Nancy Hunt (Bowman) (1927 - 1999), reporter and copy editor.

Ridgely Hunt was born to a family listed in the Social Register. He went to a New England preparatory school,. He was drafted at the end of the Second World War and rose to sergeant, although without seeing combat. Afterwards he graduated from Yale in English Literature, and then worked for New England newspapers, where he met his first wife, Constance.

They moved to Chicago in 1958 and he worked at the Daily News as a copy editor. He and his wife had a boy and two girls. In 1963 he moved to the Chicago Tribune and he became a prize-winning journalist, whose name was promoted on the newspaper’s delivery trucks. He was their war correspondent in Vietnam, for which he won four Associated Press awards. He specialized in masculine stories: he scuba-dived to wrecks on the ocean floor; he camped out with the Green Berets; he rode fire engines. He was regarded as irascible by his co-workers.

He was known for his negative comments about hippies and women, but by the late 1960s he was growing his hair long and wearing makeup. He had divorced his wife and married the family baby sitter. She sewed dresses for him and helped him with makeup. She wanted him to stay a transvestite. In 1975, a columnist at the rival Sun-Times outed Hunt, and the Tribune transferred her to the night copydesk where she became Nancy. After surgery at the University of Virginia, Nancy and her second wife divorced.

Nancy wrote her biography and appeared on television to promote it. She emphasized that as a man he had been a ‘devout heterosexual’, and film director Brian De Palma used this clip in his slasher movie Dressed to Kill, 1980.

In the early 1980s she married Wallace Bowman, Sr, and enjoined the staff at the Tribune to say nothing to him about Ridgely. In 1984 she retired, and she and Wallace spend part of their lives in Florida. Constance had to sue Nancy for missed child support payments, especially as one of the daughters has Down’s syndrome. Nancy maintained that Wallace never knew about her past. She outlived him, and spent her last years in a seniors’ residence in Florida.

• Nancy Hunt. Mirror Image: the Odyssey of a Male-to-Female Transsexual. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. 1978.
• Linda Witt.  "Brave Ex-Reporter and Now Transsexual Nancy Hunt Looks at Her Lives as Man and Woman".  People, February 12, 1979.  www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20072932,00.html.
• Marcia Froelke Coburn “Former Chicago Tribune staffers remember their late colleague’s radical transformation – from man to woman”. Chicago Tribune. September 1999.
• Brian De Palmer (dir & scr). Dressed to Kill, with Michael Caine as Dr Robert Elliot, Angie Dickinson as Kate Miller, and Nancy Hunt in a cameo on television. US 105 mins 1980.

A gentleman's servant elopes

Giovanni Bordoni (1719 - 1743). Born Catterina Vizzani in Rome, her father a carpenter. At age 14 she courted a beloved while wearing men’s clothes, and continued the practice for almost two years until her beloved’s father caught her.

Through a priest in Rome, Giovanni obtained work as a gentleman’s servant, being generally appreciated except for his incessant courting of young women. He even claimed to have venereal disease (which explained to his laundress the occasional blood on his clothing). He was wounded in the neck after encountering a rival for one of his beloveds. His master wrote to the priest in Rome who met with Giovanni’s father and was ascertained of Giovanni’s body-sex, but kept the secret from the master.

Some years later, in June 1743, Giovanni eloped with the niece of the local priest and her sister. The party was pursued and apprehended, and Giovanni was wounded in the thigh. He was eventually brought to the Hospital della Scala in Siena, and came to the attention of Giovanni Bianchi (1693-1775), commonly known as Janus Plancus, Professor of Anatomy. Giovanni died from a fever that developed from the wound – at the age of 24.

Under his pillow was found a 'leathern contrivance' stuffed with rags that he normally wore fastened below his abdomen. The public expressed great interest in the fact he was a female virgin, and some of the more devout thought that Catherine was 'nothing less than a Saint, having preserved her Chastity inviolate, amidst the strongest Temptations'. Bianchi attempted to find that Bordoni had an oversized clitoris, but it was not so. He wrote up his findings, which were translated anonymously into English with a commentary. It has recently been established that the translator was John Cleland, the author of Fanny Hill. Cleland, despite the libertinism of his novel, was shocked by the account of Giovanni and urged that such women should be severely punished.

Not the nineteenth-century vocalist.

· Giovanni Bianchi. Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani…. Venezia: Occhi, Simone 32 pp 1744. Anonymous translation into English by John Cleland: The True History and Adventures of Catharine Vizzani. 1751. Available online at www.infopt.demon.co.uk/vizzani.htm.
· Roger Lonsdale. “New Attributions to John Cleland”. Review of English Studies. 30,1979. p276-80.

Thomas Kando. Sociologist

Thomas Kando (1941- ) was born in Hungary and educated at the Universities of Amsterdam and Minnesota. Professor of Sociology at California State University, Sacramento until his retirement in 2003.

He was at Minnesota looking for a dissertation topic when the university’s medical school did its first sex-change operations. He interviewed 17 post-op MTFs, aged 21 to 55, two weeks to two years post-op.

He found four basic ways of adjusting to being female:

1. the housewife who desired respectability; 
2. the stripper who flaunts her stigma; 
3. the aspiring housewife who cannot find a husband, not being attractive enough;
4. the career woman who is well-educated and doesn’t try to pass. 

He found his subjects to be more stereotypically feminine than other women, and referred to them as ‘reactionary’ and ‘the uncle toms of the sexual revolution’. In later years he regretted his choice of dissertation, calling it ‘stupid’, ‘grotesque’ and ‘boring’.

Kando's major follower is Janice Raymond, who spends 7 pages in The Transsexual Empire enthusiastically summarizing his work.

Carol Riddell emphasizes that the short period post operative is too short. That trans women become much like cis women after a few years.

Bolin directly refutes his conclusions, by finding something close to the opposite to be the case.

• Thomas Kando. “Passing and Stigma Management: The Case of the Transsexual’.The Sociological Quarterly 13, Fall 1972.
• Thomas Kando. Sex Change; The Achievement of Gender Identity Among Feminized Transsexuals. Springfield, Ill: Thomas 1973.
• Thomas Kando. I Spent My Life Practicing Politically Incorrect Sociology.www.csus.edu/indiv/k/kandot/I%20SPENT%20MY%20LIFE.pdf: 54-6.
• www.csus.edu/soc/faculty/kando.html.
• Janice G. Raymond The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-male. Boston: Beacon Press. 1979: 79-86.
• Carol Riddell. “Divided Sisterhood : A Critical Review of Janice Raymond's 'The Transsexual Empire' “. Liverpool: News from Nowhere 1980. Reprinted in Stephen Whittle & Susan Stryker (eds).The Transgender Studies Reader.Routledge.752 pp. 2006: 146, 152.
  
• Anne Bolin. In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage. South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey, 1988: 113-6.

___________________________________________________________________

Kando's results were never replicated. What went wrong?

• His sample of 17 was far too small, although of course far larger than that of Michael Bailey.
• His subjects were at most two years post-operative. This is too short a period for the questions asked.
• He asked the wrong questions, and did not respect his subjects.
  

Wayne Dynes (1934 - 2021), bibliographer and encyclopedist

Wayne Dynes did a Ph.D. in art history at New York University. He taught for six years at Columbia University, and subsequently at the City University of New York. He was a co-founder of New York's Gay Academic Union in 1973.

His Homosexuality: A Research Guide is one of the better bibliographies on homosexuality. Out of 854 pages, only 10 are on Cross Dressing, Transsexualism and Hermaphroditism, grouped in a category ‘Boundary Crossing’ with ‘Intergenerational Sex’, and a further 8 pages on ‘Theatre and Dance’ which contains many articles on drag. He opens his Transsexualism section with the unneeded contention in opposition to the facts: “Follow-up studies have shown that many postoperative transsexuals exist in a state of almost continual depression, and for this reason the operation is now performed less often”, and then gives a biased selection of mainly anti-transsexuality books, including a positive review of Janice Raymond’s diatribe, The Transsexual Empire. The only biographies included are those of Lili Elvenes (Elbe) and Christine Jorgensen. All the others are ignored, even April Ashley’s.

He was the major editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, 1990, where he also wrote about lesbians under a pseudonym, Evelyn Gittone. This was taken to be a female pseudonym, although ‘Evelyn’ was a unisex name to earlier generations. Coupled with the lack of female and transgender contributors, this was considered scandalous, and contributed to the fact that a second edition or a paperback edition was never issued.

• Wayne Dynes. Homosexuality: A Research Guide. New York & London: Garland Publishing. xviii, 854 pp. 1987.
• Wayne Dynes et al (ed). Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. New York: Garland Pub. Chicago & London: St James. xxxviii, 1484 pp, 2 vols. 1990. Also online at www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php/Encyclopedia_of_Homosexuality.
• Wayne Dynes. “Why the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality went out of print”. www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php/EOH:WHYOutOfPrint 2006.

Alexandra Selyaninova (? - ) police captain

Alexandra Selyaninova (? - ). Male name: Alexander Selyaninov. Alexander served in the Red Army, and then trained as a miner, but was offered work in the police service. One of his tasks as a policeman was to disguise as a woman to act as bait to catch a serial killer – which he found comfortable. After being transferred to the Perm Region as a Police Captain, far away from relatives and old friends, he began to wear female clothing.

Realizing that he really wanted to be a woman, he applied for a medical examination. Doctors from Moscow diagnosed him as transsexual. There were two operations in 1991, and Alexandra was issued with a new passport and birth certificate. She has stayed in Perm and runs her own business. She is also active in the town politics, and has been selected for a trip to Cuba.

Not the author of a book on Freemasonry.

• Lilia Subin (translated by Maria Gousseva). “Transsexual police officer wants to meet Fidel Castro and find love in Cuba”. Pravda 07.09.2006. http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/84311-0.

Eugene de Forest (189? - ?) a teacher of dramatics

Eugene was a teacher of dramatics, well-known in Los Angeles in the 1910s using the title of ‘professor’. He had married in 1911. In 1915 he became engaged to ‘a well-known Los Angeles woman’, and was waiting for the finalization of his divorce when it was discovered that he was female-born, and he was arrested for masquerading. In court, he pleaded that he was ‘in nature a man’, and was acquitted.

Two years later, when ill and admitted to hospital, he was able to convince the hospital authorities to put him in the men’s ward.

• “Man by Nature Really Woman”. Los Angeles Times. Sept 30, 1917, v.12
• Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons. Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians. New York: basic Books 430 pp 2006: 24.

Erwin Gohrbandt (1890 - 1965) pioneer surgeon

This doctor is not usually mentioned in the histories of transsexual surgery. Of course the two sex-change surgeries are only a small part of his curriculum vitae.

Erwin Gohrbandt studied medicine at the Military Medical Academy and graduated in 1917 with a thesis on syphilis. He worked at the Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin. In 1928 he became a professor of surgery at the Friedrich Wilhelms University Berlin, and was also Chief Physician at the Urban Hospital. 

In 1922 Magnus Hirschfeld arranged for Gohrbandt to do the castration on Dörchen Richter.

In 1931 he did the vaginoplasty on Dorchen Richter and on Toni Ebel as arranged by Felix Abraham.  In the same year Dr Kurt Warnekros arranged for Gohrbandt to do the castration and penectomy on Lili Elvenes (Elbe), the Danish artist. 

From 1940 he worked at the Urban Hospital and was also the Medical Chief and later a general for the Luftwaffe. He also participated in lethal hypothermia experiments at Dachau Concentration Camp and in October 1942 presented a paper to the Hypothermia Conference held at the Deutscher Hof Hotel in Nuremberg. In February 1945, he was awarded the Ritterkreuz des Kriegsverdienstkeuzes (Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross with Swords) on Hitler's personal authority.

He escaped prosecution after the war, retired in 1958 and died a wealthy and respected citizen.

• Erwin Gohrbandt.  Ein Fall von postkonzeptioneller Syphilis.  MD thesis. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, 1917.  
• Erwin Gohrbandt.  Chirurgische Krankheiten im Kindesalter : mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der einschläging pädiatrischen Fragen.  S Kaeger, 1928. 
• Felix Abraham. “Genitalumwandlungen an zwei männlichen Transvestiten”. Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, 18: 223-226. 1931. English translation as “Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites”. The International Journal of Trangenderism. 2, 1. Jan-Mar 1998. Archive. 
• Erwin Gohrbandt und Joachim Gabka. Handbuch der plastischen Chirurgie. De Gruyter 1965. 3 Volumes.

DE.Wikipedia