Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
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Cindy grew up in Samoa in a Seventh Day Adventist family, and became a fa’afafine, the traditional transgender role in Samoa. Like many modern fa’afafines, Cindy has adopted western morés and is much like a drag queen, although she lives as female, and is disapproved of by the elders for this reason.
By the age of 15 she was the first night-club female vocalist in Samoa. She had an affair with a member of the Australian High Commission, who was transferred back home, but he quit his job and returned to Samoa to be with her.
In 1989 Cindy toured New Zealand, was a great success and stayed until 1996 when she returned to Samoa and started her own cabaret show that became a must for every tourist. She was also crowned Miss My Girl and Miss South Pacific Beauty Queen.
In 1999 she went to the USA for a one-off show in Carson City, but the trip was expanded as a tour. In 2002 she won Sydney’s Poly Talent Quest. She specializes in impersonations of Tina Turner.
Heather Croall (dir). Paradise Bent: Boys Will Be Girls in Samoa. Scr: Karin Altmann, with Cindy. Australia 51 mins 1999.
I hope that no-one is still reading Margaret Mead on Samoa. She never learned the language, couldn't tell when when people where having her on, and never noticed the fa'afafines.
Richard and Karen were teenage sweethearts who married just three months after highschool.
Richard Sharpe became a Boston-area dermatologist, with a cosmetic dermatology business, and a chain of hair removal clinics, LaseHair. He also taught at Harvard Medical School.
A secretive cross-dresser, who had abused his wife for many years, he came out in 2000 after he murdered her after she had left him. He had been self-prescribing female hormones to himself. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In 2007 he was acquitted of attempting to hire a professional killer to eliminate the prosecutor who had sent him to jail.
In January 2009 he managed to kill himself in his cell by hanging a sheet from the upper bunk.
*Not the soldier in the Bernard Cornwell novels and the subsequent Carlton Films television series, nor the rugby player, nor the 18th-century politician.
Lil, who lived en femme, and Maisie, who dressed for the stage, were a gay couple who lived in Hackney, London, and performed as a drag duo at various East End venues, particularly the Royal Oak in Columbia Rd, Hackney, from the Second World War and into the 1960s.
Their story was turned into a radio play, Diamond, 2006, by Linda Wilkinson, chair of Amnesty International UK, which was in turn adapted as a stage play, with Dave Lynn as Lil.
Linda Wilkinson. Watercress but no Sandwiches: 300 Years of the Columbia Road Area. London: Jesus Hospital Estate Residents Association, 2001.
Christopher Sandford (dir). Diamond. Scr: Linda Wilkinson, with Dave Lynn as Diamond Lil, and John Barr as Maisie. The Kings Head Theatre 2006.
William Griglak was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He became a Catholic priest and earned a PhD in Psychology at The Catholic University in Washington D.C..
William resigned the priesthood in 1969, and transitioned surgically to Nancy in 1979 with surgery from Dr Biber.
She never returned officially to lay status, and thus is claimed as the first female Roman Catholic priest.
Afterwards Nancy became a noted electrologist, and served as the educational director for the American Electrology Association.
Of course there are other candidates for 'the first female Roman Catholic priest'. I seem to remember an Italian priest who transitioned around the same time, but I cannot find any details any more.
Given the current interest in Mormons I reproduce this picture of the famous Utah female impersonator Madam Pattirini, who was also Brigham Morris Young (1855 - 1931), the 35th son of the Brigham Young.
This picture is a circa 1883 placard advertising an appearance in Logan, Utah. Young performed as Pattirini at Mormon venues from the 1880s to the 1900s. He did a convincing falsetto, and many in the audience did not realize that Pattirini was Young.
He had one wife and 10 children.
Connell O’Donovan. “’The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature’: A Revised History of Homosexuality & Mormonism, 1840-1980”. In Brent Corcoran (ed) Multiply and Replenish: Mormon Essays on Sex and Family. Salt Lake City: Signature Books 1994. Expanded and revised version online at: http://connellodonovan.com/abom.html.
Born in Chichester, Sussex, Anthony Hegarty moved with his parents to Amsterdam in 1977, and California in 1981. In 1990, he moved to New York to do a degree in Experimental Theatre at New York University.
He co-founded a performance collective, Blacklips Performance Cult, which became Anthony and the Johnsons which is named in homage to Marsha P. Johnson. As a teenager Antony had followed gender ambiguous performers such as Marc Almond and Boy George. A recurring theme in his work is being transgender. He has expressed a desire to be a 'a transvestite chanteuse at 3am nightclubs bathed in blue light, like Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet'. His voice is androgynous and has been taken as that of a black woman.
He has worked with Baby Dee and Julia Yasuda. He credits much of his success to Lou Reed’s patronage, which resulted in a signing to the Rough Trade label. He was in the Sebastian Lifshitz movie about a transexual, Wild Side, performing the song "I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy".
The group’s second album, I Am a Bird Now, 2005, has a cover photograph of Candy Darling on her death bed, and features excerpts from two children’s letters taken from a medical journal on intersex and sex change. It also contains “Free at Last” with the lyrics: 'One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman!'. ++It also includes guest artists Boy George, Lou Reed and Rufus Wainwright. The track "For Today I am a Boy" contains the lines: "One day I'll grow up, I'll be a beautiful girl. But for today I am a child, for today I am a boy".
In performance Antony sang Lou Reed’s song “Candy Says”.
In 2005 Antony and the Johnsons worked with film maker Charles Atlas and presented Turning in Europe featuring video portraits of enigmatic women in New York. Le Monde hailed it as "Concert- manifeste transsexuel".
In 2005, on the technicality of his British birth, I Am A Bird Now won the UK’s Mercury prize. The New Musical Express named him the fourth coolest person.
++In 2015 she announced that her name would be Anohni. In 2016 Anohni was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Manta Ray”, a collaboration with the composer J Ralph, featured in the documentary Racing Extinction. This makes her the first trans person to be nominated since Angela Morley won in 1974 and 1976, also for her music. However unlike her co-nominees, Sam Smith, Lady Gaga and the Weeknd, Anohni was not invited to perform at the ceremony, although some non-nominees were so invited. The South Korean soprano Sumi Jo was likewise snubbed under the pretense of not being "commercially viable".
++Anahni has commented on her situation as trans: "I am speaking out about my experiences but I can't speak for anyone else. Especially because my situation is ambiguous because I haven't transitioned from male to female. My experience as a transgender person has been to become comfortable expressing my sense of difference within the identity of being trans. For a lot of people, that's not their experience at all. They don't want to be trans, they want to be the opposite sex. I have so much love for those people because their condition is very real. It's almost like a sacred condition. Kids experiencing that are in a sacred crisis. They have all these gifts that boys and girls don't have."
Benito Martin León grew up in Salta, in the northwest of Argentina. He was sexually abused by his father’s friend at age 4, and was sexually abused again at age 10-12. At 15 he was working as a prostitute. He was repeatedly imprisoned for his sex and gender orientation, and for not providing sexual services to police officers.
At 18 León had moved to Buenos Aires and was living as Monica. She was arrested, detained and physically and verbally abused for 24 hours for dressing as female. She was one of the first travestis to file a complaint at this standard police abuse.
At 19 tests showed that she was HIV+ and, against the policy of confidentiality, the hospital staff shouted out her results across the waiting room. She was a co-founder of Asociación Travestis Argentinas (ATA) in 1993, of Organización de Travestis de la Republica Argentina (OTRA) in 1994. In 1999 she left OTRA and joined Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (CHA), where she worked to solicit the Ombudsman’s Office for the right to change one’s name.
For six years her lover was Alberto, a policeman, but he frustrated her attempts to better herself by education, by getting into theatre or by becoming an activist for other travestis, so she ended the affair.
Monica also completed secondary school and began university studies in law.
In 2003 she moved into the Gondolin Hotel which had been taken over by travestis from Salta after the owner died with no kin to inherit. Monica organized the Asociación Civil Gondolin, in large part to help the travestis there who were heavily into drugs and alcohol, and never used condoms. She coordinated with two hospitals to bring in 40-45 travestis monthly for check-ups to control tuberculosis. She sorted out the legal status of the hotel by getting the travestis to pay its taxes and bills.
On 18 December 2004, 60 police surrounded the hotel and robbed the inmates. Monica was shot eight times in the legs.
She fled to Paris and is seeking political asylum, but is harassed in that she does not have proper papers. In 2005 there was a media circus when Monica and Camille Barré, a post-operative trans woman, proposed to marry. This was Monica’s first affair with a woman. They were denounced by the French state for “trying to make society evolve by catching it in the traps of its own logic”.
Kristen Loehr. Transvestites in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Povery & Policy. MA thesis Georgetown University & Universidad de San Martin. 2007: 62, 67, 87, 89, 90-1, 95, 164-7, 173, 181-2, 213. http://dspace.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/4189/1/etd_kel25.pdf.
ed western morés and is much like a drag queen, although she lives as female, and is disapproved of by the elders for this reason.
returned to Samoa and started her own cabaret show that became a must for every tourist. She was also crowned Miss My Girl and Miss South Pacific Beauty Queen.
Salt Lake City: Signature Books 1994. Expanded and revised version online at: 
