “Sexuality before and after male-to-female sex reassignment surgery”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 34, 2005: 147–166.
• Sarah Brown. “Surgeon pioneers gender reassignment surgery”. The Misc. 11/11/05. http://misc.vassar.edu/archives/2005/11/surgeon_pioneer.html. No Longer Available.
• Anne A Lawrence. Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism. Springer, 2013: 27.
• Amy Saunders. “Change/MD”. Phoenix, April 2016. http://www.phoenixmag.com/lifestyle/change-md.html
• Susan Faludi. In the Darkroom. Henry Holt and Company, 2016: 134.

EN.Wikipedia     tmeltzer.com

Sheela-Marie Padgett (1958- ) dance, artist

Padgett, the son of a Baptist minister and a first-grade school teacher in Mississippi, won a scholarship at age 14 to study ballet at North Carolina School of the Arts, and then at the School of American Ballet in New York City leading to the award of a Ford Foundation Scholarship.

This led to membership of the New York City Ballet, and dancing major male roles in ballets created by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Peter Martins, Robert Lafosse and Dick Tanner. It also led to hanging out with Andy Warhol at Indochine and late nights at Studio 54.

Padgett retired from ballet in 1995, took up painting and has become known as an outstanding painter of animals. In 2007-8, both parents died in quick succession. There was a small inheritance, and a transsexual friend was upgrading with facial feminization surgery.

Padgett decided it was time and announced that she was transitioning as Sheela-Marie. This was completed with genital surgery by Toby Meltzer in Scottsdale, Arizona. While she had medical insurance, transition costs were not included: altogether including facial feminization it cost $100,000.

• Jacob Bernstein. "For Some in Transgender Community, It’s Never Too Late to Make a Change". The New York Times, March 6, 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/fashion/for-some-in-transgender-community-its-never-too-late-to-make-a-change.html.
  
• Joshua Bright. "Better Late Than Never". The New York Times, 2015. www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2015/03/08/fashion/20150308TRANSGENDER.html.
  

WilliamSecordGallery

Anne Lawrence (1950 - ) anesthesiologist, gender therapist, activist.

++ Updated November 2013.

Lawrence was a cross-dresser from childhood, who self-prescribed hormones while at medical school in Minnesota. After graduation he attempted to ‘function as a normal male’. He married a woman in 1987 and they had two children. He worked as an anesthesiologist at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center.

In 1992 he restarted hormones, and underwent electrolysis. In 1995, Anne abandoned the marriage, and transitioned socially, including at work.

She also had been able to observe Dr Toby Meltzer do a sex-change operation. The next year she returned to Dr Meltzer as a patient for her own operation, only six months after social transition.

In 1997, while working as an anesthesiologist, she allegedly performed an unauthorized vaginal inspection on an unconscious Ethiopian patient and was forced to resign.

In 1999 she worked with Andrea James on a possible book for transsexuals, but they they went their separate ways.

Anne studied for a Ph.D from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality at San Francisco, which she received in 2001. Michael Bailey was one of her thesis advisors.  She followed that with an MA in Clinical Psychology at the Washington School of Professional Psychology.

She is now a counselor specializing in trans patients, and is a writer and speaker associated with the opinions of Ray Blanchard and Michael Bailey. She described Bailey's book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, "a wonderful book on an important subject". She has replaced the term ‘homosexual transsexual’ with the less contentious term ‘androphilic’, but still apologizes for Blanchard’s insensitive usage of ‘homosexual’ to describe heterosexual trans women. She has tested Blanchard's categories with post-operative women. She is the major post-op who self-describes as autogynephilic, and has popularized the expression “men trapped in men’s bodies’ to describe persons like herself.

Anne explains the condition:

It is worth emphasizing that Blanchard's theory refers to sexual desire in a fairly broad sense; it means more than just genital arousal. In fact, Blanchard was quite aware that his theory about non-homosexual transsexuality being a manifestation of sexual desire would have to explain why the transsexual impulse persists even when genital arousal is reduced or absent. For example, many of us with a history of sexual arousal to cross-dressing or to other autogynephilic imagery report that while our sexual excitement diminishes over time, our desire for sex reassignment surgery continues and even intensifies. Likewise, when we autogynephilic transsexuals take estrogen, our libido is often diminished or even eliminated, but our desire for sex reassignment usually is not. Blanchard hypothesized that after a period of time, stimuli which have been experienced as sexually exciting come to be regarded as rewarding and desirable in their own right, even when they no longer evoke intense genital arousal. Again using the analogy of heterosexual marriage, Blanchard pointed out that men often continue to experience intense emotional bonds to the objects of their sexual desire (i.e., their wives), even after their initial intense sexual attraction has diminished or completely disappeared.

Along with Blanchard, she has compared transsexuality to amputee fetishism, a position since adopted by the antigay reparative therapy organization, NARTH and religious organizations that are now talking of 'sexual amputees'. Also like Blanchard she asserts that androphilic trans women are a type of gay men. She has proposed that a small BSTc cell count is a marker for autoandrophilia autogynephila.

Lesbian right-winger Tammy Bruce used Anne Lawrence as one of her examples of 'moral vacuum' in her 2003 book, and presents her as an advocate for gender changes for trans children, without mentioning at all what she really stands for.

Curtis Hinkle has proposed, based on both content and style, that Lawrence is the (part) author of the final section of Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen.

Her web page contains a lot of resources for transsexuals, including comparative material on the vaginoplasty of different surgeons, but her autobiography has been taken down, and she uses robots.txt to keep it out of the web archives. Material on some surgeons had to be removed when they threatened litigation.

She is a member of WPATH and the International Academy of Sex Research. She has served on the Task Force on Gender Identity, Gender Variance, and Intersex Conditions of the American Psychological Association.

In 2008 Lawrence became Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of  Lethbridge, Alberta.

From October 1998 to October 2011 she collected several hundred narratives via her website from 'autogynephilic transsexuals'.   These became the basis of her 2013 book, which was priced high to discourage the general public from reading it. 

*Not the playwright nor Ann Lawrence, the novelist.

• Transsexual Women’s Resources. www.annelawrence.com.
• Anne Lawrence. “’Men Trapped in Men's Bodies:’ An Introduction to the Concept of Autogynephilia” http://home.swipnet.se/~w-13968/autogynephilia.html.
• Tammy Bruce. The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values. Roseville, Calif: Forum, 2003: 92-4. 
• J. Michael Bailey. The Man Who Would Be Queen: the science of gender-bending and transsexualism. Washington: Joseph Henry; Oxford: Oxford Publicity Partnership. 2003: 168, 174-5, 218, 219. 
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. The Transgender Phenomenon. London: Thousand Oaks; California: Sage. 2006: 60, 86-8, 90, 94. 
• Andrea James. “The Anne Who Would Be Queen”. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/info/lawrence/anne-lawrence.html.
• Lynn Conway. “With the theory of autogynephilia in disarray, Blanchard and Lawrence propose a theory that transsexualism is an "amputation fetish", by "lumping" GID, BIID and apotemnophilia”. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/BIID/BIID.html.
• Curtis E. Hinkle. “Deconstructing the Feminine Essence Narrative: Ongoing investigation by OII: Part 2”. Intersexusa. April 25, 2008. http://intersexusa.blogspot.com/2008/04/oii-investigation-part-2.html. 
• Lawrence, Anne A. Men Trapped in Men's Bodies Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism. New York, NY: Springer, 2013.  
• Curriculum Vitae at www.annelawrence.com/lawrence_cv.pdf. Contains a full bibliography.