Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1800 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.
There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.
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Joãoand 16 brothers were born to a family of recently freed-slaves in the Nordeste region. Joãosold by his parents at age 7.
He moved to Lapa, Rio de Janeiro’s bohemian district, where he lived with a prostitute, an effeminate gay man and seven children. He started a show-biz career doing one-man drag shows at the Blue Danube basing his act on Josephine Baker, the black entertainer from St Louis who found success in Paris.
One night an abusive patron accosted him and the man ended up dead shot in the back. JoãoFrancisco was convicted of murder and served 10 years in prison.
On release he won the Best Costume award at the 1942 Carnaval as Madame Satã, based on the character in Cecil DeMille’s Madam Satan, 1930 about a woman who wins back her husband by dressing as Satan as a woman for a party in a dirigible. From there he became a drag star using several personae including “The Negress of the Bulacoche”; “Saint Rita of the Coconut Tree”; “Jamacy, the Queen of the Forest”; “the Shark”; and “the Wild Pussycat”.
Offstage he was a butch gay man, a hustler, and known for his violent temper. In total he served 27 years in prison.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
In 2002 his life was made into a film.
Rogério Durst. Madame Satã: [com o diabo no corpo]. São Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1985.
Karim Ainouz (dir & scr). Madame Satã. Scr: Marcelo Gomes & Sérgio Machado, with Lázaro Ramos as Joao Francisco dos Santos/Madame Satã. Brazil & France 105 mins 2002.
Bacalhau. “Apresento João Francisco dos Santos o Madame Satã”. Centro Cultrural de Capoeira Ventre Livre. Agosto 12, 2009. http://www.portalventrelivre.com/?p=725.
Marco Della Gatta did a diploma in piano at the Conservatory of Lecce and in jazz at that of Bari. He worked with the Notte della Taranta and l’Orchestra della Provincia di Lecce.
In 1989 he married a woman, and they had a son and a daughter. From 1991 he was the organist at the Lecce Cathedral, but without a contract.
After the death of his father, he could not die without being himself. In 2008 Della Gatte decided to transition to Luana Ricci. Luana was dismissed as the organist at Lecce Cathedral.
in 2010, she helped trans woman Emily De Salvo in her audition for the Bari Tito Schipa Conservatory by providing piano accompaniment, and was the organist for the ordination of female priest Maria Vittoria Longhitano.
John Mark Karr was raised in US Georgia and Alabama. His mother claimed he was possessed by demons and attempted to burn him alive. She was incarcerated in a mental hospital.
When he was 20, Karr married a 13-year-old and abused her. The marriage was annulled a year later. When he was 24, he married a pregnant 16-year-old. The twin daughters died hours after birth. They then had three sons.
In 1996, Karr registered Powerwurks.com and claimed to be a support organization for children. He also operated a day-care centre in Alabama. Karr then worked as a substitute teacher 2000-1 in Petaluma, California, until his arrest for possession of child pornography. His second wife then divorced him. He failed to appear to his probation officer in December 2001, and went on the run.
In 2006, University of Colorado journalism professor Michael Tracey received emails about the JonBenet Ramsey murder. The emails were traced to Thailand, and a letter to him enabled the Thai police to identify Karr. He claimed that he was in Thailand working as a teacher and seeking a sex-change, and that he had started taking female hormones, although he maintained a male presentation. He was arrested and his visa revoked. He admitted being with Ramsey when she died. He returned to the US on a business class flight and not under arrest. He was arrested at Los Angeles airport, and extradited to Colorado. However his DNA did not match the DNA found at the crime scene.
He was released, but then re-arrested on the outstanding charges in California of possessing child pornography. These charges were dropped after the investigators admitted that they had lost the computer in question. He was a media sensation for a short while.
In 2007 Karr was arrested after a domestic argument at his father’s house in Atlanta. He stopped hormones because his then fiancée did not approve, but restarted after they broke up. As Alexis Reich, she changed her name in 2008 and restarted the hormones. She reportedly completed transition in 2010.
The Wikipedia editors still have not changed the name on their article on Alexis Reich as per their standard policy, nor is she in any Wiki trans category yet.
Edouard Frans Verbaarsschott was born in Scheveningen, in the Netherlands. He was an intersex child and was bullied at school for his effeminate looks.
At 13 he left school and worked with Circus Strassburger as a clown.
At 16 Romy was working as a female impersonator at the Club Alcazar and Le Carrousel in Paris.
After a friend set their apartment on fire, she stowed away on a merchant ship to the US, and found work performing at Fire Island and Atlantic City, where she met and loved a Berlin street singer and they moved to West Berlin together.
At the age of 23, they opened a nightclub, Chez Romy Haag featuring Disco and mainly transgender artists – one of whom was Peki d’Oslo (Amanda Lear) whom Haag had met in Paris. The club became the place for celebrities to go. David Bowie and Mick Jagger had affairs with Romy. She released her first single, “Liege-Samba”, in 1977, and her first album, So Bin Ich, in 1981.
In 1983 she sold her nightclub and spent a year touring the world. On return she had sex-change surgery in Switzerland.
She then toured with her stage act. She has been in 26 films, mainly German, including Mascara, 1987, with Charlotte Rampling and Eva Robin’s. She has released 17 albums.
In the mid-1980s she was the lead figure of Queen Zero, a performance-art video intallation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1997 she received the Jackie O. Music Award in New York for her interpretations of Berthold Brecht’s music. Also the same year she was awarded the Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival for lifetime achievements in GLBT film. In 1999 she published her autobiography.
Romy Haag with Martin Schacht. Eine frau und mehr. Berlin: Quadriga 319 pp 1999. Autobiography.
Scott was raised as a slave in the US, and ran away to the West Indies. She was a practitioner in an African spiritual tradition; Upchurch suggests the Jim Banndaa, in which male-bodied persons living as female had spiritual powers. Eliza made a living by cleaning and by attending the ill, especially those afflicted by rheumatism, whom she could cure by friction and with herbs.
In 1858 she was engaged by a sea-captain with such ailments, but he abandoned her in London and sailed without her. She took to walking about in the Fenchurch Street area, probably with the intention of earning some money.
Constables of the newly founded Metropolitan Police noticed her, and assumed that she was a woman. She was arrested on the complaint of a ‘respectable man’ who asked a constable to take her in charge. She resisted strongly, but was taken to the station house and charged with having ‘annoyed gentlemen in Fenchurch Street’. The case was weak in that she had made no advance or overt proposition. In the end she was convicted solely of having resisted the constable’s attempt to put her in charge.
Charles Upchurch. Before Wilde: Sex Between Man in Britain’s Age of Reform. University of California Press. 2009: 168-171.
Brian Parry served with the Australian forces in Vietnam. He qualified as a ship’s captain.
He had two marriages, and two children from the first marriage. He then met a new female partner who stayed with him during and after transition.
Brian was recognized as Hobart’s Citizen of the year in 1998 for his work building square riggers and involving local disadvantaged youth, but by then had transitioned to Sarah.
In 2002 Sarah captained the ship she had built to re-enact the Matthew Flinders 1802 Round Australia voyage, which produced the first detailed maps of Australia, and was featured on the Australian Story television show. The trip became controversial as crew jumped ship complaining about the facilities.
Sarah: "I tend to see myself as a third gender. I live as a woman. I'm known as a woman, legally I am. However I'm able to use all those things that I learned as a male & put them to good use in my life now. I don't reject my previous life”.
Sarah was still captaining the ship in November 2007 when it was in the news for rescuing a crayboat.
Bruce Ivins was born and raised in Lebanon, Ohio. He was raised Presbyterian, but later became Catholic. He did a BS in 1968, an MS in 1971, and PhD in 1976, all at the University of Cincinnati. His dissertation was in the toxicity of disease-causing bacteria.
He was a scientist for 36 years, and a senior biodefense researcher at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland for 18 years. He initially worked on legionella and cholera, and in 1979 turned to anthrax after the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk (now Yaketerinburg). He published over 44 scientific papers, many of them on anthrax. He was the co-inventor on two US patents for anthrax vaccine technology.
He played keyboard instruments at his church and in a Celtic band, and was a keen juggler. He and his wife had two children and were staunch Catholics active in the anti-gay, anti-abortion American Family Association.
At the same time he was allegedly a secretive cross-dresser who dressed in his basement, and corresponded to get photographs of women bound and blindfolded. It was also alleged that he was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority since being rebuffed by one of its members while a student, and broke into their sorority houses to steal ritual material.
Following the aircraft attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, there were mailings of anthrax-contaminated letters to two pro-choice Catholic US senators and several news agencies. The letters proclaimed “Death to America .. Death to Israel … Allah is Great”. Ivins was on the team that analyzed the letters to determine which did contain real anthrax. Results were announced on ABC News that a chemical found in the anthrax indicated that it came from Iraq. This was later confirmed to be untrue.
The FBI investigations into the anthrax mailings focused on Steven Hatfil, also at USAMRIID, but exonerated him in 2008 and settled the lawsuit for $5.8 million that he had launched to defend his reputation.
The leadership of the FBI investigation was changed in 2006, and Ivins became the main focus. They raided his home twice; he lost his security clearance; he became depressed and attempted suicide; the Los Angeles Times reported that he stood to gain from the attacks because of his patents for the vaccine (however his employer, the US Army, owned the patents). Ivins committed suicide in July 2008 by drug overdose and died in hospital.
The FBI closed the case in 2010, and released documents pertaining to the case which contain the allegations of Ivins’ cross-dressing and bondage activities, and his KKG obsession.
This account is the official version. A quick search of the net will find many postings to the effect that Ivins was a patsy rather than a perpetrator, and maybe was murdered, and perhaps more so that he was murdered to cover up that he was acting on orders. As the evidence of his cross-dressing comes only from the FBI, it could be invented assuming that it besmirched his character.
One night an abusive patron accosted him and the man ended up dead shot in the back. João Francisco was convicted of murder and served 10 years in prison.
On release he won the Best Costume award at the 1942 Carnaval as Madame Satã, based on the character in Cecil DeMille’s Madam Satan, 1930 about a woman who wins back her husband by dressing as Satan as a woman for a party in a dirigible. From there he became a drag star using several personae including “The Negress of the Bulacoche”; “Saint Rita of the Coconut Tree”; “Jamacy, the Queen of the Forest”; “the Shark”; and “the Wild Pussycat”.
