penile-inversion vaginoplasty in 1903

The official history of penile-inversion vaginoplasty is that Harold Gillies & Ralph Millard pioneered the use of of penile skin-flap in 1951, but that their method was not penile-inversion vaginoplasty as we later knew it.   Poul Fogh-Andersen in Copenhagen, who had operated on Christine Jorgensen, continued to innovate, and in 1956 he reported that he had successfully used a full-thickness skin graft harvested from the penile skin to line the neovagina. This was taken further by Georges Burou in Casablanca, also in 1956, who set the standard for future surgeons.   His method was quickly adopted by Jose Jesus Barbosa in Tijuana and Milton Edgerton at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.   It was Edgerton who passed on details of Burou's method to Stanley Biber in Trinidad, Colorado.

This was the 1950s.

Let us turn back the clock to 1903.

________________

E.C. had been raised as a girl in New York, and identified as a woman. At age 20 she was referred by her family physician to the gynaecology professor, J. Riddle Goffe, in that she wanted to get rid of a growth between her legs. She also had a partial vagina and facial hair. Goffe examined her, and also asked her whether she wanted to be a man or a woman. She decidedly wanted the latter.

In March 1903, he operated on her at the Polyclinic Hospital (later called the Stuyvesant Polyclinic) in the presence of his class and some invited guests. He used the skin of the penis/enlarged clitoris to form the inside of the vagina. Three months later she returned and was very happy about the success of the operation.

Goffe describes the case: “The case of pseudo-hermaphroditism which I have to present is of special interest on account of the operative procedure which I instituted and performed, and which effectually eradicated all semblance of duality of sex and placed the young patient safely in the ranks of womankind, where she desired to be”. The editorial caption under the surgical photographs reads: “operation for removal of the penis and the utilization of the skin covering it for the formation of a vaginal canal”. E.C. also undertook treatment three times a week for removal of facial hair by electric depilation.  Goffe wrote up the case in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children.

Goffe's describes the operation: "The skin adjacent to the vulva was so harsh and bristled so with hair that it was not available for filling in the lateral gaps in the mucous membrane of the vagina. The only apparent resource was to allow them to fill up by granulation, when suddenly the thought occurred to me, Why not use the skin covering the clitoris? This was soft and delicate and free from hair. It
was therefore decided upon." (p760 in Goffe, quoted p76 in Mak, 2005.  Mak comments: "As far as I know, this was the first case in which the skin of a clitoris/penis was used to construct a vagina.")

Apparently the editor of the journal altered the title of Goffe's paper to say “for removal of the penis”, despite Goffe referring to the organ as a clitoris throughout. Goffe’s comment “where she desired to be” caused controversy among surgeons and gynaecologists in that the consensus at the time was that only gonads truly define sex – a position that Goffe himself had set forth in his introduction, but to which he did not in fact adhere.

A few other doctors in the very early 20th century did as Goffe did, and considered the patients wishes in deciding what surgery to do (see Mak 2011) rather than insisting on gonadal determinism, but there does not seem to be any record of any other surgeon using the skin of the penis/clitoris until 50 years later.

• J. Roddle Goffe. “A pseudohermaphrodite, in which the female characteristics predominated: Operation for removal of the penis and the utilization of the skin covering it for formation of a vaginal canal”. American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, 48:6, 1903: 755-763.
• Geertje Mak. ‘ "So We Must Go Behind Even What the Microscope can Reveal". The Hermaphrodite’s “Self” in Medical Discourse at the Start of the Twentieth Century.’ GLQ A Journal of lesbian and Gay Studies, 1,1, January 2005: 66-7, 71-8, 80-4
• Christina Matta. “Ambiguous Bodies and Deviant Sexualities: hermaphrodites, homosexuality, and surgery in the United Sattes, 1850-1904”. Biology and Medicine, 48,1, winter 2005: 75, 80-1.
• Geertje Mak. Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories. Manchester University Press, 2011: 176-82, 258-9n32.
• Elizabeth Reis,. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012: 78-80. .

David William Foerster (1933 - ) and the Oklahoma Gender Identity Foundation

David William Foerster was raised in Oklahoma. He married in 1957, and they had three sons. Foerster qualified as a plastic surgeon.

As early as 1962 Dr Foerster pioneered a method of phalloplasty for trans men.

In 1973 Drs David William Foerster and Charles Reynolds founded the Gender Identity Foundation at the Baptist Medical Center. They had done over 50 vaginoplasties, mainly Burou-style penile-inversions, by 1977, and there were another 50 trans women waiting. It was a major US transgender surgical center with patients coming from out-of-state.

The Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma finally realized what was happening. One pastor on the hospital Board of Directors called the operations “a Christian Practice”. The hospital's medical staff and lay advisory board voted overwhelmingly to continue allowing the surgeries.

However in October 1977, the Board of Directors of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma voted 54-2 to ban such operations at the Baptist Medical Center. The Gender Identity Foundation was transferred to the Oklahoma Memorial Hospital, but the program was ended here too in 1981.

In a letter to the editor of the Annals of Plastic Surgery in March 1979, Foerster wrote:

“Dissatisfaction with life, suicide, alcoholism, and sexual maladjustment are much greater before surgery than afterwards. Naturally, surgical conversion of genitals does not solve all the problems that the patient had before surgery, but neither does rhytidectomy, mammoplasty, or craniofacial surgery. As for gender Dysphoria's being ‘experimental,’ one can say that in a sense all surgery is experimental: we are constantly changing and modifying even the most cherished of procedures. If we are to call genital conversion experimental we must also classify augmentation mammoplasty using silicone prosthesis, craniofacial reconstruction for severe facial anomalies, and rotation advancement cleft lip repair as experimental. They too have been developed since the early 1960s, they too involve change of body structures, and they too have yet to be followed for a patient’s lifetime.”

• “Hospital Doctors Defend Sex Changes”. The Evening Independent, Oct 13, 1977. Online.
• Jerry Scarborough. “Baptists Vote to Ban Sex Change Operations”. Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Oct 15, 1977. Online.
• “Sex changes banned at Baptist hospital". Arizona Gay News. 21 October 1977. PDF.
• David William Foerster. "Transsexual surgery." Annals of plastic surgery 2.3, 1979: 269. Online.
• David W Foerster & Charles L. Reynolds. "Construction of natural appearing female genitalia in the male transsexual." Plastic and reconstructive surgery 64.3, 1979: 306-312.
• David W Foerster & Milton T. Edgerton. "Female to male transsexual conversion: a 15-year follow-up." Plastic and reconstructive surgery 72.2, 1983: 240.
• David W Foerster. "Penile enhancement: another wrong way to go." Plastic and reconstructive surgery 101.1, 1998: 244-245.

EN.Wikipedia

Charlotte McLeod (1925 - 2007) Part II: fame and marriage

Part 1: Youth and Copenhagen
Part II: fame and marriage
Part III: The geography of Charlotte McLeod in New York, 1957

Charlotte was offered night-club appearances. A reporter, who worked at the National Press Club and normally wrote religious articles, proposed to do a book on her, and put her up in a hotel in Washington, DC while they worked on it, but it was never finished, and he ran out of money.

She took a gig in New Orleans, but found that the contract was with a strip club.

“And right across the street was a very, well the nicest club on the street. No hard bumps and grinds and strips and all that kind of thing. And to get me out of the verbal contract the owner paid for me going to court. And the next thing I am sitting up in front of the judge. I never will forget, I had a great big felt cart wheel hat on. Couldn’t sit on the seat because the cart wheel hat hit the back and I had to take my hat off. I don’t know why I should remember that. In that day and time ladies wore their hats. And he released me from the contract and I went across to the Show Bar, which was the nicest club on the street.” (Stryker:26)

A dancer-comedienne called Cupcake wrote material for Charlotte:

“ I’ve been to many places, environments strange, and then I went to Denmark, just for a little change”.

Then she moved on to the Casino Royal in Washington where she was backed by a band. She had become a member of the American Guild of Variety Artists, and was represented by Miles Ingles who was also the agent for Cyd Cherise and Polly Bergen. One time she appeared on stage in between Gypsy Rose Lee and Mae West. She also did modeling. Charlotte met Christine Jorgensen once when they were both appearing in New Orleans.

In August 1955, Charlotte had breast implants with New York plastic surgeon, Else La Roe (1918 – 2006).

In 1956 she wrote a brief autobiography for the Mr Annual, in which she claimed that her condition was physically caused, and that 95% of transsexuals should have psychiatric treatment.

Dorothy at the all-night beauty salon

Charlotte worked as a secretary and then as a receptionist at an all-night beauty counter.

She was becoming annoyed by star reporter and television personality, Dorothy Kilgallen.

“I got tired of Dorothy Kilgallen chasing me around and writing things about me that I have never thought of doing. And I went to her house [45 E 68^th Street] one day and knocked on her door and the butler recognized me, it was strange, he said, ‘aren’t you Miss Charlotte?’ And I said, yes. And he said, don’t go away. I said, well I have no intention, that’s why I’m here. So I met Dorothy. And I said, well Dorothy, I’m tired of this, this business and I need a job. If you’ll help me get a job, I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Her husband is Dick Kollmar a Broadway producer, and he owned the Left Bank Club. He owned a little French restaurant and bar right across the street from Madison Square Garden. And in that day and time, the hat check and cigarette concession could make you a decent living. So they were most pleased to get me to be the hostess and hat check girl. The main thing that’s fun, I met everybody that ever was in show business.” (Stryker: 28)

This was 1957. It was while working at the Left Bank Club that Charlotte met Harry Benjamin, who came in as a customer. He became her physician, and also would take her out to lunch and introduce her to such conservative activists such as William Buckley as well as film stars.

Charlotte was living at the Washington-Jefferson Hotel on West 51^st Street.  Ralph Heidal, whom she had met in Bergen, had stayed in touch by mail. They ran into each other in Maxie’s, a bar close by. He offered to take her away.

In 1959, Christine Jorgensen had been denied a marriage license by a clerk in New York City, on the basis that her birth certificate listed her as male; Jorgensen did not pursue the matter in court.

Charlotte in Miami 1959

Charlotte had been working in Miami, first as a secretary, then demonstrating cosmetics. After some months, Charlotte and Ralph, having become regulars at a Miami church, were married there in November. She did not mention her birth gender, however, or the fact that she was still legally a male. Press interest was aroused, but the Florida authorities confirmed that the marriage was not in violation of state law.

Dorothy Killgallen had contacts in Miami as everywhere, and their wedding was featured in her column.

A few months later, Mr and Mrs Heidal moved to California. They lived in Berkeley, then Oakland and then Marin County. Charlotte reconnected to Harry Benjamin who spent his summers in San Francisco. He introduced her to trans women Aleshia Brevard and Kathy Taylor who had been friends since their days at Finocchio’s nightclub, where Kathy performed as Stormy Lee.

Mrs Heidal’s marriage to her husband lasted seven years.

“And bless his heart, he couldn’t do a darn thing but drive a steamship around the world. Never did teach that rascal to drive a motor car. In fact, that’s why we broke up. I had visions of a little cottage on the side of Mt. Tamalpias. And oh how we did love it. But Ralph didn’t find a job. Everything he knew was diesel, whatever made steamboats run. I took him to every plant in Northern California trying to find a job for him. And finally, I got the proverbial Dear John letter. He said it was how it is every year we had to write but unless I was willing to go back to New York, where he was perfectly happy. And we would have to part company and I wouldn’t go back to New York.” (Stryker:31)

Dorothy Kilgallen died in November 1965 at age 52 after ingesting alcohol and barbituates. Some say that she was murdered (more) for digging into the Kennedy assassination – her folder of documents on the case had disappeared and was never seen again.

After her divorce, Charlotte moved to Laguna Beach, south of Los Angeles, because she had friends there. She got a job as a receptionist at a beauty salon. Charlotte arranged to have vaginoplasty:

“I was living at Laguna Beach. And a little Japanese doctor did it. And there was some instrument that he had to have, I think. He was under the impression that he could use the same instrument on me that he could on a normal woman that needed that surgery done. Well he did and perforated my colon. And I had to go to Stanford to have the colostomy to repair his work and while I was there I stumbled on Dr. Donald Laub [head of the Sexual Identity Unit]. Oh, me. What a to-do that was.” (Stryker:22)

One of the beauticians mentioned that her brother-in-law had lost his wife to suicide. They were introduced and started dating. He was a military officer with two children, eleven and twelve. The kids started calling her Mom.

On 8 August 1969 she was visiting Kathy in Los Angeles where they could see a commotion across the canyon that turned out to be the aftermath of the murder of Sharon Tate and 3 others by members of the Manson Family.

The military officer asked Charlotte to marry him, but something had to be explained first.

“In fact, it was Cathy who went to him and explained to him the situation because we had debated. He hadn’t the vaguest idea. And I knew, if he hadn’t already asked me to marry him, Cathy said, let me see if I can help. And she went and talked to him. And Cathy’s husband did not take it so well. In fact, he was very belligerent when he did find out.” (Stryker:41) [Cathy=Kathy of course.  Aleshia Brevard, who knew her, spells it with a 'K'.   The transcription of the interview spells it with a 'C'.]

Charlotte and the military officer were married in Las Vegas in 1970 – this time with no press attention. Again the marriage lasted seven years.

Return visits to the Stanford clinic and Dr Laub created problems when her husband went with her.

“And that really ruined my marriage with my second husband. We were going up and stopped by for a chat with him. And we went in and Donald had started, he was so very selective, very selective. He had a Gorgeous George sitting in there with tattoos all over him.” (Stryker:44) “He did ruin my marriage. My husband saw me in a different view from what he had in mind.” (Stryker:45)

After the end of her second marriage Charlotte moved back to Dyersburg, Tennessee to look after her ageing mother. She stayed in touch with her step children. The son died in middle age without finding out about Charlotte’s past; at the turn of the century, Charlotte was very sick and wrote to tell the daughter on her own terms in that it would come out if she died.  That daughter has had children, and thus Charlotte became a grandmother.

++Charlotte remained in Dyersburg, and died at age 82.   Her passing was not noticed by the press, which probably would have been to her liking.

*Not the mystery writer, nor the character in the television show, McLeod’s Daughters.
_________

The Washington-Jefferson Hotel is still in business. Its rooms are now $126 a night and up. Charlotte says: it “was a place for retired show people who lived there” which probably means that even after adjusting for inflation it was cheaper in 1957, particularly if you paid by the month.

Aleshia Brevard in The Woman I Was Born to Be, 2010, p48 writes:

This is quite different to what Charlotte said, whereby the wedding was after the confrontation at Kilgallen’s apartment, and the husband was certainly aware of Charlotte’s past before he married her.

Tina Thranesen gives the name of the New York plastic surgeon as Rachael LaRoe; Joanne Meyerowitz gives it as Else La Roe. I have gone with the latter.

In the Stryker interview it sometimes becomes confusing about when things are happening. I have placed the vaginoplasty operation just before Charlotte met her second husband because she says that she was living in Laguna beach at the time, and Donald Laub was not at the clinic at Stanford until 1968.

Charlotte says that she was already married when she observed the Tate killings from a distance, but that happened in August 1969, and she also says that the wedding was in 1970. Time does affect our memories. (Stryker: 38-9)

The Wikipedia page on Dorothy Kilgallen says nothing at all about Charlotte. Likewise Lee Israel’s 1979 biography, Kilgallen. Likewise Mark Shaw’s The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What's My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen.

There is something missing from the source documents:  Dorothy Kilgallen's articles about Charlotte are not online.  The collection of newspaper articles found at TransasCity is very good, but does lack this component.

Trivia: Dorothy Kilgallen was at 45 E 68^th Street; Harry Bemjamin’s office was only a block away at 44 East 67^th St.

• “Sex-Shifter Wants to be Charlotte”. Boston Daily Record, June 15, 1954: 4. Online.
• “Charlotte Seeks Night Club Job”. New Orleans Times Picayune, June 24, 1954: 8. Online.
• “Charlotte Halted by Court Action”. New Orleans Times Picayune, July 4, 1954: 11. Online.
• “Charlotte M’Leod Suit Lost by Badon”. ”. New Orleans Times Picayune, July 10, 1954:1. Online.
• “Sex-Changed Ex-GI Becomes Miami Bride. UPI, Nov 13, 1959. Online.
• “Bride Revealed as Forner GI”. San Diego Union, 11/14/1959: A3. Online.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 82-3, 84, 89, 91, 148, 304n93.
• Susan Stryker interviews Charlotte McLeod, transcribed by Loren Basham. GLBT Historical Society, August 22, 2002. PDF.
• Aleshia Brevard. The Woman I Was Born to Be. A Blue Feather Book, 2010: 5, 48.
• Brittany Shammas.  “Five Moments in Miami’s LGBTQ History, From 1937 to 2015”.  Miami New Times, March 12, 2019.  Online.  

TransasCity Collection       Vidensbanken om konsidentitet

Charlotte McLeod (1925 - 2007) a bookkeeper goes to Copenhagen

Part 1: Youth and Copenhagen
Part II: fame and marriage
Part III: The geography of Charlotte McLeod in New York, 1957

Charles McLeod Jr., the only child of a Ford Motors salesman, was born in Nashville and raised in Dyersburg, Tennessee. The parents divorced when he was 16: both remarried. He was a lonely sensitive boy who lacked interest in masculine things. He was sometimes taken as a girl in boys’ clothing.

He consulted doctors and in the early 1940s went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He also stayed with cousins in Los Angeles in the hope of finding a medical specialist in that city who could help – but without success.

McLeod served three months in the US Army 1948 before being medically discharged with a 4-F rating. McLeod found doctors sympathetic to the idea of a sex change, but they apologized that the US laws re Mayhem would not permit such surgery.

McLeod was advised to “find such little happiness as I could in life by going to one of the ‘colonies’ that abound in our large cities” (McLeod, 1956:12). In 1948, McLeod moved to the French Quarter in New Orleans, but did not fit in the gay world either. He did find work as a bookkeeper for $75.00 a week (a good wage at the time). He tried Boston for a while, but returned to New Orleans.

He went to the Mayo Clinic a second time. They still could not offer anything, because it would be illegal.

In April 1953 McLeod, at age 28, read about Christine Jorgensen and her operation in Copenhagen. He quickly packed, and went to Dyersburg to tell his father what he was doing. With apparent parental approval, McLeod continued to New York and quickly took ship to Denmark using a minor inheritance from a grand aunt. He sailed on the MS-Maasdam. Many of the people on the ship were crossing to England for the Coronation in June.

In Denmark, the Folketing had passed a new law restricting sex-change operations (that is the ‘first’ operation, the orchiectomy or castration) to Danish nationals who were not over 26. By asking around, McLeod was directed to a renegade doctor, Dr Emil Petersen:

“a rather unscrupulous physician, a man who had been charged with collaborating with the Nazis and who had only recently returned from exile. … of frightening appearance who, from the results of a British bullet through the base of his skull, habitually walked so bent over that he never met one’s eye.” (McLeod, 1956:13).

McLeod moved into the doctor’s apartment and waited five days while Petersen came down sufficiently off narcotics to regain his surgical skill. His wife and eldest son were to assist with the operation which took place on the kitchen table. The wife administered the anesthetic.

McLeod awoke in great pain and hemorrhaging. Petersen retreated into drugs, and collapsed outside McLeod’s door. She tore the stitches in her abdomen attempting to get him up, and then an infection set in. She fled and found that she no longer had her passport. She reported this to the police, and she was told that she had to leave the country, but was allowed time to settle her medical problems.

McLeod was admitted to Bispebjerg hospital. The first operation being already done, it was now legal to complete the transition. The Danish doctors led by Dr Jens Foged (1897 – 1956) agreed to do a penectomy and relocate the urethra. Christian Hamburger, who had attended to Christine Jorgensen, was the endocrinologist, and explained to Charlotte about the need for external hormones. She was unable to pay for the medical attention, and so the medical team worked free of charge.

Charlotte then started wearing female clothes, and applied to the US embassy for a new passport. It was re-issued but again in the name of Charles. Her father was contacted, but said that he would give neither financial nor emotional support.

After recovery, Charlotte went with a church outing for a weekend in Bergen, Norway, where she met a US-Norwegian, Ralph Heidal, a seaman, who helped her with skiing.

Twice in 1953, on 5 March and 20 May, a Polish pilot defected to the West by landing his MIG fighter plane on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic. It was probably the second occasion when Charlotte was there having been invited to visit for the weekend. She created a stir: “ I never saw so many Russian troops. Microscopic was their examination of all of our papers and when it was found that my passport didn’t match, I think they thought that they had found the master spy.” (Stryker: 23)

In early 1954 Charlotte gave a very brief interview to journalists in Copenhagen. A 47-page pamphlet, Da Karl blev Karl: En dansk læges bedrift, came out telling of a second US person operated on – this time on a kitchen table. The book names the person as Karla, and the doctor as Petersen.

A few weeks later, on 24-5 February the Danish publication, Aftenbaldet (Evening Magazine) told almost the same story of Charlotte McLeod – and in retrospect it is apparent the Karla and Charlotte were the same person.

The US press picked up on the story immediately.

In early March the story broke that Roberta Cowell in England had also completed a gender change.

In late April the Copenhagen police found that Dr Petersen was the doctor who did the initial operation, and after statements that perhaps he would not be charged, finally he was charged with violating the castration law.

Charlotte inadvertently interrupted a press event for the Canadian actress, Yvonne de Carlo:

“She had all the press lined up for this big landing that she was going to make when she came in from Europe. And they found that I was in next car coach and everybody that was supposed to interview her came gang banging on me.” (Stryker p24)

It was 16 April 1954 when Charlotte arrived at New York’s Idlewild airport. She intended to transfer and fly directly to Tennessee. However fog grounded the plane. She stayed overnight in a hotel, and was swarmed by the press, to the point that she fell over. It was said that in the struggle she struck a photographer with her umbrella, and she and they were arrested and charged with assault. However the charges were quickly dropped.

Charlotte reconciled with her father.

She returned to Dyersburg and was reconciled with her father.


Continued in Part II.
__________________

Thank you to Tina Thranesen of Vidensbanken om kønsidentitet who first identified that Da Karl blev Karl: En dansk læges bedrift was actually about Charlotte.

The high quality photographs are from Transas City.

In an interview with Susan Stryker in 2002, Charlotte said (p6) that her father was a Ford Motors salesman. However several newspaper accounts in 1954 said that he was in insurance.

She also said that she was in Denmark for ‘two years’ (p24, 29). However April 1953-April 1954 is one year.

Charlotte did not know, most trans persons in 1953 did not know, but Elmer Belt had quietly started doing vaginoplasties for trans women at the University of California at Los Angeles. He got around the Mayhem restrictions by preserving the testicles, pushing them into the abdomen.

The encounter with Yvonne DeCarlo. This is recounted on p24 of the interview with Susan Stryker. Charlotte says it immediately after saying that she was in Denmark for two years which implies that it was at about the time that she returned to the US. It is unclear whether it happened in Denmark or the US. The expression ‘next car coach’ implies that that they were on a train. I have placed the anecdote immediately prior to her flight to the US, but with further information this may have to be adjusted.

• Bent Rosenwein. Da Karl blev Karla: En dansk læges bedrift. Self published, 1954.
• “Ny amerikansk Chris Jørgensen skjult her I byen efter operation”. Aftenbaldet. 24 feb 1954. PDF. Text.
• “Danes Change 2d GI to Girl”. Boston American, Feb 24, 1954: 3. Online.
• “Charlie to Charlotte Operation Successful on New Orleans Patient: ‘Christine’-type Surgery in Denmark changes Sex to Female”. Baton Rouge State Times Advocate, 2/24/1954: 1-a, 8-a. Online.
• “Operation Changes Sex of American”. Eugene Register-Guard. 24 Feb 1954. Online
• “Ex-Gi ‘Charlotte’ Goes into Hiding”. Boston American, Feb 25, 1954: 3. Online.
• “Now His Daughter, Says Ex-GI’s Dad”. Boston American, Feb 25, 1954: 3.2. Online.
• “Medicine: In Christine’s Footsteps”. Time, March 8. 1954. Online.
• “Charlotte, Who Was Charles, Falls in Hotel Scuffle”. Sacramento Bee, 17 April, 1954:6. Online.
• “Danes Check on Sex Change”. Sacramento Bee, April 19, 1954: 7. Online.
• “Sex Change or Suicide Choice”. Boston Daily Record, May 13, 1954:3. Online.
• Charlotte McLeod. “I Changed My Sex”. Mr Annual, Winter 1956. PDF.
• Susan Stryker interviews Charlotte McLeod, transcribed by Loren Basham. GLBT Historical Society, August 22, 2002. PDF.

TransasCity Collection           Vidensbanken om konsidentitet

The first Canadian surgical transsexual?

By some accounts trans history in Canada starts in 1962 when Jackie Shane was doing her gender ambiguous act at Toronto's Sapphire Tavern; legal secretary Dianna Boileau was arrested and outed after her best friend was killed in a car accident; Marie-Marcelle Godbout arrived in Montréal to start living as female; and  the Soeurs-du-Sacré-Coeur pushed the police to charge trans entertainer Lana St-Cyr with giving an indecent performance.

However, eight years earlier in August 1954, a trans woman became the third North American to seek surgery in Copenhagen.   In the footsteps of Christine Jorgensen and Charlotte McLeod she arrived in Denmark.  As had Charlotte McLeod a year earlier she found that the Folketing had passed a new law restricting sex-change operations to Danish nationals.   She self-castrated in her hotel room, forcing the medical authorities to step in. 

We do not know her name, or what happened to her afterwards, either in Denmark or in Canada.

Ottawa Citizen?, 19 August 1954. 

Tina Thranesen of the very informative trans history site Vidensbanken om kønsidentitet (in Danish) has provided the corresponding article from Ekstra Blatet, also 19 August 1954.

Her translation:

MUTILATED HIMSELF TO BE A WOMAN!

Canadian, rejected by Copenhagen doctors, taken to hospital after desperate action

A young Canadian came to Copenhagen recently for the purpose of being transformed into a woman. He had heard that Danish doctors had done this miracle with others, among them the often mentioned Chris Jorgensen.
But since then it has been forbidden to do this kind of operation on foreigners, and the Canadian was therefore rejected by the doctors he addressed.

It depressed the Canadian terribly that no-one would help him, and he has therefore performed a desperate act. In a hotel room in Frederiksberg he operated on himself with a regular knife with the result that he has now been hospitalized at Frederiksberg Hospital. His condition is quite critical, it is said.

There is, as will be remembered, something similar in the past. An American citizen, who had been rejected by Copenhagen doctors, also took an intervention on himself, which almost cost him his life. He got up, and a doctor in Frederiksberg later made an operation on him in his private consultation room.
The doctor is Emil Petersen, who during the investigation has claimed that it was only compassion that caused him to operate the American, known as McLeod.
He is, however, charged with violation of the Castration Act.

Nick

Caitlin R Kiernan (1964–) novelist

Kiernan started life as Kenneth R Wright in Dublin, and a few years later moved to Leeds outside Birmingham, Alabama, with his mother, Susan Ramsey Cleveland.

Susan, an avid reader, introduced Wright to Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker. Wright also became strongly interested in paleontology, and as a teenager, volunteered at the Red Mountain Museum where fossils of Cretaceous mosasaurs, extinct seagoing reptiles, could be seen in the rock. Wright also spent several summers on archaeological and paleontological digs.

After studying geology and vertebrate paleontology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Colorado at Boulder, Wright then held both museum and teaching positions at the Red Mountain Museum, and published in paleontology journals, mainly on mosasaurs.

By 1992 Wright had transitioned, and was using the name Caitlin R Kiernan. She wrote her first novel, The Five of Cups, but it was not published until a decade later. Caitlin continued to be published in paleontology journals using her new name.

Her 1995 short story “Persephone” was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers of America, and led to Neil Gaiman and the editors of DC/Vertigo Comics asking her to write The Dreaming, an anthology comic book spun off from Gaiman's popular Sandman, featuring both existing supporting characters from Gaiman's title and new ones of Kiernan's own creation.

Her first published novel, Silk, came out in 1998. It was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and British Fantasy Award and won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel. More novels, short stories and comics followed. Her most acclaimed novel to date is The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, published in 2012 and set in Providence, Rhode Island.

Like HP Lovecraft, a major influence, Caitlin lives in Providence with her wife. She describes herself as an atheist pagan.

Caitlin has used the Red Mountain cut, as a setting for four of her novels – Silk (1998), Threshold (2001), Low Red Moon (2003), and, to a lesser extent, Murder of Angels (2004).
She has also written as Kathleen Tierney.

• Geoffrey H Goodwin interviews Caitlin R Kiernan. Bookslut, November 2004. http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_11_003472.php.
• Jeff VanderMeer interviews Caitlin R Kiernan. Weird Fiction Review, Mar 12, 2012. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/interview-caitlin-r-kiernan-on-weird-fiction.

Encyclopedia of Alabama     EN.Wikipedia    EN.Wikipedia(Bibliography)    Wikiquote     Amazon Author Page     Queeraday    LocusMag    LiveJournal
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Of the people whom I have featured in this encyclopedia, Caitlin is one of the few listed as a notable in the Wikipedia article on her home town.

Aurora (1873? - ?) hairdresser, sex worker

Aurora arrived in Buenos Aires, from Paraguay, in the late 1890s.

He quickly drifted into prostitution, however was arrested only when found brawling in cafes, or when dressed as a female. He was persuaded to become a women’s hair stylist, and as such found work in bordellos. He was arrested several times, but there was never enough evidence for a conviction.

One time Aurora was placed in ‘preventative arrest’ after clients at a costume ball in a bordello became angry in that she was too realistic as a woman.


Aurora’s life history was taken by Dr Francisco de Veyga, and published in 1903. In it she asserts that she was born a marica. De Veyga avoided referring to Aurora as a prostitute: he called her a ‘professional’. He regarded Aurora as having an acquired mental disorientation caused by a misunderstanding of female sexuality.

• Francisco de Veyga. "La inversión sexual adquirida. Tipo de invertido profesional. Tipo de invertido por sugestión. Tipo de invertido por causa de decaimiento mental", Archivos de Psiquiatría y Criminología aplicadas a las ciencias afines. Medicina Legal. Sociología. Derecho. Psicología. Pedagogía, año 2, 1903: .193-208.
• Donna J Guy. Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina. University of Nebrasca Press, 1991:86.
• Jorge Salessi. “The Argentine Dissemination of Homosexuality, 1890-1914”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4,3,Jan 1994: 356, 359-363. .
• Osvaldo Bazán. La historia de la homosexualidad en la Argentina: De la Conquista al siglo XXI. Marea, 2006: 127.
• Kristen Loehr. Tranvestites in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Poverty & Policy. MA Thesis, Georgetown University, 2007: 30.
• Matthew J Edwards. Queer Argentina: Movement Towards the Closet in a Global Time. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: 13-7.
• María Belén Ciancio & Alejandra Gabriele. “El archivo positivista como dispositivo visual-verbal. Fotografía, feminidad anómala y fabulación”. Mora (Buenos Aires), 18,1, ene/jul 2012. Online.

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Francisco de Veyga writing in 1903, several years before Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten, 1910, uses the word 'travestida' (tranvestite).