Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
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I wrote in June 2015 about Robert Allen who was an assistant to legendary 1940s film directors Michael Powell and David Lean, transitioned in 1944 with a revised birth certificate and married his girlfriend. He then retrained as a radiologist. He published an autobiography in 1954.
Chris 0'Rourke has contacted us to point out the back page of the Daily Mirror 30 August 1957.
From this we learn that Robert was divorced from his first wife. Remember this was before the Divorce Reform Act 1969 which introduced no-fault divorce. The law then in effect was the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 which required demonstration of adultery, desertion, cruelty etc. In addition Robert had become a Catholic in 1951. So the divorce is certainly not explained. Note that the second marriage was in Congregational Church.
At age 16 William Richeson became Mary Baker and found work as a chorus girl
in New York theatre.
She later worked as nurse, waitress and chambermaid. In 1931 she married.
In 1937 she was outed, much to the surprise of her husband.
“Posed Ten Years as Woman, Danced in Chorus, ‘Married’ “. The Daily
Mail, 12 October 1937, reprinted in George Ives (ed Paul Sieveking). Man
Bites Man: The Scrapbook of an Edwardian Eccentric. Penguin Books, 1981:
128.
Maritza DelCarmen Perdomo was born in Havana, of partial Taino heritage. From the age of three she was obviously a masculine girl, and constantly had problems with wearing dresses.
The family emigrated to Florida when she was five. She became a crack addict during a stint in the US Army. Afterwards Maritza went wild in the Miami gay scene, and at 24 made a last-ditch attempt to go straight by marrying a 55-year-old Englishman. However the marriage quickly fell apart as did several lesbian affairs. In one case the intention was to start a family, but Maritza was unable to get pregnant.
At age 38 in 2002 Maritza had become a bodybuilder and occupational therapist, where she took up with Violet who worked in the same gym. She was asked if she was transitioning, based on her appearance, but she did not understand the term until she looked it up on the internet.
"The sky just like opened up. There are others like me. It was like a revelation."
Mark Cummings, as he became, went from an initial consultation with a therapist, to hormone therapy, to a full mastectomy and hysterectomy with Dr Harold Reed in Miami, to a legal name and gender change in just five months.
"It was the easiest thing. I don't let grass grow under my feet. I was fulfilling my destiny. This is what I was supposed to be."
He and Violet were then legally married. To Mark's surprise it was his father alone in family who accepted him.
Violet and Mark, 2004
In January 2006 Mark and Violet appeared on the syndicated Maury Povich Show to great success.
"Well, Maury, I want viewers to know that being transgender is not a sin, a crime, or a deviant behavior. What it is, is a birth defect. We are human beings with feelings, and all we ask is the respect... "
Following this, he was contacted by the Anderson family in Florida who were attempting to enrol their trans daughter, Nicole, in school. They were said to be the first US family to support a trans child in this way. Mark immediately agreed to help. He wrote in response to a negative posting:
"My mother did everything within her power to make me a girl, although, I knew other wise. When I met The Andersons, I had only wish they could have been my parents. When I met Nicole, I bonded instantly, and felt, what a lucky girl she is. Gender Dysphoria is real. To tell you the truth, there will be an epidemic of it. You see at 8 weeks time when the brain and central nervous system is being developed, exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals ( pesticide, herbicides, fungicides, and estrogenic compounds such as soy products) alter the typical pathways that hard wires the brain to be a boy or girl brain. The weight of scientific evidence demonstrates that Transsexualism is biologically based."
He also wrote to the school board offering to educate and train teachers himself – an offer that was declined. He persuaded the Andersons to talk to a reporter. They were grateful, but sometimes found him a bit overwhelming.
Mark became a celebrity on US Spanish-language television for his open and outspoken appearances explaining his gender change and wowing the Latino television hosts. Again he explained transgenderism as a birth defect resulting from environmental toxins. Later that year Mark Cummings published his 79 page autobiography wherein he described the anguish he felt living in a female body:
“Being in the wrong body is a crime. Death is appealing to those of us, who are encased in the wrong shell, who are trapped in a flesh of darkness, that ...sickens us to the point of madness” (pp 33).
Mark and Violet opened a wellness center business. He also wrote and performed music and toured with his life story.
It was said at the time that the Anderson family was the first US family to be supportive of a trans kid in this fashion. However the Wisconsin woman we know by the pseudonym of Sally Barry was supported by her parents in the 1930s/1940s with varying response from the school authorities
Joyce Allen from Warrington, Lancashire was a masculine tomboy who frequently scrapped with both boys and girls. She resisted having to wear girls' clothes, and took pleasure in dressing in her father's trousers. She pilfered dad's cigarettes, and when he bought a car, she, although under age, borrowed it and drove around the streets.
She had learned the violin, but at her first public performance, of Luigi Arditi's Il Bacio, a string snapped, and it was many years before Allen picked up the violin again.
She left school at fourteen, and worked at a variety of jobs, but also became well known at the local labour exchange where she befriended one of the clerks. The most satisfying job was at a local cinema.
In 1933, Joyce had met a man with whom she enjoyed going to horse races and greyhound tracks. They married, but quickly realized that 'a normal marital relationship' was impossible. Bored and incompetent as a housewife, Joyce took up gambling and lost everything, even the furniture.
Afterwards, now usually wearing slacks and with a man's haircut Allen worked in the exhibition side of the entertainment industry. She continued to suffer from stares and comments while trying to pass as a girl/woman.
"The sadistic delight of strangers in making mocking remarks about my appearance perhaps called forth a sadistic response from me. I actually had visiting cards printed, bearing a false name and address, and when people were offensive to me in public, I would hand them a card with the remark: 'If there are any further details you would like to know, perhaps you would write to me.'"
With the start of war in September 1939, Allen immediately enlisted. She was assigned as a driver to First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), and after six months was made a sergeant. In December 1941 Allen was having difficulties in avoiding a woman's sexual advances, when her mother fell ill and she was given a compassionate release.
After some weeks of caring for her mother, Allen applied for work and found a job at the Ministry of Supply where she was working with men driving heavy lorries and tippers, wearing slacks beneath a boiler suit. One evening, returning home, tired on the bus after work, Allen was subjected to an extended tirade from a man who had known her since childhood. She chased him and they fought until both were exhausted.
That done Allen knew it was time to leave Warrington. A spate of letters to film companies, advertising firms etc. produced several offers (it being wartime there were many vacancies as staff were in the forces). As a masculine woman in slacks, Allen became a secretary at the Denham Film Studios just outside north-west London, which at that time was more used than the nearby Pinewood. She was part of the team under Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger which made The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and then The Volunteer, a short starring Ralph Richardson.
At this point, in late 1943, Allen received a directive from the Ministry of Labour and National Service with instructions to report as a woman porter at a London station. This provided the nudge needed and Allen went to the Ministry of Labour headquarters in person, where he was put in touch with Valentine Harvey, the Chief Press Officer who accepted Allen as a man, quashed the directive and guided him through the bureaucracy. Allen's doctor who had previously treated him only for influenza, did a thorough examination and sent samples for pathological analysis. Allen wrote to his parents explaining that they had a son and not a daughter, and received a strongly supportive letter from his father.
In 1944 Allen took a position with Halas and Batchelor, the film cartoon company.
In September that year Allen wrote to the Registrar General, and with the doctor's report and a declaration from his parents, Allen was invited to Somerset House at the end of October that year where his birth certificate was rectified. He was asked for his male name, and, unprepared, chose ‘Robert’ from a glance at somebody else's documents.
In December Robert received a legal opinion that his first marriage was void ab initio, and he was free to marry his love from the Warrington Labour Exchange who was now working at Denham. They married quietly two days before Christmas, and spent the holiday with Robert's parents.
In 1946, the British film industry suffered one of its periodic crises with the end of wartime government subsidies, and Allen was out of a job. In March his father died. Allen suffered a few years of short-term employments and unemployment.
Valentine Harvey helped yet again, and in 1948, Allen was awarded a grant to train as a medical auxiliary, and in 1951 qualified as a diagnostic radiographer.
He developed a friendship with another radiographer who was a fervent Catholic, and promised to look into the religion after qualifying. Which he did, and at Christmas 1951 was baptised into the Catholic Church.
After a number of temporary radiography posts, Allen became a science teacher at a Christian Brothers run College in Liverpool.
His marriage came to an end, and they were divorced. In 1957 Robert remarried in a Congregational church
At the end of his life he was a resident in a nursing home in Cheshire. He died age 83.
*Not the fabric designer, nor the finance writer, nor the composer. Alan Hart also used the name Robert Allen Bamford Jr in 1918. Also Laud Humphries was born Robert Allen Humphries. Robert Eads was in full Robert Allen Eads.
Robert Allen. But for the Grace: The True Story of a Dual Existence London: W.H. Allen 149 pp 1954.
"He was once a bride". Daily Mirror, 30 August 1957: backpage. See More on Robert Allen.
2024: A very useful article that goes deeper into the films of Robert Allen:
Chris O'Rourke. "A life in pictures: trans visibility, invisible labour and the film career of Robert Allen". Screen, 65, 3, 2024. Online.
_________________________________________________
This is one of the country's earliest officially recognized gender changes. He did not take hormones or have surgery. Obviously he had an intersex condition with anomalous genitals, but he does not say which.
There is no record of Robert Allen after the second marriage in 1957.
For 18 years Watts worked as a male police officer in Casey, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria.
In 1995 Watts retired from the police, started to transition as Olivia, and set up in business as a naturopath. She was also a practitioner of Wicca.
In 2003 Olivia ran, unsuccessfully, to be a councillor in Casey. After an exchange of opinions, a Christian Labor councillor Rob Wilson denounced Olivia as a witch, and as a Satanist. He called on Casey's church leaders to consider calling a day of prayer to hold back the occult forces. Olivia was physically assaulted, and her house and car vandalized. Her business collapsed.
"On August 16 a gentleman came to my door and asked me if I was the naturopath Cr Wilson was talking about. When I admitted I was, he grabbed me and started hitting me on the forehead saying he was driving the demons out of Casey. He just kept screaming 'Out you demon, out you demon'."
Olivia sued Cr Wilson before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT). for vilification under the Victoria Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, 2001. At the trial Olivia became the first person anywhere in the world to give a legal Court Oath to the Goddess. In his submission Cr Wilson cited an evangelical Christian website called The Watchman and the Collins paperback dictionary: "Witchcraft: noun, the use of magic especially for evil purposes".
In a separate action, the Pagan Awareness Network, based in Sydney, brought a complaint against Wilson and the mayor. This was settled out of court with an apology and retraction by Wilson.
Olivia's case before the VCAT was heard in August 2004. Cr Wilson initially claimed that the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act was not breached in that, alone in Australia, witchcraft was still illegal in Victoria (this was section 13 of the Vagrancy Act 1966 which was repealed until 2005). However after the first day of hearings he agreed out-of-court to a retraction, and to financial terms which remain confidential.
More recently Olivia has suffered from MS, and became unable to work.
Chris Langdon was raised in Indiana. His father was a newspaper photographer and he started making Super 8 films while still a teenager. He was educated at the California Institute of the Arts from 1971-6, where he produced around forty well-regarded 16mm and 35 mm short films. The films were noted for satirizing tendencies in the Los Angeles art world, and using tropes taken from popular culture to question how we look at images. Chris liked to blur low art and high art, and was also an anti-war activist.
After 1976, he quit film-making, and took up representative painting which was unfashionable at that time. Later work was in graphics, sculpture, lithography, assemblage, photography, and other media.
Chris transitioned as Inga in the late 1990s. She studied traditional Chinese medicine, graduating in 1997, and lived in China for several years.
Film preservationist, Mark Toscano, tracked her down through the internet in 2009, and in January 2010 curated a retrospective of her work.
*Not Chris Langan also born 1952, the bouncer with a high IQ, nor the Australian pop singer,
++Psychiatrist Ira Pauly had published the first aggregation study of transsexual cases in 1965,
"Male
Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. A Review of 100 Cases". This resulted in a job offer from Johns Hopkins, but, after a pay rise, Pauly decided to stay at the University of Oregon Medical School.
It was to Johns Hopkins that underground film star Holly Woodlawn went for the operation in 1966, but she was denied it in that she had not been in the program for at least a year. She went on a shopping spree instead with the money that her boyfriend had provided for the operation.
One-year-old Bruce Reimer was brought to see Dr Money and surgically reassigned to female as Brenda in 1967, and continued annual visits for almost 10 years, until Brenda began to refuse, and started to change back to male as David.
++The same year Barbara Dayton moved to Baltimore with wife and children, and started living as female. The Clinic declined her application based on age, appearance and numerous tattoos. Also Barbara could not afford the fee.
The most prominent patient in the Gender Identity Clinic was writer Dawn Langley Hall who had surgery in 1968, married an African-American the next year, and publically announced the birth of a daughter in 1971 (a claim that the Gender Identity Clinic said was “definitely impossible”). ++This was also the year that Roberta White was admitted for surgery.
In 1968 the Gender Identity Clinic provided surgeon Stanley Biber with diagrams on how to do sex change surgery. Renée Richards met with John Money, but at the end was told that Johns Hopkins was not accepting any more transsexual patients at that time.
In 1969, transsexual pioneer Christine Jorgensen came to Johns Hopkins for corrective surgery. Future showgirl Michelle Brinkle ran away to Baltimore intending to register at the Clinic, but never did, and ended up at Dr Burou’s Clinic in Casablanca instead. Psychiatrist Jon Meyer became chairman of the Gender Identity Clinic, and his predecessor, John Hoopes wrote: “The surgery, often considered outrageously excessive and meddlesome by the uninformed, must be undertaken regardless of the censure and taboos of present society”. Also in 1969, Richard Green and John Money co-edited Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, with a preface by Reed Erickson, an introduction by Harry Benjamin, and published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
John Money conducted a follow-up study of ‘17 male and seven female patients’, and found that after surgery nine patients had improved their occupational status and none declined. “Seven male and three female patients married for the first time” and “All of the 17 are unequivocally sure they have done for themselves the right thing”.
In 1970, Dr Edgerton left for the University of Virginia, where he established a Gender Identity Clinic, and Dr Hoopes returned to Johns Hopkins to replace him as Chief of Plastic Surgery. Dr Meyer started his own study of the benefits of surgery.
In 1972 future doctor Dana Beyer, then a student, came to the Clinic but found the intake application so off-putting that she fled before seeing a doctor.
In 1974, 23-year-old future intersex-cum-HSTS activist Denise Tree (Kiira Triea) had surgery with Dr Howard Jones after years of therapy from Dr Money.
In a paper with John Hoopes, Meyer wrote: “Most of the patients continue to be emotionally and socially much the same as they were in the pre-operative phase”.
In 1975, Catholic psychiatrist Dr Paul McHugh became head of the Psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins. He later wrote that he intended from the start to put an end to sex change surgeries which he described as “the most radical therapy ever encouraged by 20th-century psychiatrists— with perhaps the exception of lobotomies”.
In 1976 Charles Annicello from the clinic testified in a New Jersey court on behalf of M.T., a trans woman who was suing for alimony. Louis Gooren, who would develop the Gender Clinic at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, studied at Johns Hopkins in 1976, as did Russell Reid who later became a consultant at Charing Cross Hospital.
The clinic was also featured as the location of a rather unusual at-knife-point FTM operation in John Walters’ film Desperate Living, 1977.
The Joneses retired from Johns Hopkins in 1978, and became professors of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia Medical School, where they established the first in vitro fertilization program in the United States.
In 1979, (the same year that Janice Raymond published the transphobic The Transsexual Empire) psychiatrist Jon Meyers and co-author Donna Reter reporting to Paul McHugh, finished their evaluation of fifty post and pre-op patients they saw as still deeply disturbed. “To say that this type of surgery cures psychiatric disturbance is incorrect. We now have objective evidence that there is no real difference in the transsexual’s adjustment to life in terms of jobs, educational attainment, marital adjustment and social stability,” he said. He later told The New York Times, “My personal feeling is that surgery is not a proper treatment for a psychiatric disorder, and it’s clear to me that these patients have severe psychological problems that don’t go away following surgery.” He even referred directly to “one case”, probably Reed Erickson, “In which a woman required hospitalization for drug dependency and suicidal intentions after being changed to a man”.
John Hoopes also changed his mind: “Prior to the surgery, these patients were at least male or female, but after the surgery the males converted to females weren’t really females and the females converted to males weren’t really males. . . You’ve created a new breed. You’ve created something you don’t know what to do with. … I never saw a successful patient. For the most part they remained misfits”.
The Meyer study has not been supported by later studies. Its methodology has been strongly criticized, especially the vagueness of some of its scoring, and that it does not include any measure of personal satisfaction. None of the post-operatives regretted the operation (as Meyers and Reter acknowledged). However, citing the study, the hospital administration closed the program.
The Johns Hopkins program was never important in terms of numbers, in fourteen years they provided surgery to only thirty people (compare to Dr Biber who would do many more than that every year), but in that it was the first clinic it was felt as a loss when it closed.
Even so, Johns Hopkins' reputation was such that transsexuals continued to apply to the Hospital. They were seen in the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit at $150 a time, but no referrals for surgery were made after 1979.
John Money stayed at the PRU, even after 1986 when it was moved to smaller premises outside the Hospital.
As late as 2005, a group of Christian ministers went to Trinidad, Colorado and tried to use the Meyer study to force Marci Bowers to stop performing gender surgery.
Thomas Buckley “A Changing
of Sex by Surgery Begun at Johns Hopkins”. New York Times. Nov
21, 1966.
“Sex-Change Operations at a
U.S. Hospital”. US News & World Report. Dec 5, 1966: 13.
Charles W. Slack.
"Life's Such a Drag, They'd Rather Switch". The
Village Voice. Nov 6, 1969, vol XIV, 56. Archive.
John Colapinto. As
Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. London:
Quartet xvii, 279 pp. Toronto & New York: HarperCollins, 2001:
especially chp2.
Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex
Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge,
Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 7, 80, 114, 142, 211,
218-223, 251, 266-270
Edward Ball,. Peninsula of
Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2004: 84, 157-160, 244-9.
Deborah Rudacille. The
Riddle of Gender. New York: Pantheon Books. 2005: 104-110, 111-113, 116-8,
119, 121-8, 131-3, 143, 169, 238.
The Wikipedia article, "History of Intersex Surgery", should be called "Intersex Surgery at Johns Hopkins"; as it completely ignores work done elsewhere. The work of Lennox Broster in particular is scandalously missing.
For those who like to perceive patterns in history, it is remarkable how the Johns Hopkins GIC falls between the publications of The Transsexual Phenomenon and The Transsexual Empire.
R.S. an 11-years old boy, was brought to Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1915. With his parents’ consent, exploratory surgery found that he had a uterus and ovaries. The parents insisted that he not be told that he was female. Twenty years later he returned. He was now a business man with an active sex life, and intending to marry, except that his local priest refused to marry him as he was female. The doctors examined him again, and again found female internal organs. They confirmed that he was female. Three days later he was dead by suicide.
++ In 1925 an orphan Frank was examined and a vagina, uterus, left ovary and Fallopian tubes were found. Two years later, Frances had her clitoris removed. At age 18 Frances became John and became a truck driver.
Genital reconstructive surgery was pioneered by urologist Hugh Hampton Young at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore between 1930 and his death in 1945.
Gynecologist Howard Jones had done his M.D. at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1935. In 1948 he and his wife Georgeanna became part-time faculty in the department of gynecology and obstetrics in the school of medicine.
Around 1950 there was a better understanding of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and doctors were able to treat it with cortisone. Lawson Wilkins set up a new pediatric endocrinology clinic where it was recognized that doctors could not tell a person’s sex just by looking at external genitalia, and in some cases recommended to the child and parents that the child’s sex be reversed.
Milton Edgerton became Chief of Johns Hopkins first division of plastic surgery in 1951. Shortly afterwards he met his first transsexual: “When I went in to see the patient, who was in every outward appearance female, I began to get the request for the removal of male genitalia, and if possible, the construction of a vagina”. Patients began to arrive in his office asking for corrections to botched gender surgery that had been performed elsewhere, usually out-of-country. “Not a single patient, no matter how bad the surgery that had been performed, regretted his or her trip to have the operation. And that was pretty impressive”.
John Money, who wrote his PhD thesis on hermaphrodites (the term then in use), was recruited in 1951 also by Lawson Wilkins to be professor of pediatrics and medical psychology at the newly formed Psychohormonal Research Unit (PRU) in the Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Teamed with Drs Joan and John Hampson he spent six years studying 131 intersex persons, children and adults, who had been treated at Johns Hopkins. They found persons with identical genitals and chromosomes but raised as the other gender fared equally well psychologically. On this basis Money recommended that an intersex child be steered to a chosen gender, which was usually female as the surgery was easier, but it must be done within the first two and a half years, and that the child must not be confused by being told. Their paper won a prize from the American Psychiatric Association in 1955. Soon afterwards, the Hampsons left to take up positions at Washington State University.
In 1956, performer Ray Bourbon approached the hospital to see about a sex change, but was told that it was impossible.
From 1957 to 1961, Richard Green, the future head of Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, was a student at the Johns Hopkins medical school, and worked with John Money.
In 1958, circus performer Hedy Jo Star, after a couple of years on female hormones, presented at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The doctors in the PRU examined her for five days and then sent her home to await a letter. Three months later the letter advised her not to go ahead with surgery as she had no internal female structures.
At about the same time however, the doctors evaluated a female-to-male patient, and in 1960 did a bilateral mastectomy on him.
In 1960 The Joneses left their private practice to become full-time faculty. Howard started doing ‘corrective’ surgery on intersex infants. Money became the director of the PRU in 1962 when Lawson Wilkins retired and died shortly afterwards. Money was awarded considerable grants by the National Institutes of Health, and was also subsidized by wealthy trans man Reed Erickson (who also subsidized Harry Benjamin and Vern Bullough). John Money attended monthly meetings in New York with Harry Benjamin and Richard Green under the auspices of Reed Erickson’s EEF, where the idea was raised of applying the kind of surgery being done on intersex patients to transsexuals as well.
++In 1961 Roberta White arrived without an appointment and managed to obtain an interview with John Money who admitted her for three weeks for detailed evaluation.
In 1964, a 17-year-old transsexual referred to as G.L. who had been convicted of stealing women’s clothing and $800 worth of wigs was ordered by the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City to have sex reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins. Her probation officer delivered her to the Johns Hopkins Women’s Clinic where Howard Jones was to do the surgery. However the psychiatry department intervened at the last moment, and had G.L. referred to them for therapy instead.
The next year John Money pioneered and cajoled the first Gender Identity Clinic in the US. He brought three postoperative patients of Harry Benjamin to meet with Howard Jones and Milton Edgerton. This was the same year that the Joneses with Edmund Novak published their gynecology textbook. That would go through several editions and in its time outsell all other such textbooks combined. Reed Erickson donated $85,000 to the Gender Identity Clinic over years, and became quite friendly with John Money. In addition he went to Johns Hopkins for a double mastectomy repair in 1965 after having had a mastectomy in Mexico and a hysterectomy in New York, and is arguably the first transsexual patient at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic.
However the first patient is usually taken to be an African-American referred by Harry Benjamin, Phyllis Avon Wilson (more) who was operated on by Howard Jones at around the same time. Phyllis became a dancer in New York, and on Oct 4, 1966 a gossip column in the New York Daily News carried the item: “Making the rounds of the Manhattan clubs these nights is a stunning girl who admits she was male less than a year ago and that she underwent a sex change operation at, of all places, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore”.
This caused Dr Edgerton to get a phone call from Dr Russell Nelson, president of Johns Hopkins Hospital, to find out if the story were true. Edgerton made a tactical decision and gave an exclusive to Tom Buckley of The New York Times, which ran the story on the front page on Nov 21, 1966. A press conference was called on the same day, where Edgerton and several colleagues announced at a press conference the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic under the chairmanship of plastic surgeon John Hoopes. To an audience of 100 reporters, the doctors defined transsexuals, “physically normal people who are psychologically the opposite sex”, explained that “psychotherapy has not so far solved the problem”, and that they had already operated on 10 patients, all of whom were happy with the outcome. Three were already married, and three more were engaged.
This was the same year that Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon had been published. Shortly afterwards, the Universities of Minnesota, Stanford, Northwestern and Washington at Seattle (headed by John Hampson) also opened Gender Identity Clinics.
Within a year, over 700 desperate transsexuals wrote and implored the doctors at the Johns Hopkins Clinic to help them. However the Clinic would approve for surgery only those whom they unanimously deemed to be ‘good candidates’. They devised four criteria: Is the patient a candidate for psychotherapy? Is the patient authentically motivated? Is the patient psychotic? Will the patient undergo a sociocultural crisis after receiving the operation? This left much room for the doctors’ opinions, and they often chose to err on the side of wait-and-see, recommending therapy rather than progressing a patient on to surgery.
++Previously, vaginoplasty, where it was done in the US had taken skin from the patient's thigh to construct the vagina. However patients who had had surgery in Casablanca from Dr Burou were able to demonstrate the advantages of Burou's penile inversion method. Dr Edgerton adopted and adapted this method. When he was contacted by Dr Stanley Biber in 1968, this was the method that was recommended.
Dr Hoopes, the chairman, recalled that Money was often the advocate for progression: “John Money would argue very forcefully that someone was a candidate ... that he knew the patient very well and if this program was going to make any headway this patient should be accepted”. Not surprisingly, many of the patients did not want to see a psychiatrist. This was based on previous experience with psychiatrists, in that it implied that they had a mental problem, and that they knew within themselves that what they needed was surgery. Most patients soon realized that they should read the medical literature about transsexualism and impersonate ‘textbook transsexuals’ if they wished to be progressed to the next stage.
However the doctors were willing to consider patients with what was described in 1968 as “inadequate social and moral judgment and a long history of petty and sometimes major criminal offenses”. This included transvestites, gay men and strippers, many associated with The Block, a part of downtown Baltimore with many nightclubs, bars and sex workers. The doctors realized that their patients were at risk of arrest for cross-dressing and so issued identity cards with a Johns Hopkins phone number provided by The Erickson Foundation. Dr Edgerton had several calls from police officers, and after an arrest in 1971 helped to get a female transsexual transferred to the women’s facility. Some patients dropped out during the stage where they were taking hormones. In some cases this was because they could not afford the $2,000 to $10,000 for the surgery.
Trevor David Rupe is a Maori of Ngati Maniopoto descent. He was raised in Taumarunui (map) on Aotearoa (New Zealand)’s North Island, in a family of 13 children on a sheep and cattle farm. His mother found him dressed in her cloths when he was 11, but accepted his femininity.
In 1955, at the end of military training in which he was trained as a nurse, he did an impersonation of Eartha Kitt as part of the farewell concert. He worked as a nurse in Auckland and Wellington doing part-time drag.
In 1957 Rupe moved to Kings Cross in Sydney, took the name Carmen from the 1954 film, Carmen Jones, stopped wearing men’s clothes altogether, and became the first Maori drag performer in Australia. She stripped, danced the hula and had two snakes. She also got breast implants and worked as a prostitute. In 1963 she joined the famous Les Girls revue, and worked with Carlotta. She was a friend of Noel McKay.
On a trip home Carmen was arrested in a car at 3am and charged with wearing women’s clothes. However the magistrate threw out the case because there was no such law. In 1968, the police harassment in Sydney got to be too much, and she returned to Wellington. An inheritance from her grandfather enabled her to open a coffee bar that was a brothel upstairs. The place became popular with the local rich and famous, including several MPs.
She ran for mayor of Wellington in 1977 under the banner ‘Get in Behind’ promising gay marriage and legalized brothels.
In 1979 she returned to Sydney, and to working in nightclubs. She had small parts in television dramas in 1992/3.
In 2003 she was inducted into the Variety Hall of Fame. In 2008, she lead the Decade of the Diva float at Sydney’s Mardi Gras. She was a prominent member of Agender, the New Zealand transgender group.
She died at age 75 after some months of medical problems.
Scott was raised as a slave in the US, and ran away to the West Indies. She was a practitioner in an African spiritual tradition; Upchurch suggests the Jim Banndaa, in which male-bodied persons living as female had spiritual powers. Eliza made a living by cleaning and by attending the ill, especially those afflicted by rheumatism, whom she could cure by friction and with herbs.
In 1858 she was engaged by a sea-captain with such ailments, but he abandoned her in London and sailed without her. She took to walking about in the Fenchurch Street area, probably with the intention of earning some money.
Constables of the newly founded Metropolitan Police noticed her, and assumed that she was a woman. She was arrested on the complaint of a ‘respectable man’ who asked a constable to take her in charge. She resisted strongly, but was taken to the station house and charged with having ‘annoyed gentlemen in Fenchurch Street’. The case was weak in that she had made no advance or overt proposition. In the end she was convicted solely of having resisted the constable’s attempt to put her in charge.
Charles Upchurch. Before Wilde: Sex Between Man in Britain’s Age of Reform. University of California Press. 2009: 168-171.
William Griglak was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He became a Catholic priest and earned a PhD in Psychology at The Catholic University in Washington D.C..
William resigned the priesthood in 1969, and transitioned surgically to Nancy in 1979 with surgery from Dr Biber.
She never returned officially to lay status, and thus is claimed as the first female Roman Catholic priest.
Afterwards Nancy became a noted electrologist, and served as the educational director for the American Electrology Association.
Of course there are other candidates for 'the first female Roman Catholic priest'. I seem to remember an Italian priest who transitioned around the same time, but I cannot find any details any more.
A quack doctor in New York City in the late 1970s-early 1990s who worked the clubs where drag queens hung out and sold a syringe of female hormones and B-12 for $15, or 6 for $60.
He was also a photographer and a drug retailer and a pedophile with young children frequently visiting his small apartment in New York’s Hells Kitchen. He decorated his apartment with photographs of the best looking of his feminized customers. Those who could not pay, exchanged sexual services for the hormones.
As a child James was taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky for an eye injury and left there.
He became friendly with the hospital superintendent, who provided a room. He began by delivering the hospital mail, and playing his ukulele for the patients. In his teens he learned the profession of orderly, and worked at the hospital as an orderly for the next 40 years. He was regarded as the best orderly at the hospital and trained new orderlies.
He eventually moved to a home in the black neighborhood close to the university, which he filled with antiques. Given that all of his working life was under segregation, he had a relatively good income for an African-American. He did various shades of drag, using the names ‘Sweet Evening Breeze’ and ‘Miss Sweets’, and was rumored to be a ‘hermaphrodite’. Sometimes his dress was a mix of male and female.
He frequented the local tearooms, and his home was a gay meeting place. He was one of the few older black gays to socialize in the white gay bar scene. His triumph was a drag show at the Woodland Auditorium where he was lowered from the ceiling in a basket and danced the ‘Passion Dance of the Bongo Bangoes’.
Around 1960 he and a teenaged drag, Leigh Angelique, were arrested for wearing makeup. They performed a mini-drag show for the guards, who tipped them, and spoke to the judge on their behalf. Sweets spoke up against the discrimination that women could wear make-up but men could not, and the case was dismissed.
He was active in the Pleasant Green Baptist Church and left it a bequest in his will. The Imperial Court of Kentucky named its highest award the James Herndon Award, and the
Lexington Men’s Chorus named its singing ensemble Sweet Evening Breeze in his honor. He appears as a character in Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree, 1979.
*Not the California teacher and writer, nor the media psychologist, nor the gospel singer.
Brian Waling from Bolton, Lancashire worked as an operating theatre technician and joined the Royal Navy in 1971. He married and had one child.
During the Falklands War, 1982, he served on HMS Invincible treating seriously injured servicemen.
In 1986 he started to transition and was discharged from the Navy. As Lynda, she had surgery in 1988. She then worked for North Manchester Healthcare NHS Trust. She met her boyfriend on a trip to Chester, but waited five years before telling him about her past. He stayed with her.
She has war flashbacks and post traumatic stress disorder. In 1999, she appealed to a tribunal claiming unfair dismissal and medical negligence. This claim was dismissed. She then appealed on grounds of sex discrimination, but was dismissed on the grounds that the time limit had expired in 1995. She then applied for a sickness pension in that it was post-traumatic stress rather than her gender change that had made her unsuitable to stay in the Navy. A letter from the Naval Personnel Secretariat said: “Because her post-traumatic stress disorder remained undiagnosed or acknowledged, her gender dysphoria and its apparent effects became the primary reason for dealing with her case administratively”. She was awarded £68,000 in back pension payments.
. Routledge 2008. 
