Will Franken (1973 - ) comedian

​Will Franken was raised in Sedalia, Missouri, with a “hyper-masculine” father who had been with the US military in Vietnam. His sisters dressed him as a girl, which he enjoyed. He learned to become a comedian. When he got his first car he was thrilled that he could drive to another town to buy women’s clothing. Then father discovered a pair of women’s shoes which led to a confession and being called a ‘faggot'.

Will did a degree in English with a specialization in Restoration and 18th century literature, and afterwards taught high school in New York City while pursuing an acting career. He developed comedy routines inspired by Monty Python and Kids in the Hall.

He lived in San Francisco from 2002, and lived as Sarah for three months, but still gigging as Will. It was disconcerting that Sarah was addressed as 'sir'. Sarah got married to a woman:

“We each had three bridesmaids”.  

However Will was gaining recognition as a character comedian:

“I was more obsessed with my career at that point and felt being out as transgender would limit me”. 

While in San Francisco, Franken was awarded "Best Comedian" of 2005 by the SF Weekly and "Best Alternative to Psychedelic Drugs" by the SF Bay Guardian. He later made a television debut on BBC America's “The World Stands Up,” a showcase of UK, American and Australian comedians.

There was a Wikipedia Page for “Will franken” (small f) created in 2006. He was divorced in 2007.

In 2013 Will emigrated to England, at first living in North London, and becoming known on the comedy circuit.

At the age of 42, Franken moved to Bethnal Green, and, as Sarah, started to make new friends. Initially she had a rule that she was Will on gig days, and otherwise Sarah, but then worked up the courage to perform as Sarah. As Franken was known for switching from character to character while performing, it was hard to persuade audiences that Sarah was not just another character:

'Hello, I'm Sarah and I'm going to do some character comedy for you tonight. And this is not a character by the way... It's the first time I've ever come on not in character.' 

Overall Sarah’s gigs went well. The Guardian ran a story on her, which caused a ripple of publicity and enquiries from various media.  She – 6’5”(1.96m) - did get negative comments in the street, but in many cases was able to use the incidents as material for her show.

Franken’s mother found out from Facebook, and left a comment about God’s condemnation. Sarah deleted her from Facebook.

She never started on oestrogen.

Overall Franken’s act did not change:

“In fact, in many ways, being Sarah allowed me to get across some necessary conservative perspectives quite foreign to the artistic milieu. … As always, I defended free-market capitalism and argued against the proliferation of radical Islam—although at first with considerably less expletive-laden shouting than I would have engaged in as Will.” 

However after seven months Franken reverted. As Will/Sarah was to some extent a public figure, he wrote an essay, “Seven Reasons for Will's Return”. He summarized it in The Independent:

“My exasperation at public abuse, the disarming prospect of no longer attracting females, and a lingering resentment to what I perceived as an oversight of my comedy in favour of the identity politics du jour: transgenderism… I was frightened, angry, lonely, confused – and, perhaps worst of all, bored. Utterly bored with the topic of transgenderism”. 

Will received a number of negative comments that criticised him more for his reversion than for his political opinions, and – as he responded in an article for The Federalist:

“Unwittingly, I have become a threat to a prewritten collective narrative. My choice to live again as a man implies there may be others for whom the trans lifestyle is a choice. Perhaps the fear and anger emanating from the activists is twofold. On the personal level, there’s a fear among some in the trans community who are likewise uncertain about their own decision and are reticent to address the personal responsibility of choice that is part and parcel of that uncertainty. … Especially if loose cannons like myself keep making up their own minds about what do with their own lives. Choice is rebellion. Choice is rock-n-roll”

The Wikipedia page was removed in December 2018 for lack of notability.

·                 “Will Franken is Drugs Without Having to Hit the Bottom: Recovery Comedy Interview”. Recovery Comedy, May 22^nd, 2012. Online.

·                 Ralph Jones. “Comic Sarah Franken: why I became a woman after 40 years of fear”. Guardian, 15 July 2015. Online.

·                 Megan Boyanton. “Comedian Sarah Franken on being transgender, spiritual and ready to rock ‘n’ roll”. PinkNews, 24^th July 2015. Online.

·                 Kieran Gilbert. “Transgender comedian thrives on laughter to beat fear, abuse”. Daily Mail, 9 August 2015.  Online.

·                 Alice Jones. “Transgender comedian Sarah Franken on performing her first show at the Edinburgh Fringe”. Independent, 10 August 2015. Online.  

·                 Bruce Dessau. “Exclusive: Will Franken On Changing Back From Sarah To Will”.  Beyond the Joke, 23/12/2015.  Online.

·                 Will Franken. “Why I began living as a woman - then decided to transition back”. Independent, 28 Dec 2015. Online.

·                 Will Franken.  “What Life As A Transgender Woman Taught Me About Progressives”.  The Federalist, Match 7, 2016.  Online.

WillFranken.Com   RecoveryComedy     IMDB    The Federalist    EN.Wikipedia(deletion)   PopularBio    EverybodyWiki       

________________________________________


If you must read the negative comments see the 28/12/2015 Independent article.

There are various videos of Franken performing at WillFranken.Com and on YouTube.  ​

Anita Verig Sandor (1934 - ) usherette, housewife

As Anita later told her tale to the News of the World:

Her parents in Hungary raised her as a girl, and sent her to school as such, even during the war. When she was 15 she found her birth certificate that said that she was a boy.  She was told to shut up and not ask questions.

After leaving school, she worked as a female in a factory. She found her first boyfriend and told him she was different from other girls. He said that he also had a proper girlfriend and now could have the best of both worlds.

When the Hungarian Uprising began in October 1956, Anita was afraid of being raped by the Russians, so she cut her hair, dressed in some of her father’s clothes and fled to the West. Sandor was shot in the knee, and was two months in hospital before getting to England. Sandor found work in a London hotel stillroom. He met and married a French women in 1959.  They had two sons, but separated after four years, and were divorced in 1967, with  the wife retaining custody of the children.

Anita returned to living as a woman. She was working as a cinema usherette when she met 17-year-old Peter, a building labourer.  They socialised and went on holidays with the other building workers. The major problem was his parents who objected to Anita being so much older.

She had applied for a sex-change operation as it was then known. Peter accepted this and they were able to get a council flat in Islington, north London.  In 1976 they decided to get married at an Anglican church in Hackney. She explained that she had lost her birth certificate in flight from Hungary. So they had to go to a solicitor and swear a declaration that she was Anita Verig Sandor born in 1940.

There were 50 guests at the wedding, and the vicar attended the reception.  All went well until somebody told the News of the World - three years later.

However even the article in that paper finished on a positive note with Peter declaring

“But whatever happens in the future our ambition is to continue to be as happy as we are now.  If anything ever happens to Anita, I know that I’d never marry again.”

• Ray Chapman. “Secret of the bride in white: she’s the father of two sons”. The News of the World, 25 March 1979. Online.

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As readers of the books by Peter Farrer will know, parents cross-raising a child was considered a cause of adult transgender in the 1920s and 1930s.  However it was a very unusual claim by the 1970s.

I was rather naughty of Anita to drop six years from her age.

It is not mentioned whether Anita was making child support payments.

I presume that she was going to the Charing Cross Gender Clinic.  There were very few alternatives in 1976.

Alexander Polycleitos Cawadias - part II

​

Continued from Part I.

A.P. Cawadias expanded his 1941 lecture into a book, Hermaphoditus: The Human Intersex, first published in 1943 despite the wartime rationing of paper. A second edition was published in 1946.

He re-iterated that everyone is at least mildly intersex, hermaphrodites being severely so. For those assigned male he recognised four intermediate types:

A) Dilettante – talkers, emotionalists using supposed female social forms 

B) Transvestist “a higher degree of male psychological intersexualism”.

C) Homosexual – again “a higher degree of male psychological intersexualism (1946 p40)” but there are other non-intersexual homosexuals such as those of ancient Greece, and those due to “excessive virility”. “Oscar Wilde was wrong to defend his practices by referring to ancient Hellas, because his homosexuality was of definitely intersexual nature, as shown by the general emotional make-up of the poet. It was thus a source of social mischief and had no link with the homosexuality of ancient Greece (p41)”.

D) Masochistic – “a very high degree of psychological intersexualization (p41)”.

For those assigned female, he concentrates on adrenal virilism (the major form that was treated at Charing Cross Hospital under Lennox Broster at that time). The intermediate forms that he recognises are:

A) Amazonian – “These are women excelling in sports and other male activities, and exhibiting qualities of leadership (p63)”.

B) “Psychological forms corresponding to those described for male feminism are frequent. Female homosexuality and female transvestism are outstanding. Striking examples of the latter form are George Sand and Christina of Sweden. Joan of Arc does not enter into this category. (p64)”

For those severely intersexual he of course recommends medical support, but with an important caveat.

“The Pragmatic Sex is that indicated by the will of the patient. It is the sex that will make him happier and confer better adaptation. … The pragmatic sex is to be accepted in cases of severe intersexualisation, in which the genetic sex is very doubtful and cannot be discovered. These individuals must have their place in the sun, and can have it only by virtue of their will to a particular sex. Otherwise they would be abandoned as a class apart of ‘undetermined sex.’ Many will object that the sex they will may not be their true, i.e., genetic sex, but in such cases the sex that brings most happiness and the best adaptation is surely the true sex.(p32)”

He accepts and admires the female intermediaries. However:

“Even if male homosexuals or male transvestists live unhappily and commit suicide when thwarted, overwhelming social considerations oblige the physician to ignore their will and thus their pragmatic sex. A male homosexual, for example, is a source of moral depravity in a group of other persons, particularly at schools. Besides being a generally depraving influence he is a source of contagion of intersexuality. He must therefore be thwarted in his activities, although more by treatment than by punishment. (p33)”

Michael Dillon, in his Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, 1946, describes Cawadias’ book as “vigorous and original” but fails to take the point for he continues to talk of true and pseudo-  hermaphroditism.

Mary Cawadias had survived, stayed in Greece and was a correspondent for Time and Life magazines during the 1944-9 Civil War. She later married a British diplomat.

Christian Hamburger, Georg K Stürup & E Dahl-Iversen, of the team that operated on Christine Jorgensen, read a paper at a meeting of Danish medical societies 13 February 1953, and then published it in the Journal of the American Medical Association later that year. They specifically quote Cawadias re the physician must “ignore their will and thus their pragmatic sex”. Hamburger et al reply:

 “It is understood in medical ethics that if a disease cannot be cured an attempt should be made to improve the stress and inconvenience of the patient in order to make his life as tolerable as possible, having, naturally, due regard to the interests of society. We are unable to agree with Cawadias”.

In 1954 Cawadias wrote to the British Medical Journal: 

“What is the predominant sex in an intersexual ? As I pointed out in my Thomas Vicary lecture many years ago, ‘with our contemporary ideas the predominant sex is that manifested by the total personality and not that indicated by special features of nuclear genes, gonads, endocrines, or even by the balance of sexual characters. Total personality is shown by the behaviour and will of the individual. Thus, in principle, an intersexual individual has the right to demand of us to perfectionate his sex according to his choice.”  ... "The application of this principle of free choice for the other class of intersexes, the transvestites, is much more difficult. These are individuals whose genital organs and gonads are distinctly male or female but who feel they belong to the opposite sex and want to live, dress, and work like members of the opposite sex. … In my opinion, these transvestites are as much hermaphrodites as those designated with this term, and, in fact, we find definite endocrine, genital, and other physical stigmata pointing to a definite intersexuality. They are the most unfortunate beings, leading lives of misery often terminating in suicide. We have to help them-but how ?”

In 1955, Georgina Turtle, then in transition, was referred to Dr Cawadias “London’s leading sexologist”. He conducted a proper examination and declared Turtle to be a hermaphrodite, prescribed oestrogen and advised a change of sexual role. In 1960 he supplied an affidavit to aid her in obtaining a revised birth certificate.

In 1959 Cawadias wrote to The Lancet: 

“Are we to deny to transexualists (the most tragic of all intersexes) the benefit of a change of registration which would not do any harm to anyone and would prevent for these unfortunates a life of misery and even suicide, on the basis of their nuclear chromatin ? Our legislation regarding intersexual conditions is already very deficient, and the dogma of sexual chromatin will lead to even more erroneous legal decisions. For the clinician who will guide such legal decisions, the sexual chromatin is a part; and we cannot know the whole by considering only a part. Sex is a matter of total personality -including the most important, psychological personality --and not a matter of genes, gonads, genital organs, or endocrines.”

In 1962, at the age of 78, Cawadias returned to Athens where he continued to write and give lectures. He stayed after the 1967 coup d’état that led to rule by the Military Junta. He died at age 87.

Publications by Cawadias:

• “Physical Methods of Endocrinotherapy”. The British Medical Journal, Aug 1, 1936.
• “The History of Endocrinology”. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, XXXIV, 303, December 4, 1940.
• “Hermaphroditism: A Historical Approach”. British Medical Journal, 818, Dec 6, 1941. First page.
• Hermaphoditus: The Human Intersex. William Heinemann, 1943. Second edition 1946.
• “Change of Sex”. Letter to the British Medical Journal, April 10, 1954: 876.
• “Sex Reversal”. Letter to the Editor of The Lancet, 14 February 1959: 369.

By Others

• Michael Dillon. Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. William Heineman, 1946: 58-9.
• Christian Hamburger, Georg K Stürup & E Dahl-Iversen.  “Transvestism: Hormonal, Psychiatric, and Surgical Treatment”. Journal of the American Medical Association, 151, 5, May 30, 1953: 395.
• Georgina Somerset. A Girl Called Georgina. The Book Guild, 1992: 34, 42.
• Katrina Karkazis. Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience. Duke University Press, 2001: 44–45.
• “Mary Henderson: Diplomatic consort with an unusual past”.  The independent, 15 April 2004. Online.

EN.Wikipedia                   Royal College of Physicians

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Cawadias was one year older than Harry Benjamin, and his book came out 22 years before The Transsexual Phenomenon. From our 21^st century viewpoint his legacy is mixed. His concept of the ‘predominant’ sex and the statement that the behaviour and will of the individual trump chromosomes, gonads and body shape is very modern. And yet it is a return to the 18^th century when intersex persons where allowed to choose a gender, which would then be accepted. Cawadias’ position here is very similar to Benjamin’s “Seven Kinds of Sex” published in Sexology in 1961, and then revised as the first chapter of The Transsexual Phenomenon. It is noteworthy that Cawadias is not mentioned in Benjamin’s book. Not even in passing.

The intermediate types designated Dilettante and Amazon are now quaint and dated. The social construction of gender has changed since 1943 and the behaviours mentioned are now encouraged for both genders without implications of being intersex.

Cawadias’s book was advanced for its time. It is a shame that he succumbed to the homophobic mores of the time and demanded that male homosexuals and transvestists be thwarted in their attempts to be themselves.  However the letters that he wrote to medical journals in the 1950s indicate that he had changed his mind.

The claim that transvestites (which in the 1940s included what we now call transsexuals) are a type of intersex is of course contentious. But we cannot expect Cawadias to anticipate the next 80 years of debate after he wrote.

Alexander Polycleitos Cawadias / Αλεξανδρος Πολυκλειτος Καββαδιας (1884 – 1971) endocrinologist - Part 1

Cawadias was the son of the noted Greek archeologist, Panagiotis Kavvadias/ Παναγιώτης Καββαδίας (1850 – 1928). Alexander was educated locally in Athens and then at Montpellier University and at the University of Paris where he earned a baccalaureate in 1901, and then studied in Bonn and Heidelberg. From 1906-10 he was a resident physician at a Paris teaching hospital, where he gained a MD. In 1912 he was elected Chef de Clinique in the Paris Faculty.

However the Balkan states having formed the Balkan League fought successfully to complete secession from the Ottoman Empire. This was the First Balkan War 1912-13. Immediately afterwards Bulgaria went to war against Greece and Serbia to settle boundaries. This was the Second Balkan War. Dr Cawadias returned to Greece to help his country, and in particular served during the cholera epidemic in Salonika. In 1914, he married the daughter of a banker, and, on the nomination of Queen Mother Olga, he was appointed Chief of the Medical Clinic in the Evangelismos Hospital in Athens, and he became physician to the new king, her son. During the Great War, Cawadias was the liaison officer to the British Sector, and in 1918 was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Greece attempted to expand into Asia Minor, but was defeated in the Greco-Turkish War 1919-1922. After this chaos and the need to absorb 1.5 million refugees, there was a referendum on the monarchy, and Greece became a republic in 1924. A fervent royalist, Cawadias followed his King Geórgios II (Olga’s grandson) into exile in London two years later. He qualified as a British MD at Durham University. He found a home in the prestigious Wimpole Street, and became a British subject. He quickly established a consulting practice mainly amongst wealthy Greek expatriates. He did not follow his king back to Greece in 1935 after the right-wing coup that restored the monarchy.

Cawadias specialized in endocrinology and established a reputation in the field. He was president of the History of Medicine Society of the Royal Society of Medicine from 1937 to 1939.

The reigning paradigm re intersex persons, or hermaphrodites as they were then called, was that of Theodor Klebs (1834-1913) who in his Handbuch der Pathologischen Anatomie, 1876 codified the already accepted notion that primacy in sex determination should be the gonads: thus a person with a typical female body but also testes would be designated male and a person with a typical male body but with ovarian tissue would be designated female. Klebs distinguished true hermaphroditism (both ovarian and testicular tissue) from what he called pseudo-hermaphroditism.

Cawadias was one of the first to speak out against this paradigm. In December 1941, when the worst of the Blitz was over, he gave the Thomas Vicary lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons: Hermaphroditism: A Historical Approach.

“In all cases of ‘complete’ hermaphroditism described even to-day the testis or the ovary was rudimentary and not functioning. Bisexualism could not be accepted on such slender evidence. Was there a normal woman who did not possess in her ovarian medulla testicular rudiments, or a normal woman who did not secrete testosterone? According to Klebs's criterion all normal women should be considered true hermaphrodites. (1941 p818)” …. “The ovary and testis were not the basis of sex, but merely manifestations or results of the initial genetic sexoformic impulse, which in human beings was either male or female and never bisexual. A female was not the appendage of her ovaries, to use Virchow's phrase, but had ovaries because she was female. A male was not male because he had testes; he had testes because he was male. There was neither absolute male nor absolute female. Every male had more or less latent female features, and vice versa. Intensification of this normal intersexualism characterised the disease hermaphroditism, and all degrees were encountered. (p819)”

Cawadias’ daughter Mary had been a Red Cross nurse during the Italian Invasion of Greece in 1940, and after the Germans also invaded in 1941 she was arrested by the SS and condemned to death for assisting the Allies.

Continued in Part II

52 Wimpole St

___________________

Cawadias was first at 52 Wimpole Street, and then at 50. Number 50 was the residence 1838-46 of poet Elizabeth Barrett, lover of poet Robert Browning. Their courtship was immortalised in the play  The Barretts of Wimpole Street, 1930. It was filmed twice, 1934 and 1957, in both cases directed by Sidney Franklin. It was also remade by the BBC in 1982.

The Royal College of Physicians biography of Cawadias (which does not mention intersex even once) says “In 1914, on the nomination of Queen Olga, he had been appointed Chief of the Medical Clinic in the Evangelismos Hospital”. However her husband Geórgios I had been assassinated in 1913 so she was no longer Queen. Their son Konstantínos ruled 1913-17 but was forced out for being pro-German. His second son, Aléxandros ruled 1920-3 until death from a monkey bite. Following a referendum, Konstantínos returned but abdicated in 1922 after Greece lost a war with Turkey. His first son Geórgios II then reigned 1922-4 until a republic was proclaimed. Geórgios then spent most of his time in Britain, and with his English mistress. He divorced his wife in 1935. After the right-wing coup that year and a rigged referendum, Geórgios returned and ruled during the Metaxas dictatorship, giving his consent to the suspension of the parliament, etc.

The Wikipedia page on Theodor Klebs does not mention his work on hermaphrodites. !!

John Campbell/Murray Hall (1850 - 1901) business man, Tammany Hall politician

John Campbell and his younger sister Marie, possibly from Govan, on the Clyde, were orphaned  in 1861.  Marie had worn male clothing due to ‘bad usage’ as a child.   John died two years later when Marie was 13.  He advised her to take his name and his clothes as such would ‘probably enable her the better to make her way in the world’.

In 1869 in Kirknewton, east of Edinburgh, the person now called "John Campbell" married Mary Ann, pregnant and already the mother of two.   

Some months later, in May 1870, John deserted his family.   He found work in Renfrew, adjacent to Govan, east of Glasgow, at the forge of a local shipbuilding company, Henderson, Coulborn & Co.   He lodged with a family and became well-liked for his willingness to help in the home.   He began a relationship with a local woman, Kate, and took her on romantic trips to Edinburgh. 

There was a smallpox epidemic 1870-2 in the Glasgow area.   John attended his landlady when she fell ill.   When the doctor called, he insisted that John needed to be admitted to the infirmary.  John agreed only if he were to remain fully clothed.   The doctor pressed, his suspicions aroused, and John admitted that he was Marie Campbell.   In Kirknewton, parish authorities had sought Mary Ann’s husband.  She had admitted that her husband was a woman, but as her children were not John’s her character was questioned and her claim dismissed.   On hearing the news from Renfrew, it was decided that Mary Ann and a Will Waddel, a witness to the marriage, should accompany the Inspector of the Poor to Renfrew.   John, on seeing Will exclaimed: “Is that you Will Waddel; how’s the wife and bairns?”.   

John was charged with contravening the Registration Act.  Shortly afterwards, John disappeared.

He emigrated to New York, where he gave his name as Murray Hamilton Hall.  The name of his first wife in New York is not documented.   She complained about his flirtations and womanizing, and disappeared mysteriously after a few years.  

Hall soon married again, on Christmas Eve to Celia Lowe, in the Presbyterian Church in Lower 6^th  Ave, and they became US citizens together, 20 October 1875. They adopted a daughter, Imelda, but also known as Millie. Celia, also, complained of his womanizing. Murray ran an employment agency for domestic servants, and also became involved with the Tammany politicians, where he was a member of the General Committee, and was a personal friend of New York State Senator Barney Martin.

Murray was known as a man about town. Although slight and with a rather squeaky voice, he came across as very masculine, and drank and fought within the city political in-crowd. He always wore baggy, rather too large, clothes, and an overcoat even in summer.

Celia died in 1898.

In the US Census of June 1900, Hall listed himself as male, age 60 and that he had immigrated in 1846 from Scotland.  His daughter was listed as Millie, age 20 from Maine. 

Murray Hall suffered cancer of the left breast for many years but avoided medical attention – he said that his declining health resulted from having been knocked down by a bicycle on Fifth Avenue. He purchased a considerable library of medical and surgery books, which he used towards self-treatment and to avoid disclosure. Finally, on his deathbed, he allowed his doctor to examine him closely.

On 19 January the body was buried  at night in an unmarked $12 grave at MountOlivet Cemetery, by his adopted daughter, Imelda.  For the first time since he was 13, the body was dressed in woman’s clothes. 

The inquest was held on the 28^th. Two days of testimony were taken from his doctor and from Imelda.  Imelda continued to refer to her father as ‘he’, and when nudged by the coroner to say ‘she’, She replied: “No … he was always a man to me, and I shall never think of him as a woman”. The all-male jury took just seven minutes to find that Hall had died of natural causes, and was a lady.

Alternate stories of Hall’s life were soon in circulation: that he was John Anderson, born Mary, from Ireland; that he had been born Elizabeth Hall in the lower west side of Manhattan; that he had worked the California gold fields in the 1840s. 

John Campbell:

·         “ ’A Woman Married To A Woman’: Shock Revelations and Intrigue In Victorian Scotland”.  A History of Working-Class Marriage, September 30, 2014.  Online.  The accounts of John Campbell.”

Murray Hall:

·         “Woman Long Posed as Man”. New York Times. Jan 18, 1901. Online at: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5031.
·         “Known as a Man for Sixty Years, She died a Woman: Astounding Life History of Murray Hall, the Sixth Avenue Employment Agent”.  New York Evening World, Jan 18, 1901.  Online. 
·         “Murray Hall Fooled Many Shrewd Men”. New York Times. Jan 19 1901. http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/magic/news/hall.html.
·         “Story of ‘Murray Hall’ told by her adopted daughter: Woman who Masqueraded as a Man for More than Forty Years was Buried Yesterday – Other Similar Cases in History”.  The St Louis Republic, Jan 20 1901.  Online. 
·         “The Murray Hall Case: Possible Solution of New York’s Strange Mystery: The Story of an Old Nurse”.  Goldboro Weekly Argus, Feb 14, 1901.  Online.
·         Havelock Ellis. Sexual Inversion. In Studies In The Psychology Of Sex. Random House. 1936: 246-7.
·         Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. Avon, 1978: 353-361.
·         Karen Abbott, “The Mystery of Murray Hall,” July 21, 2011, Smithsonian.com, Online.
·         Lydia Nelson. “Reanimating Archiving/Archival Corporealities: Deploying ‘Big Ears’ on De Reigeur Mortis Intervention”.  QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1, 2, Summer 2014: 132-159.

__________

The first wife in New York is not named.   There is no reason to assume that she was Kate from Renfrew, but no reason to rule that out either.

Imelda replied  “No … he was always a man to me, and I shall never think of him as a woman”, but only 9 days before had buried him in female clothes.  His sex-gender disparity had come as a shock to her, and she had not had time to think it through.

Imelda ("Story of ‘Murray Hall’ told by her adopted daughter") remembered that her adoptive parents were married on Christmas Eve in the Presbyterian Church in Lower 6^th  Ave, but was not sure which year.   As a variant, Lydia Nelson has a footnote, #55, that they “ were married on Dec. 24, 1872 at the Church of the Strangers on Mercer Street. As of 1901, 'the record [was] on file at the bureau of vital statistics,' according to the Salt Lake Herald, January 27, 1901: 12”.  If this is so, the marriage to the first wife in New York was a matter of months, not years. 

Thank you to Lydia Nelson for discovering the naturalization certificate and the census return of the Halls and including them in her article.   She also worked out where Murray’s unmarked grave is. 

Most writers about Murray Hall take their facts from Havelock Ellis,  Hall was not mentioned in the original 1897 edition of Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion (obviously), but  he was added in the 1915 edition.  Ellis states of Hall: 

“Her real name was Mary Anderson, and she was born in Govan, in Scotland.   Early left an orphan, on the death of her only brother she put on his clothes and went to Edinburgh, working as a man.  Her secret was discovered during an illness, and she finally went to America.”  

He cites the Weekly Scotsman, February 9, 1901 (which unfortunately is not available online).   

This is supported by “The Murray Hall Case: Possible Solution of New York’s Strange Mystery: The Story of an Old Nurse”, cited above in which Mrs Canning, a nurse previously with the Edinburgh Hospital, tells of Mary Anderson whose brother John died and she took his identity.  He went to Govan and there married.   After infidelities and a separation, the wife disclosed that John was a woman, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.  John went to Duddison close to Edinburgh (no such place – did she mean Duddingston?).  Suspected of having smallpox, John was taken into the Edinburgh hospital, and his body discrepancy discovered.  He was arrested on the outstanding warrant.   Edinburgh Hospital had two sections: Hamilton Hall and Murray Hall.   Hence John’s name in New York: Murray Hamilton Hall.  I assume that Canning means the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, established 1729.   However I cannot find confirmation that it had two halls of that name – Google fails to find them, nor are they mentioned in Helen Dingwall’s A History of Scottish Medicine.

John Campbell and John Anderson seem to be two variants of the same tale:

ü  Born Mary or Maria  
ü  Elder brother John who dies
ü  Takes John’s name and clothes
ü  Ellis has John go to Edinburgh; Campbell went to Kirknewton, east of Edinburgh
ü  Wife abandoned, she tells that he is a woman and a warrant is issued
ü  Works in Renfrew or Govan which are only 2 miles apart
ü  John is taken ill in the smallpox epidemic, and his body discovered to be discrepant.

These parallels are almost convincing.   Do we have a claim from 1901 that John Campbell and Murray Hall are the same?  Again Lydia Nelson delivers (p139):  “According to Sir Henry Littlejohn, Edinburgh, Scotland’s Medical Officer of Health, Hall (alias John Campbell) was born an orphan in Govan, Scotland; she wore her dead brother’s clothes to gain employment. (‘Masqueraded in Glasgow,’ Washington Post, January 29, 1901: 1)”.  Littlejohn was Edinburgh’s Medical Officer of Health.   He was also one of the two men who inspired Conan Doyle when he created Sherlock Holmes.  

On the other hand when Murray Hall was registered in the 1900 census he claimed to be 60 (born 1840) and had arrived in the US in 1846 (aged 6).  

Caveat lector!

La Bella Otero (187?–?) performer, sex worker

Luis D, from Madrid, sometimes said that he became homosexual after being seduced by a neighbour. On arrival in Buenos Aires at the end of the 19^th century, she took the name La Bella Otero after the celebrated Spanish actor-dancer.

However in the life history that she wrote for Dr Francisco de Veyga she said that she always considered herself a woman, and had worn female clothing all her life. She had married a man and borne two children before being widowed. De Veyga commented:

“Only exceptionally does he wear male garb, preferring feminine accoutrements, which he wears with ease and even elegance. He leaves his house seldom and generally in a carriage, to avoid tiresome street incidents that would be impossible to evade, given the relative notoriety among the aficionados of the genre”.

Her account was published by de Veyga separately from that of Aurora and Rosita. He commented that Otero did not

“hide very well his desire to figure as a case history in the book on sexual inversion that we are preparing”.

• Francisco de Veyga, "La inversion adquirida-Tipo profesional:' Archivos de Psiquiatria y Criminologia, II, 1903: 493-4.
• Francisco de Veyga, "La inversion sexual congenita:' Archivos de Psiquiatria y Criminologia, I, 1902.
• Jorge Salessi. “The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality, 1890-1914”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4, 3, Jan 1994: 356-8, 361.
• Jorge Salessi & Patrick O’Conner. “For Carnival, Clinic and Camera: Argentina’s Turn of the Century Drag Culture Performs ‘Woman’”. In Diana Taylor & Juan Villegas Morales (eds). Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/O America.Duke University Press, 1994: 266-8.
• María Belén Ciancio & Alejandra Gabriele. “El archivo positivista como dispositivo visual-verbal. Fotografía, feminidad anómala y fabulación”. Mora (Buenos Aires), 18,1, ene/jul 2012. Online.

Aurora (1873? - ?) hairdresser, sex worker

Aurora arrived in Buenos Aires, from Paraguay, in the late 1890s.

He quickly drifted into prostitution, however was arrested only when found brawling in cafes, or when dressed as a female. He was persuaded to become a women’s hair stylist, and as such found work in bordellos. He was arrested several times, but there was never enough evidence for a conviction.

One time Aurora was placed in ‘preventative arrest’ after clients at a costume ball in a bordello became angry in that she was too realistic as a woman.


Aurora’s life history was taken by Dr Francisco de Veyga, and published in 1903. In it she asserts that she was born a marica. De Veyga avoided referring to Aurora as a prostitute: he called her a ‘professional’. He regarded Aurora as having an acquired mental disorientation caused by a misunderstanding of female sexuality.

• Francisco de Veyga. "La inversión sexual adquirida. Tipo de invertido profesional. Tipo de invertido por sugestión. Tipo de invertido por causa de decaimiento mental", Archivos de Psiquiatría y Criminología aplicadas a las ciencias afines. Medicina Legal. Sociología. Derecho. Psicología. Pedagogía, año 2, 1903: .193-208.
• Donna J Guy. Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina. University of Nebrasca Press, 1991:86.
• Jorge Salessi. “The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality, 1890-1914”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4,3,Jan 1994: 356, 359-363. .
• Osvaldo Bazán. La historia de la homosexualidad en la Argentina: De la Conquista al siglo XXI. Marea, 2006: 127.
• Kristen Loehr. Tranvestites in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Poverty & Policy. MA Thesis, Georgetown University, 2007: 30.
• Matthew J Edwards. Queer Argentina: Movement Towards the Closet in a Global Time. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: 13-7.
• María Belén Ciancio & Alejandra Gabriele. “El archivo positivista como dispositivo visual-verbal. Fotografía, feminidad anómala y fabulación”. Mora (Buenos Aires), 18,1, ene/jul 2012. Online.

________________________________________

Francisco de Veyga writing in 1903, several years before Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten, 1910, uses the word 'travestida' (tranvestite). 

Ellie Zara Ley (1974–) surgeon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drs Meltzer & Ley

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

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

Stefánie Faludi (1927 – 2015) photographer

István Friedman was raised by prosperous Jewish parents in Budapest. However with the coming of anti-Semitic fascism in the 1930s, all was lost. 17-year-old István became a legend in his family when in 1944, wearing a stolen armband of the fascist Arrow Cross, and carrying an empty gun, he removed his parents from a holding building for Jews, and supplied them with with false papers which enabled them to live in an abandoned flat in Pest.

At the end of the war, István changed his surname to Faludi (Magyar for ‘of the village’), and was part of a youth film club, and he and two other members were able to get to Denmark, initially to replenish the Hungarian film stock.

After an idiosyncratic alteration to their passports, they were able to get on a ship to Rio de Janeiro. Through Hungarian expatriates and luck they were able to talk themselves into a team that did photography for the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, which involved journeys by canoe and plane across the Mato Grosso. They applied for visas to the US, but when they came through after three years in 1953, only István used it. His childhood sweetheart had also survived the war, and was living in New York. However on arrival he found that she was engaged to another.

Faludi, now calling himself Steven (English for István) lived in a cheap room in the Upper West Side, and found darkroom work for the photo departments of Manhattan advertising agencies. He met his wife Marilyn at a Jewish émigré cocktail party in 1957. They married six weeks later in a Reform synagogue. They acquired a house in Yorktown Heights, outside New York City, and had a son and a daughter. From the 1960s onward Faludi largely worked in the Condé Nast’s art production department doing difficult darkroom alterations for the photography that appeared in Vogue, Glamour, House & Garden, Vanity Fair, Brides. Susan Faludi (p7): “I’d always known my father to assert the male prerogative. He had seemed invested—insistently, inflexibly, and, in the last year of our family life, bloodily—in being the household despot. We ate what he wanted to eat, traveled where he wanted to go, wore what he wanted us to wear. Domestic decisions, large and small, had first to meet his approval.”

By 1976 the Faludis were separated. Later that year he broke into Marilyn’s house, and badly assaulted the man she had started seeing. He then claimed he had saved his family from an intruder, and got off with a small fine. He even claimed to be the wronged party at the divorce trial, and avoided alimony. After the 1977 divorce, Faludi moved into a Manhattan loft that was also his commercial photo studio.

In 1990, after the end of the Communist regime, Faludi visited his parents in Israel, the only time that he ever did so. He then moved to Budapest. He attempted to get the deeds of the buildings that the family used to own in Budapest, and then attempted to reclaim the buildings, but without success.

In 2004, at age 76, Faludi, now using the name Stefánie, had vaginoplasty and breast augmentation with Dr Sanguan Kunaporn in Phuket, Thailand. At this stage she had minimal experience of going out as a women – she had done this mainly in Vienna, rather than Budapest. As she did not have psychologists’ letters that approved her for surgery, Faludi wrote a letter as if from a Hungarian friend, and this was accepted by Dr Kunaporn. She also deducted 10 years from her age, in case she was rejected for being too old. Faludi flew out in men’s clothes and with women’s clothes for after surgery, and with several cameras, a tripod, a videocam, a computer and DVD player, and a suitcase full of films, music, and opera recordings. Faludi was able to persuade Kunaporn’s staff to film the operation.

Afterwards she spent time recovering in Melanie’s Cocoon in Phuket, a guesthouse run by Melanie Myers from Portland, Oregon, who had had the same operation from Dr Kunaporn as well as facial feminization from Douglas Ousterhout in San Francisco, which resulted in her losing her job as a commercial printing salesman. The guesthouse was aimed at trans women, and Mel passed her business card to Kunaporn’s patients. Stefánie was by far the oldest guest.

As Dr Kunaporn’s Post-Operative Medical Certificate specified 1937 as birth year, Stefánie used her professional skills to make an altered copy with the correct birth year so that she could change her Hungarian birth certificate.

Susan and Stefánie 

Later in 2004, after a quarter century of non communication, Stefánie contacted her daughter Susan Faludi who had become a well-known author with her books Backlash, 1991, and Stiffed, 1999. Susan visited her father in Budapest several times, and wrote up her discovery of he father’s womanhood and of Hungary in the 2016 book In the Darkroom.

Stefánie died at the age of 88.

• Susan Faludi. In the Darkroom. Henry Holt and Company, 2016.
• Marcie Bianco, Raewyn Connell, Jay Prosser, Susan Stryker & Judit Takács. “Short Takes: Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom”. Signs Journal, 2016. Online.
• Laura Miller. “Susan and Stefánie”. The Slate Book Review, June 10, 2016. Online.
• Michelle Goldberg. “Susan Faludi’s ‘In the Darkroom’”. The New York Times, June 16, 2016. Online.
• Rachel Cooke. “In the Darkroom review – an elegant masterpiece”. The Guardian, 19 June 2016. Online.
• Kay Brown. “In the Dark Room”. On the Science of Changing Sex, June 23, 2016. Online.
• Louise Adler. “In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi: dealing with Stefanie, her father”. The Australian, September 3, 2016. Online.
• Stacia Friedman. “book review: susan faludi’s ‘in the darkroom’”. Women’s Voices for Change, October 24, 2016. Online.

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

While there is some information about the trans scene and persons in Hungary, there is nothing about Hungary's best-known trans persons: the 19^th-century novelist Sándor Vay; the artist Anton Prinner who left for Paris in 1927; Charlotte Bach who left Hungary at about the same time as Faludi pere and became a theorist of gender. Nor is there any mention of Desiré Dubounet, an immigrant from the US who settled in Budapest.

A few years later Melanie reverted to being Mel so that he could marry his Thai girlfriend and get her into the US.

In 2003, as part of the preparation to join the European Union, Hungary passed the Equal Treatment Act. They were so eager that they added extra categories: in addition to race, religion and sex they included ‘family status’, ‘motherhood’, ‘fatherhood’, ‘circumstances of wealth and birth’, ‘social origin’, ‘state of health’, ‘language’, ‘part-time work status’, and ‘trade union representatives’. They also added ‘gender identity’, which made Hungary the first country in the world to do so. However the legislation was very far in front of public opinion, and while gender changes are legally recognized, public acceptance is low.  Susan Faludi does not mention any case of a Hungarian trans person being able to use the law.

Susan Faludi, as is to be expected, gives a potted history of trans surgery. Then very briefly, p151, she brings in Michael Bailey and takes his side. Transgender activists ‘hounded’ him and his supporters. Why they would do so is not explained. Susan has entered an ongoing controversy and given only one side.  She is, of course, on thin ice here. If she thinks that Bailey’s position is defensible or even cogent, then she must think that her father was an autogynephile, but she quite avoids saying so. Kay Brown of course makes this explicit, and reasonably complains that she leaves “the reader with the notion that perhaps ALL MTF transfolk are like her father” - but then it is probably true that most biographies of their nature present their protagonist as some kind of exemplar.

Stefánie Faludi was a photographer.   There are a lot of descriptions in the book of photographs, but the book itself contains no photographs at all except for one of the author on the back flap.

Twice in the book, Susan tells us why we say Hallo on the phone: “Hallo. As my father liked to note, the telephone salutation was the coinage of Thomas Edison’s assistant, Tivadar Puskás, the inventor of the phone exchange, who, as it happened, was Hungarian. ‘Hallom!’ Puskás had shouted when he first picked up the receiver in 1877, Magyar for ‘I hear you!’.” I was unable to confirm this.

H.H. (185? - ?) musician, circus performer

From 1899 to 1923 Magnus Hirschfeld was editor of the  Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen.   In 1901, volume 3, he published "Vom Weibmann auf der Bühne" (Women-man on the stage), by Dr W.S.*, a study of 15 Damenimitatoren (female impersonators).   They are referred to by a series of double initials: A.A.,  B.B., etc.    The 8th is therefore H.H.  We have no no other name for her.

According to H.H.'s own account, his parents died when he was young.  He left school and Germany, and worked his way to the US as a ship's boy.

In New York he became a musician, a flautist, but was unable to find a  place in a men’s orchestra. However, presenting as female, H.H. was engaged by a women’s band and chorus (Damenkapelle). She travelled for several years with this band as a flute player, without being read.

Eventually, H.H. left this post, but she felt so natural in female clothes that she continued so. She worked in succession as a chambermaid, a soda-seller, a waitress, and a buffet-maid.  She then joined a circus, and advanced quickly from an extra to performing as an equestrian acrobat.  A fall from the horse, which stretched a tendon, put an end to this. However she then became a female musical clown in the circus, and later formed a singing group with other women, in which she sang the second voice.

In later life, back in Germany H.H. worked as a Damenimitator.

Dr W.S. commented that H.H. was  "A very strong character, when dressed as a man he was almost tough.  Not at all sweet or affective. Dressed as a woman, as he now preferred on the street, he was graceful, amiable, and so confident that one would hardly believe his story."

• Dr. med. W.S.  "Vom Weibmann auf der Bühne".  Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 3, 1901: 313-325.  Online.
• Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. University of Philadelphia Press 1993:  223n16,

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

The Bulloughs - who claim 'no author' for the article although it clearly says 'Dr. med. W. S.', further propose that Hirschfeld "was probably also the author of the article, since it was his custom to write articles without attribution for the journal".  

Modern readers would want to know how H.H. managed to pass, at close quarters with a travelling band, without electrolysis and without female hormones.   Dr W.S. shows no interest in this aspect.
Possible she was one of the lucky few like Rachel Harlow or April Ashley who appear female even before attempting transition.

I hope that H.H. getting a job only in a female band does not imply lower standards in female orchestras.   Just as likely is that as an immigrant, H.H. was not accepted by the male musician unions.

Would a cis male disguise as female in this way to get a job and keep up the disguise day and night (when travelling) for several years?   While such a situation is a common trope in fiction, and also in cross-dreaming, I am not able to find a real-life example of such,   However if H.H. were trans she would be delighted with the opportunity. 

There is a passing resemblance to the plot of Some Like It Hot, 1959, but that was 70 years later.  

Terre Thaemlitz (1968 - ) musician, DJ.

Originally from Missouri, where his first social musical experiences were at roller-discos, Terre moved to New York at the end of the 1980s to study fine art, and became a DJ immersed in the queer house scene.

Terre became a resident at the trans hangout Sallys II. Sallys was a

“site of education, where people could share information about their transitioning experiences. There were times when you really learned things on a political level, on a social level – that’s what’s interesting. Music is usually one of the least interesting things about clubs. (quoted in Hutchinson)”

“I was identifying as Transgendered at that point. Before that I had identified as Queer in sexual terms. If I had to identify, I’d identify as Transgendered rather than male but yeah, back in the Nineties, by the time I was at Sally’s, I was identifying as Transgendered. The scene at Sally’s was dominated by Transsexuals. For a person like myself, who is not interested in surgery or hormone therapy, there was a lot of pressure to dress and look a certain style that I just couldn’t. So, I don’t think most of the people at Sally’s even knew that I was Transgendered-identified at that time. (quoted in Petros)“

Terre was fired from Sallys and other trans clubs for refusing to play music that was in the charts, particularly “wailing diva stuff”. By 1994 Terre was known as a composer in the ambient/ computer synthesis field, and established her own Comatinse label. By 1998 she was also releasing music as DJ Sprinkles.

The first DJ Sprinkles single, ‘Sloppy 42nds’ was subtitled “A Tribute to the 42nd Street transsexual clubs destroyed by Walt Disney’s buyout of Times Square”.

In interview with Carlos Pozo, Terre explained:

“Anti-essentialist transgenderism is about an appropriation and recontextualization of cultural signifiers around gender. Anti-essentialist refers to an outlook that does not believe in an inherent "essence" or content, as opposed to an essentialist transgendered outlook that one is "trapped" in the wrong body, etc. I think computer synthesis is also very much about appropriation and recontextualization, drawing from external audio sources and materials much like quotations in a book. There is no essentialist core of creativity, or sense of originality - but there can be an awareness of difference and change. So from my experience, transgenderism and computer synthesis definitely have resonations between them. When you ask about fetishization, are you asking about people fetishizing or tokenizing my music as "Queer" above any other contents? I haven't really seen that happen.

I like to think when I talk about Queer issues in my projects they arise in a complex way that doesn't reduce easily. Queer sensibility, as opposed to Lesbian and Gay sensibility, is also about anti-essentialist appropriation (the appropriation of a derogatory term to reference a notion of one's sexuality being inextricably tied to a larger social condition) and notions of pan-sexual diversity, not rigid Heterosexual vs. Homosexual binarisms. To be honest, I'm not sure how much of that gets across to people who equate Queer with Gay, but I haven't really sensed any problems with negative over-simplification. All of these ideas are simultaneously about processes of identification and processes of transition between points of identification, so that inability to solidify an essentialist identity can lead to misrepresentation or offending those with essentialist outlooks, but you can't worry about that or it will socially paralyze you.”

Terre moved to San Francisco and then to Japan, where she released material under the K-S.H.E. alias. On the Routes Not Roots album, one track, ”Saki-Chan”, incorporates a monologue from a Japanese transsexual, and in “Stand-Up” Thaemlitz tells how she was beaten senseless by Latino queens in New York. Terre has become an established figure in the Japanese house scene, and many of her releases are Japan-only.







In 2004 she recorded Trans-Sister Radio for radio. Her 2012 album Soulnessless is the “world’s longest album in history”, a 29-hour piano solo split into five cantos. It was released on an SD card, and comes with a 150-page commentary.

Her debut mix CD, 2013, “Where Dancefloors Stand Still”, protested Japan’s restrictive fuzoku law (prohibiting dancing in clubs beyond 1am).

“It seems that the queer factor of today’s house events is really low,” she says. “If you’re in the US and it’s a straight, white club then it’s just a fucking nightmare. These events are the celebration grounds for heteronormativity. There is a historic connection between queerness and deep house, and also things like transgenderism and vogue, that, to me, was really important – and it’s utterly absent.” It’s not just about the music having broader appeal, either: “It has to do with this cultural shift away from the necessity to actually have clubs function as safe spaces for different types of sexual enactment. (quoted in Hutchinson)”

Carlos Pozo asked: “Is Terre Thaemlitz your real [sic] name?” And got the answer: “Yes, the family name was a little mangled by US immigration several generations back (it was originally Thamlitz). As for the spelling of my first name (pronounced "Terry"), I think my parents were trying to name me after St. Teresa of the Roses, but they didn't want to spell it "Terri" because that's for GIRLS, and they didn't want to spell it "Terry" because that refers to St. Terence, or something weird like that. This whole gender-ambiguity thing goes way back! It's made for lots of free tampon mailings over the years.”

Terre suggests to Kate Hutchinson that “if pronouns really have to be used, Terre is ‘she’ and Sprinkles is ‘he’”.

• Interview with Carlos Pozo. Furious, Feb 1998. www.furious.com/perfect/terrethaemlitz.html.
• Terre Thaemlitz. “Collateral Damage”. Wire, January 2012. www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/collateral-damage_terre-thaemlitz.
• “Terre Thaemlitz, DJ & Producer”. In George Petros. The New Transsexuals: The Next Step in Human Evolution. Creation Books, 2012.  Online  
• Interview with Ryan Diduck. The Quietus, June 20^th, 2012. http://thequietus.com/articles/09107-terre-thaemlitz-interview-soulnessless-dj-sprinkles.
• Kate Hutchinson. “DJ Sprinkles: ‘Music is the least interesting thing about clubs’”. The Guardian, 25 October 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/25/dj-sprinkles-terre-thaemlitz.

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