Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.
There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.
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One often comes across the facile assertion that Magnus Hirschfeld coined the word ‘transvestite’ in the 1920s. Unfortunately for this assertion, transvest* and the French form travest* have been around as noun, verb and adjective for almost 500 years.
Here is a potted history of ‘transvestite’ and similar words in mainly English and French. To write this I used the Oxford English Dictionary and the Petit Robert. The Wikipedia article on En Travesti was also consulted.
The Italian ‘travestire’ from the Latin ‘transvestire’ is recorded in the 16th century. It is first recorded in French as ‘transvestir’ in 1569, and had become ‘travestir’ by 1580. The Italian origin probably accounts for the retained ‘s’ rather than a circumflex, as opposed to ‘větir’ without the prefix. The original meaning is dressing up or disguise rather than gendervesting in particular. The English meaning of ‘travesty’ as ‘ridiculous’ is not used in the French.
The word ‘travesty’ first became well known in England in 1648 with Scarron’s satire, Le Virgile Travesty en vers burlesque. So the modern English meaning of things done badly or ridiculously was there almost from the start, but so was the meaning of dressing as another.
However the pseudo-French expression ‘en travesti’, using the past participle of the verb, which is not recorded in French, was used particularly in the theatre with the specific meaning of dressing as the other gender. This usage has continued from the seventeenth century until today.
The verb form, ‘to travesty’, is not found until after 1700, and was not needed for the sense of Gendervesting, for the verb ‘to transvest’ is recorded from 1652: “How often did she please her fancy with the imagination of transvesting herself, and by the help of Man’s disguise deceiving the eyes of those who watched her deportment”. This usage, particularly applied to female-bodied persons continued into the nineteenth century.
'Travestissement' was being used in France by 1692.
'Transvestisme' is recorded in French in1845. The Petit Robert lists it as an hapax (only one recorded instance) in this period, but just as Ed Wood used ‘transsexual’ before Harry Benjamin did, people on the street are using words before dictionary compilers catch up with them.
'Travestiment' was being used in England by 1832, and 'Travestier' by 1883.
Thus Hirschfeld was rather a Magnus-come-lately a far as being a coiner of the term. However he and Sigmund Freud did reinvigorate the concept, although the psychoanalysts in Freud’s wake have done a lot of damage in rewriting transvestism to be a fetish and a perversion. While ‘travesty’, especially in English, always had a second meaning of ridiculous or badly done, the associated words did not, before the twentieth century, have the meaning of neurosis or perversion.
The enduring calumnification of ‘transvestism’ is probably the reason why ‘transvestity’ did not evolve, while ‘transsexuality’ did evolve alongside ‘transsexualism’.
Margaret O’Hartigan transitioned in Minnesota in 1979. She was on public assistance and successfully sued the State to pay for her surgery.
She moved to Everett, Washington, where she worked as a typist. She applied for a job with the State Police and discovered that only police forces and a few others may require a polygraph test asking questions to prospective employees about private matters. With the ACLU she sued the Police in 1987 on this matter. In 1989 they won, but in 1992 the Washington State Supreme Court reversed the ruling.
In the early 1990s Margaret obtained a ruling against a Seattle bisexual women’s group that excluded her because she is transsexual.
In the mid 1990s she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she persuaded the Phoenix Rising Counseling Center to include trans persons. She publicized the role the Unitarian Universalist Church had had in publishing Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire. She established the Filisa Vestima Foundation in order to collect funds to aid indigent transsexuals gain access to health care.
In 1993 she wrote:
"Every application of the term transgender to me is an attempt to mask what I've done and as such co-opts my life, denies my experience, violates my very soul. I changed my sex. Like the hijra of India and the gallae of Rome I took cold steel to myself and proved that anatomy is not destiny. Like the Siberian Chukchee shaman I have died and been taken apart, reassembled, changed sex, and come back with new powers. Like the inkte of the Mdewakanton Siouxs I grew up amongst, I have had my visions.
I am not transgender."
She helped Dean Kotula, herself and others file complaints in Oregon on the basis that they were covered under disabilities anti-discrimination laws. A newly qualified lawyer, trans woman JoAnna McNamara, successfully presented a brief with supporting theory and case law to much the same effect. This led to a squabble over the credit. Margaret put down McNamara and her client as ‘men’ who had enjoyed ‘adult white male privilege’ because they had not become women until their 40s.
In 1994 she wrote an article “The Joy of Fat” about being overweight in Dimension Magazine that was reprinted in Harper’s Magazine.
In 1996 Margaret controversially accused Jessica Xavier of racism. In the same year she received Pride NorthWest’s “Spirit of Pride Award” for her “tireless advocacy for the trans community and for trans consciousness raising with both the Les/bi/gay and general straight cultures”. She has opposed the removal of Gender Identity Disorder from the DSM in that the associated HBIGDA Standard of Care is non-abusive unlike what she was exposed to as a child, and attacked Phyllis Burke's Gender Shock which documents abusive attempts to 'cure' gender variant children as a 'transphobic' book.
One must take whatever civil rights are available wherever you live. However I do feel uneasy about trans persons being covered under laws relating to disabilities.
Why is this woman not being saluted by the HBS people as the pioneer that she is for their cause? Partly I think in that none of the HBS websites have any historical component. They do not seem to have any interest in what persons like themselves did in earlier decades.
O’Hartigan is just as contentious as Goiar in wishing to deprive other transgender persons of civil rights; but unlike Goiar she has actually achieved something useful as well.
Willow Arune, here, says: "Now, bearing in mind that Blanchard found two distinct types, he wanted to avoid the primary-secondary terminology. It had been abused in the system, with status and bias (such as Margaret Deirdre O’Hartigan in Minnesota and then Oregon)." I have previously raised the question: does HSTS=HBS? An observer might consider O’Hartigan to be both. However I wonder what Margaret herself thinks about such jargon?
Lisanne is often regarded as an autogynephile, but has rejected the description for herself, and expresses neutrality as to the value of the concept.
However she was a co-founder in 2004 with Willow Arune of the online Autogynephila discussion group, and is the editor of www.autogynephilia.org. She communicated directly with Ray Blanchard in building the site, but not with the critics of the concept.
She is rumored to have detransitioned for a while in 1995. She also created a post-modern performance piece by having an online conversation 1998-9 with Lori Anjou, her own alter-ego. Like Arune, she is on disability.
She is also a photographer with a flicker portfolio here.
Charlotte is a resident of Vigo in Galicia. She was diagnosed
by the school psychologist as a trans child at age 7, and from age 16 was on
hormonal therapy from the Vigo hospital - the first such patient to be so
treated in Vigo. However she met much derision at school from both students and
teachers and was unable to complete high school. Since 1991 she has been in
psychiatric treatment, and living on welfare.
In the early 2000s Goiar proposed the concept of Síndrome de Harry
Benjamin (Harry Benjamin Syndrome). The term had been pioneered by Tom
Reucher in Paris with an inclusivist meaning, but Goiar changed the meaning
to exclude most trans persons. She set up www.shb-info.org in 2005, and while posting
on the Australian WOMAN forum encountered Diane
Kearny in the US, who had similar opinions. They initially worked together,
but then split and in competition both set up web sites, Yahoo forums and
Standards of Care.
In 2004, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) became the government,
and quickly implemented gay marriage, but kept delaying the promised Ley de
Identidad de Género (Gender Identity Law) until prominent trans woman and PSOE
activist Carla
Antonelli threatened a hunger strike and this attracted international press
attention. The law was passed in 2007, and Carla, Charlotte and many others
were able to change their legal name and gender as surgery was not a
requirement.
A decree by the previous government in 1995 had prohibited public health
services from paying for transgender surgery. This was rescinded, also in 2007.
By then, Andalusia had already been performing these operations for eight years,
and this region was later joined by Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country.
Aragon and Extremadura paid to have patients treated elsewhere. However Galicia
and other regions did what they could to avoid offering transgender surgery.
Charlotte described HBS: 1
"Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) is an intersex condition developed in the
very early stages of pregnancy affecting the physical process of differentiation
between male and female. In this patients, the brain develops as a certain sex
but the rest of the body takes on the physical characteristics of the opposite
sex. Genetic aetiology for this condition had been showed also by modern medical
research.
Today, what was previously known as intense True Transsexualism is considered by medical res earch experts in this area as a physiological condition of
birth, which is both neurological and genetic in origin, and therefore an inborn
intersex condition (physiological). That is why by following the medical
naming conventions in regard to physiologically intersexed states or syndromes,
the condition formerly known as intense True Transsexualism (Type VI on the
diagnosis table of Harry Benjamin), must be named Harry Benjamin Syndrome.
Since people with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are conventional in their gender
identity and expression, like most members of society, these people need a
physical rehabilitation of their endocrine system and phenotype in order to
function in society as any other average person.
They are not seeking to defy social norms of gender or sexuality as is the
case of transgender and most who call themselves transsexuals .
People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome as a group are naturally opposed to
ambiguous groups of sex and/or gender such as transgender persons and most who
call themselves transsexuals. People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are not a part
of a supposed continuum with these other states of sexual or gender-related
ambiguity.
Despite the confusion in terminology with the old concept of True
"Transsexualism", persons with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (which in reality is a
type of intersex condition) should not be confused with transgenderism and other
ambiguous sexual states in general.
People born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are persons with a binary gender
orientation of either Man or Woman, as any other average person in society.
Their identity is woman or man, never "transsexual". Therefore they need a
complete physical rehabilitation in order to function sexually and develop
socially as any other average person in our society.
People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome repudiate sexual ambiguity and don't feel
identified with sexually ambiguous labels like "transsexual" or "transgender"
which neither define nor represent them."
Initially Goiar claimed that 1:500 are HBS, but has been reducing the
frequency and on 2009 said that HBS is "an extremely rare condition [1:100,000]"
(which would mean that HBS persons are only a fraction of 1% of transsexuals).
She is further contentious in that she and her movement have become known for
disparaging other trans persons, even post-ops, and GLBT persons in general.
Despite Charlotte’s on-going non-surgical status, the Spanish HBS movement
was critical of the UK and Spanish laws permitting gender change without
surgery, and most well-known transsexual activists have been disparaged on her
forum in that they are not anti-transgender (that is against all trans persons
who are not HBS). Carla Antonelli was criticized for representing Spanish
transsexuals despite being non-op – but Charlotte’s continuing pre-op status was not
mentioned. Charlotte expressed approval of the situation for transsexuals in Iran. She
objected to the term ‘transsexuality’, as opposed to 'transsexualism', as
pejorative in that she took it to imply a choice.
In 2008 Charlotte was assigned a court-appointed counsel, and with his help,
induced a Vigo judge to recognize her problem, and rule that her
"anxious-depressive syndrome" was caused by her discomfort with her body.
However the court ruled against her request for surgery in that such surgery was
not available in Galicia.
Charlotte was antagonistic to the STP 2012 depathologization campaign by
other transsexuals, and emphasized in contrast that HBS want medical
repathologization. A petition sponsored by SHB-Info.org was signed by 500
persons and was sent to the World Health Organization asking that transsexualism
be recognized, not as a psychological disorder, but as a medical one.
The HBS forum was discontinued and closed in 2011.
In 2012, her mother - the one person who had stood with her – died. Charlotte
underwent a religious crisis:
“I had never imagined and I still do not
understand what guilt I have of being born with this pathology, and the hatred
that it awakens in so many people. I felt so vulnerable. … Through a Christian
English friend, little by little I began to study some Christian texts. This was
how, little by little, I found relief in God, as a way to leave the course of
everything in the hands of a force superior to me, so I began to read the Bible
for the first time shortly after turning 40 years old.”
She became a cristiana
metodista (Methodist). 2
Charlotte won a ruling in the Galician High Court that Servizo Galego de
Saúde (SERGAS), the Galician Health Service, should pay for her to have
genital surgery. However the Galician government appealed to the Spanish
Supreme Court, which in turn also found in Goiar's favour in May 2013. By
September, as SERGAS had taken no steps to conform with the ruling, Goiar went
to the press. SERGAS then wasted almost two years sending Charlotte to public
clinics in Málaga and Barcelona that did not do the required type of operation.
In 2015, at age 42, Charlotte finally had surgery in the private Instituto de
Cirurxía Plástica, Barcelona, with Dr Iván
Mañero - the only clinic in Spain to offer colovaginoplasty.
Before the operation she asked for pastoral accompaniment, which led to her
meeting Carlos Osma of Christianos
Gays.
In 2017, Charlotte allied herself with the ultra-Catholic Hazte Oír and its
opposition to sex education and to ‘gender ideology’. She is also claiming that
the new ICD-11 term Gender Incongruence is the same thing as HBS.
According to the Spanish newspapers Charlotte at 41, despite being on female hormones since age 16 and legally female since the Ley de Identidad de Género in 2007, still has no work experience. Surgery will of course make her feel more confident, and the legal precedent she has set does far more good than all the HBS stuff, but as any cis woman would tell her, being a 40+ woman with neither job nor life partner is not an easy road.
What would the actual Harry Benjamin have thought of the HBS movement? 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.
Surely, those who organize in his name, should respect his sentiment.
Mary Veronica grew up in New Jersey as a Catholic, and has a degree in English.
She worked on Wall Street as a stockbroker and then became a porn actress as Veronica Vera, where she worked with Annie Sprinkle, and was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. She was a regular at the Studio 54 disco in New York. Through the 1980s she wrote a column about New York’s sex scene in Adam magazine.
In 1984 she testified on sexual explicit media to a US Senate committee, and argued for the decriminalization of prostitution. In 1986 she attended that year’s World’s Whores Congress in Brussels. In 1989 she helped to reorganize Prostitutes of New York (PONY). Her 1992 video, Portrait of a Sexual Evolutionary, was included in a show about sex work at the University of Michigan Law School and became the centre of a censorship battle.
She founded her Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls in 1992. She has written books on cross-dressing, and many articles on sexuality in general. In 2005 she extended her services to women also, for like men they also need to learn the artificial aspects of being female, especially the art of walking in high heels. She also runs a group for wives of crossdressers.
*Not the character in Shadow Hearts Covenant game, nor the character Veronica Vera Duckworth in Coronation Street.
Portrait of a Sexual Evolutionary, with Veronica Vera and Annie Sprinkle. US 28 mins 1992.
Veronica Vera. Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls. Main Street Books 208 pp 1997.
Veronica Vera. Miss Vera's Cross-Dress for Success: A Resource Guide for Boys Who Want to Be Girls. Villard 240 pp 2002.
Delgado Gómez was born in Güímar, Tenerife. He was trained at the Conservatorio de Música y Arte Dramático in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He then moved to Madrid, and as the Francoist vagrancy laws, under which one could be imprisoned merely for being gay or trans, were modified in 1979, Gómez as Carla Antonelli was able to transition by age 20.
She recorded a television documentary on transsexuality in 1980 for TVE-2, but the censors withheld it until after the attempted coup by Colonel Antonio Tejero in 1981.
She was active for 10 years with Grupo de Gays, Lesbianas y Transexuales del PSOE (Socialist Workers' Party of Spain), and notably campaigned for and helped to draft the Ley de Identidad de Género (Gender Identity Law).
Carla's extensive web site was one of the first to feature positive images of trans women, and is the most popular trans site in Spain. This inspired Lynn Conway's TS Women Successes page in 2000, and Carla was one of the first trans women featured on Lynn's site, but after complaints that she is not post-operative, and the mediation of June Hingle, she was removed. However Lynn still gives a special thanks to Carla.
In 2003 she was honoured by the Colectivo de Transexuales de Madrid.
In 2004, PSOE became the government, and quickly implemented gay marriage, but kept delaying the Gender Identity Law until Antonelli threatened a hunger strike and this attracted international press attention. After the Ley de Identidad de Género was passed in 2007, she was the first in the Madrid area to change her legal identity.
She then resigned her position as the co-ordinator of the GLT group but continues to support PSOE. She also agitated against the prohibition of prostitution in that many trans women can find no other employment. At that time she began to record the television series Antena 3.
She continued as spokesperson of the LGTB Federation and of the Madrid Transsexual Collective after violent attacks by NeoNazis. She has lectured at universities and at the Congress of Sexology. She was invited by transsexual groups in Venezuela, Chile and Mexico, appearing on television, in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and at the Univerity of Merida.
She was awarded the Baeza Award for visibility. In 2009 the municipality of Güímar, Tenerife gave her a lifetime award.
The Spanish HBS people, and Charlotte Goiar in particular, do not care for transsexuals to be represented by a non-op person, and even object that the Ley de Identidad de Género permits one to change one's name and gender in the Civil Registry without undergoing surgery. A Carla-Antonelli.blogspot.com was set up by an anonymous third party which pretended to be by Carla and that she was a prostitute and that she was transphobic. After a couple of years of harassment, Carla complained to the police in May 2009.
Carla has played in 6 movies and 3 television series and is often seen on Spanish television and on the stage.
From 2011-15 she was a PSOE List member of the Madrid Assembly, where she was feisty in raising trans and LGBT issues, but often did not get the support of even her own party.
June Hingle maintains that the dissension between Charlotte and Carla was created by Mariana Casas writing under various names.
June, who was also featured early in Lynn Conway's TS Women Successes page, asked to be removed in that she does not like to be regarded as a post-op transsexual.
IMDB gives Carla's birth year as 1970. That would make her 10 years old when she was in the first television documentary.
The es.wikipedia article says nothing about the feud with HBS.
There is no Wikipedia page on the Spanish Ley de Identidad de Género.
(Comment update April 2016: IMDB still gives Carla's birth year as 1970. Most of the comments below are sour grapes by HBS persons. Maybe I should remove them as HBS imploded some years back. See my Short History of HBS. I leave them for now for historical reasons.)
Peter was the son of a US foreign aid official. He grew up in Saigon and Wheaton, Illinois. His father died when he was nine.
He dropped out in 10th grade, and ran away. In 1974 he fled arrest and was shot in the leg. He was convicted of robbery and served five years.
He emerged as a white separatist. He converted to Mormonism, but later was ordained in a Ku Klux Klan affiliated church.
In 1992, he and a colleague robbed a Pizza Hut in Georgia, and he was arrested the next year. He faced a life sentence but the US Secret Service sprang him from jail to find his associate. Langan disappeared after six weeks.
He became Commander Pedro and with three confederates he became a neo-Nazi revolutionary. Imitating the 1991 film Point Break and the Andrew Macdonald (William Pierce) fascist novel The Turner Diaries, they robbed 22 small-town banks in 7 states wearing masks of US presidents and taking only what they found in the till. They called themselves the Aryan Republican Army and it has been said that they helped fund the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Langan also attended Crossdressers and Friends in Kansas City where he presented as Donna. There he met Cherie Roberts a ftm crossdresser who turned up in the final days of his trial and demanded to speak to her wife. Their story was dramatized as an episode of The Investigators television show in 2005.
*Cherie is not the female porn star. Peter is not the London and Los Angeles restaurateur, nor the orthopaedic surgeon cum painter.
Richard Leiby. “The Saga of Pretty Boy Pedro: How a Wheaton Kid Became a Neo-Nazi Bank Robber, and One Confused Human Being”. The Washington Post Feb 13 1997. Online at: http://www.constitution.org/okc/jdt03-17.htm.
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