Rachel Pollack (1945 - 2023) novelist, poet, Tarot grand master.

Pollack was raised Jewish in Brooklyn, New York. He did a BA in English at New York University and a masters at Claremont Graduate School in California.

In 1971 Pollack declared herself as a transsexual, and as a lesbian (an almost unknown position at that time). Rachel, and her wife Edith, moved to London and Rachel became the contact person for the Gay Liberation Front TV/TS group, which is how she met Roz Kaveney, and together they formed a transvestite presence at the GLF meetings. Rachel and Edith were misunderstood in different ways by both GLF and the political lesbians, but raised issues by their very presence. In line with the magical reality of her fiction, Rachel challenged the biological definition of women. Edith was active in the Women’s Liberation Front.

Rachel moved on to Amsterdam, where she started on hormones and then had surgery from Philip Lamaker in 1976. This was done without counselling in that she obviously knew what she was doing.

She returned to the US and has successfully pursued a career as a writer. Her Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best novel of the year 1989.

In 1990 at age 45 she had a bat mitzvah, 30 years after her bar mitzvah.

In 1992 she wrote “Abandonment to the Body’s Desire” in Rites of Passage:

"the trance-sexual woman sacrifices her social identity as a male, her personal history, and finally the very shape of her body to a knowledge, a desire, which overpowers all rational understanding and proof".

Her emphasis has been and remains that transsexuality is a passion, and certainly not a sickness. In 1993 Rachel spoke on trans issues to the Council of Europe, and also at the International Conference of the Harry Benjamin Association.

From 1993-5 she revived the Doom Patrol comic book and introduced, Coagula, a trans character.

She was a contributor to TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism. In a 1997 paper for the Transsexual New Telegraph (as Rites of Passage had become), she wrote:

“What sense does it make to label some people as true transsexuals, and others as secondary, or confused, or imitation? Whom does such an attitude serve? I can think of no one but the gatekeepers, those who would seize the power of life and death by demanding that transsexuals satisfy an arbitrary standard. To accept such standards, to rank ourselves and others according to a hierarchy of true transsexuality, to try to recast our own histories to make sure they fit the approved model, can only tear us down, all of us, even the ones lucky enough to match that model.”

Rachel’s Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, 1997.

Anne Lawrence cites Rachel as a major influence and includes two essays on her site, and Catherine Platine quotes her “words of wisdom” from her “Archetypal Transsexuality”:

"Transsexuality comes to us with all the power of a divine force who will not be denied. If we recognize it and accept it as a true vision of the self from the deepest part of the psyche, if we carry the Goddess with us .....then we may find it opens us to a life of spirituality and joy. If we try to deny or belittle it, or explain it away, it can destroy us. Knowing ignorance is strength. Ignoring knowledge is sickness. If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.".

Her 2002 novel, A Secret Woman, has a police detective who is both trans and Jewish.

In 2003 she published The Body of the Goddess: Sacred Wisdom in Myth, Landscape and Culture.

She is an expert on the tarot, and has written many books on its interpretation. She wrote the text for the tarot decks of Salvador Dali and Hermann Haindl, has designed her own tarot deck, and worked with Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman on the Vertigo Tarot Deck.

She suffered for some years from  Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and died from it at age 77. 

• Rachel Pollack. “Abandonment to the Body’s Desire”. Rites of Passage, 1992. Reprinted: www.annelawrence.com/abandonment.html. Reprinted again in Noach Dzmura (ed). Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in the Jewish Community. North Atlantic Books, 2010.
• Rachel Pollack. “Archetypal Transsexuality”. 1995. www.annelawrence.com/archetypal.html.
• Rachel Pollack. “Aphrodite: Transsexual Goddess of Passion”. Journal of Archetypal Psychology, Spring 1995.
• Rachel Pollack. “What is to be done? A Commentary on the Recommended Guidelines” In Gianna E. Israel & Donald E. Tarver. Transgender Care: Recommended Guidelines, Practical Information, and Personal Accounts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997: 229-35, 269.
• Rachel Pollack. “The Varieties of Transsexual Experience”, 7 Transsexual News Telegraph 18, 20, 1997.
• “Transgender Jews”. Lilith, Spring 2002.
• Rachel Pollack. “The Transsexual Book of the Dead: Osiris and the Trance Man”. In Dean Kotula. The Phallus Palace: Female to Male Transsexuals. Los Angeles, Calif: Alyson Publications, 2002.
• Cathryn Platine. “The Wisdom of Direct Knowledge”. 2003. http://gallae.com/gnostic.html.
• Rachel Pollack. The Body of the Goddess. London: Vega, 2003.
• Mair Davies. “Rachel Pollack” in W11 in the 1970s, 2006. http://maironline.com/bobby/w11/09rachel.htm.
• Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong.  "Writer Rachel Pollack, who reimagined the practice of tarot, dies at 77".  NPR, April 19, 2023.  Online.

EN.Wikipedia     www.rachelpollack.com    Tarotpedia

Louis Gooren (1943 - ) endocrinologist.

Louis Gooren was born in Wanssum, in the Netherlands. He was educated at the medical school of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, 1962-70, and then trained in internal medicine and endocrinology at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) of Amsterdam, 1972-6.

In 1975 he founded the gender clinic at the Free University Hospital. In 1976 he studied with John Money at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was registered as a specialist in in internal medicine and endocrinology in 1977, and completed his PhD on testicular hormones in 1981.

In 1988 he became the Professor of Endocrinology at the special chair of Transsexology at the Free University.

He is also interested in male aging, and co-edited two books on the subject.

He is highly critical of Michael Bailey’s book. He was featured in the 2005 television film, Middle Sexes.

He has treated over 2,200 transsexuals. He was one of the first sex-change doctors to accept patients as young as five years old.

He retired in 2008, but still works at the Free University, and also works as a consultant in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Patients include: Veronique Renard,  Rachel Pollack. 

• Louis Gooren. “Closing Speech”. 23rd Colloquy on European Law:
• Transsexualism, medicine and law. 16 April 1993. www.pfc.org.uk/gender/louis-gooren-speech.
• Norman Swan. “Gender Dysphoria”. The Health Report. 4 Sept 2000. www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/helthrpt/stories/s171717.htm.
• Peter Vermij. Een man gevangen in een mannen – lichaam. www.europeants.org/WTPS/Papers/man_gevangen.htm. Partially translated by Arianne van der Ven at www.tsroadmap.com/info/louis-gooren.html.
• Antony Thomas (dir & scr). Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She. With Louis Gooren, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Milton Diamond, Alice Dreger, Joan Roughgarden, Calpernia Addams, Andrea James. USA/UK 74 mins 2005.

Veronique Renard (1965 - ) writer, Buddhist, activist.

Renard was born in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, to a business family, she socially transitioned at age 17, and had surgery 18 months later from a team including Dr Auke de Boer and led by Dr Louis Gooren at the Free University in Amsterdam. She was the youngest person in the Netherlands to have the surgery, and at that date possibly the youngest person the world.

After college she worked as a business manager, and was also a competitive rower. In 1995 she was the bow rower of the first female crew to complete the 220 km Friesland Rowing Marathon. An accident shattering her upper right arm ended her rowing career.

In 1997 she gained a PhD in Dutch Literature. She also wrote several novels but was unable to get them published.


In 2000 after depression and considering suicide, she quit her job and went to live in Dharamsala, India with the Tibetans in exile. She became a Buddhist and took the name of Pantau (=to be helpful in Tibetan, and a small peach in Mandarin). In 2002 she took her Bodhisattva vows as a layperson.

She edited Lobsang Yonten’s The Fire of Hell: My Life under Chinese Rule, and became involved in the Tibetan struggle. She published the book book Pantau in India, about living with the Tibetan refugees. After several phoned death threats, she was beaten by two thugs who knocked her unconscious and threw her off a remote mountain road. However she was found by monks who took her to the Tibetan hospital in Dharamsala. It took a year for her wounds to heal.

She then hid in a Tibetan settlement in south India. After seven years in India, she resettled in Thailand. She decided to come out of stealth living, and with the aid of Andrea James, published her autobiography where she talks about her gender change. She currently lives in Bangkok, and is married to a Chinese professor, Chan Hao.

• Veronique Renard. Pantau in India. iUniverse, 2007.
• Veronique Renard, edited by Andrea James. Pholomolo: No Man No Woman. iUniverse, 2007.

www.pantau.org      www.pantau.blogspot.com     http://pantau2.blogspot.ca/

www.veroniquerenard.com    EN.Wikipedia.