Joanne Wingate (1960–) Sergeant Major.

Joe Rushton from Somerset joined the UK Army’s Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in 1981. He became a Warrant Officer and then Company Sergeant Major, and was on the army boxing team. He served in Northern Ireland and in Bosnia and Kosova.

He was married four times to women, and had one son.

In 1997 he privately informed his commanding officer of his intention to become a woman. Shortly afterwards, when Rushton was handing over the company to another Sergeant Major, 22 soldiers arrived in drag. The commanding officer dismissed this as simply horseplay.

Rushton became a woman as Joanne in 1998, and was transferred to a desk job in training and recruitment, but the gender in her medical and administrative files was not changed. She was passed over for promotion, and some colleagues continued to refer to her as a man.

She was dismissed in March 2003 with long service and good conduct medals, but was disciplined on two occasions involving 'inappropriate language'. All this was in disregard of the guidelines/instructions AGAI 76 re transitions within the Army. Rushton unsuccessfully sued the Ministry of Defence for discrimination later that year.

• Richard Saville. "When Sgt Major Joe said he wanted to be Joanne his men had only one response - to go on parade in drag". The Telegraph, 18 Sep 2003. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1441728/When-Sgt-Major-Joe-said-he-wanted-to-be-Joanne-his-men-had-only-one-response-to-go-on-parade-in-drag.html.
• “Transsexual 'discriminated against' ". BBC News. 25 September 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/3140648.stm.
• "Sex-Swap Soldier Speaks Out". Sixth Sense, 20 Nov 2003. http://home.arcor.de/royal-signals/page1/files/page1-1015-full.html.

EN.WIKIPEDIA  

Ludwig Trovato (196? - ) film maker.

Bettina was raised in Reims by a Sicilian father and a French mother. He transitioned as Ludwig in the early 1980s.

He has made film documentaries, mainly about painters and writers, including: Pasolini, la langue du désir, 1985 about the Italian filmmaker; Images d'images, 1987 about 15^th century painting; 3004 P about the painter Vincent Corpet; Au Coeur d'un autre temps, about Dante.

In 1999 a young man, a casual sex partner of Ludwig, egged on by his mother, accused Ludwig of rape, which led to three years of proceedings before he was acquitted. The fact that Ludwig is a trans man did not result in the charges being dropped, as giving fellatio has come to constitute rape in French law. Ludwig recounted these experiences in his book, Mon corps en procès. 

He lives in Reims, and recently has spent time in Senegal where he has been working on educational television. A retrospective of some of his films was held in Reims in 2007. In 2008 he released an autobiographical film, Ludwig.

• Catherine Millet interviews Ludwig Trovato. "Filmer comme on peint". art press, 111, fevrier 1987. Online at: www.pileface.com/sollers/article.php3?id_article=587.
• Ludwig Trovato. Mon corps en procès. Flammarion, 2003.
• Jacques Henri. "Le sexe était presque criminel". art press, 294, octobre 2003. Online at: www.pileface.com/sollers/article.php3?id_article=587.
• A. Gauvin. "Ludwig Trovato, un documentariste singulier". Pileface, 6/02/2008. http://www.pileface.com/sollers/article.php3?id_article=587.
• www.ludwigtrovato.com.

Jackie McAuliffe (1970–) sex worker, pianist.

Jason McAuliffe was born in Hackney, the third of four sons. Five years later, the parents abandoned their children.

Jason and one brother were raised by a two head teachers in Hertfordshire. Jason learned to play piano and violin, but felt different at school where he was often beaten up.

'It's like a jigsaw. You're trying to build up the picture except when I made my jigsaw, there was no picture. It's very difficult for other people to understand why you might feel like a woman, because it's bigger than anything and it takes over your life and the loneliness and isolation were horrid.'

He left home at 17 and at 20 had his first appointment at Charing Cross Hospital gender identity clinic, but still had to wait three more years. She was living as Jackie from 1993, and had surgery through the National Health Service in 1995.

Also wanting breast augmentation and facial surgery, Jackie then worked for three years as a prostitute. She was arrested and fined several times. She was working in Sussex Gardens, Paddington Green, but thinking of getting out, when a film crew arrived looking for 'interesting people' to be in a new docu-drama, and Jackie was chosen. The first episode of the program, Paddington Green was aired in December 1998.

Jackie returned to playing piano and ignored the increased traffic at her old corner in Paddington Green. In January 1999 she was interviewed on The Heaven and Earth Show on BBC1 and some weeks later was invited by Decca to record an album of piano music, Forgotten Dreams, which was released that November, and went to number 14 in the UK charts, which netted royalties for her of £8,000.

In June BBC1 showed a 30-minute special called Jackie's story:

"Everyone thinks I've got it made after being on tv, but I'm on the dole and broke ... Sometimes I'm tempted to be a hooker again".

In August she was featured in a panel discussion Genetically Modified Fame at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival. She received hundreds of letters, many from other transsexuals.

"But I didn't reply to them. I'm not counsellor or a transsexual martyr or a propagandist. There's much more to me than being a transsexual. It's about me being a human being. Being Jackie."

Shortly after Jackie stopped working Sussex Gardens, a cis prostitute, Amanda Walker, was picked up at the same spot and brutally murdered by David Smith.

• Nick Murphy Paddington Green. Narrated by Todd Carty and Ross Kemp. With Jackie McAuliffe. BBC1 1998-2001.
• "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman". Radio Times, June 05, 1999. Online at: www.jackiemcauliffe.net/i_sometimes.html.
• Kathryn Flett. "One woman's liberation: TV made Jackie a star. But Paddington Green's transsexual prostitute has already moved on". The Guardian, Jan 31, 1999. Online at: www.jackiemcauliffe.net/i_liberation.html.
• Richard Brooks. "Coping with the Fallout". The Sunday Times, 27 June 2000. Online at: www.jackiemcauliffe.net/i_coping.html.
• Jackie's Story. With Jackie McAuliffe. BBC 1 30 mins 28 June 2000.
• www.jackiemcauliffe.net.
• Chris Summers. "Prostitute murderer gets life. BBC News, 8 Dec 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/552350.stm.

Nelly Fonseca (1920 – 1963) poet.

Nelly Fonseca Recavarren was born in La Libertad, Peru, in 1922 (although some say 1920 or even 1914). At the age of nine she fell down stairs, broke her spine and was confined to a wheelchair.

Fonseca then took the name Carlos Alberto Fonseca, wore men's clothes and cut his hair short. Carlos Fonesco became a major Peruvian poet in the 1930s and 1940s. He also wrote journalism and was was awarded literary prizes.

In 1955 he published poems as Nelly Fonseca.

Around 1960, after being operated upon for a tumour, Fonesco returned to dressing as a woman.

* Not Carlos Alberto Fonseca Amador, the Sandinista.

 TRANS.ILGA   DE.WIKIPEDIA.

Kenneth Tynan (1927 – 1980) theatre critic, scriptwriter and producer.

Kenneth Tynan was raised in Birmingham and educated at King Edwards School, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He started smoking at grammar school; he stammered but gave an impression of high intelligence. In university debates he spoke out in favour of homosexuality, abortion and masturbation, a full generation before the first two were decriminalized in Britain. He had many admirers and his parties were sometimes attended by London celebrities. He also produced and acted in plays, and wrote for and edited college magazines. When his father, until then known as Peter Tynan, died in 1948, it came out that he was also Peter Peacock, a former mayor of Warrington, Cheshire, with another wife and another family.


Kenneth married the US actor and future novelist Elaine Dundy in 1951. They had a daughter the next year, named her Tracy after Spencer Tracy and got Katherine Hepburn to be godmother. Also that year Kenneth was hired by the London Evening Standard as a theatre critic. The slogan on his desk was 'Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds'. Two years later he moved to The Observer. He lambasted the middle-class country-house drama which dominated London theatre in the early 1950s, and championed the Angry Young Man movement. He is given credit for turning John Osborne's Look Back in Anger into a hit. He was the script editor at Ealing Studios, 1956-8. He also became known in the US with a series of reviews in The New Yorker, 1958-60.

Both Tynan and Dundy had extramarital affairs. Tynan favoured sadomasochism, especially caning buttocks. He had an affair with April Ashley's flatmate, and afterwards, April would mock the sound of his being spanked. In 1963 he became literary manager at the newly founded National Theatre, in those days located at the Old Vic, working with Lawrence Oliver whom he had previously disparaged. He ceased as The Observer theatre critic, but stayed on as its film critic. Dundy and Tynan finally divorced in 1964.

On 13 November 1965, on a BBC late-night satirical show, Tynan was asked about sexual intercourse on the stage and replied: “Well, I think so, certainly. I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word 'fuck' would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything which can be printed or said can also be seen." This was the first speaking of 'fuck' on British television. The BBC issued an apology, there were four separate censure motions in the House of Commons and Christian morality campaigner, Mary Whitehouse, wrote to the Queen that Tynan should have "his bottom spanked" (which of course he would have enjoyed). Billy Connolly later wrote a song about the event.

In 1967 Tynan pioneered the term 'homosexual mafia' (later 'gay mafia') as a proposed article for Playboy. Also that year he married the Canadian writer Kathleen Halton in 1967, when she was already pregnant with his child. They got Marlene Dietrich to come along as a witness. In 1969 Tynan created the stage show Oh! Calcutta! With sex and nudity (and Tony Blair's future father-in-law, Anthony Booth, in the cast), it became one of the longest running shows both in the West End and on Broadway. In 1971 he co-wrote Roman Polanski's Macbeth. Although he wrote elsewhere "No woman has ever distinguished herself [as lady MacBeth] for the simple reason that there is nothing feminine about her", this observation was not incorporated into the film. The same year he resumed keeping a diary which would eventually be published. He was forced out from the National Theatre in 1973.

He came down with emphysema. He refused to stop smoking as he thought that it was necessary for his writing. After failed projects on Wilhelm Reich, masturbation and a film about a sexual triangle, Kenneth, Kathleen and their children moved to California in 1976, where Kathleen found success as a writer, including her script for Agatha, 1979, much to Kenneth's chagrin in a time of his own failure.

As with his first wife, Tynan insisted on total sexual freedom for himself and fidelity from his wife. However Kathleen did go out with him when he was in drag. He caught, on television, the 1929 film, Pandora's Box by Georg Pabst and starring Louise Brooks, based on the play by Frank Wedekind. He dressed as Brooks for a party, and later set out to find the aging star, and did so in Rochester, New York, where they drank, smoked and talked. Kathleen wrote a script about this infatuation of her husband, which was optioned by Martin Scorsese but never filmed.

He also found a woman who would play out his sadomasochist fantasies, and they frequently cross-dressed together. Here is an excerpt from his diaries:

Kenneth and Kathleen, 1978

"Went with K. (in the Garbo dress from 'As You Desire Me' which I had copied for her) to a '20's Ball, at which I wore a feathered blue lurex peignoir, sequinned knickers, suspender belt and black stockings and a wig modelled after the hairstyle of Louise Brooks. And a six inch ivory cigarette-holder. Introduced myself, to people who asked who I was meant to be, as Lord Baden-Powell. I also shaved my legs for the occasion. Although I wouldn't want to be a woman, I love the idea of making love to a woman while dressed as one; and I much prefer the feel of my own legs when they are hairless. This doesn't make me a transvestite; but it does mean that I enjoy exploring more sexual possibilities than those available to macho males in jeans and t-shirts. (I regard it as a gap in me that I've never been turned on by the sight, touch or thought of a man.) Sadly, the other guests were mostly rich bores. (20 May 1976)".

He died of pulmonary emphysema at age 53.

A BBC film of his life was made in 2005.

• Kenneth Tynan. "The tragic history of travesty". In J. Hadfield (ed). Saturday Book 13, London:Hutchison, 1953: 39.
• Kenneth Tynan. "The Girl In The Black Helmet". The New Yorker, 1979. Reprinted in Show People: Profiles in Entertainment. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980. Online at: www.freewebs.com/everybreeze/tynan.html.
• "A doomed romance: Kenneth Tynan's screen goddess". The Guardian: Saturday Review, 21 Nov 1998: 4. Online at: www.psykickgirl.com/lulu/tynan.html. 
• Alan Travis. "How two dames saved Oh! Calcutta!: The police wanted to close it down, but the experts, including headmistresses and a vicar, thought otherwise".  The Guardian, 23 Dec 2000.  www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/dec/23/alantravis.
  
• Kenneth Tynan (ed John Lahr). The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Partially online at: http://a.parsons.edu/~schadel/thesis/fall/misc/tynan.html
• Michael Billington. "Tynan's gift was to make criticism glamorous and sexy". The Guardian, 24 Sept 2001. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,,567652,00.html.
• André Alexis. "He may have been a pervert, but Tynan sure could s'imposer". The Globe and Mail, Nov 24, 2001: D2.
• April Ashley with Douglas Thompson. The First Lady. London: Blake. 383pp. 2006: 309-11.
• "Kenneth Tynan". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Tynan.
• Chris Durlacher (dir & scr). Kenneth Tynan: In Praise of Hardcore. With Rob Brydon as Kenneth Tynan, Julian Sands as Laurence Olivier. UK BBC 73 mins 2005.

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 Of course, the name Oh! Calcutta! is derived from "O quel cul t'as!" French for "What an arse you have!".

Fatime Ejupi (1926–?) peasant, soldier, councillor.

Fatime was the fourth daughter of a Muslim peasant family in Kosova. Lacking a son, the parents deemed the child to be a boy, Fetah.

Widowed at an early age, the mother was left the difficult task of guiding her son through the rites of boyhood. This was essential in that a widow with only daughters had no right to retain her husband's house and land. She managed to avoid the synét (circumcision) and postponed the search for a bride indefinitely.

In 1944 the 18-year-old Fetah was recruited by Tito's People's Liberation Army to fight the Axis occupation. Only after two years in the army was he examined by a doctor, who declared that he was a woman, and he was discharged.

Back in his village he was appointed to the revolutionary community council where he campaigned for rights for Muslim women, in particular the ending of veils and seclusion.

The village became aware that Fetah was a 'woman'.  In 1951 Asllan Asllani decided to marry Fetah. He was still in male clothing and resisted. Asllan 'seized' Fetah and made her his bride. At the wedding she returned to the name Fatime and changed to wearing the wide harem trousers.

They had a son and two daughters. Fatime later claimed to a journalist that she was content. The mother died without granting forgiveness for the loss of her only son.

• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:162-3. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 270-1.

____________________________________________________________

Fetah was not a typical sworn virgin in that he was raised as a boy from birth.  Grémaux suggests that Fetah switching back to Fatime indicates that the Sworn Virgin tradition was already in decline by the 1950s, however Fatime’s untypicality means that her case does not support the suggestion.

Note that the gender changes are both initiated by men, the father and then Asllan.  Fetah’s only time of choice was that he chose to stay a man after being discharged from the Army.

Olave Baden-Powell (1889 - 1977) Chief Guide.

Olave St Clair Soames was born in Chesterfield. She was called Olave in that her father, a brewery owner, strongly anticipating a son, had decided on the name 'Olaf'. She was the third child, home-schooled, rejected by her mother, but close to her father with whom she would hike and shoot and whom she partnered in tennis matches. She also played the violin. They lived in 17 different homes in the first 23 years of her life.

Until her mid-teens she wore her hair cut short like a boy's, and by her late teens had articulated a dislike for conventional female clothing. She was much influenced by a family friend, the masculine Sybil Mounsey-Heysham who gave her a model of indifference to etiquette and fashion and a preference for uniforms. She adopted the twenties' fashion of flattening her breasts, and would use a handkerchief to conceal all hint of cleavage.

Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting, then 55, on meeting the 23-year-old Olave on an Atlantic crossing, recognized her purposeful walk as one that he had noted in Hyde Park two years previously. He was attracted by her sporting prowess, and by the fact that the had the same birthday, 22 February. He was able to marry her whereas he had been uncomfortable with the femininity of other women, although he still had severe headaches from shortly after their marriage until he stopped sleeping with her after the birth of their third child.

As Lady Baden-Powell Olave enthusiastically took to dressing in the scout uniform, but not that of the girl-guides. However she was acclaimed Chief Guide in 1918, and World Chief Guide in 1930. She built up the world membership of the Guides to over 6 million.

She was made Dame Grand Cross of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (GBE) 1932. In addition Finland awarded her the Order of the White Rose, and Peru the Order of the Sun.

• Tim Jeal. The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell. William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1989: 85, chp 11.

EN.Wikipedia