This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1800 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.

There is a detailed Index arranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

Showing posts with label TS-TS marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TS-TS marriage. Show all posts

26 July 2015

Maritza/Mark Cummings (1964–) Part II: serial monogamy and dissent

Continued from Part I. 

In 2012 Mark met his second wife female partner, Jessica Lynn (1974 - ), in a transgender show girl bar. Jessica transitioned in her 30s with the help of a therapist after two failed suicide attempts and a few years as a gay man. She took Mark's surname even before though they were married never registered their relationship. They had each others name tattooed on their bodies.
"In spite of our differences, Aries and Cancer, I have never loved anyone as much as I love her".
They started the internet program Transition Radio, which featured extensive video interviews with various US trans persons and others. A recreational vehicle was purchased, they set up a new blog Transgender Highway and traveled around the US. Mark published a health guide for travelers.
In 2013 their relationship was featured in both The New York Post and The Daily Mail.
Mark and Jessica

In 2014 Mark was interviewed in LGBTQIA where he spoke about how he felt
"honored to be part of the many great inspirational Trans men that [Lynn Conway] has showcased on her site. Success is a very personal word and means many different things to many people. I personally believe that being successful means being happy with who you are and what you have accomplished." and "“I believe being transgender is a gift a Spiritual awakening that is manifesting in physical form … We as transgender individuals have a major responsibility to enlighten the world. Instead we are blending in and doing much of the same, this solves nothing and that is why we continue the hamster wheel".
Later that year, Mark was told that he had been selected for the 2014 GLAAD Trans100, (a list that seems to have been removed from the internet).  However he made critical statements about Janet Mock and her interview by Piers Morgan. He was then deselected. On his Facebook page he wrote:
"I am seeing a very strange twist in our community, and why are we all of a sudden admiring individuals who have recently come out as advocates with little to no experience in that role. One is an actress, the other stealth for many years working at Peoples magazine behind a cubicle and now decides to write a book and is identifying as a fierce advocate? Both trans woman of color, which seems to be a very prominent twist these days as if they are the only ones in the trans community who have suffered and constantly harp on how bad they have it, leaving behind the rest of us. Separating themselves, creating their own groups and associations and hijacking the community at large."
For this he was denounced as prejudiced against persons of color. In July Mark and Jessica sympathetically interviewed Cathy Brennan, the Maryland attorney associated with antagonism towards trans persons. Shortly afterwards they broke up as a couple.

Mark's third wife is Lynna Lopez who also took his surname when they married in June 2015.
Lynna & Mark
“Falling in love for the first time in my life has allowed me to feel my true nature, which
is my feminine self".
Lynna is now co-host on Transition Radio, which has changed its message. Mark now denounces the therapist and surgeon who enabled him to transition:
“I went on Testosterone, and 5 months later, I had my precious breast and my amazing reproductive organs ripped out of me, all in a quest to be a ‘man’. What sane person does this, and what medical professional who swears to do no harm goes along with this diabolical plan? I am sorry but now that I have come to my senses and see what this vile community has become, I see the reason for the vileness and the darkness in its intent.”
Transition Radio lost all its sponsors, and Lynn Conway removed Mark form her Successful Trans Men site. Mark/Maritza is also now speaking out against supporting trans kids and especially against prescribing puberty blockers to them. The New York Times gave him a platform where he argued that no-one should transition before their mid-20s.  He has said: "And it’s usually a Munchausen by proxy-driven mother and it’s always a kind of wimpy dad-kind of thing going on, mom wears the pants in the family.”

 Transition Radio featured DirtyWhiteBoi, who in return published an interview on her blog with Matitza:
"I always felt different but never the typical programed response the community harps on. In my opinion there is no such thing as being born in the wrong body. It’s a neurological impairment, behavioral and mental issue, nothing wrong with the body. … I think much different now. But unfortunately, the changes are so deep, that it is hard to go back. I do identify as a female, I will never deny my truth. … I regret all my surgeries, they are butchery and not necessary. Hysto and top surgery. … I got sick of the trans community and how they badger people. I saw the vile behavior, the lies, I could not longer be part of that. They have deeper issues than gender problems and are in denial about it. Its time the gender specialists stepped up and did their job and looked at the deeper issues."
When Dawn Ennis writing for The Advocate asked Mark to nominate a sponsor or well-known public figure to speak on his behalf, he suggested Cathy Brennan.  Mark still chooses to be addressed by male pronouns as that has been the case for the 12 past years.  He says that  he and Lopez now identify  as “two-spirit” or “gender-variant,” saying, “We all have this duality".
TransitionRadio    Vidensbanken     TransgenderHighway
_____________________________________________________


With each wife, Cummings discovers love for the first time!!   A gentleman would not take that attitude to his previous wives.

"And it’s usually a Munchausen by proxy-driven mother and it’s always a kind of wimpy dad-kind of thing going on, mom wears the pants in the family.”  This is of course a return to Robert Stoller, the 1950s and the sexist idea that homosexuality, transgender and many other psychoanalytic conditions are caused by a weak absent father and a dominant mother.

Whether or not Cummings is racist, to denounce him as prejudiced against 'persons of color' is problematical as he himself is Hispanic.

Whilst not aligning with Cummings' position, some of the issues that he has raised should be getting more discussion within the trans community: 
  • The issue of the increase in numbers of trans persons over the last 50 years as due to the toxic chemicals in the environment has the virtue of being the only theory that explins the increase in numbers.   The classic account is by Christine Johnson, 2004.  PDF.   It is summarized in Deborah Rudacille's The Riddle of Gender, 2006, Chp  7.
  • the increasing practice of adulating trans persons when they step out of the closet or from stealth and shunting aside the activists who have been working for years or decades.  Cummings was rather careless in naming only black celebrities.  He should have paid more attention to what happened to Peter Tatchell.   There is no shortage of white celebrities who could have been mentioned: Bono, Beck, Maloney, Jenner.

 ______________________________________________________________________________

Dawn Ennis' article on the Cummings includes "Brennan’s statement, however, contradicts a February finding by researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine who concluded 'there is increasing evidence of a biological basis for gender identity'."   As Gender Identity Watch was delighted to point out, this sentence is not to be found in the journal article in question.   The claim was not needed for Ennis's article, and it was a sloppy error to make. 
Time: 36 comments:
Labels: , , ,

11 May 2014

Raven Kaldera (?–) shaman

Kaldera has congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Kaldera was introduced to Wicca by a boyfriend at age 14, and wandered through various pagan and earth-centered traditions including Dianic and Umbanda.

Despite being masculine, Kaldera became a wife and the mother of a daughter, and was planning to be a science fiction writer and a folk musician, until a near-death experience while battling with lupus.
"During this drawn-out illness, I had a massive vision of the goddess who had been involved with me throughout my life.”
She revealed herself as Hela, the Norse goddess of death.
"She hung me up, tore me apart like a butchered animal and rebuilt me. When I came to, I was different. I lost some fears, I lost some memories, I lost some personality traits, and there were some new things. I’d always been able to sense ghosts but now could see them much more clearly. I’d always been able to vaguely sense the presence of gods and divine entities, but suddenly they were there, like an electric fence."
Hela told Kaldera to become a man, an option he had already been considering. He took testosterone and had chest surgery.
“It was a gamble, it was a leap in the dark, but it was absolutely wonderful. For me it was sacred shape-shifting. OK, socially it’s been very difficult, but y’know, it’s hard to be a minority. The irony was that I went through my second puberty at 30, around the same time my daughter went through normal puberty.”
Later the god Baphomet arrived and talked to Kaldera.
"The reason that he, or she, liked me is that he’s a hermaphroditic god. He can shift back and forth, but he’s always mixed. I’ve lent him my body. In Afro-Caribbean terms, I’m a ‘horse’, in that I will lend my body consensually to god-possession under certain circumstances or rituals. He makes sure, while he’s using my body, to leave me a lesson of some kind.”
Raven is a northern shaman, mainly working in the Norse tradition, devoted to gods from all three pantheons: Aesir, Vanir and Rokkr, but with some input from other traditions. He sees his tribe as those who are transgender/ third gender. He is also into polyamory and the spiritual aspects of BDSM:
“If you put BDSM into a spiritual context, it’s not a question of if something deep will come up; it’s a question of when".
He is the leader or king of the Neo-Pagan First Kingdom Church of Asphodel. His wife of 13 years is Bella, a trans women. They own and run Cauldron Farm, a pagan homestead in Hubbardston in rural Massachusetts, where they live with his daughter, who still calls him 'Mum'.

Much of what he has written is controversial and is rejected by other neo-pagan groups, particularly the emphasis on ordeal, the fact that he has a boyfriend-slave, and is into domination that features pain and violence. He has written 33 books.
CauldronFarm   PaganBDSM   RavenKaldera   KingdomofAsphodel   NAFPS   RunatyrKindred    LGBTran    WorldCat    Amazon
Time: No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

07 February 2012

Ruthie and Eddie. dress-designer, horse trainer.

Ruthie, a male-bodied dress-designer, took up with Eddie, a female-bodied horse-trainer, in El Paso, Texas in the 1930s. The used to act up together in gay bars, and were advised that their marriage was “urgently advisable”. They loved the idea that they could wear each other’s clothes.

Pat Highsmith, who met them in 1940 on a trip home from college, wrote: “Each would have liked the other’s body for his own to put clothes on ... [T]hey were ... finding the greatest pleasure in the world in buying clothes for each other - which neither wore - and which soon were taken back and worn by each respectively - which was what they’d wanted after all.”
  • Patricia Highsmith. Cahiers, 4 September 1940. Unpublished.
  • Joan Schenkar. The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009: 136.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
We know of Ruthie and Eddie only because Pat Highsmith wrote about them in her notebooks, and then because Joan Schenkar used the anecdote in her biography of Highsmith.   How many tens of thousands are lost to history?
Time: No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

15 January 2008

Barbara (1913 - 1963 ) & Lauren Wilcox (1906 - ) transheterosexuality pioneers

When speaking of transgender persons the term 'heterosexual' is best used for persons who encouple with a person going in the other direction, that is an MTF with an FTM. Here is the first known such couple to attain surgery.

----

Edward Richards attended Pomona College, Los Angeles in the 1930s where he shared a dorm with Arnold Lowman, the future Virginia Prince, and then worked as a salesman in Los Angeles.

In July 1941, as Barbara Ann Richards, she was featured in the press as she petitioned the Superior Court of California to change her name and to become legally a woman. Her story was that two years earlier changes to feminine had occurred spontaneously, that she was a hermaphrodite. An endocrinologist, Marcus Graham, presented her case at a medical conference, attributing the change to an hormonal imbalance resulting from a childhood illness. 

However at a hearing in October at which the judge granted the legal change, a medical report revealed that she had been taking female hormone injections.

Lorraine Richards played the role of a devoted wife, but in 1944, away from media attention, she also had a sex change and became Barbara’s husband.

They were both only-children , and married twice: first in their gender roles as assigned at birth, and again after both had transitioned. They had met Karl Bowman and Alfred Kinsey, and the latter referred them to Harry Benjamin who became their hormone prescriber.

They were friends of Louise Lawrence, the prolific networker who brought so many early transgender persons together. The newspaper accounts of Richards were inspirations to Virginia Prince. Barbara had her final surgery in 1956 from Elmer Belt.

Barbara died 1963 of a coronary

  • “’Man’ Asks Legal Right to Assume Woman Status”. Los Angeles Examiner. July 3, 1941.
  • Barbara Ann Richards, as told to Bart Lytton. “Nature Betrayed My Body”. Sensation. Nov 1941, 88.
  • “Young Bride Won’t Leave Mate Who’s Victim of Sex Change”. Oakland Tribune. July 4, 1941
  • Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 39-41, 48.
-------------------------------

In Leah Cahan Schaefer & Connie Christine Wheeler. “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 24:1 Feb 1995: 4-5 Barbara and Lauren are referred to as  Carol and Christian. 























Time: 3 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)