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 electoral candidate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label electoral candidate. Show all posts

09 October 2016

The Rudy-Donald drag show.

I have featured this clip before, but it has a topical resonance again.





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27 January 2016

Tony Briffa (1971 - ) engineer, mayor, foster parent, activist

Briffa's parents were emigrants from Malta. When he was born, in Altona, Victoria, outside Melbourne, doctors were unsure of his sex, although the twin sister was definitely a girl. They recommended, as was the practice then, that, as he lacked the male signifier, he be raised as a girl, Antoinette.

Antoinette went to a Catholic all-girls school. She was subjected to a gonadectomy at age 7 – the parents were told that the organs were cancerous. She was on female hormones from age 11. The frequent visits to hospital made her feel like a freak. From age 12 Antoinette was telling the doctors that she was not a girl, and did not want breasts.

By age 18 she had seen her medical records. She did an engineering degree, one of only two women in the year:
"Well, there was one woman, 49 men and then there was me".
She married an understanding man, but they quickly divorced, although on good terms. Briffa worked as an aviation maintenance engineer, and at 26 she was having relationships with women, identifying as a lesbian:
"That wasn't comfortable either, because to be a lesbian, you actually need to be a woman".
At 29 Briffa found a website for intersex women. From this and what she gained from doctors she realized that she had Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (PAIS), not complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, and her body would have masculinised to some extent if medical intervention had not been imposed.
"Doctors made me 5 feet 2 inches (1.58m) on purpose. My estimated height (if I'd been left alone) was between 5 feet 8 and 5 feet 10, and that was considered far too tall for a girl. So now, I'm a very short man. It's something I always feel inadequate about".
Briffa had to come out as intersex and appear on Nine Network's 60 Minutes before being able to get a prescription for testosterone, which was needed to compensate for what would have naturally happened.  Briffa was given an advance copy of the program to show to the family before the broadcast.

Doctors tried to impose a psychiatric assessment as they would for a transsexual.
“They tried to get me to go through the trans process which I completely refused. For a start, I’m not trans and they didn’t have my approval for what they did to me previously and so I wasn’t going to jump through hoops for them to give me what my body naturally had.”
At 30 Briffa decided to live as a man, had the Victorian register of births, deaths and marriages recognize him as male, and changed his name to Anthony. However his birth certificate does not specify a sex.
"It was an interesting experiment but I realised I'm not male - I'm part male and I certainly can't have a relationship as a man. I wasn't socialised as a male, I didn't grow up male and I don't relate to a partner that way, so as Anthony I didn't have any relationships."
“I never had an issue with being raised as a girl, it was all the secrecy, the lies and all the surgeries that were done without my consent that I have an issue with. Atypical genitalia isn’t going to kill a kid, but doing surgery on kids just to make them look male or female and furthermore to make them heterosexual males or females is just unethical and it’s a breach of their human rights.”
Briffa became the public face of intersex in Australia, and also the full-time foster parent to two siblings, a girl and a boy. He ran in Altona for the Greens in the 2002 Victoria State Election and came third with 9%. He did local activism, to save a local park, and then became co-convener of a residents' association.

From 2002-12 Briffa worked in auditing airworthyness, first for the Department of Defence, and then for the Federal Police. Following the local activism, in 2008 Briffa ran for and was elected to the council in Hobsons Bay (which includes Altona). A year later he was deputy mayor, and in 2011, mayor. He is also a Justice of the Peace. In the 2012 Pride March in Victoria, Briffa marched in Mayoral robes. Briffa served for six years in all.

Briffa also served as President of the Genetic Support Network of Victoria, Vice-president of Organization Intersex International Australia and as President of the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group Australia.

While Mayor, Tony had met a woman, Manja, a teacher, and they wished to marry. Because of how Briffa is registered in Victoria, they could have married pretending to be a heterosexual couple, but Manja is lesbian, and Tony wished to be open as not being male or female. This was not possible in Australia, but is allowed in New Zealand since 2013, where they did marry that year. Tony is annoyed with Australian Marriage Equality in that what they are campaigning for excludes some intersex people.

Briffa has returned to working in aviation engineering.
EN.Wikipedia    Briffa.org    LinkedIn

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02 November 2015

Daya Rani (1959 – 2015) electoral candidate

Daya was born and has always lived in Dasna, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. She lived with other kinnars in a shared bungalow.

Although illiterate, in 2004, 2009 and 2014 Daya Rani contested the Ghaziabad Lok Sabha constituency in the General Election as an independent. In 2007 she ran for the Uttar Pradesh assembly. She stressed her gender identity:
"Why are people with me? Because other politicians fill their homes and cupboards. And I have no children, husband, wife or heirs. Whatever family I have is these people and I live off these people and I will fight for these people with the politicians who have not delivered on their promises."
However in 2014 the District Magistrate cancelled her nomination.

On the morning of 4 July 2015, Daya Rani was found dead in her room. She had been shot through a hole cut in the wire mesh over her window, and the gun fired as a train passed so as not to be heard.

Two days later the police arrested Waris and one other at the Ghaziabad bus stand, and found a country-made pistol and a knife. The accused had the idea that by murdering Rani, they could obtain her wealth, said to be 1,00,00,000 rupees or more. In addition, Waris, was married to Rani's niece, Geeta, against Rani's wishes. Later Rani had provided accommodation for Geeta and her child, but not for Waris.
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20 August 2015

Jennifer McCreath (1973 - ) government employee, marathon runner, political candidate.

McCreath was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and raised in Toronto, did business degrees at Toronto's Humber College, 2000, and Alberta's Athabasca University, 2005, and obtained a position as Senior Policy Analyst with the Government of Newfoundland.

Some months later she started transition as Jennifer, after appearing female at a Halloween party. In 2007 she did a series of interviews on provincial television station NTV about transitioning. She started getting positive reactions from people on the street who had seen her on television, but a year later lost her job.

She is also a marathon runner. She ran 30 marathons 2007-11, including the Boston Marathon in 2009 and 2010. She won a gold medal for achievement in the 2009 World OutGames in Copenhagen . She ran the 1500 metre freestyle swim and marathon run in the third gender category.

She took work as a filing clerk. She became involving in organizing St John's Pride Week, and founded the East Coast Trans Alliance.

Following trans surgery in January 2011, Jennifer applied to Nova Scotia for a revised birth certificate, but it took longer than usual. Jennifer had committed to run in a marathon, and had to fly with her male passport. Changing planes she was detained at US Immigration in Toronto, made to wait 90 minutes before being interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted, and subjected to many intrusive and irrelevant personal questions.  As a result she missed her flight and had to pay $80 for changing flights.

In 2013 she ran for deputy mayor in St John's.
“Everyone said I didn’t have any chance at all. Initially, I couldn’t get anyone to work with me. Nobody would sign my nomination papers. But six weeks later, I walked away with close to 6,000 votes — 17 per cent of the popular vote.”
In 2015 Jennifer ran in the federal constituency of Avalon. Although she was previously a member of the New Democratic Party, she ran as a candidate of the newly formed Strength in Democracy Party.
jennifermccreath.blogspot.ca     LinkedIn


____________________________________________________________________________

US immigration was never particularly friendly, and has become a lot worse since 2001.  Here is a recent story of an 8-year-old being turned away in that he might be a 'terrorist'.   Many Canadians now avoid flying into or changing planes in the US.   We might note that not a single trans person has yet turned out to be a terrorist, and that harassment based on gender incongruity has nothing to do with preventing terrorism.  
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07 June 2015

Pascale Ourbih (1972 - ) model, actress, activist


Original February 2008, revised June 2015.

Ourbih was raised in Algeria and initially trained as a pharmacist. At age 18 Ourbih moved to Paris as Pascale, and started transition. She had surgery a year later.

She found work as a model. In 2000 Pascale was offered the lead role by Pierre-Alain Meier in his film Thelma about a trans woman who returns to Crete and meets her daughter. Since then Pascale has worked in several films and television series.

In 2008, right after acquiring French citizenship, she ran for office for the Greens in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. She ran again in 2014.

From 2008 to 2013 Pascale was president of the Chéries-Chéris LGBT film festival. In 2010 she was on the jury for the Cannes Film Festival first gay prize.


She is also an activist for trans rights, human rights, the ecology and against AIDS.


FR.WIKIPEDIA    IMDB    Linteraute
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01 May 2015

Sandra MacRae (1942–) solicitor, SNP candidate

MacRae, from Dundee, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, attended schools in London and Paris, and then did a law degree at Edinburgh University. He did voluntary work for two years in Ghana, and married a Ghanaian nurse.

MacRae returned to Scotland taking a position in the Falkirk local government, and then becoming director of administration of the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council). He played for Stornaway Rugby Club. He was a Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) Candidate in Edinburgh in 1966, 1970 and 1974.

In the mid-1970s MacRae left wife, job and the Western Isles, transitioned, and as Sandra joined the legal services department at Inverness District Council in 1979. She had surgery in Glasgow in 1984. She held posts with Angus District Council and with the Ethnic Minorities Law Centre in Glasgow. She worked in private practice in East Calder before returning to Dundee to set up Alexandra MacRae & Co. She specialised in immigration law and working for ethnic minority groups.

Sandra was the SNP candidate in Glasgow Provan in 1992, taking 21.7% of the vote and coming second to Labour.

In 1997 she disappeared and it transpired that £18,000 was missing from her law practice. After seven weeks she was arrested at King's Cross Station, London, and appeared and was arraigned in Dundee. She admitted to embezzling money from a client's account in order to pay her Dundee firm's debts. She was struck off and later sentenced to 15 months. She then made history as the first trans woman in the UK to be sent to a women's prison. She served the time in the women's wing at Craiginches Prison, Aberdeen.

However, she appeared in court again in 2001 and was sentenced to three years when another embezzlment of  almost £100,000 came to light.  It was taken from an elderly client before her death, and then from the estate. Shares had been sold, and the proceeds put into accounts in MacRae's name. This time she was jailed for three years.

*not the journalist, nor the Nova Scotia writer
EN.WIKIPEDIA(Glasgow Provan)
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05 April 2015

Micheline Anne Montreuil (1952–) lawyer

Montreuil was born in Québec City where the family has lived since 1627. After studying law in industry, administration and education, Montreuil competed to be federal Liberal Party candidate in 1984 in Langelier riding, Québec City.

Montreuil transitioned as Micheline in 1986.

She was a candidate for Québec City council in 1993. From 1997-2002 she fought a legal challenge to the Registrar of Civil Status of Québec which wouldn’t change her legal name, although she had already changed her passport and other federal documentation. Her request to change her name was finally accepted in 2002.

In 1998 she failed to get a job at the National Bank and claimed that this was because of her gender history. The Bank argued that she was ‘overqualified, condescending and self-centered’ but was ruled against by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.


In 2003, as a big media event at the Quebec City Palais des Arts, she was married to lawyer and author Michèle Morgan.

In 2007, after many years on New Democrat Party committees she was acclaimed as the NDP candidate for Québec (Langelier, which had been renamed), with the approval of party leader Jack Layton. However she was later dropped, with the reason given that her language in interviews was 'too strong'.

In 2007 she also won a grievance against the Canadian Forces which turned her down as a grievance officer on the grounds that there wasn’t enough work in French. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal awarded her $40,000.

She has since worked as a lawyer at the Conseil de la justice administrative and teacher of ethics and law at the Université du Québec à Rimouski. She is also a lawyer in private practice.
www.micheline.ca    EN.WIKIPEDIA
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16 July 2014

Petra De Sutter (1963 - ) gynaecologist, academic, senator

De Sutter was raised in Oudenaarde, in East Flanders. De Sutter gained an MD, 1987, and two PhDs, 1991, 1994, from Ghent University, and also studied at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago, and became a professor and head of the Reproductive Medicine Department at Ghent University.

She completed transition in 2004.

She and her team researched on embryonic stem cells, the oocyte activation mechanism and fertility. De Sutter is on the executive of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE), a member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Medicine, and of the French Agence de la Biomedecine. She has published more than 200 journal articles.

In 2014 Petra was placed second on the Green Party list for the European elections, but they gained only one seat. In July 2014 it was announced that De Sutter was appointed to the Senate as a Green Party nomination, where she will focus on health care and environmental issues.
NL.WIKIPEDIA   LinkedIn   UniversiteitGent   WorldCat   Blog

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20 June 2014

Anette Egelund (1956 - ) sailor, politician.

Hugo Holm was raised in Svendborg, Denmark, and initially worked as a sailor. He later joined the anti-tax, anti immigration Fremskridtspartiet and was elected to Parliament.

He lost his parliamentary immunity when he was charged with drunk driving, violence, perjury and attempted fraud. Subsequently, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail for drunk driving. He attempted suicide in 1996, and was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

However this led to a final push. After working on the Mellerup-Voer ferry, she transitioned as Anette Egelund in 2004, and flew to Bangkok for surgery.
"The prejudices that I have encountered, can be counted on one hand. The biggest enemy I had was myself. I was a victim of my own prejudices about what people thought about me".
Later she joined the Det Radikale Venstre, and stood as a candidate in 2009 for the regional government (the first open transsexual to do in Denmark), but without success. She also helped the party to write its Program of sexuality and gender, where transsexuality was mentioned for the first time. She has appeared in two television programs about transsexuals.
DA.WIKIPEDIA    IMDB
__________________________________________________________

The article in Information says: "The Health Act requires namely the permission of the Interior and Health Minister to be allowed to change sex. This means that only four or five Danes obtain gender reassignment surgery in this country, while an estimated 20 Danes are operated on outside the Danish health and judicial systems abroad, mainly in Thailand."
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05 April 2014

Joan Roughgarden (1946 - ) evolutionary biologist.

Jonathan Roughgarden was raised in New Jersey. He did a BSC at the University of Rochester, and a PhD at Harvard, both in Biology. He taught at Stanford university from 1972, and did field work studying Caribbean lizards.

The last book as Jonathan was Primer of Ecological Theory, 1997. In 1998, at the age of 52, Jonathan came out as transsexual.
"It became clear to me that I wasn't ever going to figure out how to do the guy thing. Imagine as a woman if you'd set out to be a man, to learn how to live as a man. Could you do it? I couldn't. It's like asking a fish to fly."
She took a sabbatical and returned as Joan. She soon noticed how she was now much more frequently interrupted, ignored and condescended to by men.   At a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Minneapolis a prominent expert jumped up on the stage after her talk and started shouting at her. Once every month or two, she said, ''I will have some man shout at me, try to physically coerce me into stopping …When I was doing the marine ecology work, they did not try to physically intimidate me and say, 'You have not read all the literature.' “

Undeterred by this, she ran for San Francisco's District 6 Supervisor in 2000.

In 2003 gay neurobiologist Simon LeVay had a temporary position at Stanford, and invited both Roughgarden and North American Man Boy Love Association to address the same class under the title 'minority sexualities'. She declined in that "being transgendered was not an expression of sexuality". He rescheduled her but spoke for 45 minutes giving what she could only regard as "an appallingly incorrect account of presumed biological bases to gender differences".

Roughgarden was one of many trans academics who was appalled by Michael Bailey's The Man who Would be Queen, 2003, and wrote a critique of it:
"From a transgender perspective, Bailey's claim that all transgendered women match one of these two profiles is clearly counterfactual. Many transgendered women come out late in life and yet are sexually oriented to men, many come out early in life and yet are oriented to women, many who are oriented to women are attractive nonetheless, many have changed direction of sexual orientation when they transitioned, many are bisexual, and many are not sexually active. Transgendered women also encompass heterogeneity in occupation, presentation, temperament, sexual history, and ethnicity. Furthermore, transgendered people are not as fixated on sex as Bailey evidently is. The need to locate in the social and occupational space of one's gender identity, to live as a woman, is a stronger motivation for many transgendered women than is attaining sexual pleasure. … Bailey has no data, none at all. He offers no surveys, no data tables, no statistics, nothing. He doesn't give the sample size for the 'study' he refers to occasionally. No references are offered to primary literature either. Six transgendered people are mentioned by name (pseudonym). Bailey did not take detailed and rigorous notes when interviewing these subjects, and relies on his recollection of their meetings. This sample is highly non-representative because the women he interviewed he met while 'cruising' (p. 141) in 'the Baton, Chicago's premier female impersonator club,' (p. 186) leading to an occupational and socio-economic bias."
Roughgarden's next book was to be published by Princeton University Press, but she found that they were using LeVay as a reviewer and that he wanted the critical material about the search for a gay gene removed and in fact that he wanted "to reduce my book into a David-Attenborough-like nature book about gay animals, related by a transgendered woman". She moved her book to the University of California Press where it came out in 2004 as Evolution’s Rainbow. It argues for a correction to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection taking into account the varieties of gay and trans behavior found in most species. It also puts transgender behavior in the context of traditional alternate gender roles in traditional societies, and evaluates the estimated statistics. It argues for social selection rather than the Darwinian sexual selection oriented on the selfish gene, competition and deception. She further developed this approach in The Genial Gene, 2009.

Roughgarden is also a Christian and has written on the relationship between Christianity and evolution.

She retired Emerita in 2011, and moved to Hawai'i where she became an adjunct professor at the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology.
  • Carol Kaesuk Yoon. “A Theorist With Personal Experience of the Divide Between the Sexes” The New York Times, October 17, 2000. www.nytimes.com/2000/10/17/science/17ROUG.html.
  • Joan Roughgarden. "Making connections re psychologist Simon LeVay". Email to Lynn Conway, 11 Jul 2003. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/Joan-re-LeVay.html.
  • Joan Roughgarden. The Bailey Affair: Psychology Perverted. February 11, 2004. Online at: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Reviews/Psychology%20Perverted%20-%20by%20Joan%20Roughgarden.htm.
  • Joan Roughgarden, Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. University of California Press, 2004. Awarded 2005 Stonewall Prize for nonfiction from American Library Association. Chapter 1 online at www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10139/10139.ch07.html
  • Steven Kotler. “Oh So Natural: Sexual selection, the Good Book and why gay is good”. LA Weekly: Art + Books. April 15. 2004.
  • Antony Thomas (dir & scr). Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She. With Louis Gooren, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Milton Diamond, Alice Dreger, Joan Roughgarden, Calpernia Addams, Andrea James. USA/UK 74 mins 2005.
  • Joan Roughgarden, Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist. Island Press. 2006.
  • Joan Roughgarden. The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
  • Shankar Vedantam.  “How the sex bias prevails”.  The Age, May 15, 2010. 
EN.WIKIPEDIA   IMDB   WORLDCAT   AMAZON



___________________________________________________________________________

Joan's website used to be http://joandistrict6.com.  However that is now a site in Japanese.

The history/anthropology chapters of Evolution's Rainbow are perhaps not as good as the biology chapters.   For example the section on ancient Greek/Roman sexuality is based on Kenneth Dover alone.   This is a very large topic and Dover's major virtue is merely his early date.

For some reason LeVay is not mentioned in Evolution’s Rainbow.

In WorldCat Jonathan's books are listed as by Joan, but in Amazon they are treated as two different people.

Ben Barres, a physicist, also at Stanford, transitioned in the other direction at around the same time.  He commented on how he was interrupted, ignored and condescended to by men less often.   The contrast was explored in several newspaper articles.
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28 January 2014

Susan Kimberly (1941–) politician

After a journalism degree at the University of Minnesota and a stint in India for the Peace Corps, by 1968 Robert Sylvester was the editor of a small-town Minnesota newspaper, which led to meeting Mae, the women who became his wife. He told her that he was a transvestite, and later that he felt that he was a transsexual.

In 1970 he consulted a psychiatrist was told told that quitting was like quitting smoking. So he purged his female wardrobe, and Bob and Mae were married. Bob became a city councilor in St Paul, Minnesota, and then president of the council. Later he worked in investment banking.

In 1977 he told a female therapist that he wanted to be a girl, and she said: "Well, then, why don't you get on with it?" Susan started going out as female, and in January 1980 she committed to the gender change. Bob and Mae divorced in 1981. On 1 January 1983, Susan and Mae held a ceremony for invited friends including the mayor, to "commemorate the departure of Bob Sylvester and arrival of Susan Kimberly". Transition was completed in 1984 courtesy of Dr Biber.

After a few years of unemployment, she was back in City Hall working for the mayor. She ran unsuccessfully for City Council and County Board. In 1998 Susan was appointed deputy mayor of St Paul under Norm Coleman, they both having switched their allegiance to the Republican Party.
"I lost more friends becoming a Republican than I did becoming a woman".
She also worked for Coleman when he was elected as a US Senator after Democratic incumbent Paul Wellstone, the most prominent senator to vote against congressional authorization for US invasion of Iraq, died in a plane crash (perhaps assassination) eleven days before the election.

Later Susan was vice president of economic development for the St Paul Chamber of Commerce. In 2007 she flew to Florida to speak on behalf of Susan Stanton who was being fired from her job as city manager after announcing a coming transition.

She retired in 2010.
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03 August 2013

Marcella Di Folco (1943 - 2010) film actor, activist, councillor

Marcello was raised in Rome. After school he worked as a porter at the Hotel Rivoli, and then from 1965 at the Piper Club.

In 1969 Di Folco had to deliver a letter to the Cinecitta film studios, where he was spotted by director Frederico Fellini and given a part in Fellini Satyricon. From then till 1980 Di Folca appeared in several more Fellini films, and even more films by other directors. He was credited as Marcello Di Falco (actually the originally spelling of the family name).
Cross-acting as the Prince in Amarcord, 1973

In 1980 Di Folco did what she had wanted for many years and had transgender surgery with Dr Burou in Casablanca. On return Marcella worked as an intercontinental operator for Italcable.

Marcella 1999
She became an active participant in the newly founded Movimento Italiano Transessuali which achieved legal recognition of changed gender two years later. In 1986 Marcella moved to Bologna where MIT had its headquarters, and two years later became its president. In 1990 Marcella was elected to the Bologna City Council, and again from 1995-9.

In 1994 MIT opened in Bologna the world's first gender identity clinic managed by transsexuals. In 2000 she persuaded the Equal Opportunities Minister to set up a Gender Identity Commission.

In 2001 she was a Girasole (Sunflower, ie Green) list candidate. In 2004 she was Communist candidate for the European Parliament and for the Provincial Council of Bologna. In 2006 she was a Green Candidate for the Senate.

Marcella died aged 67 of a tumour.

A Bologna street has been named in her honour.
LIBEROCINEMA     IT.WIKIPEDIA    IMDB     WIKIPINK

The Italian sites claim that Marcella was the first open trans person elected to a city council.  Not to diminish her achievement, but Rachel Webb was elected to Lambeth Council in 1986, and Mark Rees to Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in 1994.
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16 July 2012

Monika Strub (1975 - ) nurse, photographer, political candidate.

Horst Strub, grew up in Emmendingen, Baden-Württemberg.   He had been fostered as a child, and was an outsider, but grew up to be a nurse and a photographer. He was a member of the neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands 2000-2. In retrospect, Strub claims not to have understood their platform, and joined because he was accepted.

Strub then became Monika. She actually found less acceptance from her fellow nurses, than from the NPD.

She later joined and became a candidate for the Linkespartei (which is to the left of the Social Democrats). She has been threatened by her former NPD associates several times, and her door and windows were covered by NPD stickers.
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20 February 2012

Kathryn Leigh McGuire (1942 – 2011) executive.

Charles McGuire Jr. Was born near Corpus Christi, Texas, the son of a construction business man. From age 9 he worked for his dad’s business. He played football as a teenager, went hunting at weekends and dressed as a girl in his spare time.

He married at 20 and he and his wife moved to Houston and raised two children. He built up a construction materials company, M&C Consolidated Inc as the major seller of stabilized sand in the city.

His wife, a born-again Christian, who had known of his dressing from early on, divorced him in in 1981. McGuire then developed his life as Kathryn, started taking female hormones, had electrolysis and had her nose restructured.

For four years M&C Consolidated Inc was investigated by a federal grand jury for price fixing, and the investigators found out about Kathryn. This became a frequent source of jokes among county officials, and witnesses interviewed by the investigators were all asked questions about McGuire’s lifestyle. McGuire went to the press in 1988 and a color photograph of Kathryn was on the front page of the Houston Chronicle with her claim that she was being persecuted because of her lifestyle.

Following this Kathryn frequently appeared on the Stevens and Pruett show on radio station KLOL where she was noted for her grace in responding to audience comments. She was featured in all the Houston papers. In 1989 she ran for Houston City Council - the first open transvestite to do so - and came second out of three. She gave considerable donations to Houston AIDS organizations, and was on a board to find a cure.

The price fixing investigation was closed in March 1991, with no indictments. Shortly afterwards Kathryn flew to London. Her stay in a hospital to be operated on was filmed by documentary maker Brian Huberman.

Afterwards she lived in in Prague with the idea of opening a restaurant. Then she lived in Amsterdam, then Philadelphia, Atlantic City and California.

Her gay son, James, wrote his first play, Daddy Kathryn, about their relationship. Kathryn turned up for the opening night, and was the center of attention. In 1999 she said of her male persona:
"That wasn't me. That was just a shell I was in, or an image I was projecting to make everybody happy."
In 2002 Kathryn published a novel about a female Jesus with a transsexual mother.

She died at age 68.

*Not the film actress.



Daddy Kathryn
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22 November 2011

Camille Cabral (1944–) dermatologist, activist, councillor.

Cabral was born and raised in Cabaceiras, Paraiba, Brazil. He passed the entrance exam for medicine and studied in Recife. While working as the Hospital das Clinicas in São Paulo, Cabral first started dressing as female.

In 1980 Cabral went to France, did an internship in dermatology, and then worked at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris. Here she came out and transitioned. She chose the name Camille when she took French nationality:  "I wanted a very French name, but elegant".

In 1993, Camille lost her job and in consequence founded the Groupe de prévention et d'action pour la santé et le travail des transsexuel(le)s (PASTT).

She also became involved in prostitutes rights, and fought against pimps and trafficking. She was a co-organizer of the Pute Pride march, and of the Red Light co-operative.

Camille was elected a list councillor for the Green Party in the 17th arrondissement of Paris and served from 2001-8. She also ran as a candidate in the parliamentary elections.
“Gender identity is not linked to sex change. Ours is not an issue of genitals, but of sensitivity, of attitude. There is no reason that we have to have genital operations in order to have our rights recognized. So I prefer to use the neologism transgender and not the word transsexual. I am a transgender woman!”
 PT.WIKIPEDIA   FR.WIKIPEDIA   TRANS.ILGA
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12 November 2011

Manuela Trasobares Haro (1962 - ) artist, singer, politician.


Trasobares was born in Figueres, also the birth place of Salvador Dalí. She transitioned surgically in London at the age of 17.

Manuela was trained as an artist by Dali, and then at the Sant Jordi Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Universidad de Barcelona. She also trained in music at the conservatory in Sofia, Bulgaria, and sang with the National Theatre of Sofia, and the Opera Theatre in Plovdiv. She was eliminated from several international singing competition, despite her obvious training, because of her gender status.

Her style as an artist has gone from surrealism to hyperrealism.

She was also an activist for transsexual rights. She married a man in 2006, and almost all the 900 residents of Geldo in Castellón, the village where she lives, attended the ceremony.

In 2007, she ran successfully as a Democratic Republican Action candidate for a council seat in Geldo making her the first trans person in Spain to hold elected office.

Also that year, two of her sculptures on religious themes were excluded from the Espai D´Art Contemporani de Castelló, because of pressure from a traditionalist Carlist group.

In 2008, she ran unsuccessfully for the national Parliament as a Republican Left candidate.
http://manuelatrasobares.blogia.com     ES.WIKIPEDIA. 

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08 November 2011

Althea Garrison (1940 - ) elected official, state employee.

Garrison was born in Hihira, Georgia, and moved to Boston, Massachusetts as a teenager. He went to Beauty Culture School when he arrived in Boston, then to Newbury Junior College, Suffolk University for a degree in administration, Lesley University for a graduate degree in management and then Harvard in 1984 for a certificate of special studies in administration.

Garrison transitioned and became Althea in 1976. She worked for the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and then the Office of the Comptroller. Later she was the vice president of the Uphams Corner Health Center in Dorchester, Boston.

In 1982 and 1986 she ran for the Massachusetts State House as a Democrat. In 1991 she ran for the Boston City Council. In 1992 she was elected as a Republican State Representative, and was outed by the Murdoch-owned Boston Herald a few days after the campaign by columnist Eric Fehrnstrom. As a representative she consistently voted pro-union, and was endorsed for re-election by the AFL-CIO and eight unions. On other issues she more frequently voted with the Democrats than with her own party. However she was defeated by the Democratic candidate in 1994.


She would seem to be the first trans person to be elected at the state level or above in the US.
However she denies that she was ever a transsexual, and refuses all questions about her personal background. She has appealed for the GLBT vote on the grounds that she is a black woman, but never on the grounds that she is trans. She has also run for mayor and other offices more than 15 times, but with no other success. She has been opposed to gay marriages, and has called for the judges who ruled in its favor to be removed from the bench. She was allied with the anti-gay-rights and anti-transsexual group MassResistance.
 EN.Wikipedia        OurCampaigns 
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12 June 2011

Katielly Lanzini (1961–) sculptor, journalist, political candidate.

Nedson Antonio Lanzini Pereira was born in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul. He married a woman and they had five children. He was a sculptor and also worked as journalist.

He started transition in 1988. In 1991 already feminine, Katielly switched to working at the newspaper in Chapecó, Santa Catarina. She also wrote for Jornal de Brazil, Globo, Mix Brasil and G Magazine.

Katielly has run for political office three times: in 2000 she ran for council in Chapecó; in 2004 and 2006 she ran for State Deputy in Santa Catarina for the Liberal Front Party (PFL). In 2004 she caused a controversy when on Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão (SBT) she declared that she prefers women, not men.

In 2006 one of her public sculptures, 7.25m tall, in Chapecó was vandalized right after Brazil failed to win the Football World Cup.

In an interview with the magazine Época, she admitted that she used her position as a journalist to remove Nedson’s image and his byline in the archives of the newspapers in Chapecó.

In 1995 she wrote an article urging the football club Chapecoense, which uses an image of an Iguazu aboriginal, to change to something less melancholy.

Understandably, the tribe took umbrage and in 2007 Lanzini was denounced by the Ministério Público Federal and fined 50,000 Reals compensation.
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25 April 2011

Gloria Gray (1970–) performer.

Gloria Gray is the stage name of a trans woman born in Zwiesel, Bavaria, child of a long-distance lorry driver and a restaurateur. She is a graduate of the Deutsche Schauspielakademie in Munich, and had surgery in 1992 with the support of her parents.

She became famous in 1993 in the television comedy Halli Galli. And then appeared in variety shows and moderated dinner shows working with celebrity chefs. She worked with Cliff Richard, Marianne Sägebrecht and Amanda Lear, and played Mae West in the film Marlene, 2000. The same year she performed at the German national final for the Eurovision Song Contest.

She has won several court cases for slander regarding her past, including one against a Munich newspaper that had claimed that she is a transvestite.

In 2004 and 2005 she was a presenter and singer on Spanish television for the gay pride broadcasts, and premiered her show, Lieder im Mieder, at Munich's 2006 Christopher Street festival.

In 2007 she was featured in the Magie der Vielfalt photography exhibition.

Her autobiography, Mit allem, was ich bin, (With Everything that I Am), was released in 2009.

In 2010 she opened a cafe named after herself in Zwiesel, and in 2011 attempted to run for the Green Party in the mayoral election there, but did not get enough signatures. In 2006 she announced her intention to marry her male lover of many years in a church wedding, but the Catholic Church refused, and it has not yet happened.


*Not the abortion activist in Alabama.

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07 October 2010

Jamie Lee Hamilton (1955 - 2019) sex worker, activist, political candidate.

James Arthur Hamilton was raised in Vancouver. His father, an immigrant from the US, was a foundry worker and union organizer until he developed silicosis of the lungs. His mother was a Chippewa native, originally from Montana, and a founder of the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre. Together they co-founded the Unemployed Citizens Welfare Improvement Council (UCWIC), and were among the first members of the Downtown Eastside Residents' Association (DERA).

However they did not understand about transsexuality, although their child became a patient of William Maurice at the University of British Columbia Health Centre, and as such the first teenager in Canada to be accepted as transsexual. James was taunted at school and left at 15.

She turned tricks both as male and as female and worked in bars as a female impersonator. She became Jamie Lee in 1975. Her father, who had been reading up on transsexuality, gave his blessing though on his death bed in 1979. Jamie Lee completed her transition with surgery in 1983.

In 1984, a residents' movement in Vancouver's West End obtained an injunction in the BC Supreme Court that completed the pushing of sex workers and deinstitutionalized psychiatric patients into the industrial no-man's land of Downtown Eastside. Jamie Lee became an activist for her local community, for sex workers, for aboriginals, for transsexuals and gays.

She held various positions in Downtown Eastside Residents' Association (DERA). She organized DERA demonstrations when long-term residents were evicted for Expo 86. She was elected the 10th Native Princess, 1988, and the same year was the founding president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) sub local 15, which is still going. She was Ms Gay Vancouver, 1991, which led to her performing with the New York travelling cast of A Chorus Line. In 1993 she started a hot meal and food bank program for trans sex workers from the First United Church. From 1993-7 she ran a clothing boutique, food bank and drop-in for sex workers.

She first ran for a seat on Vancouver City council in 1996, the first trans person in Canada to run for public office. She came 14th out of 58, the first 10 being elected. Xtra West awarded her their Community Hero Award. From 1996 to 2001 she ran Grandma's House, a non-profit centre for sex workers, and agitated to bring attention to the missing women in the period before the arrest of serial killer Robert Pickton.

She dumped 67 pairs of stiletto shoes on the steps of City Hall to symbolize 67 missing women. In 2000 she was arrested and charged with running a bawdy house. Her release was conditional that she close Grandma's house. She is the founder of Change the Code, a national lobby group advocating legal reforms re prostitution. She ran for member of Parliament for the Green Party in 2000. In 2006 she campaigned successfully against an attempt to trademark the word 'Pride'. In 2008 she attempted to run as a parks board candidate, but was dropped as a candidate as being too controversial. In 2009 she was one of many refused service at Lu's women-only pharmacy.

She is again running a community centre for sex workers. She is doing a thesis at the University of British Columbia: "The Expulsion of Sex Workers from Vancouver's West End, 1975-1985".  She has a list of over 25 women who have disappeared since Pickton was arrested, and argues that there is at least one other similar killer.

++ Jamie died at age 64 after a battle with cancer.
EN.WIKIPEDIA     www.downtowneastside.blogspot.co    www.queenoftheparks.com   
___________________________________________________________

“Hamilton is, famously, 'an unrepentant whore.'  Is she also an unrepentant madam? Sitting with her recently, I ask point-blank, 'So, were you running a bawdy house?'  She looks nonplussed: 'Well, yeah.' A hand flicks at some imaginary dirt on a cushion. 'But so is every five-star hotel in this country.'

'And you know what I really resented? They called it a common bawdy house. Listen, there was nothing common about it.'"
The Unrepentant Whore: How Jamie Lee Hamilton
changed the way we look at Canada’s underclass.



The biography of Jamie Lee Hamilton by Barbra Daniel seems to be totally unobtainable.  Neither Amazon, nor any other retailer, has a copy.  I tried and failed to get it through interlibrary loan.  As it was published in Canada, there should be a copy in the National Library of Canada, but there is not.
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