Jonathan Ames (1964 - ) novelist, columnist.

Jonathan was raised in a Jewish family in suburban New Jersey. He studied at Princeton, and his first novel, I Pass Like Night, 1989, was his senior thesis.

In 1990 he flirted with an older woman in a bar in Pennsylvania, and the memory stayed with him.

In 1992, Ames moved to New York, started sharing an apartment with an older man, and succeeded in becoming a columnist at The New York Press. Looking for inspiration for his second novel, he took up boxing and also started spending time at Sally’s, the transgender bar on 43^rd Street, across from The New York Times. He turned much of this into his second novel, The Extra Man, 1999, in which Louis Ives is fired from a New Jersey prep school after being caught trying on a bra, moves to New York, shares an apartment with an older man, and spends time at Sally’s where he is unsure whether he is a budding transvestite or a tranny chaser. His apartment mate later catches him in bed with a trans woman.

In 2001, Ames was sent Aleshia Brevard’s The Woman I Was Not Born to Be that he should write a blurb for the book, and remembered that the woman in the bar in Pennsylvania in 1990 was also Aleshia. He noted “a rash of books” on gender changes: Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, As Nature Made Him, Crossing,

Also around this time, Jonathan Lethem gave me a copy of The Vintage Book of Amnesia, which he had edited, and I thought to myself, I want to put together an anthology, it looks like easy money. So I asked Lethem how much he was paid for the book and he told me a rather high number, which turned out to be all wrong. But I didn't discover that until much later. Thus spurred by visions of money, combined with the confluence of all these gender books, I got the idea in my head for an anthology whose unifying theme would be the changing of one's sex. I was going to include transsexual memoirs, the Middlebrook and Colapinto books, some stuff on hermaphrodites and transvestites, and works of fiction that featured transsexuals. Gore Vidal, Jerzy Kosinski, John Irving, and David Ebershoff all had novels that qualified on this front, and I figured I could self-promote and include a passage from The Extra Man.

I was teaching then at Indiana University, so I used the Kinsey Library and Xeroxed about a thousand pages of material and sent it off to Vintage. They made an offer that was one-third of what Lethem had told me he got. I checked with him and he realized he had made a mistake.

I was disappointed but took their offer, and the editor and I decided I should whittle the book down just to the memoirs of transsexuals. Then it was such a pain in the ass  to get permissions--I had naively thought Vintage would do this for me--that I didn't do anything with the book for years. I kept waiting to make some money from Hollywood so that I could pay Vintage back the first part of my advance. Then some money from Hollywood did come in, and instead of giving up on the anthology, which I had been privately referring to as the "tranthology," I hired someone and he did everything and now the book is out! So the book is about sex and I did it for money. A classic tale! (Ames & Ames 2005).

Ames regards transsexual memoirs as akin to Bildungsromans, coming of age novels. He also makes an intriguing claim that Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ draws on case 129 in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.

He has described himself as “probably the gayest straight writer in America”. In his interview with himself, he makes a distinction between a tranny-chaser and a transy-chaser, and then does not really admit to being either.

• Jonathan Ames. The Extra Man: A Novel. Scribner, 1998.
• Jonathan Ames. Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs. Vintage, 2005.
• “He said, s/he said: Jonathan Ames on Jonathan Ames”. Artforum International. Jun 22, 2005. Online at: www.thefreelibrary.com/He+said,+s%2Fhe+said:+Jonathan+Ames+on+Jonathan+Ames-a0133644421.
• George Koschel. “Jonathan Ames”. glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture. 2002. www.glbtq.com/literature/am_mes_j.html.
• “Jonathan Ames”. Current Biography. October 2007. www.hwwilson.com/currentbio/cover_bios/cover_bio_10_07.htm.
• Interview with Jonathan Ames. “Boxers and Transsexuals in Times Square. Big Think. Nov 11, 2009. http://bigthink.com/ideas/17265.
• Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini (dir & scr). The Extra Man. From the novel by Jonathan Ames, with Paul Dano as Louis and Kevin Kline as Henry. US 2010.
• “Jonathan Ames”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_ames. 

___________________________________________________________

Given that Ames is quite out about having a thing for trans women, it is odd that the Wikipedia page about him mentions it not at all.

The selection of excerpts in Ames’ anthology is - how shall we say – conservative.  It you have read several trans biographies, you will have read most of them.  The book would be much more rewarding if he had sought out the less well known biographies, and perhaps translated some that are not currently available in English.  But that would have been more work.

Here is the trailer for the film version of The Extra Man.  Notice how the trans content is just not there.

Lea Sonia (191? – 1941) impersonator

Benjamin O’Reilly grew up to become Lea Sonia, Australia’s major female impersonator, in the 1930s.

In Paris he mentored the young Barri Chat.

In 1941 he was the headline star at Sydney’s Tivoli Theatre. He finished his encore with the song, “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone”. He ran across the street, darkened in the wartime brownout and was fatally hit by a tram.

He is featured as a ghost in Alex Harding’s musical, Only Heaven Knows, 1988, about gay life in Sydney.

• Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. London & New York: Routledge xvi, 540 pp 2000: 365.

• Garry Wotherspoon. “Tram Deaths” . The Dictionary of Sidney. www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/tram_deaths#.

Valerie Nicole Taylor (1956 - ) model.

Freddie Lee Turner was raised in Greenville, South Carolina with five brothers and a sister. He helped out as a surrogate mother to his siblings after their mother left. He got good grades at school, but dropped out during senior year. He was arrested, once in Atlanta, and several times locally, on misdemeanor charges.

By 1979, using the name Freda, she was known as a trans woman, and was seen leaving a bar in nearby Gaffney with Billy Posey who was found shot dead the next morning in a motel room. A taxi-driver told police that he had taken Turner to Spartanburg, and that Turner had flashed a gun and confessed the killing. It took a few days to sign an arrest warrant, by which time Turner had disappeared.

Turner moved to Atlanta and Florida, and then in 1985, as Valerie Taylor, to Glendale, Los Angeles. She sometimes worked as a photographer’s model. Valerie advertized in the personals and met Dave Allen (1944 – 1999) who did visual effects in and directed movies. She was his date to the Oscars in 1986 when he was nominated for Best Special Effects in Young Sherlock Holmes, 1985. They lived together for some years, their relationship occasionally becoming violent.

In 1990 Dave Allen started to also date divorced mother of two, Donita Woodruff.

In 1991 Dave paid for Valerie’s legal name change and surgery with Dr Biber. Also in 1991 Valerie had an accident while learning to drive, and left the scene of the accident. She was sentenced to three years probation and community service.

Dave and Donita

Dave moved in with Donita and finally married her in 1995. Valerie and Donita took a strong dislike to each other. Donita researched Valerie at the Burbank city hall and obtained a copy of Valerie’s name change. She freaked out that Dave had had a relationship with a transsexual and went for an Aids test. Her psychiatrist suggested that she watch The Crying Game, 1992, and the scene where Dil shoots the IRA agent reminded her that Dave had once mentioned that he knew someone who had killed another. She became obsessed that Valerie must be a murderer, and collected evidence.

In 1996, she informed the Burbank police that Taylor was a fugitive. Taylor denied being Freddie Turner, but her fingerprints were the same as those taken from Freddie in Atlanta. She was extradited to South Carolina. In 1997, she pled self-defense and the evidence being mainly lost and witnesses having died since, she was sentenced to 15 years, suspended to three.

Valerie

All this destroyed the marriage of Donita and Dave and their divorce was finalized in 1998.

Valerie served two years in prison at the Leath Correctional Institute for women, before returning to Los Angeles and Dave Allen.

Dave died of cancer in 1999 and it is rumored that he left most of his money to Valerie. In 2002, Valerie was convicted of assault on a boyfriend, and put on probation.


Donita Woodruff published her account as a true crime book in 2005.

*Not the English actress, nor the lesbian novelist, not the shark and underwater expert.

• Jaxon Van Derbeken and Steve Getzug. “Puzzles Surface In 1979 Slaying : Sex Change One Of Many Twists In Case”. Daily News. May 20, 1996. Online at: www.thefreelibrary.com/PUZZLES+SURFACE+IN+1979+SLAYING+%3A+SEX+CHANGE+ONE+OF+MANY+TWISTS+IN...-a083932605.
• Ann W. O’Neill. “Fingerprints Implicate Transsexual in Killing”. Los Angeles Times. May 29, 1996. http://articles.latimes.com/1996-05-29/local/me-9522_1_valerie-taylor.
• Donita Woodruff. Deadly Masquerade: A True Story of Illicit Passion, Buried Secrets, and Murder. Far Hills, N.J.: New Horizon Press, 2005.  New York: St Martin’s Paperbacks 2007. 

 EN.Wikipedia(David_W._Allen)      ____________________________________________________________

The major source on Valerie Taylor is Woodruff’s book.  However Woodruff is very much a hostile witness.  Once Woodruff realizes that Taylor had been a transsexual, she constantly refers to her as ‘Freddie Turner’ and ‘he’ despite Valerie having completed both surgery and legal name change.

Woodruff comes across as very transphobic.  In her opinion a trans woman is a man for life, Dave must be gay because he had an affair with Valerie, and she is at a serious risk of Aids because of Dave.   Whenever she meets persons who had taken Valerie as herself, Woodruff writes it that they had been ‘fooled’.  Her book could be a lot more plausible if she had consulted a trans person for advice.

She is constantly being scandalized by the world as it is.  She is scandalized that the South Carolina justice system uses plea bargaining and that the justice system is imperfect.

Donita also comes across as an unreliable narrator.  In addition to detailed accounts of dialogue which she surely could not remember that precisely, several of the reviewers on Amazon find complete incidents unlikely at best.

I was amazed that Donita could go to city hall and get Valerie’s name change papers.   Are there no privacy provisions?  This is explicitly forbidden in the UK’s Gender Recognition Act, but that is another country.

In Donita’s account, Valerie is a psychopathic killer and violent, physically and emotionally, with all who know her.  In the news articles sourced above, the murder comes across as a self-defence after a night gone wrong.  It is an unfortunate fact that some people do go crazy when with a transsexual.  As stated, Donita spoils her case by being transphobic.

Valerie Taylor is not mentioned among the inmates on the Wikipedia page for Leath Correctional Institute.

The Wikipedia page on Dave Allen does not mention either Valerie or Donita.

Laura de Vison (1939 – 2007) school teacher, performer.

Noberto David Chucri was raised by Lebanese parents in Rio de Janeiro. He graduated from the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia in philosophy, psychology and history, and became a history teacher in the public school system. Here he would sometimes take advantage of the syllabus to appear in drag, for example as Cleopatra when teaching Egyptian history.


Under the name Laura de Vison, he was also a well-known transformista from the 1970s to the 1990s. In particular he performed at the bar Boêmio. In a ninety-minute act he wore many of his almost 100 dresses.

After 18 years as a teacher he was fired after he answered student questions about the sexual transmission of Aids. Later he was arrested during a police purge and spent 10 days in jail.

He was often compared to Divine. He has been in eight films, and several television series. He was Gluttony for a samba school float in Carnaval.

He died at age 68 due to complications after surgery for a hernia.

• « Meet Laura de Vison ». Insider’s Guide to Rio de Janeiro. www.ipanema.com/laura.
• “Morre o transformista Laura de Vison“ . O Globo. 10/07/2007. http://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/mat/2007/07/10/296713887.asp.

 PT.Wikipedia.

Michael Brinkle (1951 - ) performer, sex worker, waitress.

Michael and his elder sister were left at the Baptist Children’s Home in Memphis, Tennessee when he was three. He was sexually abused in the home and later in the scouts. He and his sister were adopted by the same parents when he was nine. Michael had been called ‘Butch’ at the home, and his new parents continued this.

When he was 18 he ran away to Baltimore because he had heard about sex changes at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He worked in a restaurant, and started going out in drag. He found Inferno, the local drag bar. Kelly, a cis woman stripper, had him move in as a roommate so that her boyfriend would not come back.

Michael became Michelle, became a dancer and turned tricks. She went to New York for silicone injections. She never did register at Johns Hopkins. Another trans woman told Michelle about the operations in Casablanca, and together they applied for passports, but had to make a scene at the Passport Office before they were given the application forms. They flew to Casablanca, but Dr Burou didn’t want to perform on Michelle as she was only 19, but eventually after her pleading he took her $2,000 and did so.

On return, Michelle phoned her mother and let her know what had happened. The mother came to accept her second daughter, but still called her Butch. Michelle also had to report to the draft board where the doctor made her disrobe where others could see.

Her first lover was AWOL from the army and already married. They visited each other’s parents but he was constantly chasing other women, until she tired of that and left him.

Michelle and Kelly worked together as exotic dancers. Only some years later did Michelle have electrolysis, to remove her light beard growth, and legally change her name. She married Kelly’s brother, Frank, in Chicago, who did deals and petty crime and was very jealous. She left him and went to Hawai’i where she got a job in a nightclub. Frank somehow traced her, and brought her home at gunpoint. They moved to Memphis. He pulled a job in the club where she was working, and after a few more robberies was arrested. She stayed by him the two years he was in prison. They then separated by mutual consent. Frank later got 12 years for shooting and wounding a policeman.

Michelle stopped taking female hormones because they were increasing her weight. At age 28, with her parents encouragement, she went to beauty school and qualified as a cosmetologist.

The next year she read the Bible and decided that her life was wrong in eyes of God. As Michael, he had his breast implants removed. He still has a high voice and is still sometimes addressed as ‘ma’am’. He joined a church and told of his past, and was accepted. He kept in touch with both Kelly and Frank for some time, but finally drifted away. He attended his mother’s funeral as Michael in 1987, and his father’s in 1994.

In 2006 he published his autobiography.

• Michael Brinkle. Return to Michael: A Transgender Story. Lincoln: iUniverse. 2006.

________________________________

Other than his own autobiography, I am unable to find any information about Michael Brinkle.

On p38 Michael tells: “A so-called doctor came to town [Baltimore] every so often pumping the girls and trans-genders full of silicone.  We called him ‘Dr Plastic’.  He mixed the silicone in the bathtub!  Rumors were going around that he used ‘Turtle Wax’! No, he didn’t finish us off with a buff cloth either!  He was later arrested and put on trial for killing that trans-gender.  Kelly was supposed to testify against him but she started getting death threats over the phone.”     This would be about 1970, a year after Stonewall.  The Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic was still operating.  Can anybody identify this so-called doctor?

The book is 63 pages of text.  It is then followed by 40 pages, 40 photographs all of Michael before he ran away to Baltimore.  The only photograph of Michelle is that on the front cover.  No photographs of Michael after 30 are provided.  Nor does Michael tell us how he made a living after returning to being Michael.

On p40, there is a remarkable apology:  “Could I stop here a moment and confess something else in my memories?  I’m really ashamed to admit today that most of the men I had sex with didn’t have a clue about my real story.  I think that it must have been an inner desire to get revenge on the whole male population for the abuse that they gave me.  To this day they probably still don’t realize that they had sex with Michael and not Michelle.  At the time it was thrilling for me to know that they had no idea that they were enjoying sex with a man but in their own minds were having sex with a woman.  I really wasn’t in my right mind, was I?”   ----- I think that most of us will disagree with this paragraph.  Michelle thought that she was not a real woman, which partially explains why she changed back.

Michael thinks that being sexually abused and the absence of his biological father explains his trans nature.  If this were so, there would be many more transsexuals.

Mrs Shufflewick (1924 – 1983) comedian.

A child who had been abandoned at birth, Rex Coster was named by the couple who adopted him. He was raised in Southend-on-Sea, until 1938 when they moved to Holloway in London, an area that was heavily bombed during the Blitz.

Rex was called up to the RAF in 1942 and was able to join Ralph Reader’s RAF Gang Show. He toured North Africa, Italy and Cyprus putting on shows for the forces. His flight sergeant was Tony Hancock who would become a famous comedian in the 1950s and 1960s. Rex was usually cast as either the leading lady or as a comic vicar. After the war, as there was a popular broadcaster called Sam Costa, Rex took the name Jameson, after the whiskey, to avoid confusion.

He found work in a touring company playing a cockney charlady, a character that he named Gladys Shufflewick when he appeared on BBC radio in 1950. Rex was the first dame comedian to perform in female clothing when on the wireless. He actually arrived, usually by taxi, already dressed and stayed in character. There were very few other comedians doing anything similar, and the act took off. He was usually billed simply as Mrs Shufflewick, and many in the audience were unaware of Rex Jameson, taking Mrs Shufflewick to be a woman.

He did eight seasons at the Windmill Theatre, when as Mrs Shufflewick, he would drink at the Bear and Staff in Charing Cross Road where he developed a friendship with the young Danny La Rue. Mrs Shufflewick played most variety theatres across Britain sharing the bill with most of the stars of the day. However Rex was drinking more and more, and betting on horses, and by 1960 he was bankrupt.

In 1964 Mrs Shufflewick appeared on the LP Look in at the Local recorded live at the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs.  He also appeared in West End Shows. He also did some pantomime, and a season at Butlins Holiday Camp where he had to constrain the natural bawdiness of his act for the family audience. However he then started working the northern working men clubs where the bawdiness was encouraged. He lived in a run-down flat in Kentish Town where he kept scrap metal in the bath, and was proud of the fact that he had not had a bath in over 25 years.

In 1968 he was mentioned in the first edition of Roger Baker’s history of drag. In 1969 Mrs S was the star of an ‘adult pantomime’ in Brighton called Sinderella, but the police closed it after two nights because of complaints about the material. Also in 1969, Rex met David, a labourer in his 30s who would stay with him until his death. They shared a fondness for drink and gambling. By the early 1970s, Mrs S was mainly performing in gay pubs, especially the Black Cap in Camden and the Vauxhall Tavern in Lambeth. She recorded an LP live at the Black Cap which sold well, but within a few months there were performers who were doing her full act under their own names.   Listen to the entire album here.

Patrick Newley (1955 – 2009) became her manager in 1972, and managed to get her back into the West End as a support act to Dorothy Squires. Newley also managed Douglas Byng, and introduced the two of them.

Shuff, as both the actor and the character became known, became a fixture of the thriving gay scene of the 1970s. He gave an interview to Gay News in 1973, and was now open about his own sexuality. He did not seem to understand what the Gay Liberation Front was about, but twice Shuff was on a prominent float in the Gay Pride march. He was also a celebrity judge at Andrew Logan’s Alternate Miss World.

He played cameos in the Marty Feldman film, Every Home Should Have One, 1970, and Tony Palmer’s television documentary about music, All You Need Is Love, 1977.

In his 50s, Rex looked over 70. He continued heavily smoking and drinking till the end. In 1983, just before his 59^th birthday, he popped out to buy cigarettes and Guinness and dropped dead on the pavement. Over 500 people turned up for his funeral.

• Roger Baker. Drag: a history of Female Impersonation on the Stage. London: A Triton Book. 1968: 184-5.
• Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. London & New York: Routledge xvi, 540 pp 2000: 250-2.
• Patrick Newley. The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick: The Life of Rex Jameson. Third Age Press. 2007.
• J.D. Doyle. “Mrs Shufflewick”. Queer Music Heritage. www.queermusicheritage.com/drag-shufflewick.html. Contains an audio file from the 1964 album. And also: www.queermusicheritage.com/drag-shufflewick2.html.

____________________________________________________________

Not Southend nor Holloway nor Kentish Town list either persona of Shuff among their notable residents on Wikipedia.

Rex’s preferred term for what he did was Dame Comedian.  Not female impersonator or drag performer.

Rex’s affectionate term for his lover, David, was ‘Myra’.  Nothing to do with any character created by Gore Vidal, the cultural reference was to Myra Hindley (1942 – 2002) the Moors Murderer who finally died in prison.

Dallas Denny (1949 - ) psychologist, writer, activist.

++Revised September 2012 with feedback from Dallas.

Dallas was raised in an army family and as a child lived on and near military bases all over the world. When he was 13 the family settled in Tennessee. At age 22 he married, and at 28 was divorced. After college and graduate school he worked for the state government of Tennessee as a child protective worker and then as a psychological examiner. He held a license to practice psychology in Tennessee from 1980 until the mid-1990s, retiring it after moving to Georgia.

In his teens, Dallas started going out in public dressed as a girl. He was ready to transition gender roles, but had no idea how to go about it.

At age 30 he paid $500 to apply to the gender identity program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. After evaluation he was told he was not dysfunctional enough to receive sex reassignment services. Determined to transition with or without the help of the clinic, he immediately began to research transsexualism at the university’s medical library

At that time no physicians in Nashville would prescribe hormones to him and the drag bars wouldn't grant entry when he was crossdressed. With no legal avenue for hormones, and having never met even one other transsexual, Dallas stole part of a prescription pad and self-prescribed Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a medication now prohibited because of carcinogenic properties. He feminized over the next ten years.

The same year--1979-- Dallas reached out for support, but found only The Society for the Second Self (Tri-Ess) , the national group for crossdressers with a no-gays-no-transsexuals policy. After corresponding with co-founder Virginia Prince, he declined to join. Ten years later he looked for support once again, and once again found only Tri-Ess. Dallas lied about his transsexuality and joined. Through Tri-Ess he soon learned of a transsexual support group in Atlanta and contacted it, letting his membership in Tri-Ess lapse.

Dallas completed electrolysis in 1989, and had surgery with Dr Seghers in Brussels in 1991. She resigned her position as a psychological examiner and moved to Georgia, transitioning en route. Her female lover was not able to accept the change, and their long-term relationship ended. She kept the same first name, Dallas, it being androgynous.

She immediately found a job as a behavior specialist in Metro Atlanta, working with adults with developmental disabilities. She held that position until her retirement at age 60.

At the request of her family, Dallas did not call, write or visit for more than ten years. One of her sisters re-established contact in the late 1990s, but she didn't see or correspond with her other family members until her mother phoned her six months after her father's passing in 2001.

In 1990 Dallas founded the American Educational Gender Information Service (AEGIS) and the journal Chrysalis: The Journal of Transgressive Gender Identities. She was Executive Director of AEGIS and Editor-in-Chief of Chrysalis from 1990 until 1998. In 1993 she founded the US National Transgender Archive and Library, which now resides in the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan. She was director of Montgomery Foundation for a year.  Atlanta Gender Explorations, an open support group she founded in 1990, still meets monthly. She was a principal in the founding of the transgender conferences Southern Comfort Conference and FTM Conference of the Americas.  Also in 1990, Dallas, after much persistence, was one of the first trans professionals permitted a membership in HBIGDA (now WPATH).

Dallas was editor of IFGE's Transgender Tapestry magazine from 2000 until 2008 and director of the transgender conference Fantasia Fair from 2003 until 2007. She has written many booklets and articles on transsexualism, many of them published by AEGIS, nearly 20 chapters for textbooks, and the texts Gender Dysphoria: A Guide to Research and Current Concepts in Transgender Identity, acknowledged by Richard Green as the first books on transsexuality by a transsexual. In 2003 she and many others spoke out against Michael Bailey’s The Man who Would be Queen. 

She is now a resident of the village of Pine Lake, Georgia, the world’s smallest municipality with a transgender non-discrimination ordinance.

Virgina Prince Award For Lifetime Achievement, 2007.

In her essay for The New Goddess, she wrote: 

My betwixt and between financial status has helped me see the full panorama of transgender behaviors, for I've commingled with the rich and the poor, cross-dressers and transsexuals, the passable and the impassable. I know transsexual people who have managed to hold onto their jobs during transition and those who have been fired, and transsexual people who have deliberately walked away from their old lives to forge new ones. 1 know those whose middle-class lives fell apart when they started to deal with their gender issues, and who now live in reduced circumstances. And 1 know those who ... have never had and never will have a middle-class life, who have wound up on the streets because they were courageous enough to deal with their gender issues at an early age, and because, with their early experiences and upbringing, there was no other place to go other than the street.

In their youth, transgendered people have a terrible choice: they can be true to themselves, for which they will be at grave risk for winding up dead; or they can keep others happy by stifling their innermost selves. The choice they make will determine the path they walk through life: marginalized, rejected, harassed by others, forced into low-paying jobs or into sex work, but able to be themselves; or comfortably middle-class, with all the privileges pertaining thereto, but having to keep the closet door firmly closed as their bodies become progressively more masculine - or, for FTMs, more feminine.  Neither choice is satisfactory; either has grave consequences. Who could be blamed for walking either of these roads? (p113-4)

... 

I don't think there are two different types of transsexual people, as a number of clinicians have reported; I think there are only people who, at the fork in the road, have made different choices, and who have been shaped by those choices. Some face the risks and pains associated with transitioning early, and some delay their choice and inherit the risk and pain associated with transitioning later in life. Often, these choices are made out of consideration for others, by the circumstances of their lives and relationships, or by happenstance. I know my own life has been influenced by chance. (p115)

*Not the Country singer.

·  Dallas Denny. Gender Dysphoria: A Guide to Research. Garland 653pp 1994. 

·  Dallas Denny (ed). Current Concepts in Transgender Identity. Garland 452pp. 1997.

·  Helen Boyd. “Five Questions With … Dallas Denny”. en|Gender: helen boyd’s journal of gender & trans issues. October 5, 2005. www.myhusbandbetty.com/?p=427.

·  Dallas Denny. “My Transsexual Autobiography”. In J. Ari Kane-Demaios & Vern L. Bullough (eds). Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths. Prometheus Books. 2006: 118-128.

·  Dallas Denny.  "Down and Out at the Ross Fireproof Hotel: An Essay on Class in the Transgender Community". In Gypsey Teague (ed). The New Goddess: Transgender Women in the Twenty-First Century. Waterbury, CT: Fine Tooth Press, 2006: 106-117.

·   http://dallasdenny.com.

·  pinelaketheblog.blogspot.com.