This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1800 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.

There is a detailed Index arranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

10 August 2007

The Honourable Arthur Cameron Corbett


Arthur Cameron Corbett (1919 – 1993) was educated at Eton and Balliol. He acquitted himself fairly well in the war, rising to the rank of Captain, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre; his father was Chief Scout of the British Empire 1945-59 and governor of Tasmania, 1959-63; his uncle was Jo Grimmond, leader of the Liberal Party 1956-67. The family money came from Brown & Polson's Corn flour.

From childhood he had been a closet transvestite. As an adult he went to male brothels and paid the boys to dress him, and also dressed for some family events. He networked in the underground transy scene, and had seen Toni April, a star performer at the renowned Le Carrousel in Paris. He used his contact with Louise Lawrence to get in in touch with April Ashley, as Toni was known since becoming a woman, courtesy of Dr Burou in Casablanca.

April had become a fashionable model whose gender secret was open, but not widely known. In 1962 she obtained a small part in the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby film, The Road to Hong Kong, the last of the franchise, and this attracted more media attention. She was outed in the press, and her biography was published in The News of the World - an event that had enormous impact on the next generation of transgender Britons. April's modelling career came to a sudden halt, and she received an enormous mailbag of enquiries. The next year Arthur Corbett married April in Gibraltar, which makes her Lady Corbett.

However the marriage was a failure, and they spent very little time together. In 1969 he applied for an annullment. Divorce by mutual consent had not been previously possible, but was allowed for in the new Divorce Reform Act of 1969 which would come into effect in 1971. However he did not wish to pay alimony. He applied for an annulment on the grounds that Ashley was not a woman. The case was tried by Justice Ormrod, the only UK judge to also be qualified as a doctor. Ormrod granted Arthur Corbett’s prayer for an annullment, however he also ruled that a person born male is legally male in perpetuity. Corbett v Corbett became case law in the UK and in Australia. The correcting of birth certificates for intersex and transgender persons ceased, and such persons lost the legal right to be treated as their new gender – in particular to marry a person of the now opposite gender.

This situation continued in the UK until the Gender Recognition Act of 2004.

April rallied and opened a restaurant just round the corner from Harrods, that was an immediate sensation, and continued to run it for five years until she had a heart attack. Then she retreated to the book-shop town of Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border,

In 1977 Corbett became the 3rd Baron Rowallan when his father died.

April's first autobiography, written by Duncan Fallowell, was published in 1982.

In 1993, when Ashley heard that Arthur was dying, she went to his bedside at his home in Spain. He said that she was the only one that he had ever loved, and admitted that he had cheated her.

April's second autobiography, written by Douglas Thompson, was published in 2006, but was pulped when Duncan Fallowell pointed out that it was largely a copy of the earlier book. However somes copies are available on the second-hand market.


---------------
Corbett was, of course, a spoilt rich kid, a self-indulgent upper-class twit, who cared not what trauma he imposed on his wives, April included, and cared not that he had messed up the lives of tens of thousands of others.

However the real villain was Lord Justice Ormrod, MD, who apparently was much respected in the legal field. However this was a classic case of the law being an ass. It was quite possible to grant Arthur Corbett's petition without impacting not only on every other trans person in Britain, but also every intersex person. The ruling by Ormrod details personal medical facts that are irrelevant. The central issue was that Corbett knew perfectly well what April had been. There was no deceit on her part. This is not even discussed by him. Instead he concentrates on her medical history. He even wrote to Dr Burou for medical details. This is prurient.
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08 August 2007

Paula Grossman (1919 - 2003) music teacher

++updated 15/4/11, 7/8/16.


Paul Monroe Grossman was born in Brooklyn, NY. He grew up in New Jersey,  graduated with an A.B. in 1941 from the University of Newark (now called Rutgers), and spent the Second World War in the U.S. Army.  He then went to Columbia University where he earned an M.A. and a Professional Diploma in Music Education (S.M.E.) in 1947. In 1949 he married Ruth Keshen, and he spent the next 21 years as a music teacher in public schools in North Dakota, Montana, upstate New York and in 1957 he finally returned to New Jersey to teach at Cedar Hill Elementary School in in the town of Basking Ridge (map).


In 1971 Paul became Paula, and was suspended as a teacher. She sued, and lost. She fought the dismissal to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. However since she had been declared to be 'disabled', she eventually won a disability pension. She did stay in the same small town, and was well known as a transsexual. During the years of litigation, she became something of a celebrity, appeared on television, the guest of Johnny Carson and David Frost. She gave lectures all over the eastern United States. She supplemented her income playing as a musician in night clubs.

When it was over, she wrote A Handbook for Transsexuals, which is long out of print.

She was never allowed to teach in a school again. She stayed with her wife until she died in 2003.


Legacy


Here is a summary of Paula's book:
  • 'A transsexual has his sex changed to correct a medical condition which will kill him if he doesn't. And for absolutely no other reason whatsoever.'
  • Transvestites never should; the naturally small and feminine should not either.
  • If you cannot stand the agony, then do the change.
  • Stand up for yourself; don't be shunted aside as an outcast.
  • 'Don't let non-transsexuals formulate rules for you.'
  • If you want to keep the same job, fight for it.
  • If you want to stay with your wife and children, then do so.
  • Don't bother with electrolysis: 'Thousands of extra dollars and a couple of years of suffering is a lot of money and extra pain for the usually inaffluent transsexual to absorb. A few extra minutes a day [to shave] isn't all that ghastly.'
  • Don't be persuaded to live a year in the guise of a woman - you probably won't be able to get a job in your field.
  • Don't be persuaded to move to another town and throw away your career. Stay and fight. Work out in advance whether you can keep your job. If you cannot, figure out what you can do instead.
  • Find a good lawyer. For your name change. For a will. For a spouse's consent to the operation - needed if you do not divorce. For litigation especially in fighting to keep your job.
  • Choose the right doctor. Do not go to a psychiatrist expecting any kind of cure. Avoid bigoted and insensitive doctors.
  • Don't let other transsexuals down by being a 'slob' e.g. by becoming a stripper.
Grossman's case against her employer, Grossman v. Bernards Township Board of Education, became caselaw in the US and is frequently cited result in transsexual employment law discussions. Drs Charles Ihlenfeld and Robert Laidlaw testified on behalf of Grossman, and Dr Charles Socarides on behalf of the schoolboard.  It was ruled that she was not discriminated against as a woman, and therefore the dismissal was legal.

In Janice Raymond's diatribe of hatred, The Transsexual Empire, there is a mention of Paula Grossman. She is quoted via a newspaper article gushing about having one's hair done, cosmetics and clothes. It is typical of Raymond's sloppy research that she did not find Paula's Book. This is probably just as well.

In 2007, one of her ex-pupils wrote a sympathetic article for the St Petersburg Times.

++In 2016,  Meryl Streep revealed that she had been one of Paula's students.  


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31 July 2007

New York pickpocket 1941

The history of transpeople can be taunting. Some persons, who presumably live a life of several decades and repeatably express their transgender personality, even in periods of repression, literally have only a few moments of fame, often because they have been arrested. Then they disappear back into the darkness.


One such was a person charged with being a pickpocket who was arrested in New York in 1941, and who just happened to be photographed by the freelance photographer Weegee (Usher later Arthur Fellig 1899 - 1968). She co-operated with Weegee by lifting her skirt, and we have the photograph, but we do not know even her name.


. http://elainearmen.blogspot.com/2008/09/naked-city-by-arthur-fellig.html.
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Mathilde de Morny (1862 - 1944) painter, aristocrat

Mathilde de Morny, also known as La Marquise de Belboeuf, and sometime as La Chevalière, who had a lifetime nickname of Missy. She was a minor painter and sculptor under the name of Yssim.

Mathilde was a daughter of the Duc de Morny and grand-daughter, from the first marriage, of Josephine Beauharnais, consort of Napoleon. She was briefly the wife of the Marquis de Belboeuf.


The novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873 – 1954) had a six-year affair with Mathilde after the end of her first marriage. Colette was making a living as a music-hall dancer and mime, and sometimes Mathilde would play a minor male dance role in the troop. In 1907 the two performed Rêve d'Égypte at the Moulin Rouge: their onstage kiss caused a riot, and the police were called.


Mathilde had 'the solid build of a man, reserved and rather timid'. She looked like a distinguished, refined, no-longer-young man, for she always wore men's clothes, indeed she wore many of them at once which made her look plump. To hide her 'effeminate' figure she wore several woolen waistcoats and shirts, and several pairs of socks to fill up her men's shoes. She had a hysterectomy and had her breasts removed. She was addressed as 'Monsieur le Marquis'.

Monsieur le Marquis moved in the FTM transvestite circles in Paris, and lived a life of fine wines, long cigars, photographs of horsemen. When one of her brothers died, feeling that she should not be disrespectful to the dead, she attended the funeral in a veil and a black dress. The family thought that she looked like 'a man dressed as a woman' and begged her to change to her male attire.

She committed suicide during the German occupation, when she was ruined and desperate.
-------------------------------------------------

With the hysterectomy and mastectomy she was as physically close to being a transsexual as was available for her generation, and it seems strange to use female pronouns for the latter part of her life, but none of the sources that I have consulted uses male pronouns. This is presumably partly due to her life happening at an early stage in the social construction of transsexuality, but also due to her class position and wealth. If she had to work for a living, passing, rather than just playing with gender roles, would have been essential.

  • Fernande Gontier et Claude Francis. Mathilde de Morny: La scandaleuse marquise et son temps. Paris:Perrin 330 pp 2000.
  • Fernande Gontier. Homme ou femme? La confusion des sexes. Paris: Perrin 218 pp 2006: chp 8. 

 FR.WIKIPEDIA
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24 July 2007

Harold Delf Gillies (1882 - 1960) pioneer surgeon

Harold Delf Gillies (1882 - 1960) was born and raised in Dunedin, New Zealand. He trained at Cambridge University, where he was a rowing and golfing blue, and St Bartholomew's Hospital.  He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS) in 1910.  He married in London in 1911. He and his wife had four children.

In 1914 he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, and pioneered a facial injury ward, and later hospital for wounded soldiers. At The Queen’s Hospital which opened in June 1917, he and his colleagues developed much plastic surgery and performed over 11,000 operations on over 5,000 men. He was knighted in 1930.

In the Second World War, he consulted with the Ministry of Health, and organized plastic surgery units, and trained other doctors. He had developed ‘flap surgery’ where a flap of skin is moved to another part of the body to help healing. Flaps were later rolled into tubes, from which a penis could be fashioned.

The first transsexual surgeries had been performed in the 1920s in Berlin by Ludwig Lenz and Felix Abraham at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and in Moscow by Il’ia Golianitskii, The rise of the Nazis traumatically interrupted the evolution of this knowledge.  Arlette-Irène Leber had vaginoplasty in Switzerland in late 1941.

The next operations were by performed by Harold Gillies. A series of operations from 1942-6 on female-to-male Michael Dillon, who himself later qualified as a doctor. This was the first ever operation anywhere to change a woman into man. Gillies also performed the first UK male-to-female operation on Betty Cowell in 1951.  These operations resulting in his having to appear before the General Medical Council.  

Following this, urologist Kenneth Walker arranged an appointment for Georgina Turtle.  It was probably a mistake for Turtle to have come straight from his job as a male dentist clad in a black morning coat and pinstrip trousers.  Gillies waved him away: “I do not really think you look or could be made to look like a woman".  Subsequently Turtle's operation was performed by Gillies' colleague and compatriot Patrick Clarkson. Four years later, after Turtle had obtained a revised birth certificate, Gillies wrote to say that he was sorry for what he had said, and request help in getting one of his 'very deserving cases' a correction of birth certificate.  


Gillies is not known to have done any other sex-change operations after the two pioneering cases.

Harold Gillies is referred to as the father of plastic surgery. He was also a noted painter, a champion golfer and practical joker. His paintings were exhibited at Foyale's Art Gallery in 1948.

Mrs Gillies died in 1957, and Harold married a woman who had been his surgical assistant some months later.

In 1960, Gillies suffered a cerebral thrombosis while operating.   He died in hospital a month later.
  • Harold D. Gillies. Plastic Surgery of the Face. London: Henry Frowde, 1920;
  • Roberta Cowell. Roberta Cowell's Story. London: Heinemann. New York: British Book Centre, 1954.
  • Harold D. Gillies & Ralph Millard. The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery. London and New York: Butterworth, 1957.
  • Reginald Pound. Gillies: Surgeon Extraordinary. London: Michael Joseph, 1964.
  • Craig Williams. “Harold Gillies: Aesthetic Reconstructor”. The New Zealand Edge. www.nzedge.com/heroes/gillies.html.
  • Liz Hodgkinson. Michael née Laura. Columbus Books. 1989.
  • Pagan Kennedy. The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007: 7-8, 60-67, 70-3, 78-81, 97-9.



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20 July 2007

Alexei Pedachenko (1857 - 1908) doctor, murderer.

In Russia Pedachenko had been a doctor, who had worked in the maternity wards in Tver (known as Kalinin 1931 - 1990). Pedachenko spent some time in Paris around 1886 and was wanted for the murder of a woman in Montmartre. In 1888, he was living with his sister in Walworth, south London, which was the year of the Ripper murders.

The Monmartre murder was presumably the cause of his flight to London, although it is also said that he was an agent of the Ochrana, the Russian secret police. Some say that they ordered the Jack the Ripper murders merely to embarrass the British police; others say that the idea was to blame expatriate Russian anarchists.

Pedachenko passed himself off as a woman when he felt like it, but on other occasions he grew a heavy moustache which he wore curled and waxed. A burnt out tea kettle was found with the body of Mary Kelly, one of the Ripper victims. It is suggested that this was used to boil water to shave off his moustache so that he could escape in Kelly's clothes.

After the murders in London, and Sir Charles Warren had resigned from the Metropolitan Police, Pedachenko was smuggled back to St Petersburg, where, after murdering yet another woman in 1902, he was committed to an asylum where he died. He was cross-dressed when arrested.

In 1923 William Le Queux published Things That I Know About Kings, Celebrities and Crooks in which he claimed that the Russian provisional government of 1917 had given him manuscripts found in the cellar of Grigori Rasputin's house. These included a manuscript in French called Great Russian Criminals which specified that Pedachenko was Jack the Ripper. As Colin Wilson comments: Rasputin lived in a fourth floor flat and did not know any French.

Donald McCormick, in his 1959 The Identity of Jack the Ripper, says that he was shown a lithograph copy of The Ochrana Gazette for January 1909 which identifies Vassily Konovalov as the Ripper, and describes his cross-dressing. The Ochrana Gazette was a real publication, but other researchers have not been able to find the entry. It also, peculiarly, refers to 'Petrograd', a name that St Petersburg would not take until 1917.

Possible aliases include: Vassily Konovalov, Mikhail Ostrog, Andrei Luiskovo.
  • Paul Begg, Martin Fido & Keith Skinner “Vassily Konovalov, William Le Queux, Ochrana Gazette, Michael Ostrog, Alexander Pedachenko, Grigori Rasputin” The Jack the Ripper A to Z. London: Headline 1991.
  • Tom Cullen. Autumn Of Terror 1945. Reprinted as The Crimes And Times Of Jack The Ripper. Fontana/Collins. 1966: p206-7
  • Christopher J. Morley. “Dr. Alexander Pedachenko”. Jack the Ripper: A suspect Guide. E-Book. 2005. Online at http://www.casebook.org/ripper_media/book_reviews/non-fiction/cjmorley/146.html.
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17 July 2007

Whatever happened to ... Lanah Pelley

Hands up those who remember the 1987 film called Eat the Rich, or more obscurely, the 1985 film The Supergrass. Eat the Rich, a comedy that did not quite work, was a comedy, in the English tradition and about the horrors of life under Thatcherism, that had an unusual selling point: the actor(ess) playing the male lead Alex was a recent MTF transsexual. IMDB credits the part to 'Alan Pellay as Lanah Pelley'. The video box image shows Alex as a maternal female feeding the other actors - a scene that is not only not in the film, but has nothing to do with the plot of the film. The Wikipedia article on Eat the Rich, on the other hand mentions only Alan, and says nothing about his sex change.

 
Alan/Lanah, originally from Grimsby, Lincolnshire, a graduate of London's drag scene, had been a gender-bender punk in the band Spit Like Paint and part of the alternate comedy troop, The Comic Strip in the 1980s, sometimes playing female characters. 'Lana Pelley' played the part of 'Mary' in Supergrass.

In the late 1980s it seems that Lanah was presenting as a completed transsexual, or at least that the press releases that film reviewers get implied or said so. Here is an 80s website called The Blitz Kids which has photographs and publicity material for Lana Pelley, pushing her then new single 'Pistol in Your Pocket' which describes her as 'Alan Pelley, now known as Lanah', and as a transsexual superstar.


....

I had wondered what had happened to Lanah Pelley. Transsexuals in show biz sometimes lose their careers and disappear completely from view, for example Canary Conn, and I thought that maybe that was what had happened to her. However I have now been pointed in the direction of Al Pillay, (note the surname has now been altered also), a rising performer who is moving from successes in London's West End to a stint in Las Vegas. Al is also from Grimsby, was in Eat The Rich and had a successful single called 'Pistol in Your Pocket'. In fact it is the same person. The bio on Al's web page describes him as 'one time transexual disco diva', but that is all on that topic. In an interview on Positive Nation, the interviewer asks:
What happened to Lana and the sex change?
As far as a sex change operation, it was not even on the menu. Transsexuality for me, was more my protest against a macho, posturing gay world, and my subversion of society’s restrictive gender norms. Some of us have to go right out on a limb and overboard to find out who we are as people.
Such are the realities in show biz!

PS IMDB has a separate entry for Al Pillay, and treats him as a separate person from Alan Pellay.




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