Fatime Ejupi (1926–?) peasant, soldier, councillor.

Fatime was the fourth daughter of a Muslim peasant family in Kosova. Lacking a son, the parents deemed the child to be a boy, Fetah.

Widowed at an early age, the mother was left the difficult task of guiding her son through the rites of boyhood. This was essential in that a widow with only daughters had no right to retain her husband's house and land. She managed to avoid the synét (circumcision) and postponed the search for a bride indefinitely.

In 1944 the 18-year-old Fetah was recruited by Tito's People's Liberation Army to fight the Axis occupation. Only after two years in the army was he examined by a doctor, who declared that he was a woman, and he was discharged.

Back in his village he was appointed to the revolutionary community council where he campaigned for rights for Muslim women, in particular the ending of veils and seclusion.

The village became aware that Fetah was a 'woman'.  In 1951 Asllan Asllani decided to marry Fetah. He was still in male clothing and resisted. Asllan 'seized' Fetah and made her his bride. At the wedding she returned to the name Fatime and changed to wearing the wide harem trousers.

They had a son and two daughters. Fatime later claimed to a journalist that she was content. The mother died without granting forgiveness for the loss of her only son.

• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:162-3. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 270-1.

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Fetah was not a typical sworn virgin in that he was raised as a boy from birth.  Grémaux suggests that Fetah switching back to Fatime indicates that the Sworn Virgin tradition was already in decline by the 1950s, however Fatime’s untypicality means that her case does not support the suggestion.

Note that the gender changes are both initiated by men, the father and then Asllan.  Fetah’s only time of choice was that he chose to stay a man after being discharged from the Army.

Was Hermann Göring a transvestite?

This article is about the Generalfeldmarschall of the Luftwaffe, who ranked second only to Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany. Those interested in his general biography can read the Wikipedia entry here.

There is a rumour that Göring was a transvestite, and the question is raised in many sites on the web.

However there is very little substance to the rumour.

About the only biography that approaches the topic of transvestity is Goring: A Biography by David Irving, whose objectivity has been questioned given his association with right-wing causes and his suing for libel of historian Deborah Lipstadt. The judge in the case ruled that Irving "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".

Irving has one and only one paragraph on the topic in his 846 page biography:

Nobody was celebrated with greater enthusiasm than
Göring. “Göring,” Herbert Backe, the level-headed deputy to
the minister of agriculture, told his wife after touring eastern
Germany with the general in mid-May, “arrived at Breslau
wearing a white air-force uniform. The citizenry went wild.”

The cheers gave Göring the feeling of immortality: He was Germany -- he was the law. The increasingly odd, sometimes even effeminate garments (many of them designed for him by Carin) were a part of his public image. He was at heart almost a transvestite, certainly an exhibitionist. “Herbert,” Frau Backe wrote in her diary, “says that out in the Schorf Heath [around Carinhall] he always has a spear with him.” p193.

This is totally inadequate.

Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller. Mann für Mann : biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte von Freundesliebe und mannmännlicher Sexualität im deutschen Sprachraum. Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript, 1998 is a biographical encyclopedia of German gays. It has no entry on Hermann Göring but mentions him several times. The only contribution that it offers is that Göring had a violet nightshirt!

Actor Jeff Chandler is taken to be a transvestite on the word of Esther Williams; and J. Edgar Hoover on the word of Susan Rosentiel. There is no such witness in the case of Göring.

The movies of course contribute to the rumour. The actor Volker Spengler who played Erwin/Elvira Weiskopf, the transsexual in Fassbinder's In Einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year of 13 Moons) 1978, then, eighteen years later, played Göring in Volker Schlöndorff's The Ogre, 1996. The 1988 television film, The Man Who Lived at the Ritz, based on A.E. Hotchner's novel featured Joss Ackland as a transvestite Göring.

So, certainly case not proven.

A more plausible assumption, noting that Göring did like to dress up but mainly in military uniforms and other male but ostentatious costumes, is that he was a homovestite. Homovestity, dressing up as one's own gender, was a concept not yet developed in the 1930s, and even today is generally not discussed. It is part of gender variance, but I am not spending much time on it in this blog because a) the research has not been done for me to use b) if the research were done, it would likely swamp the transgender activities which are after all our central focus.