Thomas Szasz (1920 - 2012) psychiatry professor.

Thomas Szasz was born in Budapest. He earned  a degree in physics from the University of Cincinnati in 1941, and a medical degree from the same university in 1944. His residency was in psychiatry. He was professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York, and Professor Emeritus after retirement.


He is a prominent theorist in the anti-psychiatry movement and a critic of medicine as social control. His best known books are The Myth of Mental Illness, 1960, and The Manufacture of Madness, 1970.

Szasz has gained a reputation as a libertarian critic of psychiatric practice. He speaks against the coercive psychiatric practice which he calls 'the Therapeutic State', although many critics while not defending the abuses in mental hospitals, regard his attack as on a straw man. While his attack on the state's interference in addiction, suicide and homosexuality can easily be accepted, there is an enormous area of psychiatry which he does not discuss.

Sedgwick says: 'Phobics, depressives, manics, schizophrenics and anxiety neurotics - in short, the general run of psychiatric patients who, in addition to having 'life problems' do happen to feel distinctly unwell, rarely if ever enter Dr Szasz's casebook'.

Szasz’ solution of Contractual Psychotherapy is not available to those of limited means. Nor does he attack those of his colleagues who keep a patient in therapy for decades.

In 1969 he co-founded, with the Church of Scientology, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR).

In 1973, the American Humanist Association named Szasz, Humanist of the Year.   Note that not even one GLBT person has been so named.

Szasz's attack on psychiatry's invention of homosexuality as a disease was congruent with the rise of gay activism in the 1970s leading to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM III in 1974.

However he has come out strongly against the right of people to change their sex. He refers to trans women as ‘he’ etc; compares the operation to clitorectomy: sees sex change as a fraud, accepts uncritically the study that justified the ending of surgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, ignoring all the methodological problems that have been raised, but does not respect the decision made by the individual transsexual. He embraces Janice Raymond's pretence that sex changes are anti-feminist, and his review of her book is quoted on both its front and back pages. He has said “If a man cuts off his own penis psychiatrists call him a schizophrenic, but it he can persuade a surgeon to cut it off for him, then they call him a transsexual”.

• Thomas Szasz, “Male and Female He Created Them: review of The Transsexual Empire: The Making Of The She-Male by Janice G. Raymond”, New York Times Book Review, June 10, 1979: 11, 39. Reprinted in Thomas Szasz. The Therapeutic State. Buffalo: Prometheus Books.. 1984: 327-9.
• Thomas Szasz. Sex by Prescription. New York: AnchorPress/Doubleday 198 pp 1980: 86-92.
• Peter Sedgwick. Psycho Politics. Pluto Press. 1982: chp 6.
• “Thomas Szasz & Scientology”. TimBoucher/Journal. Dec 27, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20091015052440/http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/12/27/thomas-szasz-scientology/
• www.szasz.com.
• “Thomas Szasz”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz.

_________________________________________________________________

Charlotte Goiar is a member of CCHR, and features a 90 minute CCHR video on her HBS home page.  I have yet to find any pro-transsexual or pro-HBS material from CCHR, the Church of Scientology or Thomas Szasz.

Eugene de Savitsch (1902 - 1959) doctor, sexologist.

De Savitsch was born in St Petersburg, the son of a prominent judge. In 1917, at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, he fled to Japan.

Later he moved to the United States where he struggled against tuberculosis and poverty to become a doctor. After graduation from the University of Chicago, he studied at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Bunge Institute in Antwerp, from where he went to do field work on sleeping sickness in the Belgian Congo. Later he worked in Washington, D.C..

He published his autobiography at the age of 37.

His major work with transgender persons was his 1958, Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex, where he gives the details of Arlette Leber. He declares himself in favour of decriminalization of consensual sexual activity, but is more approving of transsexuality (described as inversion) than of homosexuality.

However he seemed to recognize sex changes as from male to female only. He commented on Nicholas de Raylan in his book, but as a lesbian transvestite, not as a female-to-male man.

• “Adventurous Doctor”. Time. Jul 01, 1940. www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,764154,00.html.
• Eugene de Savitsch. In search of complications, an autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1940.
• Eugene de Savitsch. Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex. Springfield Ill: Charles C. Thomas 1958.

Arlette-Irène Leber (1912 - ?) the first gender surgery in Switzerland.

Arlette-Irène Leber (born Arnold-Lèon Leber) of La Chaux-de-Fonds was the first known surgical transsexual in Switzerland, and had a series of operations including vaginoplasty in in late 1941 and early 1942.

In 1944 a Cantonal Court approved her petition for a change of civic status to female, and explicitly rejected a caveat from one of Leber’s doctors that she be prohibited from marrying as a woman. The legal precedent of Margrith Businger was cited.

In 1956, her psychiatrist, Dr. Otto Riggenbach, evaluated her and concluded: ‘The operation, on the one part, combined with the permission of the authorities to change her civic status, on the other, has turned an unstable and unhappy individual into a useful and contented member of society’.

It is not known whar happened to Mme Leber after that.

• Eugene de Savitsch. Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex. Springfield Ill: Charles C. Thomas 1958: Chp 10, 11.

Margrith Businger (190? - ?) pioneer gender change.

While still pre-op (she had had an orchiectomy only), Margrith Businger applied to a Swiss Cantonal Court in 1930 for a change of legal gender, and her petition was accepted.

This became a legal precedent for Arlette Leber’s legal change in 1944.

It is not known what happened to Frau Businger after 1930.

• Eugene de Savitsch. Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex. Springfield Ill: Charles C. Thomas 1958: Chp 10, 11.

Bobby Marchan (1930 - 1999) singer, impersonator

Oscar Gibson was born in Youngstown, Ohio. As a teenager he was fascinated by local female impersonators, and starting doing comedy and singing in drag.

In 1953, he organized a troupe of female impersonators and they were booked at the Dew Drop Inn in New Orleans. Bobby Marchan, as he was now called, stayed and rented a room at the Dew Drop, where he started performing with Patsy Vidalia.

In 1954 he was emcee at the Club Tijuana where he first got a recording contract. In 1956 he was employed by Ace Records’ Johnny Vincent who did not realize that Bobby was not a woman until told two days later.

In 1957 he started to collaborate with Huey Smith and the Clowns. He was lead vocalist on Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu and the original version Sea Cruise.

In 1959 he left The Clowns and did a touring drag act. His biggest solo hit was There is Something on Your Mind in 1960 which was #1 on the R&B charts.

Later songs did not do so well, and he returned to being a female-impersonator-bandleader in the 1970s. In 1977 he was the emcee at the Club Alhambra in New Orleans, and later managed hip-hop acts.

He died after a battle with liver cancer.

• “Bobby Marchan”. Find a Death. www.findadeath.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19127.
• Jeff Hannusch. “Bobby Marchan, 69, noted N.O. R&B artist”. The Times-Picayune. 1999. Online at: http://elvispelvis.com/bobbymarchan.htm#links.
• J.D. Doyle. “Bobby Marchan”. Queer Music Heritage. www.queermusicheritage.us/drag-marchan.html.

Lee Brewster (1943 - 2000) retailer, activist.

++revised October 2015 to incorparate material from Cohen's  The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York.

Lee was raised in the coal mining areas of West Virginia. As a young man he worked in finger-printing for the FBI, but was fired when it was suspected that he might be gay.

Lee Brewster with tiara and sign.  Cohen p143.

On moving to New York, he organized drag balls as fund raisers for the Mattachine Society. However they were disinterested in drag queens and other transies, so in 1970 he and thespian Bunny Eisenhower, the future Barbara de Lamere, founded the Queens Liberation Front, and Brewster began publishing Drag, one of the more political transgender publications of the 1970s, which ran for 10 years.

++They campaigned and hired lawyers to de-criminalize cross-dressing in New York, which was achieved in 1971. Previously, under city ordinances a bar or club could be closed and patrons arrested, simply because a single person, deemed to be crossdressed, was present.  Furthermore the words "homosexuals, lesbians, or persons pretending to be ..." were also struck, thus decriminalizing gay clubs and parties.   In addition, the still extant 1965 Anti-Mask: New York Penal Law criminalizing "the wearing of mask or disguises by three or more persons in a public place" was found inapplicable to those in drag.


They organized with Sylvia Rivera.

The balls he organized continued until 1973 – the last one was attended by the real versions of Jacqueline Susann, Carol Channing and Shirley MacLaine.

Lee was the proprietor of the drag emporium Lee's Mardi Gras – in business for 30 years at various locations around Manhattan, carrying a large stock of clothes, prosthetics and books. In addition to individual clients, the shop supplied costumes for Broadway, television and movies, in particular To Wong Foo and The Birdcage.

In 1999  Lee donated his extensive library  to the Wollman Archives of Transgender History and Culture, curated by Rusty Rae Moore at Transy House.

He continued to answer to ‘Mr’ in the style of old-time drag performers.

Lee died after a battle with cancer.

• Holly Brubach. Girlfriend: Men, Women, and Drag. Random House, 1999: 133-8.
• Jack Nichols. “Lee Brewster Dies at 57: Pioneering Transvestite Activist”. Gay Today. 2000. Online. 
• Douglas Martin. “Lee Brewster, 57, Style Guru For World's Cross-Dressers”. New York Times May, 24, 2000.  Online.
• Susan Stryker. “Brewster, Lee”. Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America. 2005. 
• Stephen L. Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail. Routledge, 2007: 91, 94, 142-3, 149, 151-2, 160, 246n28, 254n251,

 Matt & Andrej Koymasky    Queer Music Heritage    

Martine Rothblatt (1954 - ) lawyer, broadcast executive, biotechnologist, transhumanist.

Martin Rothblatt was born in Chicago and raised in San Diego and Los Angeles. After travel in Europe, the middle East, Kenya and the Seychelles, he thought about world satellite communications and did a degree at UCLA in communication studies with a thesis on direct broadcast satellites.

He then did a combined law-MBA degree, also at UCLA, during which he published five articles on the law of satellite communications, and prepared a business plan for the Hughes Space and Communications Group on providing communications to Latin America. He worked in broadcasting and astronomy with regard to the Federal Communications Commission.

In 1982 he married an African-American woman and they had four children.

From 1986-90 he was the CEO of Geostar Corporation. In 1987, he was largely responsible for the new treaties re space-based spectrum allocations. In 1990 he created WorldSpace and Sirius Satellite Radio.

By 1993 she was transitioning, using the name Marla Aspen. She wrote for Transgender-Tapestry, and participated in the International Bill of Gender Rights adopted by the Second International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy. In 1994, as Martine Rothblatt, she completed transition. In 1995 she published Apartheid of Sex, in which she argued that legal gender should be abolished, that unisex language should be used, and that persons should be free to change their sex as they please.

She also played a leading part in the International Bar Association’s project to develop a draft Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights. This was adopted by UNESCO in 1997, and by the UN General Assembly in 1998.

Her youngest daughter was diagnosed with life-threatening pulmonary hypertension. GlaxoSmithKline had a new drug for the disease but was not developing it because the market is too small. So Martine left WorldSpace and Sirius Satellite Radio in 1997 and founded United Theraputics, which purchased the development rights.

She also studied for a PhD in medical ethics at the Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London. This was gained in 2001 based on her dissertation on the conflict between private and public interests in xenotransplantation. This was published as Your Life or Mine, 2003. Also in 2003 she published Two Stars for Peace, which proposes that both Israel and Palestine become States in the USA.

She is active in transhumanism and technological immortality. She was also a founding member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers which seeks to build a techno-utopia.

She is featured in the film Stock Shock about what happened to the stock price of Sirius XM (as Sirius Satellite Radio became after a merger) after her departure. From a high of $9 a share it dropped to 5 cents in March 2009.

• Martine Aliana Rothblatt. The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995. 
• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 147.
• Viviane K. Namaste. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000: 124-130.
• Zina Moukheiber. “Eight hard years after her daughter's lungs seized, Martine Rothblatt hopes a new drug can save her--and others”. Forbes Magazine. 01.07.02. www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0107/138_print.html.
• Martine Aliana Rothblatt. Your Life or Mine: How Geoethics Can Resolve the Conflict between Public and Private Interests in Xenotransplantation. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004.
• Martine Aliana Rothblatt. Two Stars for Peace: The Case for Using U.S. Statehood to Achieve Lasting Peace in the Middle East. New York: iUniverse, 2003.
• Sandra Mohr (dir), Stock Shock. Scr: Liz Bolwell & Sandra Mohr. With Martine Rothblatt. US 72 mins 2009.

martinerothblatt.com        EN.WIKIPEDIA. ______________________________________________________________