Mowry Saben/Ralph Werther/Earl Lind/Jennie June (1870 - 1950) journalist, female impersonator

(This article builds on the October 2022 article in OutHistory “Who Was Jennie June?” by Channing Gerard Joseph Online.  I accept Joseph’s argument that Mowry Saben and Jennie June were the same person, and integrate the two biographies. June – in her Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Female Impersonators – slightly altered the facts of her life such as claiming to be from Connecticut rather than Massachusetts, and that she attended an “uptown” university (presumably Columbia) in New York rather than Harvard. She also altered her birth year from 1870 to 1874. This creates problems: if she says that she was 19, is this 1889 or 1894?

Pronouns? Some writers use he/she for Jennie June which is cumbersome; some use he/him as that is what June did in her own writings. I will use he/him for the Mowry Saben persona and she/her for the Jennie June persona.

AJUS= American Journal of Urology and Sexology; Auto=Autobiography of an Androgyne)

Part I: early life

Part II: publications

Part III:  comments and bibliography 

Israel Mowry Saben was raised in Uxbridge, Massachusetts in a strict Puritan family. Israel was his father and grandfather’s Christian name, and Mowry was his paternal grandmother’s maiden name. His sister three years younger was Jennie May. The father was a noted mathematician, who was disappointed that his son had no talent in that direction. However, his private education gave Mowry fluency in Latin, French and German.

At age 14 Mowry became ‘God-intoxicated’ and attended seven religious services a week in addition to college chapel. He was the leader of prayer groups, preached from the pulpit and spent two hours a day in private devotions. He then realized that he was a ‘female impersonator’ – he told this to his family physician, who did not understand the nature of such, and suggested finding a girlfriend.

In 1891 Saben attended Harvard, at first in the college and then the law school. He became a friend of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. He still did preach in the slums. He also became an assistant to the lawyer, Clark Bell who among other cases was representing a ‘cultured and moneyed fellator’ who was being blackmailed by a young man whom he had pleasured. Clark Bell was also the editor of the Medico-Legal Journal.

In the summer of 1892, Saben’s other persona, Jennie June, emerged for a ‘First Nocturnal Ramble’ to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, and then to the New Bowery. She met Red Mike for the first time.

Later that year, not sure what to make of his androgynous nature, Saben consulted three New York medical professors, two of whom were Drs Prince A Morrow and Robert S Newton. In her third book, Jennie June wrote: 

"The alienist Dr. Robert S. Newton was the third physician whom I consulted but the first who had any inkling of the true nature of my malady. His frankness put an end to my chronic melancholia. I thenceforth merely suffered from it at rare intervals. I ceased the worse than useless longing and praying for a different nature than it had seemed good to the All Wise to predestinate. The alienist opened my eyes. He taught me that the androgyne’s proclivities are not the depth of depravity that every one, even the two preceding medical advisers, had previously given me to understand." 

The other, unnamed, physician 

“gave me to understand as early as 1892 that my case was a remarkable one. This pronouncement incited me still further to keep a record of what life brought me with a view to writing an autobiography some day.”

In November 1892 and April 1893, Jennie June again did a ‘Nocturnal Ramble’ to New York’s Mulberry Street and Grand. Her ‘Fairie Apprenticeship Begins‘. She lived with Red Mike who took much of her money and abused her. She found a gig performing in a night club. (See ‘The Female Impersonator”, AJUS, June 1919). She gave out that her male name was Ralph Werther (from the painter Raphael and Goethe’s famous melancholiac). Saben finally gave up preaching and all church work.

In May, towards the end of his second year Saben was expelled from Harvard, possibly after the police broke up an all-male gathering in his room (Channing Joseph on Mowry Saben), but later other explanations were given: a ‘Nervous Breakdown’ (Auto p99) or “I was expelled from the university for being an androgyne, I came within an ace of suicide although believing that none of my family even suspected my expulsion; I having explained that my New York physician had ordered me to rest my brain on account of neurasthenia, which malady the expulsion had immediately occasioned as a matter of fact”. (II: "The Boy Is Father to the Man”) or “But the faculty, through an accident, finally discovered it [female impersonation] and immediately expelled me”.(‘The Female Impersonator’, AJUS, June 1919) or “The wreck of my happy and highly successful student-career was now brought about by a physician whom I had consulted in hope of a cure for my inversion, but not one of the two gentlemen already named. He happened to number the president of the university among his friends, and whispered to him that I ought not to be continued as a student. I was immediately expelled.” (Auto p139)

“In a few weeks I was penniless and a shelterless wanderer on the streets in midwinter. I was driven for shelter to the Bowery, because there alone lodging could be obtained for fifteen cents, and a big meal of coarse and even disgusting food for ten cents.” (Autobiography, p141) Saben was living as Jennie June and the life of a low-class fairie. "The fact that I could now satisfy every day my instinctive yearnings to pass for a female and spend six evenings a week in the company of adolescent ruffians went far towards counterbalancing the many tears I had to shed when there was nothing to divert my thoughts from my condition of an outcast and an outlaw. I never coquetted on Sunday evenings, which I devoted to worship of my Creator at some mission.” (Auto p143)

Jennie also had adventures with soldiers, even visiting them at their army camps. This led to sanctions, leading June to stop using the Ralph Werther name when seeking men or approaching doctors, and using Earl Lind instead – although the books and journal articles that she published in the 1910s carried the Werther name.

One night Jennie met a group of men who took her into a groggery near Water Street in south Manhattan, and gang raped her. 

“I was at last rendered unable to be on my feet owing to spinal trouble, and to excruciating pain in the anus whenever I attempted to walk. I was compelled to enter a hospital.”

Saben returned home. His father’s antagonism had softened. 

“Of course I never gave a true account of our period of estrangement.” (Auto p158).

What happened next is discrepant between the biographies of Saben and June.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal

• In 1894 Saben is said to have gone to England and studied at Oxford. He was there during the Oscar Wilde trials, during which he was obliged to petition for bankruptcy having liabilities of £388/16/6 after his father stopped his remittances (attested in the Jackson’s Oxford Journal). Somehow he was then able to travel to Germany and study at Heidelberg University.
• June wrote (Auto p173, 168) that her male persona became an amanuensis to a millionaire septuagenarian and the two were five months in Europe.

By the end of the decade/century Saben/June was back in the US, and in 1899 finally started writing an autobiography re their experiences as an Androgyne – although it will be 20 years before it is published. 

"But in 1900, as soon as I had this autobiography ready, I submitted it to Mr. [Anthony] Comstock in order to ascertain whether it could be circulated. He was then a Post-Office Department inspector, with power to prosecute for shipping 'obscene' matter by common carrier. He read considerable of the manuscript of this book, and stated . . . that he would have 'destroyed' it but for the fact that I impressed him 'as a person not having any evil intent." (Auto, page 24.)

Werther/June arranged to be castrated (orchiectomy) giving the reason that he suffered from spermatorrhoea. Although in his introduction to the first Werther-June book, Alfred Herzog later commented: 

“My belief is, that, feeling as a woman, desiring to be a woman and wishing to seem as much as possible like a woman to his male paramours, he hated above all the testicles, those insignia of manhood, and had them removed to be more alike to that which he wished to be”.

As Saben he became an established speaker travelling across the country giving lectures on Emmerson, Whitman, Goethe, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, religion and freedom. One of these lectures, The twilight of the gods, was published in 1903. The lecture series segued into working for newspapers, both as an editorial writer and freelancing.

An approach was made to two more doctors in New York. The first was Robert Shufeldt, an ornithologist, army doctor and eugenicist. A person using the name Earl Lind, presented a manuscript to Shufeldt by the said-to-be recently deceased Ralph Werther – also known as Jennie June. Shufeldt described Werther in a July 1905 paper in the Pacific Medical Journal: 

“Ralph Werther throughout his brief life had, in all anatomical particulars, the form of a man, though bearing to some extent the impress of the opposite sex. His psychic nature always remained distinctly that of a girl, and that, too, of a very amorous and passionate girl. In fact, he was a girl with the body of a boy. Intellectual and educated to a high degree, she passed through the most remarkable life-experience imaginable, from childhood to the day of self-destruction, which occurred before 30 years of age.  During this time, the wonderfully interesting subject of this account kept a very full diary, and scores upon scores of letters, and other matters calculated to shed ample light upon the terrible cruelties and tortures he had passed through.” 

Shufeldt however did realize that Lind and Werther were the same person, and persuaded the same to pose for nude photographs.

Dr William Lee Howard also met with Jennie June, and wrote a 1905 paper about her, “Two Souls in One Body: A Realistic But Scientific Account of a True Psychological”, in The Arena, where she is referred to as Jennie/Karl.

Also that year, Werther/Saben was diagnosed with syphilis, and was seriously assaulted by a gang of boys. He considered taking them to court, but was advised not to.

Gina Chua (1960 - ) journalist

Chua was born in Singapore, educated in the Philippines, did a bachelors’s degree in mathematics at the Universityof Chicago and a master’s in journalism at Columbia University in New York. Chua worked at the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation and the Straits Times, was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Manila and Hanoi, and later served as editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal Asia and the South China Morning Post. Chua served as a senior editor for The Wall Street Journal in New York, and began working for Reuters in 2011, where Chua introduced new tools and built top-class data and graphics teams.

After earlier confiding in her boss and a few others, she transitioned, at age 60, in late 2020 while working at home during the Covid lockdown. She informed her colleagues by email, and Reuters changed her profile photo and gender on their website. Chua changed her English name from Reginald to Gina, but left her Chinese name, which she chooses to keep private, unchanged.

Following new reports about her transition, Chua has been getting emails from parents about their trans children, about themselves, and from colleagues themselves thinking about transition.

She was appointed executive editor of Reuters in April 2021, a newly created role. A year later she left Reuters to become the executive editor of Semafor, a new media startup.

In December 2023 she wrote:

“If 2023 is anything to go by, 2024 will see a continued wave of attacks on trans people, driven by politicians who believe they can weaponize our existence as a wedge issue to electoral success and victory in the “culture wars.”

And if 2023 is anything to go by, I predict 2024 will continue to see many mainstream news organizations unwittingly and unquestioningly accept and adopt those right-wing frames and talking points in their coverage, contributing to falling public support for trans rights, and more broadly for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized communities.

I hope desperately that I’m wrong. But I fear I’ll be right.”

• “Reuters appoints Gina Chua as executive editor”. Reuters, 21 April 2021. Online.
• Jillian Eugenios. “At the helm at Reuters, this trans executive says she's finally living in the light”. NBC News, June 1, 2020. Online.
• Katie Robertson. “A Top Editor Becomes Her ‘True Self’ “. New York Times, June 4, 2021. Online.
• Juwan Holmes. “Reuters’ Gina Chua is hoping to stage a future where trans people flourish in media”. LGBTG Nation, July 21, 2021. Online.

Singapore LGBT encyclopedia Wiki     EN.Wikipedia     Thomson Reuters    ginachua.me    LinkedIn

  Muck Rack    Twitter   

Barry Farber (1930-2020) radio host

Turnabout #7 Summer 1966 p32, Siobhan Fredericks wrote: 

“the subject of transvestism in general and TURNABOUT Magazine in particular received a good deal of welcome publicity this July when the publisher of TURNABOUT was interviewed by Barry Farber on his The Barry Farber Show on WOR RKO General radio. The ninety-minute program was aired "live" in fourteen of the United States and broadcast via syndicated tape in outlets in thirty other states. …

The Farber interview was arranged by Lyle Stuart, publisher of A YEAR AMONG THE GIRLS - reviewed in TURNABOUT #6 . Farber had done his homework well. He'd read the book thoroughly and familiarized himself with TURNABOUT in advance of the broadcast. He was so favorably impressed with both the book and this magazine that he expanded the originally scheduled forty-five minute interview to a full ninety minutes.

Farber proved to be a fine interviewer, open-minded and most understanding, and we were able to get the subject matter onto a fairly sophisticated level from the start. The first half of the program involved only the two of us; the second forty-five minute segment brought in Dr. Tom Levin, assistant professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein Medical College, who aimed some intelligent, if long-winded, questions at me.

This was the first time a radio discussion of TVism reached a national audience, but it was actually the second time TVism had been aired on radio, for in January 1965 I participated in a panel discussion on New York's listener-sponsored station, WBAI- FM, with such eminent persons as Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, co-author of the Kinsey reports and presently doing research on transsexualism with the Harry Benjamin Foundation.”

In Transvestia #51, June 1968, Virginia Prince wrote: 

“Monday evening I did the Barry Farber show on WOR which turned out pretty well. Not as well as I would have liked because Barry used up a good deal of time on irrelevant matters and there is never enough time anyway. I did learn that his show is syndicated to about 15 other cities too so we got some extra coverage that way.”

Turnabout #10 p25: 

“In March of 1975, Mr. Farber again dared to beard the smug lion of sacro-sanct normalcy, by having a whole section of his program devoted to the various aspects of Transvestism. Interestingly enough, this subject followed immediately after a discussion, by a Deputy Police Chief from the Times Square area, of the problems of prostitution and other illegal sexual activities in mid-town New York.

For the second discussion of transvestism, the panel included a psychiatrist who specialized in transvestite and trans-sexual cases, a trans-sexual, the wife of a transvestite, a transvestite, and the proprietor of a TV boutique in mid-town Manhattan. That group would seem to be able to cover all bases in discussing the subject which concerns us.”

So who was Barry Farber?

Farber was born in Baltimore and raised in North Carolina. He had a knack for languages, and, to varying extents, picked up 25 of them, and published a book, How to Learn Any Language. He attended the Zagreb Peace Conference, 1951 in Yugoslavia, and the 1952 Summer Olympic Games in Helsinki. As a newspaper reporter in 1956, Farber was invited by the US Air Force to cover the airlift of Hungarian refugees from the uprising in Hungary that year. By 1960 he had his first talk show; in 1962 he had an evening talk show on radio station WOR in New York, and in 1967 he became an all-night host, also on WOR.

His first wife was Norwegian, and for some years he was an advocate for Norwegian-style social democracy, and at that time supported the US Democrat Party. However in 1970 he ran for the the U.S. House of Representatives in New York City's 19th district as the candidate of the Republican and Liberal parties, and in 1977 he ran for New York City Mayor for the Conservative Party - in both cases receiving only a small percentage of the votes.

Despite his turn to the right, he - like Lyle Stuart - believed in free speech, and, in addition to transvestites, had featured in the 1960s Frank Kameny the pioneer gay activist, and Anton LaVey of the Church of Satan in 1969. And, August 22, 1972, the day that John Wojtowicz did what came to be called the Dog Day Afternoon bank robbery, he was phoned in the bank by journalist Arthur Bell, who later that evening went on Farber’s program to discuss what he knew.

Farber remained active in broadcasting until May 5, 2020, the day before his 90th birthday. On the 6th he died at home.

Books by Barry Farber

• Making People Talk: You Can Turn Every Conversation into a Magic Moment (William Morrow & Co: 1987)

• How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own (Carol Publishing Corporation: 1991)

• How to Not Make the Same Mistake Once (Barricade Books: 1999)

• Cocktails with Molotov: An Odyssey of Unlikely Detours (WND Books: 2012)

Emi Wolters (Luz Fraumann) performer (186? - ?)

Wolters wore girls’ clothing until the start of school, and still then during vacations: she was called Hanne by the farm personnel and still later by grandfather. At the age of 13, her custody was transferred to an uncle, a professor. And the wearing of female clothing was stopped completely. Wolter’s voice did not change until the age of 20, and there was no beard growth until age 25. 

As a man Wolters took a wife, and developed a career on stage. By 1906 Wolters had written Weiberbeute, a forced-femininity novel about a mannish woman who hypnotises her stepson to think that he is a woman. She then induces a phantom pregnancy on him, and persuades him that her son is his. Her death-bed confession is dismissed by her victim as delusion. The novel was published in Budapest under the pseudonym Luz Fraumann. 

Magnus Hirschfeld included Wolters as Case #3 in his 1910 Die Transvestiten where she is referred to as Mr C. Hirschfeld also gives an extended quotation from Weiberbeute. 

During the Great War, Wolters (under her male name of Emil Mauder) was a senior lieutenant in the German army, and was taken captive by the Russians. 

In the 1920s Wolters became a well-known columnist in the trans magazines, Die Freundin and Das 3, Geschlecht. She wrote the following in Die Freundin in 1931.

“Dear Sister Ilse P.! I am one of the oldest and first cases of medical advisor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and I know from forty years of experience that even this great researcher in sexuality had first had to learn from us and how he changed his original views and findings. [...] But above all, dear fellow sisters, you should read up on the transvestite literature (I mean especially the scientific literature!). Dr. Hirschfeld has worked hard and thoroughly for us. The fact that he previously described the cross-dressing drive as pathological, and coined the not entirely accurate word "transvestitism" etc. is nothing essential, but came from developments in this field.“ 

In 1932 she drew upon more than 100 letters sent into Die Freudin, as well as newspaper reports and Hirschfeld’s Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges (Sexual History of the World War), 1930, to highlight patriotic deeds and courage under fire of both trans men and trans women. Also that year she wrote an account of how the English Queen Elizabeth Tudor had been biologically male.

++The next year, after the Nazi takeover, Wolters was mentioned several times as a correspondent and contributing author during the trial of fellow trans person Anton Maier, but was not herself arrested.

• Luz Frauman.Weiberbeute:Ein merkwürdiger Roman. Budapest: Verlag von M. W. Schneider, 1906.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Materia.  Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910: 18-25, 171-7. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Prometheus Books, 1991: 27-32, 132-9.
• Emi von Wolters. “Die Welt der Transvestism”. Die Freundin, 7, 26, 1931.
• Emi Wolters, “Transvestiten im Weltkriege [8-part series, 24 February to 13April 1932, in ‘Die Welt der Transvestiten’ supplement],” Die Freundin 8, nos. 8 to 15 (1932).
• Emi Wolters. “Ein Transvestit als Königin”. Das 3, Geschlect,5, May 1932: 16-25.
• Annette Runte. Biographische Operationen : Diskurse der Transsexualität.Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996: 131,412, 568, 582.
• Graham Robb. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. WW Norton & Company, 2003: 205.
• Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005: 35.
• Rainer Herrn. "Transvestitismus in der NS-Zeit – Ein Forschungsdesiderat".  Zeitschrift fur Sexualforschung, 26, 2013: 349.
• Katie Sutton. Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s–1930s. University of Michigan Press, 2019: 115, 193, 196, 257n96, 284n109
• “Luz Fraumann (Hirschfeld 3)”. Lili Elbe library. Online.

Karl M. Baer (1885 – 1956) journalist, accountant, manager, Hirschfeld patient

Baer was born in Arolson, Hesse, Germany, to a Jewish family, and was assigned female and raised with the name Martha. After a childhood of not fitting in with other girls and preferring to play with boys, her puberty was odd in that she grew facial hair, her voice changed and she never menstruated or grew breasts - she thought that perhaps she had tuberculosis. 

After school, Baer was trained in economics, sociology and pedagogy in Berlin and Hamburg, and became a social worker and feminist activist in B’nai B'rith working against the sexual trafficking of Jewish women. In 1904 she was sent to Lemberg (later Lwow, now Lviv which was then in Galacia) but was sent back early after censure about her male body language. 

By 1905 Baer was living as male. He smoked and drank beer, and was in love with Beile Heilpern Waldberg from Czernowitz, a married woman whom he had met in Lemberg, and who had been supportive in his gender change. They were even contemplating joint suicide, when Karl was hit by a tram and was admitted to the Berlin Charité Hospital. Inspection resulted in him being moved - under protest - to the women’s special ward. He came to the attention of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose opinion that he was mainly male was seconded by Dr Iwan Bloch. Surgery by Dr Georg Merzbach corrected his body to male as far as was possible in 1905, releasing a penis and one testicle. Baer was discharged with a medical certificate confirming his male identity, and an endorsement by Magnus Hirschfeld. In the jargon of the time, he was deemed to be a male pseudo-hermaphrodite.

To get the State to endorse the change of documented birth sex, a wax form was made of the corrected external genital area and taken with a report by Hirschfeld to be inspected by the Minister for the Interior, and since now this was clearly not a female, the Minister conceded to the request for a correction of documents. Hirschfeld gave a lecture on Baer and two others, with Baer present, for Wochenschrift für soziale Medizin, Hygiene und Medizinalstatistik, 1905, using the pseudonym “Anna Laabs” for Baer, and worked with him on his book, a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical account published under the name N. O. Body. The book was called Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren (Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years). The account in the book said that Body was French Catholic rather than Jewish, born in Bergheim in Saxony-Thuringia, and named Nora later Norbert.

In January 1907 Baer received his revised birth certificate. He gave his name as Karl M Baer. Initially the M was for Martha, but later he said that it was for Max.

He wrote accounts of the trafficking in women for the magazine Arena and for the journal  Sexualwissenschaft Nr. 9, and then a book on the topic, published by Seemann Nachf in Berlin, all in 1908.

Beile sued for divorce from her husband, Herr Waldberg, who raised the question whether Beile’s affair with Baer should equally be considered adultery as Baer was apparently actually a man. The divorce was granted and she and Karl married. However she died of pneumonia in March 1909. This led to a new court case in that the Heilpern family contested - albeit unsuccessfully - Baer’s inheritance on the grounds that he was not a man.

Karl then married Beile’s friend Elza.

The N. O. Body book sold well and was positively reviewed even in the conservative press. It was reprinted at least six times. It was made into a film twice, in 1913 and 1919 (the latter directed by Karl Grune)

Baer worked for the Victoria Versicherungs AG of Berlin selling life insurance until 1911 when he started working for the Berlin Jewish community. In 1920 he became the director of the Berlin B’nai B'rith. In 1937 B’nai B'rith was raided by the Gestapo and Baer was violently interrogated. On release he sold his apartment and he and Elza moved to Palestine. 

He again worked as an insurance agent, and then as an accountant. He had an affair with his secretary Gitla. Elsa died in 1947, and three years after that Karl married Gitla.

Karl died in 1956 age 71. His tombstone says that M is for Meir.

• Magnus Hirschfeld: "Drei Fälle von irrtümlicher Geschlechtsbestimmung". Medizinische Reform. Wochenschrift für soziale Medizin, Hygiene und MedizinalstatistikXV, 1906, 51:
• O. Body: Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren. Vorwort von Rudolf Presber. Nachwort von Dr. med. Magnus Hirschfeld.Riecke, 1907.
• Baer: “Mädchenhandel”. Arena.3. 5 August 1908: 549–555.
• M. Baer-Berlin. “Über den Mädchenhandel”.Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft Nr. 9, 1908: 513–528.
• M, Baer. Der internationale Mädchenhandel. Seemann Nachf, 1908.
• Seigfried Dessauer (dir). Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren. Based on the book by N.O.Body. Germany 21mins 1913.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Sexualpathologie : Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende. 2. Teil: Sexuelle Zwischenstufen: Das männliche Weib und der weibliche Mann. Marcus & Webers Verleag,1918: 44-8.
• Paul Legband & Karl Grune (dir). Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren. Scr: Karl Grune & Beate Chess, based on the book by N.O.Body, with Erika Glässner as NO Body . Germany75 mins
• O. Body: Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren. Reprint Hermann Simon mit einer Vorbemerkung und einem abschließenden Beitrag: „Wer war N.O. Body?“ Ed. Hentrich, 1993.
• Sander L. Gilman. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999: 281-2.
• Myriam Spörri. “N. O. Body, Magnus Hirschfeld und die Diagnose des Geschlechts: Hermaphroditismus um 1900”. L’Homme Z F G, 14,2, 2003.
• N O Body. Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years.English Translation by Deborah Simon of Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
  
  
  
• Sander L Gilman. “Whose Body is it Anyway? Hermaphrodites, Gays and Jews in N. O. Body’s Germany” in Simon, 2006.
• Hermann Simon. “Afterword: In Search of Karl Baer” in Simon, 2005.
• Petra Henderson, Original English Wikipedia page on Karl M Baer. 3 November 2008. Online.
• Jana Funka. “The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer: Narrating ‘Uncertain’ Sex”. In Ben Davies & Jana Funke (eds) Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: 132-153.
• Geertje Mak. “Scripting the Self: N.O. Body’s Autobiography”. In Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth-Century Hernaphrodite Case Histories. Manchester University Press, 2012.
• David A. Brenner. “A German-Jewish hermaphrodite: or what sexology contributed to B’Nai B’rith”. In German-Jewish Popular Culture Before the Holocaust: Kafka's Kitsch. Routledge, 2014: 41-9. .
• “Karl M. Baer”. In: Persönlichkeiten in Berlin 1825 - 2006. Erinnerungen an Lesben, Schwule, Bisexuelle, trans- und intergeschlechtliche Menschen. Senatsverwaltung für Arbeit, Integration und Frauen, Berlin 2015, S. 10–11.PDF.
• Michaela Koch. “N.O. Body and the Making of a True Man”. In Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir. Transcript-Verlag, 2017: 75-111.
• Ofer Oderet. “Recalling the First Sex Change Operation in History: A German-Israeli Insurance Salesman: The long-forgotten story of a German Jew who was born as Martha and escaped the Nazis as Karl, rediscovered by a Tel Aviv University student”. Haaretz, May 10, 2018. Online.

DE.Wikipedia     EN.Wikipedia      PATA Queens

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While it is always difficult to interpret old medical accounts in terms of modern diagnoses, it is plausible that Baer had 5-Alpha Reductase Deficiency, which would have been hard for a non-specialist doctor to spot in 1885 as it was not officially recognised until 1961.

No explanation is given of how he avoided conscription 1914-18.

Geertje Mak compares Baer to Herculine Barbin: “The protagonists of N. O. Body’s autobiography Aus einem Mannes Mädchenjahren (Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years), published in 1907, and of Barbin’s autobiographical writings have a lot in common. Both were raised as girls and only discovered that they were male in their twenties. Both had already had a passionate love affair with a woman for quite some time before the medical discovery of the error of sex. For both the breakthrough came after a confession of their life story, which in both cases led to a medical examination. Both had been more or less aware that there had been a mistake with regard to their sex, although Barbin seemed to have been more clear about the exact nature of the mistake than N. O. Body. Both were relatively well educated and obviously modelled their narratives on fictional or (auto)biographical examples they themselves had read.”

The major difference of course - which Mak does not mention - is that Barbin did not want to be a man, did not have a male gender identity, but was compelled into being a man. Thus Barbin used suicide to escape from masculinity, while Baer thrived as a man. Some writers compare Baer to David Reimer assuming that biology will out, that a biological male cannot be raised successfully as female. However Reimer was not intersex, he was a cis male. Mak’s comparison of Barbin and Baer is valid in that both had comparable intersex conditions, but what the comparison should show is that biology is only part of what we are. The self-fashioning resulting from biology and environment and choice produces different results.

Petra Henderson in her original version of the EN.Wikipedia page on Baer wrote: “Copies of the medical publications obtained by the University Medical College of Oregon enabled at least one of their female graduates (Dr. Alan L. Hart) to get his sex change surgery in the University hospital in 1917”. It is possible that Dr J Allen Gilbert did read German, and had come across Hirschfeld’s lecture to Wochenschrift für soziale Medizin, Hygiene und Medizinalstatistik  1906, but it was more likely to have read Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten, 1910. In either case the diagnosis and treatment were very different between Baer and Hart. Hart did menstruate, did not have a testicle and underwent a hysterectomy.

IMDB gives the plot of the 1919 film as: “A child born without a clear gender is raised by the father as a boy, later by the uncle as a girl and dissected after death” - which is a further deviation from Baer’s life.

Of the three biographies of Magnus Hirschfeld, that of Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld,1986, of Elena Mancini, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom, 2010 and of Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives, 2017, none make any mention of Martha/Karl Baer, Anna Laabs or N. O. Body.

Diana Thomas (1959 - ) journalist, editor, novelist

David Thomas Senior, UK diplomat, was posted in Moscow when his son was born.  The boy partly grew up in Havana and Washington, DC on later postings, and then had an elite education at Eton (paid for by the Foreign Office) and Cambridge (where he first spoke to psychiatrists about gender incongruity).  He married and they had three children. In his twenties he wrote young-adult books under the name David Churchill, while establishing himself as a journalist as David Thomas. He was Young Journalist of the Year at age 24, a magazine editor at 25 and in 1989 the youngest ever editor of the 150-year-old Punch magazine where he stayed for three years.  While there he edited a best-of anthology from the magazine. 

In 1993 he published Not Guilty - The Case in Defense of Men, which he regarded it as an examination of masculinity, and how men are oppressed thereby - however some took it as an attack on feminism.  After discussing machismo and the rise in plastic surgery for men, he writes

“This should come as no surprise. Homosexuals are pioneers for the male sex. They experiment with attitudes and lifestyles that may take decades to reach the straight community. Gays are to straights as California is to Arkansas.”  

It moves on to a section called “Frocks Away” (p104-8) in which he discusses drag parties at Mick Jagger’s house, Bohemian Grove drag events for the super elite, Paris is Burning, drag star Lypsinka being featured in Vanity Fair in November 1992 and in Esquire magazine, Wigstock, and a survey that showed that only 2% of women accept cross-dressing from their male partner, while female cross-dressing is repeatedly common in fashion.  

 “A woman has to retain only one or two visible elements of femininity in order to keep her gender identity intact. … For men, the opposite is true. It takes only one or two non-masculine elements to intrude upon a man's appearance for his whole identity to fall apart. He may be six feet six, bearded, and wearing combat boots on his feet, but if he's got a skirt around his waist, he's no longer a man in the eyes of the world. Once again one should note the extreme fragility of masculinity in the face of any threat to its conventions.”  

and  

“Transvestism is an unlikely mast upon which to fly the banner of men's liberation. The right to put on a dress is not one for which most of us would man the barricades. But it illustrates two typical processes in society's treatment of men. The first is that we drastically limit male freedom of action by drawing rigidly defined boundaries around the perimeters of acceptably masculine behaviour. The second is that we then classify any action outside these boundaries as either criminal or, in this case, perverse. Neither of those processes applies to women, whose femininity is in no way compromised by the clothes they choose to wear, any more than it is by the job in which they choose to be employed.”   

“Why are inappropriate clothes such a threat to male self-image? Perhaps our response is a sort of metaphor for the limitations that are placed upon male behavior as a whole. In the reasons why transvestism should be feared by the many, and desired by the few, lie many of masculinity's most delicate hidden secrets—secrets that relate to all men, even if they've never, in their wildest nightmares, dreamed of wearing a dress.”   

He follows this with a report on a visit to the Manchester branch of Stephanie Lloyd’s Transformations where married man “Samantha” says “I’d like to bonk” while being dressed in a tartish fashion.

Two years later he published Girl, a forced femininity novel about a man in hospital for a minor operation who awakes to find that there has been some confusion and he has had a vaginoplasty.

From 2007, as if he had never written Not Guilty,  Thomas wrote a series of masculine thriller novels under the name Tom Cain featuring Samuel Carver, an assassin who makes his killings look like accidents.  In 2015 he revived the David Churchill name and wrote a trilogy about William the Conqueror, as well as two other thrillers as David Thomas.  From 2016 he has written three Wilbur Smith novels using Smith’s characters and situations.  One of these as Tom Cain and two as David Churchill.  

In 2019 Thomas announced that she was now Diana, and has written a column in the Daily Telegraph about her experiences in transition.  She was due to have completion surgery in 2020 but of course this was delayed because of the Covid pandemic. Her 87-year-old father succumbed to Covid.  In 2021 she went to a private hospital for an enucleation of the prostate.  She estimates that transition (including facial surgery) has cost £40,000 funded by a house sale and cashing in a pension.   

Books by Tom Cain

• The Accident Man. Bantam/Corgi, 2007.
• The Survivor (US title: No Survivors).  Bantam/Corgi, 2008.
• Assassin.  Bantam/Corgi, 2009.
• Dictator.  Bantam/Corgi, 2010.
• Carver.  Bantam, 2011.
• Revenger.  Corgi, 2012.
• Wilbur Smith with Tom Caine.  Predator.  Harper Collins, 2016.  

Books by David Churchill

• Its Us and the Others. HarperCollins Juvenile Books, 1979.
• The Silbury Triangle.Heinemann, 1979.
• A Focus for Writing. Heinemann, 1980.
• Fishing Forever. Merlin Unwin, 1999.
• Devil (Leopards of Normandy 1).Headline, 2015.
• Duke (Leopards of Normandy 2).  Headline, 2017.
• Conquerer (Leopards of Normandy 3).  Headline, 2018.
• Wilbur Smith with David Churchill. War Cry. Harper Collins, 2017.
• Wilbur Smith with David Churchill. Courtney’s War. Zaffre, 2019.

Books by David Thomas

• David Thomas with Ian Irvine. Bilko: The Fort Baxter Story.  Vermilion/Hutchinson, 1985.
• Pick of Punch. HarperCollins, 1991.
• Not Guilty - The Case in Defense of Men.  William morrow & Co, 1993.
• Girl.  Penguin, 1995.
• Beggars, Cheats and Forgers: A history of frauds through the ages. Pen & Sword History, 2014.
• Blood Relative. Quercus, 2011.
• Ostland. Quercus, 2013.

Other

• “Punch Editor David Thomas”.  In Pictures,01-06-1989.  Online.
• "Tim Dowling talks to David Thomas".BBC. 24 November 2014.Online.
• Manuela Svoboda & Petra Zagar-Sostaric. “How much Artistic Freedom is permitted when it comes to Language? - Analysis of a Crime Novel”.  European Journal of Social Science Education and Research, 5,2, 2018,  Online.
• David Thomas.Media: “The dirty world of Mr Punch: Punch is fighting back by hitting below the belt. It may be hurting, but is it working?”.  The Independent, 23 October 2011.   Online.
• Julie Bindel.   “What women really want? You’ve got no idea”.  UnHerd, August 6, 2021.  Online.  
• Jane Gordon.  “ ‘Call me Diana’: Our columnist David Thomas reveals her new life and look”.  The Telegraph, 14 March 2020.  Online.  
• "David Thomas obituary". The Times, May 04, 2020.  Online. (father)
• Charlotte Metcalf.  “Conversations At Scarfes Bar: Diana Thomas”  Country & Town House,  Online.
• Diana Thomas.  “Ex-Cambridge University rower and married dad DIANA THOMAS spent six decades as a man... So why does she say trans militants are only stoking intolerance?”.  Daily Mail, 19 February 2021.  Online.  

EN.Wikipedia     LoveReading    Linkedin    Daily Mail articles     Diana Thomas at the Telegraph   Muck Rack    Amazon Author Page (Thomas)    Amazon Author Page (Cain)     Amazon Author Page(Churchill)    

--------

'David Thomas' is a rather common name, and there are several who have written books.  There is no definitive list of Thomas's writings and so the list above is tentative. 

I have added the non-fiction books to my Writings on other Topics.

Diamond Lil (1935 – 2016) performer, antiques dealer, columnist

Phillip Forrester was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia. He was in drag at age 5, and as a child sang on Savannah radio.

At Halloween 1953, he and a drag friend got dolled up and crashed a party at a local American legion. Only after several drinks did it come out that they were not cis women. They quickly left but driving home they were followed by two soldiers who shot out a tire on their car, and Forrester was orally raped.

"It was so scary: there's no words for it. But I made a decision that night that I was out. A real weird way to come out, though."

The first public drag performance was at age 18. She was popular with sailors in the port and would perform on ships docked there. Eventually this led to Forrester being discharged from the Georgia Air National Guard, and fired from a secretarial job at the Seaboard Railroad. The Savannah police arrested her several times, once on a drummed-up loitering charge.

It was time to move and she arrived in Atlanta in 1965. At that time she had a husband, and they started a small antiques shop near Peachtree and 11^th Streets. That area became ‘the Strip’ where bohemians and gays were to be found.

She dabbled in drag shows using the name Leslie Diamond. Jayne County wrote in her autobiography:

“It was considered a very big deal to go to straight clubs and pass as a woman, and there weren’t many of the queens who could pull it off. One who could was an older queen called Diamond Lil, who was the mother of all the young street queens in Atlanta.”

In 1968 a friend asked Diamond to headline a new drag show at Mrs P’s, a restaurant in the basement of the Ponce de Leon Hotel. There was an arrangement with the police: only on week-nights, and the show was not to be advertised. She took the name Diamond Lil as a last minute inspiration on the opening night. At first she mouthed to Motown records, but started singing with her own voice – one of only a few drag performers to do so.

For six months in 1970 there was a bar called the Club Centaur. Diamond and another drag artist, Phyllis Killer, performed backed by a live band. Diamond became known for her hard-driving rock’n’roll songs. She added in her own songs, and released them on 45s – some of them were played on jukeboxes across the city.

Diamond performed several times for the Georgia Gay Liberation Front. She also wrote, for the alternate weekly, The Great Speckled Bird, the first time after being caught in a police raid on a club in Savannah in 1970.

Diamond Lil, mid 1980s

In the early 1970s, Diamond moved to Sweet Gum Head, a focal point for the burgeoning drag scene. Other performers included Rachel Wells, Lavita Allen and Charlie Brown.

In 1972 Diamond did a benefit for the Committee on Gay Education at the University of Georgia and sang “Stand by Your Man.” UGA officials did all they could to throw the COGE off campus, but Lil’s support gave COGE financial backing and a public profile.

Diamond started a column in the gay paper, Sunset People, and then in the nightlife magazine, Cruise.





In 1984 Diamond Lil put out a full LP of original material, The Queen of Diamonds/Silver Grill. She was an acknowledged influence on  Lady Bunny and RuPaul who started out in Atlanta at this time. However, by then Diamond was losing her fans to AIDS. There were fewer places to perform, and she reduced her performances and concentrated on a new antiques business. She was writing for the bar magazine Etcetera – these articles were often obituaries.

In the 1990s she had a few revival shows. In 2002 she re-released her album on CD. She put out two more albums: Live at the Moonshadow Saloon, 2004, and Verge, Vigor and Vim, 2007. In 2014 the readers of the Georgia Voice newspaper voted her Best Icon; in 2015 Atlanta Pride and Touching Up Our Roots honored her in the first ever Our Founding Valentines event. After a struggle with cancer, Lil was moved into a hospice. She died age 80.

Lady Bunny is quoted in The Atlanta Journal Constitution:

"She was singing with a live band and I had never heard of a drag queen doing that. That really helped shaped my experience because it was not disco music, it was rock 'n' roll and it was original. What always interested me about Diamond Lil, she broke the boundaries of what most drag queens thought they could do. Most thought they could either lip sync or do a celebrity impersonation and she said no, I’m going to front a rock band and do original music...I did love the mock grandeur of her. I totally bought it, when you were in the same room with her, she was regal. She really was magic. She really was unique."

• Diamond Lil. ‘Diamond Lil, Most Glamorous Queen in the World, In Captivity’. The Great Speckled Bird, 3, 38, September 28, 1970:10-11. Online.
• Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. Serpent's Tail, 1995: 29- 30, 160.
• James T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South. Rutgers University Press, 2001: 81, 159.
• Tray Butler. “God save the Queen: If Diamond Lil is the grand dame of Atlanta drag, why can't she get a steady gig?” Creative Loafing, Oct 9, 2003. Online.
• Wesley Chenault & Stacy Braukman. Gay and Lesbian Atlanta. Arcadia Pub, 2008: 55, 62
• Patrick Saunders. “Atlanta drag icon Diamond Lil dies at 80”. Georgia Voice, August 9, 2016. Online.
• Shane Harrison. “Pioneering Atlanta drag performer Diamond Lil has died”. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, August 10, 2016. Online.

Diamond Lil in The Great Speckled Bird      Discogs           RateYourMusic.
____________

Other Diamond Lils.

Honora Ornstein, from Austria-Hungary, performed during the Klondike Gold Rush in the 1890s.

Evelyn Hildegard, also from Austria-Hungary, performer in California and Nevada in early 20^th century. Later a brothel keeper.

A 1928 play by Mae West, the basis of the 1933 film, She Done Him Wrong.

Katie Glass, a female wrestler in South Carolina in 1960s-1970s.

Trans woman performer in Hackney, London 1940s-1960s.

Marcus Craig New Zealand drag performer as Diamond Lil from 1972.

The 1970s rock group from Essex.

Nina Arsenault (1975–) sex worker, performer, journalist

Rodney Arsenault was raised in a trailer park in Beamesville, Ontario, where he identified with beautiful women. He gained two masters degrees and became an instructor in acting at Toronto’s York University.

Arsenault started having plastic surgery during holiday breaks and reading weeks, and became Nina. At a staff Christmas party, a grad student proclaimed:

“Aren’t you victimizing yourself by constructing your new identity out of the oppressive misogynistic values that you were socialized with as a male?”

Nina conceded the point, but embraced the image anyway.

Early on, Nina dated Eric Newman, the future Luka Magnotta, who later became a porn actor, and had plastic surgery such that when he was a contestant on COVERguy on OUTtv and Nina was a judge, she failed to recognise him.

In 2003, she had a small part in the film Soldier’s Girl.

In 2005, Nina’s talent agent was Eugene Pichler, who was also advocating against funding for transgender surgery at the same time.

After nine years, 60 cosmetic surgeries and $160,000, financed mainly from working in the actual sex trade, working as a cyber-whore, and writing a ‘t-girl’ column in Fab magazine, Nina was chosen for one of eight Unstoppable awards, that year’s theme in the 2007 Toronto Pride Gala.

Sky Gilbert, drag queen and playwright, wrote a play, Ladylike, around her persona, and it opened in November 2007. In 2010, she starred in the solo piece, I Was Barbie. In 2012, Nina’s play in seven monologues,  The Silicone Diaries, was professionally produced. She has also done performance pieces in art galleries.

In May 2012, Luka Magnotta murdered Lín Jùn, 林俊, a student at Concordia University, posted videos of the crime online and physically posted body parts to politicians and to schools. He fled to Paris and Berlin, but was arrested, returned to Canada, tried and sentenced to life in prison. His earlier relationship with Nina attracted press attention.

Later that year, the book TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work, a series of essays on her work, was published.

In 2013, while on a flight to Edmonton with fellow performer Lexi Sanfino, a flight attendant asked for makeup advice “because you used to be guys, right?” In response, Sanfino decided to strut topless down the aisle. She was arrested when the plane landed, and Nina who filmed the arrest was also arrested, but released without charges. They were addressed as male based on the ‘M’ in their passports, and Nina was questioned about whether she had had genital surgery. They pointed out that it was not illegal for a legal male to remove his top. Lexi was charged with causing a disturbance.

In 2015, Nina appeared at TEDxToronto.

• Nina Arsenault. "Tranny porn saved my life". Fab, 283, 26 Jan 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070126014028/http://www.fabmagazine.com/tgirl/archive/283.html.
• “Nina's Unstoppable! desire to be herself” The Star, June 14, 2007. www.thestar.com/sponsored_sections/2007/06/14/ninas_unstoppable_desire_to_be_herself.html.
• Nina Arsenault. "I thank God & Hugh Hefner". Fab, 276, April 24 2009. http://archive.fabmagazine.com/tgirl/archive/276/index.html#.
• Judith Rudakoff,. Trans(Per)Forming Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work. Intellect, 2012.
• Pamela Grcic. “Transsexual performer Nina Arsenault explains "The Silicone Diaries". Vancouver Observer, Feb 24^th, 2012. www.vancouverobserver.com/culture/theatre/2012/02/24/transsexual-nina-arsenault-explains-story-behind-silicone-diaries.
• Bruce LaBruce. “An interview with Nina Arsenault”. Vice, June 27, 2012, Jul 4 2012. www.vice.com/en_us/article/wondering-psychopathic-fame-monsters-part-2 www.vice.com/en_us/article/wondering-nina-arsenault-part-2.
• Alex Nino Gheciu. “Transgender artist arrested for baring breasts on plane”. The Star, June 24, 2013.
• “G. Eugene Pichler Biography”. Transgression.com, 2014. http://www.transgression.com/About/Authors/BiographyPichler.
• Nina Arsenault “The Silicone Diaries” in Donna-Michelle St. Bernard & Yvette Nolan. Refractions: Solo. Playwright Canada Press, 2014.

IMDB     EN.WIKIPEDIA
 

Donna Gee (1949–) sports writer, journalist

Gerry Greenberg was raised by a Jewish family in Caerphilly, Wales. His mother died of polio when he was six, and he was then sent to boarding school until father remarried.

His first job at age 16 was with the Pontypridd Observer weekly newspaper, where he gave singer Tom Jones his first write-up. He married and they had two daughters.

"I was in denial in public, but privately became a woman at any opportunity. I kept a bag of [women's] clothes in the garden shed that I took with me on assignment, and would dress up in the privacy of hotel rooms. Even though I knew there were many others like me out there, I was paranoid about being caught."

One time in the 1970s, Gerry's wife dressed him up as a woman for fun, but realized that it turned him on. She went to the doctor, and said that he was gay. They did not talk about it again for many years.

Gerry worked for the Express newspapers until 1976 when he moved to Manchester to work for the Jewish Chronicle and the Manchester Jewish Gazette. He then became part of the team that launched the new tabloid paper, The Daily Star in 1978 (again an Express newspaper), which was designed to use spare capacity on the Manchester presses. Gerry became the Star's rugby correspondent.

In 1992 Gerry wrote England Rugby star Wade Dooley's autobiography.

In 1997 Gerry searched 'transgender' and 'Manchester' on the Internet and found a local group. Regular e-mail exchanges followed until Gerry's wife noticed, and when she realized what was going on, she gave him a spare lipstick. Together they attended meetings and socials for trans people.

"It was stressful being two people. In time, I realized that my ultimate dream was to become a woman".

Greenberg's boss found out from an anonymous e-mail in 1999. A rumour went around that a sub-editor was changing. A betting book was opened on the identity.

"If only I’d known I was listed as a 40-1 outsider, my winnings could have paid for my surgery!"

After an initial consultations with Russell Reid,    Gerry wrote to workmates while on holiday in Israel, and became Donna Gee. The daughters, now in their thirties were accepting as were the five grandchildren.

Donna worked as a sub-editor for Metro, and the northern sports desk of The Sunday People. She had full sex affirmation in 2003. She also had electrolysis, breast augmentation, a facelift, her adam’s apple reduced and an eye lift in her quest to be a proper female. In all she paid £25,000.

In 2006 Donna and wife retired to Spain, although still doing work for papers in Manchester and Israel. They initially told the neighbours in Spain that they were cousins, but the kids visited and the neighbours asked which one was the mother to which and it became easier to tell the truth which was accepted.

She is working on her own autobiography.

• Wade Dooley & Gerry Greenberg. The Tower and the Glory: The Wade Dooley Story. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992.
  
• Daniel Ban-Tal. "When Gerry met Donna". The Jerusalem Post, 03/16/2006. http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/When-Gerry-met-Donna.
  
• Donna Gee. "Just call me Donna". PressGazette, 24 April 2007. www.pressgazette.co.uk/node/37398.
  
• "Changing Sex – the story of Donna Gee". Poison Ivyyy, October 21, 2008. https://poisonivyyy.wordpress.com/tag/gerry-greenberg.
  
• "Ruby anniversary for sex change sports editor". Hold the Front Page, 16 Feb 2009. www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2009/news/ruby-anniversary-for-sex-change-sports-editor.
  
• Donna Gee. "Costa living". Gentleman Ranters, January 7, 2011. http://www.gentlemenranters.com/january_2011_283.html.
  
• Rachel Mainwaring. "True-life story of the macho sports editor who became a transsexual". Wales Online, 29 March 2013. www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/true-life-story-macho-sports-editor-2123859.
  
• Donna Gee. Why Is My Dad Not Answering Her Phone? CreateSpace, 2015. Preview
  

GrumpyOldGran   LinkedIn    ScribblingInTheSun

Catherine McGregor (1956–) soldier, cricketer, sports writer, political aide.

Malcolm grew up in Toowoomba, Queensland, in a Catholic family. He was eight when his father died, and shorty afterwards he tried on his mother's clothes. He was a successful boy, at humanities and at cricket, at a Christian Brothers high school. He always wanted to be a soldier.

He enlisted at 18, and chose to go into the infantry, where he met David Morrison. He was known for his drinking and getting into fights.

However after a promotion, he left and joined the New South Wales Labor Party, and became press secretary to Bob Carr, then leader of the opposition. At this time Malcolm encountered Tony Abbott, who was making a name for himself in the Liberal Party, on a rugby field. In 1985 McGregor sought medical help and was offered a diagnosis of being transgender. He started going out as a woman, but lost his nerve and drank instead. He managed to stop, but had a major falling out with the Labor Party.

Malcolm went to work with the Federal Liberal Party for the 1993 election where John Hewson lost, despite expectations, to Labor's Paul Keating. 18 months later McGregor was involved in the leaking of internal polling that showed how unpopular Hewson was, and this led to Hewson being replaced.

Malcolm "having burnt my bridges with both political Parties" then became a media political commentator, and also joined the Army Reserve. After 911 he rejoined the Regular Army.
At this time Malcolm found a woman that he loved, and they married. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and was working as advisor and speechwriter for Lieutenant General David Morrison, who was now the Chief of the Army.

He had a second career as a cricket commentator for The Spectator.

In October 2011, McGregor read a magazine article about Westerly Windina in The Sun Herald, and this enabled him to tell his therapist that he was transgender.

In 2012 McGregor was awarded the Order of Australia, and discussed his gender issues with the chief, who refused twice to accept a resignation. McGregor's book, An Indian Summer of Cricket, came out under Malcolm's name, and in the final chapter she announces her impending transition. Tony Abbott reviewed it, and lauded her courage. She separated from her wife and transitioned as Catherine (Cate) "rhymes with mate'.

Cate & Tony in the ABC Radio commentary booth

In general both army and cricket associates were supportive, but there were a few negative remarks, which led to spats on social media until Morrison counselled her that such was not to happen again.

In 2014 Catherine was featured on ABC's Australian Story, introduced by her old mate Tony Abbott, now Prime Minister. Catherine transferred to the Air Force. She now writes about cricket for the Australian Financial Review. She is senior delegate for women’s cricket in the armed services, and helps select the Australian prime minister’s sides, as his representative, that play touring teams. Catherine is on good terms with her ex-wife.

*Not the academic at UVic, nor the NZ journalist, nor the actress.

• Malcolm McGregor. An Indian Summer of Cricket: Reflections on Australia's Summer Game. Griffith, A.C.T.: Barrallier Books Pty Ltd, 2012.
  
• Gabrielle Chan. "The Surprising Tony Abbott". The Hoopla, December 5, 2012. http://thehoopla.com.au/tony-abbott-shades-grey.
  
• Rick Feneley. "Cate McGregor on leaving Malcolm McGregor behind and becoming a woman". The Sydney Morning Herald, February 25, 2014. www.smh.com.au/national/cate-mcgregor-on-leaving-malcolm-mcgregor-behind-and-becoming-a-woman-20140224-33d40.html.
  
• "Call Me Cate". Australian Story, ABC1 30 mins 4 Mar 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIpYNWwX3ww.
  
• Mike Selvey. "Cricket has always been a game that takes people for who they are: Cricket writer Catherine McGregor was ‘humbled’ by the generous reception she received from the global cricket community after she announced that she was transgender". The Guardian, 13 August 2014. www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2014/aug/13/cricket-mike-selvey-column.
  
• Tom Decent. "ABC defends airing 'transphobic' Q&A tweets about Catherine McGregor". The Sydney Morning Herald, October 14, 2014. www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/abc-defends-airing-transphobic-qa-tweets-about-catherine-mcgregor-20141014-115rbk.html.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA     Pinnacle

Carol Marra (1992 - ) model, actress

Marra was raised in Belo Horizonte, and was an androgynous child often taken for a girl. She moved to Rio de Janeiro where her parents paid for her to take a degree in journalism.

After working for TV Globo, Marra found work in fashion on the production side, still dressing androgynously. A photographer whom she had been working with approached her and asked to do a photo-shoot. He showed the photos to a lot of people, and Carol, by now dressing as female, was invited to participate in the Minas Trend Preview, a fashion show that happens right before Fashion Rio and São Paulo Fashion Week.

This led to more work, including in Paris. She also acted in a production of Jean Genet's play The Maids. She has been in two television mini-series and was the first transsexual featured in Revista Trip magazine.

She has recently been seen in the company of a parliamentary advisor, who has endured the ribaldry of his colleagues, and has a supporting mother. Carol has been postponing transgender surgery because because of her busy schedule, but has met with Dr. Marcio Littleton in Rio, and had counselling.

• "Carol Marra: Aos 25 anos, a jornalista e modelo mineira é a primeira Trip Girl transex da nossa história". Revista Trip, 20.09.9012. http://revistatrip.uol.com.br/revista/214/trip-girls/carol-marra.html.
  
• Jukiana Leandra. "Chapter 50: Brazil - Carol Marra" Frank151, Winter 2013. www.frank151.com/news/chapter-50-brazil-carol-marra.html.
  
• Taylor Barnes. "Transgender Models Prosper in Brazil, Where Carnival and Faith Reign". The New York Times, March 15, 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/world/americas/transgender-models-prosper-in-brazil-where-carnival-and-faith-reign.html.
  
• "Família do namorado de Carol Marra ficou surprsa por ela ser transexual: ‘Tem que ser muito homem e seguro da masculinidade para me assumir’, disse a modelo sobre Tiago Tessari.". ego.globo, 06/2014. http://ego.globo.com/famosos/noticia/2014/06/familia-do-namorado-de-carol-marra-ficou-chocada-por-ela-ser-transexual.html.
  
• "Biquíni não atrapalha transexual Carol Marra: 'A gente esconde': A modelo posou para um grife de biquíni em uma praia no litoral norte de São Paulo.". ego.globo, 07/2014. http://ego.globo.com/famosos/noticia/2014/07/biquini-nao-atrapalha-transexual-carol-marra-gente-esconde.html.
  

Jan Morris (1926 - 2020) Part 1: youth and journalism

Part 1: youth and journalism.
Part 2: transition and empire.
Part 3: travel writer.

James Humphrey Morris was born in Clevedon, Somerset, the youngest son of a Welsh father and an English mother. His prep school education was at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford, during which time his father died.

In 1939 he attended Lancing College, which is in Sussex, but after the War started was moved to Ludlow in Shropshire. He participated in the standard homosexual play in public schools, mainly in that he was treated as a girl by older boys. Morris left at 16 and worked unpaid for six months for the Western Daily Press in Bristol.

In 1942 he then volunteered for the army and with his class background was sent for officer training at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Despite being only 16, he was assigned to the 9^th Queen's Royal Lancers (founded 1715) as a subaltern, which took him to Italy, Egypt and in Palestine he was the regimental intelligence officer.

"In the Army as at Lancing, I was never short of protectors. … Such kindnesses were seldom exactly homosexual. I still did not look effeminate, and certainly did not feel myself to be homosexual. … It was a harmless quixotry, part of a game, part I suppose a compensation, and if it ever went beyond the platonic I never experienced it myself."

He was demobbed in 1947 and in London met Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a Ceylon tea planter. They married in 1949. After a short period of employment with the Arab News Agency in Cairo, Morris went up to Christ College, Oxford to read English. He graduated with a BA, second class after two years, and with an introduction to the editor of The Times.

For five years he worked at The Times, going from trainee sub-editor to correspondent. He made his name attached to the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, when his coded message to The Times enabled the story of the successful ascent by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to be announced on the morning of the Coronation. This despite opposition by the expedition leader, John Hunt, who thought him unsuitable.

By 1956 Morris was working for The Guardian, and as their war correspondent during the Suez crisis he provided the first evidence that Anglo-French forces were in collusion with the Israelis. He reported on the Adolf Eichman trial in Israel in 1960 and the Gary Powers trial in Moscow also in 1960.

James and Elizabeth had five children, one of whom died in infancy.

In 1960 Morris won the George Polk Memorial Award for Journalism.
 
In 1962 he resigned from The Guardian and became a freelance writer.

Norah Vincent (1968 - 2022) journalist.

Norah grew up in Detroit, the only daughter of Ford Motor Company attorney Robert Vincent and minor actress Juliet Randall (whose biggest gig was The Beachcombers, 1973-6). Norah was a tomboy with an "instinctive loathing of dresses, dolls and frills of any kind". When she was 10, her father was transferred to the UK and they lived there for seven years.

Norah did a philosophy degree at Williams College, Massachusetts, where she came out as lesbian. After some freelance journalism she worked at The Free Press during its neoconservative phase.

In 1994 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

In 1996 she wrote "Beyond Lesbian" which was published in The New Republic, in which she was critical of what she saw as lesbian conformity, and she started getting her writings published in conservative publications. In 1999 she was controversially hired to do a weekly column in The Village Voice. One of her first articles was a sympathetic article on Drew, a New York trans man. Vincent has also had columns at Salon.com, The Advocate, The Los Angeles Times at all of which she established her reputation of being a conservative lesbian.

In June 2000 in The Advocate, she described transsexuals as “the most draconian arm of the PC language police”, and concluded:

“So why, as adults, do transsexuals mutilate their bodies in order to make them conform to the fashionable version of the opposite sex and gender? That only reinforces oppressive stereotypes every bit as much as liposuction or a bimbo's boob job. If you're a man in a woman's body, then live androgynously if you're such a revolutionary. Don't conform. I do it every day, and it isn't particularly easy. Half the time I'm sir, and half the time I'm ma'am, and that's how it should be when sex and gender don't matter. 

If you truly want to thwart gender norms, don't pull a fast one on the dictionary or your poor blameless privates. Live with all the polymorphy God gave you, body and soul. It's a lot more radical.”

In February 2001 she wrote up an approving article about an evening about male masculinities at Pace University. However a few months after that she blamed San Francisco giving transition costs as part of a health benefit package for employees on postmodernism and the death of the self:

"If you take seriously the idea that a person cannot be himself without the intervention of modern technology, then you have lost the notion of a self altogether".

Vincent was a senior fellow at the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies 2001-3. Richard Goldstein featured Vincent in his 2001 book on gay conservatives, along with Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia.

In 2002 she moved to Philadelphia to be with her girlfriend, and was writing with candor about her struggles with multiple sclerosis and depression.

After experimenting with male drag at the urging of a drag-king friend, she lived as a man, Ned Vincent, for eighteen months from 2004-5. She is 5'10" (1.82m). She consulted a make-up artist and used a stubble beard. She also hired a voice coach. As an act of participant observation, Ned then joined an all-male bowling club, joined a men’s therapy group, went to strip clubs and visited Catholic monks in a cloister. She found men as much as women to be victims of the gender system and women as active as men in building it. Ned was assumed to be gay, often for the same features that lead to people thinking that Norah is butch. She published this as Self-Made Man, 2006. She concludes the book with:

"I, Meanwhile, am staying right where I am: fortunate, proud, free and glad in every way to be a woman".

However, afterwards she slipped into depression and on the advice of a psychologist spent time in three different mental hospitals: one urban, public and ill-funded; one small-town; and one private and expensive. She turned this into her second book.

The depression continued.  Vincent was admitted to a Swiss euthanasia clinic where her life ended age 53.

• Norah Vincent. "Beyond Lesbian". The New Republic, Jan 8, 1996. Online at: http://igfculturewatch.com/1996/01/08/beyond-lesbian.
  
• Norah Vincent. “A Real Man: Brooklyn girl grows hair on her chest”. The Village Voice. Nov 16, 1999. www.villagevoice.com/1999-11-16/news/a-real-man/1.
  
• Norah Vincent. “Cunning linguists”.  The Advocate, June 20, 2000.  Online at:  www.thefreelibrary.com/Cunning+linguists.-a062741813.
  
• Norah Vincent. “The Big Switch: Trans-sexuals, Without the P.C.” The Village Voice. Feb 27, 2001. www.villagevoice.com/2001-02-27/nyc-life/the-big-switch/http.
  
• Norah Vincent. “Welcome to the Transsexual Age: San Francisco Gives In to Theorists”. The Village Voice. May 22, 2001. www.villagevoice.com/2001-05-22/nyc-life/welcome-to-the-transsexual-age.
  
• Richard Goldstein. Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right. Verso, 2001 – reissued as Homocons: The Rise of the Gay Right. Verso Press, 2003.
• Kevin Riordan. "Conservative contrarian amidst lgbt liberalism: An interview with Norah Vincent". PrideSource, 2/27/2003. www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=2736.
  
• Norah Vincent. Self-Made Man: one woman's journey into manhood and back again. New York: Viking 2006. London: Atlantic 2006.
  
• Norah Vincent. "Double Agent". The Guardian, 18 March 2006. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/18/gender.bookextracts.
  
• Norah Vincent. Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin. New York: Viking, 2008.
  
• Diane Torr & Stephen J. Bottoms. Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender As Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010: 212-3.
   

 EN.WIKIPEDIA     WORLDCAT     SALON     VILLAGEVOICE

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Vincent seems to have an ambivalence concerning trans issues, but is more sympathetic to female transvestites and trans men than to those of the other direction.

Self-Made Man is an odd book in that it is mainly a book for women who want to know what men do and say when women are not around.  As Diane Torr says: “She makes little sustained effort to reflect critically on her own experiences as a woman passing in male-oriented environments … Moreover, she seems intent on reinforcing precisely the gender binaries that drag kings and trans performers have sought to challenge”.

I have elsewhere criticized the reluctance of sociologists and other academics (e.g Richard Ekins, David Valentine) making studies of trans people but not even being willing to cross-dress.  So kudos to Vincent for doing so.   If only more cis people would do so.

Vincent does seem to have an attraction to greater expression of her masculinity, but without having the whatever that makes a trans man.  In this she is an interesting example of cis gender variance and female transvestity.

Vincent documents well how heteronormativity can oppress men, and admires their resiliance, but pays little attention to male strategies for escaping heteronormativity such as homosexuality, although she does have a chapter on monks.  And thus there is no discussion at all as to whether some trans women are more motivated by escaping male heteronormativity than by 'gender identity'.   Of course trans people rarely discuss this either.