Jennifer Leitham (194? - ) bassist.

John Leitham grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, cross-dressing secretly. He had a clear high voice and was able to sing harmony. He taught himself the basics of playing bass and was in a rock band in the post-Bowie androgyny phase, except that he was sometimes too successful at being androgynous.

With the advent of Progressive Rock, he started four years of serious study of the acoustic bass. This led to a six-month gig with the Woody Herman Band.

He met a woman who was completely accepting of who he was and they married. His wife proposed that his name be Jennifer. In the mid-1980s they moved to Los Angeles and he became a regular with Mel Tormé until 1996. Then he joined the Doc Severinsen Band.

The Leithams divorced in 1996, and Jennifer found a good therapist who helped her to transition. She had surgery in July 2002 with Gary Alter. The gigs with Doc Severinsen continued but some of her other work dried up. She has worked more on her own music, and has started singing again after several decades. She has also started started standing to play and moves her body more with the music. She was a featured artist at Toronto Pride 2010.

• Don Heckman. "Jennifer Leitham: Transamerican Music". Jazz Times. April 2009. http://jazztimes.com/articles/24397-jennifer-leitham-transamerican-music.
• www.jenniferleitham.com.

Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel (1694 - 1721) button maker, prophet, soldier.

Catharina Margaretha Linck (or Lincken) was born, after her father's death, at Glaucha, Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. After fourteen years in the orphanage, she had learnt the trades of button-making and of printing cotton. 

To preserve her chastity she started dressing in men's clothes, and was considering leading a holy life. He joined a group of Radical Pietists, and took the name of Anstasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel. For two years Anastasius travelled with the Pietists as a prophet. 

After losing his gift, he joined the Hanoverian troops as a musketeer using the name of Anastasius Beuerlein. After three years he deserted at Brabant, but was apprehended at Antwerp and condemned to be hung. He got out of this by revealing that he was female. This was supported by a letter from Professor Franken of Halle. 

Some time later he joined the Volunteer Company of Royal Prussian Troops in Soest, again using the name of Beuerlein. After he had been in the company for about a year, Professor Franken wrote to the company priest and Beuerlein was sent away. As Catharina, she returned to Halle and stayed one summer. 

Then Anastasius went to Wittenberg and joined the royal Polish troops as a musketeer with the name of Peter (or Lagrantinus) Wannich. On being captured by the French in a campaign near Brussels he ran away. He then served for a year with the Hessian troops in Rheinfels in Major Briden's Volunteers as Cornelius Hubsch, but ran away when after a fight he was to have run a gauntlet. 

During these period of military service, he had alternated between Catholicism and Lutheranism as circumstances dictated. He was also something of a woman chaser. Then again as Catharina she returned to Halle and made flannel, and spun and printed cotton. She stayed at this for almost four years, sometimes dressing as male, sometimes as female. Once in Halle she was arrested by soldiers, but because of Professor Franken and his disclosure of her sex, she was let go. 

On this occasion she was taken to the Rathaus to truly determine her sex. After this inspection he reverted to male. He got a job with a French stockingmaker in Halberstadt, and became acquainted with a Fraulein Muehlhahn, also called Catharina Margaretha. They wed despite the antagonism of Catharina’s mother. However Anastasius beat Catharina because she did not earn anything, and sold her goods. They lived as itinerant beggars, and converted back and forth between Catholicism and Lutheranism for Christening gifts as much as 25 reichstalers. 

His mother-in-law, assisted by a woman called Peterson, attacked him with a sword, ripped open his trousers, and detached the leather instrument that was attached to his groin. Catharina was charged with wearing men’s clothes, going with the Pietists, frequent desertions and perjuries, sodomizing her wife, stealing from her wife and converting for monetary gain. 

After a legal dispute about which method of execution was most appropriate, Anastasius was beheaded, and Catherina Margaretha was imprisoned.

• The Prussian State Archives, Halberstadt, 13 October 1721.
• F.C. Müller.  “Ein weiterer Fall von conträrer Sexualempfindung”  in Friedreich’s Blätter für gerichtliche Medizin und Sanitätspolizei. Heft 4. 1891.
• Brigitte Erikksson (translation From The German). “A Lesbian Execution In Germany, 1721: The Trial Records”.   Journal of Homosexuality.  Vol 6(1/2) Fall/Winter 1980/81.  Reprinted in Salvatore J. Licata, & Robert P. Peterson (eds). Historical Perspectives On Homosexuality. 1981 
• Angelika Steidele. In Männerkleidern. Das verwegene Leben der Catharina Margaretha Linck alias Anastasius Rosenstengel, hingerichtet 1721. Biografie und Dokumentation. Böhlau: Wien 2004.

DE.Wikipedia. ___________________________________________________________________________________

First contray sexual-feeling and then lesbian.  None of the commentaries propose FTM or trans man.  The de.wikipedia page was originally called "Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel" (see the URL) but has been renamed to “Catharina Margaretha Linck” which is going in the wrong direction.

Dianna Boileau (1930 - 2014) secretary.

A boy born in a Winnipeg home for unwed mothers was adopted by Mr Boileau, a forest ranger, and his wife, and named Clifford. They lived in Manitoba and then western Ontario. 

In Fort Frances, Clifford consulted Dr Challis who realized that he was transsexual. Dr Challis had studied with Dr Robert Ernest Cowell in London. Dr Cowell was the father of Roberta. 

Clifford acquired experience in office work by working for Dr Challis and a local Lawyer. At 17 Clifford, with his parents' approval, set out alone for Winnipeg. It was Dianna who got off the train. She stayed in a modest hotel and applied for secretarial work. However the police visited her because she had spent time in the lobby and talked to people. She confessed her male identity which quite confused the policemen. Her parents came to take her home. 

Dr Challis explained the situation to them of having a daughter, and her parents moved to Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay) so that Dianna could start her new life. However her mother was uncomfortable in the big city of 30,000, and they went back to Fort Frances. 

Dianna moved to Calgary. She obtained work as a stenographer and art-school model. She developed a friendship with Rosemary, a divorced elevator operator. She and Rosemary shared a home. After getting too close to a man, and not wanting him to find out her sex, Dianna persuaded Rosemary to move to Edmonton.

She got a job as an instructor in a dance school. She got drunk for the first time with one of the other instructors, and they were arrested for petty vandalism. When her maleness came out she was sent to a mental hospital for an evaluation. The hospital outed her to Rosemary, but it made no difference. Dianna and Rosemary moved to Toronto. Dianna found employment as a stenographer in a law firm. 

On a stifling June night in 1962, Dianna and Rosemary went for a midnight car ride to cool down, were sideswiped, and Rosemary died after the car hit the guardrail. Dianna's boss, being a lawyer, took charge. She told him that she was a transsexual. On the third day, she returned to work, and was arrested that afternoon, charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous driving. She was read by the prison matron, and transferred to men's facilities. She spent 4 days in the Don Jail for men, until her boss raised the bail amount. Her case also became a media sensation. She and her boss were bickering under the stress, and they mutually agreed that she should get another job. Dianna was arraigned as both Clifford and Dianna but was allowed to dress as Dianna. She was acquitted of criminal negligence at a trial in September. At the trial for dangerous driving in February, after 10 minutes the all-male jury also returned a verdict of not guilty. 

Dianna started drinking, lost her job and used up all her savings, and attempted suicide. The attempt outed her at hospital, and the police informed her landlady. However the landlady took her in hand, stopped her drinking, and pushed her to get a new job. 

She met other transsexuals, obtained leaflets from the Erickson Educational Foundation, and phoned Dr Leo Wollman in New York, which resulted in a prescription for female hormones from a local doctor. She started electrolysis. In 1969, she and a friend called Bambi, went to New York to be castrated by a doctor in Yonkers. They took four days to recover from this. In August she approached the gynecological department of Toronto General Hospital and was referred to Dr Betty Steiner at the new gender identity clinic that was being formed at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. 

She underwent several months of evaluation, which included two weeks as an inpatient at the Clarke Institute, and getting a local social worker to interview her parents. She was sent to the penile plethysmograph, but was allowed to exit in disgust. Dianna became the first transsexual patient to be approved for surgery by the GIC, the first to be financed by the Ontario Health Insurance Program.  Was hers the first transsexual surgery in Canada?  There were some others at about the same time at McGill University and one at Dalhousie University. 

Her operation was on 20 April 1970 at the Toronto General Hospital. The Edgerton technique devised at Johns Hopkins was used. Dr Steiner gave her a kiss as she went under the anaesthetic. Dianna was kept in the hospital for three months before being discharged. She gave a press conference in mid-September, giving only her first name. However she was overshadowed by Leo Wollman who flew up for the event, and predicted that transsexual women would be able to become pregnant within 10 years. 

Dianna wrote her autobiography in 1972, dedicated to Betty Steiner, with an Introduction by Leo Wollman, and has stayed out of the news ever since.

• "Woman Driver, 32, Found to Be Male". The Globe and Mail. June 16, 1962.
• "Man Dressed as Woman: Lawyer, Magistrate in Conflict". The Globe and Mail. July 21, 1962.
• "Dressed as Woman, Man Acquitted, Sobs". The Globe and Mail. Sept 7, 1962.
• "Dressed as Woman, Man goes on Trial". The Globe and Mail. Feb 8, 1963.
• "All-Male Jury Acquits Driver in June Death". The Globe and Mail. Feb 12, 1963.
• "Identity Concealed: Sex-change surgery is first for Canada". The Globe and Mail. April 23, 1970.
• Kathleen Rex. "Canada's first sex-swapper asks for understanding: Doctor sees day coming when transplants will enable fathers to become mothers". The Globe and Mail. Sept 16, 1970.
• Dianna as told to Felicity Cochrane, with an Introduction by Leo Wollman. Behold, I Am a Woman. New York: Pyramid Books, 1972. 
•  "Dianna: Canada's first sex change patient".   All About Women.  With host: Margo Lane; guest: Dianna Boileau.  CBC 11 mins May 29, 1972.  www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/dianna-canadas-first-sex-change-patient.

___________________________________________________________


Dianna seems to have been a bit naughty and practiced time compression in her autobiography.  She states that in 1962, the time of the trial, she was 15 years younger than Rosemary who was about to turn 40, which would have made her 24.  In addition the book leaves the impression that she was one year in Calgary and less in Edmonton, and my mental image while reading it was that she was in her early twenties when the car accident happened. However the Globe and Mail articles on her trial state that Dianna was 32 and Rosemary 45.  Hence Dianna must have been born in 1930, and will be 80 now.

With the revised chronology, Clifford was a patient of Dr Challis in 1946-7.  So the statement, that he knew about transsexualism in that he had studied with Dr Robert Ernest Cowell, is odd in that Roberta had not started her transition then.

Dr Wollman is an unreliable narrator as we know from his movie, Let Me Die a Woman, and his prediction of organ transplants so that trans women can have babies, is the same nonsense that he spouts in the 1978 film.  Ten years from 1970 is 1980.  We are 30 years further on and it is still not likely.

If the Clarke GIC had continued the personal service that it gave to Dianna, it would have a much better reputation.


 

Taff al-Khalifa (1978 - ) princess, soldier.

Latifa al-Khalifa was Sheika Latifa, and niece to Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain who became Emir in 1999 and King in 2002. At 12 Latifa was sent to a girls’ boarding school in Gloucestershire, England.

At 16, on return to Bahrain, she demanded to join the army, a normal step for princes, but unheard of for a princess. The king finally agreed, and Latifa was sent to Sandhurst for officer training – one of 90 women out of 400 soldiers. Later with the Bahraini army, she didn’t have the body strength to lift heavy weapons, and after a hip injury was medically discharged.

She became part of Bahrain’s underground gay scene, but as it is transphobic, she pretended to be a lesbian. She was picked up by the police’s discipline squad but they saw from her ID card that she was royalty.

As pressure to marry as a woman mounted she escaped during a family visit to London in 1999, and he became Taff. The family has tried to kidnap him. He has applied for asylum in the UK. 

• Ros Wynne Jones. “Princess who wants to live happily ever after as a boy”. The Express on Sunday. June 13^th, 1999. Online at www.pfc.org.uk/node/850. www.philipjohnston.com/news/ex130699.htm and at www.ftminfo.net/prince.html.
  

Alexander James Adams (196? - ) musician.

Heather Alexander was raised in California, and was later based in Oregon. She performed Celtic and World music. She was an accomplished fiddler and also played the acoustic guitar and bodhran. She played in the groups Uffington Horse and Phoenyx and well as performing solo. She was known for performing at science fiction conventions.


In 2007, after a 25 year career and 10 albums, Heather transitioned and became Alexander James Adams. He has continued performing in the same venues that Heather played in, and has played with Uffington Horse.

In 2007 he released Wintertide which features duets between Heather’s and Adam’s voices.

  EN.Wikipedia     www.heatherlands.com

John Henry Newman (1801-90) theologian, cardinal.

The son of a London banker, Newman was educated at Great Ealing School and Trinity College, Oxford. He became a Christian at 15, and an Anglican priest at 24. He was a leader in the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, converted to Catholicism in 1845, and was created a Cardinal in 1879.

Officially he was celibate all his life. However he had intense friendships with younger men, first with Richard Froude who died aged 33 in 1836, and then he lived with Ambrose St John from 1843, when St John was 28, until St John's death in 1875.

Newman was not the most masculine of men. John Campbell Shairp described Newman as a woman’s soul in man's body. Lytton Strachey described his "soft spectacled Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence". Another contemporary described him:

“Robust and ruddy sons of the Church looked on him with condescending pity as a poor fellow whose excessive sympathy, restless energy, and general unfitness for this practical world would soon wreck him. Thin, pale, and with large lustrous eyes ever piercing through this veil of men and things, he hardly seemed made for this world”.

Another:

“Early in the evening a singularly graceful figure in cap and gown glided into the room. The slight form and gracious address might have belonged either to a youthful ascetic of the middle ages or to a graceful high-bred lady of our own days.”

Wilfred G. Ward, another English convert to Catholicism reported a dream that had had a strong impact on him:

“He found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he exclaimed, ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford’. ‘I am John Henry Newman’, the lady replied, and raising her veil showed the well-known face."

In his later years a similar impression remained. One colleague described him as 'white, frail and wistful', and another as 'delicate as an old lady, washed in milk'.

His major writings were his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1866 and Grammar of Assent, 1870. His poem Gerontius was later put to music by Edward Elgar.

He died in 1890 and in accordance with his wishes was buried in the grave of Ambrose St John. A joint memorial stone was erected: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

In 1991 the Catholic Church proclaimed him as venerable, a first stage on the road to becoming a saint. In 2008 the Church, having obtained a special exception to UK law, opened the grave to separate the two men and to place the remains of Newman in a reliquary in the Birmingham Oratory, but his body had completely decomposed. Peter Tatchell condemned the separation as 'moral vandalism' in an article in The Times. Newman was beatified during the Pope's visit to the UK in September 2010.

• Peter Gay. The Tender Passion. Oxford University Press. 1987 : 236n39.
  
• Elaine Showalter. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture At The Fin De Siecle. Viking 1990: 149.
  
• Geoffrey Faber. Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement. Faber & Faber. 1974 (1933) p32-4.

  EN.Wikipedia 
_____________________________________________________________

The argument for St John and Newman being a gay couple is as strong as that for Hoover and Tolson minus the evidence of Susan Rosentiel re the drag parties. As Peter Tatchell said:  "It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person's sexual orientation." 

Newman certainly seems to have been more anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa than Karl Ulrichs was.


Which of the ancient gods of England, Lugh perhaps or Yngvi, arranged it that his body was fully decomposed before the Catholics came looking for relics?

Kiira Triea (1951 - 2012) intersex/HSTS activist, guitarist, Linux geek.

Denise Magner has claimed that she was born at the US Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, but also that she was born in Finland. Either at birth or aged 2 she was assigned as a boy. He grew up in the Baltimore area. After puberty, as Denise, she became a lesbian-separatist, and also a hard rock musician. 

She also tried living as a man for a while, and became a patient of The Johns Hopkins Hospital Psychohormonal Research Unit and of John Money, and was operated on in 1974 by Howard Jones.

Later, in 1993, as Denise Tree she became editor of Linux News, and at this time was using a jhu.edu id (Johns Hopkins University). She was also a bicycle maker and metalworker. She took the name Kiira from the character in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Kiira Triea was an early member with Cheryl Chase (Bo Laurent) of the Intersex Society of North America, (ISNA) and had an article in the first issue, 1994, of Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and maintained their website. In 1997 she founded the Coalition for Intersex Support Activism & Education (CISAE). Her essay of that year, “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”, about her experiences at Johns Hopkins and being forced to be either male or female, was originally published by Dallas Denny in Chrysalis and reprinted in Dreger's Intersex in the Age of Ethics. The essay says that she was 14 when she went to Johns Hopkins. 

She is credited with the design of the Phall-O-Meter, a useful tool for intersex activists to mock the doctors’ obsession that a clitoris must be less that 0.9 cm and penis more than 2.5 cm. 

In her essay "Learning about transsexuality from transsexuals", Kiira explains that after she became an intersex activist, she was approached by supposed intersex persons, and claims that over 99% of them were lying. Many claimed to be true hermaphrodites or Klinefelter's but were obviously not.

"Finally, I began to understand transsexuality, as it was expressed by socially privileged former men, in terms of being antithetical to my understanding of the underlying socio-political causes of intersex oppression and at odds with my goals as an intersex activist. Certainly there are many conceptual frameworks within which intersex can be understood but I found feminism to be useful because it addressed the core issues of what sexualities and what bodies are allowable by an androcentric technocracy and answered questions like why would doctors create non-functional female genitals in children, not bothering to determine the results of those interventions for decades. I also began to wonder why the natural biological variation of intersex, which did not actually result in socially expressed 'gender variance', was not allowed while the biological variation and socially obvious gender variance that resulted when adult men attempted to modify their bodies to become female was allowed."

"I began then in 1997 to understand transsexuality and its supporting model of 'gender identity' not as medical syndrome but as a social instrument which eradicated understanding in order to preserve social privilege".

On the other hand, she found that HSTS or trans-kids were quite different:

"None of them had tried to write to me for several reasons, first was that they were not motivated to acquire any other legitimizing identity as were autogynephilic transsexuals because their social identities and personal identities were congruent. They simply seemed like normal feminine girls or women whose social ‘gender’ or what Suzanne Kessler calls ‘gender attribution’ was immediately obvious both in their appearance and behavior and required no theoretical explanation. They did not present themselves to me as intersex nor did they advocate for transsexuality to be classified as an ‘intersex condition’ because, in common with intersex children, they were a socially devalued population who were often medicalized harmfully as children."

These persons she had invited to her intersex groups. Kiira herself was invited by Michael Bailey to join his closed SEXNET mailing list. She became an advocate for Bailey's variation on Blanchard's ideas. 

In 2004 Kiira launched the transkids.us website which endorsed the Blanchardian concept of 'homosexual transsexual' in distinction to autogynephiles. It was very quickly linked to by the Anne Lawrence and Michael Bailey websites. Kiira became the one and only public HSTS, although people pointed out that if she were a lesbian intersex, she could hardly be an HSTS (= heterosexual trans woman). 

Kiira died from cancer at age 61.

• Kiira Triea. “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”. http://www.isna.org/books/chrysalis/triea_pru.  Also in Alice Domurat Dreger (ed) Intersex in the Age of Ethics (pp. 141-144). Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group. 1999.
• John Colapinto. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. Toronto & New York: HarperCollins, London: Quartet xvii, 279 pp 2001: 259.
• Kiira Triea. transkids.us.
• Andrea James. “Kiira Triea (Denise Tree) and the "transkids" hoax “. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/info/transkids/kiira-triea.htm.
• Andrea James. “Legal troubles for Denise Tree (aka Kiira Triea) expose more lies”. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/notes/index.php/site/comments/legal_troubles_for_denise_tree_aka_kiira_triea_expose_more_lies.
• Alice Dreger. “A note on Kiira Triea’s place in the history of intersex activism”. http://alicedreger.com/kiira_triea.html.
• Andrea James. “No matter how you slice it: Parsing Alice Dreger’s self-defense”. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/notes/index.php/site/comments/no_matter_how_you_slice_it_parsing_alice_dregers_self_defense.
• Sophia Siedlberg. “Treestumps and Broomsticks”. OII. Feb 16,2008. www.intersexualite.org/Treestumps.html. 
• Alice Dreger.  "Losing Kiira".  http://alicedreger.com/losing_kiira.html.

___________________________________________________________

This is an overview of Kiira.  See the Andrea James pages for the details of her alternate autobiographies.

Triea, Dreger, Kessler all moved from ISNA to the Bailey camp.

Born in 1951, Triea was 61 when she died.  The only photographs available are from decades ago.

Dreger’s first essay is a defense of Triea after what James wrote.  However it merely dismisses ‘loony things said about Kiira on certain sites’ and does not address the issues.  Nor does she give any explanation at all why an intersex woman would be running an HSTS site.

Sophia Siedlberg has problems with intersex activism as radical-feminism.  Feminism is many things, not just trade-union activism for women.  One of the other things is a radical deconstruction of the sex-gender system.  Intersex activism also deconstructs the sex-gender system.