On Reading Christine Burns’ History of Trans Britain: Introduction

Part I: Introduction
Part II: 1950-1980
Part III: 1980-2004
Annotated reading list for English trans history.

Introduction

• Christine Burns. “Introduction”. In Christine Burns (ed) Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows. Unbound, 2018: 1-18.

Trans Britain was released in the UK in January 2018, and in Australia in February 2018. It is being  released in Canada and the US in September 2018. It is also available worldwide from Book Depository.

There are not many histories of British trans people, so all additions are welcome, whatever their emphasis or selections of facts. In the new anthology, Trans Britain edited by herself, Christine Burns, includes an introduction to the book, and introductory chapters to each of the three sections, that together constitute a history of the topic.

Despite the word ‘Britain’ in the title of the book, almost all that follows applies to England only. The anthology, Trans Britain, does include a chapter on Scottish trans activism by James Morton, but in Burns’ history chapters the only Scottish mention is of Ewan Forbes.

I don’t know why Burns has to start by listing trans persons and events in the US. They are well known, and surely the reader is coming to this book for a discussion on British or at least English trans persons and events.

The Introduction is more of a run around the world mentioning various trans cultures and events. A lot of the content is well-known: D’Eon, Hirschfeld, Mark Weston, Michael Dillon, Ewan Forbes.


However, I too have been researching British trans history, and there are, unfortunately, significant discrepancies between our respective accounts.  I mention them here so that future historian will combine the best of both.

➤Burns mentions the English historian Peter Ackroyd’s 1979 book, Dressing Up (review), but only to say that he quotes somebody else on the North American two-spirit tradition – and then neither this book nor Ackroyd’s Queer City (review) are mentioned again. Surely she must have found much else of relevance in the two books.

➤She repeats the misinformation that d’Eon “infiltrated the court of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia as a woman” – surely Gary Kates’ 1995 book (the first book based on the previously ignored d’Eon archives in the University of Leeds Library) refuted that canard once and for all.

➤Two pages later she repeats the extremely popular but totally false notion that Magnus Hirschfeld coined the word ‘transvestism’ - how many times does this have to be refuted before writers pay attention?!

➤After talking of pioneering surgical techniques at Hirschfeld’s institute, Burns then totally ignores the successful surgeries on Hirschfeld’s patients ( Carla van Crist who was still alive in New York in 1952; Toni Ebel who lived until 1961 in East Germany; Dörchen Ritcher who was probably murdered by Nazis in 1933) and mentions only the unsuccessful surgery on Lili Elvenes (whom she still calls Lili Elbe) who of course was not a patient of Hirschfeld.

➤Burns correctly makes the point that Alan Hart in Oregon had surgery in 1917, before Hirschfeld’s patients, but says nothing about Karl Baer who had surgery in Berlin in 1906.

➤Burns mentions Liz Hodgkinson’s biography of Michael Dillon, Michael Née Laura, only by its reissue title From a Girl to a Man.

➤Most of the English persons mentioned in the period before 1950 are trans men. It is a shame that she did not mention trans woman Norma Jackson who was famously in the newspapers in 1931. It is obvious to modern readers that she was a transsexual, but unable to get any medical assistance.

➤Nor is there any mention of Mark Weston’s surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital, Lennox Broster. While Broster in the 1930s and 1940s declined to operate on any trans person who was not also intersex, he did pioneer genital surgery at Charing Cross, and his clinic was inherited by John Randell.

Stuart Lorimer on the Charing Cross GIC

Articles on the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic (GIC)

Part I: 1818-1982
Part II: 1983-now
Part III. Addendum
Part IV. Stuart Lorimer


Stuart Lorimer (born late 1960s) qualified as a doctor at Aberdeen Medical School, with a distinction in psychiatry. He has been involved with the Charing Cross GIC since 2002.

Lorimer has provided a history of the Charing Cross GIC, with emphasis on his own involvement.

• Dr Stuart Lorimer. “1966 and All That: The History of Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic”. In Christine Burns’ Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows, Unbound, 2018: 51-67.

I have also written a history of the Charing Cross GIC – see the links above. My emphasis is different, discusses more of the patients, and starting much earlier in time. I have adjusted my account slightly, especially in the most recent years with input from Lorimer’s account.

There are two points in his account, however, that I would like to examine closely.

1966 and all that.

British persons over a certain age will immediately recognise the title as a riff on the 1930 classic satire by WC Sellar & RY Yeatman: 1066 and all that, which was published in 1930 and is a satire on how English history was taught at that time. How many readers under 40 would get the allusion is an open question as the content of history courses has changed so much. Peter Hitchins in his The Abolition of Britain says “A modern child, shown Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, simply wouldn’t get the joke. You cannot laugh at this satire on forgetfulness and confusion unless you, too, share the experience of misunderstanding and mixing up the Wars of the Roses, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck and the rest. You cannot even be enjoyably confused or forgetful about something which you never even knew in the first place.”

However the important question is what did happen at the CX-GIC in 1966 such that Lorimer and others assume that 1966 was the founding of the clinic, despite it being in operation since the 1930s under a different name.

In Part I of my account, I commented at the end: “The WLMHT GIC web site says: “The West London Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital (CX GIC) is the largest and oldest clinic of its type, dating back to 1966.” But what happened in 1966? Lennox Broster’s work with intersex persons dates back to the 1930s, and John Randell’s with transvestites and transsexuals dates to the 1950s. On the other hand the 1969 symposium reported ‘there is as yet no permanent gender identity unit’.” Lorimer’s account does not answer this.

Lorimer twice mentions 1966. On p53 he writes: “Randell was nonetheless a trailblazer, the originator, in 1966, of one of the largest and oldest trans treatment centres in the world”. On p56 he writes of Harry Benjamin: “Distinguishing his patients from transvestites (a term not coined until Benjamin was twenty-five), he opened the doors of his first proper clinic in 1966, the same year as Randell’s GIC at Charing Cross”. Neither of these assertions answers my questions. What did Randell do in 1966 that is taken as founding the clinic that he had been running since 1950, and was such that three years later in 1969 it was said that reported “there is as yet no permanent gender identity unit”.

(Note also that Lorimer is of the school that insists on ignoring the facts and claiming that Hirschfeld coined ‘transvestism’ despite it being in use from the 16^th century and that the Paris Police had been issuing permissions de transvestissement since 1800.)

Russell Reid

Complaints were made against Russell Reid in 2004, and in 2007 there was an investigation by the General Medical Council that led to his resignation. Lorimer mentions this on p62, but does not list the doctors who made the complaint. Here is the list from David Batty’s article "GMC inquiry into gender change expert" in The Guardian, 20 January 2004: “Donald Montgomery, James Barratt, and Richard Green …. Together with Stuart Lorimer, a senior registrar at the clinic, they allege Dr Reid has repeatedly breached guidelines”.


Now of course in 2004, Lorimer had been at Charing Cross only two years, and was the most junior of the four doctors mentioned. However it is naughty (to use a mild term) of him not to mention that he was one of the four doctors.

Harry Allen (1882 – 1922) musician, bartender, barber

Nell Pickerell was raised in Seattle. At age 16 Pickerell gave birth to a child by a father who was not recorded. Pickerell had already inclined to masculine interests and dress, and now adopted them full time. The child was raised by its grandparents.

Two years later Pickerell, who had taken the name Harry Livingstone, was being featured in the press as far away as Philadelphia, “A Woman By Nature – A Man By Choice”. Livingstone had been arrested several times by the Seattle police. The reason given was creating a disturbance, but really for wearing the wrong clothes.

Livingstone left town and got a job as a bartender in Washington’s Tunnel City, a railway camp at Stevens Pass in the Cascade Mountains, where a tunnel was approaching completion. Edward ‘Black Jack’ Morse, a felon from Alaska, was shot dead during an attempted robbery in Seattle in 1900. In his pocket was said to be found a photograph of himself and Livingstone taken in Tunnel City. Also in Tunnel City, it was reported, a waitress named Dolly Quappe, killed herself on Christmas Day, 1901, by drinking carbolic acid. This was said to be because she discovered that her Harry was not really a man, and anyway he loved another. In August 1902, Harry, drunk, punched a cop, which led him to the jailhouse. In November 1903, Pearl Waldren in Seattle attempted suicide by gunshot, declaring her love for Harry. In 1906, Harry was arrested again on a trumped-up charge – it was said that the police wanted to tie him in to train robberies by the infamous Bill Miner.

Harry was said to have worked at all kinds of male jobs: bronco busting, bartending, barbering, long-shoring. He sang well in a deep voice, and played piano, violin, guitar and slide trombone.

By 1911 Harry was mainly using the name Harry Allen. He was arrested and charged with selling alcohol to Native Americans.

In June 1912 Harry and a prostitute friend, Isabelle Maxwell, travelled to Portland Oregon and took a room. As Maxwell was a prostitute, Allen was charged under the 1910 Mann Act for transportation across state lines for immoral purposes. The arrival of a cop who knew Allen and his gender history resulted in the dropping of the Mann Act charges, although – Oregon having no law against cross-dressing, he was convicted of vagrancy and sentenced to 90 days in the city jail.

It just so happened that while Allen was in jail, Miriam Van Waters, a Portland native, an anthropology student at Clark University, Massachusetts and a future prison reformer, was in town doing research on female inmates at the city jail. Waters perceived Pickerell as an energetic and independent woman for whom modern society (unlike many aboriginal tribes) had no place.

By 1917 Harry was working as a police informer after Washington State introduced alcohol prohibition.

In 1919 Harry got into a quarrel with his 79-year-old father and was stabbed in the lungs from the back. The city hospital managed to save him. In 1920 he was busted for opium. Harry did die two years later at age 40 of syphilitic meningitis.

• “A Woman By Nature – A Man By Choice”. Philadelphia Times, May 6, 1900: 18. Online.
• “Dolly Quappe’s Suicide. Loved a Masquerading Girl”. Los Angeles Times, Dec 26, 1901. Online.
• The Notorious Nell Pickerell in Town”. The Ellensburgh Capital, Feb 13, 1907. Online.
• “How Catherine Madden Fell a Victim to Strong Drink; Why Nell Pickerell Will Not Wear Women’s Clothing”. The Spokesman Review, Oct 22, 1911: 24. Online.
• “Nell Pickerell Returning to Jail”. The Spokesman Review, Nov 15, 1911: 5. Online.
• “Nell Pickerell Denies Her Sex; Woman Who Dresses in Male Attire Starts Story She Is a ‘Real Man’; Rumor Causes Sensation”. The Spokesman Review, Nov 22, 1911: 6. Online.
• “Fighter, Bootlegger and ‘Bad Man’ is Miss Pickerell For Love of Whom Three Women Have Killed Themselves”. Tacoma Times, April 12, 1912. Online.
• Miriam Van Waters. The Adolescent Girl Among Primitive Peoples. PhD Thesis Clarke University, 1913: 107-110.
• “Nell Pickerell May Die of Wounds”. Seattle Star, Sept 27, 1916. Online.
• Nell Pickerell Dead:. Seattle Star, Dec 28, 1922. Online.
• Peter Boag. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011: 23-31, 35, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 53-4, 57, 117, 202n2, 203-4n14.
• Knute Berger. “Meet Nell Pickerell, transgender at-risk youth of yesteryear”. Crosscut, June 29, 2014. Online.
• John Mackie. “This Week in History: 1906 The notorious Nell Pickerell returns to Seattle”. Vancouver Sun, February 24, 2017. Online.

EN.Wikipedia
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Boag is, probably rightly, skeptical of the tales of young women who killed themselves. Sometimes it is two, sometimes three. The waitress who drank the carbolic acid is sometimes named Dolly Quappe and sometimes Hazel Walters.


Miriam Van Waters' dissertation, published 1913 was The Adolescent Girl Among Primitive Peoples. Far from seeing Allen as an invert, she heterosexualized Pickerell and even claimed that Pickerell had been married to the father of the child, and cross-dressed only to earn a better wage. She referred to Pickerell as Case I and as HA.

Francis Blair (1913–?) performer

Charles Schultz was born in West Seattle. By early teenage, Schultz had acquired a trunk full of female clothing, and often rode on the city streetcars where she passed easily.

She got work at the local Florence Theatre. Her family and friends were aware, and proud of her professional photographs. She took the stage name of Francis Blair.

In the 1930s Francis was in the chorus line of the Rivoli Burlesque. Her gender was known and her dressing space was separated from that of the cis women by a screen. She sometimes played the organ for the show.

She was in the dishwashers’ union in case no theatre work was available; she was an officer in the performers’ union.

Very unusually for the time, Francis wore her hair long, and did not have to wear a wig. When out in male persona, he concealed it under a hat.

Francis was one of the first performers to join the Garden of Allah in 1946. Syndicated columnist Walter Winchell wrote about Francis as ‘the boy with the million-dollar legs”. She was known for her singing, but also danced, stripped, produced shows and designed costumes.

During the Korean War, Francis did shows for the United Service Organizations (USO) which provided entertainment for the US Military. A rather prim hostess of the show had a fit when Francis stripped down to only a G-string.

She was also a comedian and in contrast to her usual glamor act did a double act with Kenny Bee as ‘Two Old Bags from Tacoma’ where they wore old clothes with holes in their stockings. They took that act to Finocchio’s in San Francisco as ‘Two Old Bags from Oakland’.



Years later, Francis and her husband of 20 years took a vacation in San Francisco, and they were attacked in Golden Gate Park. The husband and their dog were killed. Francis was left to drive home to Seattle alone, and was killed in a car crash in Oregon.

*Not Charles Schultz the cartoonist.

• Don Paulson. “Gay History: Francis Blair - Seattle's quintessential female impersonator”. Seattle Gay News, no date. Online.
• Don Paulson & and Roger Simpson. An Evening at the Garden of Allah: A Gay Cabaret in Seattle. Columbia University Press, 1996: 135-141.
• Gary L. Atkins. Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging. University of Washington Press, 2003: 63.
• Melissa Gohike. “San Antonio’s Drag Culture of the 1930s and 40s”. The Top Shelf, October 22, 2012. Online.

Queer Music Heritage     David de Alba     

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As with Jackie Starr, there is no mention of Francis in either Lawrence Senelick's The Changing Room or F Michael Moore's Drag! Male and Female Impersonators on Stage, Screen and Television.


It is odd that we do not have a date, not even a year, for Francis’ unfortunate demise.

Helen Savage (1955 - ) vicar, archeologist, wine columnist

Part I: Life
Part II: PhD thesis

Mark Savage was born in Barrow, Cumbria, one of three children of a Baptist minister, and was raised in various parts of Lancashire. Despite a happy family home, Mark was thinking “I didn’t understand why I wasn’t a girl” by the start of school.

After graduating from Birmingham University Savage became an archaeologist: He co-directed the first modern, complete excavation of a Roman milecastle – Milecastle 35 at Sewingshields on Hadrian’s Wall.

In his mid-20s he decided to follow his father into the church and became a Church of England (CofE) curate in Heaton, on the outskirts of Newcastle. He completed a theology degree at Durham University, and a masters in adult learning. He became an adult education advisor for the diocese of Newcastle.

He married in 1979, and they had two children. He was ordained in 1983. After ten years of teaching, Savage became the vicar in the parish of St Cuthbert’s in Bedlington, Northumberland.

From 1990 Savage was also the wine writer for the Newcastle Journal. From 1991 he owned a house in France. Being fluent in the language, was able to visit hundreds of small vineyards across the country.

However he still felt that he was living a lie. In his 40s he contacted the Beaumont Society, but quickly realised that he was not a transvestite. He saw doctors at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and was approved for NHS surgery.

Savage also began a PhD on gender dysphoria and Christian theology at the University of Durham, which draws upon the experiences of seven trans Christians who were interviewed over a period of eight months from 2002-3.

In 2004, with the support of the Bishop of Newcastle, Savage stepped down as vicar so that she could transition to Helen. While Helen is not the only trans CofE vicar, the news of her transition became national news and the press camped on her doorstep for a while.

She has stayed with her wife, and her now adult children have stood by her.

“Neither am I the least bit girly, but as a female I just feel so at ease. It fits with the way my brain works, and I now feel grateful for every new day. It may not be easy for those who know and love me, but before I was so bound up in misery and so obsessed. Now I don't have those feelings anymore. I am just getting on with my life."

She is still a CofE priest, and still a wine writer. Helen completed her PhD in 2006. (see discussion in Part II).

While Savage had wanted to return to being a parish vicar, she encountered more problems as a

woman than as a trans person in that some parishes would not take a woman priest, and she wished to remain in the north. Finally in 2015 she took the Moorland group of seven parishes around Hexham in Northumberland, and the Hexham Courant acquired its first ever wine columnist.

She also has become a Master of Wine (one of only 300 or so worldwide). She is a member of both the Association of Wine Educators and the Circle of Wine Writers; she has twice been short-listed for the coveted Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Award.

* Not Helen Savage the movie actor/director, nor the Library of Congress classifier, nor the jazz singer.
* Not any of the other writers called Mark Savage

• Mark Savage. Excavations on Hadrian's Wall at Sewingshields: Interim Report 1979. Peter Robson, 1979.
• Mark Savage. Master of Wine Study Bursary: Reports on Visits to Italian Wine-Producing Regions, 1983. The Institute of Masters of Wine, 1985.
• Mark Savage. The Red Wines of Burgundy. Octopus, 1988.
• Mark Savage & Claude Dovaz. Bourgogne rouge. Gründ, 1988
• “Vicar quits to change sex”. Evening Chronicle, 21 Mar 2004. Online.
• “’Sex Change’ vicar quits parish”. BBC News 22 March 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/wear/3555221.stm.
• “Anguish of sex change vicar”. The Journal, 22 Mar 2004. Online.
• Jane Hall interviews Helen Savage. “This is who I am, and I am proud of it”. The Journal, 13 Oct 2005. Online.
• Helen Savage. Changing Sex?: Transsexuality and Christian Theology. University of Durham PhD Thesis, 2006. Online. Review.
• Helen Savage. L’Histoire du vin de France. Fetjaine, 2011.
• “Multi-talented vicar welcomed to Slaley”. Hexham Courant, 22 April 2015. Online.

helensavage.com    twitter     WineEducators
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Several newspaper articles quote Helen to the effect that there are 5,000 transsexuals in Britain. This is surely a serious under-estimate.

The Hexham Courant mentions that Savage has written a book on music. I was unable to find it.

I have updated my Non-Fiction Books on other topics by trans authors to include Helen Savage.

Harry Stokes (1799 – 1859) master bricklayer, publican

Stokes was born and raised in Doncaster, the child of a bricklayer. He ran away, some say at age 8, and did an apprenticeship with a bricksetter in Whitby.

He married his first wife in either the Old Parish Church of Sheffield or Sheffield Cathedral in January 1817. Through the 1820s and 1830s they lived in Manchester where he built up a bricklaying firm that specialized in chimney and flue construction. His wife was the company accountant, and at its peak the company employed eight men and an apprentice.

Harry had been sworn in as a Special Constable in 1829 in the 13^th division, and acted in that capacity in the first days of the Chartist Riots, 1838.

In April, also 1838, after 22 years of marriage, Harry’s wife approached a lawyer as she wanted a separation. Harry was withholding housekeeping money, getting drunk and ill-treating her.

This was almost 20 years before the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. Divorce was governed by ecclesiastical courts and the canon law of the Church of England. In practice only the very wealthy, who could afford a private bill in Parliament, were able to get a divorce. However there was a chance of annulment.

Mrs Stokes also stated, that she accidentally made the discovery of the sex of her husband “as much as two or three years back” but that she had kept the secret till the present time. Harry was then examined by a police surgeon who did certify that he was a woman. This led to stories in the press, gossip and ridicule, and ballads that were composed and sung in the streets.

While no legal proceedings were taken, Harry had several conversations with the deputy constable and was persuaded to give the family home and contents to his wife, but refused to set aside any sum as a provision for her. Harry ceased to be a special constable in that he not present himself to be re-sworn at the annual procession at Manchester’s New Bailey.

A year later Harry met Francis Collins who, initially out of pity, took him on as a lodger in nearby Salford for a couple of years. She was 10 years his senior, a barmaid with an adult son and daughter. They returned to Manchester and established a beer-house under her name. They were assumed to be a couple and Collins took the name of Stokes. Eleven years later they opened a second beer-house under the name of her son.

However Harry in later years fell into decayed circumstances. In October 1859, a body was found in the River Irwell. The corpse was identified as that of Harry Stokes, then aged 60. The stories of 1838 being remembered, two women were deputed to examine the body. They reported back that it was of a “woman”. Again there were various newspaper stories about the “man woman”. Francis Collins Stokes maintained that despite sharing a bed with Stokes for 20 years she did not know that he was a woman.

• "A Female-Husband". The Manchester Guardian. 11 April 1838:2. Online.
• "The Woman-Husband". The Manchester Guardian. 14 April 1838: 2. Online.
• “A Female Husband in Manchester”. The Weekly Dispatch, 15 April 1838: 175. Reprinted in Oram & Turnbull.
• "A Woman Passing as a Man for Forty Years". The Manchester Examiner. 22 October 1859. Online.   
• “ ‘Harry’ Stokes, The Man Woman”. Salford Evening News, October 1859. Online.
• The Lancet: A Journal of British and Foreign Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics, Physiology, Chemistry, Pharmacology, Public Health and News, Volume 2, 1859:649-650. Online.
• Alison Oram & Annmarie Turnbull. The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780–1970. Routledge, 2001: 21-3, 26-8.
• Esther Roper & Eva Gore-Booth. “Harry Stokes – Manchester’s ‘female husband’ “. Warp and Weft, https://wearewarpandweft.wordpress.com/harry-stokes-a-female-husband-in-manchester.
• Esther Roper & Eva Gore-Booth. “Harry Stokes – timeline “. Warp and Weft. https://wearewarpandweft.wordpress.com/harry-stokes-a-female-husband-in-manchester/harry-stokes-timeline.

EN.Wikipedia

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Some accounts (Lancet, Salford Evening News) ignore the first wife married in Sheffield and instead tell of a one-day marriage to a widow, Betsy, who kept a beerhouse, but objected that her new husband was a woman and charged him with assault, which led to his spending a month in the New Bailey prison. Warp and Weft think that maybe this was misremembering because of the ballads that were sung in 1838.

A BBC2 discussion from 4 June 1973 with Della Aleksander

This program was part of a series called Open Door that launched in April 1973.   Championed by the BBC’s director of programmes at the time, David Attenborough, the series provided a platform for marginalised groups to talk about issues affecting them, without any editorial intervention. 


Four trans women were described as the Transex Liberation Group, and were led by Della Aleksander.  The others were Rachel Bowen, Jan Ford and Laura Pralet.   Della was also the founder of GRAIL (Gender Research Association International Liaison), and co-produced this program.

They are joined by two men: Member of Parliament for Pontypool, Leo Abse, who had introduced the private member’s bill to decriminalize homosexuality that had become law in 1967, and Dr Schlicht, a psychiatrist. 

The opening clip is from the comedy program, Are You Being Served?  The same 'joke' was repeated in the movie spin-off from the series.

Note that the pre-ops are referred to as 'transsexuals' and the post-ops as 'sex changes'.   I wonder how much of out jargon today will still be used in 2063 in the same way?   Della several times describes herself and others as 'intersexual', a term which we use much more carefully these days. 

If the video does not play full-screen, click: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06c83f4.

• Lydia Smith.  "Trans women discussed trans rights on the BBC 45 years ago—here’s what it looked like".  Pink News, 27th July 2018.  www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/07/27/trans-women-discussed-trans-rights-on-the-bbc-45-years-ago-heres-what-it-looked-like.
• Gay Power Couple.  "These transgender women appeared on the BBC 45 years ago".  The gay Power Couple, July 29, 2018.  www.gaypowercouple.com/these-transgender-women-appeared-on-the-bbc-45-years-ago.