Jerry Leach (1941 - ) pastor, counselor.

Jerry was cross-dressing with neighborhood girls from the age of three. At that age his father said how much cuter Jerry was as a girl. Jerry kept dressing in his mother’s clothes, and at 17 was badly beaten when his father found out. Jerry told his mother while being cross-dressed, but she never mentioned it again.

He joined the US Navy after highschool, and after 18 months told the base psychiatrist of his yearnings, and was quickly discharged.

He went to college and found a woman to marry. He told her of his cross-dressing before the wedding, and she stayed with him. After college he trained as a pastor, although his attitude to his god was ambivalent. He mixed crossdressing, including going out to malls as femme with his pastoral duties. His femme name was Jennifer Leach, the name his parents had picked when they were hoping for a girl.

All this strained his relationship with his wife and two children. In the late 1980s, they tried a separation. Jennifer found a sympathetic therapist and started taking female hormones, and was accepted to go forward to surgery after lying that she was divorced, that she was living and working fulltime as female and had found a boyfriend.

However Jerry was still reverting to male and living with his family. He felt guilty about what he was doing to his family, and, after paying the surgery fees, was on the verge of shooting himself, when he had a religious experience.

He then sought out Christian counselors and put his transvestity behind him. He joined Crossover in 1988.

Leach runs Reality Resources, founded 1999, the only US Christian organization to advertise therapy that will "heal" transgender people. This is where Focus on the Family and Exodus direct their trans clients. Judy/Josef Kirchner wrote for Reality Resources for a while. Leach denies that there is any genetic aspect to transsexuality or transvestity and attributes them to psychological trauma experienced in early childhood, partly following the books by Elizabeth Moberly.

He claims to have worked with over 1600 transgender persons in the last 25 years. He claims a 100% success rate in ‘curing’ any trans person who continues to work with him for over four years. This requires weekly visits at $85 a time.

*Not the president of the World Affairs Council of America.

• “Jerry Leach”. TransChristians. www.transchristians.org/people/jerry-leach.
• David Kyle Foster. “An Interview With A Former Transsexual and Transvestite”. Mastering Life Newsletter. 12 & 13. 1996. www.masteringlife.org/index.php?view=article&catid=43%3Atransgender-disorders&id=129%3Ainterview-with-a-former-transsexual-and-transvestite&option=com_content&Itemid=29 and also at www.transchristians.org/people/jerry-leach/leach-interview.
• Jerry Leach. Jennifer or Jerry? Reality Resources Publications. www.leaderu.com/stonewall/pages/jerry_l.html. No longer Available.
• Jerry Leach. Flight Toward Woman. Reality Resources Publications (self published booklet, previously titled Cowboys Don’t Cross-dress). 2001.

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Most of the above is taken from Leach's interview with David Foster on the Mastering Life site. However I do recommend the TransChristian pages on Leach. They subject his various writings and interviews to a close reading, and find lots of inconsistencies. Note that Leach is very coy about where he was educated. Thus his professional qualifications are not confirmed. He is not qualified as a psychologist. There has been mention in the past of PhD but that claim has disappeared.

Zelda R. Suplee (1908 - 1989) Director of Erickson Educational Foundation.

Updated 15 March 2012, 2 Feb 2013, 15 October 2013, 21March 2016.

Zelda was raised in New York City, and did a BA at New Jersey College for Women (now part of Rutgers University).

She was a keen nudist. With her then husband, Reed Suplee (1916-86), she owned and managed three nudist camps in the period 1930s – 1950s, and was in Doris Wishman’s Diary of a Nudist, 1961, and also in The Moving Finger, 1963 and The Parisienne and the Prudes, 1964 – all nudist films. She was the first full-frontal nude in Playboy magazine (in black-and-white).

For 17 years she was editor and researcher of True Story, True Detective and Master Detective Magazine.  She was a consulting sexologist, an hypnotist and one of the first to do past-life regressing, and was interested in all kinds of health and psychic phenomena. 

In 1965, after Reed Erickson had founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), he hired Zelda to run it. From her office in New York she and lesbian feminist activist Phyllis Saperstein (they had met in a nudist camp) managed the daily operations, and the contacts with transsexuals who asked for help. Erickson made the final decisions about who and what he funded, but spent much of his time in Baton Rouge and then Mexico with his family.

In 1969 EEF and the Albany Trust co-sponsored a symposium, “The First International Congress on Gender Identity" in London.  Zelda was the co-ordinator. In 1971 she was part of the First National Conference on Religion and the Homosexual, which took part in New York, and several time attended police conventions where EEF pamphlets were distributed.  She compiled the EEF newsletter 1969-76 which reported the ongoing dialogue between EEF, trans people and associated professionals.  In 1971 EEF sponsored production of a 28-minute docuentary, I am Not This Body, which featured a discussion in the EEF office between Zelda, Leo Wollman, two trans women and actress Pamela Lincoln (who was purportedly seeking information about transsexuals).

Also around that time Zelda introduced Doris Wishman, whom she had known since Diary of a Nudist, to Leo Wollman, which resulted in the film Adam or Eve, 1971, which was later recut with additional footage and finally released as Let Me Die a Woman, 1978.

Zelda was also Erickson's contact with psychic research and healing. In 1971 her apartment was the location for pioneering infrared photography of psychic energy.  In 1976 she was given a pre-publication copy of the book, A Course in Miracles, which she passed on to Reed who financed its printing.

Zelda was the public face of EEF until it closed in 1977.

In 1981, at the 7th International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, HBIGDA presented lifetime achievement awards to Reed Erickson, Zelda  and Harry Benjamin.

In 1983 she moved to Los Angeles to handle Erickson's dealings with ONE Inc..

Zelda introduced Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna to some of the transsexuals whom they interviewed for their book, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, 1985.

After EEF, she moved to Galveston to start the Janus Information Facility (JIF) with Paul Walker who was a co-founder of HBIGDA.

She died aged 81 in Los Angeles.

• Doris Wishman (dir).  Diary of a Nudist, with Zelda R Suplee as the camp director.  US 72 mins 1961.  
• Nicholas Ghosh.  "Tribute to Zelda R. Suplee".  Gender Review, December 1978.  
• Walter J. Meyer,  Paul A. Walker & Zelda R. Suplee. 1981. "A Survey of Transsexual Hormonal Treatment in Twenty Gender‐treatment Centers". Journal of Sex Research, 17, 4: 344-349.  Abstract
• Suzanne J. Kessler &Wendy MacKenna. Gender: A Ethnomethodological Approach. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987: xiii. 
• Ingo Swann. Remote Viewing: The Real Story: An Autobiographical Memoir. 1996: Chp 5. www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/RealStoryCh5.html.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 211-2 ,216, 227, 231, 236, 239-240, 257, 280.
• Andy Humm & Joan Nixon. “Phyllis Saperstein Recalled”. Gay City. 12/29/2005. gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=17007725. 
• Michael J. Bowen.  " 'StrangerHer': The Peculiar Saga of Let Me Die a Woman".  Booklet included in Synapse DVD release of Let Me Die a Woman, 2005. 
• Aaron Devor. "Building a Better World for Transpeople: Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation".  International Journal of Transgenderism, 10, 1, 2006: 47-68.  
•  "'What's My Line?' segment from the 50s (60s)?".   Clothes Free Forum, April 2008.  www.clothesfreeforum.com/archive/index.php/t-12092.html.  
• C. Todd White. Pre-Gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009: 204. 

IMDB     

This clip is of Zelda, using the pseudonym Yolande Reed, when she appeared on What's My Line in 1953.

Herbert Dyce Murphy (1879 – 1971) spy, explorer, whaler, sheep rancher.

Murphy was born to a privileged family in Melbourne and finished his education at Oxford University, England. Before university and during the vacations he acquired considerable experience on ships particularly on expeditions in the Arctic.

He played a female role in a Greek play while at Oxford, and on that basis was recruited by military intelligence. He already was an officer in the territorial army. His task was to live as a woman in Belgium and France. He was trained to be a woman by a family friend, Lady Broughton – he found entering and leaving hansom cabs to be the most difficult. As Edith Murphy, he closely studied the French and Belgian railways. He enjoyed the assignment which continued for five years. A French lieutenant proposed to Edith in Paris. It is also said that Edith ran into Herbert's mother in London. Mother, after recognizing Edith, smoothed things over by saying that she had always wanted a daughter.

He always maintained that the woman with a white parasol in the painting, ‘The Arbour’ by Phillip Fox, originally sketched at Bath in 1902, was himself, Fox accepting Edith as a young woman.

After a few years the assignment was becoming more difficult as he lost his youth. Returning to being a man, he worked in whaling and voyages to the polar regions. He was rejected for Ernest Shackleton’s 1908 Antarctic expedition for supposed effeminacy, but was accepted on Douglas Mawson’s 1911-4 expedition.
He joined the Australian Imperial force in 1916, but was dismissed for inferior vision.

He bought a country property where he ran sheep and turned it into a holiday centre for poor Melbourne children. A High-Anglican, he was for 35 years a member of synod, and was also a shire councillor for 10 years. He was in demand as a speaker and as a singer of shanties. For three months annually, he sailed to Antarctica with the Norwegian whaling fleet. He claimed that he continued doing this until the age of 85 by lying about his age.

Like Robert Baden-Powell, Murphy married late in in life, in 1934 at the age of 54. He and his wife had no children.

The character of the transgender Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair, 1979, is at least partly based on Herbert Murphy as Edith, and especially on his encounter with his mother.

• S. Murray-Smith, 'Murphy, Herbert Dyce (1879 - 1971)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, Melbourne University Press, 1986, pp 637-638. www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A100622b.htm.
• Heather Rossiter. Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer: The Life of Herbert Dyce Murphy. Jane Curry Publishing. 2005.

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This is an odd story. In some ways there is either too little or too much cross-dressing. If he was so at home as a woman, how could he do it for five years, and then never again. Maybe the years as a 'Lady Spy' never happened. There are no official records of the medals he was supposedly awarded.

Murray-Smith says:

"Something of a Munchhausen perhaps—some of his claims appear to be fantasies. However, much of even his most outrageous stories 'check out', and in his embellishments he was striving for the symmetry of art."

Murray-Smith also quotes the naturalist, C.F. Laseron:

"He [Murphy] holds himself up to ridicule as well as his other characters. Yet he never loses his air of diffidence; his whole method is apologetic. His stories have a curious suggestion of truth; they are convincing and at the same time too impossible to be true."

So Murphy, a good story teller, span a yarn of his years in skirts, and White, Murray-Smith and Rossiter were all too happy to just accept it. Five years was a long time to live as female without hormones and shaving daily. Of male-born non-intersex persons of Murphy's generation, very few succeded in living full-time as female. Would the androgyny of youth make Murphy feminine enough?


A review of Rossiter's biography by Crusader Hills makes a point:

As a distant relative, Rossiter has done Murphy’s life a disservice by reducing it to one without any discernible psychosexual colour. Rossiter works on the basis that because Murphy married late in life he was undoubtedly and exclusively heterosexual. Maybe he was, but she wouldn’t know that. In describing his reasons for cross-dressing in public (two times of which were documented extensively, including in a photograph) she posits that he was testing whether or not he would get away with it. Any biographer with her salt would have at least entertained the notion that Murphy’s cross-dressing was probably not confined to once or twice in public, plus the several spying missions he did for the British government on the continent. Nor does she consider the significance of his pursuance of homosocial settings, such as the sailing and whaling ships, and exploring expeditions he joined. Ultimately though, the fault of this biography is not in its blindness to alternative readings of Murphy’s life or the bland lack of curiosity that Rossiter displays, it is simply a piece of vanity writing from the perspective of unexplored privilege.

Herbert Charles Jerome Pollitt (1871 - 1942) female impersonator, art collector.

Jerome Pollitt was a stage female impersonator under the name of Diane De Rougy. He took his femme name from a celebrated courtesan and actress Liane de Pougy.

In 1898, whilst appearing at the Cambridge Footlights club, he met and had an affair with the then unknown Aleister Crowley. Crowley describes his lover:

'Pollitt was rather plain than otherwise. His face was made tragic by the terrible hunger of the eyes and the bitter sadness of the mouth. He possessed one physical beauty - his hair. This was very plentiful and he wore it rather long. It was what is called a shock. But its colour was pale gold, like spring sunshine, and its texture was of the finest gossamer.'

Crowley would later write that 'I lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me'.

Pollitt was also a friend of Aubrey Beardsley, and was painted by James Whistler. He was an art collector. He was the original of the 'Babe' in E.F. Benson's 'The Babe, B.A.'.

Crowley immortalized Pollitt in The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist - a collection of poems which are a blend of Persian mysticism and the glorification of homosexual love, written in the style of ghazals by an imaginary seventeenth-century poet, Abdullah El Haji, supposedly translated into English by an Anglo-Indian, Major Lutiy, and discussed by an equally imaginary Anglican clergyman. In the closing sections of the book, the name of Herbert Charles Jerome Pollitt is spelled out in the first letter of each line, to be followed (but in reverse order) by that of Aleister Crowley.

Pollitt did not share Crowley's spiritual quest, and Crowley ended the affair shortly after going down from Cambridge in 1898. He later recognized this as an 'imbecile' mistake, and he continued to regret it.

• Aleister Crowley, (ed John Symonds and Kenneth Grant). The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography. Bantam Books. 1971: 130-2,137-8.
• Susan Roberts. The Magician Of The Golden Dawn: The Story Of Aleister Crowley. Contemporary Books, Inc. 1978: 34-5.
• John Symonds. The Great Beast: the Life and Magick of Aleister Crowley. Mayflower. 1973: 177-8.
• “Pollitt, Herbert Charles Jerome, 1871-1942, collector. Photograph albums: Guide”. Harvard University Library. http://oasis.harvard.edu:10080/oasis/deliver/~hou01559.
• Alex Owen. "Aleister Crowley in the Desert". www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/642011.html.

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Crowley (1875 - 1947) says that Pollitt was ten years older, and this has been repeated in many places, but the age difference was actually only four years.

Katey Red (1981 - ) rapper.

Kenyon Carter was punished by his mom when he painted his fingernails at age 5, but kept playing with dolls while his cousins played football.

In late teenage, as Katey she started performing at parties, and met a disc jockey from Take Fo’ Records. She was signed to capture the gay and female market. She released her first full album in 2000, and soon after started taking female hormones.

She is regarded as the first 'homosexual' rapper and bounce star. She is regarded as the pioneer of ‘sissy rap’. She is 6”2’ (1.88 m) and wears a size 14 (Eur:46) shoe.

• Neil Strauss. “A Most Unlikely Star”. The New York Times May 28 2000. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E00E6DB163DF93BA15756C0A9669C8B63.
• John McDonnell. "Scene and heard: Bounce and 'sissy rap' ". The Guardian. 29 Sept 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/sep/29/sissy.rap.neworleans.bounce
• http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=233546943.

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One would wish that the use of the word 'sissy' has a defiance as in our take back of the word 'queer'. However I am not finding this in the news articles.

Note the attitude in the Strauss article that if Katey is transgender, she is therefore homosexual!

Bounce was a music form specific to New Orleans, but apparently has moved out across the US south with the post-Katrina diaspora.

Note the penultimate paragraph in McDonnell's article: "Not everyone can come to terms with this new form of bounce rappers though. The rise of sissy rappers has led to people like seminal rap group Partners-N-Crime almost turning their back on the genre."

George Alan O’Dowd (1961 - ) singer, DJ, onetime androgyne.

George was raised in Eltham, London by Irish parents.

As a participant in the New Romantic movement in the early 1980s he and his friend Marilyn (Peter Robinson) were noted for their androgynous dressing. Malcolm McLaren, who had run the Sex Pistols, arranged for Boy George, as he became known, to perform with Bow Wow Wow.
 
Shortly after George and three others formed Culture Club. The group took off and had singles and albums at the top of the charts.

George’s dress style resulted in him being regarded as the most famous transvestite of the period, but he frequently insisted in interviews that he did not wear female underwear, and that he was proud to be a man, with no need to be a woman. He claimed that his dressing was more like that of a priest. In his 1995 biography, he said: "I wanted people to know I was gay. In many people's eyes, I was the premier poof, the benchmark by which others would be measured”, although in the 1980s he had avoided admitting to being gay and had famously said that he prefered a ‘nice cup of tea’ to sex.

He developed a serious heroin addiction. Bandmate Michael Rudetski died of a heroin overdose. George’s brother David attempted to save his life by talking about the addiction on national television. In 1986 George was arrested for heroin possession.

His solo career after Culture Club was less successful. For a while he wrote songs under the name Angela Dust. He had a new hit with “The Crying Game”, released with the film in 1992. He started DJing and was asked to mix compilation discs by Fantazia and Ministry of Sound. In 2002/3 he starred in the musical Taboo, based on his own life, but playing a different character. The show lasted for two years.

In 2005, in New York, he called the police over a robbery and was arrested for cocaine possession. He was sentenced to garbage duty for ‘wasting police time’.

In 2008 he was convicted of assaulting and imprisoning a Norwegian prostitute in his home in east London. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, but was released after 4, and was required to wear an ankle monitor for 90 days.

• Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984:112-3.
• Boy George and Spencer Bright. Take It Like a Man: The Autobiography of Boy George. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1995.
• Boy George and Paul Gorman. Straight. London: Century, 2005.
• Andy McSmith. “Boy George: A hero destroyed by drug 'degradation' “. The Independent. 17 Jan 2009. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/boy-george-a-hero-destroyed-by-drug-degradation-1418230.html.
• “Boy George”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_George.
• www.boygeorgelive.com.

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I wasn't in London for New Romanticism, and never related to that phase of the rock-pop rainbow.

'Gender variance' is a wide term. That is why I chose it. Obviously George O'Dowd comes under the wide umbrella, even though his dressing up is only a phase that he passed through. However there is no rule that says that to be gender variant, you have to be so for life. I don't see O'Dowd as either a transvestite or a drag queen. He seems to be more of a theovestite (dressing (up) as a priest). Even in the '80s I was put off by his insistence that he wore male underwear under his frocks.

Some persons have complained that I included Rudy Guliani on this blog. Guliani is a lot closer to being transgender than O'Dowd is. And he does not go around insisting that he has male underwear under his skirts.

Was Arthur James Balfour (1848 - 1930) intersex?

Arthur Balfour was born in East Lothian. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge where he read Moral sciences, and took a second-class degree.

He expected to marry his cousin, May Littleton, but she died of typhus when he was 27. He then remained a bachelor. He is credited with the expression: "Nothing matters very much and most things don't matter at all”. In middle-age he had a long friendship with Mary Wemyss, who was later Countess of Elcho, but biographers have not established that this was a sexual relationship. On the other hand he was in good terms with Harold Nicolson, the homosexual diplomat husband of Vita Sackville-West.

Balfour was a product of nepotism, in the most literal sense, in that his uncle, Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, the last Prime Minister to rule from the House of Lords, paved most of his way. This is often taken to be the origin of the expression: “Bob’s your uncle”. In the words of Ben Pimlott, Balfour is best described as an 'imperturbably arrogant, effortless mediocrity'. He was born into a family with several members active in Parliament; at 21 he inherited an enormous fortune; at 26 his uncle arranged for him to have a safe Conservative seat. His uncle arranged his promotion within the commons, and in 1902 handed over the premiership to him. He was Prime Minister 1902-5.

His imagination was limited in that he had a complete lack of experience of anything outside the aristocratic establishment, and he was totally against any kind of positive action. He was against Poor Law Reform, and he approved the anti-union Taff Vale judgement (which did a lot to help the Liberals win the 1906 election). He supervised the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904, which would commit the UK to war ten years later. He is most famous today in that he gave his name to Britain's declaration in 1917 for a national home for Jews in Palestine. In 1919 he, as Foreign Secretary, backed the British invasion of Russia of that year. In all he was 27 years in the cabinet.

Despite his enormous fortune, he never married. At Cambridge and in Parliament he was the object of homophobic putdowns. His biographer, Mackay, says that he did not find any indications of homosexual involvement, but he does not show that he was heterosexual either. He goes on to quote from A.J.P. Taylor's life of Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate, where Beaverbrook, having been put in his place by Balfour, retaliated later by asserting 'Balfour was a hermaphrodite. No one ever saw him naked'. Taylor asks whether it was usual to see cabinet ministers naked?

Mackay does come up with an incident whereby Balfour was indeed seen naked as part of his official duties. Sydney Parry, who was Private Secretary to the First Lord of the Treasury from 1897 to 1902, recalls in his memoirs that he was sent to 10 Downing Street with an urgent dispatch during the Boer War. Balfour was still upstairs. 'I ran up with it, heard him splashing in his bathroom, and knocked at the door: "Lord Lansdowne wants an immediate reply. Shall I come back in twenty minutes?" "Is it very urgent?" "Yes." "Bring it in, then. If you don't mind, I don't." So I slipped in and read it aloud, while A.J., in native majesty like Milton's Adam, towelled himself and dictated his reply simultaneously.'

Mackay thinks that this proves that Balfour could not be hermaphroditic (intersex), but of course there are more forms of intersex than he allows for.

• A.J.P Taylor. Beaverbrook. Penguin.1972: 154.
• Ruddock F Mackay. Balfour: Intellectual Statesman. Oxford University Press. 1985: 8-9.
• “Arthur Balfour”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Balfour.

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So, case not proved. However it is an intriguing suggestion.

It was suggested in the 1970s that the later bachelor Prime Minister, Edward Heath (1916-2005, PM 1970-4), was gay, and as Mackay did of Balfour, Heath's biographer John Campbell, writing in 1993, examined the supposed evidence and found no substance. However Heath's friend Jeremy Norman, who founded the London gay club, Heaven, said in 2006 that "Unquestionably, he was a gay man". Also Graham Chapman once claimed to have had sex with Heath, and Conservative Brian Coleman has said that Heath was warned to stop cruising in 1955 when he became a Privy Councillor and Chief Whip.

So I think that we can say that Mackay, despite his competence as a political biographer, is rather naive re homosexuality and intersex.

Beaverbrook claiming that Balfour was a 'hermaphrodite' is simply being homophobic, but the word choice does indicate that rumours had been going around.