This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1800 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.

There is a detailed Index arranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

01 December 2009

Hibiscus (1949 – 1982 ) performer.

George Harris Jr was born in Bronxville, Westchester, New York. His family moved to Florida and lost their money in real estate.

On return to New York, child George worked as a model in commercials, and at Caffe Cino and other off-off-Broadway theaters. At 13 he left home to live with an older man, with the understanding of his parents. One of his contacts was Jack Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker who was already cross-dressing his actors.

At 17, George had an offer to drive to California, and arrived in San Francisco in time for the Hippy thing. He grew his hair, became vegetarian and wore robes and headdresses. At midnight on December 31, 1969, The Palace, let him, as Hibiscus, and several others put on a show and the Cockettes were born. They put on periodic reviews using castoff junk for their props, and dressing in drag and as whatever they liked. They attracted the attention of celebrities, and were featured in articles in Rolling Stone and Paris Match.

One night after a performance he came home to find that his apartment building had burned down. He took a break, but on return found that he had been voted out of the group, and that shows were no longer free. He founded a new group, Angels of Light, which did their first performance in Grace Cathedral before the police evicted them. Allen Ginsburg did his first drag with the group and was was Hibiscus’s lover for a while.

Hibiscus left the group and returned to his family in New York, and started an East Coast version of the Angels. They were discovered by Swiss choreographer, Maurice Bejart who financed a European tour.

He died of AIDS at age 33.
  • Mark Thompson. “Children of Paradise: A Brief History of Queens”. In Mark Thompson (ed). Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987: 61-8.
  • “Hibiscus (entertainer)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibiscus_%28entertainer%29.
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28 November 2009

Ray Blanchard (1945 - ) psychologist.

Ray Blanchard’s father, an aviation metal smith died in the Japanese attack on the USS Franklin, just before his namesake son was born. The son was raised a Catholic in Hammonton, New Jersey.

He did an A.B. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967, and PhD in psychology at Urbana University, Illinois, 1973, the year that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of diseases. He had a draft classification of 4-A, the sole surviving son of a service member killed in action, and so was exempt unless war was officially declared, which the US never did against Vietnam.

He emigrated to Canada anyway. He did post-doctoral research at Dalhousie University investigating learning processes in animals (mainly rats) until 1976 when he became a clinical psychologist at the Ontario Correctional Institute in Brampton (now the Brampton Adult Training Centre). There he met Kurt Freund while working with sex offenders. They made plans to collaborate, and in 1980, Blanchard started working at the Clarke Institute in Toronto (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health).

He did work on male birth order and sexuality and claims that the number of older brothers increases the chance of homosexuality in right-handed men, but not in left-handed men or in women at all. He claims that pedophiles have lower than expected IQs and higher rates of non-right-handedness. He hypothesizes that “these and other correlates of pedophilia reflect some perturbation of prenatal neurodevelopment in subsequently pedophilic males”.

A lot of his work utilizes phallometric diagnosis. He is best known for his re-presentation of Kurt Freund’s ideas on fetishistic transsexualism which he re-labelled as ‘autogynephylia’. He insisted for many years that there are no gay trans men, and consistently ignored Lou Sullivan’s letters in the 1980s explaining that Lou and many others are indeed gay trans men. Further to this he does not acknowledge autoandrophilia, which is the term that his theoretical system should apply to such trans men. However he now claims to have published two of the earliest reports of gay trans men (but without using that terminology).  He also insists and persists in referring to heterosexual trans women as homosexual, and refuses to use the word ‘androphilic’.

Blanchard is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto (despite being a psychologist not a psychiatrist), and in 1995, after Kurt Freund’s retirement, he became Head of Clinical Sexology Services in the Law and Mental Health Programme of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). He served on the gender dysphoria sub-working group for the DSM-IV, 1994, and is serving as Chair of the paraphilia sub-working group for the new DSM-V. He is an Associate Editor of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment and a member of the Editorial Board of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

He supported Michelle Josef’s lawsuit in 1999 to get gender surgery relisted under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan. He supplied material to Lisanne Anderson for her Autogynephilia Site.

He gave a paper at the Third International Body Integrity Disorder Meeting in 2003 comparing BIID (apotemnophilia=desire to have a limb removed) to Gender identity disorder, as did Anne Lawrence. This has fed the usage on the religious right of referring to sex changes as sexual-amputation fetishism.

Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, 2003, recycles many of Blanchard’s ideas. Blanchard's favourable review of the book is the only review that he ever wrote for Amazon, and he resigned from HBIGDA (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now WPATH) when it criticized the book, an act which he called 'appalling'.

In 2002 the CAMH GIC was awarded a Presidential Citation from Div 44 of the American Psychological Association.  Ray Blanchard accepted the award on behalf of CAMH.

The population of Ontario being over 13 million, there should be around 200 trans persons completing transition each year.   Before the suspension of Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) funding for gender surgery in 1998 Blanchard's management had kept the number approved to around 10 per year, and it looks as if the numbers approved since the re-instatement in 2008 will be approximately the same.

As Blanchard manages a clinic that rejects most of its applicants, and proclaims a universal theory based on the minority that it accepts, it is a reasonable assumption that the majority are rejected precisely because they do not fit the theory.  For this crime of contradicting the theory, they are denied OHIP funding.

In 2004 he wrote: “This is not waving a magic wand and a man becomes a woman and vice versa.  It's something that has to be taken very seriously. A man without a penis has certain disadvantages in this world, and this is in reality what you're creating" (Jane Armstrong. “The Body within, the body without”. The Globe and Mail June 12, 2004 here).
______________________________________________________________________

I am not discussing the concept of autogynephilia in any detail here as I have already done so here.

As his insistence on calling heterosexual trans women ‘homosexual’ shows, Blanchard regards trans women as men, and trans men as women.  This was shown again in the 2004 article in The Globe and Mail.  Blanchard has tried to claim that he is not transphobic, but until he changes in his regard of which gender we are, it is inevitable that many, probably most, of us do regard him as transphobic.  This attitude will probably not change until the next generation take over the gender clinics.   It does appear that Blanchard and Zucker are attempting to solidify their position in the DSM-V, so that it will last for another generation.

Of course Blanchard supported Michelle Josef’s lawsuit in 1999 to get gender surgery relisted.  The CAMH GIC is a stronger institution when it can offer the carrot of paid-for gender surgery on the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.

Blanchard claims that pedophiles suffered “perturbation of prenatal neurodevelopment”.  The HBS people claim that the same thing happened to them, but don’t phrase it so well.

Unlike Kurt Freund who was married to a woman and had had children, and unlike James Cantor who is openly gay, Blanchard has been very coy about his private life.  Andrea James’ article of November 2009 is by far the best on this particular topic, but I would maintain that his closetry denies him the right to claim to be gay.

Being a right-handed eldest child with a heterosexual younger brother, I am not sold on the birth-order effect.

Blanchard, Zucker and Cantor are all by upbringing American.  That is a bit too many to be all in one Canadian clinic, especially the dominant Canadian clinic on transsexuality.
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26 November 2009

Jean Fredericks (193? – 197?) singer, drag performer, ball organizer.

Jean sang counter tenor in his local church, and was cast as Juliet in a school play.

He studied singing and trombone at the University of Toronto, and was cast in a comic role in the All-Varsity Revue in a sketch based on Carmen. This led to a satirical concert with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

He played drag shows across North America, and in 1960 moved to England.

After a straight role in a West-End musical and at the Edinburgh Festival he concentrated on his drag act doing mock-opera. In 1964 he released an LP Recitals are a Drag. In 1965 he was featured in the first issue of London Life magazine.

In 1969 he and Ron Storme started to organize five or more drag balls a year in London, mainly at the Porchester Hall.

He had a small part in the Barry Humphries film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, 1972.


The Porchester Hall tradition was continued by Ron Storme after Jean’s death.

*Not the Hopi photographer.
  • Chris Shaw & Arthur Oates. A Pictorial History of the Art of Female Impersonation. London: King-Shaw Productions. 1966: 29.
  • “The Fabulous Mr Jean Fredericks”. Follow-Up: the monthly magazine for the gay scene. 1973.
  • J.D. Doyle. “Jean Fredericks”. Queer Music Heritage. www.queermusicheritage.us/drag-fredericks.html.
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24 November 2009

Jane Heap (1883 – 1964) editor, Gurdjieffian.

Jane was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas. After high school she moved to Chicago.

In 1912 she helped found Chicago’s Little Theatre which put on influential avant-garde plays.

She wore her hair short in the male style, and preferred male clothing, especially suits and a bow ties, although she never used a male name.

In 1916 she met Margaret Anderson, and the two became lovers and joint editors of the Little Review, a seminal magazine of literary modernism which published works by most of the new influential writers in English, many courtesy of their foreign editor in London, Ezra Pound.

In 1920 the US Post Office seized and burned four issues that contained excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses. The next year, they were tried and found guilty of obscenity, fined $100 and forced to discontinue serializing the book.

Heap then became the major editor. In 1924 she met G.I. Gurdjieff, and established a Gurdjieff study group. She moved to Paris, to study at his institute. Margaret Anderson had also moved to Paris with her new lover, and they continued to issue the Little Review until 1929.

In 1927 she established an all-women Gurdjieff study group. In 1935 Gurdjieff sent her to London to set up a new study group, and she stayed there the rest of her life.

She died of diabetes at age 81.
  • Andrea Barnet. “Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap: Life for Art’s Sake”. In All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004: 66-88.
  • Linda Lappin. “Jane Heap and Her Circle”. Prairie Schooner. 78, 4. Winter 2004: 5-25.
  • “Jane Heap”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Heap.
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21 November 2009

Christian Schenk (1952 - ) physicist, politician.

Christina Schenk studied physics at Humboldt University in East Berlin, and became a research fellow at the German Democratic Republic Academy of Sciences.

From 1974-81 she was a member of the ruling Socialist Unity Party.

She was then active in the opposition movement sponsored by the Protestant Church, and was a lesbian and feminist activist.

From 1990 she was a member of the Bundestag of the united Germany for the Independent Women’s Association (UFV), and then from 1994 for the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) until 2002. She was the head of the Feminist working group for the PDS 1994-8, and also active in queer and lesbian politics. She was the first Bundestag member to declare as a lesbian.

From 2004 Schenk attended Leipzig Hospital where she was prescribed male hormones, and in 2006 transitioned legally and surgically to male. His wife supported his change.  As they had previously registered as a partnership, they cannot marry without a year of separation .  The district court has consented to their marrying, and the case has gone to the Berlin Senate Administration Board.

*Not the athlete, nor the computer technologist.
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19 November 2009

Eric Barreto (1962 – 1996) Carmen Miranda impersonator.


Eric Barreto from Rio is Considered to be the best Carmen Miranda impersonator. He was selected to play Miranda in the re-enactments for Solberg’s documentary of her life.

When he died, he was interred in tomb close to that of Carmen Miranda herself.

*Not the football player.
  • Helena Solberg (dir & scr & narration). Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business. With Eric Barreto as Carmen Miranda. Brazil/UK 92 mins 1994.



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17 November 2009

H. Taylor Buckner (1936 - ) sociologist.

Buckner was born in Kentucky. He did a BSc in Sociology at Louisville in 1959. ++His Masters thesis at the University of California at Berkeley was based on a questionnaire sent to 262 subscribers to Transvestia magazine.

However he did his PhD, 1967, by joining the Oakland Police Department and doing a participant observation study.

He was appointed Associate Professor at Sir George Williams University, Montréal (now part of Concordia University) and later became Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He retired Emeritus in 1996.

He made a study of transvestites in the late 1960s. He admits that, unlike his work on the Oakland Police, there was no participant observation. He re-used the survey of 262 transvestites from Transvestia magazine, supplemented by interviews with seven transvestites (four anglophone and three francophone – all, except one student, with good professional jobs) who responded to letters that he put in the Montréal Star and Montréal-Matin. He read a paper on this research at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in San Francisco, September, 1969. This was the same meeting of the ASA that issued a public declaration endorsing the rights of gays and other sexual minorities.

Buckner’s academic portrait of heterosexual transvestism was of a pathology.
“The heterosexual transvestite provides an interesting example of a socially induced "pathology" because he seems to have internalized part of a social relationship, and acts toward himself in a way that a normal person acts toward a socio-sexually significant other.”
“The transvestite is blocked from achieving either the cultural goal of normal heterosexual masculine functioning, a goal which he shares, or the common variant, homosexuality. His response to this double blockage is to create a miniature society within himself in which he can achieve a cultural goal without following the cultural pattern of achieving it through interpersonal relationships.”
His position is that there is no biologic etiology. He proposes a five-step model:
1. “In most cases, although not absolutely all, the first step in becoming a transvestite comes between the ages of about five and fourteen from the association of some item of feminine wearing apparel with sexual gratification, usually through masturbation.”
2. “The second step in becoming a transvestite comes when the youth perceives some heterosexual difficulties...”
3. “The third step in becoming a transvestite is the blockage of the homosexual outlet. ”
4. “The fourth step in becoming a transvestite involves this elaboration of masturbation fantasies into the development of a feminine self. ”
5. “The fifth step in becoming a transvestite involves fixing the gratification pattern in the identity of the transvestite. Until this fifth step occurs one cannot speak of a person as being a true transvestite; he may have branched off into some other form of deviant sexual behaviour, or he may be functioning in a normal heterosexual pattern.”
The only published transvestite biography that he refers to, and the only person he directly quotes, is the highly untypical one of Leonard Wheeler, a fetishist,  bondage misogynist:
“Keeping her lovely is a full-time job. It literally takes several hours a day - but when I look into the mirror and see what we have made, it's worth every bit of the hard work and discomfort involved. When we walk down the street, our feet flying in their tight patent leather pumps because Connie's skirts are so narrow at the knees, our heels clicking in precise feminine rhythm, it's a great feeling to know that heads are turning. The women look, and they envy Connie her wardrobe; the men look and they envy whoever she belongs to, and maybe they think she doesn't belong to anybody, but they're wrong. She belongs to me. I'm the man whose hands run over her body, the man who touches her where only a lover is allowed to touch. Yes, quite frankly, I get great pleasure from her body. It's more than just sex, I know that now. It takes the place of sex. It's a tingle that I feel through me. It's how I suppose sex feels to a woman.” [emphasis added by Bruckner].
Apparently he then lost interest in the subject and did no further work on it.

*Not the football player.
  • ++Harry Benjamin.The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press, 1966. New York: Warner Books Edition 1977: 49, 52, 59, 62, 105, 108.
  • H. Taylor Buckner. “The Transvestic Career Path”. Read at the American Sociological Association annual meeting. San Francisco, September, 1969. Psychiatry. Vol.: 33, No. 3. August,1970: 381-389. Online at: www.tbuckner.com/TRANSVES.HTM.
  • Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. University of Pennsylvania Press 1993: 331-2.
  • www.tbuckner.com.
  • Caroline Devilliers. “The Five Steps”. A Cross-Dresser’s Compendium. www.thewolfshead.co.uk/html/the_five_steps.html.
______________________________________________________________

This is a good example of what you can do with a sample that is obviously far too small to be valid, and which has produced a class/professional bias that a first-year student should be able to spot as lopsided.  Here is Buckner’s description of his sample:  “Their masculine roles are largely involved with symbolic manipulation: a medical doctor engaged in research, a professor, a Ph.D. in research, an architect with two professional degrees, a university student, an executive, and a minister. It may very well be that transvestites live a somewhat more complicated fantasy life than most people”.

And then to quote one and only one biography that admits that the person is untypical of transvestites.

How did he get this paper peer-reviewed?

Vern Bullough comments on Buckner’s paper:  “Two decades of research have added significantly to the data base, but the outlines of this pattern after the first cross-dressing episode seem valid at least for some male transvestites”.  I have already given my opinion of Bullough.  Devilliers discussion is much more insightful than Bullough's is.

Viviane Namaste is also at Concordia.  However she completed her PhD the year that Buckner retired.  She is a later generation.
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