Jeanne Hoff (1938 – 2023) psychiatrist

++original September 2013, revised February 2019 to include extra detail from Gill-Peterson's book, and December 2023 to acknowledge Jeanne's passing.

Eugene Hoff  was born in in St Louis.  Hoff did an MD at Columbia University, College of Physicians And Surgeons 1963 followed by a doctorate in solid state chemistry at University College, London (where he also converted to Catholicism), followed by training and a residency as a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

Hoffinitially thought of himself as homosexual, but in exploring homosexuality found out that he was not. He was introduced to the Harry Benjamin practice, possibly by Wardell Pomeroy of the Kinsey Institute.

Hoff was a guest on the NBC television program Not for Women Only where he (as she was still) explained transsexualism from a medical viewpoint referring to trans women as 'men' as was the then practice.

"You can say that you know that you are a woman, therefore you want to be one. But no woman I have ever asked has been able to tell me what that means, and I doubt that transsexuals will be the first to define it."

Harry Benjamin's successor Charles Ihlenfeld resigned the practice in 1976 to begin a psychiatric residency in the Bronx, and Hoff took over.  This was Hoff's first clinical practice other than the residency in St Louis.  The practice was being managed under the aegis of the Orentreich Medical Group, a dermatology and hair restoration practice, which was located at in the same building as the Benjamin practice at 1 East 72nd St. It was then still administered by Benjamin's office manager and assistant Virginia Allen.

Hoff fired Virginia, the nurse, Mary Ryan, and the physician, Agnes Nagy, and pleased Dr Orentreich by moving the practice downtown to a townhouse behind the Chelsea Hotel, at 223 West 22nd Street.

In this period Dr Hoff confronted the homophobic psychiatrist Charles Socarides in a television debate and challenged his reactionary views that homosexuality can be cured by psychoanalysis. 

Hoff was starting her own transition.

 
Her best known patient was the punk musician Jayne County, who wrote in her autobiography: 

"When I walked into the consulting room for my appointment, I nearly fainted: Dr Jean Hoff was a man who was going through the sex change himself. She looked like a woman in man's clothes, she wore men's clothes and no make-up, and she had short hair that was just beginning to grow out. Later on she went through the full change, changed her name to Janine Hoffand got her own practice.   

The best thing about Dr Hoff was that she kept asking me questions about myself over and over again, to make sure that I really knew what I wanted. She'd say things like, 'Do you think you'd ever go back to wearing men's clothes?' and I'd say, Yeah, sometimes I see a jacket I like and think it might be fun to wear.'  At the time I was talking to her about the full sex change, but I was really quite afraid, and I thought it would cut me offfrom all my folks. She said to me, 'Look, there are different degrees of transsexualism. You are a transsexual, but not all transsexuals have a full sex change. Some people are better offjust taking hormones and dressing as a woman. There are some transsexuals who go back to dressing as men. There are so many different degrees, and you shouldn't just assume that because you are transsexual you have to have a sex change. You should only get a sex change if you are one hundred and twenty five per cent sure about it. If you have the least hesitation about it, don't do it.'  That was one of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me. Dr Hoff also said that, given the kind of circles I was moving in, there really wasn't much need for me to have a sex change." 

Becoming Jeanne, 1979

Hoff completed her transition to Jeanne with surgery with Dr Granato in 1977. She was interviewed at home by Lynn Redgrave and Frank Fields immediately before surgery and two months afterwards. The resulting television program "Becoming Jeanne" won the prestigious Ohio State Broadcasting award in 1979.

It was now the case that for the first time a trans psychiatrist was in charge of a practice for trans persons. Gill-Peterson comments:

"Though the medical model was still based in gatekeeping and an unacknowledged racialization of gender, Hoff cared deeply about the well-being of her clients to a degree that is viscerally embedded in the archive she gifted to the Kinsey Institute. Her work demonstrates a level of empathy entirely absent from transsexual medicine since its advent—not to mention its predecessors in the early twentieth century— an ethic of care that, although greatly constrained by the material circumstances and history of psychiatry and endocrinology, was also entangled with her situated perspective as a trans woman. It is important to underline that Hoff represents yet another trans person who took an active and complicated role in medicine, rather than being its object."

Gill-Peterson has read Hoff's interview notes in her archive papers at the Kinsey Institute, and comments:

"Because she took the time to interview them without only reducing what they said to standard diagnostic biographies, her notes offer comparatively richer glimpses into trans boyhood than those of her predecessors." 

 

In 1978 Hoff became aware of a young black trans woman, then 30, who had been committed to a psychiatric Institution in New Jersey for 15 years.  Initially labeled  ‘schizophrenic’, her gender identity issues were taken as evidence of ‘delusion’, ‘mental retardation’ and ‘sexual perversion’. Hoff interviewed her, and petitioned for her release.

“Through all the florid language of the [psychiatric] reports there is an unmistakable moralistic disapproval of her effeminacy and homosexuality but not the slightest hint that the diagnosis of transsexualism was suspected, even though it was quite evident from the details provided. . . . She should be placed in the community, preferably living by herself” and “she should be permitted to explore the various problems that arise from cross-gender living, hormonal therapy, and surgical gender reassignment.” (quoted in Gill-Peterson)

However by 1980 there were few patients left in the practice, and Hoff had already taken a job in a psych ward in Brooklyn. The next year she sold the building on West 22nd St and moved away, first to Massachusetts and then California.

She became a psychiatrist at San Quentin prison. She was in the news in April-May 1998 when she was the only one of three psychiatrists to testify that murderer Horace Kelly might be competent to be executed, and the defense attorney attempted to impeach Hoff.

She retired after being assaulted during a counseling session by a death-row inmate.

In 2013 she donated her archives to the Kinsey Institute.

Jeanne Hoff died at age 85. 

• "Masculine, Feminine or Androgynous?" Not for Women Only. WNBC 1976  hosted by Polly Bergen and Frank Fields, produced by Madeline Amgott.  Archive 
  
• Becoming Jeanne…A Search for Sexual Identity. NBC 30 June 1978. Jeanne Hoff interviewed by Lynn Redgrave and Frank Fields.
  
• Kathleen Casey.  "Gay Catholics Hear Transsexual's Story".  Asbury Park Press, October 10, 1978: 23. 
• Jeanne Hoff. "Multiple personality disorder?" The Journal of clinical psychiatry, 48(4), Apr 1987. 
• Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995: 99-100.
• Michael Dougan. "Killer's mental records turn up". SFGate, April 17, 1998. Online,
  
• Maria L LaGanga. "Killer Understands He Faces Execution, Prosecutor Says". Los Angeles Times, May 01, 1998. Online.
  
• Michael Dougan. "Sanity trial outcome rests with minutiae". SFGate, May 5, 1998. Online.
  
• Sara Catania. "The Alienists: Where experts divide, jury must decide". LAWeekly, May 13 1998.  Archive.
  
• Andy Humm. "Socarides, Leading Anti-Gay Shrink, Dies". Gay City, 4,52 Dec 29-Jan 4, 2005. 
  
• "Jeanne Hoff Archive". The Kinsey Institute. Online. 
  
• SJ Parker. Emails to Zagria, 15,17 September 2013.
• Julian Gill-Peterson. Histories of the Trangender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018: 159-160, 171, 174, 192-3, 248n105, 251n32, 252n45, 253n79-82, 254n84-5.
• Andy Humm.  "Jeanne Hoff, first trans psychiatrist to serve trans people, dies at 85".  Gay City News, December 5, 2023.  Online. 

____________________________________________________________________________

Although Horace Kelly's lawyer subpoenaed Hoff's prison personnel file in an attempt to impeach her, he presumably hadn't heard rumours that she was transsexual, didn't find it in the file and didn't read her.   Otherwise he probably would have used it to defame her.   She had been in the 1978 television special under the same name, but that was 20 years earlier.   Before the Internet it was much more difficult to make connections.

Jeanne was also, in effect, outed in Jayne County's 1995 autobiography, but presumably the lawyer didn't read punk biographies.  

+++ Other sources led me to write that Hoff left New York in 1981, having sold her building at 223 West 22nd Street.  Gill-Peterson writes that she stayed in practice through the 1980s.  ??

Peter Farrer (1926 - 2017) tax inspector, trans historian

Peter Farrer’s father was a Church of England vicar and schoolmaster who lived in various parishes, and during the Second World War had a parish in the Isle of Man, where Peter and his twin sister attended the independent King William’s College. Peter was head of the cadet force and captain of the rugby team. It was at this time that he found that he was interested in wearing female clothing.

He did his national service 1946-9 in the Army and was posted to Trieste. He then went to Oxford University where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

In 1952 Peter married his dance teacher, Joan – his father officiated. He also became a tax inspector, where he remained until retirement. Peter and Joan had one son.

From 1964-6 they were in Nairobi where Peter helped set up an Inland Revenue system for the newly independent Kenya. In 1968 he was posted to Formby outside Liverpool, where he stayed. He was promoted to Senior Inspector and dealt with the tax affairs of major Liverpool companies.

His wife knew of his cross-dressing and research thereof, and permitted it only when she was elsewhere. Unfortunately Joan was afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s and died in the 1970s.

Peter began building a collection of dresses, but apparently never cross-dressed outside his home. In his lunch breaks he visited Liverpool museums to study Victorian dresses and corsetry. He joined the Costume Society and the Northern Society of Costume and Textiles. Through the former he met his second wife, Anne Brogden, a lecturer in art and fashion. They married in 1982 and bought a house in Garston, south Liverpool, where they created an outstanding fashion library that included complete runs of Vogue, Queen, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and other fashion magazines.

Peter had a particular interest in dresses made of taffeta. He had such dresses especially made by the Brighton-based dressmaker Sandi Steyning, owner of the Kentucky Woman Clothing Company. He was also a collector and editor of primarily letters to newspapers re enforced cross-dressing of young boys, mainly in England, and during the early 20^th century, but also regular cross-dressing.

In 1985 Peter contacted The Glad Rag, the publication of The Transvestite/ Transsexual Support Group run by Yvonne Sinclair and became a contributor, mainly of historical letters.

In 1987 Farrer published a 44-page pamphlet Men in Petticoats: A Selection of Letters from Victorian Newspapers. It features letters and photographs from 19^th-century publications such as The Family Doctor, Modern Society and Society. Central attention is devoted to Fanny and Stella and their trial in 1870, but there is also discussion of the joys of tight-lacing. The pamphlet and the books that followed were self-published under the publisher name of Karn Publications Garston: Karn was Peter’s mother’s maiden name.

After retirement he was able to visit major libraries in London and Oxford, Richard Ekins’ Transgender Archive in Ulster and the Kinsey Institute in Indiana.

In 1992 Farrer published In Female Disguise: An Anthology of English and American Short Stories

and Literary Passages, which featured prose stories from 1475 to 1900 by authors such as Walter Scott, Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling etc. but not poetry or drama (so nothing by Shakespeare).

Men in Petticoats was followed by The Regime of the Stay-Lace, which paid more attention to ‘petticoat punishment’ (forced femininity) in Victorian newspapers that the first booklet, and also Borrowed Plumes, which found much cross-dressing content in newspapers 1989-1912 (some of which had already been published in Glad Rag).

Richard Ekins, in both his books, thanks Farrer for his contributions. Farrer contributed two papers to Blending Genders, 1996 (ed Richard Ekins and Dave King), one on cross-dressing in literature and the other on the newspapers that he was analysing in his books with examples of the correspondence from readers.

Farrer had been doing an MA in Victorian literature at the University of Liverpool on ‘Women in Control’ and was awarded his degree in 1996.

In 1997-8 Farrer published in two volumes, Confidential Correspondence on Cross Dressing, 1911-1920 taken from the publications New Photo Fun, New Fun, Fun, Bits of Fun – and referring to the mentions in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some of the letters had been published in Glad Rag.

There remained other contributions to Glad Rag that did not fit in Borrowed Plumes or Confidential Correspondence, and that was published as My First Party Frock in 1997.

Through a chance reading of an article in a 1902 magazine, Farrer had become aware of Maurice Pollack (1885-1918), son of Polish immigrants in Birmingham, who became an accomplished child female impersonator but enlisted during the war and died of wounds in the latter stages of the Palestine campaign. Peter was able to reconstruct Pollack’s life with the help of his family, and published the research as a book.

He then turned his attention to London Life 1923-41, the major publication between the wars that paid

attention to cross-dressing and similar topics and printed readers’ letters on such. This research was published in two volumes, 2000 and 2006.

Farrer also gave papers at the Gendys conferences. In 2002 his Gendys paper was a response to Gary Kates’ Monsieur d'Eon is a Woman, 1995, the first book based on the d’Eon papers in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University. Farrer challenges Kates’ conclusion that d’Eon did not wear female clothes until ordered to do so by the French king.

In 2004 his Gendys paper was on the Louise Lawrence Collection at the Kinsey Archive. In this he gives a summary of Bessie/William Beck and his wife. William had been subjected to petticoat punishment in the 1920s, found that he liked female clothing and as an adult married a dominant woman who continued his forced femininity. While one does assume that such stories are fiction, Peter investigated further and found letters by Bessie and wife to Transvestia (despite Virginia Prince’s noted aversion to fetishism), and to Toronto’s Justice Weekly.

In 2006 Farrer wrote a summary of his work for Transgender Tapestry. He had already been attending to the Toronto publication Justice Weekly, 1956-1972, and its continuation of the tradition of London Life, and published a book on in in 2011.

Farrer had obtained Bessie’s autobiography, edited it and published it in 2012. That was his last book.

Peter’s second wife, Anne, died in 2014.

In 2015 the Liverpool Homotopia festival featured Transformation: One Man’s Cross Dressing Wardrobe, based on Peter’s life-time collection, and with the books and magazines, they have become a permanent exhibition at the National Museums Liverpool.

Peter died at age 90.

* Not the member of the board at Scottish Water; nor the visual-effects film person; not the chartered surveyor;

by Peter Farrer: (all published by Karn Publications Garston except where otherwise stated)

• Men in Petticoats: A Selection of Letters from Victorian Newspapers.1987.
• In Female Disguise: An Anthology of English and American Short Stories and Literary Passages. 1992.
• Borrowed Plumes: Letters from Edwardian Newspapers on Male Cross Dressing. 1994.
• The Regime of the Stay-Lace: A Further Selection of Letters from Victorian Newspapers. 1995.
• “Men in Petticoats: the letters of ‘Grateful’, ‘A Lover of Lingerie’ and ‘Victim of Stays’ to reveal the extent of Cross-dressing in Victorian England”. Antique International, 25, Autumn 1995: 44-9.
• “In Female Attire: Male Experiences of Cross-Dressing – Some Historical Fragments” and “120 Years of Male Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing in English and American Literature”. In Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds). Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing. Routledge 1996.
• Women in Control. MA thesis in Victorian Literature, The University of Liverpool, 1996.
• “Letters on Cross Dressing”. Gendys Conference. 1996. Online.
• Confidential Correspondence on Cross Dressing, 1911-1915. 1997.
• “Boy Ballerinas and Swinging Skirts”. TV Scene, 23, April 1997: 36-8.
• Confidential Correspondence on Cross Dressing Part II, 1916-1920. 1998.
• With Christine-Jane Wilson. My First Party Frock: And Other Contributions to The Glad Rag, 1985 to 1991. 1997.
• The Life of Maurice Pollack, 1885-1918: A Birmingham Actor. 1998.
• Tight Lacing: A Bibliography of Articles and Letters Concerning Stays and Corsets for Men and Women:, 1999.
• Cross Dressing between the Wars: Selections from London Life, 1923-1933. 2000.
• 'D'Eon De Beaumont: New Facts, Or Fiction?', Gendys 2002 Conference, 2002. Online.
• “The Louise Lawrence Collection”. Gendys Conference, 2004. Online.
• Cross Dressing between the Wars: Selections from London Life, Part II 1934-1941. 2006.
• “Petticoat Punishment in Erotic Literature: Part One: Before 'Gynecocracy'“. Petticoat Discipline Quarterly, March 2006. Online.
• “Letters on Crossdressing, 1867-1920”. Transgender Tapestry, 110, Fall 2006: 48-55. Online.
• “Letters on Crossdressing, 1867-1920, Part Two”. Transgender Tapestry, 111, Winter 2006/7: 46-8. Online.
• Cross Dressing Since the War: Selections from Justice Weekly 1955-1972. 2011.
• William Edward Beck (ed Peter Farrer). Happenings: The Story of Bessie. 2012.

about Peter Farrer:

• Richard Ekins. “The work of Peter Farrer: women’s clothes and cross-dressing with a provisional list of novels in which mention of cross-dressing is made, 1901–1951”. Archive News: Bulletin of the Trans-Gender Archive 3(1), 1992: :3–20.
• Richard Ekins. “Building a Transgender Archive”. Cross-Talk, 47, September 1993: 19-22.
• Richard Ekins. Male Femaling: A grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex changing. Routledge, 1997: 7, 40, 45.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. The Transgender Phenomenon. Sage Publications, 2006: xv, 61, 106.
• “Revealed: The secret frills of the Liverpool taxman”. Confidentials, 12 October 2015. Online.
• “Grayson Perry Outdone: Transformation Exhibits Peter Farrer’s Cross Dressing Wardrobe”. Artlyst, 16 October 2015. Online.
• “Obituary: Peter Farrer” The Sunday Times, April 22 2017. Online.
• Anthea Jarvis. “Obituary: Peter Jarvis”. Costume: The Journal of the Costume Society, 51, 2, 2017. Online.
• “Obituary: Peter Farrer 20-05-1926 to 10-02-2017”. Beaumont, 98, June 2017: 08. PDF.
• Victoria Haddock. “Transformation: One Man’s Cross-Dressing Wardrobe”. The Costume Society, December 19, 2017. Online.

EN.Wikipedia


Peter Farrer is thus a major trans historian, although some would prefer that there be a greater distance between transvestity, petticoat punishment and fetishism.

Farrer's books were self-published, and Karn Publications Garston has closed down. Some of the books have become very expensive.  I hope that his executor is making some arrangement for the books to remain available.

Lisa Sigel explains the significance of London Life:

‘The combination of low illiteracy rates and the broad suppression of books on sexuality made magazines a particularly important source for information about sex during the interwar years.The generation coming of age in the 1920s and 1930s saw reading as a part of their lives, but books about sex remained hard to access. Libraries refused to stock risqué novels and sexological works by Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Fearing fines, imprisonment, and hard labour, most booksellers stocked only legal books. As a result, those who actively looked for information about sexuality often had a hard time finding it. One source of information proliferated, however: individuals could eke out a sense of sex from materials at the newsagent’s shop. “Every district, even the poorest,” had a few newsstands that sold magazines and newspapers. George Orwell offers a compelling description of the place of such shops in the local community: “You never walk very far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the same: a few posters for the Daily Mail and the News of the World outside, a poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players [cigarettes], and a dark interior smelling of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed two penny papers, most of them with lurid cover illustrations in three colours.” Intellectuals recognised that periodicals shaped the tastes and minds of the population. “Probably the contents of these shops is the best indication of what the mass of the English people really thinks and feels. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in documentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance tell one a great deal, but the novel is aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level.” A newsstand magazine, London Life boasted a circulation at over fifty-five thousand before the Great War, according to David Kunzle, and this figure rose throughout the interwar years. Advertisements for the magazine were placed on “1,000 cinema screens throughout Britain” in 1928, and it was available in railway stations across India.’ (“Fashioning Fetishism from the Pages of London Life”, The Journal of British Studies, 51, 2012: 667-8)

Leah Cahan (Schaefer) (1920 – 2013) singer, psychologist

Leah Cahan was born in Milwaukee, and raised in Chicago. She was the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who had escaped the pogroms in Lithuania.

Intending to be a music teacher, she started singing at age 15 at Central College (now Roosevelt University). After college she was in The Barries, a female trio. They lasted five years, sang on NBC radio in New York, were among the first artists to record for what became Capitol Records, and had a hit record with the Johnny Mercer, “San Fernando Valley”.

She lived in California and learned folk songs. Back in New York she was part of The Wayfarers, and became the first wife of jazz legend Hal Schaefer who was then in the group, and became known as Lee Schaefer.

After her second divorce Leah tried analysis, but after her father died, she slipped into a period of depression while living on unemployment pay.

A second session of analysis in 1953 led to her accepting the suggestion that she herself become an analyst. She was accepted at Columbia Teachers College, and then Columbia University, where she earned an MA and then a doctorate.

A third marriage at this time resulted in a daughter.

For her doctoral thesis she chose the topic of female orgasm. It was then 1961, and the ongoing work by Masters and Johnson had not yet been published. She was given permission by Ernest G. Osborne(1903-63), the head of her department who supervised her thesis until his early death. Leah was also advised by Margaret Mead. She quickly realized that understanding orgasm required understanding a whole life. She interviewed 30 white, middle-class women who were unaffected by the then just-beginning women’s movement. They talked about their first reactions to menstruation, their adolescent sexual encounters, their first sexual act, and how they feel about orgasm and adult sexuality. One finding was how each woman in the study had a negative reaction in childhood to the idea that her parents had sex. Many of the women had never talked to anyone in such detail before.

Leah 1974

The thesis was completed in 1964, and Columbia suggested that a commercial publisher would be appropriate, but it took until 1973 until one was willing.

After graduation, Leah was credentialed as a psychotherapist. After she had built a practice using the name Leah Schaefer, and had established a reputation in the field, she was contacted by Wardell Pomeroy, a co-author of the Kinsey Reports. Pomeroy had been working with Harry Benjamin as a therapist to assess ‘true’ transsexualism. Schaefer was chosen because of her ability to be non-judgmental. Pomeroy was preparing to move to San Francisco, and wanted her to take over his work with transsexuals, which she did. She continued to work with transsexuals for the rest of her life, progressing from evaluation to general therapy.
 
She was the first women president of Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS), 1978-1979. She worked with Connie Christine Wheeler. They interviewed Harry Benjamin in 1979 about the history of the SSSS, he took to them and trusted them with his files. They read all the 1500 or so files, and started meeting regularly with him to discuss what they found.

In 1983 they presented a paper “The Non-Surgical True Transsexual: A Theoretical Rationale”, an elaboration of Harry Benjamin’s Type IV, the person who cross-lives but does not desire gender confirmation surgery. After Benjamin’s death in 1986, Wheeler and Schaefer became the custodians of Harry Benjamin’s professional archives.

Schaefer was president of HBIDGA 1991-5 (before it was renamed WPATH), and was involved in the writing of several editions of its Standards of Care. In 1995 Schaefer and Wheeler published their seminal work, “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”.

Schaefer donated the Benjamin archives and her own archives to the Kinsey Institute in 2007.

Leah 2007

Nancy Gonzales, who met Schaefer in 2008, summarized her work with transsexuals:

“She takes issue with the terms ‘gender dysphoria’ or ‘gender identity disorder’ in referring to these individuals' circumstances.  She feels that it's pejorative and inaccurate to classify this condition as a pathology.  In her professional opinion, most of the presenting problems they have stem from the stigmatization they suffer.  She believes that transsexualism is a birth anomaly and maintains, as do a growing number of scientists, that transsexualism is a naturally-occurring variation in humans and is part of a person's inborn psyche.” 

Leah Scheafer died aged 92.

• The Barries & Johnny Mercer. “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah”. 1944
• Paul Weston & his Orchestra, The Barries & Johnny Mercer. “San Fernando Valley”. 1944. Lyrics
• The Wayfarers (Hal Schaefer; Elka Sylvern; Lee Schaefer; Paul Bain). Wandering with the Wayfarers, LP RCA Victor, 1957.
• Lee Schaefer & Jim Hall. A Girl and a Guitar. LP United Artists, 1958.
• Lee & Hal Schaefer. Finian’s Rainbow and Brigadoon Remembered. LP United Artists, 1959.
• Leah Cahan Schaefer. Sexual Experiences and Reactions of a Group of 30 Women As Told to a Female Psychotherapist. Ed D Thesis, Columbia University 1965. Revised as Women and Sex; Sexual Experiences and Reactions of a Group of Thirty Women As Told to a Female Psychotherapist. Pantheon Books, 1973.
• Leah C Schaefer . "Frigidity." Modern woman.  Charles C Thomas, 1969: 165-177.
• Edward M Brecher.  "Leah Cahan Schaefer".  The Sex Researchers.  a Signet Book, 1971: 184-202.  
• Lindsay Miller. “Woman in the News: Dr. Leah Schaefer: A Lot More Than Just Sex”. Washington Post, 7/28/1973. Online.
• Suzanne Lowry. “Come as you are”. The Guardian, July 5 1974. Online.
• Leah C. Schaefer & Connie C. Wheeler. “The Non-Surgical True Transsexual: A Theoretical Rationale”. Eighth International Symposium on Gender Dysphoria, Bordeau, September 16-19, 1983. Abstract Revised as "The nonsurgery true transsexual (Benjamin's category IV): A theoretical rationale." International Research in Sexology (Sexual Medicine) 1 (1984).
• Leah Schaefer. “TV Relationships”. The tv-ts Tapestry, 43, 1984: 30-3. Online.
• Connie Christine Wheeler & Leah Cahan Schaefer. "Historical overview of Harry Benjamin's first 1500 cases." Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, Tenth International Symposium on Gender Dysphoria, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1987.
• Connie Christine Wheeler & Leah Cahan Schaefer “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 24:1 Feb 1995. Online at www.helen-hill.com/pdf/hbfirst10cases.pdf. Revised as the Afterword to Randi Ettner. Confessions of a Gender Defender: A Psychologist's Reflections on Life Among the Transgendered. Evanston, IL: Chicago Spectrum Press, 1996.
• Jamil Rehman, Simcha Lazer, Alexandru E. Benet, Leah C. Schaefer, and Arnold Melman. "The reported sex and surgery satisfactions of 28 postoperative male-to-female transsexual patients." Archives of sexual behavior 28, no. 1 (1999): 71-89.
• Stephen B Levine, George R. Brown, Eli Coleman, Peggy T. Cohen-Kettenis, J. Joris Hage, Judy Van Maasdam, Maxine Petersen, Friedemann Pfaefflin, and Leah C. Schaefer. "The standards of care for gender identity disorders." Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality 11, no. 2 (1999): 1-34.
• Anne Lawrence, Yvon Menard, Stan Monstrey, Jude Patton, Leah Schaefer, Alice Webb & Connie Christine Wheeler. "The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association′ s Standards Of Care For Gender Identity Disorders, Sixth Version." World Professional Association For Transgender Health, 2001.
• Leah Cahan Schaefer & Connie Christine Wheeler. "Guilt in cross gender identity conditions: Presentations and treatment." Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy 8, 1-2 (2004): 117-127.
• Ellen Michel. “A Season of Recognition for KI Donor Dr Leah Schaefer”. Kinsey Today, November 2007. www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/images/schaefer-newsletter.jpg.
• Nancy Gonzales. “When October Goes: My Day with Leah Schaefer”. NCFR, 2008, www.ncfr.org/members-stories/when-october-goes-my-day-leah-schaefer.
• Dana Beyer. “Remembering Dr. Leah Schaefer, the Sweet Singer-Turned-Psychiatrist Who Healed a Generation of Trans Women”. The Huffington Post, 01/30/2013. www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-beyer/leah-schaefer-trans-women_b_2569123.html.

Discogs
____________________________________________________________

I don’t know why there is no mention at all of Leah Schaefer in Joanne Meyerowitz’ How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.

Leaf Schaefer started her career as a psychologist while married to her third husband, but using her first husband’s surname.

Schaefer and Wheeler discuss Benjamin’s Type IV as it is usually taken to be, that is as a cross-living, non-op person. However in Benjamin’s 1966 book, as I have discussed, a Type IV is defined as “’Dresses’ as often as possible with insufficient relief of his gender discomfort. May live as a man or a woman; sometimes alternating.” Benjamin’s typology actually erases full-time non-ops, as well as gay and female transvestites and gynephilic High Intensity Type VIs.

Randi Ettner, psychologist and author of Confessions of a Gender Defender, 1996, is Leah’s niece. The book has, as an Afterword, a rewrite of “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases”.

The backing singers here are The Barries
 

Georgina Somerset (1923–2013) Part II: wife and author.

Part I: dentist and surgeon-lieutenant
Part II: wife and author
Part III:  Turtle’s typology

Several of the medical men in London had suggested to Georgina that she write her autobiography, but what she did produce was a study based on those transsexuals who had contacted her. This involved a detailed knowledge of 30 of the transsexuals (one of whom was the future Jan Morris) and lesser knowledge of 100 others. The book was published in 1963, under her maiden name, as Over the Sex Border, with a Foreword by Kenneth Walker.

This was three years before Harry Benjamin's book, and thus is the first ever on the topic. It is summarized as the last 30 pages of her 1991 autobiography.  She says that she is not a transsexual, and that surgery should be only for intersex persons and those transsexuals under 25 who have never married or had children.

"Less than a few percent of transsexuals are true or primary transsexuals. These are generally the lonely, sensitive, asexual types of transsexual" (p82).

She refers to trans women as male transsexuals.

"The sad part is that, however permissive society becomes, these cases will always have to accept that biologically and organically they are really no more than feminised males or masculinised females, and will forever remain, regardless of their altered anatomy, of the male or female sex to which they were born. (72)".

However she does balance this with:

"There are still some to-day known to me of that era who were repeatedly turned away, heartbroken and suicidal, and yet who have managed to struggle on trying to do 'the right thing' and maintain the respect of society. For them the magical dream of being a young girl has gone for ever – they never wanted to be old women! They banged at the door and it creaked a little, making it easier for the next, but they themselves never 'made it' through. It is these less fortunate unknowns, not just the well known cases, that transsexuals have to thank to-day for the recognition given to the syndrome. (p97)"

While Over the Sex Border is included in Richard Green's bibliography to Harry Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomena, Benjamin himself, in the main text, completely ignores it. Similarly, John Randell's Sexual Variations, 1973 lists the book but never refers to it.

Mrs Somerset wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal in 1966, to note that a leading article on transsexuality failed to mention her book, and concluded: "It is interesting that most if not all medical studies [on transsexualism] have been made by men. (p67)"

Attention drawn to this letter led to her being invited to appear in a BBC Horizon program on "Sex Change" prompted by the withdrawal of the Press sisters from international athletics. This was the first appearance of a "sex changeling" person on a medical program on British television. She gave up a day in her surgery, cancelling a full appointment book, to go to Television Centre, and gave a forty-minute filmed interview. However only a minute of her interview was broadcast, and she was afterwards informed that she had said more than the BBC was prepared to screen.

In January 1969, a medical article in the doctors' weekly newspaper, Pulse International, compared her to Christine Jorgensen as being transsexual,

"implying that I was homosexual, would have had breast implants, electrolysis and was probably not legally married, I had no choice but to instigate libel proceedings for, indeed, all these premises were totally false" (p44).

The proceedings continued for two years, during which Justice Roger Ormrod ruled in Corbett v. Corbett against the femaleness of April Ashley. However Georgina was not deterred, and even sent a copy of her book to Justice Ormrod, and he wrote back:

"you and I have arrived independently at the same conclusions as to the legal position".

She submitted medical reports and underwent blood tests and other medical examinations. For the first time she discovered her chromosomal constitution: mosaic XO/XY. If she had lost she would have been forced into bankruptcy. However two days before the scheduled hearing, the defendants offered an apology based on Georgina's medical records, and a statement was read in the High Court by her barrister, Leon Brittan (later a controversial minister in Thatcher's cabinet and posthumously famous for losing a detailed dossier on child abuse by prominent men).

Shortly after that Georgina ceased taking artificial oestrogens.

In 1983, at age 60 she applied for a state pension, only to find that the National Insurance database still had her down as a man. However she was able to point out that she had been legally female since 1960, and was granted the pension.

In 1989 Mrs Somerset wrote to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, in reply to an article by the recently deceased Charles Armstrong, and made the point:

"If male transsexualists are BORN with a female brain, one would not expect their average age to be 35 years and many to have married and fathered children. … Moreover, they lack the vital formative years in their desired role and have a past from which there is no escape, even in dreams."

She cited Charles Socarides with approval:

"You don't change the body to conform to anything and, after the operation, the patient remains what he or she was born and the psychic problems are the same or worse",

and continued:

"By 1962 I had studied nearly 300 cases, and it became apparent that most were psychologically disturbed in more than the sexual plane. Not only do they convince themselves that their 'sex-change' is real but will lie, cheat and even falsify documents to gain their ends. However sympathetic, we cannot ignore the moral and social issues. Wives commit suicide, children are left fatherless, and all responsibilities are disregarded in their quest. … If we are to allow some form of modified birth certificate on compassionate grounds it should be granted only to those under 25 years who have never married or had children."

The next year she wrote, again to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine,

"These true transsexuals are rare, often asexual and although popular, usually lonely sensitive souls, and its is these who primarily deserve our pity and time-consuming help. However, large numbers of homosexuals, antisocials, exhibitionists and perverts have for some time been jumping onto the transsexual bandwagon, bringing the subject and the medical profession into disrepute. These are more aptly trans-homo-sexuals, often having their partners at their side when having surgery, many afterwards becoming prostitutes." (quoted p74).

Georgina, 1990

In 1991 she did publish her autobiography, (from which most of the above is taken) under her married name. The book contains a Forward by Grant Williams, the urological surgeon who resigned from Charing Cross Hospital in 1988 in protest against wasting hospital resources on transsexuals: he iterates that sex cannot be changed, and that the vast majority of transsexuals are totally unsuitable for surgery. The book also includes a reprint of Over the Sex Border (changing the spelling from 'transexual' to 'transsexual').

In response to a review of her autobiography in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Georgina wrote to clarify that she is not transsexual:

"Dr Pryor is wrong to suggest that I am one such case who has been able to adapt and lead a happy and useful life in my chosen gender. As my autobiography relates, my own circumstances are unique. I did not change my name: As a physical and genetic hermaphrodite this was done officially when my birth certificate was corrected from 'Boy' to 'Girl' as a result of affidavits from my father, a surgeon, and a sexologist."

In 1995 a profile of Georgina was broadcast on ITV.

In December 2003 she wrote to the Daily Telegraph to oppose the Gender Recognition Bill, then before Parliament, and re-iterated that

"trans-sexuals do not change their sex but only become simulacra of the opposite sex".

This was quoted with approval by Norman Tebbit in the House of Lords.

Georgina's wedding headdress has been preserved and is on display in the Museum of Croydon. Georgina died at age 90, survived by her husband of fifty-one years.

*Not the equestrian. There were also several Georginas in the family tree of the Dukes of Beaufort (family name: Somerset).

• Georgina Turtle. Over the Sex Border. Victor London: Gollancz. 319 pp 1963.
  
• Georgina Turtle. “Transsexuality”. British Medical Journal. 9 July 1966: 116. www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=1943075&pageindex=1.
  
• Bobbie Jacobson. “The Sex Changers”. World Medicine 9, 13 Feb 1974:17,19.
  
• Georgina Somerset. "Ethics of Transsexuality". Letter to the Royal Society of Medicine, 82, August 1989. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1292275/?page=1.
  
• Georgina Somerset. "The transsexual predicament". Letter to the Royal Society of Medicine, 83, Jun 1990: 416.
  
• Georgina Somerset, with a Forward by Grant Williams. A Girl Called Georgina: An Illustrated Autobiography, with Study Update. Lewes: The Book Guild. 475 pp 1992. Includes a reprint of Over the Sex Border.
  
• Georgina Somerset. A Collection of Ephemera Relating to 'A Girl Called Gerogina. 199?.
  
• Georgina Somerset. Letter to the Royal Society of Medicine, 87, Sept 1994. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294801/?page=2.
  
• Gordon Mason (dir). A Girl Called Georgina. With Georgina Somerset. Carlton UK 30 mins 1995. Won the Silver Award at the Houston International Film Festival
  
• Dr Georgina Somerset. "Re: Saddest part of the syndrome". Letter to the Daily Telegraph, 23 Nov 2003. Online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TNUKdigest/message/7388.
  
• Dr Georgina Somerset. "Simulacra of the opposite sex ". Letter to the Daily Telegraph, 28 Dec 2003. www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/3600786/Simulacra-of-the-opposite-sex.html.
  
• Norman Tebbit. "Birth certificate is fact". Letter to the Daily Telegraph, 04 Jan 2004. www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/3601074/Birth-certificate-is-fact.html.
  
• "Georgina's Wedding Coronet". The Museum of Croydon. www.museumofcroydon.com/ixbin/indexplus?record=CAT4638&_IXEMBED_KIOSK_=kiosk/a5_k5&_IXFROMC_=1.
  
• "Georgina Somerset – obituary". The Telegraph, 05 Dec 2013. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/medicine-obituaries/10498291/Georgina-Somerset-obituary.html.
  
• Mish O'Brien. "RIP Georgina Somerset". OII-UK, 8 December 2013. http://oiiuk.org/663/rip-georgina-somerset.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA      LGBTHISTORYUK
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One could argue that as Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten and Havelock Ellis' Eonism contain accounts of persons who are from our perspective obviously transsexuals, then Turtle's book was not the first on the subject. However it was the first book to use the term. It was rude of Benjamin and the author of the BMJ leading article to not even mention her book, probably because she was a dentist and not a medical doctor, and probably more so because she was herself a transsexual, which I am sure is how they they perceived her despite her protests to the contrary.

Note that Turtle uses 'transsexualist' without any reference to Benjamin, and it would seem that the word was in use in England independently of the use of 'transsexual" via Cauldwell-Lawrence-Wood-Benjamin in California.

It is, of course, contentious to insist that chromosomes = sex as Somerset and various others have done.   Benjamin named the first chapter in his 1966 The Transsexual Phenomenon "The Symphony of Sexes" and while admitting that chromosomal sex is fundamental, 'sex' also has genetic, anatomical, legal, gonadal, germinal, endrocrinal, psychological and social aspects. Chromosomes are the one aspect that cannot be changed. By making chromosomes the same as 'sex' Somerset thinks that she is able to differentiate herself from transsexuals as a class.

Much as I identify with Georgina as she attempts to get her book noticed, I must admit that I was appalled by her suing because she was compared to Christine Jorgensen. Let us repeat her words: "implying that I was homosexual, would have had breast implants, electrolysis and was probably not legally married, I had no choice but to instigate libel proceedings for, indeed, all these premises were totally false". Two years after homosexuality had been partially decriminalised, Mrs Somerset still treats an assumption of homosexuality as a libel. Furthermore, when she denies being homosexual, she is not denying being lesbian, she is denying being androphilic – an odd thing for a woman married for seven years to say. Jorgensen, an openly heterosexual woman, had admitted an interest in men. Nor was there any reason to assume that Jorgensen had had breast implants. Jorgensen's UK publishers should have counter-sued for the defamation of androphilia.

In her various missives to journals and newspapers, Georgina never writes in support of any transsexual. In fact after the initial surge of respondents after the publicity of her change and then marriage, it seems that she avoided all transsexuals. Certainly she avoided the English transsexual groups: GLF TV/TS group, Beaumont Society, the TV-TS Support Group, SHAFT, Press for Change, although she has good words for the Beaumont Trust and lists gender identity clinics and a few groups at the end of her autobiography. However her opinion of such groups is: "most of these appear to be mutual admiration societies run by transsexuals themselves" "they fail to help the lonely transsexual who does not feel, or wish to feel, part of an abnormal group. These would be distressed by the sight of other types … even the thought of having to attend a Gender identity Clinic or sit in a private waiting room with other transsexuals is off-putting."(p87)

There is passing mention in A Girl Called Georgina of Christine Jorgensen and April Ashley, but not a word about Betty Cowell (1918 – 2011) only five years older than Georgina, who also served in the Second World War, who also claimed to be intersex, and who also dismissed other transsexuals: "I had female chromosome make-up, XX. The people who have followed me have often been those with male chromosomes, XY. So they’ve been normal people who’ve turned themselves into freaks by means of the operation", and avoided meeting them.

Practically all the points that are raised by transphobes are found in Georgina's books and letters: still have a prostate, not raised as female, need to dilate, no female reproductive organs, sex cannot be changed, no periods, cannot become pregnant, deep voices, etc.

On page 69 of her biography, Somerset writes: "The fact that those with Klinefelter's syndrome [XXY] are almost certainly sterile and may present with some female physical characteristics does not, in itself, predispose to transsexualism. Much as one must sympathise with their predicament, those with such a constitution hoping that it gives some justification for their desire for a 'change' can only be disappointed, since this chromosomal aberration is not a mixed-sex, mosaic aberration, occurs in 1 in 700 males, and only very few of these are transsexuals – evidence enough that the aetiology of the problem is much more complex than genetic considerations alone." If one removes "is not a mixed-sex, mosaic aberration" one can replace 'Klinefelter's syndrome' with mosaic XO/XY. Somerset asserts that the latter alone is a justification for a desire for a change, but does not demonstrate it.

On p92-3 Georgina lists in details the contents of her private archive. I have found no mention of what happened to it.

There is no mention of Turtle's book in Janice Raymond's The Transsexual Empire, although it would have been very useful to her. Norman Tebbit quoted Georgina Somerset; Sheila Jeffries quoted Norman Tebbit on the subject, but does not mention Somerset at all.

Bet Power (1950 - ) archivist, activist

Of Polish descent, Power was born and raised in Chicago. Power's father, a sailor taught the child, who already thought of himself as a boy, carpentry, baseball, bowling, billiards and poker. He played sports with his elder brother's friends without being outed as a girl.

At age 6 he witnessed a women pedestrian killed in a car accident. His mother started abusing him, attacking her husband and mutilating herself. At 13 Power was obliged to wear a dress for confirmation, and after that for church and the Catholic all-girls school.

Power became a street kid who did alcohol and other drugs. By 16 he passed well enough to get into leather bars and drag-show clubs. He marched for civil rights and ran from the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He was part of the Workers World Party.

He went to a therapist and fell in love with her, but she was homophobic, and rejected him with prescriptions of antidepressants and antipsychotics. She urged Power's mother to have him committed. He was diagnosed as having a "narcissistic personality disturbance with anxiety and recurring panic attacks". He managed to avoid taking the compulsory pills, and started talking about a boyfriend. Six weeks after this he was released. He became an activist in the anti-psychiatry movement.

In 1972 he found a butch lesbian psychologist who told him that he was a butch, that he did not need therapy and should get involved at the Lesbian Feminist Center. There he found support to get off drugs, lose the 50 pounds he had gained from the prescription drugs, and to eat vegetarian. He was grateful but did not really think that he fitted in. The Chicago Lesbian Feminist Center housed the New Alexandria Lesbian Library (NALL) and Power became a volunteer there. He also had his first lovers and completed an MA in comparative literature and sociocultural processes, and got a job as a proof reader with a magazine publisher.

In 1977 the Chicago Lesbian Feminist Center closed and Power rescued the books and magazines from the NALL. He broke with his bio-family in 1979. They denied all the abuse, and Power had not only made it up, he was also queer. He, his lover, and the NALL collection moved to Huntington, and later Northampton, Massachusetts. He got a job in an ad agency in Hartford. Connecticut.

Lovers came and went. Bet drank heavily in "dyke, gay and trannie bars". In 1982 he tried to stop drinking. In 1983 he kicked in the bedroom window of an ex-lover, and was briefly in jail. He went to an alcoholism counselor, and also did a past-life regression with a psychic counselor. He was told that he had always, in every past life been a man, and in his previous life had been a Japanese scientist who was executed for treason after helping the US develop the atom bomb. He admitted his alcoholism and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous. He also came out both as trans and as into Sado-Masochism.

In 1986 the NALL received a letter from Louis Sullivan containing his pioneering Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual. Bet finished reading it in two hours. It gave him a vocabulary to describe himself, and now he knew that he was not the only FTM transsexual. He contacted Louis, and a few weeks later flew to San Francisco to meet him. They wrote and phoned each other frequently until Lou's early death in 1991. By then Bet had met his wife and his job was going well, and he did not feel that he could move to San Francisco to continue Lou's work.

He was no longer involved in the lesbian community. They were uncomfortable with his maleness, and also with the fact that he directed a monthly support group for lesbian, bi and trans into S/M. He decided that the NALL collection was not just a lesbian collection, and renamed it as the Sexual Minorities Archives.

He visited a gender counselor to decide if he wanted to medically transition, as his wife was

encouraging him to do. Despite knowing only one FTM crossdresser in all of New England, in 1992 he founded, on his forty-second birthday, the East Coast Female-to-Male Group (ECFTMG). It grew slowly but eventually was able to split into separate groups in the major New England cities.

He settled as being non-hormonal and non-operative. Despite some employment discrimination, he has managed to achieve creative director—vice president positions in advertising and marketing. His wife left him for a cis man in 1995.

In 2007 Power was diagnosed with granulomatosis polyangiitis, and now needs surgery every six months to keep breathing. He has not worked since. He is living on disability.

The house that contains the Sexual Minorities Archives is rented, and the owner wishes to sell. Power does not have the money to buy it, but has organized a fundraising campaign.

He is also contemplating a legal name change to Ben.

• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 155.
  
• Bet Power. "My Wonderful Askewness". In J. Ari Kane-Demaios & Vern L. Bullough (eds) Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths Prometheus Books, 2006: 57-74.
  
• Andre Perez. "Interview with Bet Power". Transgender Oral History Project, May 12, 2008. Online.
  
• Fred Contrada. "Bet Power shines bright amid his Sexual Minorities Archives". MassLive, July 15, 2014. Online.

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Michelle De Ville (1958–) performer, habilleuse.

19-year-old De Ville first met transsexuals in a Montréal gay bar. They were dressed as men but had obviously started on hormones. This led to a discovery of the bars that catered to transvestites and transsexuals: PJ's for English speakers and Café Cléopâtre further east for French speakers.

De Ville completed education in 1979 with a diploma from the CEGEP St Laurent in Sciences humaines.

Michelle was often found in Montréal's bars and nightclubs. Many times she was given a hard time in gay bars, or ejected, for being too feminine. She was much more accepted in disco and then New Wave clubs through the 1980s. She got to know a club owner, and became first a waitress, and then a 'door-bitch' deciding who got into the club. She did drag shows at PJ's and Cléopâtre's, starting with an impersonation of Brigitte Bardot.

This led to some small parts in movies shot in Montréal. The most significant were Or D'ur, Amour impossible and Evixion, each directed by Bashar Shbib. For Amour impossible, she introduced the film at gay film festivals across Canada and in New York. She was also in The Surrogate, 1984, a mainstream Canadian film where the major trans role went to professional impersonator Jim Bailey.

In 1989 she was working with Comité Sida Aide Montréal, but was concerned in that HIV+ trans women were being referred to by male pronouns.  Although not HIV+ herself,  she started a group specifically for HIV+ trans women.

"In my book, the trans community should be within the gay community, we should be a whole, that's what we say about LGBT rights. We're supposed to stick together, but the reality is totally different."

In 1990 she was interviewed in Fuzzbox magazine on how queens/ transsexuals had not been allowed in some gay bars even those with a drag show.

In 1994 Michelle was gratuitously insulted by two police officers. She made an official complaint, handicapped by the fact that the officers had hidden their name tags, which resulted in her being hassled by police for six days until she was stopped with her lawyer in the passenger seat. When the case finally came to court, a year later, the police insisted that there was no way to know which police officers were in which car.

Viviane Namaste`s 2005 C'était du spectacle! drew partially on Michelle`s personal archives.  

Michelle makes a living selling and renting period clothing, and also books and records.

• Interview with Michelle de Ville. Fuzzbox, 1990. np.
  
• Ki Namaste. "'Tragic Misreadings': Queer Theory's Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity". In Michele Eliason & Jim Cullen (eds). Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Anthology. New York: New York University Press, 1996: 186.
  
• Viviane K. Namaste. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000: 10-11.
  
• Viviane K. Namaste. C'était du spectacle!: l'histoire des artistes transsexuelles à Montréal, 1955-1985. Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005: xii.
  
• Viviane K Namaste. Sex Change, Social Change Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism. Toronto: Women's Press, 2005: 210.
  
• Michelle De Ville interviewed by Viviane Namaste. "'We Paved the Way for Whatever Tolerance They Have in Their Lives': An Interview with Michelle De Ville, 'The First Door Bitch in Montreal'". In Dan Irving & Rupert Raj (eds). Trans Activism in Canada: A Reader. Women's Press, 2014.
  

*not the Hollywood special effects person, nor the French film director

IMDB     LinkedIn      AmazonReviewer
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There is a pattern whereby academics who write about trans people have a favourite person whom they mention again and again.   For Vern Bullough it was Virginia Prince.   For Richard Ekins it was Phaedra Kelly.   And for Viviane Namaste it is Michelle De Ville.

Namaste 1996, 2000, 2005 returned and returned to the 1990 Fuzzbox interview where Michelle spoke of herself and others being hassled as trans women in gay bars.   This is hardly straighforward.   Are trans women a type of women or a type of gay or both?  Should trans women want to go where cis women are not allowed?  I, also, in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was less confident of passing, would go to gay bars in Toronto where it did not matter if I were read.  Fortunately, I never had such bad experiences as Michelle talks about.  The fact that the same bars that did not welcome women (trans or cis) also had drag shows is not very germane as a trans issue.   Women who go into bars offering striptease or pole dancing are unlikely to be treated the same as the male customers.  The issue is more a feminist one of what attitude to take to men in gender segregation where women`s bodies and images are commodified.

The section on Michelle's films in the 2014 interview needed some fact checking.   Namaste spelt  Evixion as Eviction, and Michelle named The Surrogate as Blind Rage (presumably a working title, but not the release title).

You may care to browse Michelle`s Amazon Reviews.   Her dismissal of Benjamin`s Transsexual Phenomon as 'dinosaur' and 'dangerous' and her dismissal of the film Different for Girls as 'both irresponsible and offensive' sets her apart.   She is also a big fan of Jayne Mansfield.

Victoria Fenández (1932–) performer

Victor Fernández was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico. His father persistently denied that such an effeminate child could be his.

Victor moved to New York soon after high school, where she became Vicky Starr and a performer.

In the 1960s she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and started female hormones with great success. She was able to work in a bar in North Beach as the district's first topless dancer. Conforming to the conventions of the time, she ended the act be taking the microphone and in a baritone: "I've got a secret. I'm a man!".

After surgical completion and several husbands, Victoria remained active in the Latina gay/LGBT/queer community. In the late 1990s she participated in the community oral history project.

She also amassed a personal archive documenting her life in the city, including her performances as “Mr. Vicki Starr,” friendships with fellow transgender women, and sex work. With funding from Center for Chicano Studies Horacio Roque Ramírez & Rolando Longoria have been digitizing her collection.

• "Vicki Starr". Drag Queen, 1, Neptune Production, 1970: 34-9.
  
• Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. Gender in performance. Routledge, 2000: 396
  
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 201.
  
• Horacio N. Roque Ramírez & Rolando Longoria II. "Digitizing Desires: Virtual Public Memory, LGBT Latino Histories, and the Vicki Starr Collection" UC Santa Barbara, Center for Chicano Studies Newsletter, X, 1, Spring 2007: 3. www.research.ucsb.edu/ccs/CSI%20News07.pdf.  NO LONGER AVILABLE
  
• Horacio N. Roque Ramírez. "Queer Immigrant Sexual Crossings to San Francisco: The Lives and Labors of Puerto Rican Performer Vicki Starr". GLBT Historical Society: Talking Back: Queer History Fully Exposed, 2009. www.facebook.com/events/205745065780.  NO LONGER AVILABLE
• Horacio Roque Ramírez. "Archives of Sexual Crossings: The Meanings of Puerto Rican Topless Transgender Performer Vicki Starr". American Historical Association, January 3, 2014. https://aha.confex.com/aha/2014/webprogram/Paper14140.html.

Leo Wollman (1914 – 1998) gynecologist, hypnotist, sexologist.

Original March 2007; revised October 2013; 1st paragraph revised December 2019 with information from Wollman's step-granddaughter.

Leo Wollman lived almost his entire life on Mermaid Avenue, Coney Island, Brooklyn, except for his medical education in Edinburgh. He married in 1936, and he and his wife, Eleanor, frequently travelled back and forth to Scotland for a few years. Eleanor sailed home in September 1939 as war broke out, but Leo stayed in Scotland until 1942. ++They had two sons Arthur (1943 - 2019) who became a urologist in San Diego, and Bryant who became a mailman.  Arthur in turn has a son who also became a doctor. In the mid-1950s Eleanor died, and Leo remarried and adopted his new wife's daughter.

Leo became a gynecologist at the Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn. He was also a hypnotist and interested in psychosomatic dentistry. In some newspaper accounts he is described as a psychiatrist.

Wollman (right) at a Hypnosis Conference in Mainz, 1970.

On July 31, 1961 Wollman, in his role as a hypnotist, appeared in a television discussion re the use of the then new pacemaker. He was head of the New York Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnotism.

In the mid-1960s Wollman became an associate of Harry Benjamin, and they shared a practice. Wollman started running a group session where transsexuals could meet and exchange ideas and experiences. He also used hypnosis to determine whether a transsexual was authentic.

In Benjamin's 1966 book, The Transsexual Phenomenon, Wollman is described as a "noted gynecologist and student of hypnosis". He is quoted and what he said is found at the bottom of this article.

In December 1966 Dr Carl Coppolino, anesthesiologist and hypnotist, was on trial for the murder of his lover's husband. The now jilted lover claimed that Coppolino hypnotized her into injecting her husband with succinylcholine which caused a heart attack. Leo Wollman testified that under hypnosis:

"It's impossible to have a subject do something they feel they are morally unable to do". 

Coppolino was acquitted, but four months later he was convicted of murdering his own wife by an injection of succinylcholine. He served 12½ years.

WBI Boston 1968 with Dr Leo Wollman.  Presenter Bob Kennedy

In 1968 Wollman was phoned from Toronto by Dianna Boileau, and arranged for a local doctor to prescribe female hormones for her. Also that year he was in the WBI Boston television channel with Virginia Prince. On September 19, 1969 he was on the Phil Donahue television show to discuss transsexual operations.

Wollman contributed a paper on post-operative care of the neo-vagina to Richard Green & John Money's 1969 book, Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment.

In 1970 he flew up to Toronto for the release of Dianna Boileau's autobiography. He rather dominated the event and predicted that transsexual women would be able to become pregnant within 10 years. At this time he claimed 110 sex change patients with only one case of regret. He estimated 5 male-to-females for each female-to-male.

In the early 1970s he was President of The American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine.

Lyn Raskin's 1971 autobiography, Diary of a Transsexual uses the pseudonym "Dr Len Williams" for Dr Wollman. He sent her to Dr Burou in Casablanca for surgery. A few years later Wollman's patients were having surgery in the New York area, at Yonkers Hospital, by plastic surgeons Benito Rish and David Wesser. Eventually both Rish and Wesser had their licenses lifted by the state medical board, although their work with transsexuals was not cited as the reason.

Another associate of Wollman was Garrett Oppenheim, a cis-heterosexual who had previously been a journalist on the New York Herald-Tribune. He then became a hypnotist and sex counselor. He and his wife sold counseling cassette-tapes, ran an organization for transsexuals called Confide, and published an associated newsletter called Transition.

In 1971 the Erickson Educational Foundation sponsored the production of a 28-minute documentary, I am Not This Body, which featured a discussion in the EEF office between Zelda Suplee, Leo Wollman, two trans women and actress Pamela Lincoln (who was purportedly seeking information about transsexuals). Suplee and Wollman had previously known each other through their mutual interest in hypnosis.  Around this time Suplee introduced Wollman to the exploitation film director, Doris Wishman, who was interested in making a film about transsexuals.

In 1973 Wollman published an article advocating female circumcision as a cure for frigidity.

Wollman was an associate of Michael Salem, the cis-heterosexual who ran a boutique in New York and a mail-order service for transvestites. Wollman advised re colors and lingerie styles. He also helped Salem write his 1973 book How to Impersonate a Woman. He then sent copies to what he called "the clown-transvestites": Milton Berle, Tony Curtis, Johnny Carson, Flip Wilson, George Burns, Jack Benny.

In 1977 Renee Richards was obliged to go to court to establish her right to play in women's tennis. Both her surgeon Dr Roberto Granato and Dr Wollman testified on her behalf. Wollman stated that he had treated over 1,700 transsexual patients and that

"It is his view that Dr. Richards should be considered a female... despite the fact that the chromosomes may appear to be that of a man, if she has the external genital appearance, the internal organ appearance, gonadal identity, endocrinological makeup and psychological and social development of a female, she would be considered a female by any reasonable test of sexuality."

From 1971 Wollman had been working with Doris Wishman (1912 – 2001) one of the very few female exploitation film directors of her generation. Their joint project/film first came out as Adam or Eve, 1971, but was later recut with additional footage and released in 1978 under the title Born A Man... Let Me Die A Woman. Cinematography was done by Casa Susanna regular Andrea Susan Malick.  It was advertised, misleadingly, as: 'All true! All real! See a man become a woman before your eyes'. In a cross between a documentary and pornography, Dr Wollman, who reminds us of his MD, his PhD and his DD, shows us scenes where a transsexual explains that she will get a womb transplant and have a baby; dramatized scenes where trans women pick up men for sex; gory close-ups of vaginoplasty; dramatized suicides and self-castrations. Incorrect biological explanations are given, e.g. that homosexuality and transsexuality are both the result of incorrect development of glands. The film contains footage from Wishman's previous films, and has continuity errors. The credits are misleading: only some of the real trans women are listed; porn star Harry Reems (who did not know that he was in the film) is listed as Tim Long; porn star Vanessa del Rio is not listed at all. It was banned in the UK. Kleinhans argues that the reels are in the wrong order, and that Wishman "constantly undermines the doctor's discourse of tolerance with footage that presents transsexuals as freaks and staged episodes that exploit transsexualism for sensationalistic effect". However there is no record of Wollman disassociating himself from the film or complaining about Wishman's final cut. Wishman was quoted in Psychotronic Video 26.:

Wollman in Let me Die a Woman

“I found the transsexuals to be very sad and lonely people. Because of that, I paid them more than anyone else, to ease my conscience, I guess. I didn’t want to think that I was exploiting them, although I really wasn’t. They were all very happy to be in the film.” 

There is a paperback tie-in to the film by MJ Lucas (who may be either Wishman or Wollman).

In 1979 Rosalyne Blumenstein, then 15 but claiming to be 16, took the bus and train out to Mermaid Avenue to see who she describes as "a sweet little old doctor" who gave her a bottle of Provera. However she never went back.

Along with Paul A. Walker, Ph.D., Jack C. Berger, MD., Richard Green, MD., Donald R. Laub, M.D., Charles L. Reynolds, Jr., M.D., Wollman was a co-author of the first Harry Benjamin Standards of Care which was approved at the Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, San Diego,California, February 1979.

Dr Leo Wollman died in 1998, aged 84. His widow donated his papers and other material to Transy House which established the Wollman Archives of Transgender History and Culture.

The 1999 article by Teresi & McAuliffe claims that Wollman treated 2,800 transsexuals, and that he hormonally primed one of his patients to breastfeed his own child. The patient was still with her wife and they took turns feeding the child.


*Not the economist

Wollman's publications:

• "Hypnosis in Weight Control". American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 4,3,1962: 177-180. DOI:10.1080/00029157.1962.10401892.
  
• "How Prenancy Tests Work". Sexology: Modern Guide to Sex Knowledge, 31, March 1964.
  
• "Hypnosis for the Surgical Patient". American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 7,1,1964: 83-5. DOI: 10.1080/00029157.1964.10402397.
  
• "A Brief Note on the Origin of the Psychoprophylactic Method (PPM) in Obstetrics." American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 7.1,1964: 85-86.
  
• Quoted in Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press, 1966. New York: Warner Books Edition 1977: 161-2 Online at: www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/ECR6/benjamin and at www.mut23.de/texte/Harry%20Benjamin%20-%20The%20Transsexual%20Phenomenon.pdf.
  
• "Brief statistics on female adolescents." Journal of Sex Research 2.1,1966: 25-26.
  
• "In contrast to the schizoid, the normal individual maintains his unity and identity through the strength of his impulses and feelings. The difference in the two conditions can be contrasted diagrammatically in terms of impulse formation and muscular activity. Collapse of schizoid rigidity plunges the individual into a schizophrenic." Fertility and Sterility 17.2,1966: 273-277.
  
• "Transsexualism: Gynecological Aspects".  Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 29: 463, 1967. doi: 10.1111/j.2164-0947.1967.tb02280.x
  
• "Surgery for the Transsexual." Journal of Sex Research 3.2,1967: 145-147.
  
• "Abstracts of Current Literature." American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 11.2, 1968: 132-134.
  
• "Office Management of the Postoperative Male Transsexual". In Richard Green & John Money (ed). Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.
  
• "Hooded Clitoris: Preliminary Report". Journal of American Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine,20, 1973: 3-4.
• "Female Circumcision". Journal of American Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine, 20, 1974: 130-1.
  
• "The Effect of Deviate Behavior on a Marriage". Osteopathic Physician, 41,5, 1974: 111.
  
• "Nonverbal communication for prevention of mental illness." Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry & Medicine, 22,2,1975: 51.
• With Paul A. Walker, Ph.D., Jack C. Berger, MD., Richard Green, MD., Donald R. Laub, M.D. & Charles L. Reynolds, Jr., M.D. Standards of Care: The hormonal and surgical sex reassignment of gender dysphoric persons. The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, Inc. 1979. Online at: www.genderpsychology.org/transsexual/hbsoc_1990.html.
  
• With Erwin DiCyan, George Goldberg & Arthur Hastings. "Holistic approaches to oral health and dentistry". Health for the whole person: the complete guide to holistic medicine (1980): 333.
  
• With Laurence Lotner. Eating Your Way to a Better Sex Life: The Complete Guide to Sexual Nutrition. Pinnacle Books, 1983.
  

Other sources:

• "Coppolino May Take Stand: The Defense Rests". The Norwalk Hour, Dec 14, 1966. Online at: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1898&dat=19661214&id=TuogAAAAIBAJ&sjid=qW8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=4953,3405220.
  
• Kathleen Rex. "Canada's first sex-swapper asks for understanding: Doctor sees day coming when transplants will enable fathers to become mothers". The Globe and Mail. Sept 16, 1970.
  
• Lyn Raskin. Diary of a Transsexual, Olympia Press, 1971.
  
• Dianna as told to Felicity Cochrane, with an Introduction by Leo Wollman. Behold, I Am a Woman. New York: Pyramid Books, 1972.
  
• Michael Salem. How to Impersonate a Woman; A Handbook for the Male Transvestite. NY: M. Salem Enterprises, 1973.
  
• Jack O'Brien.  Schenectady Gazette, 2 Nov 1973
• "Richards v. US Tennis Assn". Leagle, August 16, 1977. www.leagle.com/decision/197780693Misc2d713_1654.
  
• Doris Wishman (dir). Born A Man... Let Me Die A Woman. Hosted by Leo Wollman, with trans persons Leslie, Lisa Carmelle, Deborah Harte, Ann Zordi, and porn stars Harry Reem, Angel Spirit and Vanessa del Rio. Scientific and medical advisor: Dr Leo Wollman. US 78 mins 1978.
  
• M.J. Lucas. Let Me Die A Woman: The Why and How of Sex-Change Operations. New York: Rearguard Productions. 1978. The book that goes with the film. Leo Wollman consulted.
  
• Thomas Waugh. "Medical Thrills: Born A Man... Let Me Die A Woman". The Body Politic, 49, Dec 1978-Jan 1979: 41-2. Reprinted in The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema. Durham (N.C.): Duke university press, 2000.: 72-3.
• Dick Teresi & Kathleen McAuliffe. ""Male Pregnancy"Omni, 8, 1985. Reprinted in Patrick D Hopkins (ed), Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology. Indiana University Press, 1999. 
• F. Hodges. "A Short History of the Institutionalization of Involuntary Sexual Mutilation in the United States" in George C. Denniston & Marilyn Fayre Milos (eds). Sexual Mutilations; A Human Tragedy. Springer, 1997: 32.
  
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 214, 216, 222, 227, 252.
  
• Rosalyne Blumenstein,. Branded T. 1st Books Library, 2003: 70. 
• Michael J. Bowen.  " 'StrangerHer': The Peculiar Saga of Let Me Die a Woman".  Booklet included in Synapse DVD release of Let Me Die a Woman, 2005. 
• Tania Modleski "Women's Cinema as Counterphobic Cinema: Doris Wishman as the Last Auteur"; Chuck Kleinhans "Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi" in Jeffrey Sconce. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste. Duke University Press, 2007:60-2, 112-4, 119.
• SJ Parker. Emails to Zagria, 22,28 September 2013.

EN.WIKIPEDIA   
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Apparently 'Wishman' is Doris' birth name, and there is no implication from it of her being transgender.

What should we make of Dr Leo Wollman?  Was he a second Harry Benjamin who helped almost 3,000 transsexuals on their way, or was he a hypnotist conman who associated with dubious practioners and took the patients whom Benjamin was unsure about.   Or was he a mixture of the two.  His involvement with Doris Wishman in producing a film that is best regarded as camp has not helped his reputation.  Either way there were no eulogies after his death as there were for Benjamin.   His publications are mainly short, and there is no biography of him.

The Carl Cappolino trial was in December 1966.   18 months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated, purportedly by  Sirhan Sirhan.   This assassination is frequently cited as a hypnotic subject being compelled to kill.  Philip H. Melanson's. The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968-1991.  S.P.I. Books, 1994 actually quotes Leo Wollman on the topic as ironic background while arguing for the opposite.

Female circumcision is, among other reasons, condemned in that it, far from curing frigidity, removes the clitoris and thus any possibility of sexual pleasure.

The Wollman quote in Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon is:

"Before irrevocable surgery makes the transition from male to female physically permanent, it is essential that a psychiatric evaluation and a psychological examination be done. This is indicated for the protection of the physician as well as the patient. Also a period of observation under estrogen therapy to reduce libido and tension is recommended.

It is suggested, as an avant garde technique, that hypnotic progression might be an important asset in the true evaluation of the transsexual's needs and aspirations. This projection into the future may, in some cases, dispel certain faulty attitudes and provide the faltering future female with second thoughts before definitive surgery.

Following the preparatory estrogen hormone therapy to provide breast tissue and decrease the male libidinous feelings, the transsexual embarks upon a new life immediately after the surgical removal of the external male sexual apparatus and the creation of a functional vaginal sheath. Many varying surgical procedures have been divised and are being carried out with equivocal results. However, in those cases where medicine and surgery have successfully created a phenotypic female, the "gynecological" problems of the male-to-female individual merit special attention.

For this patient, patient understanding and gentle treatment are necessary. The most frequent complaint after the operation, excluding the painful convalescence, is urinary frequency usually due to a urethro-cystitis. Antibiotic treatment will effect a rapid surcease from the disquieting urinary signs and symptoms.

A rather unusual urinary complaint is the control of the direction of the urine stream flowing from the urethra. If the urethral opening remains high, the flow will run over the rim of the toilet seat. This messy condition may be prevented by adjusting the tilt of the pelvis to permit the urine to flow into the bowl.

Another common complaint is the inability of the transsexual (now a female) to consummate sexual intercourse. This may be due to many factors. Notable among these are 1) an artistic vagina, 2) a narrow introits, 3) a thin vaginorectal septum, 4) an insufficiently lubricated vaginal canal, 5) vaginal bleeding from the apex of the freshly scarred vaginal pouch after vigorous coitus.

Treatment for these aforementioned dyspareunic states will vary with the condition found. Simple hygienic measures, proper lubrication methods, new coital techniques, dilatation by means of a Kelly aluminum dilator or a bakelite Young's dilator or a solid plastic mold worn with a flattened superior surface to protect the urethral passage, and sensible advice usually meted out to newly-weds are some of the physical and psychophysiological treatments found effective.

Above all, it is imperative for the gynecologist to regard his patient as a "female" - as "she" so rightly deserves to be considered after the lengthy and costly efforts to become a physical female. A great deal of research is indicated by the medical and psychological investigators before more consistent help can be offered to these male transsexuals, now ostensibly functioning females. The Harry Benjamin Foundation is now actively engaged in a research program of this type."