Anthony Storr (1920 – 2001) psychiatrist.

Anthony Storr was the youngest child, 10 years younger than his closest sibling, son of the Sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey who was 51 when Anthony was born –his mother was 44. Anthony was lonely and miserable at boarding school, partly because of his inability at sports. He was bullied and had only average marks. He suffered all his life from asthma and depression.

He went up to Christ's College, Cambridge, where his moral tutor was C.P. Snow. After two years he was given a wartime courtesy degree without taking a tripos.

He studied at Westminster Hospital and qualified as a doctor in 1944, and subsequently specialised in psychiatry. His asthma precluded his having to do military service. He gained a Diploma in Psychological Medicine in 1951, and then trained in the Jungian school but was not a strict adherent. In 1942, he married Catherine Cole, who subsequently became a children’s novelist.

In 1964 Storr published a book called Sexual Deviation which sold quite well, and strongly influenced thinking in the English-speaking countries. Quite possibly, from the internal evidence, Storr thought that he was writing a liberal book, an intelligent mix of common sense and psychoanalysis, a plea for compassion rather than condemnation of the poor perverts. However looking from 45 years later, the book comes across more as a compendium of heterosexist prejudices and untested assumptions. A particularly dubious technique of Storr's is to give one, that is only one, anecdotal example as the basis of his generalisations. There are no footnotes or other references to evidence, or refutations of alternate positions. One is expected to accept his wisdom.

His standard in deciding what is sexually deviant is 'emotional maturity', a concept on which 'there is so much agreement' that it can simply be defined as 'the ability to form a stable relationship with the opposite sex which is both physically and emotionally satisfying, and in which sexual intercourse forms the main, though not the only, mode of expression of love'. He does acknowledge that there are homosexuals who are stable, balanced and mature, and that there are immature heterosexuals: 'Nevertheless, it is still true to say that heterosexuality is a more mature form of sexual behaviour'.

He admits that ‘minor degrees of fetishism can be detected in every man, and there is no point at which one can say that normality ends and pathology begins’. He also thinks that fetishes have their origin in very early childhood. Only men are fetishistic; women have no such need ‘because they do not have to achieve or sustain an erection’.

His chapter on transvestity follows immediately on his chapter on fetishism, and it is presented as a variation thereupon. He also repeats the common misconception that transvestites dress usually to masturbate. He gives no reason to assume that masturbation is more common among transvestites than among other men. This false premise also leads to his conclusion that there are no female transvestites and that female cross-dressing is of a completely different nature. He gives the standard psychoanalytic interpretation of transvestity as follows:

“The homosexual man replaces his love for his mother by an identification with her: the fetishist refuses to acknowledge that a woman has no penis. The male transvestite assumes both attitudes simultaneously. He fantasies that the woman possesses a penis, and thus overcomes his castration anxiety, and identifies himself with this phallic woman.”

He adds to this that the transvestite is imagining a “seductive courtesan” and identifying with her as a phallic woman. This phallic woman need not be his mother for such images are easily found, e.g. witches and mother goddesses, both of which come with many phallic symbols. To a small child women in general appear threatening and powerful. Therefore a transvestite gains masculinity rather than loses it by identifying with such a masculine and powerful woman. Such an identification argues a “fairly complete failure” in the normal separation of a boy from his mother in growing up, and also “a failure to relate emotionally to any person other than the mother”.

He does note that for ’normal’ men, the desire to dress as female is widely catered for vicariously in public entertainment.

He discusses that there are also men who seek an operation to “change their sex”. This is possible for anatomical hermaphrodites, but “this is very far from changing the sex of an individual with normal organs, and such an operation is of course impossible”. This was written in 1964, a decade after Christine Jorgensen’s operation had received extensive media coverage. The word “transsexual” is not used at all – although he is writing a full decade after Cauldwell, Benjamin and Ed Wood had put the word into circulation. Such men are submitting to “castration” because they have “given up all hope of competing with other males on anything approaching equal terms”. Those who express the “delusion” of becoming the opposite sex “are invariably psychotic”. In such a schizophrenic the patient's ego “is overwhelmed, so that he is no longer able to exercise conscious control, and is at the mercy of phantasy and unconscious contents”.

Female cross-dressing is merely a part of lesbianism which is merely the normal schoolgirl crush for another female extended into adulthood because of a shortage of men or because of emotional immaturity. Such lesbianism is of course always “faute de mieux”, although it may be better than nothing. Female cross-dressing is on the decline.

“Thirty years ago England seemed peculiarly apt at producing a stalwart breed of commanding women clad in collars and ties, tweeds and boots, striding manfully through life with hair cut short and faces innocent of cosmetics. Increasing psychological sophistication has diminished the numbers of those who display their adoption of the masculine role so blatantly.”

He also wrote books on depression, the psychology of music, gurus and charismatic leaders, and the value of solitude. He also served on the Parole Board and a Home Office committee on obscenity and film censorship.

He had three daughters with his first wife, Catherine Storr. They divorced in 1970, and he married again.

He died aged 80 of a heart attack.

• Anthony Storr. Sexual Deviation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1964.
• Anthony Stevens. “Obituary: Anthony Storr, formerly Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, Oxford Health Authority”. Psychiatric Bulletin. 2001, 25:365-6. http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/25/9/365.
• Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. “Anthony Storr, 80, Psychiatrist and Writer”. The New York Times. March 28, 2001. www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/anthony-storr-80-psychiatrist-and-writer.html. 

EN.WIKIPEDIA   

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For the female fetishism that he does not acknowledge see the references in my article on Autogynephilia. For the sexuality of female-to-male cross-dressing see Lou Sullivan.

There is very little that is original in Storr’s book, but, as a Penguin, it was widely available, for many in the 1960s it was the only book that they read on the subject. It was on the reading list for my first year psychology course at university. Almost all his ideas had been previously proposed by psychoanalysts.

These psychoanalytic ideas are fortunately not as common now as they were in the 1960s. However they were largely and uncritically accepted by Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard and have been incorporated into their concept of Autogynephilia. They are also being recycled in a simplified and mean-spirited way by many of the HBS people.

Storr got indifferent marks at school, and got into Cambridge anyway. The British class system at work.

Charlotte Bach’s theory of evolution

Sexual Deviation Is The Mainspring Of Evolution

Every member of any species 'divided' by sex, having to unite with a member of the other sex to reproduce, experiences to some degree the tensions inherent in its 'separateness' from the other sex, its inability ever to attain complete individual integrity as a member of the species. 

Her theory applied such observations, arguing that a group deviation from the norm of reproduction – thwarting, or self-thwarting – of the reproductory drive, will to some degree creates inner tensions in individuals, and those individuals may resolve them in different ways: for examples, an excessive drive to dominate the environment (including other individuals), to challenge or replace (for the 'good' of the group) established rituals and values, or to celebrate, or bemoan, the existential experience of being a member of the group, or even to withdraw from the life of the group as far as practicable. 

She argued that though expressing a deviation may for an individual be an evolutionary dead end, deviations create a repertoire from which a species may select behaviours advantageous to its survival, and reject others, in the way Darwin believed that ‘Natural Selection’ operated.

Thus, deviations from the reproductory norm are an essential part of the evolutionary process. In a complex dynamic involving the individual’s internal and external environment, the drive to express deviations is countered by the drive to resist them. Their expression will be channelled into the environment, in terms of established social rituals, or by the creation of new patterns or pieces of behaviour. The established patterns she termed ‘stable’, the novel expressions of behaviour she termed ‘emergent’, and creating them is what all of us are doing, all the time. Every man, she said, is a new Adam; every woman, a new Eve.

She believed this was the source of creativity. She also argued that deviations from the norm could be expressed negatively or positively - homosexuality, withdrawal into monasteries and nunneries or other forms of celibacy, but were often expressed within a context of reproductory behaviour - homosexuals having and rearing children, or people who do not want children of their own nevertheless acting in loco parentis (as teachers, carers, advisors) in the nurture and socialisation of the children of others.

Quoted from The Theory on www.charlottebach.org/the_theory.htm.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Central to Bach’s theory is an eight-box typology that is based on the old trapped soul concept. You may be a male soul in a male body, a female soul in male body, a female soul in female body or a male soul in a female body. Which gives four options. However the soul strives to become the other sex, and this striving can be denied or asseverated. Now we have eight options:

1. The stable options:

1. 
   
   Male positive denialist. The heterosexual male, physically and psychologically male, denying the pull to become female.
2. 
   
   Female positive denialist. The heterosexual female, physically and psychologically female, denying the pull to become male.
3. 
   
   Male negative denialist. A female soul in male body who denies the pull to the other psychological sex, i.e. male. This is a transvestite or drag queen.
4. 
   
   Female negative denialist. A male soul in female body who denies the pull to the other psychological sex, i.e. female. This is a butch lesbian

2. The changeable/creative options:

1. 
   
   Male positive asseverationist. The male, physically and psychologically male, accepting the pull to become female. (This is not properly explained. Would this be a metrosexual or a psychologically androgynous male who is accepting of his female side?)
2. 
   
   Female positive asseverationist. The heterosexual female, physically and psychologically female, accepting the pull to become male. (This is not properly explained. Would this be a psychologically androgynous female who is accepting of her male side? Would one type of this be a career woman?)
3. Male negative asseverationist. A female soul in male body who accepts the pull to the other psychological sex, i.e. male. He will be masculine, and dress definitely so, and might be quite aggressive. (This is what others have called a homovestite. Would homophobia fit here?)
   
4. Female negative asseverationist. A male soul in female body who accepts the pull to the other psychological sex, i.e. female. This is a femme lesbian who dresses extra femme. (Although surely a heterosexual femme or homovestite would fit here also.)
   

This, of course, is done in terms of 1960s stereotypes. There is no actual place here for a transsexual, nor actually for a non-op like Bach herself. 

In rereading Wilson’s Mysteries in an attempt to write this I found contradictions. Wilson first assigns a transvestite to 1.3, but two paragraphs later to 2.1 ! Wilson himself first accepted that he is a Male positive denialist. He is very much the cisgendered heterosexual. He later twigged that that would deny his creativity. Surely he would want to be a Male positive asseverationist? Perhaps being of his generation (born 1931) he does not do so. He leaves 2.1 and 2.2 unexplained.

________________________________________________________________________________

I am not a fan of 4-box or 8-box typologies. They can be useful in laying out ideas, but they also restrict ideas to their simple forms. There are some good bits here:

• the important idea that one can deny or asseverate the pull to be the other sex.
• the incorporation of cisgendered heterosexuals into the schema.
• the inclusion of the concept but not the word homovestity (Zavitzianos did not coin the word until 1972).
• the ideas that a female soul in male body is in denial of her male sexual pull if she is transgender. This is of course contrary to what most transgender persons assume.

On the other hand:

• where do transsexuals fit?
• 2.1 and 2.2 would need to be much more clearly developed.
• there is no comparison or correlation to other theorizing on sex and gender.

See also Charlotte Bach's biography.

Charlotte Maria Beatrix Augusta Bach (1920 -1981) hotel employee, accommodation agent, hypnotherapist, would-be philosopher, fake baron.

See also Charlotte's Bach's Theory of Evolution. 

Karoly Hajdu, the son of a tailor, was raised in Budapest. Karoly did badly at school but read voraciously on his own.

After Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941 he managed to obtain a ‘student exemption’. In 1942 he forged a birth certificate that he was Karoly Mihaly Balazs Agoston Hajdu, son of the Baron of Szadelo and Balkany. Shortly afterwards he was conscripted into the Railway Builders Regiment, but managed to wrangle a transfer to the army propaganda unit – where he stole cameras and sold them on the black market. He later admitted that he had cold-bloodedly killed a teenage soldier because he could not show the right papers, and claimed to have been in the German SS.

After the war his sister emigrated to Venezuela, and later was joined by their mother.

Calling himself Karl Hajdu , Karoly managed to get to the British sector in Austria, and from there, as he spoke good English, to Britain in 1948 as a refugee. Presenting himself as Baron Carl Balkanyi who at been a university lecturer, he got a job at Harwich Labour Exchange, and then at the British Council.

He was experimenting with cross-dressing. A friend left a suitcase with his wife’s dresses and underwear and Carl tried them all on. He asked the friend to remove the case. He bought female clothing, and then purged them.

He worked in small hotels and nightclubs, and in Brighton met Phyllis Rogers. She and her son moved to London to be near him, and they were married in February 1953. Carl put his female clothing into storage.

He opened an accommodation agency in Paddington, illegally charging prospective tenants. He was taken to court several times on this charge and for not registering his business, being fined increasing amounts. Shortly after the 1954 conviction, he presented at the Hungarian Embassy declaring that he was a fugitive and prepared to go back. This was reported in the Daily Mail. The Sunday People sent a reporter to his agency, and ran a lengthy article on how he ran his business.

After the Hungarian Uprising, Hajdu collected ₤2,000 to send ‘freedom fighters’ into Hungary, and led a march to Downing Street. However he was not able to explain where the money went.

In 1957 he was pressed into bankruptcy listing 26 creditors. He retrieved his case of women’s clothing.

Shortly afterwards he took the name of Michael Karoly and took a course in hypnotherapy. He never graduated but set up in business as a hypnotherapist anyway. He also was taken on as a psychology lecturer at the Stanislavsky Studios in Knightsbridge, and wrote a column on psychology for Today magazine. He was also commissioned by Paul Elek, a Hungarian, to write a book on hypnosis. The book, the only one of his ever published, includes an early explanation of the joys of cross-dressing, and many of the patients in the book are aspects of himself.

Michael and Charlotte, both

In 1963 he was charged at Knebworth with a breach of the peace after being arrested dressed as female. He separated from his wife, founded Divorcees Anonymous and seduced several of the women who attended. After a denouncing article in the Sunday People, both his hypnosis patients and members of Divorcees Anonymous stayed away.

He attempted to return to his wife, but she had a new lover. She died of a severe uterine haemorrhage that erupted while she and her lover were on holiday in Germany. It then came out that she had embezzled thousands of pounds from her employer. Her son Peter died in a road accident a few weeks later.

In shock Michael retreated into Phyllis’ flat, avoided all contact and took lots of photographs of himself in his wife’s clothes. He wrote two novels in this period: One, Siobhan, was about one of his lovers. Although she was newly married, he sent it to her. She and her husband instantly contacted their solicitor, and warned Karoly off. The Second Coming was a science fiction novel with a sex-change theme.

In May 1966, he was charged with 13 offenses of obtaining credit under false pretences, and trading as a psychologist without disclosing that he was an undischarged bankrupt under another name. He was jailed for three months.

In 1967 he wrote to the prominent female impersonators Danny La Rue and Ricky Renée for advice on cross dressing.

He placed an advert in the New Statesman as a psychologist seeking transvestites, and got a dozen replies. One was from the person who would transition as Della Aleksander, but who at that time was a novice. Another, a silk fetishist, persuaded Michael that he could be a ‘spiritual transvestite’ for whom the clothes are merely an emblem. He acted as male escort for several of his new contacts, and started a book, Man and/or Woman: A Comprehensive Study of the ‘Tammuz Complex’ (Transvestism), using the anecdotes of his new contacts.

He also started to go out dressed as Charlotte. At the same time, as Michael, he took his last female lover. Through Della, Charlotte was able to obtain female hormones, although she persuaded herself that living as a woman in itself altered her hormones. Her method of coping with being read was to engage the person in conversation, and to repeat the story of how her husband and son had died. From 1968, Charlotte was more or less living fulltime as female. The major exceptions were signing on for unemployment pay, and Michael the psychologist’s one paying client.

Karoly’s mother in Venezuela had not heard from him since his bankruptcy in 1957. A friend from Caracas visited London and discovered Charlotte. The mother, at 82, accepted her new daughter. Two years later she came to visit.

Charlotte changed her name by deed poll in 1970 to Charlotte Maria Beatrix Augusta Hajdu, but normally used the surname Bach. She started writing the enormously long Homo Mutans, Homo Luminens which presents the transsexual urge as the key to human evolution, but could not interest any publishers. She also wrote an autobiographical novel Fiona which also has never been published.

Using the name Daphne Lyell-Manson she went into business as a spanking madam. She later wrote about the spanking trade: “On the Basic Axioms or Lemmata of a Universal Theory of Relativity”.

Charlotte started giving weekly talks in a friend’s flat. One of her acolytes, Don Smith, produced several pamphlets on Bach’s ideas, each of which sold between 500 and 1,000 copies. She was several times invited to speak to gay and lesbian groups. She wrote to television programs and the science editors of The Times offering her assistance, but was not taken up. She wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to advise him that god is a human invention.

She sent a 521 page version of Homo Mutans, Homo Luminens, all in capitals and on orange paper, to the writer Colin Wilson, who eventually read it, and became an enthusiast. He interviewed her for the magazine Time Out, and featured her prominently in his book, Mysteries, 1978.

Brian Lewis, a professor at the Open University used his research budget to print 100 copies of her book, and she sold it at her weekly meetings. She was invited to give seminars at a few universities, and she upstaged the featured speakers at a debate at the Royal Institution. A wealthy doctor, Michael Kirkman, endowed the Kirkman-Bach College of Human Ethology, and Charlotte wrote to the eminent ethologist Desmond Morris to be a patron, but Morris was quite puzzled by the approach.

Charlotte died of untreated liver cancer, having refused to go to a doctor, at the age of 60. The revelation that she was a ‘man’ was a surprise to Wilson and Lewis.

She left her papers to Bob Mellors who had been a gay activist. He researched her life for several years until he was murdered by a burglar in 1996 in Warsaw where he was teaching English. A friend of Bob passed the papers onto Francis Wheen.

• Comer Clarke. “The Baron” The Sunday Pictorial 13 Jan 1957
• “Man Dressed as Woman Walks into Hotel”. Hertfordshire Mercury. 26 April 1963.
• Michael B. Karoly. Hypnosis.  London: Elek, 190 pp 1961. Hajdu/Bach’s only published book.
• Colin Wilson. Mysteries: An Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal and the Supernatural.  Putnam, 1978 London: Grafton Books 1979: 514-523.
• Bob Mellors (ed). Extracts from an unpublished Work: An Outline of Human Ethology by Charlotte M. Bach. 4 Pamphlets London: Another Orbit Press. n.d.
• “Bent is best, said Charlotte Bach”. Gay News. Feb 18, 1982.
• Colin Wilson. The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. Grafton Books,1988.  Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1989: chps 1-2.
• Colin Wilson. The Devil’s Party: A History of Charlatan Messiahs. Virgin, 2000: chp 12. Also published as Rogue Messiahs: Tales of Self-Proclaimed Saviors. Charlottesville, Va: Hampton Roads xxvii,274 pp 2000: chp 12.
• Francis Wheen. “Move Over Darwin”. The Guardian 28 Sep 2002. www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4509155-103425,00.html
• Francis Wheen. Who was Dr Charlotte Bach? Short Books, 2002.
• Michael Roth. “Sex, Sin and Evolution: Dr Charlotte Bach and Emergent Evolution”. Apes, Angels and Outlaws: New Science, New Philosophy, New Directions. www.apesangelsandoutlaws.com/downloads.htm.

EN.Wikipedia  

_______________________________________________________________________________

Although the Beaumont Society, the UK Princian group, had been founded in 1965, Michael/ Charlotte never bothered with it. Nor did she attend the Porchester Balls which started in 1969, nor the Gay Lib dances in the early 1970s. Nor Yvonne Sinclair’s TV/TS Support Group after 1976. She probably would not go to any event where she was not in charge.

Michael was charged with trading as a psychologist without disclosing that he was an undischarged bankrupt under another name. Should he not also have been charged with trading as a psychologist under false pretences?

There is no mention of Charlotte Bach in Kris Kirk & Ed Heath’s Men in Frocks, 1984. I was active in London Gay Lib in the early 1970s, but I never heard of Charlotte Bach until I read Colin Wilson many years later.

Some of our enemies would suggest that a fraudster is a natural for doing a gender change and getting away with it, as would be an actor. However the reality is probably that a person who is a fraudster in their life before transition, will use the same approach when they do transition. There are others, almost certainly greater in number, who strive for authenticity, and a gender change comes naturally, as part of that authenticity.

Amazon has a product review of Wheen's book that is so negative that I am going to reproduce it as a curiosity: “Mercifully published by Short Books, this nasty little work is not short enough. It is just possible that Wheen, formerly a Guardian columnist, may be writing a spoof but, even so, the point of the book escapes even the most generous reader. It's not funny, it's not interesting and it is stuffed with extremely tasteless photographs which leave a scummy feeling in the mind. According to Wheen, Charlotte Bach wrote unpublished and unpublishable books about sexual deviancy, both fiction and non-fiction, frequently using her own life as material while attributing her own experiences to other 'patients'. The relevance of the title escapes the reader for Wheen gives ample documentation about his subject.”

See also Charlotte Bach's theory of evolution.

Jean Marie Stine (1945 - ) writer, publisher.

Henry Eugene (Hank) Stine, who also has written as Allan Jorgenson, Robert Randall, Victor N. Davich, Janice Morgan Stevens and Sibly Whyte, is most famous for the novel Season of the Witch, 1968, in which a man, accused of rape, is punished by having his consciousness transferred to the woman’s body. Still having a male consciousness, s/he hopes to regain his original body, but has to kill the body to kill the personality now occupying it. Finally she realizes that she is pregnant from her original male body, and accepts her femaleness. The story was filmed in 1996 as Memory Run (also released as Synapse).

Stine was editor of Galaxy science-fiction magazine from 1979, and transitioned to Jean Marie in the 1980s.

Jean Marie is also a writer of self-help books, and is the publisher of Renaissance E Books.

She was a board member of the transgender groups IFGE and the Tiffany Club of New England; a contributing editor for both the online magazine International TG and the print zine Transformation.

She has also written biographical material about Ed Wood, the filmmaker.

• Charles Platt. “Hank Stine”. Who Writes Science Fiction? London: Savoy Books 1980. New York: Berkley Books as Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction. 1980.
• Allen A. Goldstein (dir & scr) Memory Run/Synapse. Scr: David N. Gottlieb & Dale Hilebrand, based on the novel Season of the Witch by Hank Stein, with Chris Makepeace as Andre Fuller and Karen Duffy as Celeste/Josette. US 90 mins 1996.
• Jean Marie Stine. Ed Wood – The Early Years Renaissance E Books. 112 pp 2001.
• Janice Morgan Stevens. Everything you wanted to know about sex changes ... and were afraid to ask: a primer for male to female transsexuals. Renaissance E Books. 2002.

EN.Wikipedia.       

Did Virginia Prince have Harry Benjamin Syndrome?

I have elsewhere written on Virginia Prince.

Here I would like to pursue an unexplored position. In my essays on Prince and on autogynephilia, I proposed that Prince was the classic autogynephile. That is still my position. However let us see what happens when we line up the chief femmiphilic and the HBS side-by-side.

1. Virginia Prince was an actual patient of Harry Benjamin, just as much as Sally Barry, Reed Erickson, Barbara Wilcox, Christine Jorgensen, Lynn Conway, Renée Richards or Diane Kearny. Benjamin prescribed female hormones to Prince.
2. Of the three major criteria for a transsexual -- hormones, genital surgery and living full-time in the target gender -- Prince scores 2 out of 3. Benjamin did not recommend surgery for all his transsexual patients.
3. Diane Kearny writes: “my brain gender of female was quite clear to me and others including family long before a hint of puberty. That in essence describes those born with HBS”. Prince passes this test easily.
4. Prince urged privacy, stealth even closetry, for those in her groups. Surprise: the HBS people urge the same for their membership.
5. Diane Kearny writes of “evidence that true transsexuals/HBS are born and not nurtured”. Much the same evidence supports the idea that femmiphilics are born and not nurtured.
6. Prince was intolerant of most transgender persons, especially drag queens, homosexual transvestites, all gender queers, all transsexuals, and all non-ops who did not conform to her own transgenderist (a different word from transgender) or femmiphilic template. Surprise: HBS people are intolerant of most transgender persons, especially drag queens, homosexual and heterosexual transvestites, all gender queers, all non-ops, and the vast majority of transsexuals who did not conform to the HBS template.
7. Trans men are totally ignored by Prince; while there do seem to be a few HBS trans men, you can easily read the HBS web sites without being aware of them.
8. Prince was often domineering to the point of bullying and rudeness, often telling potential transsexuals that they were ‘delusional’. HBS persons are constantly telling people that they are ‘fetishists’ and ‘autogynephiles’.
9. Prince advocated a false respectability of a dated concept of being a 'lady'; many of the HBS persons object to being described as gender variant, and are even proud to self-describe as gender conformist, which is also a false respectability.
10. Both Prince and many HBS persons are indifferent or hostile to feminism.

HBS persons make the point that Prince did not desire a sex change. Of course that is what she said. But surely she protested too much. You don't need a PhD in psychology to understand that if you are fanatically against something, it is likely that you are actually attracted to that thing, but are unable to be honest about your attraction. It is now generally accepted that homophobes are actually aroused by their own sex. A self-confident heterosexual has no need to be homophobic.

In any case, Benjamin posits three kinds of transvestite, one of which is the transsexual. If there is such a thing as a "Harry Benjamin Syndrome", it surely covers all three kinds. To limit it to the third only, is tendentious.

Idaho

This Sunday 17 May 2009 is IDAHO.
It is a shame that some gender variant persons are intolerant of others.
I would like to quote from Harry Benjamin. He writes with regret of intolerance: “Too many individuals are that way; what they do not like must be forbidden and punished. Then they are satisfied. I have even met transvestites who dislike (or pretend to dislike) transsexualism so much that they are against estrogen treatment and operation (for reasons of self protection?). There are also transsexuals who dislike transvestites as well as homosexuals. Intolerance can be found in strange quarters.” The Transsexual Phenomenon, p114-5 of the Warner Books 1977 edition.
In particular, those who organize in his name, should respect his sentiment.

Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Wood and the coining of ‘transsexual’.

In Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten, 1910, the word he uses for what we might call transsexualism is ‘Geschlechtsuebergaenge’, which would literally be a sexual over-going. This word is translated as ‘transsexual’ in Michael Lombardi-Nash’s 1991 English translation of Die Transvestiten. Obviously 'sexual over-going' was not going to catch on in English.

In 1923, Hirschfeld did use the expression 'seelischer transsexualismus' (psychic transsexualism) in a journal paper, ‘Die intersexuelle konstitution’. Although, of course, one wonders whether it was his own expression, or one suggested by one of his minions.

Die Transvestiten was not translated into English until 1991, and ‘Die intersexuelle konstitution’ has never been translated. Kurt Freund, as a German-speaking Czech sexologist, probably read read both of them. Harry Benjamin, being German, could have read them, but he shows no evidence of taking the word ‘transsexual’ from Hirschfeld. There is no evidence of British or US doctors having read Hirschfeld.

The word ‘transsexual’ next appeared in Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, 1948: 612, as a kind of homosexual considered as an intermediate sex.

The next year, 1949, David Cauldwell wrote a paper for Sexology about a girl who wanted to be a boy. He entitled the paper ‘Psychopathia transexualis’ (note the one S). This paper was not much noticed. Harry Benjamin later commented: "Whether I had ever read that article and the expression remained in my subconscious, frankly, I do not know". It was Louise Lawrence who introduced Benjamin to Cauldwell’s writings.

The word next turns up in Edward D. Wood, Jr’s 1953 film, Glen or Glenda. This is intriguing. Was the word in use among trans people before Benjamin started using it? Did Louise, having read Cauldwell, pass the word on to other transvestites? We do know that the word ‘homophobe’ was used in Screw magazine two years before it was officially coined in 1972. Probably by the early 1950s, the word ‘transvestite’ was sufficiently common that different people coined ‘transsexual’ independently.

Harry Benjamin first used the word in December 1953, and went on to popularize it, particularly in his 1966 book. He spelt the word with two-SS.

By the early 1970s doctors were dissatisfied with the word 'transsexualism' because it had lost its medical connotations, and so Norman Fisk in 1973 proposed 'gender dysphoria syndrome' to remedicalize the concept.

John Money pays homage to Cauldwell by using his one-S spelling, as does The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, 1973 on stage, 1975 film (“I'm just a Sweet Transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania“. However the two-S spelling has proved more popular.

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon, New York: The Julian Press. 1966.
• Harry Benjamin. “Introduction”. In Richard Green and John Money (eds.), Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1969.
• David O. Cauldwell. ‘Psychopathia transexualis’. Sexology, 1949. 16: 274-280.
• Richard Ekins, Dave King. (2001) "Pioneers of Transgendering: The Popular Sexology of David O. Cauldwell". IJT 5,2, www.symposion.com/ijt/cauldwell/cauldwell_01.htm.
• Norman Fisk. "Gender Dysphoria Syndrome". In D. Laub & P. Gandy (Eds.) Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome. 1974: 7–14.
• Magnus Hirschfeld,. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Material. Berlin: Pulvermacher, vi, 562 pp1910. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. 424 pp 1991.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. ‘Die intersexuelle konstitution’. Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1923. 23: 3-27.
• Andrea James. “Magnus Hirschfeld”. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/info/magnus-hirschfeld.html.
• Kinsey, A.C., Pomeroy, W.B., and Martin, C.E. (1948) Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders.

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Bullough and Bullough in Crossdressing, Sex and Gender, 1993: 257, state that "Hirschfeld in 1910 called one of his patients a psychic transsexual". They give no reference. Presumably they are confusing his book and his 1923 paper.