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

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

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

Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts

30 August 2016

Audrey Tang 唐鳳 (1981 - ) Perl programmer.

++ original October 2010; revised August 2016.

Táng Zōnghàn 唐宗漢,  who later took the English name Autrijus Tang, was born in Taiwan, learnt the Perl programming language at 12, dropped out of school at 14, founded a business at age 16 and by the age of 19 had worked in California as a software entrepreneur. 

In 2005 she transitioned and changed her Chinese name to Táng Fèng 唐鳳 and her English name to Audrey Tang.  Her parents backed her unconditionally. 

She has done pioneering work especially in Perl, Haskell and open source programming. She has translated related textbooks into Chinese. She is a proponent of autodidactism and individualist anarchism.

In 2014, Tang announced her retirement as an entrepreneur, and devoted her time to internet public welfare projects in Taiwan such as g0v.tw and the vTaiwan platform, as well as working on a contract for Apple.  

In August 2016 Audrey was named a minister without portfolio to mange digital information for the Taiwanese government.

*Not the Malaysian jazz musician

  EN.Wikipedia      pugs.

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01 August 2014

Jennifer Diane Reitz (1959 - ) activist, game designer, artist.

Raised in Oregon, Reitz studied biochemistry, but left without a degree. Jennifer had surgery at age 22. Since then she has lived in a polyamorous family that has grown to four persons, three women and a man.

She was out about being a lesbian-oriented bisexual, although pretty much asexual, and being part of a successful polyamory, but until she was 38 kept her gender history a deep secret.
"I have lived my entire life psychologically crippled by the shame of the very thought of anyone discovering my transsexuality. No longer. The best way to destroy embarrassment, is to have nothing one needs to hide. I am finally facing the vile bigot inside my own head that lives to condemn myself."
Since 1981 Jennifer has worked in the games industry, at first with dice-based fantasy games, and then after 1985 on Amiga and IBM computers. She was co-founder and visual designer of the video games site HappyPuppy.com (which was sold for a considerable sum in 1996) and LinkTown.com, (both are now defunct) and helped in the creation of OtakuWorld.com.  She and her spouses run Accursed Toys. Her recent work, mainly webcomics, is on Jenniverse.com.

Jennifer is the author of transsexual.org, Going from what is written on Transsexual.org:
  1. Jennifer conflates gender and gender identity, and proclaims that "the difference between sex and gender are at the very core of the issue" but ignores the difference between gender and gender identity.
  2. She proclaims that "it is apparent that some fifty percent of transsexuals die by age 30, usually by their own hand. This morbidity is known as the 50% Rule".
  3. She does recognize the high success rate of hormones and surgery.
  4. She opts for foetal hormonal events as the cause of transsexuality, and unlike many recognizes that the same is posited for homosexuality: "Although transsexuality is not the same thing as homosexuality, the two can sometimes occur in conjunction with each other, and there is evidence that both are created by the similar mechanisms, in utero".
  5. She proclaims that transvestity is something quite different: "primarily a sexual fetish that occurs after puberty … the behavior is apparently not rooted in a biological, pre-natal basis, but is learned".
  6. She rejects "transgenderism" as an "empty word" whose "primary function is social and political, and not clinical, despite the efforts of some to legitimize this essentially meaningless term".
  7. She accepts the 1:30,000 estimate for transsexuals, but argues that because "transsexuality is most commonly caused by stress-related hormonal changes … more transsexuals are born during times during or following war".
  8. She claims that "the transsexual is on average two standard deviations in intellect greater than the base population, and one standard deviation higher than those defined as homosexual". 
  9. "Every society in history has had some name, role or way of relating to the transsexual, from ancient Canaan and Turkey to India, even to the present day."
  10. Her site contains self-administered test to identify m-f transsexuals. She calls it Combined Gender Identity And Transsexuality Inventory (COGIATI).
Jennifer describes herself as a hetaera (the highly educated Greek courtesans).

EN.WIKIPEDIA   Transsexual.org   OtakuWorld   Jenniverse

COGIATI:
___________________________________________________________

Transsexual.org appears not to have been updated since 2009.

COGIATI has been much criticized for its reliance on gender stereotyping.  In particular maths ability is regarded as masculine, and admissions of such will result in the person not being identified as transsexual.  I would say that Jennifer's conflation of gender and gender identity damages the COGIATI seriously.

On Transsexual.org Jennifer insists “I care nothing for the politics of gender, nor the politics of sexuality, nor politics at all. Indeed I am reviled by such, gender issues are about survival and identity, and it is despicable to use the agony of anyone as a basis for petty power games.”   Presumably she fails to see the inevitable politics in her attitudes to transvestites and to transgenderism.   In fact we could take her as a pre-cursor of the HBS movement.  At the same time the gender stereotyping of COGIATI makes her position comparable to that of Ray Blanchard and his division of trans women into AGP/HSTS.

I don't see where late-transition transsexuals fit into her scheme, particularly those who have been husbands and fathers.

I simply do not understand her claim that “more transsexuals are born during times during or following war”.  In western Europe and north America, there were a few transsexuals in the 1960s (presumably born in the 1940s) but there are a lot lot more today.

She cites no sources for her claim of 50% dead by age 30.

Not all traditional societies had reverence for trans persons.   It is an interesting question why some did and others did not.   Some think that societies that have institutional inter-generational sex do  not have trans roles.   Some, such as the Celts, seem to have had neither.

We should be very wary of theories that flatter us by claiming that we are more intelligent and creative.  Again Jennifer cites no sources.  Many of the persons whom I have featured on this blog do indeed have intelligence and creativity, but that is one reason why I selected them and not others.   I have also featured trans persons, particularly those now in prison, who seemed rather challenged in terms of intelligence.
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27 March 2014

Riki Anne Wilchins (1952 - ) computing, activist.

(S/he and hir are Riki's preferred pronouns.)


Wilchins grew up in Cincinnati, his father a surgeon, and transitioned to Riki Anne in the late 1970s. S/he did a bachelors degree in Psychology & Communication at Cleveland State University in 1980 where s/he also attended the gender clinic. Hir transition resulted in a breakup with hir girlfriend of seven years. Wilchins later did a masters in Clinical Psychology at the New School for Social Research 1981-94.

In 1981 s/he moved to New York where s/he found work on Wall Street doing computer consulting in banking and brokerage despite being openly transsexual.

S/he approached lesbian archivist, Joan Nestle, asking to be included in the archive, but fearing rejection, and they became friends.

Wilchins was an early supporter of Nancy Burkholder after she was ejected from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MWMF) in 1991. Wilchins was one of the founders of Camp Trans across the road from MWMF from 1994. Wilchins argued strongly that pre-op and non-op should be included in MWMF as much as post-op women. Also in 1994 Wilchins and Denise Norris co-founded Transexual Menace to follow on from Transgender Nation. Later that year, after the murder of Brandon Teena, Wilchins organized a demonstration against New York's Village Voice which had printed an article by Donna Minkowitz on the murder which used only female pronouns for Teena. Later still Wilchins confronted Janice Raymond at the New York bookstore Judith's Room:
"You say we want to 'pass' as women. Well, I don't pass. I wear this Transexual Menace logo every place that I go. Between the two of us, only you pass as a woman. If, as de Beauvoir held, 'One is not born a woman, but becomes one,' if femininity is an invention of men foisted on women, if feminine behavior is a learned cultural performance of hair, clothing, voice, gesture, and stance so one is perceived as a female, then by presenting yourself as a woman it is you who have been co-opted into traditional sex roles, you who serve their institutions, and you who are performing here." 
photo by Mariette Pathy Allen
In 1995 Wilchins worked with Phyllis Frye and Karen Kerin on National Gender Lobby Day, a largely successful attempt to lobby every member of the US Government. Riding the excitement from the lobbying effort, Riki gave a rousing speech at that year's Be-all convention in Chicago on the need for a transgender organization to press for political change. In 1996 representatives from most US transgender organizations (but not Phyllis Frye after Wilchins took over the leadership of Lobby Day) met to charter the new organization GenderPAC. The paperwork was signed and Wilchins was named Executive Director.

A split quickly developed between those who wanted to keep the organization transgender specific and those who followed Wilchin's lead in addressing the gender expression of everybody. Policy Advisor JoAnn Roberts and President Angela Gardner resigned over this issue. That same year Riki wrote an article for TGForum with the ironic title '…Only a Crossdresser', in which s/he wrote:
"Once crossdressers ever *really* come out, and begin to enunciate the politics of the direct, head-on challenge their very existence poses to gender regimes, I think we have a truly revolutionary force on our hands, a potent force. The only question is, how long will they think of themselves, and allow so many of us to think of them, as '…only crossdressers?' "
Also that year, when Sean O'Neill in Colorado was sentenced to 90 days for statutory rape after consensual sex but without revealing his gender history, Wilchins commented:
"If you look androgynous and someone wants to claim that you're passing yourself off as the other gender, you've just committed a felony".
Riki also campaigned with Hermaphrodites With Attitude and Lesbian Avengers.

MWMF 1994 - photo by Mariette Pathy Allen


In 1997 hir book Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender came out, and became one the iconic books of 'transgender' as it was then conceived, and along with Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg, Wilchins was one of the 1990s iconic transgender persons. It was also a kickstart to the burgeoning Gender Queer movement. The book is a mixture of gender theory a la Judith Butler and Michel Foucault mixed with Riki's personal experiences. It also includes photographs by Mariette
Pathy Allen. Amongst other things s/he says:

"I have no interest in being part of a transgender or transexual movement whose sole purpose is to belly up to the Big Table and help ourselves to yet another serving of identity Pie, leaving in our wake some other, more marginalized group to carry on its own struggle alone. What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate and contain what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do. The point of a gender liberation movement for me … is also about the seventeen-year-old Midwestern cheerleader whose health is destroyed by anorexia because 'real women' are supposed to be preternaturally thin. It's about the forty-six-year-old Joe Six-pack who wraps his car around a crowded school bus on the way home from the bar because 'real men' are supposed to be heavy drinkers. It's about the unathletic and fat little boy who's physically attacked by his classmates everyday after school. It's about the two lesbian lovers stalked and killed on the Appalachian trail in Virginia. It's about the aging body succumbing to an unnecessary hysterectomy because certain kinds of gendered bodies simply don't matter as much. And it's about the sensitive, straight young man who is repeatedly raped his first year in prison because, within that environment, he's received as genderqueer, genderdifferent, or simply gendervulnerable".
Also:
"Academics, shrinks, and feminist theorists have traveled through our lives and problems like tourists on a junket. Picnicking on our identities like flies at a free lunch, they have selected the tastiest tidbits with which to illustrate a theory or push a book. The fact that we are a community under fire, is irrelevant to them. They pursue Science and Theory, and what they produce by mining our lives is neither addressed to us nor recycled within our community … Our performance of gender is invariably a site of contest, a problem which – if we could but bring enough hi-octane academic power to bear – might be solved".
The same year GenderPAC produced The First National Study on Transviolence, with 402 respondents the most extensive study on violence against gender variant persons. Later in 1997 Wilchins and GenderPAC made a tactical agreement with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) that 'gender identity' and 'gender expression' be dropped from that year's version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to improve its chance of passing. In exchange both groups would lobby for gender variance to be added to the Hate Crimes Statistics Act. This of course infuriated the various trans activists groups – the more so as both acts failed to pass.

Wilchins was on the cover of the Summer 1999 Transgender Tapestry. By that time Wilchins had managed to push out of GenderPAC most representatives of the founding transgender organizations with the exception of Tony Barreto-Neto from TOPS and Carrie David from IFGE, and converted the supposedly political campaigning organization into a non-profit educational charity. GenderPAC started recruiting state and campus co-ordinators. In December 2000, Gina Reiss, GenderPAC Managing Director was quoted:
“I’m tired of the fact that 85% of the people calling the office are transgender people
seeking help”.
In a speech that year Wilchin said:
"A transgender struggle is an important thing, but it is not my fight. In fact I personally have no interest in being transexual or transgender… What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do".
In 2001 Tony Barreto-Neto was forced out. Later that year, Time Magazine selected Wilchins as one of "100 Civic Innovators for the 21st Century." Wilchins was a featured columnist on gender issues for The Advocate.

In 2002, Riki with Joan Nestle and Clare Howell edited GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary which included essays by Sylvia Rivera, JT Leroy, Cheryl Chase, Gina Reiss, Rusty Mae Moore and many others. It includes four essays by Wilchins: A Certain Kind of Freedom: Power and the Truth of Bodies. In the fourth, "Deconstructing Trans", s/he wrote:
"It's fair to say that 'transgender' was created by the gay and feminist movements. Its emergence became practically inevitable from the day those movements began moving away from gender. … Genderqueerness would seem to be a natural avenue for feminism to contest Woman's equation with nurturance, femininity, and reproduction: in short to trouble the project of Man. Yet feminists have been loath to take that avenue, in no small part because queering Woman threatens the very category on which feminism depends."
In 2004 Riki published hir primer of theoretical concerns, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. However at $63 it was priced not to sell. S/he worked with anthropologist David Valentine. He helped hir edit Read My Lips, they wrote a paper together on violence against gender variant people, and s/he is frequently mentioned in his Imagining Transgender. They both critique the obligatory identity requirement for being transgender.

In 2006 Riki and hir wife adopted a baby girl.

In 2009 s/he closed GenderPac, and founded TrueChild which promotes "'gender transformative' approaches to philanthropy and policy that challenge rigid gender norms and inequities in order to improve life outcomes for at-risk youth".
EN.WIKIPEDIA      AnneLawrence.com       BCHolmes       LinkedIn





_______________________________________________________________________________

In earlier days Riki prefered to spell 'transexual' with one 's' to avoid the medical implications.   However more recently she has been spelling it 'transsexual'.

This site is called 'gender variance who's who' and so of course we welcome those who speak up for other forms of gender variance in addition to transgender and transsexual.

However Wilchins did upset many trans activists by downplaying the trans aspect of GenderPAC.  S/he should have made it clear from the start what GenderPAC would be doing, and relied much less on donations from trans groups.

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22 March 2014

Jessica Diana Bussert (1965 - ) network specialist, photographer.

Joshua Bussert grew up in the US Mid-west. He married his girlfriend at 18 when she became pregnant. In 1985 he studied data processing at Vincennes University, Indiana. He was also seeing a counselor to overcome his desire to be a woman. He had three children with his first wife before they divorced.

Bussert converted to Catholicism, and then met Sharon, a born Catholic, who became his second wife in 1990, after being told of his cross-dressing. They raised the three children from his first marriage and adopted two sisters from Haiti. Bussert worked in business consulting and systems analysis for networks, went to the Kinsey Institute for counseling, and they found Gender Identity Dysphoria.
In 2001 Bussert started working for Hitachi Data Systems, and in 2003 started laser hair removal, and looked for a transsexual community, but being in the middle of Indiana found none. In addition a 19-year old transsexual was murdered locally with her body set on fire.

Bussert applied for a transfer to the UK branch of Hitachi. He was to be an IT techie and business manager at £88,000 a year. The supervisor was open-minded, but moved on soon after. In London Bussert met Russell Reid at a conference, became a patient of his and started taking female hormones, and going out as female more often. She socially transitioned 2005 with Facial Feminization Surgery and breast augmentation with Dr Douglas Ousterhout in San Francisco. Her new supervisor had responded to the mention of a sex change: “Don’t do that to me, Josh. I had to work in an office with someone who did that once and it was weird”.  By this time Russell Reid had been forced into retirement and Charing Cross Gender Clinic gave her a run-around.

Hitachi effectively demoted her and she was given a negative appraisal. She took sick leave for stress, returned and again went on sick leave. Hitachi stopped paying her salary and she resigned. Jessica sued for £500,000 in the UK and $3.6m in the US, but without success.

Since the Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations 1999 it is clear that not only is it illegal to discriminate against transsexuals, but that this covers employees intending to undergo gender reassignment. However the Employment Tribunal in Reading dismissed Bussert's claims ruling that she had left the company of her own free will. Furthermore it found no fault with the way that Hitachi had handled the situation, and even commended Hitachi managers for displaying good management practice and embracing diversity.

As Bussert was no longer employed, the Home Office ruled that her permit to live in the UK was no longer valid, and Jessica and Sharon returned to Indiana.

They have since become award-winning photographers.
http://bussertimages.smugmug.com
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14 October 2013

Melanie Anne Phillips (1956 - ) film-maker, story-software designer.

After a degree at the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California,  directing two feature films before the age of 30: Brothers of the Wilderness, 1984, and The Strangeness, 1985, recording many hours of music, marrying as a man and fathering two children,  Melanie became involved with the International Foundation for Gender Education and worked with them to produce a VHS Tape on developing a female voice which focuses on voice resonance rather than pitch.

In 1991, Melanie took a break from film-making and, with her long-time writing partner Chris Huntley, developed the Dramatica Theory of Story, for which they had first laid the foundations while still at college together.


She also began her three-year transition that concluded with surgery with Dr Biber in Trinidad, Colorado. She kept a daily journal during transition which is available online. In 1994 she set up the first online transgender support site, and became one of the most cited advisors on developing a female voice.

After three years of full-time effort, the first version of Dramatica (Amazon reviews, WIKIPEDIA) was released. It is one of the most sophisticated software packages for fiction writers, which included a long manual, and supporting videos. Melanie also teaches courses in Dramatica theory through UCLA.

In October 2006 in an essay on her Heartcorps site, and reprinted on Gender Life Forum, she wrote:
"I've unintentionally perpetrated a great disservice.  I've given the impression the anyone can learn to sound completely female in voice as I have.  That's why I created the voice video I've been selling for about ten years.  Now, I'm not so sure. And in my diary, without ever considering an alternative, I've presented myself as just another transsexual and documented my story in the hope it might smooth the way for others.  But now I wonder if it doesn't really foster false hope. … out of all those who have sex reassignment surgery, only a very few have female minds.  All the rest, no matter how feminine they have become, have male minds - they don't just think like men, then think as men. ... After all, those who speak in a female voice are as rare as those with female minds, in my experience.  Sure, anyone can learn to be more feminine in their speaking, but to actually alter the timber of the voice so it is rich and full but female in resonance, that may be beyond the ability of the rank and file transsexual."
However she does insist:
"Now, granted, a woman born into a male body is no more entitled to sex change surgery than any man who wanted it.  And the standards that they use to determine if you can receive surgery are ignorant, outdated, and laughable, if they weren't so cruel. Honestly, SRS should be available to anyone who wants it, as long as they are certified sane.  No RLT should be required.  I don't know of a single individual (though there must be some) who determined to have the surgery and then changed their mind because of problems with RLT.  And I don't know of anyone who had the grit to go through with the surgery who didn't have what it needs to get through RLT. … Again, there is nothing better or worse about having SRS if you are of male or female mind.  And the achievements of anyone from that community who has a female mind and a collection of female physical traits may not be as heroic or laudable as it first appears.  They simply may have had more to start with and an easier path because there was less to alter. Ultimately, I think of female minded post-ops as intersexed women rather than transsexual.  In some, they are close enough to the range of normal male physical form with fully functioning testicles and no ovaries that no medical professional would class them as hermaphrodites.  And yet, possessing many of the traits above, they are truly intersexed in all ways except the reproductive organs."
On her web site Melanie describes herself as "parent of two, still married to my spouse of thirty years but living with another woman, my soul mate, for the last eight years".

Andrea James' TS Roadmap is dedicated to Melanie for her inspiration.


*Not Melanie Phillips the Daily Mail journalist who was nominated bigot of the year.
*There is no connection between Dramatica and the rude and satirical Encyclopedia Dramatica.
IMDB    AMAZON    WORLDCAT    LINKEDIN


_____________________________________________________________________________

WorldCat dates the IFGE tape to 1980 which cannot be right as IFGE was not founded until some years later.

Melanie in 2006 seems to be proposing 2 types of transsexuals like either HSTS/Autogynephilia or HBS. However I could not find any discussion of her proposal compared to HSTS/Autogynephilia or HBS.
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13 August 2013

Michael Wallent (1969 - ) IT executive

Michael Wallent was raised in Boston, Massachusetts and studied engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He married a woman, and moved to Seattle to join Microsoft in 1996 and advanced quickly.

By 1999 he was overseeing the team of 300 working on Internet Explorer, and was known for his blunt even aggressive comments re his team's work.

By 2005 he had had two children and had divorced and remarried. He was now head of a team that helped design the look and feel of Windows Vista.

In 2007 he and his second wife had a child, and he took paternity leave. At this time Wallent told his wife that he was transgender. On return to work Megan Wallent explained the situation to her boss, and then to the others on the team. She took six weeks leave, started her blog, had breast implants and facial surgery. When she returned to Microsoft it was to a different division.

It was noted that Megan's management style was different in that she asked probing questions to help the engineer find a solution. She discussed her situation re the Microsoft transgender healthcare program with the Microsoft JobsBlog:
"The other thing that gets complicated is that what they will pay for is mostly bottom surgery. Turns out that for FTM [female-to-male] transgendered folks, bottom surgery is kinda not the thing. And even increasingly for MTF [male-to-female] transpeople, bottom surgery isn’t necessarily for everybody. I didn’t have it. I have no plans to have it. I’ve been very public about that. I had facial surgery, and that’s not something that benefits would cover.
It raises interesting issues of what’s elective. Is it elective to pass? It brings up this fundamental question: if you believe that Gender Identity Disorder is a medical issue, and you want cure people of that, what is that? Is it all about bottom surgery? I’m going to say no. Gender identity isn’t about your parts, it’s about how you present yourself to the world. I’ve had this conversation with senior folks in HR, and they get it."
In 2010 Megan joined the board of Out & Equal, which advocates for LGBT equality in the workplace.

In March 2013 Wallent announced on her blog that he was returning to being Michael, purportedly because of the health risks for "someone with my genes" associated with estrogen.
EN.WIKIPEDIA
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11 June 2013

Kristin Paget (197? - ) software security consultant

Paget, from the UK, is a software security consultant working in the US.

In August 2002, Chris Paget published a paper on a design flaw in Windows XP, NT4.0 and 2000 which permitted privilege escalation and what became known as Shatter Attacks. Microsoft replied that it was an intended design, but issued a security patch before the end of the year. Windows Vista was designed to avoid the issue.

In 2004 Chris married a woman.

In 2006 Paget and a team was contracted by Microsoft to analyse the new Windows Vista for security bugs. They found more than Microsoft expected and the release date had to be put back several months. The team received special T-shirts signed by the Vice President of Windows Development that proclaimed: "I delayed Windows Vista".

Paget became the chief hacker at Recursion Ventures, which specializes in hardware security. In 2008 Chris was declared one of the top 15 people in computer security by eWeek magazine.

In 2009 Paget built a machine for $250 from surplus hardware that was able to read the numbers on RFID chips in passports and drivers licences from a passing car at distances of up to nine metres.

In 2010 Paget, who was by now Kristin, wrote on her blog:
"I’ve decided that it’s time to stop living to other people’s expectations / prejudices and live life on my own terms instead. What does that mean? ... Sure, I’m biologically male, but for a long time I’ve regarded myself as mentally female; I’ve come to the conclusion that it really doesn’t work for me to try to be one or the other. I value my ability to switch back and forth as my mood dictates, and that means that how I present myself to the world switches back and forth as well. Some days I want to wear a pretty dress and sparkly jewellery, other days I want to be big, male, and intimidating. Why commit to one or the other fulltime when I can have both?"
The next year Paget transitioned. She and her wife made a trip to Las Vegas, and Kristin went through the TSA screening at the airport as a woman for the first time. This led her to realize:
  1. Whenever I felt like I had a choice, I was choosing to be a woman.
  2. Whenever I felt like I *had* to be male it upset me immensely – I truly hated it.
  3. If I could cope with TSA as a woman, I could cope with anything.
She started on estrogen, and had her first surgery.
"Most of the people I see on a daily basis never knew Chris and completely accept me as Kristin; looking back it feels like I never really was Chris, I was just Kristin pretending to be a boy and doing a lousy job of it."
However she did run into the problem that she was expected to divorce her wife.

The Non-Disclosure Agreement re Windows Vista expired and Kristin gave a presentation on the project at the Las Vegas Black Hat Hacking convention.

In 2012 Kristin was employed by Apple to work on its security.

*not the cricketer, nor the novelist.
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06 April 2012

Tom Reucher (196?–) psychologist, activist.

"Until the lions have their historians, tales of hunting will continue to glorify the hunter ' African proverb cited by Tom Reucher

Reucher first worked as a computer programmer-analyst. In the late 1980s he joined Joseph Doucé’s Centre de Christ Libérateur which helped him overcome his shame and become an activist.

In 1994 he was a co-founder of the Association du Syndrome de Benjamin, which grew to over 300 members. (This is apparently the first use of the term Syndrome de Benjamin). They asked for the syndrome to be removed from the bailiwick of psychiatry, that the term ‘transsexuality’ not be used as it is stigmatizing. They drafted a bill to harmonize changes of civil status. From 1997 they marched in Paris, the first Saturday in October under the label Existrans. They also marched with Gay Pride.

Tom Reucher did a diploma and then a masters in psychology at the University of Paris 8, applying ethnopsychiatry and queer theory to allow transsexuals to speak for themselves.

In September 2001 the magazine Res Publica published an article on transsexuality by Colette Chiland, and the magazine accepted a reply by Reucher, but the management then changed its mind and the reply did not appear, apparently to oblige Chiland.  Reucher’s article was presented at the HBIGDA symposium in September 2003.
“Speaking out by transsexual or transgender individuals in order to counter the professionals who speak in their place is a novelty in France. This goes hand in hand with reclaiming their identity by the act of self-naming, as well as with the founding of organizations to protect their rights. (When ‘Shrinks' are Frightened by Transsexuals ..) “
In 2002 he was a co-founder of VigiTrans, and of the Groupe Activiste Trans, and the next year set up the website Transidentité. From 2003-2006 he worked with the first trans radio program, Bistouri oui-oui , on Radio Libertaire FM 89.4 Mhz.  In 2004 he left the Association du Syndrome de Benjamin following internal dissent, and has been working with Sans contrefaçon. By 2005 the Existrans march was attracting over a thousand marchers.

Since 2005 he has preferred the term transidentity rather than transsexuality or Benjamin Syndrome. In 2007 he completed training in Reichian analysis. In 2008 he moved to Brest where he works as a psychologist and analyst. He is an active member of OII-France.
“My academic career and my background therapy led me to question the medical practices and to understand what was effective and ineffective for transsexes. I also met with transgender men and women and exchanged with them.There are many commonalities.”(Mon parcours thérapeutique et ma formation universitaire m'ont amené à remettre en cause les pratiques médicales et à comprendre ce qui était efficace et inefficace pour les transsexes (transsexuelLEs). J'ai aussi rencontrer des transgenres et échangé avec elles et eux. Il y a beaucoup de points communs. -- Qui Suis-Je? at Transidentité: le site de Tom Reucher)
“The writings of these experts arise from their fright, poor knowledge of the various processes of  transidentity, and heterocentric theories now set up as "standards" in defiance of human rights. In evoking the idea of psychopathology, these words of experts generate social and political consequences for transgender people, such as rejection by family, friends and neighbours, and society in general. These writings also show an inability to learn from patients." ("Les écrits de ces experts découlent de leur frayeur, d’une méconnaissance des différents processus de transidentité et de théories hétérocentrées qui se sont érigées en « normes » au mépris des droits humains. En évoquant l’idée d’une psychopathologie, ces paroles d’experts génèrent des conséquences sociales et politiques pour les personnes transsexuelles, telles que leur rejet par la famille, l’entourage et par la société en général. Ces écrits montrent également une incapacité à apprendre des patients." - Quand les trans deviennent experts)
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The Association du Syndrome de Benjamin  was formed in 1994.  The Harry Benjamin Syndrome founded by Charlotte Goiar happened a decade later and was initially called Síndrome de Benjamin.   I have not been able to find any mention of Goiar acknowledging the prior existence of Association du Syndrome de Benjamin.    While the ASB was radical, queer and inclusive, HSB was mainly conservative, homophobic and separatist.  It is very difficult to imagine the HBS crowd in a thousand-strong march with gays, socialists and greens.

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    09 October 2010

    Kelly Lynn Martin (1969 - ) systems developer.

    Scott Goehring was raised in Indiana and was educated at Purdue University and Indiana University. He was married, as an undergraduate, to a wife whose previous husband had been a Scientologist. They had two children. 

    In 1991 he founded the Usenet Group alt.religion.scientology, and controversially added a flag.sea.org mail id to the application which implied a Scientology co-sponsor. By 1995 the Usenet group had become a high-volume group with confrontations between skeptics, and believers, cancelbots and law suits. 
     
    By then Kelly and Scott were involved in the Agoran Nomic MUD gaming. In 1999 Kelly came out as transgender to the Agoran Nomic MUD community and acknowledged that she and Scott were the same person. In 2001 Scott and his wife were divorced, and Scott legally became Kelly Martin. 

    In 2004 Kelly joined Wikipedia and quickly rose through sysop to the Arbitration Committee. In 2006 she was forced to resign. She works as a systems developer in Linux and Windows environments.

    * Not the television actress.
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    Note that the Wikipedia page was initially called "Scott Goehring", and then renamed to "alt.religion.scientology".

    Religious Freedom Watch, like CCHR, is part of the Church of Scientology.  A well-known HBS organizer is a registered CCHR investigator and promotes CCHR on her site.   Note that the Religious Freedom Watch includes a photograph of Kelly, refers to her all through as "Scott Goehring", and uses only male pronouns.
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    13 September 2010

    Kiira Triea (1951 - 2012) intersex/HSTS activist, guitarist, Linux geek.

    Denise Magner has claimed that she was born at the US Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, but also that she was born in Finland. Either at birth or aged 2 she was assigned as a boy. He grew up in the Baltimore area. After puberty, as Denise, she became a lesbian-separatist, and also a hard rock musician. 

    She also tried living as a man for a while, and became a patient of The Johns Hopkins Hospital Psychohormonal Research Unit and of John Money, and was operated on in 1974 by Howard Jones.

    Later, in 1993, as Denise Tree she became editor of Linux News, and at this time was using a jhu.edu id (Johns Hopkins University). She was also a bicycle maker and metalworker. She took the name Kiira from the character in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

    Kiira Triea was an early member with Cheryl Chase (Bo Laurent) of the Intersex Society of North America, (ISNA) and had an article in the first issue, 1994, of Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and maintained their website. In 1997 she founded the Coalition for Intersex Support Activism & Education (CISAE). Her essay of that year, “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”, about her experiences at Johns Hopkins and being forced to be either male or female, was originally published by Dallas Denny in Chrysalis and reprinted in Dreger's Intersex in the Age of Ethics. The essay says that she was 14 when she went to Johns Hopkins. 

    She is credited with the design of the Phall-O-Meter, a useful tool for intersex activists to mock the doctors’ obsession that a clitoris must be less that 0.9 cm and penis more than 2.5 cm. 

    In her essay "Learning about transsexuality from transsexuals", Kiira explains that after she became an intersex activist, she was approached by supposed intersex persons, and claims that over 99% of them were lying. Many claimed to be true hermaphrodites or Klinefelter's but were obviously not.
    "Finally, I began to understand transsexuality, as it was expressed by socially privileged former men, in terms of being antithetical to my understanding of the underlying socio-political causes of intersex oppression and at odds with my goals as an intersex activist. Certainly there are many conceptual frameworks within which intersex can be understood but I found feminism to be useful because it addressed the core issues of what sexualities and what bodies are allowable by an androcentric technocracy and answered questions like why would doctors create non-functional female genitals in children, not bothering to determine the results of those interventions for decades. I also began to wonder why the natural biological variation of intersex, which did not actually result in socially expressed 'gender variance', was not allowed while the biological variation and socially obvious gender variance that resulted when adult men attempted to modify their bodies to become female was allowed."
    "I began then in 1997 to understand transsexuality and its supporting model of 'gender identity' not as medical syndrome but as a social instrument which eradicated understanding in order to preserve social privilege".
    On the other hand, she found that HSTS or trans-kids were quite different:
    "None of them had tried to write to me for several reasons, first was that they were not motivated to acquire any other legitimizing identity as were autogynephilic transsexuals because their social identities and personal identities were congruent. They simply seemed like normal feminine girls or women whose social ‘gender’ or what Suzanne Kessler calls ‘gender attribution’ was immediately obvious both in their appearance and behavior and required no theoretical explanation. They did not present themselves to me as intersex nor did they advocate for transsexuality to be classified as an ‘intersex condition’ because, in common with intersex children, they were a socially devalued population who were often medicalized harmfully as children."
    These persons she had invited to her intersex groups. Kiira herself was invited by Michael Bailey to join his closed SEXNET mailing list. She became an advocate for Bailey's variation on Blanchard's ideas. 

    In 2004 Kiira launched the transkids.us website which endorsed the Blanchardian concept of 'homosexual transsexual' in distinction to autogynephiles. It was very quickly linked to by the Anne Lawrence and Michael Bailey websites. Kiira became the one and only public HSTS, although people pointed out that if she were a lesbian intersex, she could hardly be an HSTS (= heterosexual trans woman). 

    Kiira died from cancer at age 61.
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    This is an overview of Kiira.  See the Andrea James pages for the details of her alternate autobiographies.

    Triea, Dreger, Kessler all moved from ISNA to the Bailey camp.

    Born in 1951, Triea was 61 when she died.  The only photographs available are from decades ago.

    Dreger’s first essay is a defense of Triea after what James wrote.  However it merely dismisses ‘loony things said about Kiira on certain sites’ and does not address the issues.  Nor does she give any explanation at all why an intersex woman would be running an HSTS site.

    Sophia Siedlberg has problems with intersex activism as radical-feminism.  Feminism is many things, not just trade-union activism for women.  One of the other things is a radical deconstruction of the sex-gender system.  Intersex activism also deconstructs the sex-gender system.
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    01 August 2010

    Chris Korda (1962 - ) priest, programmer, musician.

    Christopher Korda was a great-nephew of film magnate Alexander Korda and the only son of Michael Korda, the novelist and editor-in-chief at Simon & Shuster in New York. Chris was a loner as a teenager, incarcerated for a while, and left New York for good when 14.

    She settled in Boston, worked for a while as a female impersonator, and considered but did not complete a full transition to female.

    In 1992 an alien intelligence, The Being, visited her in a dream and warned of the coming eco-catastrophe. She immediately changed her life and founded the Church of Euthanasia and anointed herself as Reverend. The Church advocates four pillars: suicide, abortion (the Church is not pro-choice – giving birth leads to excommunication), cannibalism (for those who are not vegan like Chris) and sodomy (any form of non-procreative sex).

    Chris works as an engineering consultant, and has recorded several records, released on the Kevorkian label. She has a girl-friend.


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    11 March 2010

    Danielle Berry (1949 - 1998) game designer.

    Dan Bunten was born in St Louis, Missouri and later raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. He completed a degree in Industrial Engineering in 1974.

    He became a computer game designer for the Apple, Atari and Commodore platforms. He created M.U.L.E.,1983, and The Seven Cities of Gold, 1984.

    Dan was married to women three times and had three children with them, but became androphilic after transition in 1992.

    Three years after transition Danielle wrote a note combining various emails that she had sent that advise others not to follow her path:
    ”You lose control over most aspects of your life, become a second class citizen and all so you can wear women's clothes and feel cuter than you do now. Don't do it is all I've got to say.”
    “Being my 'real self' could have included having a penis and including more femininity in whatever forms made sense. I didn't know that until too late and now I have to make the best of the life I've stumbled into. I just wish I would have tried more options before I jumped off the precipice. I miss my easy access to my kids (unlike many TS's I didn't completely lose access to them though), I miss my family and old friends (I know they 'shouldn't' have abandoned me but lots of folks aren't as open minded as they 'should' be ... I still miss them) and finally, I hate the disconnect with my past (there's just no way to integrate the two unrelated lives). There's any number of ways to express your gender and sexuality and the only one I tried was the big one. I'll never know if I could have found a compromise that might have worked a lot better than the 'one size fits all' sex-change. Please, check it out yourself before you do likewise.”
    She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Computer Game Developers Association, 1998.

    A chain smoker from teenage, Dani died of lung cancer shortly after.
     EN.Wikipedia
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    01 January 2009

    Bo Laurent (1956 - ) intersex activist, programmer, translator.

    Brian Sullivan was born in New Jersey (although some accounts say that he was named Charlie Chase at birth). He was surgically re-assigned to female at 18 months, when doctors found a uterus and ovotestes. While Brian was what was then called a ‘true hermaphrodite’ (although some accounts specify different intersex conditions), the doctors told the parents that he was actually a girl. They excised her penis/clitoris, and her parents moved to another town and called the child Bonnie Sullivan. The child stopped speaking for six months.

    They were advised to shield the child from her medical history. Bonnie frequently felt different, but was never told why, although she found out about the clitoridectomy when she was 10. From the age of 19 she tried to access her medical records, and it took three years before she succeeded.

    She did a degree in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and studied Japanese at Harvard. She then helped to found a technology company in Japan doing computer and translation work.

    At age 35 she had a nervous breakdown and she flew to Florida and asked her mother a lot of questions. She then moved to San Francisco and started contacting anybody who might help. One such was Anne Fausto-Sterling who was about to publish her paper “The Five Sexes” in The Sciences. Sullivan wrote a letter which was published in the next issue (July/August 1993) asking persons with intersex conditions to contact ‘Cheryl Chase’ at the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), which jump-started the organization.

    She became quite critical of the standard of care for intersexed infants developed by Dr John Money, which proposed early corrective surgery and silence to the child so that he/she will not grow up questioning his/her sexual identity. As Cheryl Chase, Sullivan has been a major voice for the position that surgery on intersex children should not be done until the person is able to make an informed choice, that parents and doctors should be open with the child about the condition, and that parents should be ready if the child later opts for the other gender from that in which it was raised.

    Chase has appeared in several documentaries on intersex. She changed her legal name to Bo Laurent in 1995. In 1998 she wrote an amicus brief for the Columbian constitutional court re proposed surgery on a six-year-old boy. In 2004 she persuaded the San Francisco Rights Commission to hold hearings on medical procedures for intersex children. She has published in medical journals, and has criticized feminist writers for ignoring surgery on intersex children while condemning female genital cutting. ISNA was honored with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission's 2000 Felipa de Souza Human Rights Award.

    However in later years she has worked more closely with doctors than with other intersex activists. In particular, she has worked closely with the non-intersex Alice Dreger, who became a major voice in ISNA. She co-authored a paper with Dreger advocating that ‘Intersex’ be replaced by ‘Disorders of Sex Development’ (DSD) – a position strongly criticized by other intersex activists as repathologization.

    In 2004 Laurent married her wife of five years in San Francisco, when same-sex marriage was briefly permitted in California for the first time. They live on a hobby farm in Sonomo, California.

    In 2008 ISNA was closed down with an anonymous statement, and Chase, who was now openly calling herself Bo Laurent, joined The Accord Alliance (founded by Katrina Karkazis, the author of Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience) which has anonymous funding through the Tides Center and a $305,000 grant from The California Endowment, a spin-off from Blue Cross insurance.

    Also in 2008, Bo completed an MA in Organization Development that she had started at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco and completed at Sonomo State University.

    *Not Cheryl Chase the voice actress.
    ______________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Confusion has arisen from Bo's practice of using both 'Cheryl Chase' and 'Bo Laurent', sometimes in the same publication. Remember the brouhaha when Wayne Dynes also used the name Evelyn Gittone in The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. In Phyllis Burke's Gender Shock, 1996 (an otherwise well-researched book) Burke somehow managed to interview both Chase and Laurent without noticing that they were the same person.

    Susan Stryker's Transgender History, which was published only a few months ago, mentions Chase only as an activist, without a single word about her Bo Laurent persona, and without a single word about the controversy over the DSD terminology.

    The 'Cheryl Chase' Wikipedia page has a link at the bottom to a category called "American Intersex Activists'. When you click on it it turns out to be a set of one. There is no mention of Sherri Morris of the AIS Support Group, Hale Hawbecker who is developing a legal challenge to infant intersex surgeries or Curtis Hinkle, the founder of OII. These three are also missing from Stryker's book.
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