Amanda Lepore (1967 - ) model, performer.

Armand Lepore was raised in Cedar Grove, New Jersey to an Italian-descended chemical engineer and a German-descended mother. Armand articulated a desire for a sex change at age 11 after seeing a television program on the topic.

After being rejected at school after dressing as female, Lepore was tutored at home. By age 15 she was designing costumes for dancers at a strip club, and was able to barter costumes for female hormones with another underage transsexual. After she grew breasts, she was sent to a psychiatrist and diagnosed as transsexual. Her parents were informed and she was put on legal hormones.

The same year, Amanda had a plastic surgeon boyfriend and he did her first operation, rhinoplasty, for free. Her next lover was a bookstore owner. His parents took her in, and took her to an SRS surgeon. However as she was a minor, her parents’ consent was required. She had genital surgery at age 17. She married the bookstore owner and moved in with his family. From jealousy and fear of others finding out that she was transsexual, they treated her as as a prisoner in the house. She finally escaped and filed a restraining order against her husband.

Amanda first worked as domatrix, and then in nightclubs. She has had three breasts augmentations, her eyes slanted twice, her forehead lifted, her hairline pulled down and her brow been reduced. She has had forehead, buttocks, hips and lips enlarged with liquid silicone, and had her lower ribs broken and pushed in.

She has worked extensively with photographer David LaChapelle advertising Armani and MTV. Swatch have released a ‘Time tranny’ watch with her features.

In 2001 she and Sophia Lamar were hired to perform at the Twilo nightclub in New York, but later fired and replaced by ‘real girls’ at the last minute. They sued, and settled out of court.

Amanda has issued several singles and her first album in 2005. She does modeling and partying. She is on the cover of Lords of Acid's 1999 album Expand Your Head. She has had cameos in many music videos, especially with gay rapper Cazwell, and in several gay films.

• Tony Phillips. “Twilo’s Gender Gap”. The Village Voice, Apr 3 2001. www.villagevoice.com/2001-04-03/news/twilo-s-gender-gap.
• Chris Azzopardi. “She ... Amanda Lepore”. Gay & Lesbian Times, 30 Jul 2009. www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=15221.
• “Amanda Lepore”. IMDB. www.imdb.com/name/nm1242945.

EN.Wikipedia.

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In the comments under the Gay & Lesbian Times article, somebody using the moniker Liz denies that Amanda is transsexual and insists that she is autogynephilic.  This is double nonsense:  if ‘autogynephilia’ were a meaningful term, such a person would still be transsexual.  And it is quite clear that Blanchard and Bailey would categorize Amanda as a strong example of their other group, the badly named HSTS.  Liz of course is of the school where autogynephile = transsexual whom I do not relate to. 

David van Rippey (1924 - ?) retailer, minister, bigamist.

Dorothy van Rippey was raised in Waynesboro, Tennessee.

Van Rippey became David in 1950. He owned a service station and a women’s shoe store in Arkansas. In 1953 he was ordained a minister in the conservative Church of Christ, and married for the first time. He and his wife adopted two young boys.

prison mug shot, Thompson p47

He later married Glenda, who, when she found out about his first wife, complained to the county sheriff in August 1961. Van Rippey plead guilty to bigamy, and, after four months in the Monroe County jail, was transferred to Cummins Prison Farm, near Pine Bluff. He refused to remove his clothes for the standard medical exam, and guards had to be called to undress him.

He was then designated a woman, removed from the brutal farm work that male prisoners were expected to do, and assigned to work in the laundry and prison. He was assigned a cot outside the Superintendent’s office.

The story appeared on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette, and then in other papers across the southern States. A man who had been at school with Dorothy wrote to the Superintendent to identify her. Van Rippey confessed his past.

Both his marriages were deemed to be void. The Arkansas parole board granted parole, and van Rippey was released to the custody of relatives and returned to Tennessee. He stayed out of the press after that: Thompson was unable to find out what he did later.

• Brock Thompson. The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South.  Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2010: 45-50.

• . 

Katielly Lanzini (1961–) sculptor, journalist, political candidate.

Nedson Antonio Lanzini Pereira was born in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul. He married a woman and they had five children. He was a sculptor and also worked as journalist.

He started transition in 1988. In 1991 already feminine, Katielly switched to working at the newspaper in Chapecó, Santa Catarina. She also wrote for Jornal de Brazil, Globo, Mix Brasil and G Magazine.

Katielly has run for political office three times: in 2000 she ran for council in Chapecó; in 2004 and 2006 she ran for State Deputy in Santa Catarina for the Liberal Front Party (PFL). In 2004 she caused a controversy when on Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão (SBT) she declared that she prefers women, not men.

In 2006 one of her public sculptures, 7.25m tall, in Chapecó was vandalized right after Brazil failed to win the Football World Cup.

In an interview with the magazine Época, she admitted that she used her position as a journalist to remove Nedson’s image and his byline in the archives of the newspapers in Chapecó.

In 1995 she wrote an article urging the football club Chapecoense, which uses an image of an Iguazu aboriginal, to change to something less melancholy.

Understandably, the tribe took umbrage and in 2007 Lanzini was denounced by the Ministério Público Federal and fined 50,000 Reals compensation.

• "Transexual disputará eleições em SC". Transgêneros, 14/08/2002. www.fervo.com.br/trans/artigo.php?ban=banner1&titulo=Milit%C3%A2ncia&assunto=militancia&materia=019.
• “Biografia: Trans da CPLP - Katielly Lanzini”. Confissões agridoces de uma sereia trans. 22 Dez, 2008. http://aquariodasereia.blogspot.com/2008/12/biografias-de-transexuais-brasileiras.html.

Leslie Feinberg (1949 - 2014) author, activist.

Leslie’s preferred pronouns are ze and hir.

++=added later 

See also: A re-reading of Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors.  

Diane Leslie Feinberg was raised by Jewish working class parents first in Kansas City, Missouri, then in Arizona and Buffalo, New York. She left home as a teenager. Her parents debated signing papers to have her incarcerated, and even speculated that Leslie was possessed by an evil spirit.

Leslie Feinberg, 1973, Transgender Warriors, p19

Leslie originally did factory work, and explored the butch scene in New York State, Pennsylvania and Ontario. In the early 1970s she tried to femme her appearance in applying for a job, and was taken for a man in drag.

Therefore he tried to pass as a man, and got a job as a art-gallery guard. He started taking male hormones, grew a beard and had breast reduction. After a demonstration of the US class system when Nelson Rockefeller visited the art gallery, he quit and got a job as a dishwasher. Here he met fellow workers who were in the Workers World Party.

Leslie found a home in the party and, although passing as male, felt able to come out as trans. Ze felt alienated by the feminist and gay/lesbian orthodoxies of the early 1970s which condemned butch and femme lesbians, and drag queens. In 1980 World View, the publishing arm of the Workers World Party, ze published Journal of a Transsexual about hir non continuance as a transsexual.

Ze caught a tick bite in the 1970s and has suffered from untreated Lyme Disease and other problems ever since.

Feinberg became a high-ranking member of the Workers World Party, and managing editor of Workers World newspaper. Hir wife since 1992 is the lesbian poet-activist Minnie Bruce Pratt. Feinberg took out legal papers defining certain biologically-related persons as not part of hir family following their hostility.

Ze put out a Marxist analysis of transgender liberation in 1992, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. This was the first publication with 'transgender' in the title (although Richard Ekins had established his Trans-Gender Archive six years earlier), and foreshadowed the dialectic to come by using the word as an umbrella term, as a term of choice for one who declined surgical completion and as a rejection of the gender binary. Ze also addresses society’s negative reaction to non-standard gender expression in transgender and other persons. Ze used the pamphlet as the basis for hir slide show which ze showed all over the US.

Ze followed it with hir first novel, Stone Butch Blues, 1993, about a transgender person growing up in Buffalo's butch-femme culture in the 1960s, which while not actually autobiographical draws on much of the author's life in that the protagonist starts a transition to male, and then withdraws and identifies as transgender. Stone Butch Blues won the Stonewall Book Award for Literature.

With the success of this novel, Leslie, along with Riki Anne Wilchins and Kate Bornstein, became the major media example of transgender. Stryker describes Feinberg as 'one of the chief architects of the new transgender sensibility'.

In 1994, in the introduction to the second edition of her The Transsexual Empire, Janice Raymond discussed Feinberg along with k.d. lang and RuPaul as part of finding non-surgical transgenderism also non-acceptable. In particular she finds Stone Butch Blues deficient in its political analysis of gender.

That same year Feinberg, along with fellow trans activist Jamison Green, challenged the womyn-born-womyn policy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival by asking to enter.

Leslie almost died in 1996 while suffering from endocarditis, when ze was refused medical care after the doctor noticed hir non-standard gender and ejected ze from the hospital.  When ze was finally accepted in another hospital, they insisted on putting hir in the women's ward, to some furor.

Ze published two non-fiction works on transgender: Transgender Warriors, 1996, a survey of trans persons in history, which also contains autobiography, and ++ controversially a few short sentences on Virginia Prince: “But the word transgender is increasingly being used in a more specific way as well. The term transgenderist was first introduced into the English language by trans warrior Virginia Prince. Virginia told me, ‘I coined the noun transgenderist in 1987 or ’88. There had to be some name for people like myself who trans the gender barrier’ “.  Outside Tri-Ess and IFGE this seems to be source of the misinformation that Prince coined the term. ++
  
Trans Liberation, 1998, was based on talks that ze gave in 1997 as hir health was slowly recovering.  Both books are interspersed with first person account by a variety of trans activists including Cheryl Chase and Sylvia Rivera.  Both books were published by Beacon Press, which is somewhat notorious among trans activists as it was the publisher of both Janice Raymond and Mary Daly.

Ze published a further novel, Drag King Dreams, 2006, about an aging trans man and a mixed group of trans person reacting to the killing of one of them, and to police harassment.  Ze also published a book in support of Cuba in 2008. Ze has been writing a column ‘Lavender & Red’ in the Workers World newspaper since 1995, which ze describes as a book in progress. It focuses on trans, gay and lesbian rights in the USSR, the USA and Cuba.

Ze regards hirself as polygendered and prefers non-gendered pronouns. While masculine in appearance, ze does not try to be fully male. Ze lobbied gay organizations to add ‘Bisexual’ and ‘Transgender’ to their names (GLBT rather than GL), and appeared at Camp Trans in 1999.

Ze has been acutely ill since 2007, and has been taking photographs rather than writing. Feinberg's younger sister, the author Catherine Ryan Hyde, had reconciled somewhat with ze, but then published a novel with a transgender character that has re-opened the gap between them. While her trans man character cannot be read as a portrait of Leslie, it does show how little she understands ze.

Leslie died November 2014, succumbing to complications from multiple tick-borne co-infections, including Lyme disease, babeisiosis, and protomyxzoa rheumatica, after decades of illness.  Hir last words were: “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”

• Diane Leslie Feinberg. Journal of a Transsexual. World View 21 pp 1980.
• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. World View Forum, 1992.
• Leslie Feinberg. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books 1993. Los Angeles: Alyson Books 320 pp 2003.
• Janice Raymond. “The Politics of Transgenderism”, the Introduction to the Second Edition of The Transsexual Empire. Teachers College Press. 1994. Also in Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds). Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing. London & New York: Routledge 1996: 218-221.
• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press 218 pp 1996. Paperback: Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Beacon Press 218 pp 1997.
• Leslie Feinberg. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Beacon Press 160 pp 1998.
• Interview by Mark Gabrish Conlon. ""Leslie Feinberg: 'Poly-Gendered' Author, Activist Speaks Out". Indymedia, 19.06.2003. http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2003/06/6567.shtml.
• Leslie Feinberg. Drag King Dreams. Carroll & Graf 280 pp 2006.
• Leslie Feinberg. Rainbow solidarity: in defense of Cuba. World View Forum, 2008.
• Susan Stryker. Transgender History. Seal Press. 190 pp 2008: 123.
• Diane Torr. Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2010: 91-2
• Leslie Feinberg. "While a hostile relative re-writes my life: ‘Who is, and is not, my family’". Questioning Transphobia, Jan 14, 2011. www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3568.
• Catherine Ryan Hyde. "In response to a recent issue". www.catherineryanhyde.com/blog/2011/1/14/in-response-to-a-recent-issue.html.
• Leslie Feinberg. Lavender & Red. Workers World, 1995-2011. www.workers.org/lavender-red.
• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warrior. www.transgenderwarrior.org.
• Minnie Bruce Pratt. “Leslie Feinberg”. www.mbpratt.org/mylove.html. 
• Minnie Bruce Pratt. "Transgender Pioneer and Stone Butch Blues Author Leslie Feinberg Has Died", Advocate, November 17 2014.  www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2014/11/17/transgender-pioneer-leslie-feinberg-stone-butch-blues-has-died.

EN.WIKIPEDIA   AMAZON.COM    IMPERIAL COURT TRANS HERO   

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When writers such as Suzan Cooke, Cathryn Platine and Ashley Love rant about Transgender, Inc and the transgender conspiracy, I cannot but wonder what they have against Leslie Feinberg.

As some trans voices advocate abandoning support for gender expression, it is useful to go back and read Feinberg with hir repeated support for the concept.

Transgender Warriors is a light book.  However it does serve well the purpose for which it was intended: to explain transgender to the wider world.  Feinberg’s master work is Lavender & Red which is available online.   I recommend that for the more advanced reader.

Raymond, in finding Stone Butch Blues deficient in its political analysis of gender, is really saying that she and Feinberg have different political analyses.

Click here for a cartoon included in Transgender Warriors.

Davide Tolu (1969 - ) writer, translator, activist.

Tulu was ejected from the women's toilets at age 14, and started using the men's. He spent time in feminist and lesbian organizations.

As David he published his autobiographically inspired novel Il viaggio di Arnold in 2000.

The next year, he founded Coordinamento Nazionale FtM, the first such group in Italy.

He has translated Leslie Feinberg and others into Italian. In 2004 he organized Feinberg's Italian tour, and was the author and director of One New Man Show, performed by Matteo Manetti. Until 2005 he was on the national council of Crisalide AzioneTrans. In 2008 he was co-editor with Buci Sopelsa of Tr@nscritti, a collection by trans persons, their spouses, family and friends.

He has also appeared in TransAzioni, 2004, by Mary Nicotra, Crisalidi, 2005, by Federico Tinelli and O sei donna o sei uomo, chiaro?, 2008, by Enrico Vanni.

• Davide Tolu, with a preface by Iole Verde. Il viaggio di Arnold: storia di un uomo nato donna(The Journey of Arnold: Story of a Man born as a Woman). Roma: Edizioni Univ. Romane 292 pp 2000.
• Mirella Izzo with Davide Tolu interviewed by Romina Tufts. “Tra uomini e donne non ci sono confine”. Gufetto. www.boomy.it/DetEdit.asp?R=3.
• www.davidetolu.it.

J'Noel Gardiner (1958 - ) finance professor.

Jay Noel Ball was raised in Wisconsin. After a variety of schools he graduated with a Ph.D. in business from the University of Georgia in 1987, and an MBA from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1988. In 1988 Jay married his classmate and girlfriend of eight years, and obtained a job teaching at Northeastern University in Boston.

He was denied tenure in 1993, as it had come out that he was a transvestite, despite the support of the finance faculty. Jay made the transition to female, and both partners turned up for the 1994 divorce hearing in female clothing. J’Noel had surgery from Dr Eugene Schrang.

She was hired in 1997 to teach finance at Park University, Kansas. She was a popular teacher, and no-one knew much about her past.

In May 1998, at a Founder's Day event she met the 85-year-old Marshall Gardiner, a two-term state-representative who was a donor to the university. After some months of dating, and after J'Noel explained her past during a game of scrabble, they were married in September by a Kansas supreme court judge. A year later Marshall suffered a heart attack on a flight to Baltimore, and J'Noel laid him on the floor of the plane.

He had died intestate, which meant that half of his $2.4 million estate went to his wife. His estranged son Joe Gardiner hired a private detective to investigate J'Noel. He challenged the probate of the will first on the grounds that J’Noel had signed a pre-nuptial agreement, but then on the grounds that Kansas does not recognize marriage between persons born the same sex. The Texas precedent of Christine Littleton was cited. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that as the current law is silent on transsexuals, they were as at birth, and that the Kansas prohibition on marriage between persons of the same sex applies.

• Devon Spurgeon. “Double Bind: Why a Woman in Missouri is a Man in Kansas, and Why It Matters”. The Wall Street Journal. July 7, 2000. Online at http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Gardiner.html
• Alex Tresniowski. "Split Heirs". People, August 28, 2000. www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20132137,00.html.
• Kendrick Blackwood. “A Woman Scorned”. The Pitch, Kansas City. Nov 29, 2001. www.pitch.com/2001-11-29/news/a-woman-scorned/1
• “Kansas Supreme Court Says Transsexual Marriage Invalid: Rejects Claim for $2.5 Million” Associated Press. March 15, 2002. www.genderadvocates.org/News/GardinerAP.html.
• William Saletan. "The Trying Game: The mutual frustration of transsexuals and conservatives". Slate, March 20, 2002. www.slate.com/id/2063410.

Chris Dale (1962 – 2011) mountaineer.

Chris Dale was born in Penrith in Cumbria, the son of a policeman. He ran truant at age 16 and solo climbed without a rope the Old Man of Stoer, a 197ft (60 m) sandstone tower off the coast of Sutherland. A few years later, on a trip to Australia, he made a bold first ascent up a 180 m sandstone face in the Blue Mountains.

In the 1980s he was part of a group of British climbers based in Chamonix, beneath Mont Blanc, who pioneered new routes despite despite police harassment. They also established rules of method, regarded by some as purist, that climbers should not hammer in pitons or worse still use a drill to
place bolts.

He had a short marriage from 1987.

Chris, who was 6'6'' (1.98 m) subsequently trained as a mountain guide, but had problems with the required skiing requirement.

He was an enthusiastic cross-dresser. On one occasion his female persona was introduced to a Frenchman who misheard his name as 'Crystal', and Chris took that as his femme name. While shopping in the women's department of a branch of Asda (Walmart) in Scotland, Dale was thrown out for acting suspiciously. He complained in writing citing the the Sexual Discrimination Act, and received an apology and a substantial voucher. He relished his return to the same store, trying on clothes and getting the help of the manager who had evicted him. 

He was disciplined by the mountain guides association when, being in drag at their annual dinner, he felt obliged to deck a fellow member who was groping under his skirt without an invitation.

In 2003 he ascended Dun Dubh on the Quiraing mountains on the Isle of Coll – what was believed to be Britain's last unclimbed mountain. On his major holiday, he went to Nepal to do an extra long bungee jump.

In recent years injury prevented Chris from guiding, and he worked in a climbing shop, and introducing disadvantaged children to the outdoors. In the tradition of climbers' modesty, his Facebook listed his interests as "fluff, pink things, sparkly stuff ... mountains". He was diagnosed with cancer in 2010, and died a year later.

• "Chris Dale". Sport Obituaries, The Daily Telegraph, 24, Feb 2011. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/sport-obituaries/8346303/Chris-Dale.html.
• "Mountaineer Chris Dale obituary". To Hatch a Crow, Feb 24, 2011. http://tohatchacrow.blogspot.com/2011/02/mountaineer-chris-dale-obituary.html.
• Dave Hewitt. "Pinnacles and pink fluff: not exactly your ordinary climbing guide". Caledonian Mercury, March 7, 2011. http://outdoors.caledonianmercury.com/2011/03/07/pinnacles-and-pink-fluff-not-exactly-your-ordinary-climbing-guide/001598.
• "Chris Dale". Facebook. http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/Chris-Dale/1713992522.