Barbette (1899 - 1973) trapeze artist, female impersonator, aerial choreographer.

Van der Clyde Broodway was born in Texas, probably in Round Rock. He joined the circus at age 14. He became a (male) trapeze and tight rope performer in the Ringling Brothers' Circus and on the Orpheum Circuit.

When one of the Alfaretta Sisters, the World Famous Ariel Queens, died, she had no replacement and Van stepped in.

Thereafter he retained the female guise - this was not an unknown practice in the circus. Barbette started a solo act at the Harlem Opera House in 1919. His combination of female impersonation and trapeze artistry was a great success. He maintained the illusion of femininity until the end of his act when he removed his wig.


In 1923 he took his act to England and France. During an engagement at the London Palladium, he was caught having sex with a man, and never again allowed to work in England. In France he was hailed by the noted writer and artist Jean Cocteau, who gave him a cameo in his film Le Sang d’un Poète, 1930, and had a brief affair with him. The drag-trapeze-artist murderer in Alfred Hitchcock's Murder, 1930 is inspired by Barbette, and is not in the source novel.

Barbette toured Europe and America through the twenties and the thirties until a high wire accident put him into hospital for a year.

A continuing stiffness in his arm prevented a continuance of his career on the trapeze, although he continued as an aerial choreographer and consultant, for example on Till the Clouds Roll By, 1946 and The Big Circus, 1959.

He was also a consultant for Some Like It Hot, 1959.

He committed suicide at the age of 74 after years of chronic pain.

His life was turned into a play, Barbette, 2002 by Bill Lengfelder & David Goodwin.

• Jean Cocteau. “Le Numéro Barbette” Nouvelle Revue Française. July 1926. Reprinted as Le No Barbette. Paris: Jacques Damase 76 pp 1980. Reprinted in ManRay & Jean Cocteau (translated from the French by Catherine Garo). Barbette. Borderline 1988.
• LeGrand-Chabrier, "Les Métamorphoses de Barbette," Vu 144 December 17, 1930.
• Roger Baker. Drag: a history of Female Impersonation on the Stage. A Triton Book 1968 p216-8.
• Francis Steegmuller. Cocteau: a Biography. An Atlantic Monthly Press Book. 1970. p364-8 and Appendix XIV 'A Visit to Barbette, 1966'. .
• Joe E. Jeffreys "Barbette: That Daring Young [Wo]Man on the Flying Trapeze," in Arthur Gerwitz and James J. Kolb (eds) Art, Glitter and Glitz: American Theatre of the 1920s Greenwood Press 1999.
• David de Alba. “Barbette”. FI Pictorial Tributes Epilogue. http://phantomdragon.com/THELEGEND/epilogue.htm.
• "Barbette (performer)". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbette_(performer)

Lennox Ross Broster (1888 - 1965) pioneering surgeon.

Lennox Broster was the fifth child of eight of a farmer in Molteno, South Africa.  He won a Rhodes Scholarship, and studied medicine at Oxford University.  He met his wife-to-be, Edith, at Oxford.  They later had three daughters. 

Lennox became Head Surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital, London, and later a well-known Harley Street surgeon. He did pioneer research and provided hormonal therapy and surgery for intersex patients, especially those with adreno-genital syndrome (now known as Congenital adrenal hyperplasia), at Charing Cross Hospital in the 1930s and 1940s.  Patients included: Mark Weston.

In 1932 he devised an operation which provided heretofore-impossible access to the adrenal gland for removal of tumours.

++An 1938 article in the Daily Mirror about his work was headlined “Doctor Changes Sex of 24: Patients Have Married”.   The article specifically mentioned Donald Purcell who did marry four years later.

Broster's work was reported in The News of the World, in 1943, which attracted male-born patients who would now be regarded as transsexual. However there is no evidence that he operated on any such person, and Clifford Allen, the psychiatrist who worked with him, specifically rejected surgical treatment for ‘transvestites’ (the term then in use).

Unlike the other surgeons who operated on intersex and 'transvestite' patients in the 1930s and 1940s, e.g. Harold Gillies, Kurt Warnekros, Ludwig Levy-Lenz, Erwin Gohrbandt, Milosh Kilcka, he did not do just one or two as an experiment, but did several hundred operations over the years.

He later worked with John Randell.

He died in Wimbledon, London, aged 77.

• Lennox Ross Broster,  Surgical Problems of the War. Lippincott, 1933.
• L. R. Broster, Clifford Allen, H. W. C. Vines, Jocelyn Patterson, Alan W. Greenwood, G. F. Marrian, and G. C. Butler. The Adrenal Cortex and Intersexuality. London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1938.
• Lennox Ross Broster. The Clinical and Surgical Aspect of the Adreno-Genital Syndrome. 1938.
• L. R. Broster.  Endocrine Man: A Study in the Surgery of Sex. William Heinemann, Medical Books, 1944.
• Lennox Ross Broster & Howard William Copland Vines. The Adrenal Cortex: a surgical and pathological study. H.K. Lewis & Co. Ltd, 1933.
• “Were Once Sisters”. The News of the World. 2 Aug 1943.
• Dave King. “Pioneers of Transgendering: John Randell, 1918-1982”. University of Ulster: Gendys Conference, 2002. www.gender.org.uk/conf/2002/king22.htm. 
• "The Broster Family Connection".  Family Trees, History and Stories.   http://genealogy.amay.co.uk/main.php?p=FF2-broster.

Mark Weston (1906 - ?) shot-putter and javelin thrower.

Mary Edith Louise Weston was England’s best female shot-putter 1924-1930 and the best javelin thrower in 1927.

In 1936 Mary became Mark after two operations by Lennox Broster at Charing Cross Hospital. Broster said: “Mr. Mark Weston, who was always brought up as a female, is male, and should continue life as such".

Two months later Mark married his close friend, Alberta Bray, in Plymouth.

His younger sibling, became Harry a few years later.

• “Change of Sex”. Time. Aug 24, 1936. www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,756527,00.html.
• Donald Furthman Wickets. “Can Sex in Humans be Changed”. Physical Culture Jan 1937. http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/01/16/can-sex-in-humans-be-changed.

Paul Wegman (1944 - 2004) actor, drag performer.

Paul Wegman grew up in Rochester, NY, and initially worked in a carnival.

He first moved to Orlando, Florida  in 1965. In 1966 he worked for a while as a female stripper without being outed, and was also booked for prostitution in a gay bar by police officers who thought that he was a woman.


He became well-known in Orlando as an actor.  He was known for his versatility of roles in straight theater, and who had a second stage career as Miss P.

He worked with Logan Carter in the early ‘70s, and had developed the Miss P persona by the mid-1970s when he moved his act to the Parliament House, a theater in Orlando. In addition to his own act, he emceed the other drag queens, staged an all-male version of A Chorus Line, and presented various gay plays.

Paul died from complications from Aids.

• James T. Sears. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South. Rutgers University Press 421 pp 2001: 74-6, 82-5, 128-9, 155-6, 160-1.
• Jason Piekarski and Michael Wanzie (dir). Paul Wegman: A Tribute. US 40 mins 2006.
• "Paul Wegman 'Miss P'. Gay Orlando History. http://gayorlandohistory.com/gallery/v/Entertainment/Drag/MissP/img274.jpg.html

Dora Ratjen (1918 - 2008) high-jumper, barman.

Gretel Bergmann (1914 - ) had won the German Olympic trials in 1936 in the high-jump, and was expected to be Germany's representative at the Olympic Games. However two weeks before the Games she was was dropped from the team because of 'mediocre performance'. The real reason, of course, was that she was Jewish. She was replaced by Dora Ratjen of the Hitler Youth, an odd woman with a deep voice and who never showered with the other women. The other German representative was Elfriede Kaun.

In the Berlin Olympic Games of that year, Ratjen came fourth. Only three jumpers cleared 1.60m : Kaun, the UK's Dorothy Odam and Hungary's Ibolya Csák (1915 - 2006). All failed 1.62m at the first attempt. At a jump-off, also at 1.62m, Csák was the only one to clear, and became the first Hungarian to win an Olympic Gold.

The irony for the the Nazis was that Bergmann had cleared 1.64m in the trials. And more than that, Csák was also Jewish

In 1938, Ratjen won the European championship in Vienna, beating Csák into second place. However she was later examined by a police doctor after being read at a railway station, and found to have ambiguous genitals. Her European championship was rescinded, as was her permit to compete – on the grounds of violating her amateur status. Csák was awarded the gold.

In 1957, Herman Ratjen, a barman in Hamburg, said that he was Dora Ratjen, that he had been raised as Horst Ratjen, and had lived as a woman for only three years and that the Nazis compelled him to compete as a woman.

----

Bergman emigrated to the US in 1937 and quickly won their national title in high-jumping. She married and became Margaret Lambert. She saw the story of Herman Ratjen in Time in 1966 in a story about the introduction of sex testing. She did not return to Germany until 1999 when a stadium in her home town of Laupheim was renamed in her honour.

Csák later worked at the Hungarian Banknote printing company, but remained an active spectator in Hungarian athletics until her death in 2006.


Herman Ratjen died at the age of 90.

• “Dora Ratjen”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_Ratjen.
• “Ibolya Csák”. The Daily Telegraph. 14/02/2006. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1510324/Ibolya-Cs%C3%A1k.html.
• Christopher Hilton. “Amazing tale of man called Hermann who finished fourth in women's high jump”. The Independent. 20 July 2008. www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/athletics/amazing-tale-of-man-called-hermann-who-finished-fourth-in-womens-high-jump-872322.html.

____________________________________________________________________________

This case is the one and only of gender imposture in the Olympics. The whole embarrasment of sex-testing rests on this case. However we do not know the details of Ratjen's intersex status. It could be that she is actually entitled to compete as a woman under modern rules. The claim of Herman Ratjen in Hamburg in 1957 to be Dora rests only on his say-so. No journalist seems to have actually checked it out.

The 2009 film Berlin 36 is the story of Gretel Bergmann. There is no character called Ratjen in the cast list.

Sin Kim Dan (1938 - ) sprinter.

Dan broke the women’s records for 400m and 800m in 1961/2. She was the first woman to run 400m in less than 52 seconds.

In 1963 in Moscow, other female sprinters refused to run against her because she looked like a man.

A South Korean man claimed that she was his son who had disappeared during the war.

She was not in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as North Korea was not in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

Her record was not passed until 1969, and it still holds in Asia.

Obligatory sex-testing for international athletics was introduced in 1966, and for whatever reason, Sin did not compete after that.

• “Shin Kim Dan”. Wikipedia: Die freie Enzyklopädie. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Kim_Dan.

Zdenek Koubkov (1913 - ?) runner, jumper, performer.

Zdenka Koubkova, who worked as a corset fitter, became a runner who set Czechoslovak women's records in the broad jump, high jump, a half-dozen sprint and middle-distance runs.

She broke the women’s world record for the 800-metre dash at the Women's World Games in London in 1934.

A genital examination was ambiguous, and she was stripped of her award and banned from Olympic competitions.

To her humiliation, a nude photograph of her was published in a medical book.

Professor Milosh Kilcka, head of a surgical institute in Podol (now Podil) in Kiev, Ukraine, decided to emphasize Zdenek’s masculinity by means of an operation. The operation was so successful that the Czechoslovakian government officially sanctioned Zdenek’s transfer to masculinity

Zdenek went to New York in 1936 and performed in a Broadway club as a tableau vivant.

• “Change of Sex”. Time. Aug 24, 1936. www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,756527,00.html
• Donald Furthman Wickets. “Can Sex in Humans be Changed”. Physical Culture Jan 1937. http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/01/16/can-sex-in-humans-be-changed.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002:33-4.