This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.

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Showing posts with label teacher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teacher. Show all posts

21 February 2020

Carolyn Mercer (1947 - ) headteacher

Mercer was raised by working-class parents in Preston, Lancashire, and left school at 16 with minimal qualifications to work for a plastering and tiling contractor. Mercer also played rugby and did weight lifting and boxing.

At 17 Mercer spoke to the family doctor about feeling as if in the wrong body but was told “Stop bothering your mother”. The vicar arranged a referral to a psychiatric hospital where Mercer was subjected to ‘five or six’ sessions of electric shock aversion therapy while seeing pictures of women’s clothes. It took 40 years to get over that experience.

Mercer was married at age 19, and they had two children. Voluntary work in a youth club led to training as a primary school teacher, but as there was a shortage of maths teachers, Mercer ended up in a secondary school. By age 26 Mercer was head of mathematics, and did a degree at the Open University followed by a masters in Education Management at Sheffield Hallam University.

Mercer became deputy head, acting head, and then headteacher at a school in Blackpool at the age of 37 and thereby the second youngest headteacher in the country.

In 1994, Mercer had begun transition by taking estrogen. Word and got around, and a news photographer came to the door and took a photograph that then appeared in the tabloids. Mercer was suspended and investigated for not having “the honesty or integrity to be a headteacher”. However there was no case to answer – but it did intimidate her into having her newly grown breasts removed.

Mercer finally met a supportive psychiatrist in 2000, retired in 2002 at age 55 and this time did complete transition as Carolyn.

Since retirement Carolyn has been a hospice trustee and vice-chair, trustee of a national hospice charity, a member of Lancashire Constabulary Independent Advisory Group and chair of Lancashire LGBT.

  • “Ex-headteacher 'pretended to be a man' for 55 years”. Lancashire Post, 4th April 2016. Online.
  • Unity Blott. “Transgender headteacher, 68, reveals she was forced to endure brutal electric shock therapy as a teenager to try to 'cure' her”. The Daily Mail, 4 April 2016. Online. 
  • Alice Evans. “Trans conversion therapy survivor: 'I wanted to be cured so asked to be electrocuted' “. BBC News, 23 August 2019. Online.
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24 February 2018

Juno Dawson (1985–) school teacher, young adult author

James Dawson, from Bingley, Yorkshire, went to the University of Bangor (previously the University College of North Wales), moved to Brighton, Sussex, and became a school teacher of personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education. He lived as a gay man.

He wrote young adult novels with gay characters. He also wrote the well-received Being a Boy, 2013, a guide for boys going through puberty. In 2014 Dawson wrote in the Guardian:
“I was unaware gay people even existed and, when puberty hit, found myself more than a little lost. I so dearly wish there had been just one book with a character who was a bit like me – just a normal teenage guy who happened to be gay. I would have especially loved one whose sexuality did not define him.”
The same year, he became the first male winner the Queen of Teen award where the shortlist are all nominated by teenage readers, who then vote for the winner.

Dawson published This Book is Gay for lesbian, bisexual, gay, queer, transgender or just curious persons, but mainly for teens and young adults. By this time Dawson had begun a gender transition. In 2015 she announced that she was transgender and that her name was Juno. Most of her books were re-issued with her new name (but not Being a Boy).

She was signed to write a column in Glamour magazine to document the experience of transition.
In an interview with Attitude magazine, May 2017, Juno says
"I think there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay men as a consolation prize because they couldn’t be women. That was certainly true of me."
She describes her identity as a gay man as a 'personal misdiagnosis', and believes that it is a more common phenomenon than one may think.


For her Glamour column, Juno interviewed the plastic surgeon Christopher Inglefield who does work for trans persons.  She was considering facial feminization surgery. She was then invited to be part of the ITV 3-part series documentary, Transformation Street. She is featured in episode 2. It fell to her to help educate the television crew on limits, such as the inappropriateness of childhood photographs. Initially the program was to be called Sex Change Clinic, and Juno had to make a fuss to explain that such terminology is outmoded.

Juno’s most recent book is The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both, which restates for another generation that gender is a system of oppression for cis and trans both, mixed with autobiography.

*Not the US Actress, nor the other writers called James Dawson.
Amazon Author Page     EN.Wikipedia     Glamour

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This book is gay contains the following diagram which I think is kinda neat:



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11 December 2016

Dana Rivers (1955 - ) teacher.

David Warfield was raised in California. After school he joined the US Navy, where he did a lot of drugs and alcohol. He was a baseball coach and a white-water rafting instructer. David had three wives and a daughter.

At 35 he became a teacher in Antelope, outside Sacramento, California, and won awards for providing inspiration to at-risk teens in what became the award-winning Media Communications Academy. He was awarded an $80,000 grant for his program, won the school's award for the teacher who most inspires students and received a standing ovation from the district's staff at its annual meeting in 1998.

Warfield started transition to Dana Rivers early in 1999 with the intention of returning to school in September as Dana. This was supported by the school, and other teachers read a letter from Dana to their classes, and Dana was interviewed by the school newspaper. However all of four (out of 1500) parents complained that their religious and moral standards had been violated when Dana explained herself to students. They were supported by the Pacific Justice Institute (a right-wing activist legal organization that would be designated a hate group in 2014 by the Southern Poverty Law Center). The PJI threatened the board with lawsuits if they did not try to fire Dana. At a school board meeting a parent said that her 16-year-old daughter was traumatized from hearing about transexualism. However the daughter stood up and told the board that her mother was wrong.

Dana was fired by the school board. Her students protested her suspension with frequent phone calls to the local radio station and marched to the state capitol. Three school-board trustees were threatened with election-recall petitions in protest. Dana was honored with a $10,000 grant from the Colin Higgins Foundation for courage in the face of discrimination. She sued the school board and settled for $150,000 – they also agreed to drop all charges and expunge Dana’s record of all reference to the dismissal. They agreed to use only her new name in all record keeping, and to support her future employment as a teacher by giving to prospective employers an accurate history of her teaching career. Thus she had permission to return to teaching at a different California school.


Dana completed surgery in June 2000 with Dr Eugene Schrang. For three years she was a trans activist appearing on various media including Oprah. People magazine named her one of the 25 most intriguing people of 1999, and Jane magazine named her one of the Gutsiest Women of the Year. She met with Congressman Barney Frank who later dropped trans persons from the campaign for employment non-discrimination right (ENDA) for supposed tactical reasons. There was talk of a book and a film, but they never happened.

Dana then moved to San Francisco and found employment teaching social studies and history at a county jail Charter School.

In November 2016, an Oakland female couple, 56 and 57, and their 19-year-old son, died after being stabbed and shot. Their garage was set on fire. Rivers was arrested outside, covered in blood. She was charged with murder, arson and possession of metal knuckles.

Matt & Andrej Koymasky.
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27 September 2016

Two New York plastic surgeons in the 1970s

Facial Feminization Surgery is sometimes said to have been developed by surgeon Douglas Ousterhout in 1982.   Of course transsexuals had surgery to change their appearance before that date, although perhaps not in so systematic an approach.   It was then referred to by the more general term "plastic surgery" but also as "facial contouring".    Rhinoplasty (nose jobs) were the most common such operation.  The same plastic surgeons often also did breast enhancements.  Here are two New York surgeons who worked in this field. 

Felix Shiffman (1925 - 2005)

Felix Shiffman was born in New York City, served in the US Army, earned a dental degree at New York University and a medical degree from Hadassah University in Tel Aviv. He practiced cosmetic surgery for over forty years from 1954 in New York City, and also owned an art gallery. He advertised his services to transsexual patients, particularly in New York Magazine, and was known for his rhinoplasties.


In 1974 Luis Suria, then aged 45, was in transition to female.  She was an unlicensed school teacher, who had not worked steadily since 1961, but held sporadic employment as a commercial artist.  She visited Drs Shiffman and Rish, mainly the former, in June/July 1974 and again in December 1974 and underwent injections of free silicone to acquire female breasts. By March 1975 Suria’s breasts were sore and she returned for treatment from Dr Shiffman, who referred her to Dr Dhaliwal who performed a bilateral subcutaneous mastectomy.  Suria, shocked by the severity of the resulting wounds, checked out of the hospital against medical advice, and later developed a wound site infection which required another operation.

Meanwhile, in 1980 Dr Shiffman was advertising: “Specializing in Cosmetic Surgery and Facial Contouring for Transsexuals”. New York Magazine reported that his receptionist was giving quotes for silicone shots at $120 to $240 a unit, but when the magazine spoke to Shiffman, he denied doing silicone shots.

Luis Suria, having abandoned transition, became a born-again Christian, and, with psychiatric help, returned to being “a regular man”.  He sued for malpractice and the case Luis Suria v. Felix Shiffman et al came to court in 1983. The plaintiff argued that Shiffman committed malpractice when he injected silicone into Suria's breasts in July and December 1974, that Dhaliwal committed malpractice in the performance of the mastectomy, and that Dhaliwal had improperly failed to obtain informed consent for the procedure. Suria maintained that consent was given for "incision and drainage” but not for a mastectomy. In contention Shiffman claimed that he did not treat the patient until December 1976, and that “symptoms were caused by injections of mineral oil administered by a transsexual friend”.

In November 1983, the jury found that in July and December 1974 Shiffman did commit malpractice which was a proximate cause of the plaintiff's injuries, that Dhaliwal did not commit malpractice but did fail to obtain plaintiff's informed consent, which failure was a cause of the plaintiff's injuries, that the plaintiff was guilty of negligence that was a cause of his injuries, that Shiffman was 60% at fault, Dhaliwal 15% and the plaintiff 25%, and that the plaintiff's total damages were $2,000,000. The trial court dismissed the claim against Shiffman on the ground that plaintiff's contributory negligence barred recovery and, reducing the amount of the verdict by 25%, the proportionate share of plaintiff's fault, entered judgment in the principal amount of $1,500,000 against Dhaliwal alone.

Both Dhaliwal and Suria appealed, objecting to the direction of a verdict in favor of Shiffman. Dhaliwal argued that he was a "successive tort-feasor" (a person who commits a second tort against the same previously injured party) and should not be held responsible for the entire damage award. The verdict against Shiffman was reinstated.

Suria talked of writing a book to help “those who are confused about their sexual orientation” (sic).   His final award was $600,000.

In later years Dr Shiffman specialized in liposculpture, and as late as 1999, Shiffman was still doing breast augmentations.

In March 2000 Shiffman pleaded no contest to “practicing fraudulently; filing a false report; practicing with negligence and incompetence on more than one occasion and failing to maintain accurate records”, and surrended his medical license.

In 2001 Shiffman retired to Ormand Beach, Florida. In September 2003 he was involved in a car accident where a man pushing a motorcycle was killed. He died at age 79 shortly afterwards.
  • Sharon Churcher. "The Anguish of the Transsexuals". New York Magazine, 13, 25, June 16, 1980: 49.
  • “Suria v. Shiffman”. Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, First Department, March 19, 1985. Leagle. Find a Case
  • “Former transsexual wins malpractice suit”. The Auburn Citizen, February 20, 1986. PDF
  • Jack Lechner. Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You. Crown Publishers, 2000: 95.
  • Felix Shiffman. Surrender of License. PDF
  • “Man On Road Hit, Killed By Car”. Orlando Sentinel, September 21, 2003. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2003-09-21/news/0309210026_1_ormond-nova-beach-police.
Obituary

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I couldn't find a statement that Suria actually got the $600,000 (almost $1,450,000 today).

Apparently Luis Suria v. Felix Shiffman et al has become case law with regard to successive tort-feasors. 

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Peter Fries (? – 1981)

Peter Freis was a plastic surgeon on Park Avenue, New York in the 1970s. He advertised in New York Magazine, and did facial work and breast implants for mtf transsexuals.

He is said to have practiced 'closed capsulotomy' to break the capsular contracture, a reaction to breast and other implants. This was just brute force, squeezing the breasts till the scar tissue split.

His last nurse was Robyn Arnold, the girlfriend who was charged with, but not convicted of, the murder of Diane Delia. Fries died, by happenstance, a few days after Delia was killed.
  • Linda Wolfe. “The Transsexual, the Bartender and the Jewish American Princess”.  New York, 17 Jan 1983: 30, 33. Online Uses the ‘Freiss’ spelling.
--------

While Wolfe mentioned “Freiss” in the magazine version of the Diane Delia story, he is not mentioned under either spelling in the reprint in her book The Professor and the Prostitute, and Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, 1987.
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28 October 2015

Bebe Scarpinato (1951 - 2019) activist, teacher, performer

In the early 1970s, Bebe Scarpi(nato) had graduated from Queens College, New York (which she denied choosing for its name) where she'd founded a Gay Community organization.

She became active in the Gay Activist Alliance, where she met Sylvia Rivera. Sylvia felt that GAA was not radical enough, but never actually left the organization. It was Bebe who ensured that Sylvia's dues were paid up.

Scarpi was also in the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, was director of the Queens Liberation Front (QLF), was on the originating board of the National Gay Task Force and was active in planning the fourth Christopher Street Liberation Day (which later became the New York Pride March).

However there were problems with many gay activists:

"You don't have to embrace stereotypes in order to be gay so it was looked at as an anachronistic method of trying to be gay and in the truly liberated society there would be no cross gender identity. You could be a feminine man, but you wouldn't opt to dress and act like a woman." (Cohen p108).
In November 1971, the androgynously-dressed Bebe was called to testify before the New York City Council's General Welfare committee. The Gay Activist reported:
" 'Bebe' Scarpi, a transvestite in male attire, gave testimony on the minority group, he pointed out that transvestites used the men's room because they 'd been warned they would be subject to arrest if they entered the ladies room. And even transvestites had to heed the call of nature. Bebe, a student at Queens College, gave what amounted to a short course on the lifestyle and problems of transvestites with such charm, ready wit and intelligence, that even the Councilmen appeared beguiled. … Chairman Sharison seemed unable to comprehend that some transvestites were heterosexual. He wanted to know whether Bebe believed transvestites would be protected by Intro 475. 'Only as a homosexual, not as a transvestite', Bebe explained, and perhaps the councilman would care to enact legislation protecting the transvestite." (Quoted in Cohen p 150)
At a third hearing in December, policemen were posted outside the ladies rooms to prevent 'transvestites' from using them. Bebe, definitely not androgynous that day, asked the policeman what he was doing, and then went in and did her business. On the way out she commented to the policeman that he had not checked her. The New York Mattachine Times complained that transvestites were jeopardizing the bill with their restroom behavior.

In 1973 the committee was still blocked in its attempt to pass a bill to ban discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing and public accommodation. To get it passed, an amendment was proposed that nothing in the definition of sexual orientation “shall be construed to bear upon the standards of attire or dress code". Bebe, as QLF director, was put in the uncomfortable position of submitting to this wording or seeing the bill fail.

For the Christopher Street Liberation Day in June 1973, Bebe went to the 82 Club and got the showgirls, in full regalia to march behind an 82 Club banner.


In 1974 Bebe attended a feminist conference where Jill Johnston, mother of two and author of Lesbian Nation, had proposed that mothers neglect to care for male babies. Bebe, from the question line, accused Johnston of being a neo-fascist and dictating to women as well as to men. At this point Bebe was recognized from earlier encounters.

Scarpie was the Editor of Drag Magazine, and an associate for 20 years of Lee Brewster's.

In addition she started a career as a high school teacher. When she was not teaching she worked as a stripper.
"Stripping is such a liberating experience; I would strongly recommend everyone to try it".
It was commented that she looked like a middle-class lady. Bebe is the first known trans woman to become a school principal.
"I've never identified myself as transgender. I prefer drag queen. I've always been a 'she' and always will be." (quoted by Lee)
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25 June 2015

Robert Allen (1914 - 1997) film maker, radiologist, teacher

Joyce Allen from Warrington, Lancashire was a masculine tomboy who frequently scrapped with both boys and girls. She resisted having to wear girls' clothes, and took pleasure in dressing in her father's trousers. She pilfered dad's cigarettes, and when he bought a car, she, although under age, borrowed it and drove around the streets.

She had learned the violin, but at her first public performance, of Luigi Arditi's Il Bacio, a string snapped, and it was many years before Allen picked up the violin again.

She left school at fourteen, and worked at a variety of jobs, but also became well known at the local labour exchange where she befriended one of the clerks. The most satisfying job was at a local cinema.

In 1933, Joyce had met a man with whom she enjoyed going to horse races and greyhound tracks. They married, but quickly realized that 'a normal marital relationship' was impossible. Bored and incompetent as a housewife, Joyce took up gambling and lost everything, even the furniture.

Afterwards, now usually wearing slacks and with a man's haircut Allen worked in the exhibition side of the entertainment industry. She continued to suffer from stares and comments while trying to pass as a girl/woman.
"The sadistic delight of strangers in making mocking remarks about my appearance perhaps called forth a sadistic response from me. I actually had visiting cards printed, bearing a false name and address, and when people were offensive to me in public, I would hand them a card with the remark: 'If there are any further details you would like to know, perhaps you would write to me.'"
With the start of war in September 1939, Allen immediately enlisted. She was assigned as a driver to First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), and after six months was made a sergeant. In December 1941 Allen was having difficulties in avoiding a woman's sexual advances, when her mother fell ill and she was given a compassionate release.

After some weeks of caring for her mother, Allen applied for work and found a job at the Ministry of Supply where she was working with men driving heavy lorries and tippers, wearing slacks beneath a boiler suit. One evening, returning home, tired on the bus after work, Allen was subjected to an extended tirade from a man who had known her since childhood. She chased him and they fought until both were exhausted.

That done Allen knew it was time to leave Warrington. A spate of letters to film companies, advertising firms etc. produced several offers (it being wartime there were many vacancies as staff were in the forces). As a masculine woman in slacks, Allen became a secretary at the Denham Film Studios just outside north-west London, which at that time was more used than the nearby Pinewood. She was part of the team under Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger which made The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and then The Volunteer, a short starring Ralph Richardson.

At this point, in late 1943, Allen received a directive from the Ministry of Labour and National Service with instructions to report as a woman porter at a London station. This provided the nudge needed and Allen went to the Ministry of Labour headquarters in person, where he was put in touch with Valentine Harvey, the Chief Press Officer who accepted Allen as a man, quashed the directive and guided him through the bureaucracy. Allen's doctor who had previously treated him only for influenza, did a thorough examination and sent samples for pathological analysis. Allen wrote to his parents explaining that they had a son and not a daughter, and received a strongly supportive letter from his father.

In 1944 Allen took a position with Halas and Batchelor, the film cartoon company.

In September that year Allen wrote to the Registrar General, and with the doctor's report and a declaration from his parents, Allen was invited to Somerset House at the end of October that year where his birth certificate was rectified. He was asked for his male name, and, unprepared, chose ‘Robert’ from a glance at somebody else's documents.

In December Robert received a legal opinion that his first marriage was void ab initio, and he was free to marry his love from the Warrington Labour Exchange who was now working at Denham. They married quietly two days before Christmas, and spent the holiday with Robert's parents.

Allen returned to Denham to be the second assistant director on the film Carnival, directed by Stanley Haynes based on the novel by Compton Mackenzie. He was then an assistant to David Lean on Great Expectations, based on the novel by Charles Dickens.

In 1946, the British film industry suffered one of its periodic crises with the end of wartime government subsidies, and Allen was out of a job. In March his father died. Allen suffered a few years of short-term employments and unemployment.

Valentine Harvey helped yet again, and in 1948, Allen was awarded a grant to train as a medical auxiliary, and in 1951 qualified as a diagnostic radiographer.

He developed a friendship with another radiographer who was a fervent Catholic, and promised to look into the religion after qualifying. Which he did, and at Christmas 1951 was baptised into the Catholic Church.

After a number of temporary radiography posts, Allen became a science teacher at a Christian Brothers run College in Liverpool.

++His marriage came to an end, and they were divorced.  In 1957 Robert remarried in a Congregational church

At the end of his life he was a resident in a nursing home in Cheshire.   He died age 83.

*Not the fabric designer, nor the finance writer, nor the composer. Alan Hart also used the name Robert Allen Bamford Jr in 1918. Also Laud Humphries was born Robert Allen Humphries. Robert Eads was in full Robert Allen Eads.
  • Robert Allen. But for the Grace: The True Story of a Dual Existence London: W.H. Allen 149 pp 1954.
  • "He was once a bride".  Daily Mirror, 30 August 1957: backpage.  See More on Robert Allen
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This is one of the country's earliest officially recognized gender changes. He did not take hormones or have surgery. Obviously he had an intersex condition with anomalous genitals, but he does not say which.

There is no record of Robert Allen after the second marriage in 1957.  
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07 October 2014

Kerstin Thieme (1909 – 2001) composer. music teacher

Karl Thieme was born and raised in the Erzgebirge, on the border between Saxony and Czechoslovakia. He studied music and composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Leipzig with Hermann Grabner. He became a music teacher in Leipzig. His first major success was Variations on a Theme by Hindemith for large orchestra, 1934.

During the Second World War he was conscripted into the German army and became a prisoner of war in Italy.

From 1946-8 Thieme worked at Leipziger Rundfunk, but then decided to relocate himself outside the Soviet zone of occupation.

In 1950 he found work teaching music at a Nuremberg secondary school, and later taught at the Nuremberg Conservatory and then the Friedrich-Alexander Universität. He composed for the Nuremberg International Organ Week. An important work was Canticum Hope for soprano solo and mixed choir, 1973.

Thieme retired in 1974, and as Kerstin completed transitioned two years later. Kerstin kept composing. In 1989 she was awarded the composition prize at the  Fanny Mendelssohn competition. Her Requiem was premiered in 1998.

Kerstin died at age 92 in Stuttgart.
  • www.kompositionen-thieme.de
  • Antje Olivier & Sevgi Braun: Komponistinnen aus 800 Jahren. [800 years of women composers] Sequentia, Kamen 1996: 412.
DE.WIKIPEDIA    List of works
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01 October 2014

Charl Marais (1958 - 2013) teacher, bookkeeper, activist.

Marais was born and raised in Cape Town, in a religious family. As both parents worked, the child lived, until the age of ten, with other family members, and was sexually abused by an uncle.
"I knew that I was a girl because I looked like all the other girls, but why did that make me sad? … The most permanent thought and feeling in me almost all of my life was this feeling of just going though the motions. Medication was the only thing that could bring me out of this feeling of wanting to die and possibly commit suicide."
When in hospital having the appendix removed, a friend suggested that to Marais that she was a lesbian. She knew that she had had crushes on girls but thought that "this was wrong as it's not Christian". At this time, 'lesbian' was the only concept that she had encountered that approximated her feelings.

Marais qualified as a teacher, but did not feel suited to the profession,  and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1978. The uncle who had abused her came to visit and Mrs Marais applied for a court order to keep him away. The lawyer who was assisting met Marais, and straight-away asked: "Have you ever considered having a sex change?". This set her thinking.

Marais obtained a teacher's post in a small school of 50 children in Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape.
"I met a girl there, and it was like an instant attraction for both of us. The sex-change thing didn't yet sit well with me because it was impossible, So we went with the lesbian thing."
In 1981 Marais moved back to Cape Town and found work at a newspaper. When the girlfriend arrived she was pregnant, which led to their breaking up.

In the mid-1980s Charl Marais discovered the Cape Town group, Phoenix, which was a Virginia Prince type group of mainly married cross-dressers. Charl was welcomed to their meetings and parties, and made a fuss of as he was their only female-to-male member, and also their only coloured member (this was still the apartheid era). One of the members was transsexual and told Charl about gender surgeries, and that operations were being done in Durban by Dr Derk Crichton.

In 1992 Charl had a hysterectomy and an ovarectomy, and was able to change the name on his ID card (but not the gender code embedded in the ID number).

One girlfriend left because he didn't have phalloplasty, even though he couldn't afford it. Another committed suicide.

From 2002 Charl worked as a bookkeeper.

After the Alteration of Sex Description and Sex Status Act 2003, he applied again to change his ID number but each person he saw demanded different documentation. In 2009 he tried again armed with letters from a psychiatrist, psychologist and two GPs, and the Department of Home Affairs lost his application form. He tried again in June 2010, and this time was successful.

He became involved with Gender DynamiX, South Africa's major transgender organization, and for some years was their bookkeeper and newsletter editor. In 2010 he was a co-editor and contributor to Trans: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa.

He died at age 55 after a period of illness.
LinkedIn
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Location Cape Town, South Africa

25 September 2013

Adela Vazquez (1958–) performer

Vazquez was born during the Cuban Revolution to a single mother, and raised by his grandparents in Camagüey.

He was sexually active with men early, and especially when he was sent to a  boarding school at age 11, where he seduced both bullies and teachers.
"But do not call me gay.  I never had gay sex.  Never will.  I'm always the girl, he's always the man."
At 15 he was in the school drag pageant, where he stood out by being real. In 1974 Vazquez was called to register for the Cuban army, but turned up in semi-drag and was ruled ineligible because 'homosexual'.   He became a teacher but was obliged to resign despite being a good teacher. He discovered the gay scene and took such jobs as supervising convict labor.

In 1980, when Vasquez was 22, President Fidel Castro said that anybody who wanted to leave Cuba could do so, and sent mental patients and convicts with them.   Vazquez joined the 'Marielitos' (as they came to be known from the name of the harbor where they left). The Marielitos were sent to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, where Vazquez found a lover the first night. In all he had 31 lovers before being sent to a gay sponsor, Rolando, in Los Angeles.

By 1981 he had his first venereal disease, just as AIDS arrived. Rolando persuaded Vazquez to start using condoms, and helped him get a job at the Neiman Marcus department Store. However he did too many drugs and was fired, but then worked doing sewing for a boyfriend who was a designer at the Ice Capades. Together they went to see the trans performers at the Cha Cha club.

Vasquez decided that it was time to change and became Adela. After changes that come from taking hormones, Adella advertised herself as a 'She-Male' in Hollywood Connections, and was a sex worker for a few years. In 1992 Adela was invited by a community worker to enter in the Ms Gay Latina contest, which she won.

Since then Adela has been an activist against HIV. She started as a showgirl with the AtreDivas, a drag group that would donate their earnings to AIDS charities. She has become an artist and a performer and lives in San Francisco.

In 2004 the artist Jaime Cortez developed her life story into a graphic novel.

In the documentary film, Diagnosing Difference, Adela says: “I think ‘passing’ is a word to discriminate us immensely. Not everybody can pass. And passing is something that the doctors will tell you to do, you try to pass. Well, no matter how much I pass, I will never be a biological woman. How about empowering me as the transgender woman that I am?”


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22 August 2012

Alice Baker (18?? - ? ) school teacher.

In 1910 Alice Baker was a school teacher in Harrah, Oklahoma. She left for Oklahoma City where a man paid attention to her. However he then reported to the police that she was a man. She was arrested for masquerading, but seized an opportunity and left town.

The next year, as James Arthur Baker, he was teaching in Segundo, Colorado, just west of Trinidad. Several of his schoolboys suspected that he was a woman disguised as a man. They took their concerns to the authorities who arrested Baker and lodged him in the women’s quarters at the local jail. At a court hearing ten days later, the prosecutor supplied evidence that Baker had gone by the names Madeline, Mabel and also Irene Pardee, and had corresponded both as male and as female. Furthermore Mrs Baker had deserted a husband and two children in Oklahoma. He also displayed items of female clothing taken from Baker’s trunk. However three physicians, who had examined Baker, testified that he was man, and the judge dismissed the case.

Baker arrived in Portland, Oregon in the spring of 1913. She arrived in men’s clothes but found refuge at the women’s Peniel Mission, where she explained that she had had to leave home in Idaho after a disagreement with her parents, and had traveled as a man with a fake moustache. Donations were made to her of feminine attire and a ‘transformation’ wig. There were even rumors that a local evangelical minister had proposed. However the wife of the Peniel Mission’s superintendent became suspicious, and a short stay in hospital resulted in the physician reporting to the superintendent and to the local authorities that she was a man. Baker quickly left town, on a ship sailing to California, with a man friend.

In late 1913 Baker was again arrested, this time in Kansas City, Kansas, charged with dressing as a woman. By this time she had a lawyer husband. The two had counterfeited gold certificates, and even travelled to Japan to exchange them for real gold.

*Not the Great War veteran, nor the Artie Baker who was jailed in San Quentin in 1916 before being discovered to be female-bodied.
  • Peter Boag. Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2003: 82.
  • Peter Boag. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011: 84-6.
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Boag discusses Baker in Portland in both his books.  In the first it is stated that she arrived in Portland in Spring 1913.  The second is more vague, perhaps to allow time for the trip to Japan before the Kansas arrest.

This is a remarkable reconstruction of Baker's life by Boag who had noted her stay in Portland in his 2003 book, and then found other  articles in different local papers and realized that they referred to the same person.

Baker is not listed as a prominent resident in any of the Wikipedia town pages.
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12 July 2012

Alecs Recher (1975–) teacher, politician, lawyer, activist.

Anja Recher was raised in Schwamendingen, Zürich. She twice visited South America. From 1996 she worked as a bicycle courier, and from 2000 in the administration.

She also worked with impaired and gifted children, and gained a diploma in remedial teaching in 2003.

In 2004 she was elected to the Zürich Kantonal legislature for the Alternate List Party.

In 2008 Recher informed the Kantonal legislature. that he was undergoing hormonal treatment to become a man, and that his name was now Alecs.

He has completed a bachelors law degree at the University of Zürich, and a masters at the University of Luzern,

He is a founder/co-president of Transgender Network Switzerland , and is the author of a study of homophobia, transphobia and discrimination in Switzerland.
 DE.WIKIPEDIA   TRANS.ILGA
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06 July 2012

Camille Barbin (1838 – 1868) school teacher, railway clerk.

Adélaîde Herculine Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d’Angely in Charente-Maritime. Her family usually referred to her as Alexina.  Her father died when she was young, which resulted in her being raised in an almost exclusively female and strongly religious environment.

Alexina was chosen for a charity scholarship to study at the school of an Ursaline convent. In 1856 she was sent for teacher training. Afterwards she became an assistant teacher in a girls’ school, where she had an affair with a fellow teacher, Sara.

Abdominal pain and religious guilt led Alexina to a confession with the bishop, and with her permission to break confessional silence, he sent for a doctor to examine her. The doctor found that she had a small penis and testicles inside her vagina, had never menstruated or developed breasts, and shaved facial hair.

In 1860 a tribunal heard evidence from Dr Chestnet of La Rochelle. As a result the register of Barbin’s birth was changed: the sex to male, and the name to Abel. It was deemed that Barbin had always been male. The next Sunday, Abel Barbin, dressed as a man appeared at the church of Saint-Jean between his mother and one of the town’s most respectable ladies.

This did not mean that Abel could marry Sara. The scandal was great and they were kept apart. A family connection secured for Barbin a position of clerk to a Paris railway company. Dr Chestner wrote up the case for the Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale.

Abel committed suicide at the age of 30 by inhaling from his gas stove in his room in the rue de l'École-de-Médecine in Paris. The police doctor, who had been called, examined the dead man’s genitals expecting to find that he was a syphilitic - a common cause of suicide at that time - but finding something quite different. Word spread quickly, and Dr E Goujon at the Faculity of Medicine acted quickly so that the body would not be lost to science. He performed an autopsy and took careful notes, including two detailed drawings of Barbin’s genital area.

In addition Barbin had left memoirs, in which the male persona is referred at as Camille. They were given to Auguste Ambroise Tardieu who published excerpts in his Question médico-légale de l'identité, 1872.

In 1893 the German psychiatrist and novelist Oskar Panizza, wrote a fictionalized version of Alexina/Camille as Ein skandalöser Fall: Geschichten, which is obviously taken from the account in Tardieu but set in the eighteenth century.

Five years later, Armand Ernest Dubarry, a French novelist who wrote several medical pot boilers, published L'hermaphrodite, again based on Alexina/Camille.

In 1908 Neugebauer summarized Camille’s story in his immense inventory of hermaphroditism. Either by his doing, or as a printer’s error, Barbin’s name was affixed to the image of somebody else.

After that interest in Barbin dissipated until, in the late 1970s, the memoirs were discovered in the archives of le département français de l'Hygiène Publique, and were published by the controversial academic Michel Foucault.

The story was filmed in 1985 as Mystere Alexina. To the plot from the book, the filmmakers added an intrigue of being secretive about the gender of the actor who played Alexina: Philippe Vuillemin, a comic book artist, was billed as Vuillemin only.

In 2010 Sarah Leaver, who has a similar intersex condition, performed a one-woman play based on Barbin’s memoires.
  • Chesnet. “Question d’identité. Vice de conformation des organes génitaux. Hypospadias. Erreur sur le sexe” . Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 2, 14, 1860: .206-9.
  • Abel Barbin. Mes souvenirs. 1863-8. Published Paris: Editions du Boucher, 2002. www.leboucher.com/pdf/herculine/xherculi.pdf.
  • E. Goujon. “Étude d’un cas d’hermaphrodisme bisexual imparfait chez l’homme”. Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie normales et pathologiques de l’homme et des animaux, 6, 1869: 599-616. Reprinted in Foucault 1978/80.
  • Auguste Ambroise Tardieu. Question médico-légale de l'identité dans ses rapport avec les vices de conformation des organes sexuels, contenant les souvenirs et impressions d'un individu dont le sexe avait été méconnu,. Paris: J.B. Baillière et Fils,1872. Contains selection from Barbin’s Souvenirs.
  • Oskar Panizza. Ein skandalöser Fall: Geschichten. 1893. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and published in Foucault 1980. Reprinted: München: Martus Verlag, 1997.
  • Armand Ernest Dubarry. L'hermaphrodite. Paris: Chamuel, 1898.
  • Franz Ludwig von Neugebauer. Hermaphroditismus beim Menschen. Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1908:748.
  • Michel Foucault (ed) Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Translated by Richard McDougall as Herculine Barbin: being the recently discovered memoirs of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite. New York: Pantheon Books; Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980.
  • René Féret (dir & scr). Mystere Alexina. Scr: Jean Gruault, based on the book by Herculine Barbin & Michel Foucault, with (Philippe) Vuillemin as Alexina Barbin. France 86 mins 1985.
  • Alice Domurat Dreger. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, Ma, Harvard University Press. 2000: 16-20, 23, 28-9, 51-2, 76, 239n21.
  • Sarah Leaver (writer & performer). Memoirs of a Hermaphrodite, 75 mins 2010. Performed in London, Brighton, Manchester, Liverpool www.decibelpas.com/index.php?id=85.
  • “Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin:_Being_the_Recently_Discovered_Memoirs_of_a_Nineteenth-century_French_Hermaphrodite.
EN.WIKIPEDIA     FR.WIKIPEDIA    TRANS.ILGA
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Dr Goujon left us two detailed drawing of Barbin’s genital area, but we have no record of her face.  The drawings may be viewed in Dreger’s book.

The EN.Wikipedia article, in line with its usual practice, retrojects final gender back to birth.  “It's wikipedia policy to use the gender that the person decided upon as the pronoun throughout, not alternate them”.  However it gives not the slightest evidence that Barbin chose to be male, or even accepted the gender reassignment.  Suicide was her method of refusing to be male.  Even stranger, having imposed male pronouns, it names the article with Camille’s birth girl name: “Herculine Barbin”.

Actually the birth name was Adélaîde Herculine Barbin, so if only one first name is given, it should be Adélaîde Barbin.  However it would be better to refer to Alexina, as this is what family and friends called her.  This is one case where the film got it more right than most of the books about this person.

Likewise Abel is a name imposed.  When Alexina uses a male name for herself, she uses Camille.  I have used Camille in the name of this article in that it is the last name that Barbin used for herself.

If Barbin had been born earlier, s/he would have been determined to be a hermaphrodite, and permitted to choose a gender.  This freedom had been gradually reduced since the eighteenth century and by 1860 the church, the state and medicine in alliance took it upon themselves to determine the ‘true sex’ of a person, and compel them into it, without any consideration of the person’s feelings.

Previously to 1860, the major determinant in sexing a person had been presence or lack of a penis or vagina.  Barbin had both and should have been a hermaphrodite.  However the new fashion was that gonads determined sex.  Barbin had testes but no ovaries.  This criterion was the trump until chromosomes were discovered in the twentieth century.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am not a follower of Michel Foucault.  However I feel that his paragraph from page xiii is certainly worth pondering:
Alexina wrote her memoirs about that life once her new identity had been discovered and established. Her "true" and "definitive" identity. But it is clear she did not write them from the point of view of that sex which had at last been brought to light. It is not a man who is speaking, trying to recall his sensations and his life as they were at the time when he was not yet "himself." When Alexina composed her memoirs, she was not far from her suicide; for herself, she was still without a definite sex, but she was deprived of the delights she experienced in not having one, or in not entirely having the same sex as the girls among whom she lived and whom she loved and desired so much. And what she evokes in her past is the happy limbo of a non-identity, which was paradoxically protected by the life of those closed, narrow, and intimate societies where one has the strange happiness, which is at the same time obligatory and forbidden, of being acquainted with only one sex.
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10 May 2012

Ariadne Kane (1936 - ) teacher, activist.

Of Greek descent, Joseph DeMaios was raised in New York City. The only time that he cross-dressed as a child, he was discovered by his parents, and did not repeat the activity again for four years.

In 1958 Joseph completed a Bachelor of Science in Biophysics, Mathematics and Chemistry at City College, New York, and undertook graduate work in biophysics at New York University and University of Buffalo. He had a short marriage with a fellow student. When that collapsed, he worked for five years as a Math and Physics teacher in Boston.

In 1966 he moved to Europe, where he taught at St. Stephen’s School in Rome, from 1966-67, and at the American College of Switzerland in Leysin, from 1967-68. He was able to cross-dress for Fastnacht in Munich and Mardi Gras in Naples. He moved from teaching to curriculum design.

On return to the US he did educational consulting, developed a travel company, and worked as a realtor.

Kane & Prince at Fantasia Fair, 1981, by Patty Allen
He joined the Boston Gamma chapter of Tri-Sigma, and when the leader discontinued on obtaining surgery, DeMaios stepped forward using the name Ariadne Kane. He and others restructured and relocated the group which was renamed the Cherrystone Club.

From 1975 Kane was one of the initial organizers of Fantasia Fair, the annual week for cross-dressers in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Also from 1975 he ran the Human Outreach and Achievement Institute, later the Outreach Institute of Gender Studies (OIGS) dedicated to educating the public and working with health professionals. He married his girlfriend of nine years after explaining cross-dressing to her, and introducing her to the group.

In 1978, the year that the Cherrystone Club split into the Mayflower Club and the Tiffany Club, Kane was interviewed by Boston’s Gay Community News, and used the term ‘transgenderist’ which was catching on at that time. It seems that it was he who introduced Virginia Prince to the term as Prince used it briefly in the next year and then stopped doing so. Kane himself preferred the term ‘androgyne’.

Kane appeared on many radio and television shows, notably The Phil Donahue Show in 1980 and The David Susskind Show in 1982, and in classrooms in the Boston area. Kane gave seminars at the annual meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the American Society for Criminal Justice Professionals, the American Society of Sociology, and the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists.

IFGE (International Foundation for Gender Education) was founded by Merissa Sherill Lynn in 1986, initially as an outgrowth from the Tiffany Club. IFGE instituted a Virginia Prince Award, and, apparently with no sense of irony, actually awarded the first one to Virginia Prince. The next went to founder Merrissa Sherrill Lynn and the third to Ariadne Kane.

Kane completed an Ed.D. from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco in the early 2000s.

In 2006 Kane, as J. Ari Kane-Demaios, edited with Vern Bullough Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths, a collection of autobiographical essays by 18 trans women and two trans men. Kane described it to Helen Boyd: “We tried to involve contributors from all sectors of the gender spectrum, including androgynes, non operative and post-operative, individuals, spouses and close friends of T people” but the editors carefully restricted the sample to middle-class white persons, and, with only one exception, to US citizens, and excluded sex workers and any who had a male spouse. (See review)

Ariadne Kane prefers male pronouns. He identified as androgyne and bigender since first active in the 1970s, and has identified as bisexual since the late 1990s.
 MEMORY.BC 
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The Fantasia Fair site says:  “ 'Fan Fair' is the oldest and longest-running event of it's [sic] kind".  Depending on how you define 'of its kind', it may be.   However Koovagam in Tamil Nadu has been running for centuries, and the Auténticas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro in Juchitan in Oaxaca for many decades (despite being censored from the Wikipedia article on the town).

In his interview with Helen Boyd, Kane with all due modesty says: "The two most important milestones in TG history are the seminal studies on CD/CG behaviors, done by M. Hirschfeld in the early part of the 20th Century (1920's) and Fantasia Fair".
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05 March 2012

Thomas Baker (1680 - 1749) milliner, playwright, molly, lawyer, schoolteacher, vicar

Baker was said to have been educated at Oxford. Between 1701 and 1708, when the London stage was in transition from the bawdyness of Restoration comedy to a new sentimental and moralistic style, four of his plays were performed in London: The Humour of the Age, 1701, Tunbridge-Walks, 1703, An Act at Oxford, 1704, revised as Hampstead Heath, 1705, The Fine Lady’s Airs, 1708.

Tunbridge-Walks was the most successful, and also the least bawdy. In the 1778-83 Encyclopedia Britannica and the 1782 Biographia Dramatica, David Baker (not known to be a relative) was of the opinion that Baker had in Tunbridge-Walks written the molly character, Maiden, based on himself, intending to place his own failings in a ridiculous light for the purpose of warning. For this reason, Trumbach regards Baker as the first molly that we know of. Maiden has what at that time were regarded as female accomplishments: he can sing, dance, play the guitar. He can also dress a woman in that he was once an apprenticed to a milliner. He likes women’s company but has never had sex with a woman. He and his friends gather in his chamber and dress and play as women. He “[loves] mightily to go abroad in Women’s Clothes,” especially to the theatre.

Baker is also credited as being Mrs Crackenthorpe who wrote in the tri-weekly satirical periodical, The Female Tatler, 1709-10. According to a rival paper, The British Apollo, Baker suffered a beating after a prominent London family was ridiculed in The Female Tatler, and Mrs Crackenthorpe ceased writing soon afterwards because of an “Affront offer’d to her by some rude Citizens, altogether unacquainted with her Person”.

After this Baker disappeared from the London literary scene. He acquired a position in Bedfordshire where he worked as a schoolmaster and vicar. After his death, said to be of the skin disease, morbus pediculosus, his successor wrote of him: “Baker was a man of strange turn, imperious and clamorous upon topics of no service towards the promoting of true religion in his parish and not a little addicted to stiff and dividing principles”.

*Not Tom Baker, also of Tunbridge Wells, the fourth Dr Who.
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17 November 2011

John de Verdion (1744 - 1802) book dealer, language teacher.

Theodora Grahn was born in Leipzig and raised in Berlin where her father was an architect, noted particularly for the rebuilding of the Sankt Petrikirche.

After his death in 1750 at Bayreuth, she was raised by an aunt, and became proficient in Mathematics, French, Italian and English, as well as her native German.

The aunt died in 1758, leaving 1,000 Reichsthalers. Theodora took to trading as an Exchange Broker and prospered in the then ongoing Seven Years’ War. At its end in 1763 she went to Beyreuth.

On return in 1768 Grahn had declared himself to be Baron de Verdion. The next year Verdion became the secretary and amanuensis of Johann Basedow, the educational reformer. However, it being remembered that Verdion had been a woman, gossip ensued and they were compelled to part.

Later some young men from a merchant’s counting house, invited Verdion to an inn, got him drunk and verified his sex. This prompted Verdion to emigrate to England where as Dr John de Verdion, he became a language teacher and book dealer.

He was helped for a while by his co-patriate Frau Schwellenberg, an attendant to the Queen, Charlotte Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He taught German to the William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland and later Prime Minister, and to Edward Gibbon, the historian. He taught English to the Prussian ambassador.

Verdion was well known at book auctions, and on occasions would buy a entire coach load of books.

Verdion became a regular at Furnival’s inn and coffee house in Holborn where he became known for his prodigious consumption of food and drink. There were suspicions that he was a woman, and he was subjected a few pranks that expressed that opinion.

After 30 years in London, a fall downstairs developed into dropsy, and, despite the ministrations of a German physician who lived in the same house, he died. By his will he bequeathed all to the master of Furnival’s inn and coffee house, but upon his taking possession it proved inadequate to discharge the bill. Verdion’s considerable collection of foreign gold and silver coins were nowhere to be found, neither was his sword.

The coffin plate was at first engraved ‘John de Verdion’, but was then altered to ‘Miss de Verdion’. Verdion was deposited in the burying ground of St Andrew, Holborn.
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I am rather surprised that a 14-year-old girl in Berlin in 1758 was not only allowed to become an Exchange Broker, but was a success and made money at it.

I am less surprised that in 1769 it was a scandal for a man and a man-woman to work together.  There are still some Muslim societies that have that attitude even today.

John de Verdion was in London at the same time as D'Éon de Beaumont.  I have not been able to find any mention of de Verdion in books on de Beaumont.  In much the same way that books on Virginia Prince do not mention Edward Wood, although they were both in Los Angeles at the same time.
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07 July 2010

Laura de Vison (1939 – 2007) school teacher, performer.

Noberto David Chucri was raised by Lebanese parents in Rio de Janeiro. He graduated from the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia in philosophy, psychology and history, and became a history teacher in the public school system. Here he would sometimes take advantage of the syllabus to appear in drag, for example as Cleopatra when teaching Egyptian history.


Under the name Laura de Vison, he was also a well-known transformista from the 1970s to the 1990s. In particular he performed at the bar Boêmio. In a ninety-minute act he wore many of his almost 100 dresses.

After 18 years as a teacher he was fired after he answered student questions about the sexual transmission of Aids. Later he was arrested during a police purge and spent 10 days in jail.

He was often compared to Divine. He has been in eight films, and several television series. He was Gluttony for a samba school float in Carnaval.

He died at age 68 due to complications after surgery for a hernia.
 PT.Wikipedia.
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