Ruthie and Eddie. dress-designer, horse trainer.

Ruthie, a male-bodied dress-designer, took up with Eddie, a female-bodied horse-trainer, in El Paso, Texas in the 1930s. The used to act up together in gay bars, and were advised that their marriage was “urgently advisable”. They loved the idea that they could wear each other’s clothes.

Pat Highsmith, who met them in 1940 on a trip home from college, wrote: “Each would have liked the other’s body for his own to put clothes on ... [T]hey were ... finding the greatest pleasure in the world in buying clothes for each other - which neither wore - and which soon were taken back and worn by each respectively - which was what they’d wanted after all.”

• Patricia Highsmith. Cahiers, 4 September 1940. Unpublished.
• Joan Schenkar. The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009: 136.

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We know of Ruthie and Eddie only because Pat Highsmith wrote about them in her notebooks, and then because Joan Schenkar used the anecdote in her biography of Highsmith.   How many tens of thousands are lost to history?

Irving Thalberg (1899-1936). Norma Shearer (1902-1983)

Irving Thalberg (1899-1936). Norma Shearer (1902-1983). Married 1927.

Thalberg, born in Brooklyn, NY, was the outstanding movie producer of the inter-war period.. 'The Boy Wonder', the model for Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Irving Thalberg worked his way up the ladder to be executive producer of Universal City by the age of twenty. He left this position to become the first Vice-president of MGM in 1924. He died of heart attack and pneumonia at the age of 37.

Shearer, born in Montreal with a RCMP cop for a father, was a rising star at MGM when she married the boss. She was nominated for Best Actress Oscars six times.

Irving and Norma were recreational transvestites. Flamini's 1994 biography says: 'Because he carefully watched what he ate, Thalberg's frame never varied, and Norma's dress size fitted him well, as did her shoes. One of their private jokes was to dine together by candlelight wearing each other's clothes, Thallberg in an Adrian creation complete with makeup, Norma wearing one of his suits.'

• Roland Flamini. Thalberg : The Last Tycoon and the World of M-G-M. London: Deutsche, New York: Crown Publishers. x, 309 pp 16 plates 1994: 154
• “Irving Thalberg”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Thalberg.
• “Norma Shearer”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Shearer.

Barbara (1913 - 1963 ) & Lauren Wilcox (1906 - ) transheterosexuality pioneers

When speaking of transgender persons the term 'heterosexual' is best used for persons who encouple with a person going in the other direction, that is an MTF with an FTM. Here is the first known such couple to attain surgery.

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Edward Richards attended Pomona College, Los Angeles in the 1930s where he shared a dorm with Arnold Lowman, the future Virginia Prince, and then worked as a salesman in Los Angeles.

In July 1941, as Barbara Ann Richards, she was featured in the press as she petitioned the Superior Court of California to change her name and to become legally a woman. Her story was that two years earlier changes to feminine had occurred spontaneously, that she was a hermaphrodite. An endocrinologist, Marcus Graham, presented her case at a medical conference, attributing the change to an hormonal imbalance resulting from a childhood illness. 

However at a hearing in October at which the judge granted the legal change, a medical report revealed that she had been taking female hormone injections.

Lorraine Richards played the role of a devoted wife, but in 1944, away from media attention, she also had a sex change and became Barbara’s husband.

They were both only-children , and married twice: first in their gender roles as assigned at birth, and again after both had transitioned. They had met Karl Bowman and Alfred Kinsey, and the latter referred them to Harry Benjamin who became their hormone prescriber.

They were friends of Louise Lawrence, the prolific networker who brought so many early transgender persons together. The newspaper accounts of Richards were inspirations to Virginia Prince. Barbara had her final surgery in 1956 from Elmer Belt.

Barbara died 1963 of a coronary

• “’Man’ Asks Legal Right to Assume Woman Status”. Los Angeles Examiner. July 3, 1941.
• Barbara Ann Richards, as told to Bart Lytton. “Nature Betrayed My Body”. Sensation. Nov 1941, 88.
• “Young Bride Won’t Leave Mate Who’s Victim of Sex Change”. Oakland Tribune. July 4, 1941
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 39-41, 48.

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In Leah Cahan Schaefer & Connie Christine Wheeler. “Harry Benjamin's first ten cases (1938-1953): a clinical historical note”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 24:1 Feb 1995: 4-5 Barbara and Lauren are referred to as  Carol and Christian.