Cindy Thái Tài (1981 - ) make-up artist, singer.

The family of Nguyen Thái Tài wanted him to become a tailor. Instead he became a well-known make-up artist.

Finally Thái Tài announced a desire to be a woman. She travelled to the Yanhee Hospital in Bangkok, between 1999 and 2005 for surgical transition. As Cindy she is one of the very few Vietnamese transsexuals to speak on the topic.

She is still a well-known make-up artist, and released her first singing album, Noi long co don, in 2006, and then Tinh yeu da mat a year later. Both were commercial successes. She has also appeared in the films Saigon tinh ca and Trai nhay where she was cast as a transsexual singer.

In 2008 there was a scandal when a pornographic item appeared on her web site, but apparently was placed by her former manager.

Her boy friend is a German businessman. She is working on an autobiography.

• Nhu Lich. “Transgender journey”. Thanh Nien News. 22 October 2008. www.thanhniennews.com/print.php?catid=6&newsid=43075.
• www.cindythaitai.net.

  VI.Wikipedia.

Eugene C. Perkins (1869 – 1936) doctor.

Perkins, raised in Buffalo, married Margaret Curren in Florida in 1908.

They moved to California where he practiced medicine in La Jolla.

After 28 years of marriage, Margaret pre-deceased Eugene by six months. While his corpse was being prepared for burial, it was discovered that he was female-bodied.

• Girl Who 'Wed' Another Girl: Pre-1950 Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Marriages in the US. http://pre-1950sgaymarriage.org.

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What a terrible title!  “Girl Who 'Wed' Another Girl”.  It turns trans men not only into women, but into girls.   Even if the persons featured on the site are lesbians, it insults them by reducing them to ‘girls’, and by putting quotes around ‘wed’ it says that gay weddings are less valid than heterosexual ones.

Furthermore, in regard to Dr Perkins the site says: “It is unclear whether Dr. Eugene Perkins truly gendered himself as male or merely assumed a male identity in order to work as a better-paid male physician and marry her girlfriend.”  He ‘merely assumed’ an identity and kept it up without a break for at least 28 years.  It is this kind of unthinking nincompoopery that causes rifts between lesbians and trans men.

Machiel Van Antwerpen. (1719 - 1781) maid, seamstress, soldier.

Maria Van Antwerpen was raised Catholic in Breda, the seventh child and second daughter of a brandy distiller, who in later years worked on the docks. Maria was orphaned at age 13. Two years later a great fire destroyed 90 per cent of the city. Maria worked as a maidservant until 1746 when she was dismissed for visiting her family for Christmas.

Afraid of becoming a prostitute, she became Jan van Ant, and enlisted as a soldier, and shortly afterwards he married the daughter of his sergeant. However he was billeted in Breda in 1751 and recognized, initially by a child, and arrested.

The trial was much reported, a song was written about her, and Franciscus Lievens Kersteman wrote up an autobiography of Van Antwerpen. Maria was banished from Brabant and Limburg and all garrison towns. She moved to Rotterdam and then to Gouda, making a living as a seamstress.

In 1762 Maria having met Cornelia Swartsenberg who was unmarried and pregnant, and became Machiel van Antwerpen. Machiel again enlisted, this time in Zwolle and married her. The first child was stillborn. They moved to Amsterdam, where Machiel became a soldier working for the city. A second child, a son was baptised with Machiel as the father, but died after seven weeks.

On a trip to Gouda in 1769 he was recognized and charged with 'mocking holy and human laws concerning marriage'. Cornelia managed to escape. The resulting interrogation, spread across five hearings resulted in 43 folio pages of text, and makes Machiel one of the best documented working-class persons of the eighteenth century. He said of himself: "‘ik ben in de natuur een manspersoon, maar uiterlijk een vrouwspersoon (I am a male by nature, but a woman externally)".

As Maria he was banished to exile in Holland and West Friesland, and disappeared from history other than we know that she died, back in Breda, in 1781, the year that the city was captured by Spanish and Flemish troops.

• Maria Van Antwerpen & Franciscus Lievens Kersteman. De Bredasche Heldinne ('The Heroine of Breda'). 1751
• Rudolf M Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol. Dekker. Vrouwen in mannenkleren: de geschiedenis van de vrouwelijke travestie. Rainbow pocketboeken, 134. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Maarten Muntinga, 1989. Amsterdam: Muntinga, 1992. Translated by Judy Marcure and Lotte Van de Pol, with a Foreword by Peter Burke. The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan Press, New York : St. Martin's Press, 1989. p1,3-4,11,18,23-6,44,63-9,78-9,82-4,86,89,92-3,96-7,110.
• "Antwerpen, Maria Van". Huygens Ing, 07/04/2009. www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/DVN/lemmata/data/Antwerpen.

 EN.Wikipedia.

Rumiko Matsubara 松原留美子 (195?–) performer.

Rumiko Matsubara 松原留美子 won a beauty contest for businesses in the Roppongi night-club area in Tokyo in 1981 as a woman, and was used as a model: the ‘Roppongi Beauty’.

Once her transgender status was revealed, she posed semi-nude for a men's magazine, released an album of songs, and acted in a film Kura no naka, 1981. She was promoted using the newly coined term nyūhā fu, which was coming to be used for mixed-gender persons.

She described herself:

'I have been a woman since the day I was born. Only my body was mistakenly born as male.'

• Interview with Rumiko Matsubara.  Allen, 12, Oct 1982: 42-4.
• Mark McLelland. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age. Lanham Md & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield 2005: 198.
• Mark McLelland. “Living more ‘Like Oneself’: Transgender Identities and Sexualities in Japan”. In Jonathan Alexander and Karen Yescavage. Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2003: 214.
  
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  hā fu (=half) was an established Japanese word for a mixed race person, especially a Euro-Japanese person.  nyūhā fu (= new half) was coined in 1981, and was first used by a 'gai' singer called Betty. The term was picked up by the press in time for it to be applied to Rumiko.  While the term would seem to approximate to what Westerners might call a non-op trans woman, McLelland emphasizes that it is best understood as an occupational category.
  
  
  

Fawziya Janahi (1962–) lawyer

Janahi was raised in Bahrain. She went to university in Egypt where she had a roommate, also a Bahraini, who had obvious difficulties in being a woman, and in 2001 asked her, by then a qualified lawyer, to help. In 2005 the case was won and the ex-roommate was officially a man, and later married as a man.


Her second case was the Bahraini shot-put disabled athlete Hussain Rabie which concluded with success with 2008, and supported by fatwas from both Sunni and Shia Shariaa Courts.

This attracted media attention, and brought Janahi cases from all over the Gulf. The law is fairly straightforward in Bahrain, but more complicated in the other countries.

Janahi insists on a minimum two-year psychiatric evaluation, and is the only lawyer in the region taking such cases.

Previously Kuwaiti male lawyer Adel Yehya attempted some 13 similar cases but quit after they were rejected by the courts. Janahi was initially rejected by her family for taking such cases, but after some years they have come around to supporting her.

While the Bahraini government is supportive, other Gulf are more difficult. She has a journalist present when meeting her clients in some countries in case of police raids.

• "Bahraini Lawyer adopts sex change cases in the gulf". Transgender Egypt, Feb 12, 2008. http://tgegypt.com/2008/06/11/bahraini-lawyer-adopts-sex-change-cases-in-the-gulf/#more-22.
• Suad Hamada. "Transsexuals in the Middle East Await the Wave of Change". THEWIP, Sept 2, 2009. www.thewip.net/contributors/2009/09/transsexuals_in_the_middle_eas.html.
• Suad Hamada interviews Fawziya Janahi. "Guardian Angel of Gulf Transsexuals". ILGA, 08/11/2009. http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/m8Pe91K10D.

Raven Navajo (1965–) sailor, escort, barmaid.

Michael Scott Harmon was born in New Jersey and raised in Kentucky. His father was a full-blooded Navajo, but also an alcoholic who fell asleep with a lighted cigarette and died in the resulting apartment fire when Michael was 6 months old.

His mother remarried, to a Vietnam veteran who was straight with Michael about how boys are expected to behave, but also let him be himself. The stepfather died in a car accident when Michael was 13. Michael got drunk for the first time after the funeral.

He moved in with an alcoholic uncle, dropped out of school, got drunk and tried to be a man. At 17 he was arrested and the judge offered Juvenile Hall or military enlistment. In the US Navy he specialized in aviation electronics, and learned how to get away with being drunk.

At age 25 he married a Filipina, they had two sons, and he was reassigned to San Diego. After an arrest for drunkenness in 1992, he was sober for 11 years. He left the military in 1995 after 16 years service. He got divorced and returned to his Navajo roots.

He changed his name to Raven Navajo. A few years after that he started dressing as female, and after a while going to drag clubs. His eldest son, at age 13, told Raven that she was happier as a woman, and should go full-time. To get work she started as an escort, first in Kentucky, and then in Las Vegas. She started female hormones. Then she took a job bar-tending in a trans-friendly nightclub. And started drinking again.

One night in 2007 she took up with fellow drinker Brenda Schmalfeldt and they continued at Raven’s apartment. They got into a quarrel and Raven hit her. She woke up to find Brenda dead. After two days of drinking to get the courage to kill herself, Raven put Brenda’s body in her car, and drove until she found a dumpster. A few days later Raven called the police to confess, but they never called back. When they finally came to see her, she confessed, but the body was no longer in the dumpster.

Raven attempted to plead guilty to first-degree murder, but drunkenness is a defense to premeditation, deliberation and malice. The jury found her guilty of second-degree, and she got 10 years to life - in a men’s prison as she has not had surgery.

• Francis McCabe. "Fight over money led to death: Woman's body yet to be found; transgender in jail ". Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jan 24, 2007. www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2007/Jan-24-Wed-2007/news/12136369.html.
• David Kihara. "Killer going to prison". Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 10, 2008. www.lvrj.com/news/17456059.html.
• Abigail Goldman. “Transgender killer torn with guilt, searching still for identity: Life story riddled with abuse of alcohol, hidden tendencies”. Las Vegas Sun. May 8, 2008. www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/may/08/transgender-killer-torn-guilt-searching-still-iden.

Yeda Brown (194?–) performer.

Brown was raised in Bagé, in Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil.  His father was a military officer, and as a familial duty he did apply for military service, but was rejected.

The name ‘Yeda’ was picked in homage to Ieda Vargas, who was Miss Universe 1963, and also from Rio Grande Do Sul.

In 1967 Yeda moved to Rio de Janeiro and became a performer with Rogéria at the Teatro Rival. She was part of the show, Les Girls, and toured in Uruguay and Argentina.

In 1974 she moved to Paris, and performed at Madame Arthur's and Le Carrousel. In 1975 she completed her transition with Dr Michel Seghers in Brussels, and her father paid for the surgery.

Afterwards she moved to Spain, where she was the first known surgically completed transsexual, and became famous on stage, screen and record. She had a small part in the ground-breaking El Transexual, 1977, that was partially inspired by the story of Lorena Capelli who died of peritonitis after an illegal sex change (the only kind in Spain at that time).

Yeda became known as El Cuerpo de Oro and Musa da Transição , and was taken up by Salvador Dali, who declared her to be his new muse. She partied with Boy George and David Bowie. Yeda returned to Brazil several times in the late 1990s to get her documentation changed. She lived in Barcelona, and then in Madrid.

• Yeda Brown, la última musa de Dalí. 5 de maio de 2008. http://yedabrownmusadedali.blogspot.com/2008/05/yeda-brown-la-musa-de-dal.html.
• Jim Beaux. “Brazil: Yeda Brown, the Muse of Salvador Dali”. Trans Mirror. 7 June 2009. http://transmirror.blogspot.com/2009/06/brazil-yeda-brown-muse-of-salvador-dali.html.