Camille Cabral (1944–) dermatologist, activist, councillor.

Cabral was born and raised in Cabaceiras, Paraiba, Brazil. He passed the entrance exam for medicine and studied in Recife. While working as the Hospital das Clinicas in São Paulo, Cabral first started dressing as female.

In 1980 Cabral went to France, did an internship in dermatology, and then worked at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris. Here she came out and transitioned. She chose the name Camille when she took French nationality:  "I wanted a very French name, but elegant".

In 1993, Camille lost her job and in consequence founded the Groupe de prévention et d'action pour la santé et le travail des transsexuel(le)s (PASTT).

She also became involved in prostitutes rights, and fought against pimps and trafficking. She was a co-organizer of the Pute Pride march, and of the Red Light co-operative.

Camille was elected a list councillor for the Green Party in the 17th arrondissement of Paris and served from 2001-8. She also ran as a candidate in the parliamentary elections.

“Gender identity is not linked to sex change. Ours is not an issue of genitals, but of sensitivity, of attitude. There is no reason that we have to have genital operations in order to have our rights recognized. So I prefer to use the neologism transgender and not the word transsexual. I am a transgender woman!”

 PT.WIKIPEDIA   FR.WIKIPEDIA   TRANS.ILGA

Buck Angel (1972 - ) adult film maker.

Susan was a tomboy as a child in San Francisco’s San Fernando Valley.

As a young woman she used the name Laura, and worked as model, but she was uncomfortable as a woman, and did a lot of drugs and alcohol. She hung out with butch lesbians because there was nowhere to go.

Transitioning in his twenties, he had top surgery and hormones, which he supplemented with bodybuilding. He was husband to Ilsa Strix (Karin Winslow), a top dominatrix in Los Angeles, until she left him in 2003 for Lana Wachowshi, one of the two directors of the Matrix films.

Buck moved to New Orleans to be with his second wife, body piercer, tattooer and body modification enthusiast Elayne Angel - he took her name, and became Buck Angel. He then sought work as a trans-porn actor.

In 2005, Buck was the first trans man in an all-male porn film, and he was in another film where he had sex with trans woman Allanah Starr. For the latter he was nominated for Transsexual Performer of the Year and Most Outrageous Sex Scene. In January 2007, Buck won Transsexual Performer of the Year at the Adult Video News Awards.

In 2008 he and Allanah  were sculpted life-size by London artist Marc Quinn.

Buck is the best-known and best-paid FTM porn star. He is billed as ‘a real man, with a real pussy’.

He frequently appears on talk shows and at sex conventions.

“I do believe that people need to recognize this as a real medical condition. I do also believe that a lot of people don't take it as seriously as it needs to be taken. It's kind of become a trendy thing. They're playing with their gender, and maybe they don't really want to be male. Which is fine, but as a real transsexual person, I don't consider myself a transsexual, I consider myself a man.”

• Mark Miller. “Matrix Revelations: The Wachowski Brothers FAQ”. Wired 11.11 Nov 2003. www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/matrix_pr.html.
• “Buck Angel”. Bizarre. Nov 2004. www.bizarremag.com/sleaze/interviews/1472/buck_angel.html?xc=1.
• Gerry Visco. “Man? Or Woman? You Decide: Porn Actor Buck Angel’s Body is a sexual confusion”. New York Press, March 29, 2006. www.nypress.com/article-13179-man-or-woman-you-decide.html
• Dan Hunt (dir).  Mr Angel, with Buck Angel, Elayne Angel, Tyra Banks, Dan Savage. US/Canada/Germany/Mexico 68 mins 2013.  

 EN.WIKIPEDIA    Website.

John de Verdion (1744 - 1802) book dealer, language teacher.

Theodora Grahn was born in Leipzig and raised in Berlin where her father was an architect, noted particularly for the rebuilding of the Sankt Petrikirche.

After his death in 1750 at Bayreuth, she was raised by an aunt, and became proficient in Mathematics, French, Italian and English, as well as her native German.

The aunt died in 1758, leaving 1,000 Reichsthalers. Theodora took to trading as an Exchange Broker and prospered in the then ongoing Seven Years’ War. At its end in 1763 she went to Beyreuth.

On return in 1768 Grahn had declared himself to be Baron de Verdion. The next year Verdion became the secretary and amanuensis of Johann Basedow, the educational reformer. However, it being remembered that Verdion had been a woman, gossip ensued and they were compelled to part.

Later some young men from a merchant’s counting house, invited Verdion to an inn, got him drunk and verified his sex. This prompted Verdion to emigrate to England where as Dr John de Verdion, he became a language teacher and book dealer.

He was helped for a while by his co-patriate Frau Schwellenberg, an attendant to the Queen, Charlotte Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He taught German to the William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland and later Prime Minister, and to Edward Gibbon, the historian. He taught English to the Prussian ambassador.

Verdion was well known at book auctions, and on occasions would buy a entire coach load of books.

Verdion became a regular at Furnival’s inn and coffee house in Holborn where he became known for his prodigious consumption of food and drink. There were suspicions that he was a woman, and he was subjected a few pranks that expressed that opinion.

After 30 years in London, a fall downstairs developed into dropsy, and, despite the ministrations of a German physician who lived in the same house, he died. By his will he bequeathed all to the master of Furnival’s inn and coffee house, but upon his taking possession it proved inadequate to discharge the bill. Verdion’s considerable collection of foreign gold and silver coins were nowhere to be found, neither was his sword.

The coffin plate was at first engraved ‘John de Verdion’, but was then altered to ‘Miss de Verdion’. Verdion was deposited in the burying ground of St Andrew, Holborn.

• “Miss Grahn, or De Verdion”. Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum: or, Magazine of remarkable characters. London: R.S. Kirby, 1820. Vol ii: : 49-53. www.archive.org/stream/kirbyswonderfule02kirb/kirbyswonderfule02kirb_djvu.txt.
• “Miss Theodora De Verdion”. The Lives and Portraits of Curious and Odd Characters. Worcester [Mass.]: T. Drew, 1852: 42-5. http://tinyurl.com/6qwgxks. 

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I am rather surprised that a 14-year-old girl in Berlin in 1758 was not only allowed to become an Exchange Broker, but was a success and made money at it.

I am less surprised that in 1769 it was a scandal for a man and a man-woman to work together.  There are still some Muslim societies that have that attitude even today.

John de Verdion was in London at the same time as D'Éon de Beaumont.  I have not been able to find any mention of de Verdion in books on de Beaumont.  In much the same way that books on Virginia Prince do not mention Edward Wood, although they were both in Los Angeles at the same time.

Dudley Clarke (1899 - 1974 ) secret agent.

Dudley Wrangel Clarke was born, with the caul, in Ladysmith, Natal, during the four-month siege that was an early engagement in the Second Boer War. As an adult he spent several years lobbying the War Office that he was entitled to the Boar War campaign medal.

He was educated at Charterhouse School for three years, and then joined the Royal Horse Artillery in 1916, and a month after his 17th birthday was at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was too young to go to France, so he applied to join the Royal Flying Corps and was posted to Egypt, where he got his wings.

He had the knack of being in the right place and knowing the right people. He had many friends in the 11th Hussars, one of the snootiest regiments, despite being a mere artilleryman himself. He liked to enter and leave rooms silently and without being noticed.

Between the wars he was involved in various Middle East crises and rose through the ranks. He also put on the Royal Artillery display for the 1925 Royal Tournament, and wrote and directed Christmas pantomimes at the Staff College at Camberley in 1933-4, and the Silver Jubilee Display in Aden in 1935. From 1936 he was a Brigade Major in Palestine.

During the Second World War Lieutenant Colonel Clarke ran a deception section in Cairo under MI6 whose job was to deceive the Axis about Allied troop movements. For a flight to Egypt, which took six days during the war as they had to go via the Canary Islands, Lagos and Khartoum, he impersonated a US war correspondent and wore a loud pair of black-and-white plus-fours. He recruited a double of General Montgomery who spent time in the Mediterranean while the real Montgomery was in England; he created a fictitious First United States Army Group in Kent to fool the Germans that Calais would be invaded. He created a fake Special Air Service paratrooper regiment, and when such a troop was really created he arranged for it to have the same name.

Photographs taken by the Madrid police

In October 1941 Clarke travelled to Lisbon and Madrid under the guise of being The Times war correspondent, Wrangel Craker. He was arrested in the latter city in women’s clothes. He tried claiming that he was a novelist studying men’s reactions, and then that he “was taking the feminine garments to a lady in Gibraltar and thought that he would try them on for a prank”. The police considered him to be a ‘homosexualist’, but a German agent who believed that he would assist the Germans arranged Clarke’s release.

This allowed Alan Hillgarth, the British naval attaché, to get him away, and then to Gilbraltar, where he joined a convoy for London. German agents in Ceuta and Algeciras signalled its departure, and U-boats were able to sink several of the ships, including the Aristo where the crew and passengers had five minutes to get to the lifeboats and rafts. Six died and 45 including Clarke escaped.

Hillgarth sent the police photographs to London, where they were shown to Prime Minister Churchill. The cross-dressing caused short-term embarrassment to Clarke, but did not affect his career.

After the war Clarke was made a Companion of the Bath. He retired from the Army and worked for the Conservative Party, and was on the board of Securicor, Ltd. He wrote and published an account of his early military career, and a second volume that was never published. He wrote a history of the 11th Hussars. He then approached the authorities to do a book on the wartime deceptions, but got nowhere. Books on the topic did not appear until the 21st century.

In 1955 he wrote a thriller, Golden Arrow in which he pays a lot of attention to the women’s clothes.

“With all her natural beauty she seemed sadly incapable of acquiring a proper flair for dress ... superbly endowed with grey-green eyes and Titian Hair, with the long slim legs and the gently-curved figure of a model, she could usually be relied upon to ruin the effect of the most exquisite outfit with some shocking misalliance ... As she swung proudly into the hall of the hotel, his first glance went straight to the revolting little hat in exactly the wrong shade of mustard”.

Clarke never married and died at age 75 with an obituary in The Times.

• Dudley Clarke. Seven Assignments. London: J. Cape, 1948.
• Dudley Clarke The Eleventh at War, Being the Story of the XIth Hussars (Prince Albert's Own) Through the Years 1934-1945. London: M. Joseph, 1952.
• Dudley Clarke. Golden Arrow. Hodder & Stoughton, 1955.
• Thaddeus Holt. The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004:12-4, 791.
• Guy Maynard Liddell, edited by Nigel West. The Guy Liddell Diaries Volume 1, 1939-1942. London: Routledge, 2005: 180-1, 185, 192, 200.
• Nicholas Rankin. Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914-1945. London: Faber and Faber, 2008: 255-67, 479-80, 493-503, 549-50, 593. Reprinted as A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Piers Brendon. “Dark arts and self-delusions”. The Guardian, 4 Oct 2009. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/04/history
• Ben Macintyre. Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. New York: Harmony Books, 2010: 38, 153-4.
• Duncan Gardham. “MI6’s cross-dressing spy”. The Telegraph, 22 Sep 2010. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8017042/MI6s-cross-dressing-spy.html
• Jeffery Keith. MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909-1949. London: Bloomsbury Publ, 2011: 406-7.
• “Dudley Clarke”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Clarke

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Holt’s The Deceivers, 2004, says a lot about Clarke, but nothing about the incident in Madrid. The first public discussion is in Guy Liddell’s Diaries, published 2005: “At the time he was dressed as a woman complete with brassière etc. Why he wore this disguise nobody quite knows. ... It may be that he is just the type who imagines himself as the super secret service agent”. Bits and variations on this are quoted in most of the subsequent books. The other secret agents could understand disguise, but not why he would also wear the underwear.

The caul was believed to protect from drowning.  That is why good money for paid for the caul of another.   It worked in that Clarke did not go down with the Aristo.

Noël Coward coined a term for leaving without being noticed: exsinuate.

Trivia: there are several movie connections:

1. While the full tale of the deception departments was not allowed to be told until the 21st century, two of their successes became best-selling books and then films: The Man Who Never Was, 1956, and I Was Monty’s Double, 1958.   The 1981 film, Eye of the Needle stars Donald Sutherland as a German spy who discovers and photographs the fake US Army Group.
2. Dudley’s brother, T.E.B. Clarke was a film script writer.  He was awarded an Oscar for The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951, and Sons and Lovers, 1960.  He also wrote Passport to Pimlico, and The Blue Lamp.

Manuela Trasobares Haro (1962 - ) artist, singer, politician.

Trasobares was born in Figueres, also the birth place of Salvador Dalí. She transitioned surgically in London at the age of 17.

Manuela was trained as an artist by Dali, and then at the Sant Jordi Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Universidad de Barcelona. She also trained in music at the conservatory in Sofia, Bulgaria, and sang with the National Theatre of Sofia, and the Opera Theatre in Plovdiv. She was eliminated from several international singing competition, despite her obvious training, because of her gender status.

Her style as an artist has gone from surrealism to hyperrealism.

She was also an activist for transsexual rights. She married a man in 2006, and almost all the 900 residents of Geldo in Castellón, the village where she lives, attended the ceremony.

In 2007, she ran successfully as a Democratic Republican Action candidate for a council seat in Geldo making her the first trans person in Spain to hold elected office.

Also that year, two of her sculptures on religious themes were excluded from the Espai D´Art Contemporani de Castelló, because of pressure from a traditionalist Carlist group.

In 2008, she ran unsuccessfully for the national Parliament as a Republican Left candidate.

• "Spain local election sees first transsexual woman as councillor". Typically Spanish, May 30, 2007. www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_10722.shtml.

http://manuelatrasobares.blogia.com     ES.WIKIPEDIA. 

A letter from Linda Lee

Linda Lee wrote for Drag magazine and then Female Mimics for 15 years or so.  She is now a children’s magician.
____________________________________________________________

Thank you for your Gender Variance Who's Who. (Lovely term "gender variance"; so much less "loaded" than a lot of the other terms used.).

The index brought back good memories of people I knew, some well, some only very slightly, and lots that I didn't know but was highly aware of.

I wrote for Lee Brewster for about five years or so until DRAG folded, then moved to FEMALE MIMICS for another 8-10 or so...

The one time I visited NYC, Lee threw a dinner for me at Luchow's (the first place in America that Harry Benjamin ate, he told me in a letter...) and I met Chrysis briefly. Stunning!

I met Kristi Kelly through a friend and interviewed her at some length. We went out to dinner and had intended to get together again the next time I was in L.A. and then, within a couple of months came news of the plane crash. I spoke at her funeral which was one of the harder things I've done and I didn't get through it without tears.

Steve Dain I met through the SAR programs I participated in for the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco and we stayed in friendly touch even after I stopped speaking at them. I hadn't heard from him in a while and found out about his passing a bit later though I had suspected that something had happened.

talking to the Human Sexuality class at a local college

I especially appreciated your piece on Marie-Pierre Pruvot. I knew she'd become a teacher but was delighted that she seems to have been such a respected and honored one. It's pleasant, too, to know that she is still enjoying her life. I wish that there were English translations of her books.

As I initially looked at the names in your list, I had the line from the old poem running through my mind, "Gone. Gone. All are gone..." but looking at the pieces about them, I realize that those people are alive in me, as I would not be the person I am, if I had not known them.

So I am very grateful that you've brought them into my immediate thoughts again, and, again, my thanks for the exceptional work you've done and the recollections it has given me.
____________________________________________________________

Linda is still at P.O. Box 23001, Oakland, CA 94623. 

Lou Reed mentions a Linda Lee in his song “Cool it Down”, but if it was intended to refer to this Linda Lee, she doesn’t know about, and the lyrics do not match her any more that Reed’s “Sister Reed” match Sylvia Rivera.

Althea Garrison (1940 - ) elected official, state employee.

Garrison was born in Hihira, Georgia, and moved to Boston, Massachusetts as a teenager. He went to Beauty Culture School when he arrived in Boston, then to Newbury Junior College, Suffolk University for a degree in administration, Lesley University for a graduate degree in management and then Harvard in 1984 for a certificate of special studies in administration.

Garrison transitioned and became Althea in 1976. She worked for the Massachusetts Department of Revenue and then the Office of the Comptroller. Later she was the vice president of the Uphams Corner Health Center in Dorchester, Boston.

In 1982 and 1986 she ran for the Massachusetts State House as a Democrat. In 1991 she ran for the Boston City Council. In 1992 she was elected as a Republican State Representative, and was outed by the Murdoch-owned Boston Herald a few days after the campaign by columnist Eric Fehrnstrom. As a representative she consistently voted pro-union, and was endorsed for re-election by the AFL-CIO and eight unions. On other issues she more frequently voted with the Democrats than with her own party. However she was defeated by the Democratic candidate in 1994.


She would seem to be the first trans person to be elected at the state level or above in the US.

However she denies that she was ever a transsexual, and refuses all questions about her personal background. She has appealed for the GLBT vote on the grounds that she is a black woman, but never on the grounds that she is trans. She has also run for mayor and other offices more than 15 times, but with no other success. She has been opposed to gay marriages, and has called for the judges who ruled in its favor to be removed from the bench. She was allied with the anti-gay-rights and anti-transsexual group MassResistance.

• “Althea Garrison”. Wicked Local Roslindale. Aug 10, 2005. www.wickedlocal.com/roslindale/archive/x902797191.
• Adam Reilly. “The compulsive candidate: What makes Althea Garrison run?”. The Boston Phoenix, Sept 23-9, 2005. www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/04985020.asp
• “1st TG elected official isn't so proud”. Washington Blade. Oct 25, 2008. www.washblade.com/blog/index.cfm?blog_id=118. NO LONGER AVAILABLE
• “You Can’t Make This Shit Up”. ENDAblog. Oct 30, 2008. endablog.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/you-cant-make-this-shit-up.
• David Ferguson.  "Top Romney aide outed transgender woman in political smear".   RawStory 11 May 2012.  www.rawstory.com/2012/05/top-romney-aide-outed-transgender-woman-in-political-smear.  

 EN.Wikipedia        OurCampaigns