Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825 – 95) jurist, activist.

Ulrichs was born and raised in Aurich, Hanover. His father died when he was 10. He later recalled that as a young child he wore girls’ clothes, played with girls and wanted to be one. His first sexual experience was at age 14 with his riding instructor.

He studied law and theology in Göttingen and history in Berlin. His dissertation, in Latin, was on the Peace of Westphalia. From 1849 to 1857 he was a legal advisor for the district court of Hilesheim in Hanover. He was fired for being gay. He then worked as a reporter for the Allgemeine Zeitung, and lived off a small inheritance.

Under the pseudonym of Numa Numantius, he wrote a series of booklets in the 1860s proposing that homosexuality is natural and biologically based. He describes himself as an Urning, and used Dioning for males attracted to females. He proposed that Urnings are anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa (a female psyche confined in a male body), a metaphor that would be applied to trans persons in later generations.

He then wrote more under his own name, and pleaded at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich for a repeal of the anti-homosexual laws. His books were banned and confiscated in Saxony, in Berlin and throughout Prussia.

As a patriotic Hannoverian he was briefly imprisoned after the Prussian Anschluss in 1866. The next year he left Hannover for good. He lived in in Munich, Wurzburg and Stuttgart, and then from 1879 he lived in Italy, where he finally settled in L’Aquila. He continued to publish in German and Latin at his own expense.

In 1884 he wrote the first gay vampire story, “manor” in in his collection, Matrosengeschichten (Sailor Stories).

He died at age 70.

There are now streets named for him in Munich, Bremen and Hanover. His birthday is marked each year by a poetry reading at Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz in Munich. There is an annual pilgrimage to his grave in L’Aquila. The International Lesbian and Gay Law Association presented a Karl Heinrich Ulrichs Award in 2005 and 2009.

• “Karl Heinrich Ulrichs”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Heinrich_Ulrichs.
• PJ Nash & Michael Lombardi-Nash.  “Karl Heinrich Ulrichs”. www.angelfire.com/fl3/celebration2000.

Wallace Beery (1885 – 1949) elephant trainer, female impersonator, film star, airplane pilot.

Wallace Beery was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He joined the Ringling Brothers circus at age 16 as an assistant elephant trainer. He left after being clawed by a leopard.

He made his name as an actor doing female impersonation first on the New York stage and then in one-reel comedies in the silent era, in 30 of which he appeared as Swedish maid called Sweedie.

In the thirties he was described as as having a 'pug-ugly face, ungainly 250-pound wrestler's physique and crinkly, boyish grin [which] fascinated audiences', starred in several MGM films of that time, including The Secret Six, Grand Hotel and The Champ (for which he received an Oscar in 1932).

Louis Mayer of MGM had a soft spot for the reckless pilot who often crashed his plane in deserts and on mountains, but who flew though a stormy weather and a forced landing in St Louis to be at the bedside of dying mother in New York.

Beery remained a drag queen who would put on an evening dress and a feathered hat at the slightest provocation.

As an actor he ignored the dialogue he was given, ill-treated his co-stars, and improvised everything to the despair of the director. He was brutal with women: he bloodily raped his first wife, Gloria Swanson, on their wedding night, and without her consent got her to drink an abortificant when she was pregnant.  He was equally bad to his second wife, Rita Gilman.

In 1937 Ted Healy, a founder of the Three Stooges, was beaten to death. One account is that the beating was inflicted by Beery, Albert Broccoli (the future producer of the James Bond films) and Pat DiCicco (gangster and Broccoli’s cousin). MGM sent Beery to Europe for several months and put out a story that three students had done the beating.

Beery acted in over 230 films. One account says that he died of a heart attack on the Queen Mary at age 64. The ship owners took his body to New York and put it in a hotel to avoid bad publicity. Other accounts say that he died at home in Beverly Hills.

• Charles Higham. Merchant of Dreams: Louis B. Mayer, M.G.M., and the Secret Hollywood. New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc. 488 pp 1992: 168-9. London: Sidgewick & Jackson 1993. London: Pan Books 1994. New York: Dell 1994.
• “Gloria Swanson – Marriages”. http://home.hiwaay.net/~oliver/gsmarriages.htm
• “Wallace Beery”. Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com/name/nm0000891.
• “Wallace Beery”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Beery.
• “Sweedie”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweedie.
• “Ted Healy”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Healy.

In memoriam Ephilei (1983 – 2010).

Ephilei was raised in Chicago.

A professed Christian, she was the author of TransChristians which played particular attention to trans persons who had changed back for religious reasons.

She was also the author of Answering-Islam and WikiChristian, and was active in the asexual community. She was open about her transgender nature, but had not gone full time.

She was killed in a car accident at age 26.

• http://ephilei.blogspot.com.
• www.transchristians.org.
• http://answering-islam.org.
• http://wikichristian.org.
• “Map of Ephilei on the Web”. http://sites.google.com/site/ephilei.

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Ephilei commented on this blog several times.   We had exchanged opinions and information and cited each other about transgender Christians, especially Jerry Leach and Perry Desmond.  

I do recommend the TransChristians site.

Daniel Paul Schreber (1842 - 1911) jurist, mental patient, theologian.

Daniel Paul was the son of a physician, Daniel Moritz Schreber, who had published pamphlets about taming rebellious children and imposed orthopaedic devices on his own children. Daniel Paul Schreber’s elder brother, Daniel Gustav Schreber committed suicide in his 30s.

Daniel Paul Schreber became Presiding Judge of the Saxon High Court of Appeals. In 1893 at the age of 42, having just been appointed the Senatspräsident of the Superior Court in Dresden, he became convinced that he was being transformed into a woman, and that he was to be the wife of God. He was diagnosed as having dementia praecox and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic and stayed there until the new century. After release he published his memoirs of the experience in 1903.

Sigmund Freud wrote an analysis based on Schreber’s memoirs but without ever meeting him. His diagnosis was paranoid dementia, based on repressed homosexual feelings for his physician.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari interpreted Schreber’s experiences in terms of the experience of power in late capitalism.

Jacques Lacan said that Schreber was incapable of being the phallus that the mother lacks and that he was left with the solution of being the woman that men lack.

Morton Schatzman interpreted Schreber’s experiences as mirroring the physical restraint methods used by Schreber’s father to control children.

Richard Ekins, deviating from his declared adherence to grounded theory, uses Schreber as his one example of a solitary ‘male femaler’ who living before the terms transsexuality or even transvestity had been developed, must construct concepts from his own life experience.

Schreber has been described as the 'most quoted patient in psychiatry'. He died during a subsequent hospitalization.

• Daniel Paul Schreber. Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken. Leipzig: O. Mutze 1903. Translated into English by Ida MacAlpine & Richard A. Hunter: Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. London: Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd. 1955.
• Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia. Translated as Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) 1911. Standard Edition, vol 12; The Penguin Freud Library, vol 9.
• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L'anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. 1972. Translated into English by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
• Morton Schatzman. Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family. London: Allen Lane 1973. New York: Random House 1973. Penguin. 1976.
• C. Barry Chabot. Freud on Schreber: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Critical Act. The University of Massachusetts Press. 1982.
• David B Allison, Prado de Oliveira, Mark S Roberts & Allen S Weiss (ed). Psychosis and Sexual Identity: Towards a Post-Analytic View of the Schreber Case. State University of New York Press. 1988. A collection of recent work.
• Richard Ekins. Male femaling : a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing. London & New York: Routledge. 1997: 110-3, 128.
• Jacques Lacan. "On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis", in Écrits: A Selection (translated by Bruce Fink), pp. 531-214. New York: Norton. 2002: 92.
• Brent Dean Robbins. “The Psychotic Dr. Schreber Page: The Life of Daniel Paul Schreber, Mystic and Madman”. Mythos & Logos. mythosandlogos.com/Schreber.html.

 EN.Wikipedia DE.Wikipedia
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As we have seen with Charles Lowman, Frederick Taylor and Robert Baden-Powell, pillars of society are quite often secretive or even public cross-dressers. However such persons do not normally have mental breakdowns.

I would like to repeat the paragraph on Schreber that I wrote in my review of Richard Ekins’ Male Femaling:

Under Constituting he needs examples of femalers who have ignored or have no access to common terms like 'transvestite' or 'transsexual' and invent their own terms. Despite the many persons he spoke to over the 17 years he has no example of such a person that he has met, and falls back on the Daniel Schreber case made famous by Sigmund Freud and discussed in countless books. This example is unnerving in that it is the only example in the book of a schizophrenic trans person. He should either have discussed schizophrenics elsewhere in the book or have not mentioned this one. Schizophrenic trans-ness is a topic of great interest, but it belongs in a different book. To bring it in just to fill one slot in his schema is not reasonable.

As many of us know, if you are schizophrenic or have dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality) as well as transsexual, what the shrinks call ‘co-morbidity’, you are very unlikely to be approved by the gatekeepers. This is an area which needs more attention, but I have not found a suitable book or blog on the topic.

As we can see in the sample of theorizing that I give above, many theorists from very different schools have used Schreber and his memoirs to pursue their own agendas. All of which make it the more difficult to understand Schreber as a person. And - an important point - their theories turn Schreber into any else but a transgender person.

Note that the de.wikipedia article does not even mention the trans aspect of Schreber.

Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797 - 1856) male impersonator, actress, theatre manager.

Lucia Bartolozzi was born in London to an Italian art-dealer and violinist father and a German pianist and piano-teacher mother.

At the age of sixteen she briefly married Armand Vestris, a French dancer, ballet-master and rake. In 1815 Armand launched her career with a private show at the King's theatre in the Haymarket.

Lucia Vestris played many breeches parts such as Don Giovanni and MacHeath. In 1830 James Planche began working with her in burlesques, which were similar to pantomimes, but included daring and extravagant sets.

In 1838 she married Charles Mathews. They took over the management of Covent Garden Theatre and put on the first known version of Love’s Labour Lost since 1605, with herself as Rosaline. In 1840 she starred in the first relatively uncut A Midsummer Night’s Dream casting herself as Oberon, which started a tradition of female Oberons that lasted for 70 years. Her legs became very famous, and plaster casts of them were sold. There is even a song about such casts being stolen. She was still playing Breeches Parts when she was fifty.

She was the first woman ever to manage a London stage, and was the first stage manager to use realistic sets.

• Clifford Williams. Madame Vestris - a Theatrical Biography. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973.
• William Worthen Appleton. Madame Vestris and the London Stage. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.
• Gerald Frow. "Oh, Yes It Is"! A History of Pantomime. London: British Broadcasting Corp, 1985: 90-5.

 EN.Wikipedia.

Ross Hamilton (1889-1965) female impersonator.

Ross Hamilton was raised in Pugwash, Nova Scotia.

In the Great War he enlisted as a private and worked as an ambulance driver in France. He was then selected to be part of the Dumbells, an army entertainment unit that became the most famous of the 30 or so Canadian army shows. Although formally part of the regular army, the show was entirely funded and organized by the YMCA.

Ross had a remarkable soprano voice, and his Marjorie character was an opera diva. He continued this act with the Dumbells Canadian and US tours until 1932.

In 1939 he was re-engaged with the rank of lieutenant to organize entertainment units. In 1940 his act was was featured as a talent show in a National Film Board production about new recruits, Letter From Camp Borden.  However he was caught doing more with the new recruits than he was supposed to. He was quietly discharged by the medical board ‘for reasons other than medical’.

He continued as an entertainer and retired to Nova Scotia. He died of heart disease.

• Raymond Spottiswoode (dir). Letter From Camp Borden. With Ross Hamilton. Canada. NFB. 17 mins 1940.
• Max Braithwaite. 'The rise and fall of The Dumbells,' Maclean's, 1 Jan 1952.
• “Ross Hamilton, World War I Dumbell, Dies”. The Montreal Gazette. Sep 30, 1965. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19650930&id=eaUtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=h58FAAAAIBAJ&pg=7029,6530343.
• Paul Jackson. One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World War II. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2009: 72-3.
• “Ross Hamilton, entertainer (1889 - 1965)”. The Virtual Gramophone: Canadian Historical Sound Recordings. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/4/4/m2-1011-e.html.
• “Ross Hamilton”. Ambisextrous. http://scaa.sk.ca/gallery/genderimpersonators/ross_hamilton/hamilton_index.htm.

Russell Reid (1943 - ) psychiatrist.

Russell Warwick Stedman Reid was born in New Zealand. He trained as a doctor at Otago University in Dunedin (where John Money had taught psychology). He served as a captain with the NZ army in Vietnam. He then completed his training as a psychiatrist at Maudsley and Bethlehem Royal Hospitals in London. He was also an exchange resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore with John Money.

From 1982 he was a consultant at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, and also ran a private practice as an alternate route to the NHS path for transsexuals. He worked with surgeons Peter Philip, James Dalrymple & Michael Royle. He was a member of the parliamentary forum on transsexuality, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ expert committee on transsexuality.   He helped and guided hundreds of transsexuals.

Like John Money and Ray Blanchard, Dr Reid became interested in apotemnophilia, and referred two such patients to Robert Smith, surgeon at Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary who amputated their legs at their request. Then the hospital Trust stopped the procedure. Dr Reid was featured in the BBC2 program Complete Obsession about apotemnophilia.

In 2004 as the Gender Recognition Bill was proceeding through parliament, Reid faced an complaint to the General Medical Council that he too easily accepted patients for hormone therapy and surgery. The complaint was brought by four of his colleagues at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, psychiatrists James Barrett, Richard Green, Donald Montgomery and senior registrar Stuart Lorimer on behalf of four of his former patients. A fifth patient filed a separate complaint. (For more on the five patients see Batty, 2007). The patients included a convicted paedophile who thought that being female would get him closer to her boyfriend’s children, but lost interest in a sex change when that did not work out, and a woman with manic depression who thought that she was turning into Jesus and becoming male would help. In addition Charles Kane, Claudia and four other former patients started legal claims for damages against Dr Reid.

Reid retired from his NHS post in 2005, and in 2006, trans man and doctor, Richard Curtis, took over Reid’s private practice.

The complaints were formally addressed in 2007. The charge was that he did not adhere to the HBIGDA (now WPATH) Standards of Care in that he prescribed cross-gender hormones and recommended gender surgery without adequate assessment. Many of his professional peers spoke in his defence, as did more than 250 of his former patients who posted to a blog. He was found guilty of Serious Professional Misconduct, mostly for failing to communicate fully with patients’ family doctor (a rule that many doctors are unaware of) and not documenting his reasons for departing from the HBIGDA Standards of Care guidelines sufficiently. However, the panel "determined that it would be ... in the public interest as well as your own interests if you were to return to practice..." and allowed him to return to practice, subject to some normal, by GMC Fitness To Practice panel standards, restrictions on his practice and hormone prescriptions for the next 12 months.

* Not the Chicago plastic surgeon, nor the editor of The Sunday Post, nor the Liverpool graphic designer, nor Russell Reed, the impersonator, nor Russell Reid Ortiz the baseball player.

• D. Di de Cegli, James O. Dalrymple., L. Gooren, Richard Green, John Money, & Russell Reid. Transsexualism: The Current Medical Viewpoint. London: Press For Change. 1996.
• Russell Reid, Melanie McMullen, Stacy Novak, Ashley Carrington, et al. INSIGHTS into transvestism, transsexualism and other gender presentations. Insights. Nd
• Jemima Harrison & Vivienne King (dir). “Complete Obsession”. Science and Nature. With Russell Reid and Robert Smith. BBC2 9:30pm Thursday 17 Feb 2000. Transcript at: www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/obsession_script.shtml.
• Carl Elliott. “A New Way to be Mad”. The Atlantic. December 2000. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/4671/1/.
• David Batty,. “GMC inquiry into gender change expert“ The Guardian. 20 Jan 2004 www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4839988-103690,00.html.
• Russell Reid. “Minefields and Pitfalls in Gender Identity Disorder, for both Patient and Doctor”. Gendys Conference, 2004. www.gender.org.uk/conf/2004/04reid.htm
• Peter Tatchell. “Listening is not a crime”. The Guardian. 6 October 2006. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/oct/06/drrussellreidunjustlyaccus.
• “Fitness to Practise Panel Hearing: Dr Russell Warwick Stedman Reid” General Medical Council. 25 May 2007. http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/05/25/reid.PDF.
• David Batty. “Q&A: Russell Reid Inquiry”. The Guardian. 25 May 2007. http://society.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329615991-105965,00.html.
• David Batty. “Russell Reid inquiry: key figures: David Batty profiles the main people in the inquiry into the treatment of transsexuals by Dr Russell Reid”. The Guardian. 25 May 2007. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/may/25/health.society.

EN.Wikipedia    http://russellreid.blogspot.com/      IMDB    

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Russell Reid has kept his private life very so.  There is no mention of a wife or civil partner or anything.

I am one of hundreds who passed through Dr Reid's gatekeeping and have never complained to the GMC or taken him to court.