Janine Roberts (1942 - 2016) journalist.

Raised in England by a Northern Irish family. At age 17 joined a Catholic order to prepare for the priest-hood. During the eight years of training, acquired degrees in theology and philosophy, and was ordained in 1967. Then did a B.Sc. in sociology at the London School of Economics.

Afterwards resigned from the priesthood, married a woman, and they moved to Australia. They had two daughters. Started working with Australian Aboriginals.

In 1975, she became Janine, although it took her another eight years to be accepted for surgery as she was still living with her wife and raising her daughters.

In 1976 her first book (editor and co-author), The Mapoon Books, on aboriginal culture and institutional racism was published. She works with aboriginal groups in resisting mining on their territory, and researched Granada TV’s World in Action program on the issue. In the 1980s she worked as a freelance journalist and documentary maker.

In the late 1980s she was working on a documentary on the diamond industry for Australian, US and UK television. She produced a program for BBC’s Panorama on the CIA, MI6 and KGB under Gorbachov, and The Sun outed her to attack her credibility. In 1992, when The Diamond Empire was two-thirds shot, her home was invaded and she was seriously beaten and was in hospital for two months. While she was on the critical list, the BBC took control of the project away from her. However in 1994 the program was shown on the BBC and in the US with her name on it. Pressure from the diamond monopoly, De Beers, resulted in its showing on Australian Broadcasting Company being cancelled, and in the BBC not selling it abroad, especially to South Africa.

She continued to research the diamond industry, especially in South Africa and Namibia where she was a guest of the miners’ union. This resulted in the book Glitter and Greed, 2003.

In 2002 she published The Seven days of My Creation on her own gender transition, and on the status of women through the Christian centuries. She has also published on the causes of AIDS and on problems with the polio vaccine. She was also a Wicca priestess.

Janine suffered a massive stroke in 2010, and died six years later at age 74. 


*Not the family therapist.

• Janine Roberts . The Seven days of My Creation: tales of magic, sex and gender. San Jose: Writers Club Press 628 pp 2002. Liskeard, Cornwall: Exposure Publishing 384 pp 2006.
• J. P. Roberts. Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel. New York: Disinformation, 2007.  
• "Jan Roberts: Commemorating a true warrior".  MAC: Mines and Communities, 2016-03-02.  www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=13279.
  
• www.sparkle.plus.com.
• www.witch.plus.com.

WorldCat    IMDB    AIDSWiki  

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What an amazing woman. I came across one of her web sites while googling for something on religion.

Nobody has done a Wikipedia page on her. She is not in any of those lists of outstanding transpersons that we find on the web.

Here is an excerpt from her documentary on the Diamond Empire.

Nancy Hunt (Bowman) (1927 - 1999), reporter and copy editor.

Ridgely Hunt was born to a family listed in the Social Register. He went to a New England preparatory school,. He was drafted at the end of the Second World War and rose to sergeant, although without seeing combat. Afterwards he graduated from Yale in English Literature, and then worked for New England newspapers, where he met his first wife, Constance.

They moved to Chicago in 1958 and he worked at the Daily News as a copy editor. He and his wife had a boy and two girls. In 1963 he moved to the Chicago Tribune and he became a prize-winning journalist, whose name was promoted on the newspaper’s delivery trucks. He was their war correspondent in Vietnam, for which he won four Associated Press awards. He specialized in masculine stories: he scuba-dived to wrecks on the ocean floor; he camped out with the Green Berets; he rode fire engines. He was regarded as irascible by his co-workers.

He was known for his negative comments about hippies and women, but by the late 1960s he was growing his hair long and wearing makeup. He had divorced his wife and married the family baby sitter. She sewed dresses for him and helped him with makeup. She wanted him to stay a transvestite. In 1975, a columnist at the rival Sun-Times outed Hunt, and the Tribune transferred her to the night copydesk where she became Nancy. After surgery at the University of Virginia, Nancy and her second wife divorced.

Nancy wrote her biography and appeared on television to promote it. She emphasized that as a man he had been a ‘devout heterosexual’, and film director Brian De Palma used this clip in his slasher movie Dressed to Kill, 1980.

In the early 1980s she married Wallace Bowman, Sr, and enjoined the staff at the Tribune to say nothing to him about Ridgely. In 1984 she retired, and she and Wallace spend part of their lives in Florida. Constance had to sue Nancy for missed child support payments, especially as one of the daughters has Down’s syndrome. Nancy maintained that Wallace never knew about her past. She outlived him, and spent her last years in a seniors’ residence in Florida.

• Nancy Hunt. Mirror Image: the Odyssey of a Male-to-Female Transsexual. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. 1978.
• Linda Witt.  "Brave Ex-Reporter and Now Transsexual Nancy Hunt Looks at Her Lives as Man and Woman".  People, February 12, 1979.  www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20072932,00.html.
• Marcia Froelke Coburn “Former Chicago Tribune staffers remember their late colleague’s radical transformation – from man to woman”. Chicago Tribune. September 1999.
• Brian De Palmer (dir & scr). Dressed to Kill, with Michael Caine as Dr Robert Elliot, Angie Dickinson as Kate Miller, and Nancy Hunt in a cameo on television. US 105 mins 1980.