Leslie Townsend (1960 - ) model, film extra.

Townsend grew up in Philadelphia. After learning about Renee Richards, and seeing a Donahue episode about transsexuals Townsend sent away for some informational materials which were then discovered by father. Townsend was then sent for professional help to, among others, John Money.

At 19 Leslie left home for Key West, New Orleans and then New York. She worked as a female impersonator and a sex worker. She had genital surgery at 23. She was married to a man for 18 months. She moved to Houston and was reasonable successful as a model, acting in commercials for malls and condominium complexes. In Los Angeles she was an extra in television shows: The West Wing, Alias, Boomtown and Malcolm in the Middle. In Las Vegas she was a stand-up comic. She has also worked as a secretary and tended bar.

After 20 years of stealth she wrote her autobiography and started speaking at colleges and transgender groups.

"Following my surgery, I realized that I could fit into society as a woman and no one would ever be the wiser. And until very recently I lived in deep stealth. In fact, I was in so deep that I didn't know there was a name for it. Stealth. Once I was told its meaning and it's use in the transgender community, I realized that it is definitely a word that describes the last twenty years of my life. In all that time I never found it easy or advantageous to reveal the details of my past to anyone. I'm sure that fear was the motivating factor in keeping my secret. Fear of rejection, loss of friendship, loss of boyfriends. In retrospect, I think I feared the loss of my female persona and validation of that persona that I received from the men in my life. Fear can be such a crippling emotion. For me, the prospect of divulging my secrets went hand in hand with giving up life as I knew it in my seemingly secure little world. Looking back, I have to wonder how secure that world was if one tidbit of information could have brought it tumbling down. It has taken me all of those twenty years to come to terms with the shame I held onto for so long."

Leslie has moved back to Philadelphia to reconnect with her family, and is now active in real-estate development. She has set up a fund for transgender students at the University of Pennsylvania.

She was also part of the all transgender production of The Vagina Monologues, and the resulting film, Beautiful Daughters.

*Not the Derbyshire cricketer, nor the Australian cricket umpire, nor the Royal Navy Rear-Admiral, nor the Ohio River historian.

• Leslie Townsend. Hidden in Plain Sight. San Jose: Writers Club Press 158 pp 2002.
  
• Lynn Conway. “Leslie Townsend's Story, Hidden in Plain Sight”. TS Successes. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/LeslieTownsend.html.
  
• Andrea James. "Transitioning early in life: Leslie's advice". Trans Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/early/leslie.html.
  

IMDB

Diane Baransky (193? - ?) hairdresser

Diane Baransky apparently had surgery at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1963.  Her brief moment of fame was in February 1967 when she and John Money were interviewed by Alvin Davis on the CBC program This Hour Has Seven Days.  Her purpose was to demonstrate how convincing as a woman a transsexual could be.  It was not stated whether she were Canadian, or whether she had come from the US with John Money.

As John Colapinto summarizes her appearance:

‘At this point the camera cut from Dr, Money and his questioner to a a blond women who walked out onto the set.  Dressed in a narrow skirt, high heels, and a matching close-fitting jacket, she took a seat in the chair across from the two men.  A close-up shot revealed that her round, pretty face was expertly made up, in the style of the mid-1960s, with heavy eyeliner, mascara, and foundation, her mouth thickly painted with lipstick.

“This is Mrs. Diane Baransky,” the show’s announcer said.  “Until four years ago, her name was Richard.” …

Now she was accepted as a woman and had recently married her husband, a fellow hairdresser. ‘

The show was watched by Mr and Mrs Reimer in Winnipeg, who wrote the next day to John Money for advice about their son who had been left without a penis after a botched circumcision by cauterization.

• John Colapinto. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl.  HarperCollins, 2000: 21-6.

__________________________________________________

There are a couple of problems with this account.  The standard account is the first transsexual to have surgery at Johns Hopkins was Phyllis Wilson in 1966, and in February 1967, Johns Hopkins was claiming to have done only two such surgeries.  From the ‘four years ago’ it is implicit that she transitioned in 1963.  However transition may take some years.  It is possible that Diane was the second patient after Phyllis in late 1966, or that she had gone to Europe or Morocco like so many transsexuals at that time.  The account in Colapinto’s book does not clarify the issue.

The second problem is that according to Colapinto the CBC program was This Hour Has Seven Days.  According to CBC Archives page This Hour Has Seven Days was a satirical news program, and most importantly, it ran from October 1964 to May 1966.  That it, it was no longer being broadcast in February 1967. Nor is there an Alvin Davis listed as one of its interviewers.  Very likely Mr and Mrs Reimer mis-remembered the name of the program – that is very easy to do. Again Colapinto’s account does not clarify the issue.   However the BBC documentaries were able to find the relevant clip, but do not give the broadcast details.

“Diane Baransky” was probably, according to the customs of the time, a pseudonym.  Certainly the one woman of that name who is found in a Google search is too young to be the same person.  Like Agnes, who was in the news a few years earlier, she successfully managed to stay out of the news for the rest of her life.

Kiira Triea (1951 - 2012) intersex/HSTS activist, guitarist, Linux geek.

Denise Magner has claimed that she was born at the US Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, but also that she was born in Finland. Either at birth or aged 2 she was assigned as a boy. He grew up in the Baltimore area. After puberty, as Denise, she became a lesbian-separatist, and also a hard rock musician. 

She also tried living as a man for a while, and became a patient of The Johns Hopkins Hospital Psychohormonal Research Unit and of John Money, and was operated on in 1974 by Howard Jones.

Later, in 1993, as Denise Tree she became editor of Linux News, and at this time was using a jhu.edu id (Johns Hopkins University). She was also a bicycle maker and metalworker. She took the name Kiira from the character in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Kiira Triea was an early member with Cheryl Chase (Bo Laurent) of the Intersex Society of North America, (ISNA) and had an article in the first issue, 1994, of Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and maintained their website. In 1997 she founded the Coalition for Intersex Support Activism & Education (CISAE). Her essay of that year, “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”, about her experiences at Johns Hopkins and being forced to be either male or female, was originally published by Dallas Denny in Chrysalis and reprinted in Dreger's Intersex in the Age of Ethics. The essay says that she was 14 when she went to Johns Hopkins. 

She is credited with the design of the Phall-O-Meter, a useful tool for intersex activists to mock the doctors’ obsession that a clitoris must be less that 0.9 cm and penis more than 2.5 cm. 

In her essay "Learning about transsexuality from transsexuals", Kiira explains that after she became an intersex activist, she was approached by supposed intersex persons, and claims that over 99% of them were lying. Many claimed to be true hermaphrodites or Klinefelter's but were obviously not.

"Finally, I began to understand transsexuality, as it was expressed by socially privileged former men, in terms of being antithetical to my understanding of the underlying socio-political causes of intersex oppression and at odds with my goals as an intersex activist. Certainly there are many conceptual frameworks within which intersex can be understood but I found feminism to be useful because it addressed the core issues of what sexualities and what bodies are allowable by an androcentric technocracy and answered questions like why would doctors create non-functional female genitals in children, not bothering to determine the results of those interventions for decades. I also began to wonder why the natural biological variation of intersex, which did not actually result in socially expressed 'gender variance', was not allowed while the biological variation and socially obvious gender variance that resulted when adult men attempted to modify their bodies to become female was allowed."

"I began then in 1997 to understand transsexuality and its supporting model of 'gender identity' not as medical syndrome but as a social instrument which eradicated understanding in order to preserve social privilege".

On the other hand, she found that HSTS or trans-kids were quite different:

"None of them had tried to write to me for several reasons, first was that they were not motivated to acquire any other legitimizing identity as were autogynephilic transsexuals because their social identities and personal identities were congruent. They simply seemed like normal feminine girls or women whose social ‘gender’ or what Suzanne Kessler calls ‘gender attribution’ was immediately obvious both in their appearance and behavior and required no theoretical explanation. They did not present themselves to me as intersex nor did they advocate for transsexuality to be classified as an ‘intersex condition’ because, in common with intersex children, they were a socially devalued population who were often medicalized harmfully as children."

These persons she had invited to her intersex groups. Kiira herself was invited by Michael Bailey to join his closed SEXNET mailing list. She became an advocate for Bailey's variation on Blanchard's ideas. 

In 2004 Kiira launched the transkids.us website which endorsed the Blanchardian concept of 'homosexual transsexual' in distinction to autogynephiles. It was very quickly linked to by the Anne Lawrence and Michael Bailey websites. Kiira became the one and only public HSTS, although people pointed out that if she were a lesbian intersex, she could hardly be an HSTS (= heterosexual trans woman). 

Kiira died from cancer at age 61.

• Kiira Triea. “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”. http://www.isna.org/books/chrysalis/triea_pru.  Also in Alice Domurat Dreger (ed) Intersex in the Age of Ethics (pp. 141-144). Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group. 1999.
• John Colapinto. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. Toronto & New York: HarperCollins, London: Quartet xvii, 279 pp 2001: 259.
• Kiira Triea. transkids.us.
• Andrea James. “Kiira Triea (Denise Tree) and the "transkids" hoax “. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/info/transkids/kiira-triea.htm.
• Andrea James. “Legal troubles for Denise Tree (aka Kiira Triea) expose more lies”. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/notes/index.php/site/comments/legal_troubles_for_denise_tree_aka_kiira_triea_expose_more_lies.
• Alice Dreger. “A note on Kiira Triea’s place in the history of intersex activism”. http://alicedreger.com/kiira_triea.html.
• Andrea James. “No matter how you slice it: Parsing Alice Dreger’s self-defense”. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/notes/index.php/site/comments/no_matter_how_you_slice_it_parsing_alice_dregers_self_defense.
• Sophia Siedlberg. “Treestumps and Broomsticks”. OII. Feb 16,2008. www.intersexualite.org/Treestumps.html. 
• Alice Dreger.  "Losing Kiira".  http://alicedreger.com/losing_kiira.html.

___________________________________________________________

This is an overview of Kiira.  See the Andrea James pages for the details of her alternate autobiographies.

Triea, Dreger, Kessler all moved from ISNA to the Bailey camp.

Born in 1951, Triea was 61 when she died.  The only photographs available are from decades ago.

Dreger’s first essay is a defense of Triea after what James wrote.  However it merely dismisses ‘loony things said about Kiira on certain sites’ and does not address the issues.  Nor does she give any explanation at all why an intersex woman would be running an HSTS site.

Sophia Siedlberg has problems with intersex activism as radical-feminism.  Feminism is many things, not just trade-union activism for women.  One of the other things is a radical deconstruction of the sex-gender system.  Intersex activism also deconstructs the sex-gender system.