Inga Langdon (1952 - ) film-maker, artist, healer.

Chris Langdon was raised in Indiana. His father was a newspaper photographer and he started making Super 8 films while still a teenager. He was educated at the California Institute of the Arts from 1971-6, where he produced around forty well-regarded 16mm and 35 mm short films. The films were noted for satirizing tendencies in the Los Angeles art world, and using tropes taken from popular culture to question how we look at images. Chris liked to blur low art and high art, and was also an anti-war activist.

After 1976, he quit film-making, and took up representative painting which was unfashionable at that time. Later work was in graphics, sculpture, lithography, assemblage, photography, and other media.

Chris transitioned as Inga in the late 1990s. She studied traditional Chinese medicine, graduating in 1997, and lived in China for several years.

Film preservationist, Mark Toscano, tracked her down through the internet in 2009, and in January 2010 curated a retrospective of her work.

*Not Chris Langan also born 1952, the bouncer with a high IQ, nor the Australian pop singer,

• "Chris Langdon". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Langdon.
• "Chris Langdon "L.A. Avant-Garde". Orphans7. http://sites.google.com/site/orphans7/home/chris-langdon.
• Reed Johnson. "A showcase for experimental filmmaker Chris Langdon". Los Angeles Times, Jan 25, 2010. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/25/entertainment/la-et-langdon25-2010jan25.

Edith Ferguson (188? - 196?) female impersonator, instructor.

++Revised March 2013 to correct who was behind the 1952 Transvestia.

Edith Ferguson (or Enid Foreman) was a female impersonator, and perhaps also a lawyer, in southern California, who retired in the early 1950s.

Edith advertised in Billboard and Variety magazine offering ‘personalized instruction’ in female impersonation. For a fee of a few hundred dollars she sent 50 or more mimeographed lectures on how to do makeup, how to wear clothes, how to sound and appear like a woman.

Edith, Muriel (later known as Virginia Prince) and other transvestites started meeting at the Long Beach home of Joan Thornton.  In 1952, they started a mimegraphed newsletter which they called Transvestia.  The initial subscription list was built around Louise Lawrence’s address book, and the subscription list for Edith’s instruction course.  However when Prince restarted Transvestia in 1960, Edith and Joan were no longer involved.

She spoke out against transsexual surgery, but hoped that the Christine Jorgensen publicity might ‘redound to the benefit of transvestites in general’.

• Darrell Raynor. A Year Among the Girls. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1966. New York: Lancer Books, 1968: 105-6.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 180-1.

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A few hundred dollars in the early 1950s would be a few thousands now.

The Standish Hotel, Hull, Quebec, Halloween, 1950

Photograph by Michael Berens, held in the Library and Archives Canada.

M. Lefort (1799 - 1864).

Marie Madeleine was raised as a girl. At the age of sixteen, she developed a moustache and whiskers, and she decided to dress as a man.

The same year, 1815, Lefort was presented at the Paris Faculté de Medicine, and examined by several renowned doctors. A commission was appointed to determine her sex. Two experts, François Chaussier, obstetrician, and Philippe Petit-Radel, surgeon, declared that she was a malformed male, but Pierre Béclard, professor of anatomy, insisted that he was a female but with a hypertrophied clitoris, a strong voice and a beard.

At the age of nineteen, Lefort decided that psychologically he was a man. He then avoided the attentions of authorities and journalists despite seeking medical attention a few times, until 1864 when as a man with a long grey beard he was admitted as a patient to the Hotel Dieu de Paris. He was treated for pleurisy, but died shortly from the disease. An autopsy revealed that he had all the 'essential organs of a woman'

• Pierre Béclard. Bulletins de la Faculté, 1815: 273.
• C.J.S. Thompson. The Mysteries of Sex: Women Who Posed as Men and Men Who Impersonated Women London: Hutchinson. 1938. New York: Causeway Books. New York: Dorset Press, 1993: 17.
• AliceDomurat Dreger. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge, Ma, Harvard University Press. 2000: 54, 55, 56, 57.

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Despite a clear decision by Lefort to live as a man, all the medical accounts refer to him as Marie Madeleine and none give his male name, nor any details of what he did all his life.  How did he live? Did he marry?  Nothing is said.

Patti Dawn Swansson (1950–) sports writer.

Pat Doyle knew from his abusive father that he was not supposed to wear dresses, so he learned to to hide them. "It was suffocating. Imagine yourself six feet under, in a casket, and knowing that you're alive, but nobody else knows you're alive. They think you're dead."

Pat and Patti, both

He grew up to have three failed marriages, and became a respected sports writer for the Toronto Sun, Toronto Star, Calgary Sun, Winnipeg Sun and Winnipeg Tribune. He covered major sports events, including Super Bowls, Major League Baseball, the Stanley Cup playoffs, world championship boxing, the PGA Tour, professional tennis, and once hosted his own radio talk show in Winnipeg.

At the beginning of the new century, Pat moved to Victoria, BC, and she started transition in 2008, with surgery in 2009. "I'm finally living, The transition was absolute joy. A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing."

She is working at a couple of part-time jobs, and still does some sports writing. She has also written a book about her life.

• Paul Friesen. "New life after sex change". Winnipeg Sun, Nov 26, 2010. Online at: http://forum.beginninglifeforums.com/index.php/t/7483/3b87ce9f4245d930b52a07648c7de7b1.
• Paul Friesen. "Bomber shocked to hear about writer's sex change". Winnipeg Sun, Nov 26, 2010. Online at: http://forum.beginninglifeforums.com/index.php/m/121828/02fc9d9eed6a3b98a75fe17f9393d80c/#msg_121828.
• "Patti Dawn Swansson". Bleacher Report. http://bleacherreport.com/users/408633-patti-dawn-swansson.

Tai Wakefield (1948 - ) inmate.

Douglas Wakefield, married and a father of two, was arrested and convicted in 1974 for strangling his uncle in Gipton, Leeds, beating him with a hammer and stabbing him 48 times with a garden fork.

Later in HMP Parkhurst he killed another inmate. He twice took prison officers as hostage, and has done more than 1,000 hours in solitary. He also had a second marriage while behind bars.

In the mid-1990s he applied for and was allowed to change sex. After surgery, as Tai, she was transferred to New Hall prison for women.

There she met Thelma Purchase, who is doing a minimum 30 years for suffocating a disabled man who had left her £60,000 in his will. They decided to be joined in a civil partnership. They were able to pay the £345 wedding costs out of money that they had saved in jail.

• Alastair Taylor & John Kay. "Sex-change killer to wed lesbian murderess in jail ". The Sun, 29 Mar 2010. www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2910808/Sex-change-killer-to-wed-lesbian-murderess-in-jail.html.
• Vicki Robinson. "Leeds sex swap strangler to marry murderer". Yorkshire Evening Post, 30 Mar 2010. www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/Leeds-sex-swap-strangler-to.6189760.jp.

Maryam Hatoon Molkara (1950 - ) activist.

Fereydoon Molkara worked in television before transition. In 1978, before the Iranian Revolution, Fereydoon wrote to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was then in exile, requesting religious guidance. Khomeini replied that the case was different from homosexuality, and said that she should follow the Islamic obligations of being a woman.

After the Revolution, Fereydoon, like all other transgender persons in Iran, was seriously harassed. She was made to wear men’s clothing, forced to take male hormones, and confined in a psychiatric hospital.
In 1983, she tried approaching Khomeini directly and was badly beaten up by his bodyguards before succeeding. However Khomeini did give Fereydoon a religious authorization for sex-change surgery. This has been taken to be a fatwa that covers other transgender persons as well.

Subsequently Maryam struggled to organize transgender persons in Iran, and introduce medical standards. However she was not happy with procedures in Iran, and had surgery in Thailand in 2001. She runs the major transsexual campaign group in Iran, and frequently has to bail out trans persons who have been arrested.

• Nazila Fathi. “As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex”. The New York Times. Aug 2, 2004. www.nytimes.com/2004/08/02/international/middleeast/02iran.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091489991-2sBf34Gerj3nlXAaASXZcQ.
• Robert Tait. “A Fatwa for Freedom”. The Guardian. 27 July 2005. www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1536658,00.html.
• Angus McDowell. "The Ayatollah and the transsexual". The Independent. 25 November 2004. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-ayatollah-and-the-transsexual-534482.html.

  EN.Wikipedia.