Judy Bowen (1944 - ) business woman, activist

Judy Bowen was assigned male and so raised in Virginia and Tennessee despite feeling otherwise.  The family was religious – church three times a week – and Bowen was a teenage reporter for the local evangelical paper, The Daily Beacon.

This led to a journalism scholarship at the University of Tennessee. Bowen became involved with the civil rights movement where she found greater acceptance as a trans woman. There were several transsexuals at a racially mixed party when three white men came in and started stabbing people. Judy escaped through a window. However they could not call the police because racial mixing was then illegal in the State, and those who were stabbed had to be taken to hospital in separate cars.

A male friend was moving to New York to be a teacher, and Judy went with him. They lived on Long Island. Judy started going to transsexual clubs and one night won a contest at the Queen of Hearts club in Garden City, Long island, when it was raided and they were all arrested. As her friend was a teacher, he would have lost his job if seen with her.

She and three others found a third floor studio apartment at Christopher Street and Gay Street in Greenwich Village, a short walk from the Stonewall tavern. In 1967 Judy became a patient of Harry Benjamin. For a while she worked, as a bookkeeper in male guise, always keeping her jacket on to hide her newly grown breasts. Then she found that she could make good money as a taxi-dancer in the Times Square mafia establishments.

“I started in the dance clubs, like the Tango Palace. It was usually 60/40; 60 percent cis female and 40 percent trans. It was a place where lonely men with problems would go, and they would pay to sit with a girl for an hour. They had to buy champagne and we’d drink water. From there, I graduated to a gentleman’s club in the Times Square area. I was the only transgender person, that I knew of, who worked in that place.” 

She also had a wealthy benefactor.

Judy was not at the Stonewall riots in July 1969 because she was working, but she was part of the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade a year later. Afterwards she organized two short-lived groups. Transvestites and Transsexuals (TAT) was formed in 1970 but lasted only a couple of months. Bowen was quoted as saying that she found the transvestites “too politically radical”. Transsexuals Anonymous had its inaugural meeting in the office of surgeon Benito Rish in early 1971. About twenty attended, the most prominent of whom was Deborah Hart.

“I started Transsexuals Anonymous because we needed to talk and we had to be anonymous or we might be murdered if someone found out. As transsexuals we were motivated to become as close to genetic females as possible. Transsexuals were living, working, and transitioning into female roles. That's what made us different from transvestites. Some transsexuals go through with the surgery, and some don't. In that group [TA] we basically gave each other confidence. We helped each other with jobs and school. That sort of thing. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson had STAR. They had no desire to become female.” 

Judy had surgery from Drs George T Whittle and John Clarke at the Jersey Shore Medical Center in 1971. There were complications and then litigation that continued for many years. The Jersey Medical Center discontinued transsexual surgery in response.

Judy in 1974

In 1974 the Gilded Grape announced a Miss Gilded Grape Contest. The most sensational contestant was Judy who spoke for ten minutes about her operations. However her operations seemed to count against her. Drag Magazine commented that rules against surgery should be spelt out clearly in advance. The winner was Eddie, a bartender at the Grape, in drag for the first time.

The FBI were going after the mafia dance halls, and Judy was warned by a lawyer to get out. She had been buying property since before Stonewall:

“I ended up owning an Italian restaurant in Queens for 35 years. I added an art gallery. Eventually I had four buildings on the block and started publishing the Western Queens Gazette, a community-based paper which is still going today, and the Long Island City News. I raised money for youth and senior programs and I got appointed to the community board. I worked to get a gymnasium converted into a youth center to keep the kids off the street. I was and am very community minded.” 

During this period she was mainly non-disclosing of her gender history.

In the late 1970s Judy became a regular at Studio 54, and met Andy Warhol, and was an extra in a couple of Woody Allen films. In the mid-1980s she met the man who became her husband.

In 1998 Judy’s mother passed on, and Judy and her husband decided to move to Las Vegas.

Today, in her 70s, she is an active member of The Center in Las Vegas, which supports the needs of LGBTQ people, as well as a champion of the Safety Dorm for transgender individuals at The Salvation Army, which houses and provides professional support for homeless transgender people in Las Vegas.

• “Drag Drops in on New York’s Drag Oasis: Beauty at the Gilded Grape”. Drag: The International Transvestite Quarterly, 4, 14. 1974: 32, 38. 
• “Transsexual nears trial in malpractice suit”. Drag: The International Transvestite Quarterly, 7, 26. 1978: 4. 
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 236.
• Brendan Zachariah O’Donnell. Definition and Redefinition: Alliance and Antagonism in Homosexual and Trans Communities in the U.S. BA Thesis, Wesleyen University, 2014: 59. Online. 
• Owen Keenen. “Trans pioneer Judy Bowen looks back at community changes”. Windy City Times, 2016-11-30. Online. 
• Zackary Drucker. “Transgender Activist Judy Bowen Recalls the Stonewall Riots”. Vice: Identity, Nov 29 2018. Online.
• Daniel Villarreal. “This trans activist recently shared her memories of the Stonewall uprising and early life in NYC” LGBTQNation, December 2, 2018. Online. 
• Enzo Marino. “Local transgender woman recounts experience during Stonewall Riots”. Fox5Vegas, Jun 28, 2019. Onine. 
• “Judy Bowen: Center Legacy Award”. The LGBTQ Center of Southern Nevada, 2020. Online.

George Traver Whittle (1927 – 2017) sex-change surgeon

George Whittle was raised mainly in New Jersey. His father, a Naval Commander, was in command at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 when the airship, the Hindenburg, crashed and burned. Ten-year-old George was among the witnesses.

Whittle graduated from Princeton in 1948 with majors in psychology and chemistry, and acquired a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania two years later. He did an internship at the Graduate Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania and surgical residencies at the Bronx VA and Columbia Presbyterian Hospitals in New York. In 1952 he was called to active duty in the US Navy and served in Korea. On return, he and his first wife moved to Long Branch, New Jersey and raised four children. He started the first renal dialysis unit in central New Jersey. He performed lithotripsy surgery, and was on the teaching staff of Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, PA. He was a Diplomat of the American Board of Urology and elected a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

In the early 1970s, Whittle attended a symposium in Elsinore in Denmark on Transsexuality. Upon return, at the request of Johns Hopkins University, The University of Minnesota and the UCLA Medical Center he volunteered to surgically treat transsexual patients at the Jersey Shore Medical Center. He completed eight such operations assisted by Dr John Clark, both male to female and female to male operations. In his obituary he is quoted as saying that it was one of the most gratifying and challenging aspects of his medical career. His nurse Gloria, who was with him from 1970, helped provide aftercare and counselling. One of his patients was the New York business woman Judy Bowen who was in pain for years afterwards and later sued. This led to the Medical Center barring any more such operations.

The Ashbury Park Press in 1981, quoted Whittle that he was only too happy to give up the work with transsexuals because of “the day-to-day headaches and aggravations” and because it was a “losing proposition”. Of ‘male transsexuals’ [that is trans women] he said that they “have all the usual things wrong – emotional instability, financial difficulties, bad work habits and rehabilitive potentials. They are largely being supported by welfare; they don’t pay their bills”. On the other hand, “The female transsexuals [that is trans men] who have been assigned to male identity are exactly the opposite: they are generally stable, responsible and often productive persons who can be depended upon to pay their bills, have good work habits and normally wind up as a responsible member of the community”.

George and his first wife divorced in 1975. Gloria became his second wife in 1994 on his 67^th birthday. They retired the next year and moved to Florida. Whittle died age 90.

• “Transsexual nears trial in malpractice suit”. Drag: The International Transvestite Quarterly, 7, 26. 1978: 4. Online.
• “Doctor still believes in sex changes: A decade ago, area physician did controversial surgery”. Ashbury Park Press, 29 November 1981: 51. Online.
• “Memorial: George T Whittle ‘48”. Princeton Alumni Weekly, September 13, 2017. Online.

Legacy.Com

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Legacy.com says that the symposium was in Elsinore in Norway. Neither Wikipedia nor Google maps knows of such a place. Elsinore, the English name for Helsingør, the location for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is of course in Denmark. Unless what is meant is Helsingborg, just over the water in Sweden - but again not Norway. However the Danish town is more likely, and I have adjusted the account accordingly.

Legacy.com says of Whittle’s transgender surgeries: “This led to him becoming one of the leading surgeons of transsexuals in the country, completing both male to female and female to male.” Really! Eight surgeries makes a surgeon a national leader?  Stanley Biber, who started transgender surgery only a few years earlier, went on to complete several thousand such operations.  Biber was a national leader.