Alejandra Victoria Portatadino (1959 - ) petroleum engineer, anthropologist, lawyer.

Portatadino was born in Buenos Aires. He studied engineering, specializing in petroleum refining, and became a manager with Chevron. He had been consulting a psychiatrist who had diagnosed multi-personality syndrome. The diagnosis was changed to gender dysphoria, and he started hormones.

A few months later, while on a work assignment in Chile she changed her appearance and became Alejandra. This was okay with her boss. She was considering having surgery in Chile which was more advanced in services for trans persons, but the Homosexual Community of Argentina (CHA) encouraged her to do it in Argentina to set a precedent. In 2001, Chevron acquired Texaco and Portatadino was transferred to Texaco, where she had to dress in a suit and tie. She was demoted and then fired.

Alejandra educated herself on the law and anthropology and applied for legal recognition. She applied to obtain legal recognition as a woman, and for the right to have gender surgery. The judge required an evaluation from government medical investigators, and they agreed with Portatadino’s request. The judge then dismissed the case as outside his jurisdiction. She applied to the Supreme Court and the expert opinion already obtained was accepted. She was able to use this but still had to file many motions in lower courts. She gave a paper at the first Argentine conference on gender dysphoria in 2005. She was finally legally recognized in 2006, and had surgery the same year.

Since then she has worked with the law division of CHA on rights for all GLBTTI persons. In particular she was able to arrange free hormone supervision in a state hospital, and to establish the standards of care for transsexuals in Argentina. She has a grant from the World Health Organization to do outreach work for sex workers with Aids.

In 2008 on International Women’s Day, Alejandra was recognized by the Buenos Aires Legislature as one of 20 Argentinean women who ‘broke traditional moulds’.

She uses the term Harry Benjamin Syndrome in preference to transsexual.

• Alejandra Victoria Portatadino. “Mi Historia Bien Sencilla”. Transsexual Women’s Successes. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/Alejandra/Alejandra.html#Historia. English Translation by Sonia John: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/Alejandra/Alejandra.html#Story.
• Interview with Alejandra Victoria Portatadino. www.politicaydesarrollo.com.ar/nota_completa.php?id=1929.
• Alejandra Victoria Portatadino.  La Discriminación y el Estado de Apartheid.  2008.  www.shb-info.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/apartheid.pdf.

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Sonia John adds a translators note to her translation:

"The label "travesti," with its connotation of sex work, is very highly stigmatized throughout Latin America.  In addition, the general Latin American public often does not make a distinction between "travesti" and "transexual," and so some trans women there are working to change public attitudes by avoiding the latter term, referring to the Harry Benjamin Syndrome instead."

Charlotte Goiar likes to claim Alejandra's work in Argentina as an HBS success, but note that she works with the CHA and uses the umbrella term acronym GLBTTI, both of which are anathema to most HBS persons in Europe and North America.

Danielle Berry (1949 - 1998) game designer.

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

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

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

Three years after transition Danielle wrote a note combining various emails that she had sent that advise others not to follow her path:

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

She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Computer Game Developers Association, 1998.

A chain smoker from teenage, Dani died of lung cancer shortly after.

• James Hague. “Interview with Danielle Berry”. In James Hague (ed) with an Introduction by John Romero. Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers. Floppy disk. 1997. Also at www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/BERRY.HTM
• John Gorenfeld. “Get behind the M.U.L.E.” Salon.Com. http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/03/18/bunten/index.html. March 18, 2003. 
• Dani Bunten Berry. www.anticlockwise.com/daniNo Longer Available
• Danielle Berry. "Special Note to Those Thinking About a Sex Change”. Dani Bunten Berry. www.anticlockwise.com/dani/personal/changes/dont.htm. Also at Lynn Conway's homepage. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Warning.html. Her regrets 3- years post-op.

 EN.Wikipedia

Enza Anderson (1964 - ) civil engineer, political candidate, journalist.

Enzo Anderson was born and raised in Toronto by Italian-immigrant parents.  He graduated as a civil engineer in 1988, and worked as a supervisor at a concrete manufacturer.

At weekends he hung out with drag queens in Toronto’s gay village. When he was laid off, she became Enza and worked at a gay bar. She started calling herself ‘Supermodel’ although she has never walked a runway.


In 1998 she was on the cover of the Toronto Sun giving the then Toronto mayor, Mel Lastman, a sloppy kiss at the end of Pride. Two years later she ran against him for the office of mayor and came in third. In 2002 she ran for the leadership of the homophobic Canadian Alliance Party (previously the Reform Party and now the Conservative Party). Stephen Harper (now Prime Minister) won, and Anderson had to drop out because she was not raising enough money. In 2003 she ran against the city incumbent in the Toronto downtown ward, and came second.

In the same year, she had breast enhancement, charging it to her credit card.


She got herself a job writing for the free daily, Metro, by cold-calling the Toronto editor and reminding her of her political runs. She profiles Toronto’s party scene, attending 200 parties a year, and also profiles transit users. She also contributes to Fab and to Xtra.

She has done volunteer work with AIDS and gay youth charities, and was on the Police Liaison Committee.

In 2008 she was Grand Marshall for Toronto Pride.

She has a small part in the 2010 horror movie, Horrorween.

• Antoine Tedesco. “My date with Enza: Enza "Supermodel" Anderson: drag queen, politician, and a great set of legs too” Scene and Heard. 2002. www.sceneandheard.ca/archive/V2_03/focus_enza.htm.
• Chris Dupuis. “Pride grand marshall: Model citizen”. Xtra June 19, 2008. www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx?AFF_TYPE=3&STORY_ID=4952&PUB_TEMPLATE_ID=2.
• Rita Zekas. “Enza gets her Marilyn moment”. The Toronto Star. Jun 21, 2008. www.thestar.com/living/article/444921.
• “Enza Anderson”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enza_Anderson.

Christine Chappel (1972 - 2000) electrical goods retailer.

Bryan Hooley was born in Perth, Western Australia. After moving to the UK he studied electronic engineering at Salford University.

He married Alison Halfacree in 1990 and moved to Roxwell, Essex to be with his wife. They had a daughter in 1992.

Hooley transitioned to female in 1994 and became Christine Chappel (after the nurse in Star Trek), but did not legally change her name.

In 1996 she claimed in court that she had had a two-year relationship with Rev Christopher Awdry whom she met at a model railway show in Chelmsford. Awdry is the son of Rev Wilbert Awdry who created the Thomas the Tank Engine series of books. She claimed that she had written some of the new books. The court found in favour of Rev Audry.

She sometimes appeared as Christine, and sometimes as Bryan. She was working at an electrical store in Chelmsford. In 2000 Christine won possession of the family home in court, which also ordered Alison to leave.

Shortly afterwards Christine disappeared. Her naked body washed up on a Suffolk beach weighted down by gym weights. She was identified by her fingerprints.

After an investigation, her brother-in-law, Charles Halfacree pleaded guilty to manslaughter, preventing the lawful burial of a body and conspiring to pervert the course of justice. They had had a fight. Halfacree is seven stones (44 kg) heavier than Chappel, and is 6’4” (1.93 m). During the fight her head hit a door frame. Halfacree hid the body for a month, and then he put it on a lilo and floated it out to sea. He was jailed for four years and three months.

Alison jumped bail, spent some time in Scotland, and then went to Poole, Dorset where she was arrested. She was sentenced to 18 months for perverting the course of justice and one month for absconding.

• Maurice Mcleod. “Chained body on beach was sex-change father”. The Guardian. Mar 6, 2000. On line at: www.pfc.org.uk/node/775.
• “Wife jailed for sheilding ex-partner’s killer”. BBC News. 10 Apr 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1270859.stm.

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It is not explained how the police had her fingerprints to match against.

Tamara Natanovna Press (1937 - ) and Irina Natanovna Press (1939 - 2004) sports stars.

The Press sisters were raised in Kharkiv in the Ukraine. They were Jewish and their father had died in the Great Patriotic War.

They studied at the University of Leningrad and were trained at VSS Trud and Dynamo. Tamara excelled in shot put and discus throwing. She won gold and silver medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Irina won a gold in hurdling in Rome and a gold in the Pentathlon at Tokyo. Between them they set 26 world records.

They both retired in 1966, which was coincidentally the year that sex testing for athletes was introduced. There were rumours that they were intersex or even men, or that they took male hormones. They remained popular Soviet sporting stars.

Irina joined the KGB and became an officer in the border troops. Tamara became a civil engineer and wrote several books about sport and about civil engineering.

• “Tamara Press”. “Irina Press”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_Press. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irina_Press.

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Ukrainians, like Russians and Greeks and most East Europeans, femininize women's surnames usually by adding a vowel, often 'a'. E.g. Putin's wife is Putina. So why is 'Press' not so feminized? Is 'Press' a Ukrainian name?

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 - 1915) efficiency engineer.

Taylor is best remembered for his career as an efficiency engineer. Copley's biography calls him the 'father of scientific management'. He organized the management of Bethlehem Steel, Cramp's Shipbuilding and Midvale Steel. He patented one hundred inventions, and devised the Taylor-White process for treating high-speed tools.

He was also a star in the amateur theatricals put on by his cricket club. He was most celebrated for his impersonations of young ladies. He is said to have done this with such fidelity that even his wife was deceived.

He was also a tennis player of note , and won the first doubles tournament in the 1881 US National Championships.

• Frederick Winslow Taylor. The principles of scientific management. New York : Harper & Row, 1911. 30 other editions up to 1998.
• Frank Barkley Copley. Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers, Publishers 1923:88-9.

EN.Wikipedia.

Reed Erickson (1917 – 1992) engineer, scion of wealth, philanthropist, drug addict.

Rita Alma Erickson was born in El Paso, Texas, of German descent, and raised in Philadelphia. In 1946 she was the first woman to graduate from Louisiana State University in mechanical engineering.

Reed as a teenager

She was already involved with a New York woman who was a left wing activist. Rita worked as an engineer, until she was fired for refusing to fire a woman suspected of being a communist. The FBI kept her under surveillance, and recorded in 1954, that she refused to become an informant.

She started her own company making stadium bleachers. In 1962, when her father died Erickson inherited the majority of the family businesses, Schuylkill Products Co., Inc. and Schuylkill Lead Corp.

In 1963, at the age of 46, she became a patient of Harry Benjamin, and started living as a man. Reed legally transitioned the same year, and had an hysterectomy in New York, and double mastectomy at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, both in 1965 – which was a legal precedent in Louisiana. Also in 1963 he married his first legal wife, who was in the entertainment industry, but they divorced in 1965.

In 1964 he founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), financed entirely by himself. That year he also met Aileen Ashton, a New Zealander who was working as a dancer in New York City. He proposed on their second date, and they had a lavish wedding in Christchurch, New Zealand. They lived in Baton Rouge, and within a few years they had a son and a daughter, and Reed had started doing recreational drugs.

++Reed employed Zelda Suplee to run the Erickson Educational Foundation.  She had managed nudist camps, and was the first full-frontal nude in Playboy magazine (in black-and-white).  From her office in New York she and lesbian feminist activist Phyllis Saperstein (they had met in a nudist camp) managed the daily operations, and the contacts with transsexuals who asked for help. Erickson made the final decisions about who and what he funded, but spent much of his time in Baton Rouge and then Mexico with his family.

Reed in 1962

In 1969 he sold the Schuylkill business for $5million and went on to amass over $40 million, mainly from investments in oil-rich real estate. In 1973 the family, including his pet panther, moved to Mazatlan, Sinola, Mexico. By the end of 1974, Reed and Aileen were divorced. She took the children to Ojai, California, and he followed to be near the children. He married his third wife, a Mexican, Evangelina Trujillo Armendariz, in 1977, but she also left him, in 1983, because of his drug usage.

Though the EEF he financed gay and trans organizations, and research into New Age activities such as acupuncture, homeopathy, dolphin communication and altered states of consciousness. The EEF published booklets on various aspects of transsexuality, sponsored addresses to various professionals, and sponsored two of John Money’s books, and three of Vern Bullough’s. It donated money to the Harry Benjamin Foundation, but fell out with Benjamin in 1968. It subsidized the transsexuality program at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. It sponsored three symposia that grew into the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA).


The longest-running recipient of financial support was ONE Inc of Los Angeles, founded in 1952 and still running, the pioneer homophile organization. Erickson had advised them to create a non-profit tax-exempt charitable arm, the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR). Erickson was president of ISHR from 1964 till 1977. He donated 70-80% of the budget, some $200,000. In 1981 ONE was accredited as a graduate degree-granting institution. Erickson suggested that the college needed a proper campus, and for $1.9 million purchased a 3.5 acre property from the religious leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. ONE moved its large library and archives into the campus. However by this time Erickson had apparently soured on the organization. He failed to turn over the property deed as previously agreed, and began filing legal suits against ONE to remove them from the campus. The expense of the move and the cut of funding from EEF almost bankrupted ONE, and the defensive efforts paralyzed its operations. The battle continued for over 10 years, with Erickson’s daughter continuing his fight. In 1992 a settlement was reached whereby ONE received $1 million, the property was sold and ONE came under the auspices of the University of Southern California.

By the end of his life Erickson was addicted to drugs, and a fugitive from US drug agents.He was
arrested for cocaine possession in Ojai, in 1983. After two more arrests he retreated to Mexico.

He died in January 1992, aged 74.

• Aaron Devor writing as Holly Devor. "Reed Erickson (1912-1992): How One Transsexed Man Supported ONE." In Vern Bullough (ed). Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context. New York: Haworth. 2002. Online at: http://web.uvic.ca/~ahdevor/ReedErickson.pdf
• Aaron Devor. Reed Erickson and The Erickson Educational Foundation. http://web.uvic.ca/~erick123.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 210-2, 215-6, 219, 223, 258, 268, 327n5,8, 336n6.

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Vern Bullough's stipend from Reed Erickson was $70,000 (almost $1 million in today's money), and the ingrate completely leaves Erickson out of his Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender.