Mowry Saben/Ralph Werther/Earl Lind/Jennie June: Part III - Comments and bibliography

Part I: early life

Part II: publications

Part III:  comments and bibliography 

Comments:

Jennie June was also the pen name of Jane Croly (1829-1901), journalist – and definitely a different person.

---

While our June’s writings were the earliest first-person accounts of being a feminine invert, the publication in books restricted to professionals, and in medical journals that ordinary persons never see, means that the example was not available to other inverts, androgynes and trans persons. Autobiography of an Androgyne cost $4 when first published in 1919. An average worker making circa $10 a week would be unlikely to spend 40% of a weekly wage on the book even if they were permitted to do so. Even more so the fairies in the Bowery where lodging could be obtained for fifteen cents, and a meal for ten cents.

Apparently, Saben/June chose the name ‘Earl Lind’ in that ‘Earl’ rhymes with ‘girl’, and from the noted singer Jennie Lind.  There is no mention of the noted Swedish female impersonator ?Lind? who had toured the US several times.

While the masquerade balls at the Hamilton Lodge did not become the so-called Faggot’s Ball or Dance of the Fairies until a new group of organizers took over in 1923, transvesting persons had been attending since the original Masquerade and Civic Ball in 1869. There is no mention of this in either of June’s published books, although in the second the Philhedonic Ball is mentioned – which may be another name for the same.

Accounts of Paresis Hall, other than by Werther-June, are less effete, and present it as a gangster-owned brothel pimping trans girls and boys in drag.

Saben/June was proud of their German. So why no mention of Hirschfeld’s 1910 Die Transvestiten in the second book? They had made a point of reading Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis and even Otto Weininger.

When Saben-June say that they have read Havelock Ellis, of course they mean Sexual Inversion, 1900. Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies was not published until 1928. This is unfortunate in that Eonism and Hirschfeld’s Transvestiten (which apparently Saben-June did not read) provide examples of the variety of lives lived by trans women at that time.

The other oft-cited example of ‘fairies’ or ‘tantes’ living with, cruising or even loving young toughs is Jean Genet’s 1943 novel Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. When I first began to transition in the 1970s I met a few older trans women who assumed that I would live that kind of life. I – being a gaylib allumna and for other reasons – dismissed the idea completely. My problem with the Werther-June books is its assumption that if trans, that is the life. Plenty of trans women of Saben-June’s generation did otherwise. We recently saw the example of Stella Angel, born the same year as Saben, who was trans and sometimes in New York, without being a fairie. 

There is another aspect that alienates Werther-June from modern trans women. As Meyerowitz, 2011 puts it: 

“There is something else that troubles the categories that we routinely use today. In the book, Lind not only describes himself as feminine but also portrays himself as a baby. …When promenading the streets as a fairy, Lind insists that he is not an adult but a baby or ‘baby-doll.’ His fairy persona includes a loud and proud infantilism. It partly reflects Lind’s version of womanhood, in which the height of femininity is the ‘helpless cry-baby species of woman.’ Acting the baby also seems to be a way to try (not always successfully) to get young men to comfort, pet, and coddle a fairy.”

“Their craze for fellatio is only the abnormal survival through adulthood of the infant's feeding instinct”. Really? Freud said something similar – although he is not mentioned in this context. I am informed that if this idea comes up in modern gay pornography, it is a clue that the author is a woman.

Saben was of course a nepo baby who unlike the other fairies on the Bowery had a second life that provided an income and respectability. Some commentators have used Saben as a example of slumming. The ability to consult some of New York’s top doctors – for which one required both comportment and money – was also a priviledge denied the other fairies.  Some impoverished trans women or fairies did get reported on by top doctors - if referred by the police, or if incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals - something significantly different from a consultation.

Incidentally, a young and unknown German doctor had opened a medical practice in New York in 1914. His name was Harry Benjamin.

Saben apparently was not drafted in 1917 when the US joined the ongoing war. As he was then 47, this is not surprising.

It is ironic that the iconic androgyne of the 1910s was so anti-feminist, and insistent that women contribute nothing to culture. This despite taking the name Jennie June, who was a pioneer female journalist, and then the surname Lind from a noted female singer Jennie Lind. Saben wrote: “Women are quite as free as men. There is nothing but their lack of innate capacity to prevent them from becoming the great Poets, Musicians, Artists, Scientists, Philosophers, Inventors, and Reformers of the race” – this from someone who was educated at Harvard which did not permit women at all until the 1940s, and not propertly until 1970.

In 1895 in Oxford, Saben went bankrupt owing £388/16/6. This at a time when a standard working wage was £1 a week.

Comments from other writers:

The Little Review, November 1914, said: “The Spirit of Life, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders along through some two hundred and fifty pages. … There are indubitably certain good things in the book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, et al.” Online.

Joanne Meyerowitz, 2011 wrote of the Autobiography: “In his own telling, Lind spends most of his days living the seemingly uneventful life of a college-educated, native-born Protestant, middle-class white man, a deeply religious scholar with aspirations to missionary work, but he also leads a secret “double life,” compelled by strong sexual longings — irresistible cravings to perform fellatio — that torment and distract him. In the late nineteenth century he becomes a flaneur, wandering at night through the poorer neighborhoods of New York City, dressed as a down-at-the-heels man, but with a distinctive fairy style — red bow tie, white gloves — and the assumed street names of Ralph Werther and Jennie June. This is a classic “slumming” narrative told by a class and ethnic outsider. In the story Lind pursues rough young men, mainly the native-born sons of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, and he also shows a special fondness for soldiers, sailors, and other men in uniform. And he goes into great detail about his sex life, resorting to Latin phrases when the English might seem vulgar or obscene.”

Long Island medical journal. Associated Physicians of Long Island. Medical Book News. June, 1919, №6:

“The name of the author of this abnormal biography is of no interest. She, to accept his own classification, tells the inconveniencies, trials and sufferings of her unsocial condition for the purpose of securing some amelioration through legal recognition of his invasion. A woman’s mind, ways and proclivities encased in a body which is only one third feminine, and in particular possessing organs for which (s)he has no use but lacking an orifice for which she would have great use! helas, what a mess! Of course every person who is not normal is to be pitied, and so far as is consistent with running a world should be allowed all possible freedom. Whether the attitude of scientists and moralists toward the relation of the sexes which is so peculiar to this century, and bids fair to be its high light when looked at by the twenty-first can be made to include a benevolent view of congenital inverts, or ought to, is a fine subject for the expression of variant opinions. The author makes this plea — pity us, spare us: we are what we are against our wills. As for the substance of the book itself, — the reader will do well to have some apomorphine at hand. $4.00 is some price, too. A. F. E.”

Other Persons who knew Saben-June:

Jennie May Saben Burnap (1873-1971) 

Saben’s sister became Mrs Burnap after marriage in 1895 to Willard E Burnap.  Find a Grave names her as Jennie May (thereby suggesting Saben’s femme name of Jennie June). However the Mowry Saben death notices name her only as Mrs W E Burnap (her husband’s name). The Burnaps had one daughter, Ruth. 

Jennie was three years younger than Mowry. In her second book, p93, Jennie June wrote: “As for the genesis of my first feminine name, I chose "Jennie" at four. I have always considered it the most feminine of names. When I began my double life, I appended ‘June.’ I adopted that surname because of its beautiful associations,”

What Jennie May Saben Burnap thought about her brother riffing on her name is not recorded.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

A poet and playwright from Maine, who befriended Saben at Harvard. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times in 1922, 1925 and 1928, and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1927. Bisexual, never married. 

• Scott Donaldson. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, Columbia University Press, 2007.

Wikipedia 

Clark Bell (1832-1918)

LLD, founder and for many years, editor of Medico-Legal Journal. Employed Saben under the name Earl Lind.

Prince A Morrow (1846-1913)

A sex hygienist who founded the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, the first Social Hygiene association in the United States, in New York City in 1905. In 1910, this organization joined with various other Social Hygiene associations across the country to create the American Federation for Sex Hygiene with Morrow as president. He translated works of the French dermatologist Jean Alfred Fournier (1832-1912), and he became the leading publicist of the syphilis problem.

During the 1890s, he had opposed plans for the annexation of Hawaii on the grounds that its population had high rate of leprosy. 

• Prince A Morrow (ed). A System of Genito-Urinary Diseases, Syphilology and Dermatology. 1893.

Robert S Newton (1857-1903)

Neurologist and alienist who was well known in New York for providing expert testimony at trials.

Alfred W Herzog (1866-1933)

Herzog, physician and lawyer replaced Clark Bell as editor of Medico-Legal Journal. He published and wrote introductions for both of the Werther-June books.

He lived at 123 West 83rd Street, NY. He was arraigned in May 1925 charged with felonious assault after rescuing a female neighbor, one of his tenants, who was being beaten by two brothers with a club. He used his gun and put the two men in hospital.

His first wife, 30 years younger, divorced him in 1928.

Died of apoplexy at age 67.

• Alfred W Herzog. “Homosexuality and the Law”. The Medical-Legal Journal, 34, 8, December 1917.

•     “Doctor who shot 2 to save woman arraigned today”.  Daily News, May 19, 1925:2.

•  “Chivalrous Doctor shoots 2: Woman in peril while Brothers raged, he avers”.  Daily News, May 19, 1925
• Alfred W Herzog. Medical Jurisprudence. Bobbs-Merrill, 1931.

William Robinson (1867-1936)

Physician, sexologist and birth control advocate. Editor, American Journal of Urology and Sexology. Father of Victor Robinson. In 1919-20 the AJUS published several articles by Werther-June.

Victor Robinson (1886-1947)

Editor, Medical Review of Reviews. Published Werther-June’s "The Biological Sport of Fairie-ism, and had a contract to publish Riddle of the Underworld, the third part of Werther-June’s trilogy – although this never happened.

Robert Shufeldt (1850-1934)

Mycologist, ornithologist, army doctor and eugenicist. He worked as a surgeon in the campaign against the Sioux. He is credited with coining the word "paleopathology", the study of diseases and cause of death of decomposed specimens. He took many nude photographs.

In 1906 he examined and then wrote a paper on the fairie J W (Loop-the-Loop).

As a eugenicist he was obsessed with the purity of the white race. He wrote two book length harangues against black persons, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, 1907 and America’s Greatest Problem: the Negro, 1915. He also saw ‘perverts’ as an impurity that should be prevented by controlled breeding – but as most people were ignorant of their existence they should be written about.

He married three times. The first wife Catherine committed suicide in an asylum. His second wife, Florence Audubon, (granddaughter of John James Audubon, the noted ornithologist) left him after two months of marriage, accusing him of adultery with their Norwegian housekeeper, who would later become his third wife. Around this time he published a pamphlet titled On Female Impotency which included a photograph of a nude woman whom he described as a mulatto but likely was Ms. Audubon. This paper describing his personal problems, thinly veiled as medical research and meant to blackmail Florence, stated his affiliation to the Smithsonian Institution which outraged the Smithsonian leadership and led to his dismissal in 1897. Shufeldt refused to pay alimony following the divorce and claimed bankruptcy which was taken up in the US Supreme Court Audubon v. Shufeldt, 181 US 575 (1901). He took back many of the specimens that he had collected for the Smithsonian and later deposited them with the New York State Museum.

• R W Shufeldt, "Dr. Havelock Ellis on Sexual Inversion," Pacific Medical journal (San Francisco), vol. 45 (1902), p. 20.

• Robert W Shufeldt. “The Medico-Legal Consideration of Perverts and Inverts”. Pacific Medical Journal, XLVIII, July 1905:391-3. Online.

• R W Shufeldt. “Biography of a Passive Pederast”. American Journal of Urology and Sexology, 13, 1917: 451-60. Online 

Wikipedia 

Excerpt from The Negro

Hugh Ryan On Shufeldt

Mitchell Kennerley (1878-1950)

From England, Kennerley was sent to New York to manage US branch of John Lane Publisher. Later he started own imprint. He published many books by the early 20^th century avant garde including books about sex, some of them books by queer writers (including Wilde and Whitman). He published Saben’s The Spirit of Life, Saben wrote for his magazine, The Forum, and their 1924 correspondence in which they discuss homosexuality and inversion has survived.

There is no mention of Saben in Bruccoli’s biography except the The Spirit of Life is included in the long list of the books that he published in an appendix. In fact the word ‘homosexual’ appears but once – in connection with Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

• Matthew J Bruccoli. The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerly, Bookman. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Secondary publications:

• “Local Failure – Re Israel Mowry Saben”. Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 2 Mar 1895. 
• Robert W Shufeldt. “The Medico-Legal Consideration of Perverts and Inverts”. Pacific Medical Journal, XLVIII, July 1905:391-3. Online.
• William Lee Howard. "Two Souls in One Body: A Realistic but Scientific Account of a True Psychological”, The Arena; 34, 192, Nov 1905: 467-9. An account of Jennie/Karl.
• “Mowry Saben Dies in San Francisco“. 
• Richard Cary. “Mowry Saben About Edwin Arlington Robinson”. Colby Quarterly, 9, 6, March 1972.
• Bert Hansen. “American Physicians' Earliest Writings about Homosexuals, 1880-1900”. The Milbank Quarterly, 67, 1, 1989.
• George Chauncey. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Basic Books, 1994: 42–44, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59–60, 62, 77, 79, 110, 118, 187, 190, 291–292.
• Anne Herrmann. “The Androgyne as ‘Fairie’: A Self-Authored Case History” Queering the moderns: poses/portraits/performances. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000: 143-163. Discusses Werther as one of six early examples of writers who cross boundaries and “queer the traditional spaces of modernism”.
• Henry L Minton. Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America. University of Chicago Press, 2002: 19-29,
• Melissa Norelle Stein. Embodying Race: Gender, Sex, and the Sciences of Difference, 1830-1934. PhD thesis, Rutgers University, May 2008: 217-235. Online.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. “Thinking Sex with an Androgyne” GLQ 17.1, 2011.
• Aaron Shaheen. “Strolling through the Slums of the Past: Ralph Werther’s Love Affair with Victorian Womanhood in Autobiography of an Androgyne”. Journal of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 128.4, 2013. 
• Emma Heaney. The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory. Northwestern University Press, 2017: 172-8.
• Bjorn Klein. „Voyeurismus und die Macht des Blicks in den Sexualwissenschaften und der New Yorker Unterwelt um 1900“. L’Homme, October 2019.
• Francisco Araujo da Costa. „Original Reviews of Autobiography of an Androgyne”. Medium, Jun 23, 2019. Online.
• Channing Gerard Joseph. “Who Was Jennie June?”. Outhistory, October 10, 2022. Online.
• Lee Lanzillotta. “How an ‘Androgyne’ Upended Gender in 1899”. Gay & Lesbian Review, November-December 2023. 

Find-a-Grave            Wikipedia(Jennie June)                  Wikipedia(Mowry Saben)

Ernst Burchard (1876-1920) doctor and sexologist

Part I: life

Part II: Lexikon

Part III: history of cis words

Ernst Burchard was born in Heilsberg, then in Germany, but now Powiat Lidzbarski in Poland. His father was a doctor, but apparently he was raised by foster parents in Gumbinnen, Danzig and Insterburg. He studied medicine in Tübingen, Würzburg and Kiel. His dissertation, submitted in Kiel in 1900, dealt with some cases of transient glycosuria. He then opened a practice in Berlin as a general practitioner and neurologist.

Being himself gay, he inevitably came into contact with Magnus Hirschfeld, and was one of the co-founders of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, WhK ( Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) in May 1897.

In 1904, two young gay men, Karl Feigl and the writer Kurt Münzer attempted to blackmail Burchard and Hirschfeld. Burchard filed a complaint, and testified as an expert witness. He declared both men to be mentally defective, and he described Feigl thus: “The homosexually inclined young man had a strongly feminine character and also showed the characteristics of gossip, intrigue, and lack of judgment and criticism, which some women possess". Feigl only was sent to prison: Münzer later became a well-known writer. 

Burchard published a pamphlet Erpresserprostitution(=Blackmailer Prostitution).

Burchard frequently appeared for the defense together with Hirschfeld as a court expert in trials of gay men charged under § 175 of the penal code, which made gay sex a crime.

Burchard left

In 1911, a year after the publication of Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld was attempting to get other sexologists to use the new term, Transvestiten, that he had adapted from French usage. To this end he invited several colleagues and a few trans women to meet in his flat in October 1911. Burchard was of course one of the colleagues. He and Hirschfeld co-wrote some papers to widen the awareness that it was possible to obtain a Transvestitenschein.

In 1912 Burchard supported Hirschfeld in writing reports to enable the obtaining of Transvestitenscheins and/or approved name changes for Berthold Buttgereit, Louis Sch. and Emilie Kellner.

Burhard published three books: on sexual infantilism, on the psychology of self-accusation, and a lexicon of sexology.

After the outbreak of war in 1914, Burchard gave a lecture to the Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft (Medical Society for Sexual Science) on 18 December, which he then repeated at the WhK. He described how trans women reacted when conscripted as men, and the impact on their mental condition.

Due to the anchoring of the bodily transformation tendency in the soul, however, the feeling of the impossibility of military service still seems to be particularly strong among transvestites. For many it is not in the least fear of danger or strain, but merely the feeling of complete unsuitability for a continued masculine way of life. For example, I know of transvestites who went to the district command in their female clothes and declared quite seriously that they would like to go into the field as a nurse or market-servant, but that they would never live in the barracks as a man among men. In such cases, of course, the doctor's judgement as to the military unfitness at hand cannot be in doubt. (Burchard 1914/1915, p. 376)

He emphasised that this was not shirking and that many trans women were quite willing to enlist as nurses or in food services.

Burchard was a poet, and published poems in gay publications. He was also active in the Bund für Menschenrechte (League for Human Rights).

He had resigned from the board of the WhK on December 14, 1908, due to illness. He was to give a series of lectures on "The Cultural Significance of the Mentally Abnormal" at the newly founded Institut für Sexualwissenschaft from 1919. His early death, however, was the reason that it took place with only one event. He was only 44.

Burchard’s publications:

• Erpresserprostitution. Kampf-Verlag, Berlin, 1905.
• with Magnus Hirschfeld. „Zwei Gutachten über Beziehungen homosexueller Frauen“. Zeitschrift für Kriminalanthropologie 50, 1912: 49-61.
• with Magnus Hirschfeld. „Zur Kasuistik des Verkleidungstriebs“. Ärztliche Sachverständigen-Zeitung, 18, 23, 1912: 477-9.
• with Magnus Hirschfeld. „Spermasekretion au seiner weiblichen Harnröhre“. Ein Mann mit vollkommen weiblichen äußeren Genitalien. Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift, 37, 1912: 2425-8,
• with Magnus Hirchfeld. „Ein Fall von Transvestitismus bei musikalischem Genie“. Neurologisches Centralblatt,, 52, 1913:946-950.
• Der sexuelle Infantilismus (Juristisch-Psychiatrische Grenzfragen; Bd. 9, Heft 5). Verlag Marhold, Halle/Saale 1913 (zusammen mit Magnus Hirschfeld).
• Zur Psychologie der Selbstbezichtigung. Adler-Verlag, Berlin 1913 (Beiträge zur forensischen Medizin).
• Lexikon des gesamten Sexuallebens. Adler-Verlag, Berlin 1914.
• „Sexuelle Fragen zur Kriegszeit“ Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, 1, 10, 1914/15: 372-380,
• „Weibliche Soldaten“, In: Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, XXV. Jahrgang, 6. August 1916, Nr. 32, S. 477.

Other

• Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller. Mann für Mann : biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte von Freundesliebe und mannmännlicher Sexualität im deutschen Sprachraum. Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript, 1998: under “Burchard, Ernst”, “Feigl, Karl” and „Münzer, Kurt“.
• Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005: 73, 79, 85, 88-90, 91-2, 96-7, 99, 118, 119, 129, 137n18.
• „Ernst Burchard, Dr. med., Arzt“. Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V. Online.

EN.Wikipedia

Edward Podolsky (1902-1965) doctor and writer

Edward Podolsky, born and raised in New York, was a doctor who also wrote books. In his early years he wrote science fiction, and then essays about science fiction.

His first medical book in 1934, Young women past forty; a modern sex and health primer of the critical years, was advice for the middle-aged woman. He then did advice books: The Doctor Prescribes Colors and The Doctor Prescribes Music. And in 1942 The Modern Sex Manual. 

Podolsky married in 1944 at the age of 42. In 1946 he wrote Post-War Sex Problems and How to Solve Them for returning service men and their brides, and also revised the English translation of Hirschfeld’s The Sexual History of the World War, 4^th edition. He followed that with Red Miracle: The Story of Soviet Medicine in 1947.

In 1953 he published his Encyclopedia of Aberrations: A Psychiatric Handbook.  The Encyclopedia was reviewed by Heine Kohut: “The gravest fault, however, lies not in the alphabetical order of the material but in the use of original papers, culled, apparently in their entirety, from various contemporary publications. While these articles were, of course, chosen with an eye to being sufficiently general, they were yet not planned by their authors to constitute the kind of authoritative summary that the reader of an encyclopedia has the right to expect, at least in approximation.”

The article on “Transvestism” is not signed and is presumably by Podolsky. It summarizes the work and typologies of the sexologists  Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, Moll, Fenichel and others. 

Podolsky was interested in the psychology of murder. In 1954 he published “Mind of the Murderer”, and then in the Medico-Legal Journal in the Decembers of 1959, 1962 and 1965 he published “The Manic Murderer”, “The Epileptic Murderer” and “The Lust Murderer”.

He also wrote for Sexology: Sex Science Illustrated and for One: The Homosexual Magazine.

In 1960 Podolsky connected with Carlson Wade. Their first joint work was Erotic Symbolism; A Study of Fetichism in Relation to Sex. 

This was followed the same year by Transvestism Today; The Phenomena of Men Who Dress as Women. The title page is misleading in that Podolsky is listed as the first author, and his photograph only is on the inside back flap. However he contributed only the Introduction, and a comparison with his “Transvestism” article in his 1953 Encyclopedia of Aberrations shows it to be a minor rewrite of the same. Dr Gutheil has been added but not Harry Benjamin, despite the 1953 symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine that featured both Benjamin and Gutheil.

In 1962 Podolsky and Wade with Epic Publishing Company brought out a six-volume Sexual Behavior Series: Lesbianism, Exhibitionism, Nymphomania, Voyeurism, Transvestism and Fetishism.

In 1967 they published Abnormal Sex Activity, with K.D.S. of Cleveland, and Sexual Masochism: The Sexual Pleasure of Pain and Sexual Sadism: The Sexual Urge of Love and Pain with Stewart Gordon Publications.

Edward Podolsky died in 1965 age 63.

Science Fiction

• “The Figure of Anubis”, Weird Tales, February 1925
• “The Masters from Beyond”, Weird Tales, September 1925
• “Death by Radio”, Amazing Stories. December 1932.
• “The Drug that Kills the Soul”. Unknown Fantasy Fiction, March 1940.
• “Life on Other Planets?”. Planet Stories, Summer 1940.
• “The Human Blood Hound”. Fantastic Adventures, August 1940.

Health and sex

• Young women past forty; a modern sex and health primer of the critical years. Herald Publishing, 1934.
• The Doctor Prescribes Colors: The Influences of Colors on Health and Personality. National Library Press, 1938.
• The Doctor Prescribes Music: the influence of music on health and personality. Frederick A Stokes Company, 1939.
• with James Parker Hendry. Secrets of Love and Marriage, 1941
• The Modern Sex Manual. Cadillac Publishing, 1942.
• Post-War Sex Problems and How to Solve Them. Cadillac Pub Co, 1946. Advice on a range of concerns for the returning serviceman and his bride.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. The Sexual History of the World War. In Collaboration with World- Famous Physicians, Scientists and Historians. New York: Panurge, 1934. Second edition, New York: Falstaff, 1937; 3rd ed., New York: Cadillac, 1941; 4th rev. ed., by Edward Podolsky, 1946.
• “Some Achievements of Soviet Medical Research”. Russian Review, 6,1, September 1946.
• Red Miracle: The Story of Soviet Medicine, The Beechhurst Press, 1947.
• “The mind of the Peeping Tom”. Sexology: Sex Science Magazine Illustrated, 19,2 September 1952.
• Encyclopedia of Aberrations: A Psychiatric Handbook. Philosophical Library, 1953.
• “The Mind of the Fetishist.” Sexology: Sex Science Illustrated. 19,7, February, 1953.
• “Causes of Organic Frigidity”. Sexology: Sex Science Illustrated, 20,7, February 1954.
• “Two-Sexed Individuals”. One: The Homosexual Magazine, July 1954. Online. A discussion of some of Dr Broster’s intersex patients.
• “Mind of the Murderer’. The Journal of Criminal Law, 45, 1, June 1954.
• The Neuroses and their Treatment. Philosophical Library, 1958.
• The Modern Sex Manual. Cadillac Publishing Company, 1958.
• “The Manic Murderer”. Medico-Legal Journal, 27, 4, Dec 1959.
• with Carlson Wade. Erotic Symbolism; A Study of Fetichism in Relation to Sex. Epic Publishing Co Inc., 1960.
• Introduction to Carlson Wade. Transvestism Today; The Phenomena of Men Who Dress As Women. New York: Epic Pub. Co, 1960. Online at Queer Music Heritage.
• “The Epileptic Murderer”. Medico-Legal Journal, 30, 4, Dec 1962.
• with Carlson Wade. Lesbianism. Sexual behavior series, no. 1. New York: Epic Pub. Co, 1962.
• with Carlson Wade. Exhibitionism. Sexual behavior series, no. 2. New York: Epic Pub. Co, 1962.
• with Carlson Wade. Nymphomania. Sexual behavior series, no. 3. New York: Epic Pub. Co, 1962.
• with Carlson Wade. Voyeurism. Sexual behavior series, no. 4. New York: Epic Pub. Co, 1962.
• with Carlson Wade. Transvestism. Sexual behavior series, no. 5. New York: Epic Pub. Co, 1962.
• with Carlson Wade. Fetichism. Sexual behavior series, no. 6. New York: Epic Publ. Co., Inc, 1962.
• “The Lust Murderer”. Medico-Legal Journal, 33, 4, Dec 1965.
• with Carlson Wade. Abnormal Sex Activity. Cleveland, Ohio: K.D.S., 1967.
• with Carlson Wade. Sexual Masochism: The Sexual Pleasure of Pain. Stewart Gordon Publications, 1967.
• with Carlson Wade. Sexual Sadism: The Sexual Urge of Love and Pain. Stewart Gordon Publications, 1967.
• Encyclopedia erotica sexualia: The study of sexual practices, normal and abnormal. Stewart Gordon Publications, 1967.

By Others:

• Heinz Kohut. “Encyclopedia of Aberrations”. Social Service Review, 27,3, Sep 1953.
• “Vintage Publications Attempt to Diagnose Transvestism, Masturbation & Other Sexual ‘Deviations’ “. Dangerous Minds, 01.06.2017. Online.

Find a Grave                 ISFDB

Janis Ashley (1951 - ) pediatrician

Ashley qualified as a doctor, and married young. At age 25 he knew he wanted to be a woman, and the marriage ended in divorce.

She had completion surgery in 1978 and became one of the two practicing pediatricians in Sedalia, Missouri, a town of 21,000. In 1985 she adopted a baby boy.

In late 1989 Ashley decided that she wanted to be man again, and mentioned that she did so in an interview with the Sedalia Democrat. Many of her patients rallied in support.

• “Pediatrician Discloses Sex Change, Desire to Change Back”. Associated Press, October 12, 1989. Online.
• “Doctor Who Changed Sex Will Become a Man Again”. Chicago Tribune, October 13, 1989. Online.
• “Woman Wants to Change Sex Again”. TGIC, Butterfly, Eon, November-December 1989:3. Online. 
• Susan Jimison. “Sex Swap Doc Wants to be a Man Again”. Twenty Minutes, January 1990: 1. Online.

Richard Curtis (1967 - ) doctor, yacht racer

Richard Curtis started life as Vanda Zadorozny,  the child of a Polish immigrant who survived a Nazi forced labour camp and became a mine worker in West Yorkshire.

Vanda had medical training at St. Bartholomew’s Medical College and the Royal London School of Medicine, followed by work in various hospitals. Zadorozny also did an MBA and for three years worked in the pharmaceutical industry bringing medical expertise to sales and marketing, before returning to doctoring as a general practitioner.

Zadorozny had developed a passion for sailing while at university and competed at the national level for 15 years winning several championships. Zadorozny had affairs with men, but they did not feel right: he felt that he was “a gay man trapped in a woman’s body”.

He was working as a locum at a general practice in Richmond, London, when he completed transition as Richard Curtis in 2005, shortly after the Gender Recognition Act came into force. He was the first transsexual to be recognised by the General Medical Council under its terms.

Dr Curtis met Russell Reid, and started to sit in with trans clients, and by the end of the year was taking his own patients. He took over the private practice in 2006, when Reid retired facing complaints that he was too willing to be helpful to transsexuals. Curtis was a member of  professional and activists groups: WPATH, Gendys Network, FTM NetWork, FTM London, Gender Trust and GIRES. He aimed to offer a ‘one-stop’ service wherein trans clients can be assessed, diagnosed, given referrals, prescribed and dispensed hormones, given follow-up and health checks, offered counselling and hair removal treatment and even speech therapy. Ruth Pearce describes his reputation at the turn of the decade: 

“The name ‘Dr Curtis’ was widely associated with a more liberal form of care that centres informed consent rather than placing the burden of proof upon trans patients, a factor that was sometimes linked by participants to Curtis’ own background as a trans man. Transhealth patients such as Ben felt more confident that the possible future of transition would eventually manifest, and within a predictable time frame too. They were less worried about encountering cisgenderism or transphobia from Curtis, or having to prove themselves ‘trans enough’.”

However some complaints were made: mainly about his high fees: as high as £240-an-hour. More significantly, a woman, who had presented as a trans man, regretted taking testosterone and having a double mastectomy; it was alleged that Dr Curtis had prescribed to patients under 18 “without the specialist knowledge or skills to do so”; that he failed to follow “accepted standards of care”. In November 2011, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) imposed a number of restrictions on Dr Curtis’ practice. He "must maintain an anonymised log detailing every case where he prescribes for patients with gender dysphoria and for patients who he refers for gender dysphoria surgery". The panel also ruled: "He must not prescribe hormonal treatment for patients with gender dysphoria, or refer any patients for gender dysphoria surgery, unless those patients have undergone a recent mental health or psychological assessment carried out by an appropriately trained mental health care professional."

In 2013 the General Medical Council opened an investigation into the practice of Dr Curtis. However in February 2015 it announced that the Fitness to Practice hearing originally scheduled for that month would not be going forward.

Curtis maintained the support of trans patients and activists. The Twitter #TransDocFail campaign led to a dossier of over 100 cases of serious and sometimes dangerous mistreatment of trans patients by other doctors. This was formally presented to the GMC, and Jane Fae wrote an article for The Guardian making the same points. However, no action appears to have been taken against a single doctor as a result.

Dr Curtis had made several changes so that his service was more similar to NHS gender clinics, such as requiring a second diagnosis prior to hormone prescriptions, and he stopped accepting patients under 21.

On June 2017 Dr Curtis announced the discontinuance of his practice. This was at the same time as the Welsh physician Helen Webberley who had been offering prescriptions after consultations by Skype, was also investigated by the GMC and put under restrictions.

*not the screenwriter, nor the Washington State representative.

• Luke McEwan. “Laser 4000 Nationals at Dalgety Bay Sailing Club Report”. Yachts and Yachting, 22 Aug 2000. Online.
• Nicki May Reid. Dr Richard Curtis BSc. MB.BS takes over from Dr Russell Reid. Angel News 2 Feb 2006 www.theangels.co.uk/article.asp?id=524 . No Longer available.
• Elizabeth Day. “Richard, the first transsexual GP, was Vanda, the miner’s Daughter”. The Telegraph, 09 Oct 2005. Online.
• Curtis, R., Levy, A., Martin, J., Zoe-Jane, P., Wylie, K., Reed, T. and Reed, B.  Guidance for GPs, other Clinicians and Health Professionals on the Care of Gender Variant People. Department of Health Publications, 2008.
• David Batty. “Doctor under fire for alleged errors prescribing sex-change hormones”. The Guardian, 6 Jan 2013. Online.
• Martin Evans & Andrew Hough. “Dr Richard Curtis: transsexual doctor faces investigation”. The Telegraph, 07 Jan 2013. Online.
• Sam Webb. “Transsexual doctor who charges £240-an-hour investigated over sex-change treatments after complaint by woman who regretted having her breasts removed”, The Daily Mail, 7 January 2013..
• Matthew Jenkin. “Campaign calls for end to trans doctor 'witch hunt'”. Gay Star News, 10 January 2013. Online.
• Jane Fae. “The real trans scandal is not the failings of one doctor but cruelty by many” The Guardian, 10 Jan 2013. Online.
• Nick Duffy. “General Medical Council drops case against transgender doctor”. Pink News, February 27, 2015. Online.
• Tris Reid-Smith. “Is General Medical Council failing trans people as they clear top doctor after four year probe?”. Gay Star News, 26 February 2015. Online.
• Kamilla Kamaruddin. “What it’s like to be a transgender patient and a GP”. British Journal of General Practice, 67 (600) 2017: 313. Online.
• “Dr Curtis is closing his Gender Clinic”. Susan’s Place, June 2017. Online.
• Ruth Pearce. Understanding Trans Health: Discourse, Power and Possibility. Policy Press, 2018: 72, 149-50, 165-7.

------------

An item I did not put in the bibliography is Sheila Jeffreys’ Gender Hurts. She has a half-page on Curtis. Simply citing David Batty in The Guardian. she puts far too much weight on a statement that Curtis was quoted as saying:  ‘I’ve never wanted children, or a white wedding like most women dream of, or a man to take care of me. Instead, you were more likely to find me fitting a kitchen or tiling the bathroom’.  Jeffreys comments: “Her understanding of gender was very constricting and traditional”. Really! A woman who becomes a yacht-racing champion has a constricting and traditional view of gender! Of course Jeffreys does not mention that Curtis was a yachting champion.

Richard Curtis Gender Specialist - Part 1 from Jay Stewart on Vimeo.

Sarah Muirhead-Allwood (1947 - ) hip-replacement surgeon

William Muirhead-Allwood was educated at the  Wellington independent school in Somerset, and was trained at the prestigious St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School.  Muirhead-Allwood became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, has private consulting rooms at Wimpole Street, and specialised in hip-replacement surgery.  

Muirhead-Allwood married a nurse in 1983, they had two sons, and lived in Haringey, north London.  She knew of the Sarah persona, which she considered to be simply cross-dressing, but when Sarah announced an intention to transition, she insisted on a separation. 

   

In 1996, the Sunday Mirror was preparing a story about Sarah’s transition, so she went public about her transition rather than be outed by the tabloid press: 

"For years l have called myself Sarah, and that is how many of my friends know me.”  

In general medical colleagues were supportive, however the medical committee of the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers temporarily withdrew her admitting privileges.   However they were reinstated in December 1996. 

Dr Muirhead-Allwood retired from the NHS, aged 65 in 2012.  She continues in private practice. 

She has had many celebrity patients.

•                    Tracy Schaverien & David Rowe.  “You can call me ma'am; Queen Mum's Hip Op Surgeon And His Sex Change Secret: She never knew top doctor was growing breasts.”.  Sunday Mirror, 31 March 1996.  Free Library.

•                    “Queen Mother’s Surgeon Outed”.  Aegis News, 4/96:9.  Online.

•                    “TS SurgeonGender Talk, Regains Admitting Privileges “. Trans-Actions #5.  December 1996. Online. 

•                    Adam Helliker.  “Hip Hip for Sarah Muirhead-Allwood”.  The Express, May 20, 2012.  Online.

Top Doctors      

Eleno de Céspedes (1545–?) surgeon

The child was born in Castile but the initial name is not recorded. The father was Pero Hernández, a Castilian peasant and the mother an African slave. The child inherited her mother’s slave status, and was branded on both sides of her face.

At age twelve, Elena de Céspedes, the owner, died, and the child was freed and given the owner’s name. The new Elena de Céspedes was married at 16, to a stone mason. He left after three months, and she received news that he had died.

However she was pregnant. As she reported later, the childbirth was unusual. During labour, a penis also emerged: “with the force that she applied in labour she broke the skin over the urinary canal, and a head came out”. Céspedes gave away the baby, and had surgery to further reléase the member.

Elano – as he now was – was able to have relations with women. He moved from town to town, working as a tailor, a hosier, a soldier. Finally he lodged with a surgeon, who taught him the trade. He worked in the Hospital de la Corte, and built up a library of 24 medical texts.

Céspedes was known for his affairs with women. In 1586, that is after over twenty years of living as male, he proposed to marry Maria Del Caño. The vicario (archdeacon) of Madrid, suspecting that he was a capon (eunuch), required an examination. The lead examiner was Dr. Francisco Díaz de Alcalá, a prominent urologist, and surgeon to the King. Diaz determined Céspedes’s identity to be male and not hermaphrodite:

“It is true that he has seen Eleno’s genital member, and having touched all around it with his hands and seen it with his eyes, he made the following declaration: That he has his genital member, which is sufficient and perfect, with its testicles formed like any other man. . . . And he thus said and declared that in his opinion Eleno does not bear any resemblance to a hermaphrodite or anything like it”.

The marriage went ahead. However a year later, just after injuries suffered while riding a horse, combined with a bout with cancer, he was arrested and charged in secular court with sodomy and ‘contempt for the sacrament of marriage’.  He explained that there had been changes:

"At present I have only my woman’s nature. The male member that emerged from me has just recently come off in jail, while I was a prisoner in Ocafia. It only now finished falling off, after more than fifteen days. What happened is that before last Christmas I suffered a flow of blood through my woman’s parts and through my rear end, which caused me great pain in my kidneys. I’d hurt myself while riding horseback and the root of my member became weak. The member became spongy and I went cutting it bit by bit, so that I’ve come to be without it. It just finished falling off about fifteen days ago, or a little more, as I’ve said."

Céspedes was examined by midwives who determined that he had a vagina, but was a virgin. The charges were changed to bigamy and the case was transferred to the Inquisition.

Dr. Díaz changed his testimony, now believing that the defendant’s male genitalia had been a deception:

“an art so subtle that it sufficed to fool him by sight and by touch”.

Céspedes asserted that he was a hermaphrodite.

“I never made any pact, explicitly or tacit, with the devil, in order to pose as a man to marry a woman, as is attributed to me. What happens is that many times the world has seen androgynous beings or, in other words, hermaphrodites, who have both sexes. I, too, have been one of these, and at the time I arranged to be married the masculine sex was more prevalent in me; and I was naturally a man and had all that was necessary for a man to marry a woman. And I filed information and eyewitness proof by physicians and surgeons, experts in the art, who looked at me and touched me, and swore under oath that I was a man and could marry a woman, and with this judicial proof I married as a man.”

He insisted that the women whom he had had relations with had no knowledge of his female organs. He was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to two hundred lashes. He was then put to work without pay in the Toledo hospital to use his medical skills, but was obliged to wear female clothing. The hospital administrator complained:

“The presence of Elena de Céspedes has caused great annoyance and embarrassment from the beginning, since many people come to see and be healed by her”.

Thus Céspedes became the first female surgeon in Spain. There would not be another for some centuries afterwards. 

Céspedes was mentioned in Jerónimo de Huerta’s 1599 annotated translation of Pliny’s Natural History (as a transgendered mulatta criminal lesbian) and Antonio de Fuentelapeña’s 1676 El ente dilucidado: Tratado de monstruos y fantasmas.

• Vern L.,Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993: 94-6. (the Bulloughs never mention that Céspedes was born a slave; refer to him throughout as ‘she’ and refer to the Archdeacon as ‘vicar’. )
• Israel Burshaton. “Elena alias Eleno”. In Sabrina P. Ramet (ed). Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. Routledge, 1996.: 105- 122.
• Elizabeth Krimmer. In the company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women Around 1800. Wayne State University Press, 2004: 75.
• Leila J Rupp. Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women. New York University Press, 2009: 95-6.
• Sherry Velasco. Lesbians in early modern Spain. Vanderbilt University, 2011: 7, 11, 68-9, 75-8, 81-3.
• Richard L Kagan & Abigail Dyer. “Sexuality and the Marriage Sacrament: Elena/Eleno de Céspedes“. Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011: 36-59.
• Von Christof Rolker. “„I am and have been a hermaphrodite“: Elena/Eleno de Céspedes and the Spanish Inquisition”. Männlich-weiblich-zwischen,  27/11/2016. http://intersex.hypotheses.org/2720.

ES.Wikipedia    Butch Heroes

__________

So what do we make of this.   His penis was maybe a large clitoris, and was later damaged.  But why would the midwives, having found a vagina, then declare that Céspedes was a virgin?   Elena had previously given birth.

Rolker makes the point: "At the same time, this in my view clearly demonstrates that Elena/Eleno was not ‚accused‘ of hermaphroditism. Rather, hermaphroditism in sixteenth-century Spain (as in medieval France, for that matter) was a defence strategy. Eleno/Elena’s story of first gradually changing from woman to man and later from predominantly male to predominantly female hermaphrodite may be mind-boggling, but given the very real danger of being condemned for sodomy, the story in the end was live-saving."

Ellie Zara Ley (1974–) surgeon

Eleazer Ley was born in San Luis, Sonora. His mother was Chinese, and his father half-Chinese. Shortly after birth he developed a medical complication that the local doctors did not know how to deal with. Despite not having the correct papers, his mother was able to take the child across the US border to a hospital in Yuma, Arizona, purely with a doctor’s letter.

Ley grew up to be a doctor. He did undergraduate work in the US as a foreign student, returned to Mexico for medical school, and immigrated to the US. He worked at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY and in the general surgery program at the University of Arizona. He then completed a fellowship in pediatric craniofacial plastic surgery at Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City. At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles he received fellowship training in hand and microsurgery, and then returned to the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, to complete a fellowship in plastic and reconstructive surgery.

He considered extending his skills into gender surgery, and researched how it was being done in Thailand. He had also married, and they had two daughters. He took a position in Tucson where his wife is from. Approaching 40, Ley had 14 years of medical school, residency, and three fellowships. He opened the Ley Institute of Plastic & Hand Surgery, LLC and the Arizona Craniofacial & Pediatric Plastic Surgery. He also did work in Nogales, Sonora, for the border community.

Then Ley had a damascene moment. Helping the two daughters with nail polish, it was suddenly apparent what was missing from life.

“It just stirred something inside of me that wouldn’t stop, this force. It was relentless after that. My feminine side just completely came out.”

Ley transitioned and was divorced in 2015. Ellie Zara Ley had surgery from Dr Toby Meltzer, who

Drs Meltzer & Ley

continued discussions with her for several months and then asked her to join his practice. She closed her Tucson practice, and moved to Scottsdale. She shadowed Meltzer’s surgeries, and is now taking on her own patients.

• “Border experience has profound impact on Dr Eleazar Ley”. Tucson Medical Center, October 23, 2013. https://tmcaznews.com/2013/10/23/border-experience-has-profound-impact-on-dr-eleazar-ley.
• Amy Saunders. “Change/MD”. Phoenix, April 2016. http://www.phoenixmag.com/lifestyle/change-md.html
• “Dr. Meltzer is excited to welcome a new talent, Ellie Zara Ley MD to his practice!”. Tmeltzer.com. http://www.tmeltzer.com/news_events.html.

Carys Massarella (1965–) physician.

Calum Massarella grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1990, cum laude, and completed an FRCPC in Emergency Medicine at McMaster University in 1997.

From there Massarella took a position in the emergency department at the associated St Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton, Ontario, and became Chief of Emergency Medicine there in 2001. Massarella also married and had two children.

When Massarella was 42, a trans patient suffered a cardiac arrest and died. This brought home to Massarella that he did not want to die as a man, and as Carys she completed transition in 2009, with surgery in the US.

Carys remains an attending Emergency Physician at St. Joseph’s and is the lead Physician for the Transgender Care Program at Quest Community Health Centre in nearby St Catharines. She is President of the Medical Staff Association.

“The biggest obstacle for most transgender individuals is access to medical care,” she says. “In our clinic, we no longer refer patients to psychiatrists. Being transgender is not a pathology. Gender dysphoria is not a psychiatric illness.”

“What I always tell people is, you’re always going to have a transgender identity. That’s never going to change. Whether or not you transition, that’s a personal decision. But at the end of the day, the vast, vast majority of people do better after they transition, or they feel better after they transition.”

“I must say, my American colleagues…every time I tell them I did this at a Catholic hospital they are like ‘no you didn’t’ and I’m like ‘yes I did.” 

• Scarlet Woman. "Incredible Women You Need to Know: Dr. Carys Massarella". http://thescarletwoman.tumblr.com/post/44385084579/incredible-women-you-need-to-know-dr-carys-massarella.
  
• Daniel Nolan. "Doctor is fighting for transgender community". The Spec, Nov 17, 2011. www.thespec.com/news-story/2183961-doctor-is-fighting-for-transgender-community.
  
• Lindy Mechefske. “Finding Your Identity”. Western Alumni Gazette, Spring 2014. Online at: www.alumni.westernu.ca/alumni-gazette/spring2014/finding-your-identity.html.
  
• “CBC's Transforming Gender comes amid headlines over gender identity”. CBCNews, Feb 25, 2015. http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/cbc-s-transforming-gender-comes-amid-headlines-over-gender-identity-1.2971872.
  
• Wendy Leung. “‘We’re just regular people’: Documentary shines light on what it’s like to be transgender”. The Globe and Mail, Feb 25, 2015. www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/were-just-regular-people-what-its-like-to-be-transgender/article23204839.
• "Local transgender advocate speaks about her journey".  CHCH, April 24, 2015. www.chch.com/local-transgender-advocate-speaks-about-her-journey.

Joy Shaffer (1955–) doctor.

Shaffer did a BS in biology at the California Institute of Technology. She was a college room-mate of Kay Brown. In 1979 Joy had transgender surgery.

In 1980 Mary Elizabeth Clark, Jude Patton, Joy Shaffer, Carol Katz, Dianne Saunders and Kay Brown founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California Transsexual Rights committee, building on what Vern Bullough had done with the ACLU in the area in the 1960s.

Joy and Kay mid 1980s

In 1981 Joy started medical school, and gained an MD from Stanford University in 1985. In 1995 Dr Shaffer founded Seahorse Medical Clinic in San Jose, California. She worked with Anne Lawrence, and introduced Lawrence to Kay Brown.

That same year she was quoted in an article in the New York Times on the brain research of Dutch researcher Dick Swaab which had made claims of a brain difference in MTF transsexuals. She said that Swaab's results corresponded to what she and her colleagues were finding using magnetic resonance imaging technology to scan brains.

Joy wrote the foreword for Transgender Care, 1997. Dr Shaffer was a member of HBIGDA/WPATH, the American College of Physicians, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine and the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association.

The clinic in San Jose continued until 2005, and was a major resource for transsexuals in that area.

She emigrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand,  and worked at a rural medical clinic which served mainly Maoris.

• Natalie Angier. “Study Links Brain to Transsexuality”. New York Times, November 2, 1995. www.nytimes.com/1995/11/02/us/study-links-brain-to-transsexuality.html.
  
• Joy Diane Shaffer. “Intergendered – between the worlds”. Hermaphrodites with Attitude, Summer 1995. Online at: http://www.isna.org/files/hwa/summer1995.pdf.
  
• Anne Lawrence, Joy Diane Shaffer, Wynelle R Snow, C Chase & Bo T Headlam. “Health Care Needs of Transgendered Patients”. Letter to Journal of the American Medical Association, 276, 874, 1998. Online at: http://www.annelawrence.com/healthcare.html.
  
• Joy Diane Shaffer. “Introduction” to Gianna Israel & Donald Tarver. Transgender care: recommended guidelines, practical information, and personal accounts. Temple University Press, 1997.
  
• Joy Shaffer. “The Unquiet Life and Death of Kristi Independence Kelly”. In Kay Brown's Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, 1999. www.transhistory.net/history/TH_Kristi_Kelly.html.  Archive.
  
• Kay Brown. “TransGender Theory”. Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, 1999. www.transhistory.net/history/TH_Theory.html. Archive.
  
• Kay Brown. “ACLU Transsexual Rights Committee...”. Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, 2000. www.transhistory.net/history/TH_ACLU.html.  Archive.
  
• Kay Brown. “What the NEXT Wave of Transgender Activists Need to Know”. On the Science of Changing Sex, December 9, 2014. https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/what-the-next-wave-of-transgender-activists-need-to-know.
• Andrea James. "Joy Shaffer archive".  Transgender Map.  Online. 

___________________________________

Some accounts say that Joy was the 1^st known trans person in medical school in 1981. There is equivocation around the word 'known' but James Barry graduated MD from Edinburgh in 1812; Mary Walker from Syracuse in 1855; Eugene Perkins in the 1890s; Madeleine Pelletier in 1903; Alan Hart from Oregon in 1917; Ewan Forbes from Aberdeen in 1944; Gloria Hemingway from Miami in 1964; Camille Cabral from Recife in the 1970s; Anne Lawrence from Minnesota in 1974; Robertina Manganaro in the early 1980s. However despite this list, Joy was still a pioneer.

Kay Brown in 1999 wrote: “Shaffer, in an as yet unpublished study, used MRI data from a large pool of controls, MTF and FTM transsexuals to demonstrate that the corpus callosum showed sexually dimorphic structures that, on a statistical basis, correlated with gender identity”. I presume that it was never published, in that I cannot find it in Google Scholar or WorldCat.

Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939) Part II: doctor and activist

Continued from Part I.


From 1905 Dr Pelletier eked out a living as a local doctor, a doctor for the post office and was the first woman to become the doctor for the welfare department.

She always wore her hair short and wore male clothing, but refused to apply for a permission de travestissement. She considered that female clothing represented slavery. Being short and fat she did not pass well. Sometimes she had to walk fast to escape public taunts. She was known to carry a revolver in her pocket. She would shout, use slang and go to places where women were not supposed to go.

She was an active feminist and socialist. From 1905 she was on the national council of the French Socialist Party, and represented it at most international congresses before the war. However the socialists made fun of her at meetings and pretended not to recognize her in the streets.

In 1906 she became secretary of La Solidarité des femmes, and published La suffragiste. In 1910, forty women attempted to run in the election, Pelletier in the 8^th Arrondisment in Paris as the Socialist candidate, but all their candidatures were rejected.

Pelletier was strongly in favour of birth control and abortion and wrote for Le Néo-Malthusian. She posited the right of a woman over her own body as an absolute right. She argued against the Natalists for whom a high birthrate was a patriotic duty, and against the Communists for the freedom of the individual. She argued that women had just as much right as men to sexual pleasure, and for that contraception, including abortion, was necessary.

A police report (she remained an object of police surveillance throughout her life) described her as 'tribad', but it seems that she was celibate. She regarded sex with men as part of the oppression of women, and expressed contempt for feminists who wanted to remain feminine. On occasion she even rejected sex as a degrading animal activity, an attitude shared with bourgeois women on the National Council of Women.

She proposed two categories of women: the superior kind who are totally independent including sexually; and the others. Feminists said that all that was against nature and an injury to feminism. Anti-feminists mocked her as showing where feminism leads – she confirmed their fears. She would say that her dress said to men that she was their equal, and that she liked to externalize her ideas. That whoever is truly worthy of liberty doesn't wait for someone to give it, but takes it.





Pelletier advocated for the virilization (her coining – she liked provocative and polemical words) of women: not just access to education, work, art or writing, but also to duelling, military service and militant chastity.

In 1913 she wrote: "Ah que ne suis-je un homme ! Mon sexe est le grand malheur de ma vie (Ah, why am I not a man! My sex is the great misfortune of my life)".

In 1914 she put out a pamphlet proclaiming the right to abortion, and afterwards did abortions in her office.

During the Great War Pelletier worked for the Red Cross treating the injured from both sides, and attended pacifist meetings. On one occasion in Nancy, a crowd took her as a German spy because of her strange appearance. In 1916 she wrote: "Du soleil, il y en a peu dans ma vie. Le monde n'aime pas les femmes qui se distinguent du troupeau; les hommes les rabaissent, les femmes les détestent. Enfin, il faut se résigner à ce que l'on ne peut empêcher et je ne donnerais tout de même pas ma place contre celle d'une brebis bêlante (There is little sunshine in my life. The world does not like women who stand out from the herd, men belittle them, women hate them. In the end, we must resign ourselves to what we can not help and I would not change places with a bleating sheep.)"

She joined the French Communist Party when it was founded in 1920, and the next year visited the Soviet Union, despite that being illegal at the time. To do that she had to wear female clothing and a wig: it was like being a transvestite. On return she wrote Mon voyage aventureux en Russie communiste. However she left the Party in 1926. Afterwards she was an anarchist.

In 1937 she had a stroke which left her partially paralyzed.

In 1939 Dr Pelletier was arrested for practising abortion, denounced by the brother of a patient who was also the father of the foetus. She was incarcerated in the Perray-Vaucluse asylum where she had trained, and as the new war started she was forgotten. Her health deteriorated and after eight months, still incarcerated, she died at age 65.
_________________________________________________________

A note on fashion.   Women born in the 1870s experienced a somewhat one-off chagrin.   All through their youth, their courting, and their motherhood, they were expected to wear ankle-length skirts, and then in the 1920s, when they were well into middle-age, skirts were shortened.   A serious case was made against women's clothing before the great war.  The long skirts combined with corsets  could be quite dangerous impeding the wearer from escaping from fires, tram accidents etc.  But Pelletier's dislike for female clothing continued through the 1920s and until her death.  She would certainly not take advantage of the new freedoms whereby women showed their legs.  She considered the practice of a low decolletage, that is plunging necklines, in pre-1914 dress as 'servile'; showing one's legs as well was even worse.

Obviously Pelletier is some kind of gender variant, but she eludes our 21st century categories.   Social constructions like non-binary, gender queer or female masculinity were not available during her lifetime, and so she could not use them. 

Christine Bard comments “On peut penser qu'en étant assimilée à l'homosexualité, l'étrangeté de Madeleine Pelletier devient soudain plus familière (One might think that being equated with homosexuality, the strangeness of Madeleine Pelletier suddenly becomes more familiar)”p246, and then “Sur le plan personnel, elle est très proche des transgenres d'aujourd'hui (On a personal level, she is very close to today’s transgender) p247“ but does not pursue this idea.  A proper discussion of Pelletier’s place in trans history is yet to be written.

Jack Halberstam in his seminal Female Masculinity, discusses the rich British and US expatriates in Paris in the 1920s, but pays no attention to to native Parisians.  Radclyffe Hall was rich and did not have to work, and could be dismissed as merely playing at masculinity.   Pelletier was born in the slums, and by her intellect and hard work became one of the first female-born doctors.   Halberstams’s notion of female masculinity is severely deficient in that persons like Pelletier are not included.


There has become an industry of many books about the rich lesbian expatriots in Paris in the 1920s.  I checked several of them, and again and again there is no mention of native  working-class Parisians such as Pelletier.

There is no mention, in any of the sources that I consulted, of Pelletier’s reaction to the news that a fellow Parisian resident, one Einar Wegener, went to Dresden and became Lili Elvenes, or that in 1912 a Berlin surgeon had done gender surgery on a trans man.  As a doctor Pelletier must have been aware of these developments.   Nor is there any mention of her reaction when the exiled Magnus Hirschfeld came to live in Paris in 1933. 

Why did I stick with female pronouns?   There is no indication that Pelletier wanted otherwise, but there is also the fact that Pelletier never took a male name – at least none is reported.   See also Mathilde de Morny. 
_________________________________________________________

Publications by Madeleine Pelletier

• Prétendue dégénérescence des hommes de génie. Paris: l'Acacia, 1900.
  
• L'Amour et la maternité. Paris: la Brochure mensuelle, 1900.
  
• "Recherches sur les indices pondéraux du crâne et des principaux os longs d’une série de squelettes japonaises". Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 15 nov.1900, 514–29.
  
• M.Pelletier & P. Marie. "Sur un nouveau procédé pour obtenir l’indice cubique du crâne". Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1901, 2, 188–93.
  
• "Contribution à l’étude de la phylogénèse du maxilaire inférieure". Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1903, 3, 537-45.
  
• L'association des idées dans la manie aigüe et dans la débilité mentale. Faculté de médecine de Paris, 1903. Reprinted Paris: Rousset, 1903. Reprinted as Les lois morbides de l'association des idées. Paris: Jules Rousset, 1904.
  
• "L’écho de la pensée et la parole intérieure". Bulletin de l’Institut Général Psychologique, (Séance du 6 mai), 440–73, 1904.
  
• "La prétendue infériorité psycho-physiologique des femmes". La Vie Normale, , 1 (10), 1–6, 1904.
  
• Admission des femmes dans la Franc-maçonnerie. Paris: [s.n.], 1905.
  
• L'idéal maçonique. Paris: [s.n.], 1906.
  
• La femme en lutte pour ses droits. Paris: V. Giard et E. Brière, 1908.
  
• Idéologie d'hier: Dieu, la morale, la patrie. Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1910.
  
• Les Tendances actuelles de la maçonnerie. Paris: aux bureaux de l'"Acacia, 1910.
  
• Dieu, la morale, la patrie: idéologie d'hier. Paris: V. Giard et E. Brière, 1910.
  
• L'émancipation sexuelle de la femme. Paris: M. Giard & E. Brièr, 1911.
  
• Philosophie sociale. Les opinions--les partis--les classes. Paris: M. Giard et Brière, 1912.
  
• Justice sociale? Paris: M. Giard et E. Brière, 1913.
  
• L'éducation féministe des filles. Paris: M. Giard & E. Brière, 1914.
  
• L'Individualisme. Paris: Giard-Brière, 1919.
  
• "In anima vili", ou Un crime scientifique: pièce en 3 actes. L'Idée Libre (Paris. 1911). Conflans-Sainte-Honorine: "l'Idée libre, 1920.
  
• Mon Voyage aventureux en Russie communiste. Paris: Marcel Giard, 1922.
  
• Supérieur! Drame des classes sociales en cinq actes. [Paris]: a. Lorulot, Conflans-Honorine, 1923.
  
• L'âme existe-t-elle ? Paris: Groupe de propagande par la brochure, 1924.
  
• Capitalisme et communisme. Nice: impr. de Rosenstiel, 1926.
  
• Le travail: ce qu'il est, ce qu'il doit être. Paris: Groupe de propagande par la brochure, 1930.
  
• Une vie nouvelle: roman. Paris: E. Figuière, 1932.
  
• La Femme vierge, roman. Paris: V. Bresle, 1933.
  

By Others:

• Charles Sowerwine. ‘Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939), femme, medecin, militante’, L’Information Psychiatrique, 9, 1988: 1189–1219.
  
• Claudine Mitchell. “Madeleine Pelletier (1874 - 1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression”. Feminist Review, 33, Autumn 1989: 72-92.
  
• Felicia Gordon. The Integral Feminist--Madeleine Pelletier, 1874-1939: Feminism, Socialism, and Medicine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
  
• Marie-Victoire Louis. “Les analyses de Madeleine Pelletier sur la sexualité et la prostitution”. Site de Marie-Victoire Louis, 01/12/1992. www.marievictoirelouis.net/document.php?id=496.
  
• Joan W. Scott. “The Radical Individualism of Madeleine Pelletier” in Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Harvard University Press, 1997: 125-160.
  
• “Madeleine Pelletier: Médecin psychiatre, journaliste, romancière et militante suffragiste (1874-1939)”. Tetue, 8 mars 2003. www.tetue.net/spip.php?article37&lang=fr.
• Felicia Gordon. “Convergence and conflict: anthropology, psychiatry and feminism in the early writings of Madeleine Pelletier (1874—1939)”. History of Psychiatry, 19,2,June 2008 19: 141-162
  
• Felicia Gordon. “Publicity and Professionalism: Madeleine Pelletier (1874 - 1939) and Constance Pascal (1877 - 1937)”. Modern & Contemporary France, 17,3, August 2009: 319-334.
  
• Christine Bard. Une histoire politique du pantalon. Éd. du Seuil, 2010: Chapitre viii.
  
• “Madeleine Pelletier 1874-1939: Féministe d’avant-garde”. Divergences, 23 mars 2012. http://divergences.be/spip.php?article3031&lang=fr.
  
• “Madeleine Pelletier: Médecin psychiatre, journaliste et éditrice, militante suffragiste, romancière (1874-1939)”. 8mars.omline.fr. http://8mars-online.fr/madeleine-pelletier?lang=fr.
  

FR.WIIPEDIA   EN.WIKIPEDIA    Worldcat