Marion Bodmer (1910 - 1981) lawyer.

Marion’s parents in rural Pennsylvania, wanting a girl, announced their baby to be so, and then were embarrassed to switch the child to boys clothing. They had named the child Marion as it is fitting to both sexes.

Marion’s ‘boyish’ ability in sports led the neighbors to suspect that she might not be a girl. They explained the situation to Marion at age 9. He threw a tantrum and wept, but his parents persuaded him to continue. They considered moving to another place where Marion could start over as a boy, but Mr Bodmer had acquired considerable property and become Chief Burgess.

Marion continued through high school as a girl, as a good student and for three years was on the girls’ basketball team, however the other girls considered that she played like a boy and her nickname was Gus. 

At age 19 Marion switched to male clothing with the intention of entering the legal profession, and to that end registered at a preparatory school in Allentown for the summer, and Dickenson law School in the fall.

He married a Turkish-born doctor and they lived in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania and had two children.

• “ 'Girl' For 19 Years Revealed As Man; Marion Bodmer of Selinsgrove, Pa., Graduated From Female High School, Changes Attire”. July 14, 1929. The New York Times.
• “ ‘Girl’ for 19 Years, Boy To Stay in Allentown”. The Reading Eagle. July 16, 1929. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FJAzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KeEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4342,2840616&dq=marion+bodmer+pennsylvania&hl=en.
• L.H.Hamsley. “Imposters in Petticoats”. In David O. Cauldwell (ed). Tranvestism … men in female dress. New York: Sexology Corporation. 1956: 63.

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This story, which resembles fantasies found in transvestite fiction, was actually reported in the US national press at the time.

Thank you to Kathy Padilla for the photograph and the obituary of Marion's wife.

Marion is on the right in the front row in the photograph.

Maryani (1960 - 2014) sex worker, teacher.

++ updated April 2014.

Maryani was raised as a Catholic boy in Yogyakarta, Java. She grew up up be waria*, and for many years was a sex worker and drank alcohol.

She then converted to Islam. She has since adopted an eight-year old girl, and in 2008 turned her house into Indonesia’s first Islamic school specifically for waria. As mosques are gender segregated, there is no place for waria to pray. Twice a week a group of about 20 waria, many tired because of their night-time employment, come to study the Koran and pray. They also study baking and beauty therapy to provide employment opportunities other than sex work.

Maryani says: “I'm thankful to God I've been given this fate, that I live like this".

In 2013 she made the umrahm, the minor haj pilgrimage.

She died at age 53, which resulted in the temporary closing of her school, but it reopened a few weeks later.

• Aubrey Belford. “Indonesian transgendered find refuge in Islamic school”. France 24.11 Nov 2008. www.france24.com/en/20081111-indonesian-transgendered-find-refuge-islamic-school.
• “Photo Story: The Third Sex : Getty photographer looks at life as a transgendered Muslim.” The Vancouver Sun. Nov 11, 2009. www.vancouversun.com/news/2210885/story.html. 
• Prodita Sabarini. "A transgendered person goes on ‘umrah' ". The Jakarta Post, July 05 2013. www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/07/05/a-transgendered-person-goes-umrah.html. 
• "Indonesian Qur’an school for transgender women reopens". GayAsia News, April 23 2014.  http://gayasianews.com/2014/04/23/indonesias-quran-school-for-transgender-women-reopens.

*= wanita (woman) + pria (man)

Pudgy Roberts (? - ) female mimic.

Pudgy was a New York female impersonator most famous in the late 1960s.

He also wrote two novels, Dormitory Mates, 1968 and Seafood, 1969, an how-to book, and edited a monthly magazine.   ++He also wrote for Gay Power, 1969-70, and ran a business distributing flyers.

Avery Willard made a short film about him, and he was one of the first drag queens to do comic relief in a porno movie, The Sexualist, 1975.

• Pudgy Roberts. Female impersonator's handbook. Newark: Capri Publishers, 1967.  Selections 
• Gil Truman.  "Girls Who Are And Can't: An Interview with Pudgy Roberts".   Female Mimics, 1,12, Spring 1968.    Online at:  http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/PUDGY.HTM.
• Avery Willard (dir). Camp Burlesgue. With Pudgy Roberts impersonating Bette David, Carol Channing, Tiny Tim, Marlene Dietrich, Lily Tomlin, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. US 6 mins 1969.
• Kemal Horulu (dir)  The Sexualist: A Voyage to the World of Forbidden Love.  With Pudgy Roberts as Papamabuto.  US 73 mins 1973. 
•  Donald Greenhaus. “Without Abstract”. Society. Vol 11,1 November 1973. www.springerlink.com/content/h6870muw8m283033/fulltext.pdf?page=1.
• Pudgy Roberts (ed). The great female mimics. New York: Mark Lithographers. 1963-79. Monthly magazine.  Sample 
• Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. Routledge xvi, 540 pp 2000: 384, 395, 403n15.
• Mark Singer.  Mr. Personality: Profiles and Talk Pieces from The New Yorker.  Mariner Books, 2005: 95-8. 

IMDB     Queer Music Heritage  

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I met Pudgy once, when we were both in Lee Brewster's boutique.

Carmen Rupe (1935 - 2011) performer, mayoral candidate.

Trevor David Rupe is a Maori of  Ngati Maniopoto descent. He was raised in Taumarunui (map) on Aotearoa (New Zealand)’s North Island, in a family of 13 children on a sheep and cattle farm. His mother found him dressed in her cloths when he was 11, but accepted his femininity.

In 1955, at the end of military training in which he was trained as a nurse, he did an impersonation of Eartha Kitt as part of the farewell concert. He worked as a nurse in Auckland and Wellington doing part-time drag.

In 1957 Rupe moved to Kings Cross in Sydney, took the name Carmen from the 1954 film, Carmen Jones, stopped wearing men’s clothes altogether, and became the first Maori drag performer in Australia. She stripped, danced the hula and had two snakes. She also got breast implants and worked as a prostitute. In 1963 she joined the famous Les Girls revue, and worked with Carlotta.  She was a friend of Noel McKay.

On a trip home Carmen was arrested in a car at 3am and charged with wearing women’s clothes. However the magistrate threw out the case because there was no such law. In 1968, the police harassment in Sydney got to be too much, and she returned to Wellington. An inheritance from her grandfather enabled her to open a coffee bar that was a brothel upstairs. The place became popular with the local rich and famous, including several MPs.

She ran for mayor of Wellington in 1977 under the banner ‘Get in Behind’ promising gay marriage and legalized brothels.

In 1979 she returned to Sydney, and to working in nightclubs. She had small parts in television dramas in 1992/3.

In 2003 she was inducted into the Variety Hall of Fame. In 2008, she lead the Decade of the Diva float at Sydney’s Mardi Gras. She was a prominent member of Agender, the New Zealand transgender group.

She died at age 75 after some months of medical problems.

• “Carmen recalls Coffee Lounge glory days”. Gay.co.nz. www.qna.net.nz/news/696.html.
• Carmen Rupe. “Madame Carmen”. In Tracie O’Keefe (ed) Trans People in Love. Routledge 2008.
• “Carmen”. Time Out Sydney. 2010. www.timeoutsydney.com.au/thebridge/colourfulsydneyidentity/carmen.aspx.

IMDB 

Brenda Lana Smith remembers Christine Jorgensen

US - Christine Jorgensen - 1926-05-30—1989-05-03… [2010-05-03 BLS]

2010-05-03

Twenty-one-years ago today… on 1989-05-03… my comatose very good friend and "605 Calle Canasta #1, San Clemente, California 92672" housemate Christine Jorgensen (nee George W Jorgensen Jr) died at 15.59 PDT in the presence of her sister Dolly Cudworth, nurse Lillian Havens RN, and her good friend and confidante Susan Constans, and myself at San Clemente General Hospital, San Clemente, California, USA - death due to metastatic bladder cancer…

Entrusted with the awesome responsibility and privilege of her "Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care," I legally did as she had bidden. With her looks ravaged beyond recognition and knowing her quality of life was no longer tolerable I acted on her awesome given authority by waiving all further life support systems when hospitalizing her. Which I would have expected and have wanted done for myself had our tables been turned and it was my looks, not hers, that were ravaged beyond recognition.

By entrusting her final transition in San Clemente to a consul and knight of Denmark, destiny had brought Christine a full circle from "Georg" Jorgensen's transition some thirty-seven years earlier in Copenhagen.

We both realistically accepted that she would never be beautiful again. The side effect of her and medicine's valiant attempt to overcome the original bladder cancer that, although in remission in the bladder and seemingly remitting in the lung, had finally roosted in the brain. Steroids to relieve cranial pressure horrifyingly undid in just a couple of weeks almost forty years worth of hormonal and surgical feminization.

Christine died positively believing that she would have beaten her cancer if it had been diagnosed earlier. Bless her, she didn't give up until after I had the terrible task of advising her that she had three inoperable tumors in her brain. It was the only time we ever really held each other.

From my first having moved in with her, Christine had optimistically had me carry my camera and pictorially record her visits to the oncology department to embellish the barely started and never completed sequel of her autobiography.

And during her final days she pragmatically had me record her ogre-like transformation to posthumously emphasize the possible consequence facing people with a familial history of cancer who imprudently neglect having regular check ups.

Chris was adamant that her "change" had absolutely nothing to do with the onslaught of her bladder cancer. She put it down to her smoking, drinking, and living the good life to its fullest, as she did to just days before her demise... an already toxic combination—she would emphasize—not helped by a predisposition to the disease when one has a familial history of cancer.

Nevertheless—having autocratically bidden me relay her posthumous message—I should add that I have memories of this indomitable terminally ill lady was just couple or so weeks before she died still resignedly smoking away, and smugly raising her bucket size glass of vodka-on-the-rocks "mit twist" to salute her dear friend Yul Brynner's posthumous television message: "Just don't smoke!"

In retrospect, the more I think about it, Chris—knowing my anecdote regarding me probably not having "changed" if I hadn't quit smoking—was probably appreciatively toasting the fact that I would not have been there to care for her if I hadn't done just that…

Brenda Lana Smith, R.af D.
Cornwall, Britain...

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© Brenda Lana Smith, R.af D., 2010... All Rights Reserved…

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"To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform." - Theodore H. White

Mary Edwards Walker (1832 – 1919) doctor, suffragette.

Mary Walker was born and raised in Oswego, New York, the youngest of five daughters. In the early 1850s she adopted the new pants outfit associated with the name of Amelia Bloomer. She became one of the very first women doctors in the US when she graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1855, the only woman in her class. She married in 1856, wearing men’s cloths, and she did not take her husband’s name. They set up a joint practice in Rome, New York, but separated in 1859.

With the start of the US Civil War in 1861, she volunteered on the Union side, but was only allowed to be a nurse, but after working as an unpaid field surgeon near the front lines, she became the second ever US Army Surgeon in 1863. In 1864, while treating civilians, she was captured by Confederate troops and charged as a spy. She was released as part of a prisoner exchange. In 1865 she was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, the only women to ever receive one.

She was an advocate for women’s dress reform and in 1866 was elected president of the National Dress Reform Association, and made speaking tour of England. In 1869 she finally obtained her divorce. She became a persistent wearer of trousers, switching from an androgynous mix to strictly male clothing later, although at all times insisting on being treated as a lady, and she never attempted to pass as male. She stood by the earlier suffrage position that the US Constitution gave women the vote, and she opposed the majority of suffragists who switched tactics to campaign for a female suffrage law.

She argued that women’s clothes kept them “unnaturately excited, or in a condition to be excited sexually”. Her solution to the sexual double standard was for men to be continent. She condemned all anal and oral sexual acts, and also masturbation.

In 1887 she began the first of several mid-western tours in dime-museum sideshows. She built up a collection of over 1000 pictures and letter of cross-dressing individuals. She corresponded for many years with the German transvestite Otto Spengler.

In 1902 a medical journal article referred to “Dr. M- W--, of Washington" as “the most distinguished sexual invert in the United States".

In 1917 the US Congress revoked her Medal of Honor (along with 900 others) as she had not been in ‘actual combat with an enemy’, but she refused to return it and continued to wear it until her death. She died of old age at 86, and was buried in her black suit.

A Liberty ship was named after her in the Second World war. US President Carter restored her medal in 1977. The US Postal Service issued a 20¢ Mary Walker stamp in 1982. The medical facilities of SUNY Oswego are named for her as is a US Army Reserve center in Walker, Michigan.

• Mary Edwards Walker. Hit. New York: American News, 1871.
• Mary Edwards Walker. Unmasked, or The Science of Immorality. To Gentlemen. Philadelphia: Wm. H. Boyd, 1878.
• R. W. Shufeldt, "Dr. Havelock Ellis on Sexual Inversion," Pacific Medical journal (San Francisco), vol. 45 (1902), p. 201.
• Charles McCool Snyder. Dr Mary Walker: the Little Lady in Pants. Arno Press, 1976
• Allison Lockwood. 'Pantsuited pioneer of women's lib, Dr. Mary Walker'. Smithsonian. 7 March 1977.
• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 111.

Women in History    EN.WIKIPEDIA     FTM Contributions to Medicine, Psychology, Science and Engineering     OutHistory. ____________________________________________________________

The FTM page implies that she was a trans man, but limited by the technology of the time.  I don’t see this.  While she liked men’s clothing, there is no implication that she wanted to be a man.  Unlike many female-born persons in the 19th century she did not attempt to pass as male.  Had she done so, she would have been able to vote.

Alejandra Victoria Portatadino (1959 - ) petroleum engineer, anthropologist, lawyer.

Portatadino was born in Buenos Aires. He studied engineering, specializing in petroleum refining, and became a manager with Chevron. He had been consulting a psychiatrist who had diagnosed multi-personality syndrome. The diagnosis was changed to gender dysphoria, and he started hormones.

A few months later, while on a work assignment in Chile she changed her appearance and became Alejandra. This was okay with her boss. She was considering having surgery in Chile which was more advanced in services for trans persons, but the Homosexual Community of Argentina (CHA) encouraged her to do it in Argentina to set a precedent. In 2001, Chevron acquired Texaco and Portatadino was transferred to Texaco, where she had to dress in a suit and tie. She was demoted and then fired.

Alejandra educated herself on the law and anthropology and applied for legal recognition. She applied to obtain legal recognition as a woman, and for the right to have gender surgery. The judge required an evaluation from government medical investigators, and they agreed with Portatadino’s request. The judge then dismissed the case as outside his jurisdiction. She applied to the Supreme Court and the expert opinion already obtained was accepted. She was able to use this but still had to file many motions in lower courts. She gave a paper at the first Argentine conference on gender dysphoria in 2005. She was finally legally recognized in 2006, and had surgery the same year.

Since then she has worked with the law division of CHA on rights for all GLBTTI persons. In particular she was able to arrange free hormone supervision in a state hospital, and to establish the standards of care for transsexuals in Argentina. She has a grant from the World Health Organization to do outreach work for sex workers with Aids.

In 2008 on International Women’s Day, Alejandra was recognized by the Buenos Aires Legislature as one of 20 Argentinean women who ‘broke traditional moulds’.

She uses the term Harry Benjamin Syndrome in preference to transsexual.

• Alejandra Victoria Portatadino. “Mi Historia Bien Sencilla”. Transsexual Women’s Successes. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/Alejandra/Alejandra.html#Historia. English Translation by Sonia John: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/Alejandra/Alejandra.html#Story.
• Interview with Alejandra Victoria Portatadino. www.politicaydesarrollo.com.ar/nota_completa.php?id=1929.
• Alejandra Victoria Portatadino.  La Discriminación y el Estado de Apartheid.  2008.  www.shb-info.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/apartheid.pdf.

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Sonia John adds a translators note to her translation:

"The label "travesti," with its connotation of sex work, is very highly stigmatized throughout Latin America.  In addition, the general Latin American public often does not make a distinction between "travesti" and "transexual," and so some trans women there are working to change public attitudes by avoiding the latter term, referring to the Harry Benjamin Syndrome instead."

Charlotte Goiar likes to claim Alejandra's work in Argentina as an HBS success, but note that she works with the CHA and uses the umbrella term acronym GLBTTI, both of which are anathema to most HBS persons in Europe and North America.