Elizabeth R. Moberly (196? - ) theologian.

Moberly is a theologian and self-proclaimed psychoanalyst. She thinks that the primary cause of homosexuality is the failure of bonding with the same-sex parent, and that homosexuality is a reparative drive to repair this lack of affection. She advocates homosocial bonding instead. She implies that gay activists are basically dishonest.

She coined the term ‘reparative therapy’ to describe her therapeutic approach to restore one’s sense of gender identity. Where the failure of bonding is particularly severe, ‘a defensive detachment from the same sex implies disidentification: not just an absence of identification but a reaction against identification’. In other words, transsexuality is extreme homosexuality.

• Her research did not involve psychotherapy with any gays or transsexuals.
• She simply did an extensive review of the previous writings of Irving Bieber, Lawrence Hatterer, and Sigmund Freud. No trained psychologist or psycho-analyst would restrict themselves to just these three writers.
• She admitted that she had done no new research.
• Her work was never peer-reviewed by any psychologists or psycho-analysts.
• The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatrics have all condemned reparative therapy as ineffective.

She was invited to speak at ex-gay conventions in the US in the movement that produced NARTH (National Association for Recovery and Treatment of Homosexuality).

Moberly's opinions continue to be endorsed in Christian circles as ‘scientific’.

She now works in cancer research.

• Elizabeth R. Moberly. Psychogenesis: The Early Development of Gender Identity: London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1983.
• Elizabeth R. Moberly. Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic. Cambridge: James Clarke 1983.
• Jeffry G. Ford. “Reparative Therapy is Neither”. http://jgford.homestead.com/Fordessay.html.
• Elizabeth Moberly. "Homosexuality and The Truth". Leadership U. March 1997. www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9703/opinion/moberly.html with reponses at www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9706/correspondence.html.

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I was unable to find a clear statement of what qualifications, if any, Moberly has. No writers claim that she has any qualifications in either psychology or psychoanalysis. The assumption is that she has a degree, a PhD even, in theology. Sometimes Cambridge is mentioned, sometimes Oxford. Or maybe she was a child in Cambridge.

Veronique Renard (1965 - ) writer, Buddhist, activist.

Renard was born in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, to a business family, she socially transitioned at age 17, and had surgery 18 months later from a team including Dr Auke de Boer and led by Dr Louis Gooren at the Free University in Amsterdam. She was the youngest person in the Netherlands to have the surgery, and at that date possibly the youngest person the world.

After college she worked as a business manager, and was also a competitive rower. In 1995 she was the bow rower of the first female crew to complete the 220 km Friesland Rowing Marathon. An accident shattering her upper right arm ended her rowing career.

In 1997 she gained a PhD in Dutch Literature. She also wrote several novels but was unable to get them published.


In 2000 after depression and considering suicide, she quit her job and went to live in Dharamsala, India with the Tibetans in exile. She became a Buddhist and took the name of Pantau (=to be helpful in Tibetan, and a small peach in Mandarin). In 2002 she took her Bodhisattva vows as a layperson.

She edited Lobsang Yonten’s The Fire of Hell: My Life under Chinese Rule, and became involved in the Tibetan struggle. She published the book book Pantau in India, about living with the Tibetan refugees. After several phoned death threats, she was beaten by two thugs who knocked her unconscious and threw her off a remote mountain road. However she was found by monks who took her to the Tibetan hospital in Dharamsala. It took a year for her wounds to heal.

She then hid in a Tibetan settlement in south India. After seven years in India, she resettled in Thailand. She decided to come out of stealth living, and with the aid of Andrea James, published her autobiography where she talks about her gender change. She currently lives in Bangkok, and is married to a Chinese professor, Chan Hao.

• Veronique Renard. Pantau in India. iUniverse, 2007.
• Veronique Renard, edited by Andrea James. Pholomolo: No Man No Woman. iUniverse, 2007.

www.pantau.org      www.pantau.blogspot.com     http://pantau2.blogspot.ca/

www.veroniquerenard.com    EN.Wikipedia.

Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926 - 2003) academic.

Carolyn Gold was born in East Orange, New Jersey and educated at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. She married James Heilbrun and they had three children.

She studied English Literature at Columbia University, New York, earning a Ph.D in 1959. She then taught at Columbia until she retired. She was the first woman to receive tenure at Columbia. She also wrote 14 detective novels as Amanda Cross, initially in stealth mode until 1970 when a fan outed her after researching copyright records.


In 1973 Heilbrun published her Towards a Recognition of Androgyny, a text which on rereading today seems rather ordinary in its explanation that extremes of masculinity and femininity are unhealthy, and in providing examples from the literature of different periods of androgynous characters. She also uses 'androgynous' to describe novels where the female characters are as well drawn as the male ones.

As innocent as her observations were, they drew two waves of criticism. First from those who believed in society's genders and who reacted with outrage that they should be criticized. Secondly a group of feminists, predominantly Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich, criticized the concept of androgyny as inseparable from patriarchal assumptions. As early as the special androgyny issue of Women's Studies in 1974 , which also contained criticisms of androgyny as patriarchal, Heilbrun was wondering if she had defined or defended the concept with 'proper vigor'.

When she published Reinventing Womanhood in 1979 she did not use the word androgyny and talked instead of autonomy. However by 1986 when she wrote the essay 'Gender and Detective Fiction' she had used 'androgyny' again, although she has never returned to the androgyny debate.

While she says in her last book, The Last Gift of Time, that she had envied men their clothes since young adulthood, it was not until she retired that she adopted trousers, shirts and flat shoes.

She committed suicide at age 77 when she felt that her life was complete.

*Not the comedian, Amanda Cross.

• Carolyn G Heilbrun. Towards a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Knopf 1973.
• Anonymous (Camille Paglia). Review of Towards a Recognition of Androgyny.  The Yale Review, LXII, 4, 1973. 
• Carolyn G Heilbrun. “'Gender and Detective Fiction”. In Hamlet's Mother and Other Women. New York: Columbia University Press 1990.
• Carolyn G Heilbrun. The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. New York: Dial Press. 1997
• Pat Holt. “Remembering Carolyn Heilbrun: Feminist Scholarship and Suicide”. Holt Uncensored, reprinted in Frugal Fun www.frugalfun.com/carolyn-helibrun.html.

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When I first read Heilbrun's Towards a Recognition of Androgyny around 1980 I found it very disappointing. Like Bullough's books it promises an interesting topic but holds so much back. We had to wait until 1991 for Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae for a book on androgyny in literature that delivered on the topic, but Paglia was already writing her PhD thesis"The Androgynous Dream: the image of the androgyne as it appears in literature and is embodied in the psyche of the artist, with reference to the visual arts and the cinema" in 1971. Paglia quite rightly panned Heilbrun's book in The Yale Review: "Heilbrun's book is so poorly researched that it may disgrace the subject in the eyes of serious scholars". And Paglia, unlike Heilbrun, was androgynous in her lifestyle as well as writing about it.

Heilbrun was obviously out of her depth when she came up against Daly and Co. It is as if she had been cossetted in her ivory tower and had not been exposed to the rough and tumble of feminist discourse. She wondered if she had defended the concept of androgyny with 'proper vigor'. Of course she had not. In the early 1970s there was a crying need for someone to champion the concept, but Paglia at that point was merely an unknown graduate student. Heilbrun, with tenure and a prestigious post at Columbia, was totally inadequate for the job. Daly and Co criticized transsexuals for not being androgynous, and also dismissed androgyny as patriarchal pseudo-wholeness. And, ironically, at the same time they were far more androgynous in their lifestyles than Heilbrun. There is a certain pre-post-modernist charm in the conventional wife and mother of three, in the conventional skirt and high-heels, trying to make her case without understanding what was then the new wave of feminism. A further irony is that Heilbrun was only two years older than Daly, but one feels as if she is of a previous generation.

One of the criticisms of the tenure system, which is supposed to guarantee freedom of expression, is that those who need it don't get it, and those who get it seem no longer to have anything radical to say. Heilbrun, who taught at the same university where she did her PhD, a special privilege, would exemplify this criticism.

Rachael Padman (1954 - ) physicist.

Padman did a degree in Electrical Engineering in Melbourne, and then worked for two years in CISRO’s Radio-Physics Laboratory in Sydney. In 1977, he went to the then all-male St Johns College at Cambridge University because of the cutting edge radio-astronomy work at Cavendish Laboratory.

Soon after arrival he got a referral to John Randell at Charing Cross Hospital gender identity clinic, as an NHS patient. He was put on a prescription of oestrogens. He dressed androgynously but was not out. After 18 months he informed his PhD supervisor, and things went well. His parents visited in 1979, on a round-the-world trip after his father’s retirement, and he was able to tell of the coming change. He had intended to take the name, Susan, but there were two Susans in the lab. He woke up one morning feeling that Rachael was the right name.

Rachael changed her name by deed poll, in 1981, and she went full time at Easter on a trip back to Australia. She returned as female, and completed her PhD. She was the first female student at St Johns which was about to start admitting female students. She had surgery in October 1982 , and her PhD was approved while she was in hospital.

Six weeks later she left for a two-year fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984 she returned to Cambridge.

In 1996 she was offered the position of Director of studies in physical sciences, Newnham College, the sole remaining all-female college at Cambridge. While the Governing Body, in general, knew that Rachael had been transsexual, her fellow Australian, Germaine Greer, was also a fellow of the college. Greer, who is known as an anti-transsexual activist, made a fuss about it, and the issue was in the newspapers. Almost all the other Fellows did support Rachael, and she is still there.

• Emma Wilkins. “Fellow who had sex change divides all-women college”. The Times. June 27th 1997. Online at: http://intermargins.net/repression/deviant/transgender/news/2001Jul-Dec/transnews_20011025e-1.htm.
• David Batty. “A Gender for Success”. Guardian. 14 Aug 2004. http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialcare/story/0,,1282713,00.html.
• Rachael Padman. “Rachael’s Story”. Transsexual Women's Successes. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/RachaelPadman.html. Also at: www.gendercentre.org.au/55article6.htm.
• www.phy.cam.ac.uk/people/padmanr.php www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~rachael.

Felicitas Von Vestvali (1824 - 1880) tenor, actor.

Anna Marie Staegmann was the youngest daughter of a high official in Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland). Her parents disapproved of her aspirations to join a theatre, and she ran away dressed as a boy.


She studied voice with the composer Saverio Mercadante in Naples, and developed into a deep contralto. She was advised to study tenor parts, and as Felicitas von Vestvali sang Romeo in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and other trouser roles. Napoleon III presented her with silver armour for her Romeo when she sang in Paris. She went on to equal success in the US and in Mexico. In the latter she was chosen as the new director of the National Theatre.

After bad reviews in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in San Francisco in 1865, she switched to non-musical acting and was again successful as Romeo and especially as Hamlet. She performed the roles in English, and at the Lyceum in London. Queen Victoria commanded a performance.

She finally played Hamlet in Germany. Audiences came for curiosity and in antagonism, but were won over.

She had a child, but her lesbianism was known, and was made public after her death.

• Magnus Hirschfeld translated from the German by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress. Prometheus Books. 1991: 348.
• Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. Gender in performance. London, New York: Routledge, xvi, 540pp. 2000: 274-5.
• Tony Howard. Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction. Cambridge University Press 2007: 56-9.
• “Felicia Vestvali”. Mathew Brady Gallery. www.npg.si.edu/exh/brady/gallery/18gal.html.

Thomas Dilverd (1837 - 1887) female impersonator.

Thomas Dilverd (or Dilward) was a minstrel female impersonator. He was the rarity in black-face minstrelsy, an actual black man. He was also unusual in being only three feet one inch (0.93m) tall.

He sang, danced and played the violin. He started with the Christy Minstrels in 1853, and later worked with the minstrel troupe run by Francis Leon and Edwin Kelly, and billed himself as 'Japanese Tommy'.

He popularized the expression ‘hunky dory’ in the 1860s based on the earlier ‘hunkum-bunkum’ and’ dori’, a Japanese word for street.

He later worked with black minstrel troops.

His final home was the Colored Home and Hospital on East 65^th St in New York where he died of asthma.

• Anthony Slide. Great pretenders: a history of female and male impersonation in the performing arts. Lombard, Ill.: Wallace-Homestead Book Co., 160 pp. 1986: 17.
• “Thomas Dilward”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dilward.

Caroline Cossey (1954 - ) model.

Barry Kenneth Cossey was born in Norfolk, with XXXY chromosomes, Klinefelter’s Syndrome. She started living as Caroline in 1971 at age 17, and began work as a showgirl and topless dancer.

She had breast augmentation and Adam’s Apple reduction surgery, and then genital surgery in 1974, under Dr John Randell at Charing Cross Hospital.

She developed a career as a model, using the professional name Tula. She was featured in fashion advertisements particularly. She was noted in Smirnoff Vodka’s “Well They Said Anything Could Happen” advertisement in 1981 that shows her water-skiing behind the Loch Ness Monster. She was a Page Three Girl for The Sun. This led to a small part in the James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only, 1981, and an associated article in Playboy.

This exposure led to her being outed in The News of the World, a rerun of what had happened to April Ashley in 1962, which ruined her modelling and acting career. She responded with her first autobiography, I am a Woman.

In the mid-1980s she was featured in music videos by Duran Duran and Power Station.

In 1983 she and Count Glauco, an Italian, intended to marry, but UK law at that time did not recognize her as female. She applied to the Registrar General and to her Member of Parliament. She started appeals to the English courts for the right to have her birth certificate re-issued and to marry.

In 1989 her appeal reached the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and the Court ruled in her favour. On this basis she married businessman Elias Fattal, whom she had known for four years, but press attention outed her to his family, and he left her.
 

The Thatcher government appealed the European Court of Human Rights ruling, and it reversed its decision. This enabled Fattal to have their marriage annulled.

In 1991 she became the first transsexual as such to be featured in Playboy, and also released her second autobiography which featured her legal battle.

In 1992 she married a Canadian man, David Finch under Canadian law, and lives with him in US Georgia. She ranked #24 (1995) in FHM's 100 Sexiest Women.

• Lynn-Holly Johnson and Robin Young photographed by Richard Fegley. “For Your Eyes Only (Bond Girls)” including Tula. Playboy. June 1981.
• Bill Rankine. “James Bond Girl was a Boy” The News of the World 1981
• Tula. I am a Woman. London: Sphere Books: Rainbird, 167 pp 1982. First autobiography.
• European Court of Human Rights. Affaire Cossey: arret du 27 septembre 1990. Publications de la Cour européenne des droits de l'homme. Série A, Arrets et décisions, vol. 184. Strasbourg: Greffe de la cour, Conseil de l'Europe, French and English on opposite pages, numbered in duplicate. 54, 54 pp 1990.
• Michael Binyon. "Sex Change Woman Loses Legal Case". The Times. 28 September 1990 Home News.
• Jane Dunn. "How Barry Became Carrie". Sunday Times. 5 May 1991. Features.
• Gretchen Edgren, photographed by Byron Newman. “The Transformations of Tula”. Playboy. September 1991.
• Caroline Cossey. My Story. London & Boston: Faber and Faber. xiii, 225pp.1992. Second autobiography.
• Jo Alexander. “I'm getting married ... and my sister's having the baby”. Woman 25 May 1992.
• Sophie Goodchild. "New Hope for Transsexuals as MPs Move to Change Law on Birth Certificates". The Independent. 23 June 2002 (p. 13).
• “Caroline Cossey”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Cossey.

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The parallels with April Ashley:

• Both were natural beauties.
• Both became models.
• Both had tiny parts in one the weakest entries in an ongoing film series, April in Road to Hong Kong,1962.
• Both were outed in the News of the World.
• Both lost their screen credit.
• Both suffered in their modelling careers.
• Both wrote two autobiographies.

Are Caroline Cossey and other persons with Klinefelter's Syndrome intersex?   The question whether April Ashley had Klinefelter's Syndrome was raised during Corbett v. Corbett, but despite her blood being examined by Professor FTG Hayhoe, a chromosome expert at Cambridge, no clear answer was given.  Either way, the result of Corbett v. Corbett was to establish a legal criterion for intersex that was not the same as the medical criteria.   Because Klinefelter's Syndrome persons have a Y chromosome (no matter how many Xs) they are 'chromosomally male' and therefore concordant in their chromosomal, gonadal and genital sex.   

Let us go to Stephen Whittle's Blog, posting of 14 July 2008, where he says that: "In English law, there has been *NO* change of the position of intersex people with the coming into force of the Gender Recognition Act. Since time immemorial, intersex people in the UK have been able to apply to have their birth certificates amended to better reflect the sex they are. This system is still in existence for those who wish to use it." Unfortunately this statement does not distinguish between the medical and the legal concepts of intersex.

Therefore, Caroline Cossey, intersex by common sense and medical opinion, spent six years of her life going through the hassle of court after court because she was not intersex by Justice Ormrod's definition.

It is to Caroline's credit that she is not hung up on these distinctions and in her autobiographies  uses the word 'transsexual' of herself.

It is a nasty irony that although Caroline's appeal to the European Court paved the way for Press For Change and the Gender Recognition Act, person's such as herself with Klinefelter’s Syndrome are being given a hard time by the Gender Recognition Board.