Potassa de la Fayette (195? - ) model

Potassa was a star in the early days of New York's Studio 54, 1977-8, where she was noted when on the dance floor, and liked to pick up straight Wall-Street type guys and take them to a balcony for oral sex.


Said to be from Santo Domingo, she was photographed by Andy Warhol – in the nude displaying her more than average male endowment.

She was also in the Salvador Dali set, and was seen with him around town.

It is not recorded what happened to her later.

• Anthony Haden-Guest. The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. William Morrow, 1997: 113.
• Peter Conrad. “Studio 54: heady daze of disco decadence – in pictures”. The Guardian, 14 Mar 2015. Online.
• Brian Belovitch. Trans Figured: My Journey from Boy to Girl to Woman to Man. Skyhorse Publishing, 2018: 96.

Two lives ended in a workhouse 1889-1899

Mary Mudge (1804-1889) dairy maid

In the 1850s Mary Mudge was running a small dairy farm of nine acres and three cows in a village close to Tavistock, Devon. She lived with her sister and also took in lodgers.

By 1871 she was living alone in a cottage on the Duke of Bedford’s estate. By 1881 she was living with a 31-year-old gardener and his family, and was described as an aunt.

In 1885 she was taken sick, and was recommended to the workhouse in Tavistock.

She died there age 85, and as her body was being prepared for burial, was discovered to be male-bodied.

• “A Man Eighty Five Years in Woman’s Clothes”. Raynold’s Newspaper, 31 March 1889.
• Peter Stubley. “Mary Mudge: Cross-dressing in the 19th Century”. History Hack, December 18, 2012. Online.

Charley Wilson (1834 - ?) master painter

Catherine Coombs, from Somerset, educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, was married at 16 to a first cousin, 23 years older. He ill-treated her, and she ran away to her brother in West Bromwich. He was a painter and decorator, and helping him she learned the trade.

Twice the husband forced her return. On the third run-away, Coombes bought a suit of boy’s clothes, and took the name Charley Wilson.

Wilson obtained work as a painter and joined the painters’ union.

For 14 years he worked as a painter in Yorkshire.

For 13 years he was a painter in London with the Penninsula and Oriental (P & O) Company : most of the ships of their line bore his handiwork. He worked on the Rome, The Victoria, The Oceana and the Arcadia. The elaborate ornamentation was largely Wilson’s work, done in enamelling – a distinct branch of the painter’s craft.

Wilson was stand-offish with regard to socialising with other men, and in particular avoided coarse and vulgar conversation. He owned a little house near the Victoria Docks, and for 22 years his niece kept house for him, being taken by the neighbours to be his wife.

In July 1896, at the age of 62, Wilson fell from a scaffold, and fractured his ribs. The attending doctor did not notice anything discrepant about his sex. However being unable to work, Wilson fell into destitution and was admitted to the West Ham workhouse. He was put in the male ward but, before the compulsory stripping, requested to see the matron and doctor, and stated: ‘I am a woman”, and then made a statement about her life.

Wilson told the Telegraph reporter that he felt very uncomfortable in the female workhouse uniform.

• “Stranger than Fiction: Authenticated Story of a Singular Woman’s Life” The Daily Telegrath, 3 November 1897. Online.
• “A Woman’s Strange Career: Forty-Two Years Disguised in Male Attire”. Kalgoorlie Miner, 10 November 1897. Online.
• “In Man’s Attire: Catherine Coombs Worked With Men for Years”. Wichita Daily Eagle, Nov 12, 1897.  Online.
• “Men in Women’s Guise”. Drag: The International Tranvestite Quarterly, 5, 18, 1975: 27. Online. 
• Louis Sullivan.  Information for the Female-To-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual, 1985:21. Online. 

Thomas Hall (1603–?) soldier, seamstress, servant

Raised with the name Thomasine, Hall was born near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. At the age of twelve she was sent by her mother to live with an aunt in London.

Hall’s brother probably died in the 1625 expedition to take Cadiz, in alliance with the Dutch against Spain – the first disaster in the reign of the new king Charles Stuart. At the age of twenty-two Hall cut her hair, became Thomas, enlisted as a soldier and served in France where British forces occupied the Île de Ré to assist the Huguenots at the Siege of La Rochelle.

On return to England on 1627, Hall was in Plymouth, became a woman again, and earned a living making bone lace and doing other needlework. She became aware of a ship being made ready to sail to Chesapeake in the Virginia colony, part of the reinforcement of the colonists after the Powhatan reprisals of 1622. It was Thomas who sailed with it, as an indentured servant.

In January 1628*, in Virginia, a John and Jane Tyos of Jamestown and their servant, Thomas Hall, were convicted for receiving stolen goods. A note was made that Thomas had been able to sow a napkin into a bag – a skill rare among male servants.

Shortly after that John Tyos sold Hall to a John Atkins (as one could with an indentured servant) but as a maidservant. It also seems that Hall switched gender in what little private time was available. Atkins took Hall to the tobacco-growing area of Warrosquyoacke (now Isle of Wight County) Virginia.

There were rumours that Hall had had sex with men, and also with at least one woman. As the community became aware, Hall was subjected to a forced body inspection, first by his owner, Atkins, and a few women who declared him to be a man, and this having been declared, by men who concurred. The situation was referred to Warrosquyoacke’s de facto leader Captain Nathanial Bass. As Hall’s ‘male’ organ was non-functional, as he lacked the power to procreate, Bass deemed Hall to be female.

However the others were not happy with that decision, and in 1629 this situation came to the attention of the Council and General Court of Virginia who commanded Hall’s appearance. They accepted Hall’s self-definition that he was ‘a man and a woeman’. They ordered that it be published that Hall 'is a man and a woman', and they dictated his dress: 'hee shall goe Clothed in mans apparell, only his head to bee attired in a Cyse and Croscloth wth an Apron before him'.

*at that time New Years day was 25 March (Lady Day) and so that January was regarded as still 1627.

• Jonathan Ned Katz. Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. 1983, Carrol & Graf Publishers, Inc. 1994: 71-2
• Mary Beth Norton. “Searchers Againe Assembled” in Founding Fathers & Mothers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. Vintage, 1997 :183-202.
• Elizabeth Reis. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009: 10-14, 168n35.
• Holly Hartman. Gender Roles in Colonial America. Western Oregon University, 2015: 14-7. Online.
• Shana Carroll. “Transgender History in Colonial America”. Medium.Com, Oct 15, 2018. Online.

EN.Wikipedia OutHistory
----------------------------

Hall is reported as being willing to show his male member but pointed out that it was non-functional. He also claimed to have a ‘hole’ which was also examined. Quite possibly he was female with a largish clitoris.  Those who examined him and proclaimed him to be male must have done so simply because he had something approximating a penis.


There is no record of what happened to Hall after the ruling by the Council and General Court of Virginia. Hopefully he completed his indenture, and then moved elsewhere where he was not subject to the ruling about his clothing.

As John Tyos had purchased a male servant, probably from the ship's captain, but then sold her on a maidservant, we wonder if this entailed a financial loss.   One hopes that female servants were just as valuable as male ones, but knowledge of history suggests otherwise.   This aspect is not discussed.

Eleno de Céspedes (1545–?) surgeon

The child was born in Castile but the initial name is not recorded. The father was Pero Hernández, a Castilian peasant and the mother an African slave. The child inherited her mother’s slave status, and was branded on both sides of her face.

At age twelve, Elena de Céspedes, the owner, died, and the child was freed and given the owner’s name. The new Elena de Céspedes was married at 16, to a stone mason. He left after three months, and she received news that he had died.

However she was pregnant. As she reported later, the childbirth was unusual. During labour, a penis also emerged: “with the force that she applied in labour she broke the skin over the urinary canal, and a head came out”. Céspedes gave away the baby, and had surgery to further reléase the member.

Elano – as he now was – was able to have relations with women. He moved from town to town, working as a tailor, a hosier, a soldier. Finally he lodged with a surgeon, who taught him the trade. He worked in the Hospital de la Corte, and built up a library of 24 medical texts.

Céspedes was known for his affairs with women. In 1586, that is after over twenty years of living as male, he proposed to marry Maria Del Caño. The vicario (archdeacon) of Madrid, suspecting that he was a capon (eunuch), required an examination. The lead examiner was Dr. Francisco Díaz de Alcalá, a prominent urologist, and surgeon to the King. Diaz determined Céspedes’s identity to be male and not hermaphrodite:

“It is true that he has seen Eleno’s genital member, and having touched all around it with his hands and seen it with his eyes, he made the following declaration: That he has his genital member, which is sufficient and perfect, with its testicles formed like any other man. . . . And he thus said and declared that in his opinion Eleno does not bear any resemblance to a hermaphrodite or anything like it”.

The marriage went ahead. However a year later, just after injuries suffered while riding a horse, combined with a bout with cancer, he was arrested and charged in secular court with sodomy and ‘contempt for the sacrament of marriage’.  He explained that there had been changes:

"At present I have only my woman’s nature. The male member that emerged from me has just recently come off in jail, while I was a prisoner in Ocafia. It only now finished falling off, after more than fifteen days. What happened is that before last Christmas I suffered a flow of blood through my woman’s parts and through my rear end, which caused me great pain in my kidneys. I’d hurt myself while riding horseback and the root of my member became weak. The member became spongy and I went cutting it bit by bit, so that I’ve come to be without it. It just finished falling off about fifteen days ago, or a little more, as I’ve said."

Céspedes was examined by midwives who determined that he had a vagina, but was a virgin. The charges were changed to bigamy and the case was transferred to the Inquisition.

Dr. Díaz changed his testimony, now believing that the defendant’s male genitalia had been a deception:

“an art so subtle that it sufficed to fool him by sight and by touch”.

Céspedes asserted that he was a hermaphrodite.

“I never made any pact, explicitly or tacit, with the devil, in order to pose as a man to marry a woman, as is attributed to me. What happens is that many times the world has seen androgynous beings or, in other words, hermaphrodites, who have both sexes. I, too, have been one of these, and at the time I arranged to be married the masculine sex was more prevalent in me; and I was naturally a man and had all that was necessary for a man to marry a woman. And I filed information and eyewitness proof by physicians and surgeons, experts in the art, who looked at me and touched me, and swore under oath that I was a man and could marry a woman, and with this judicial proof I married as a man.”

He insisted that the women whom he had had relations with had no knowledge of his female organs. He was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to two hundred lashes. He was then put to work without pay in the Toledo hospital to use his medical skills, but was obliged to wear female clothing. The hospital administrator complained:

“The presence of Elena de Céspedes has caused great annoyance and embarrassment from the beginning, since many people come to see and be healed by her”.

Thus Céspedes became the first female surgeon in Spain. There would not be another for some centuries afterwards. 

Céspedes was mentioned in Jerónimo de Huerta’s 1599 annotated translation of Pliny’s Natural History (as a transgendered mulatta criminal lesbian) and Antonio de Fuentelapeña’s 1676 El ente dilucidado: Tratado de monstruos y fantasmas.

• Vern L.,Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993: 94-6. (the Bulloughs never mention that Céspedes was born a slave; refer to him throughout as ‘she’ and refer to the Archdeacon as ‘vicar’. )
• Israel Burshaton. “Elena alias Eleno”. In Sabrina P. Ramet (ed). Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives. Routledge, 1996.: 105- 122.
• Elizabeth Krimmer. In the company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women Around 1800. Wayne State University Press, 2004: 75.
• Leila J Rupp. Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women. New York University Press, 2009: 95-6.
• Sherry Velasco. Lesbians in early modern Spain. Vanderbilt University, 2011: 7, 11, 68-9, 75-8, 81-3.
• Richard L Kagan & Abigail Dyer. “Sexuality and the Marriage Sacrament: Elena/Eleno de Céspedes“. Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011: 36-59.
• Von Christof Rolker. “„I am and have been a hermaphrodite“: Elena/Eleno de Céspedes and the Spanish Inquisition”. Männlich-weiblich-zwischen,  27/11/2016. http://intersex.hypotheses.org/2720.

ES.Wikipedia    Butch Heroes

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So what do we make of this.   His penis was maybe a large clitoris, and was later damaged.  But why would the midwives, having found a vagina, then declare that Céspedes was a virgin?   Elena had previously given birth.

Rolker makes the point: "At the same time, this in my view clearly demonstrates that Elena/Eleno was not ‚accused‘ of hermaphroditism. Rather, hermaphroditism in sixteenth-century Spain (as in medieval France, for that matter) was a defence strategy. Eleno/Elena’s story of first gradually changing from woman to man and later from predominantly male to predominantly female hermaphrodite may be mind-boggling, but given the very real danger of being condemned for sodomy, the story in the end was live-saving."

Candy Lee (193? - ) female impersonator, bartender, Mardi Gras, muse to Tennessee Williams

The first gay 'krewe' – of the krewes that put on the New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations – was the Yuga Krewe, founded in 1958. The name is an exoticism referring to the Kali Yuga of Hinduism. It was also a gay in-joke to refer to it as KY (after the branded lubricant), and perhaps Yuga is a play on (are) you gay? The Krewe had grown out of the Steamboat Club, a gay social organization. These were the years when gay organizations had to be discreet; Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison and Louisiana district attorney Richard Dowling pursued an anti-gay clean-up, supposedly for the tourists, and a crackdown ensued. The first two Yuga Balls were held in a private house on Carrollton Avenue, but the neighbors had become irate. The third Yuga Ball in 1960 was held in a jazz club, Mama Lou’s on Lake Pontchartrain, reached by a wooden walkway that proved quite difficult for those who came in high heels. The fourth and fifth Yuga Balls were held in the suburb Metairie in a school that had a large dance studio, and was surrounded by a wooded area close to the lake. The second gay krewe, that of Petronius, held its first ball in 1962 at the same location. However the Yuga Ball a week later was raided by the Parish Police. Some managed to flee, but many were arrested in what the police dubbed a ‘lewd stag party’. Those arrested had their names printed in the newspapers and thus most lost their jobs.

Candy Lee had started a career as a female impersonator at the Club My-O-My on Lake Pontchartrain. She also worked as a bartender at Bacino’s bar, and was an acquaintance of playwright Tennessee Williams when he returned to the city in the late 1950s.

Williams wrote an one-act play, And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens in 1958, which is said to be inspired by the life of Candy. The play’s protagonist, an interior decorator who sometimes cross-dresses, is called Candy, and is about to turn 35. Her older lover who set her up in business has left her for a younger man. Candy picks up a sailor, Karl, in a gay bar. She spends money on him, and he then beats her up and steals more. This was the first play by Williams with explicit gay characters, and was never performed during his lifetime.

The real Candy Lee had been arrested five times at Bacino’s in 1958, as had the other bartenders. She was also one of the founder members of the Yuga Krewe. However she did not get on with the other members, and by the early 1960s had been banned from the balls. The word is that she called the police on the 1962 Fifth Yuga Ball.

• Michael Paller. Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality and Mid-Twentieth-Century Broadway Drama. Palgrave MacMillan, 2005: 133-7, 246n45n47. Discussion of the play.
• Howard Philips Smith. Unveiling the Muse: The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans. University Press of Mississippi, 2017: Chp 1 The Royal Krewe of Yuga and the Birth of Gay Carnival.

--------------

Clay Shaw, New Orleans business man and prominent in the city’s gay scene was likely a member of the Yuga Krewe. He is best known as the only person to be prosecuted for the assassination of US President Kennedy (Tommy Lee Jones portrayed Shaw in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.)

Elmer Belt (1893 - 1980 ) urologist, pioneer sex-change surgeon.

++Original version April 2009; revised March 2019, and again February 2021.
                                                                             
Originally from Chicago, Elmer Belt moved to Los Angeles with his family at age 9. He did a bachelors, 1916, and a masters, 1917 at University of California Berkeley.  He married his high-school girlfriend in 1918. He qualified as M.D. in 1920 at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. As his first son had been in a serious motor accident, and as he was not satisfied with the orthopedic treatment at the UCLA, he  applied for a residency in General Surgery at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where his son could be treated by Dr Lovett. Afterwards they returned to and lived in Los Angeles for the rest of their lives. Belt opened a private practice. 

Belt had collected the works of novelist Upton Sinclair since he was a student. In 1934 he was part of Sinclair’s campaign to become governor of California. By then he had established the Elmer Belt Urologic Group, a group practice which moved to its own building on Wilshire Blvd. in 1936; the second floor of this structure housed his ever-expanding library.

From 1939 through 1954 Belt served as the President of the State Board of Public Health, having been first appointed by California Governor Culbert Olsen and then reappointed by Governor Earl Warren for each of Warren's three terms in office. While treating Warren, Belt was able to put the case for a medical school at UCLA, which opened in 1946. He was not only instrumental in the founding of the UCLA School of Medicine, he found its first dean, and continued to support it for his whole life. Dr. Belt had privileges as a staff, attending, or consulting urologist at many hospitals around Los Angeles County and taught as Clinical Professor of Surgery (Urology) in the UCLA School of Medicine. He was acknowledged as a specialist for prostate problems.

In 1950, when he was 57, Belt was contacted by Harry Benjamin who was starting to accept transsexual patients, and was looking for competent and willing surgeons.   At some point after that Belt became the first surgeon in the US to do sex change operations on a regular basis, many on patients referred by Harry Benjamin. While he was associated with the UCLA School of Medicine, he did not perform his operations there.  They were usually done at the Good Samaritan Hospital.   He predated the team led by Poul Fogh-Andersen in Copenhagen, and he was doing vaginoplasty using skin grafts from the thigh, buttocks or back while the Fogh-Andersen team was doing only orchiectomy and penectomy. While most surgeons would not do a castration because of the mayhem laws in effect in California and most other states, Belt got around this by preserving the testicles, pushing them into the abdomen, to preserve the hormones that they produced and to avoid charges of mayhem. He regarded this as good practice. As he explained to a colleague: “It is not necessary to disturb the patient’s endocrine balance to maintain his condition as a transsexual since the faulty tissues lay within the substance of the testis in the first place.” 

Belt's nephew, Willard Elmer Goodwin (1915-98) was in 1951 the founding chair of the Division of Urology in the Department of Surgery at the UCLA School of Medicine.  Belt had trained him in the techniques of sex-change surgery, and he did several such operations at UCLA.  Belt's second son, Bruce (1926-2012) also became a urologist and practiced with his father for 20 years or so. 

Belt was also interested in doing surgery for trans men. He corresponded with Harry Benjamin about how to do this. Benjamin mentioned the flap techniques that Harold Gillies had done for Michael Dillon, but was unsure that such a procedure was worth following. Belt did have a trans man client who had had breast reduction from another Los Angeles surgeon, and as he had a cystic ovary, hysterectomy was medically justified anyway. Phalloplasty was considered, but in the end was not done.

Willard E Goodwin asked Rollin Perkins, a professor of law, about the mayhem statutes in 1954. Perkins acknowledged that there was a “want of judicial decision on the point” and advised caution given the uncertainty and the prejudice.  A committee of doctors at UCLA, including Goodwin and psychiatrist Frederick Worden, decided against the practice, and Goodwin ceased doing so.  Belt also ceased although as he never did the operations at UCLA he was not affected by the decision.   Annette Dolan, who did her own auto-orchiectomy, was one of his last patients.  

In 1956, Dixie MacLane was arrested in Los Angeles by a vindictive policeman, and although she had had her surgery in Mexico, Dr Lyman Stewart from Belt’s practice provided supportive written testimony as did Harry Benjamin.

Both Belt and Goodwin had restarted quietly. As Belt wrote to Benjamin, he considered himself a softie who found it hard to turn away such desperate patients. In 1956, he did completion surgery on Barbara Wilcox, who was one of the first trans women to receive female-hormone injections and who in 1941 had successfully petitioned the Superior Court of California to change her name and to legally become a woman. 

In 1958 there was a fire in Belt's office and most of his records were lost. 

A notable patient was Agnes who approached UCLA psychiatrist Robert Stoller also in 1958. Stoller convinced himself that she was intersex rather than transsexual, and referred her to Belt for surgery. Also that year, Belt saw an 18-year-old trans woman “who is trans-sexual and earnestly desires an operative procedure for the change of his sex”, but as he explained to Benjamin, he turned her away for being under the age of medical consent. 

Patricia Morgan, from New York came in 1961, but it took four months before a bed could be found in a hospital for Belt’s type of surgery. Then she had to wait another two months for the second phase, the vaginoplasty. And then she developed urinary problems and Belt had to do a third operation.

Aleshia Brevard, who like Annette Dolan had done an auto-orchiectomy, came in 1962, one of Belt’s last trans patients.  Hedy Jo Star had also been referred to Belt and accepted.  She was saving up for this just before Belt discontinued doing genital surgery, however a friend referred her to a doctor in Chicago who arranged surgery elsewhere.

He discontinued finally in 1962 under family pressure after he heard about the growing practice of Georges Burou. He had continual problems finding hospitals where he could do the work; he feared that a dissatisfied patient would ruin his practice by suing; he had a number of patients who did not pay their bills. There were also complaints about the way that he treated some patients. He was by then 69 and ready for retirement.

He was not part of the UCLA Gender Identity Research Clinic (GIRC) that was founded the same year, led by Robert Stoller and Richard Green, although he had more experience of transsexual patients than the entire GIRC team together.

Elmer Belt was a collector of artefacts by or about Leonardo de Vinci for over 60 years. He gave the collection to the UCLA in 1966.

Willard Goodwin was a member of the GIRC and was the urological surgeon for the operation on Beverly-Barbara in 1968, the GIRC’s first transgender operation.

Bruce Belt left medicine in 1977 and became a high-school teacher.

Elmer Belt died in 1980 at age 87.

• Elmer Belt. Surgical teaching through motion pictures, A. R. Fleming co, 1937.
• Elmer Belt. Leonardo the anatomist. Logan Clendening lectures on the history and philosophy of medicine, Ser. 4, Univ. of Kansas Press, 1955.
• Patricia Morgan as told to Paul Hoffman. The Man-maid Doll. Lyle Stuart, Inc, 1973: 51-3, 56-64, 68-9.
• Willard E Goodwin, MD.  "A Chat with Elmer Belt".  Urology, 10, 4, 1977.  
• Akleshia Brevard. The Woman I Was Not Born to Be. Temple University Press, 2001: 81-7.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States . Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 142, 146, 147-8, 160, 162-3, 164,192, 242.
• Jules Gill-Peterson. Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018: 137, 171-2, 244n25n26n28, 251n27.
• Victoria Steele.  Emails to Zagria, February 2021. 

LA Conservancy   Elmer Belt Papers   Vidensbanken om konsidentiten     Google Scholar     EN.Wikipedia   

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When Belt was interviewed by Goodwin in 1976, he said that after the car accident that injured his son, "I wasn’t satisfied with the orthopedic care he was getting at the University of California" and so did a residency in Boston.  I think that was 1922.  Virginia Prince's father was Charles Lowman, an orthopedic physician trained in Boston with the same Dr Lovett that Belt was taking his son to see.  As I wrote "The owner of the building where Charles Lowman had his clinic made an offer that if Lowman could establish a functioning hospital within 15 years, he would donate clear title to the building and its gardens. This was done and further expansion of the Los Angeles Orthopedic Hospital was being discussed when the 15 years had passed in 1922".   So one does wonder why Belt did not take his son there.

Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez (1964 - 2016 ) sex worker, singer, prisoner.

++I originally wrote about Cristina Otiz in May 2008.  A lot has happened to her since then.

Cristina was born José Antonio Ortiz Rodriguez, the fourth of six children, in Adra, Almeria, Andalusia. Jose became known as Joselita.  From an early age Joselita showed talent in fashion design.  She was never accepted because of her gender expression and was attacked and mistreated, but as a man was considered to have good physique and was awarded the title Mister Andalusia in 1989 at the age of 24.  Still as José Antonio, Ortiz entered a competition on television in 1991 and won a trip to Thailand.

Ortiz had been secretly dressing as a woman, and in January 1992 she went to Madrid and began  transition.

Cristina was working as a prostitute in 1996 when she was discovered by television host and journalist Pepe Navarro who was doing a story on trans people. He hired her, and she became famous on his television shows Esta noche cruzamos el Mississippi and La sonrisa del pelícano, and with a music single ‘Veneno pa tu piel’ (Poison in your skin). She became known as Cristina La Veneno (the poison).

There was a plan to make a film about her life, but it did not happen. She starred in two porn films:  El secreto de la Veneno and La venganza de la Veneno, both 1997.  She toured Spain as a singer, and in 1998 was on television in Buenos Aires for a month.

In 1999, Cristina was arrested in an insurance scam, accused of arson, after an anonymous denunciation by her Italian ex-boyfriend. Investigation uncovered other crimes and she was sentenced to three years in a men’s prison, 2003-6, where she was frequently attacked and raped, and was incommunicado to her family for many months. Her weight doubled from 60 to 122 kg, and she suffered obvious physical deterioration.

After release she appeared on television gossip shows, complaining about her treatment in prison. The Instituciones Penitenciarias denounced her statement as calumny, but later in 2006 the Socialist Workers Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (no relation) introduced a new policy of respecting a prisoner's gender and changed name, and placing trans women in women's prisons.

She was confronted by other trans activists in that she gave a bad image to the trans community.   In 2010 she was challenged on television to lose the weight that she had gained in prison, and some months later had lost 35kg.  But she was still suffering from bulimia and depression. 

In 2013 Cristina presented her 23-year-old boyfriend.   However he disappeared with her savings of €60,000.   But she was hired as one of the stars of the show Que trabajo Rita. From the end of 2013 to 2014, La Veneno made stellar appearances in some of the concerts of the tour.

In October 2016 her long-promised memoirs, ¡Digo! ni puta ni santa, appeared.  It was co-written with Valeria Vegas, a friend, and self-published through the Bigcartel web site.  She gave the initials of many famous politicians and footballers who had had sex with her.    This resulted in death threats.

In November that year she was found at home with bruises, unconscious and with a serious bruise on her head.  She was rushed to hospital, put into an induced coma, and died a few days later.  She was 52.  Officially she was deemed to have suffered a fall after massive consumption of pills, but there are suspicions that one of the death threats was acted on. Her family attempted to re-open the case in 2017 to show that it was murder.

A plaque has been mounted in Cristina's Honour in Madrid's Parque del Oeste where she worked as a prostitute.

In 2019, Cristina's sister attempted to again re-open the case with the support of Dr Luis Frontela, a prestigious forensic doctor, who pointed out defence wounds on Cristina's hand.  However the attempt was without success.

*Not the  University professor.

• "Los buenos modales son Veneno". Perlas ensangrentadas. Online.
• "La Veneno pasa factura".  Interviu, 24/04/2006.  Online. 
• "La Veneno, su infierno en la cárcel" Entrevista en “Qué me dices”, 3 de abril de 2006. Archive. 
• "Prisiones denuncia a «La Veneno» por decir que sufrió abusos en la cárcel" ABC, 21 de abril de 2006. Online. 
• «La Veneno, perdida por los hombres de mal vivir». El Mundo. 12 de noviembre de 2016. Online. 
• CristinaOrtiz & Valeria Vegas. ¡Digo! ni puta ni santa: las memorias de la Veneno. Roi Porto DL, 2016.
• "La Veneno murió por una caída accidental".  El Periodico, 10/11/2018.  Online.
• " 'La Veneno' pudo ser asesinada, según un nuevo análisis forense".  La Opinion de Tenerife, 09.01.2019.  Online.

  ES.WIKIPEDIA    IMDB     

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The ES.Wikipedia page on Adra does list Cristina among its citizens of note.