Alice Purnell (1943 - ) chemist, activist, nurse, counsellor, poet

++February 2015 - revised after feedback from Alice.


Purnell was conceived in a haystack in the Wirral during an air-raid. He was sexually and physically abused at prep school by the headmaster who was later convicted. His parents had a 'messy horrid' divorce when he was doing his O-level examinations.

He felt confused in that he felt that he should be a girl but was not attracted to men. He developed an alternate identity as Anne who, by the age of 15, socialized only with people who knew nothing of Purnell's male life.

Purnell did a degree in chemistry. He found love with a woman to whom he explained about Anne. She accepted this side of him, but asked that Anne change her name as her sister was also Anne. Purnell had been called Dormouse at school, and, in homage to Lewis Carroll, became Alice.

They were living in Sussex. One evening on the way home from work as a research chemist, Purnell encountered, before the police arrived, a trans girl who had hanged herself in a tree. Her father showed up and expressed anger but not sorrow. Purnell felt that he could easily have been that trans girl, and this led to becoming a volunteer with the Samaritans, the advice line for those at risk of suicide. She found that a third of calls on the line featured gender difficulties.

Alice did not know how to express her femininity until she found a a copy of Virginia Prince's Transvestia in a sex-book shop in London's Soho. She used the Transvestia contact system to find like-minded persons, and became a member of the European Chapter of Virginia Prince's FPE.


Alice, Alga Campbell from Dublin, Giselle, a US expatriate, and Sylvia Carter, met in 1965 and agreed to found the Beaumont Society (named after the 18^th century transvestite pioneer). The membership numbering was started at 100 (which was assigned to Alice, and then issued back and forth from that to give the impression of greater membership. Initially there were almost as many overseas members as in the UK, with some in Malaysia, Kenya and other parts of the Commonwealth. Alice became the overseas contact person because of her French. Regional contacts were appointed but were often the only member in their region.

After an initial meeting in Hampstead, the first full meeting was held in Southampton in 1966 with 12 in attendance including two wives.

Purnell had been attending the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Clinic under the care of Dr Randell, and that same year was offered surgery.  However Purnell married his lover instead after five years together. They had two daughters and a son.

Following the practice of Prince in the US, new members had to be vetted, and the application form explicitly stated that no hint of overt gayness would be tolerated.

"It was also risky meeting others to sponsor them. I remember a character from Gibraltar who was very cagey indeed, who I arranged via the contact system to sponsor so she could attend meetings when in the UK; (you could not do so if not sponsored as they were often in people's homes). At the meeting in a car park this person told me my date & place of birth, schools and University, bank balance and workplace. I was horrified. He had discovered all this via our Secret Service for whom he worked in the Colony. He said he did this to secure his own confidentiality in case we breached his. I felt disinclined to sponsor him and was really horrified that even then governments held so much info' on all of us. I did sponsor him after discussion with Alga. It was a bit of a mutual standoff, but what an invasion of my own privacy!"

Alice, Alga, Virginia, Sylvia - 1971

In 1969 Virginia Prince visited the Beaumont Society in London, Leicester and Scotland. On her return in 1971 she stayed with Alice.

Alice was on BBC Radio 4 with agony aunt Claire Raynor. She attended the TV/TS conferences at Leeds University in 1974, and Leicester University in 1975 – the latter was organized by the Beaumont Society. Also in 1975, Alice was a co-founder of the Beaumont Trust, a registered charity, which separately from the Beaumont Society, set up a helpline and published educational booklets on transgender topics. In 1976 Alice became Vice-President of the Beaumont Society, and President a year later.

In 1977, Alice trained as a nurse, specializing in geriatric services. She then worked as such for 26 years, at one time becoming a matron, ++including nursing support for transgender surgery.

She ++finally had surgery in 1982 after the dissolution of her marriage, and remained President of the Beaumont Society until 1984. She also worked with Judy Cousins at SHAFT. She researched the then literature on trans topics and was disappointed. She joined HBIGDA (now WPATH) and attended its European meetings. She found that they were dominated by US concerns and that the Standards of Care were mainly to protect the surgeons, and that the emphasis was on psychiatry rather than on psychology/counselling. Using the contacts that she had made she organized the first of the GENDYS conferences which was held at Manchester University in 1990. This was intended as a British conference, and deliberately brought together each type of professional who deals with trans persons, and each type of trans person. There were a further seven GENDYS conferences held every two years. Alice edited all the GENDYS Conference Reports and often contributed papers.

Alice in 2011

After obtaining a masters degree in counselling and psychology, she co-founded Gender Trust and subsidized it in its first year. It was intended to help transgender rather than transvestite persons, and was, like the Beaumont Trust, a registered charity. However after a year the legal counsel to the Gender Trust was insisting that the trustees were to view her counselling notes. She regarded this potential breach of confidentiality re those she had counselled to be outrageous and resigned from Gender Trust. She also took them to court to establish that the copyright to the 2005 book was hers, and was not held by the Trust.  ++She estimates that she has counselled around 500 trans persons.  

She is also a poet, a dog lover and a fossil collector. She has lived most of her life in Sussex.

Alice Purnell was made an OBE in the 2012 New Years Honours List: "For services to Transgender People".

• Alice Purnell. "Why does transexuality exist?" and "TV, TG, TS – What's in a label?" in Michael Trevor Haslam. Transvestism: A Guide. Beaumont Trust, 1993.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 1^st International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1991.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 2^nd International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1993.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 3^rd International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1995.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 4^th International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1996.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 5^th International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1999.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Gendys 2K: Sixth International Gender Conference Report. London: BM Gendys, 2001.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 7th International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys,2002.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.), Conference Report of the 8th International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 2004.
  
• Alice Purnell. Transexed and Transgendered People: A Guide. Gendys Conferences, 2005.
  
• Alice L100. "A History of the Beaumont Society". Beaumont Magazine, 13,4, 2005. Online at: www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/6971183/a-short-beaumont-history-the-beaumont-society.
  
• Alice Kelly Purnell. Be the Flame Not the Moth: An Anthology of Poems (and Some Prose). Golden Flower Press, 2010.
  
• Alice Purnell & Jed Bland (ed). Trans in the Twenty First Century: Concerning Gender Diversity. Beaumont Trust, 2011.
  
• "New year honours for Brighton and Hove LGBT supporters". Brighton and Hove News, December 31^st, 2011. www.brightonandhovenews.org/2011/12/31/new-year-honours-for-brighton-and-hove-lgbt-supporters/12027.
• email from Alice Purnall, 7 Feb 2015

Christine Burns interviewed Alice Purnell,20 May 2013




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We have a list of the 4 founders of the Beaumont Society, but we still don't have a list of the 12 founders of the Hose and Heel Club.

Alice says that the Beaumont Society was never really anti-gay, merely obliged to distance itself from being perceived as gay because of the laws at the time.  Whether you buy this or regard it as a post-facto PR position, the Beaumont Society has grown away from its Princian origins.  The interview with Christine Burns contains none of the mean spirited rhetoric that Prince herself retained till the end.

Note that Alice uses 'transgender' as a umbrella term apart from transvestites.  You find the same usage with Katherine Cummings, the Australian FPE alumna.   The sterile debate re transgender=heterosexual transvestite is mainly a US hangup.

++In the initial verion of this article I had assumed that Alice was non-op because a) she was president of a Princian organization and b) there was no statment to the contrary.   However it has now been clarified that the assumption was not so, and statements have been added in the narrative above.


Dallas Denny has an essay, Consumer relations: WPATH’s evolving relations with those it serves, in which she mentions that as late as 1989 she was still getting a run-around attempting to join HBIGDA. Alice had joined a few years earlier, but apparently in stealth.

Judy Cousins (1917 - 1993) soldier, sculpter, businessman, activist, golfer.

SHAFT, run by Judy Cousins, sculptor and golfer, was the major UK group for transsexuals during the 1980s.

Revised 30/11/11.

Lewen Tugwell was born in Tallital, Nainital, India, and was later a Major in the British Indian Army. With his wife Joan, he had two daughters and a son.

Lewen was a professional sculptor of life and abstract pieces, based in Farnham and Sunninghill.  He was noted for his concave bust of Shakespeare whose eyes followed you around the room, and for a bust of Denis Thatcher (husband of you know).  He exhibited at the Royal Academy three times.

He experimented with cast polyester resin, and found that with the right temperature and amounts a crazing or internal shattering could be created.  He patented the process and registered Shattaline Ltd.  His wife, Joan, was the business manager.

In 1969 new partners joined, and the firm moved first to Woking and then to the Cromarty Firth area of Scotland.  Manufacture of Shattaline was discontinued a few years later because of the inflated price of polyester resin, and the disappearance of Lewen.

He was reported as 'missing, presumed dead'  in the Farmham Herald in March 1971.  This was to  spare the family the truth that Lewen had become Judy Cousins, but it generated newspaper stories and she was traced. At a time when there was almost no support for families, it took a few years for them to adjust.

From Bodyshock

Judy established SHAFT (Self-Help Association For Transsexuals) in 1980 and ran it for many years. It was the major UK group for transsexuals for the next decade.

Richard Ekins became the SHAFT librarian, and SHAFT made a foundation deposit to the Trans-Gender Archive in 1986.  Rachael Webb was in SHAFT for a short while but she and Judy did not get along.

Judy began teaching sculpture.  Her most prominent student was the German artist Christa Hunter, with whom she shared a studio for several years. 

In 1989 SHAFT was re-organized as The Gender Dysphoria Trust, with Charitable Status.  Judy was Non-Executive President

Both as Lewen and Judy she was an active golfer. Judy was a member of Stoke Poges Club in Buckinghamshire and rose into the higher ranks of women's amateur golf.

She died of Parkinson's disease at age 75

Liz Hodgkinson’s book is dedicated to Judy, but never discusses her in any detail.

* Not Judy Cousins, the lecturer at Cardiff University, nor the judo champion.  Not Lewan Tugwell, archdeacon of the Isle of Wight, Judy's uncle.

• "Missing Major 'May Be Alive".  Aberdeen Press and Journal, 12 September 1971. 
• Nora Warner.  "Grandmother Changed Sex".  Tit-Bits, Apr 1981. Online. 
• Tracey Kandohle.  "Judy was a man".   Maidenhead Advertiser, August 27, 1982. Online.
• Tracey Kandohle.  "Change of Life".  Reading Evening Post, January 12, 1984.  
• "I had the wrong soul in the wrong body".  The Times, February 7, 1985: 2.4.  Online.
• "The Sex Changlings".  Aberdeen Press and Journal, 9 July 1986.
• Liz Hodgkinson.  "father, Dear Father: Ex-officer and gentleman Judy Cousins and her daughter Penny Croucher talk to Liz Hodgkinson".   The People, ?, 1987.  Online. 
• Liz Hodgkinson. Bodyshock: the truth about changing sex. London: Columbus, 1987: 28, 88, 91.
• Lewine Mair & Ben Fenton. "Changing sex is a golf handicap". Daily Telegraph. 23 May 1996. Online at: www.pfc.org.uk/node/1005.  No Longer Available.
• Richard Ekins. Male femaling: a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing. London & New York: Routledge. 1997: 43.
• Mike Andrew. "Major Lewen Tugwell - the man behind the product". Shattaline: Its History, products and Processes, 2011-05-17.  www.weydonian.net/shattaline/3_tugwell.html
• "Shattaline".  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattaline.  No Longer Available.
• Angela (one of Judy's daughters).  Email, Oct 30, 2011.

BFI    

___________________________________________________________

Apparently Judy was quite insensitive to the other meanings of the word ‘shaft’.

It is amazing how quickly Judy and SHAFT have disappeared from the record.   SHAFT was the major UK group for transsexuals before Press For Change.

Persons who visited both London and Toronto in the 1980s commented how much Judy Cousins and Susan Huxford had in common: they both were in the British Army in India, they had similar conservative attitudes and opinions, and both ran major transsexual groups.

Rachael Webb (1940 - 2009) lorry driver, housing officer, councillor, activist.

Tim knew from age six that he wanted to be a girl. He had little formal education but was self-educated by reading Marx and the 1950s existentialists. He was a beatnik, and an activist in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and spent time in the existential and gay scene in Soho. He did drugs to suppress the idea that he might be transsexual.

In 1967 he consulted with the Maudsley Hospital in London and started taking female hormones. However he married a woman, they had two children and he stopped taking the hormones. By 1972 he had broken up with his wife and restarted on hormones. However he then married again, qualified for a Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) license, became a long-distance lorry driver, and had two more children.

When this marriage finished in 1978, he was prescribed hormones by his family doctor in King’s Lynn, and saw Dr Randall at Charing Cross Hospital and started transition as Rachael. Female long-distance lorry drivers were not permitted at that date. Rachael became an active feminist, and was a member of the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party. She moved to London and worked as a housing officer with the Borough of Southwark. She was in the Self Help Association for Transsexuals (SHAFT) for a while but did not get on with Judy Cousins who ran it.  Rachael was expelled for being too radical.

From Bodyshock

Rachael became notorious in the press in 1983 when she used a £2,000 loan, available to all council employees, to pay for her operation (others used it as a deposit for a mortgage). The same year she was part of the campaign to elect Peter Tatchell in Bermondsey which encountered homophobia from left, right and centre. Rachael was left with a feeling of ‘personal inauthenticity’ and for a while was a patient of existentialist psychiatrist R.D. Laing. In 1986 she was elected as a Labour member of the London borough council of Lambeth.

Rachael’s personal collection of material was one of the first donations towards Richard Ekins’ Trans-Gender Archives. She was featured in Hodgkinson’s Bodyshock, Jane Jackson’s film and wrote a paper for Ekins and King’s Blending Genders. In the first she is quoted:

“We transsexuals have nothing to gain from our attempts to gain legitimacy and respectability from the medical profession. We confuse ourselves and other people by trying to adopt a false identity, and pretending that we are real women (1987: 108)”.

In the third she emphasises that she is a Radical Feminist, a constructed woman, and endorses the views of Janice Raymond:

“My position is rooted in a basic acceptance of feminist arguments concerning the misogynist nature of society and in the belief that male transsexuals perpetuate misogyny when they indulge in a manipulative game of getting others to collude in their fantasy that they are women. ...

I never cease to wonder at the number of men who express some sort of dissatisfaction with their identities and roles as men. I believe this is always connected with envy of women, particularly an envy of their ability to procreate. I think it is imperative that such feelings are brought out into the open and recognised for what they are, so that we can deal with them in a constructive rather than destructive way. For this reason we must create an environment in which we can admit to our feelings, even if this leads us to reject sex reassignment procedures. ...

Without claiming to be the most convincing transsexual there is, I am able to say that those who do not know my history do assume that I am a woman, born as such. I still believe that there is a problem with this however. To what extent am I, and others like me, causing harm by indulging in my fantasy?”.

After eight years as a councillor, Rachael returned to continental lorry driving, and became an activist in the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU). She was a delegate to the lorry drivers regional trade group, a member of the regional women’s committee, the regional LGBT working party, delegate to the two Labour Party conferences and the union’s delegate conference. She fought for equal wages and conditions for truck drivers across the EU. She was the TGWU delegate to the ITF conference for women transport workers in London in September 2005.

At age 66 she semi-retired and merely worked part-time.

Rachael died at a time of her own choosing at age 69.

• Liz Hodgkinson. Bodyshock: the truth about changing sex. London: Columbus, 1987:102-8.
• Jane Jackson (dir). Sex Change - Shock! Horror! Probe. Scr: Kristiene Clarke, with Rachael Webb and others. UK TV Channel 4 50 mins 1989.
• Terri Webb. “Autobiographical Fragments From a Transsexual Activist”. In Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds). Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing. London & New York: Routledge 1996.
• Richard Ekins. Male femaling: a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing. London & New York: Routledge. 1997: 45,97.
• Rachael Webb. “Working life”. Transport International Online, 26 Jan 2007.  Archive. 
• Fiona Fox. “Tribute to Rachael Webb...”. Fiona Fox’s Tales, 4 Feb 2009. http://foxstales.blogspot.com/2009/02/tribute-to-rachael-webb.html.

_______________________________________________________________________________

The two Ekins references refer to Terri Webb, formerly Rachael.  Presumably she changed her mind and went back to Rachael.

Maggie Fiona Fox published an email from Rachael on her blog, which is valuable.  However Maggie then published a rant in February this year on TS-SI, attempting to posthumously convert Rachael into an HBS/CT activist.  It should be apparent from her life and writings that she was nothing of that sort.

Richard Ekins (194?–) jazz musician, sociologist, psychoanalyst.

++ updated August 2012, March 2014

++Teenage Richard Ekins was a fan of New Orleans jazz.  Inspired by the legendary trumpeter DeDe La Croix Pierce (1904 - 73), he played the same instrument in New Orleans-style jazz bands mainly in and around Birmingham, firstly with the Burgundy Street Stompers in 1964, before teaming up with pianist Bob Barton to co-lead the Crescent City Stompers from 1966 to 1968.  On his first visit to New Orleans in 1966 he encountered Joseph 'Kid Twat' Butler, bass player with the Kid Thomas Band, who had never seen such a tall, long-haired and heavily-bearded man, and bowed down proclaiming: Here come de Lord!".  The moniker stuck.  Lord Richard set up his own record label,  La Croix Records, and released seven LPs by both British and New Orleans musicians. The famous Kid Thomas Band recorded live in 1968 at Kohlman’s Tavern in New Orleans was one of his projects.
  

Richard also did a Ll.B Hons in Law at the University of Birmingham in 1966, and then a PhD on the work of philosopher and social psychologist George Mead at the University of London where he was influenced by Margaret Coulson & Carol Riddell's pioneering introductory textbook on sociology. ++He fathered two sons named after his record label and a jazz hero:  Matthew La Croix Ekins (1974-) and Luke Baptiste Ekins (1977-) - named for Willie Baptiste, the banjo player++.  Richard completed his PhD in 1978 after an extended period with Mead disciple David L. Miller at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the Mead Archive at the University of Chicago.


Ekins chose transvestites and transsexuals as the empirical domain to which he would apply his theoretical training.

"As a student of the sociology of knowledge, I approached the area in terms of the interrelations between the various ‘knowledges’ in the area, conceptualized in terms of three principal ‘knowledges’: those of ‘science’, those of ‘members’ (of transgendered people), and those of ‘everyday life’."

Ekins and Dave King first met at the British Sociological Conference on Gender in Manchester in 1982.

"My work was based upon observations of what later became several thousands of transgendered people, extended interviews with several hundred informants, and detailed life-long life history work with several dozen informants from a number of different continents. From the outset I took care to follow selected informants in the full range of their social settings. This often entailed detailed observational and interview work with medical and related professionals, with the families of my transgendered informants, and with the various service providers to trans people, such as beauticians and hair care specialists. At the same time, I immersed myself into the full range of transgender ‘community’ events such as private meetings, drag balls, erotic networks, and so on. (2006:8)"

He started at the University of Ulster at Coleraine as a senior lecturer in sociology in 1984, by which time he had developed his signature jargon of 'femaling'. In 1986 he established the Trans-Gender Archive with himself as director. This is probably the earliest textual use of 'transgender' in the collective sense, although the term had been used orally with that meaning in Britain as early as The First National TV.TS Conference in 1974 at Leeds, and was so used on BBC Radio in 1979. Ekins contributed towards the definition of Transgender in the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 1989 Ekins obtained a M.Med.Sc in psychotherapy from Queen's University, Belfast. In 1995 he switched to being a senior lecturer in psychology. In 1996 he completed his training as a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society and International Psychoanalytical Society.  In 1996 Ekins and King edited a collection of papers, Blending genders: social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing, with contributions from both trans persons (Mark Rees, Phaedra Kelly, Rachel Terri Webb, Stephen Whittle) and from academics (Neil Buhrich, Janice Raymond).  The next year Ekins published Male Femaling: a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing. (Review) Ekins also published books on psychoanalysis. 

In 1999 Ekins and King published "Towards a sociology of transgendered bodies" in The Sociological Review, where they summarized their position:

"Transgendering refers both to the idea of moving across (transferring) from one pre-existing gender category to another (either temporarily or permanently), and to the idea of transcending or living ‘beyond gender’ altogether. Following Plummer’s (1995) work on sexual stories, we distinguish a number of contemporary transgendering body stories which we consider in terms of four major modes or styles of body transgendering: those we identify as ‘migrating’, ‘oscillating’, ‘erasing’ and ‘transcending’. We give illustrative examples of each mode with reference to the binary male/female divide, the interrelations between sex, sexuality and gender, and the interrelations between the four main sub-processes of transgendering, which we identify as ‘substituting’, ‘concealing’, ‘implying’ and ‘redefining’."

Also in 1999, Ekins and King met Anne Lawrence at the 6th Biennial Harry Benjamin Conference in London. They sort of incorporated her ideas into Ekins' concept of erotic femaling, and in 2001 published “Transgendering, Migrating and Love of Oneself as a Woman: A Contribution to a Sociology of Autogynephilia”. Unlike the Blanchardians they see autogynephilia in MTFs as very similar to that in cis women.

“In our judgement, our framework provides the conceptual wherewithal to unpack such issues in a way denied to the taxonomic, typological and diagnostic approach followed by Blanchard.”

Ekins was Reader in Cultural and Media Studies from 2002, and Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies from 2006.

In 2009 Ekins and King published The Transgender Phenomenon, which expanded the program that they had proposed in "Towards a sociology of transgendered bodies", 2006.   The book heavily features Virginia Prince, to the point of including an extensive biography, and is one of the very few books to discuss Charlotte Bach.  And the same year they published a book devoted exclusively to Prince and her writings.

Since retirement, Ekins  has completed an MA in Popular Music Studies at the University of Liverpool and is currently working for a PhD in Musicology at Goldsmiths, University of London. and has returned to recording jazz-revival CDs.

++The Trans-Gender Archive had never been inventoried.  After retirement Ekins offered the collection to the London School of Economics’ LGBT Hall-Carpenter Archive, but was told it would not be accepted because of a lack of an inventory listing what it contained.  They also insisted that they would need him to get rid of any items subject to copyright or containing personal information like addresses.  He then accepted an offer from Aaron Devor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, who arranged for it to be shipped to Victoria.  Other possible UK sites were not consulted.  

*not the Oxford law tutorial fellow

• Richard Ekins. ‘G. H. Mead: Contributions to a Philosophy of Sociological Knowledge’, PhD thesis, University of London, 1978.
• Richard Ekins.‘Male Transsexualism, Sociological Analysis and Some Problems of the Double Hermeneutic’, Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, Manchester. 1982.
• Richard Ekins. (1983) "The Assignment of Motives as a Problem in the Double Hermeneutic: the Case of Transvestism and Transsexuality, Annual Conference of the Sociological Association of Ireland, Wexford, 1983.
• Richard Ekins. "Facets of Femaling in Some Relations Between Sex, Sexuality and Gender", Annual Conference of the Sociological Association of Ireland, Drogheda. 1984.
• Richard Ekins. "News from Around the World - In Their Own Words: Interview with Dr. Richard Ekins of the Trans-Gender Archive, University of Ulster". Renaissance News, The Chrysalis Interview, 1 (5), 1987: 4-5.
• Richard Ekins. "Building a Trans-Gender Archive: On the classification and framing of trans-gender knowledge". Beaumont Trust International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester, 1990. www.gender.org.uk/conf/1990/90ekins.htm.
• Richard Ekins. ‘On Male Femaling: A Grounded Theory Approach to Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing’, The Sociological Review, 41 (1): 1–29, 1993.
• Richard Ekins & Ruth Freeman (ed). Centres and Peripheries of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Psychoanalytic Studies. Karnac Books, 1994.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds). Blending genders: social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing. London and New York: Routledge. 1996.
• Richard Ekins. Male femaling: a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing. London & New York: Routledge. 1997.
• Richard Ekins (ed). Selected Writings of Anna Freud. Penguin, 1998.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Towards a sociology of transgendered bodies". The Sociological Review, 47:580–602, 1999.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Telling Body Transgendering Stories". In Kathryn Backett-Milburn & Linda McKie (eds). Constructing Gendered Bodies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. “Transgendering, Migrating and Love of Oneself as a Woman: A Contribution to a Sociology of Autogynephilia”. International Journal of Transgenderism, 5,3, www.wpath.org/journal/www.iiav.nl/ezines/web/IJT/97-03/numbers/symposion/ijtvo05no03_01.htm.
• Richard Ekins. Unconscious Mental Life and Reality. Karnac Books, 2002.
• Dave Senior. "Dan Pawson's Artesian Hall Stompers in the 60's - The Forgotten Recordings". Jazzgazette, 2004. Online at: http://home.scarlet.be/davesenior/AHS%20in%20the%2060.htm.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Rethinking 'Who put the 'Trans' in Transgender?" GENDYS 2004, The 8th International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester. www.gender.org.uk/conf/2004/04ekins.htm.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Transgendering, Men, and Masculinities". In J. Hearn, M. Kimmel and R. Connell (eds). Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. London & New Delhi: Sage, 2005: 379-394.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. The Transgender Phenomenon. London: Thousand Oaks; California: Sage. 2006.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds), with a forward by Susan Stryker. Virginia Prince: Pioneer of Transgendering. Haworth Press Inc., Paperback: 65 pages 2006. Essays about and by Virginia Prince.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Pioneers of Transgendering: The Life and Work of Virginia Prince". GENDYS 2k, The Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester Eng. www.gender.org.uk/conf/2000/king20.htm. 2006.
• David Valentine. Imagining Transgender: an ethnography of a category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007: 262n2.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "Transgender, Transvestism, and Transsexualism". In G. Ritzer (ed). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007: 5037-5043.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. "The Emergence of New Transgendering Identities in the Age of the Internet". In S. Hines and T. Sanger (eds). Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity. London: Routledge, 2010.
• Amy Smart.  "University of Victoria transgender archive gets a European boost".  Times Colonist, July 12, 2013.   www.timescolonist.com/news/local/university-of-victoria-transgender-archive-gets-a-european-boost-1.523095.
• Alice Hutton.  "Unique transgender archive sent to Canadian university after offer to LSE is rebuffed".  Camden New Journal, 18 July 2013.   www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2013/jul/unique-transgender-archive-sent-canadian-university-after-offer-lse-rebuffed. 
•  Catherine Baker.  "The ethics of archive acquisitions: why couldn’t an important collection of British trans history stay in the UK?".  22 July 2013.  http://bakercatherine.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/the-ethics-of-archive-acquisitions-why-couldnt-an-important-collection-of-british-trans-history-stay-in-the-uk.

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The OED definition of transgender which Ekins contributed to is

“Of, relating to, or designating a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender, but combines or moves between these; transgendered.  Although often used (esp. among participants in transgender lifestyles) as a generic and inclusive term which deliberately avoids categorizations such as transsexual or transvestite, in wider use transgender is sometimes used synonymously with these more specific terms.”

The books by Ekins and King are not just sociology, they are also history.  There are incidents recorded in their books that  I have not found elsewhere.  The use of 'transgender' on BBC radio mentioned above;  Stephen Whittle being active in the UK branch of Angela Douglas' TAO.  Anybody like myself researching history and biography will find the books essential for this alone.

While Ekins and King have taken Blanchardian ideas into their theorizing, I cannot find any examples of reciprocation. 

In fact I cannot find any critical discussions of Ekins' work outside the circle around Kenneth Plummer.

Ekins seems to be quite insensitive to the fact that many, perhaps most, trans persons find the term ‘male femaling’ to be offensive.  He also uses ‘transgendered' which is now rejected by many, probably most, transgender persons, but that point was not not commonly made back in 2006.

On the last page of Male Femaling, 1997, he mentions the lack of studies of male maling and female femaling.   We are still waiting. 

The Transgender Phenomenon give an  amazingly uncritical account of the Blanchardian ideas, and dismisses the  opposition in merely a few words:  "a concerted campaign has been fought in an attempt to discredit this book alongside the work of Blanchard and Lawrence (see Conway, 2004; James, 2004)".   What happened to the interrelations of the the three knowledges?  Surely, against what Ekins had promised us, this is a privileging of professional knowledge.

Likewise the book is weak on criticism of Prince, and does not consider the damage that her homophobia and transgenderphobia did.  The book was published in 2006 and therefore does not mention HBS which started only in that year.  Prince was as much against transgender diversity as the HBS people are, and Ekins does not make this clear.  See the comparisons here.


Fortunately the term ‘male femaling’ has not taken off.  It is not the case that he uses the American single l rather than the British double ll (compare modeling and modelling).  The dropped ‘e’ requires a single l or else the pronunciation changes.

Why 'Trans-Gender'?  ""The use of the hyphen was in homage to ‘psycho-analysis’. ‘Psycho-analysis’ as opposed to ‘psychoanalysis’ represented, until very recently, commitments to purity, integrity and authenticity in some quarters. Indeed, the British Psycho-Analytical Society still retains the hyphen. (2006:14-15)".

Richard Ekins has been hanging around trans events etc since 1979.  He says not a word about whether he ever did participate, whether as sociological participant observation, for the simple fun of it, as an exercise in performativity, or to understand better what he was watching.


In Surya Monro's GenderPolitics, which was published in 2005, a year before The Trangender Phenomenon, on the second page of the introduction, we find: "I keeping with the usual norm, I shall identify myself at this stage as a female-bodied bisexual, who does not identify as trans in any substantial way at present, but who has explored some trans identities in the past."  Despite his higher rank, Ekins does not feel that he can be as open about himself.   Maybe it is a difference of generations.          

Note to US readers:  what is called a professor in the US is a lecturer in the UK.  A UK professorship is top rank in the department.                                                                                                                                                                                                

Usually when I profile a musician I include a video of them performing, or, failing that, a link to a site where the person's music can be sampled.  I found neither.

Brenda Lana Smith, consul, activist.

Brenda Lana Smith has a small but important part in our history. You can read about her in Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, and Richard F. Docter. Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christine Jorgensen, and the Cleis Press' 2000 edition of Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography.


In her male phase she was a long-time resident of Bermuda and was the Honorary Danish Consul. This led to the bestowment of Ridder af Dannebrogorden (R af D). After a divorce after 29 years of marriage with a son and daughter, Brenda completed transition with surgery with Stanley Biber in 1984. Brenda was introduced to Christine Jorgensen by Sister Mary Elizabeth, and became Christine's housemate for the last six months of her life, and arranged her estate at her death. Later Brenda moved back to England. She has remained active for transsexual rights, and especially against the lack of gay and transsexual rights in Bermuda where the Gender Recognition Act and other UK civil rights acts do not apply.

A few days ago Stephen Whittle commented on this blog:

Brenda,
How lovely to hear you are still alive and kicking so to speak. At this age, one tends to presume the worst far too often.
Is your autobiography on the press yet. Or do we really have to wait until you are gone.
love, Stephen (Whittle) .

 

Brenda has replied:

Greetings, all… especially to Stephen (Whittle OBE—a blast from my
past…)

Rest assured that this otherwise reclusive 76-year-old Anglo-Danish
Mancunian born Bermudian exile is particularly alive and kicking when
it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity being individually
separate and distinct entities that need to be regarded and legislated
as such in much needed amendments to Bermuda's present gay and gender-variant omissive Human Rights Law...

That done and dusted…

As most folk will have probably observed I am not given to bantering
online... this is not so much that I dislike confrontational
situations or that I might diplomatically prefer not to unnecessarily
fuel volatile situations with my two cents' worth... but, since my
early pre World War 2 school days, due to what is now termed Attention Deficit Disorder impeding my committing on paper/online what I might readily articulate…

Whether publicly or privately... we gender-variant folk all seem to
hold that our own particular manifestation of dissociative gender
identification is unique... often deep down believing that we
individually hold the proprietary format on all matters gender-
variant... and… divided by semantics idealistically bicker between
ourselves to that end…the end result is that none of us tend to
countenance our peers lightly… no doubt subconsciously looking for
imperfections that we have yet to come to terms with within our own
selves...

My own metaphysical belief in that we need search inwardly for the
answer to whatever over attracts or irks us gave rise to the
therapeutic content of not only my partially electronically
transcribed journals, but my still self-searching twenty-two year-old
musing: "a'top a dung-hill..." with its some 200-plus A4 page small
print roots in what is a now politically incorrect 1950s mind-set...
remains "a work in progress" procrastinating on my 2.66GHz Intel iMac,
in much need of my editing, and properly punctuating by a grammarian
before ever being photographically embellished and archived for
posterity, whatever…

One thing for sure… while my failing memory is increasingly in the
habit of relying on extracts to support or illustrate an occasional
argument online… any publisher of "a'top a dung-hill…" whose author
The Gender Genie thinks is male… will certainly have a field day
posthumously endeavouring to commercial address my dyslexic 'stream of consciousness' style musing...

So, I while I need not worry about being unable to claim immunity
behind:

"Kindly appreciate that Brenda Lana Smith R.af D. having had no
editorial input whatsoever in the above declines to entertain e-mail
argument on its content..."

A diplomatic fence-sitting rider that I long ago attached on articles
I had gleaned and once widely conduited—that are now posted sans rider on "From brendalana's Archives…" < http://www.bermudasucks.com/forum/index.php?topic=3038.0
My present bloated unresolved concern raised by "Is your autobiography on the press yet, Or do we really have to wait until you are gone…" is to whom I now best leave my archives and memorabilia, etc... to honourably enjoy after I am gone…

Brenda Lana Smith R af D
Cornwall 2009-09-08