Jane Heap (1883 – 1964) editor, Gurdjieffian.

Jane was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas. After high school she moved to Chicago.

In 1912 she helped found Chicago’s Little Theatre which put on influential avant-garde plays.

She wore her hair short in the male style, and preferred male clothing, especially suits and a bow ties, although she never used a male name.

In 1916 she met Margaret Anderson, and the two became lovers and joint editors of the Little Review, a seminal magazine of literary modernism which published works by most of the new influential writers in English, many courtesy of their foreign editor in London, Ezra Pound.

In 1920 the US Post Office seized and burned four issued that contained excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses. The next year, they were tried and found guilty of obscenity, fined $100 and forced to discontinue serializing the book.

Heap then became the major editor. In 1924 she met G.I. Gurdjieff, and established a Gurdjieff study group. She moved to Paris, to study at his institute. Margaret Anderson had also moved to Paris with her new lover, and they continued to issue the Little Review until 1929.

In 1927 she established an all-women Gurdjieff study group. In 1935 Gurdjieff sent her to London to set up a new study group, and she stayed there the rest of her life.

She died of diabetes at age 81.

• Andrea Barnet. “Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap: Life for Art’s Sake”. In All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004: 66-88.
• Linda Lappin. “Jane Heap and Her Circle”. Prairie Schooner. 78, 4. Winter 2004: 5-25.
• “Jane Heap”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Heap.

Christian Schenk (1952 - ) physicist, politician.

Christina Schenk studied physics at Humboldt University in East Berlin, and became a research fellow at the German Democratic Republic Academy of Sciences.

From 1974-81 she was a member of the ruling Socialist Unity Party.

She was then active in the opposition movement sponsored by the Protestant Church, and was a lesbian and feminist activist.

From 1990 she was a member of the Bundestag of the united Germany for the Independent Women’s Association (UFV), and then from 1994 for the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) until 2002. She was the head of the Feminist working group for the PDS 1994-8, and also active in queer and lesbian politics. She was the first Bundestag member to declare as a lesbian.

From 2004 Schenk attended Leipzig Hospital where she was prescribed male hormones, and in 2006 transitioned legally and surgically to male. His wife supported his change.  As they had previously registered as a partnership, they cannot marry without a year of separation .  The district court has consented to their marrying, and the case has gone to the Berlin Senate Administration Board.

*Not the athlete, nor the computer technologist.

• “Christian Schenk (Politiker)”. Wikipedia: Die freie Enzyklopädia. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Schenk_%28Politiker%29.
• www.christian-schenk.net.
• Simone Schmollack.  “Der Frauenversteher: Die ehemalige Bundestagsabgeordnete Christina Schenk ist jetzt ein Mann”.  taz.  03.03.2007.  http://www.taz.de/index.php?id=archivseite&dig=2007/03/03/a0002.
• “Transsexueller PDS-Politiker: Eheverbot”.  Queer.de.  17.01.2008.  http://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=8181

Eric Barreto (1962 – 1996) Carmen Miranda impersonator.

Eric Barreto from Rio is Considered to be the best Carmen Miranda impersonator. He was selected to play Miranda in the re-enactments for Solberg’s documentary of her life.

When he died, he was interred in tomb close to that of Carmen Miranda herself.

*Not the football player.

• Helena Solberg (dir & scr & narration). Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business. With Eric Barreto as Carmen Miranda. Brazil/UK 92 mins 1994.

H. Taylor Buckner (1936 - ) sociologist.

Buckner was born in Kentucky. He did a BSc in Sociology at Louisville in 1959. He did his PhD, 1967, at the University of California at Berkeley by joining the Oakland Police Department and doing a participant observation study.

He was appointed Associate Professor at Sir George Williams University, Montréal (now part of Concordia University) and later became Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He retired Emeritus in 1996.

He made a study of transvestites in the late 1960s. He admits that, unlike his work on the Oakland Police, there was no participant observation. He used a survey of 262 transvestites done by Virginia Prince’s Transvestia magazine, supplemented by interviews with seven transvestites (four anglophone and three francophone – all, except one student, with good professional jobs) who responded to letters that he put in the Montréal Star and Montréal-Matin. He read a paper on this research at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in San Francisco, September, 1969. This was the same meeting of the ASA that issued a public declaration endorsing the rights of gays and other sexual minorities.

Buckner’s academic portrait of heterosexual transvestism was of a pathology.

“The heterosexual transvestite provides an interesting example of a socially induced "pathology" because he seems to have internalized part of a social relationship, and acts toward himself in a way that a normal person acts toward a socio-sexually significant other.”
“The transvestite is blocked from achieving either the cultural goal of normal heterosexual masculine functioning, a goal which he shares, or the common variant, homosexuality. His response to this double blockage is to create a miniature society within himself in which he can achieve a cultural goal without following the cultural pattern of achieving it through interpersonal relationships.”

His position is that there is no biologic etiology. He proposes a five-step model:

1. “In most cases, although not absolutely all, the first step in becoming a transvestite comes between the ages of about five and fourteen from the association of some item of feminine wearing apparel with sexual gratification, usually through masturbation.”
2. “The second step in becoming a transvestite comes when the youth perceives some heterosexual difficulties...”
3. “The third step in becoming a transvestite is the blockage of the homosexual outlet. ”
4. “The fourth step in becoming a transvestite involves this elaboration of masturbation fantasies into the development of a feminine self. ”
5. “The fifth step in becoming a transvestite involves fixing the gratification pattern in the identity of the transvestite. Until this fifth step occurs one cannot speak of a person as being a true transvestite; he may have branched off into some other form of deviant sexual behaviour, or he may be functioning in a normal heterosexual pattern.”

The only published transvestite biography that he refers to, and the only person he directly quotes, is the highly untypical one of Leonard Wheeler, a fetishist,  bondage misogynist:

“Keeping her lovely is a full-time job. It literally takes several hours a day - but when I look into the mirror and see what we have made, it's worth every bit of the hard work and discomfort involved. When we walk down the street, our feet flying in their tight patent leather pumps because Connie's skirts are so narrow at the knees, our heels clicking in precise feminine rhythm, it's a great feeling to know that heads are turning. The women look, and they envy Connie her wardrobe; the men look and they envy whoever she belongs to, and maybe they think she doesn't belong to anybody, but they're wrong. She belongs to me. I'm the man whose hands run over her body, the man who touches her where only a lover is allowed to touch. Yes, quite frankly, I get great pleasure from her body. It's more than just sex, I know that now. It takes the place of sex. It's a tingle that I feel through me. It's how I suppose sex feels to a woman.” [emphasis added by Bruckner].

Apparently he then lost interest in the subject and did no further work on it.

*Not the football player.

• H. Taylor Buckner. “The Transvestic Career Path”. Read at the American Sociological Association annual meeting. San Francisco, September, 1969. Psychiatry. Vol.: 33, No. 3. August,1970: 381-389. Online at: www.tbuckner.com/TRANSVES.HTM.
• Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press 1993: 331-2.
• www.tbuckner.com.
• Caroline Devilliers. “The Five Steps”. A Cross-Dresser’s Compendium. www.thewolfshead.co.uk/html/the_five_steps.html.

______________________________________________________________

This is a good example of what you can do with a sample that is obviously far too small to be valid, and which has produced a class/professional bias that a first-year student should be able to spot as lopsided.  Here is Buckner’s description of his sample:  “Their masculine roles are largely involved with symbolic manipulation: a medical doctor engaged in research, a professor, a Ph.D. in research, an architect with two professional degrees, a university student, an executive, and a minister. It may very well be that transvestites live a somewhat more complicated fantasy life than most people”.

And then to quote one and only one biography that admits that the person is untypical of transvestites.

How did he get this paper peer-reviewed?

Vern Bullough comments on Buckner’s paper:  “Two decades of research have added significantly to the data base, but the outlines of this pattern after the first cross-dressing episode seem valid at least for some male transvestites”.  I have already given my opinion of Bullough.  Devilliers discussion is much more insightful than Bullough's is.

Viviane Namaste is also at Concordia.  However she completed her PhD the year that Buckner retired.  She is a later generation.

Leonard Wheeler (? - ) a transvestite into bondage and misogyny.

In 1964 Leonard Wheeler published Sex Life of a Transvestite. He revealed Connie, his female self as an erotic transvestite who was also into bondage, with cruel sadistic fantasies about women. He does state that his bondages and his attitudes to women are separate from his crossdressing, and that he is hardly typical of transvestites.

His thoughts were written up by Jack Jardine (1931 - 2009), a lesser science fiction writer using one of his aliases. Using the same alias he had published Girls on Sin Street, about prostitution, the year before.

The book contained an introduction by Albert Ellis (1913 – 2007), an associate of Alfred Kinsey, who had published Sex Without Guilt in 1958, and was then writing Homosexuality, Its Causes and Cures which would be published in 1965. He later became the father of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and was known for his liberal use of swear words.

Wheeler’ book was the only biography cited, and Wheeler the only person quoted,  in H. Taylor Buckner’s convention paper on transvestites that was read to the American Sociological Association in 1969, which found the practice to be a pathology.

Nothing else is known about Leonard Wheeler.

*Not the football player.

• Leonard Wheeler, as told to Jack Jardine writing as Larry Maddock, with an introduction by Albert Ellis. Sex life of a Transvestite. K. D. S. Publ. Co 1964.
• H. Taylor Buckner. “The Transvestic Career Path”. Read at the American Sociological Association annual meeting. San Francisco, September, 1969. Psychiatry. Vol.: 33, No. 3. August,1970: 381-389. Online at: www.tbuckner.com/TRANSVES.HTM.

Sylvester James (1947 – 1988) singer.

Sylvester was raised in Los Angeles. He was encouraged to sing by his grand-mother, the 1920s-1930s jazz singer, Julia Morgan, and he became a child gospel star singing in churches all over southern California and beyond.

However he fell out with his parents and ran away at 16. He lived on the streets in Los Angeles, and moved on to San Francisco in 1967. He performed in drag as Ruby Blue, singing Billie Holliday and the other women blues singers.

He became part of the San Francisco radical drag troupe The Cockettes and is in two of their films, Luminous Procuress and Tricia’s Wedding, both 1971. He also taught them to sing. He also played a female impersonator in the Bette Midler retelling of the life of Janis Joplin, The Rose, 1979.

As a rock singer he had limited success, even though the albums were dance oriented. He found fame as a disco and Hi-NRG singer. He is best known for singing the disco classic "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)". Sylvester appeared on the Joan Rivers show in 1986 and talked about his husband Rick, and showed off his wedding ring.

He reacted to pressure from the record label to butch-up his image by attending meetings in drag. He went public when he was diagnosed with AIDS. And attended Pride events in a wheelchair. He died from complications from AIDS at the age of 41. A drag photo-shoot, which he staged as a gag provided the cover for his posthumous album, Immortal, 1989.

• Paul Oremland (dir). The Rhythm Divine: The Story of Disco. US 55 mins 1991.
• David Weissman & Bill Weber (dir). The Cockettes. US 100 mins 2001.
• Tim Smyth (dir). Sylvester: Mighty Real. US 11 mins 2002.
• Joshua Gamson. The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the 70s in San Francisco. New York: Henry Holt and Co. 2005.
• Kevin E. Taylor. “Sylvester: A revolution recorded, televised & never compromised”. Gay Men of African Descent. www.gmad.org/Sylvester.htm.
• “Sylvester James”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_James.
• www.sylstar.net.

Stella MacGregor (192? - ?) bearded lady, accountant.

Betty MacGregor was raised in Battle Creek, Michigan. Even as a young woman she had to shave up to six times a day. She did a master’s degree at the University of Michigan to work with gifted children. While working at the hospital, she she would slip away for a quick shave to avoid funny looks from patients and doctors.


During World War Two she let her beard grow and started working in circus sideshows. She married twice. Her first husband died in the war, and the second died in a road accident. However the demand for bearded ladies had passed, and in the mid-1960s she made only $50 a week.

According to her last manager, she quit the sideshow business, became a man, and he worked as an accountant.

• Mark Hartzman. “Stella Macgregor” American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. 2006: 184-5.

____________________________________________________________

This is the only case that I have heard of where a bearded lady later becomes a man.

Unfortunately, the manager did not tell Hartzman whether MacGregor's change was aided by hormones and surgery or not. 

Carola Kretschmer (1948 - ) musician.

Thomas Kretschmer was born in Fulda, Hesse, West Germany. He became a rock guitarist and worked often with Udo Lindenberg.

Kretschmer transitioned to Carola in 1999. She is still with the Udo Lindenberg band.

• “Carola Kretschmer”. Wikipedia: Die freie Enzyklopädie. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carola_Kretschmer.
• www.carola-kretschmer.de/index.html.

Waltraud Schiffels (1944 - ) academic.

Walter Schiffels was born in Saarbrücken, Germany. He did a PhD in German in 1975, and became an instructor at Saarland University, and then Director of Culture Department at Saarbrücken Volkshochschule.

After a divorce from his wife, he became an alcoholic and even worked as a transvestite in a brothel.

She transitioned to Waltraud in 1988. She is also a fiction writer, and has also written an autobiography and advice for transsexuals.

• Barbara Kamprad and Waltrauf Schiffels (ed). Im falschen Körper: Alles über Transsexualität. Zürich: Kreuz Verlag. 1991
• Waltraud Schiffels. Frau werden: Von Walter zu Waltraud. Zürich: eFeF-Verlag. 1992.
• Waltraud Schiffels. Ich bin zwei. Ein Gespräch über Literatur und das Leben zwischen den Geschlechtern. Bamberg: Palette-Verlag. 1993.
• Andrea Bronstering. “Eine Dame alter Schule”. www.transgenderradio.de/beitrag/schiffels.html.
• “Waltraud Schiffels”. Wikipedia: Die freie Enzyklopädie. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltraud_Schiffels.

Synthia Kavanagh (1962 - ) sex worker, inmate.

Richard Chaperon was born in British Columbia. From ages 2 to 9 he was in the care of the Children's Aid Society; from age 11 to a week before his 16th birthday, he was in a juvenile detention centre, and first started dressing as female.


Synthia legally changed her name at age 19. As an adult she calculated that she had spent only six years of her life not in some kind of institution.

She says that she always felt that she was female. She has twice been assessed by the Gender Identity Clinics in British Columbia and Ontario, for approval for a sex-change, and has twice been refused.

In 1985, she was working as a prostitute when she murdered a fellow transsexual, her roommate Lisa Black, with a hammer and a knife.

The judge suggested 'simple humanity' requires that Synthia serve her sentence in a woman's prison, however the correctional services rejected this and put her in Millhaven Penitentiary, the maximum-security prison for men in Bath, Ontario. The correctional services would not put her in a women's prison because she still had male genitals, and substantially reduced her dosage of estrogens despite the fact that she has been taking them for many years.

The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, Ontario's Gender Identity Clinic, refused to approve her for a sex-change because she was unable to complete a two-year Real-Life Test. She filed a human rights complaint and the Human Rights Tribunal agreed that the policy of Corrections Canada placing trans women among the male population was discriminatory and that the absolute ban on sex changes was unwarranted. This decision was upheld in Federal Court.

Kavanagh had the operation in 2000, and in 2001 was transferred to Joliette, a medium-security women’s prison north of Montréal.

In 2005 she trashed a room at Edmonton’s women’s prison and fought off guards. She was then transferred to the maximum-security Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario.

• Bruce DeMara. “Serving a life term in two prisons”. The Toronto Star. 4 March 1990.
• “Synthia Kavanagh Human Rights Case”. The Transgender Inmate Experience. Oct 4, 2008. transgenderinmate.blogspot.com/2008/10/blog-post.html.
• Transgender Prisoners in Canada.  http://www.vcn.bc.ca/august10/downloads/trans_prisoners_july2007.pdf

_______________________________________________________________________

The 2005 trashing incident provoked some ‘she is still a man’ newspaper articles.

Synthia Kavanagh was not the first Canadian inmate to have gender surgery, although she is the best known.   She was preceded by Shelley Ball in 1980.

Steve Dain (1940 – 2007) gym teacher, FTM pioneer.

Doris Richards attempted marriage as a woman, but it did not work.

Later, while working as a girls’ gym teacher in Union City, California, he transitioned to male at age 35, with surgery from Dr Donald Laub at Stanford Gender identity Clinic.

Steve lost his job and went to court. He was briefly a media topic, but the very next day the Renée Richards story pushed him off the front page.

Eventually he won a court ruling that he could teach again, but was not able to find a school that would hire him.

He worked setting ceramic tiles. He became a focal point for trans men in the San Francisco area, and helped other to follow him including Lou Sullivan, Jamison Green and Max Valerio.

He did eventually teach again in a community college.

He died of cancer at age 67.

• Lee Grant (dir). What Sex Am I? . US 58 mins color 1985.
• Max Wolf Valerio. “RIP Steve Dain – FTM Pioneer”. Trans Group Blog Feb 28, 2008. http://transgroupblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/rip-steve-dain-ftm-pioneer.html.
  

Eva Robin’s (1958 - ) performer.

Roberto Maurizio Coatti was born in Bologna. He was intersex, who looked like a normal boy, but developed as a woman after puberty.

She took her name from Eva Kent in the Diabolik comics, and Harold Robbins, and thought it to be more cute with an apostrophe.

She is also model and a singer. In 1977, using the name Cassandra, she recorded the disco classic, Disco Panther (see below).

It remains unclear just which intersex condition applies, and there are rumours that she did have genital surgery, perhaps in 1998 or even 1991, although Eva denies this.

She did reveal her penis in the films Evaman, 1980, and Mascara, 1989 (as did Romy Haag), where she played a drag performer, but never since.

In two Hercules films, Ercole, 1983 and Avventure dell'incredibile Ercole, 1984, she played Dedalos as a female, although in Greek myth the character is a man.

She played a transsexual in Belle al Bar, 1994.

She has been in 19 films, and also on Italian television program Il bello delle donne (The Beautiful Women) 2002.

Her legal name is still Roberto Coatti.

• “Eva Robin’s”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Robin's.
• Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com/name/nm0732189.
• Annie Richards. “Fabulous Eva”. Second Type Women. www.secondtype.com/gallery-eva.htm.

Sandie Crisp (1960 - ) performer.

John Baima from Los Angeles was poliomyelitic at age 3 months, and was for a while a quadriplegic. At age six, he fell asleep during a church service, and afterwards was able to move, even to walk. His parents split up shortly afterwards, and he was put into foster care, where he was severely abused physically and sexually.

One foster parent, to develop his muscle strength, made him spend 8 hours a day in the pool. This enabled him at age 12 to get a gig as a swimming double for Eric Shea in The Poseidon Adventure, 1972.

His growth was restricted by an ill-fated attempt to strengthen his spine with a steel rod. It was supposed to be removed at age 16, but the doctor had died by then, and it is still in place.

At 18 he got lost in the MGM studio and made a cameo appearance on the Lou Grant show. He worked as a children’s speech therapist, married a woman and had three children.


In 1980 he was diagnosed as HIV+, probably from one of many blood transfusions. He was very gaunt at this time, and was photographed with false lesions – the photographs were sent to the new President Reagan to spur action on Aids.  At the same time he was videoed tap-dancing.

She became a drag queen under the name the Goddess Bunny.  She changed her everyday name to Sandie Crisp. In 1986 Sandie was sitting, smoking, on Hollywood Boulevard when she was approached by Penelope Spheeris, which led to a small part in Hollywood Vice Squad, 1986.  Altogether, she has been in five films.

Also in 1986, she was approached by artist Joel-Peter Witkin who asked her to appear in a photographic reinterpretation of Leonardo Da Vinci's Leda and the Swan. She has also been in Marilyn Manson (see below) and Dr Dre videos.

Her first husband died in a car accident on Mulholland Drive. She worked as a prostitute for two years to support an unemployed husband’s drug addiction.

She has been thrown out of “half the bars in LA”.

She retains a positive attitude, and ran for Empress of Los Angeles, as a prelude to running for serious public office.

• Nick Bourgas (dir). The Goddess Bunny, with Sandie Crisp. US 85 mins 1998.
• Scott Michaels. “Shelley Winters”. Find A Death. nd. http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/w/Shelleywinters/shelley.htm.
• James Doorne. “Goddess Bunny”. Bizarre. January 2008. www.bizarremag.com/entertainment/interviews/6423/goddess_bunny.html.
• www.goddessbunny.com.

Howard W. Jones (1910 - ) gynecologist.

A native of Baltimore, Jones did an A.B. at Amherst College 1931, and an M.D. at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1935. In 1940 he married fellow gynecologist Georgeanna Seegar (1912 – 2005).

During the Second World War he was a chief surgeon under Generals Patton and Simpson during the invasion of Europe.


In 1948 he and Georgeanna became part-time faculty in the department of gynecology and obstetrics in the school of medicine at Johns Hopkins. In 1960 they left their private practice to become full-time faculty.

Their 1965 textbook with Edmund Novak went through several editions and in its time outsold all other such textbooks combined.

Howard did the ‘corrective’ surgery on John Money’s intersex infants, and in 1965 when Money started the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he did the surgery on their transsexual patients starting with Phyllis Avon Wilson. The infant David Reimer was reassigned to female in 1967. Dawn Langley Hall had surgery in 1968, and maybe Kiira Treia in 1974. Howard also established the crytogenetics laboratory at Johns Hopkins when the field was in its infancy.

The Joneses retired from Johns Hopkins in 1978, actually just before the Gender Identity Clinic was closed, and were then appointed professors of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia Medical School, where they established the first in vitro fertilization program in the United States.

The Jones were the only gynecologists from the US invited to advise the Catholic Pope on assisted reproduction.

• Edmund R. Novak, Georgeanna Seegar Jones, and Howard Wilbur Jones. Textbook of Gynecology Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co, 1965.
• Howard Wilbur Jones, and William Wallace Scott. Hermaphroditism, Genital Anomalies and Related Endocrine Disorders. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co, 1971.
• Howard Wilbur Jones, and Charlotte Schrader. In Vitro Fertilization and Other Assisted Reproduction. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, v. 541. New York, N.Y.: New York Academy of Sciences, 1988.
• “The Howard W. Jones, Jr. Collection”. Medical Archives. 1999. www.medicalarchives.jhmi.edu/sgml/joneshw.html.
• Howard Wilbur Jones, and Georgeanna Seegar Jones. War and Love: A Surgeon's Memoir of Battlefield Medicine During World War II with Letters to and from Home. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2004.
• www.jonesinstitute.org. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

As Harold Benjamin became a sex-change doctor after the normal age of retirement, so the Jones started their career in in vitro fertilization also after retirement age.

Dawn Langley Simmons (1922 – 2000) part 2: wife and mother.

Continued from Part 1.

After her two weddings, Mrs Simmons was now a pariah in Charleston. Much of this was a social freeze, but it also irrupted into catcalls, a crate set on fire, a dog poisoned.

She had spent a lot of money on the two weddings. She also bought John-Paul three or four fishing boats and three cars. The trove of art and antiques was being diminished.

The First Federal Savings and Loan, which held the mortgage on her house, announced that it would foreclose it she did not pay off the full loan immediately. This it did in April 1971, and the house was sold by public auction at a bargain price. They moved into a rented house in an unfashionable part of town.

John-Paul was having an affair with another woman, white-skinned but officially black, and made her pregnant. Her family said that she had enough children and her father made arrangements for Dawn to buy the baby. Dawn padded her stomach and phoned the Johns Hopkins Clinic to tell them that she was pregnant. Edgerton asked her to come in for a free examination, but she did not. The pregnant mother checked into hospital as Mrs John-Paul Simmons, and after the birth, 17 October 1971, her father gave the baby to Dawn. She phoned Edgerton again to announce that the baby had arrived.

With the original record of birth which listed Mrs John-Paul Simmons as the mother and her own papers in her married name, and the baby, Dawn registered the birth in Philadelphia while on a visit to her publishers. She called the child Natasha after the character in War and Peace. She was 49 at the time but claimed to be 34.

She also published her first autobiography, The Ballad of Dawn and John-Paul, the same year, in which she claimed to be a female intersex wrongly raised as a boy. The publisher changed the title to Man into Woman, which Dawn disliked.

John-Paul came and went as he chose. He had other lovers, and at least one other child. Dawn acquired bruises which she blamed on muggers and racists, but they seemed to happen only when John-Paul was around. She wrote to her husband:

My dear Johnny,
I am not upset with you as I know you were not yourself the other night. I have no money left. You know that and you destroyed all of my work when I couldn't give you $30 for your son. I shall never stop you from seeing Natasha as I love you and have always loved you. Nobody would love a man who has tried to kill them several times, gave them 45 stitches in their face, broke their nose, and cheekbone and ruined the eyesight in one eye. But I have never ever shut the door against you and you came back. You were the kindest man I ever knew before that woman ruined you with drink. I am eternally thankful to you for the most beautiful baby in Charleston. You don't have to live with us again Johnny; I don't think you can live with anybody.

In December 1973 she claimed that a masked white intruder threatened the baby, raped her and broke her arm. But she never reported this to the police.

She and Natasha fled to Catskill, New York, where she acquired a run-down historical house for a mere $200 binder. John-Paul Simmons left his other wife and child and followed. He took up sculpture and had some success. However he did drugs and drink and would go out in the snow barefoot. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and delivered to the state mental hospital in Albany. He returned home several times, but committed minor thefts and assaults.

Dawn became an art teacher in a Catholic school and was reduced to writing for the National Enquirer. In 1981 she got an advance on her writing a biography of Margaret Rutherford, and moved with her daughter to nearby Hudson, New York. In 1982 she divorced Simmons, but continued to care for him.


In 1985, on a trip back to Charleston, she was an extra in the ABC/Warner Bros miniseries North and South.

Natasha in turn became a mother.

In 1995 Dawn published her third autobiography, Dawn, a Charleston Legend. Nigel Nicolson, the son of Vita and Harold, reviewed it positively in The Spectator:

“there is not a word of reproach for me in her book. Like everything else about Dinky, it is gallant, resilient and unfailingly generous”.

The publishers flew her to Charleston for book signings. Natasha and her children returned to Charleston that year, and Dawn followed two years later. As she aged, she suffered from Parkinson’s disease and osteoporosis. She died at home at age 77.

John-Paul remained in hospital in Albany. He was not informed of her death until Edward Ball tracked him down.

Dawn Simmons had written three autobiographies, over 20 celebrity biographies, novels and children’s books.

• Dawn Langley Simmons. Man into Woman: A Transsexual Autobiography. London: Icon Books, 1970.
• Margaret Rutherford as told to Gwen Robyns. Margaret Rutherford: an Autobiography. London: W.H. Allen, 1972: 149-155
• Dawn Langley Simmons. All for Love. London: Star Books, 1975.
• Virginia Spencer Carr. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975: 519-520.
• John Picton. “Story lacked one vital fact: Dawn started life as Gordon”. The Toronto Star. 19 March 1989.
• Dawn Langley Simmons. Dawn, a Charleston Legend. Charleston, S.C.: Wyrick, 1995.
• James T Sears. Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1997: chp 5.
• Jack Hitt. “Dawn”. This American Life. Chicago Public Radio. Oct 30, 1998. www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=633. Includes an audio podcast. The segment on Dawn starts 8 minutes in. http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/CPRadio_player.php?podcast=http://www.thisamericanlife.org/xmlfeeds/15.xml&proxyloc=http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/customproxy.php.
• Philip Hoare. “Obituary: Dawn Langley Simmons”. The Independent. Sep 28, 2000.
• Dinita Smith. “Dawn Langley Simmons, Flamboyant Writer, Dies at 77”. The New York Times. September 24, 2000. www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/nyregion/dawn-langley-simmons-flamboyant-writer-dies-at-77.html.
• Edward Ball,. Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

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In writing on Simmons, one has to choose: does one go with the story in Simmon’s three ( yes 3) autobiographies that she was really a girl mis-assigned at birth, and that Natasha was a child of her body, or does one go with Edward Ball with his thorough fact checking and interviewing of almost everybody who knew her?

Certainly we can see Dawn being economical with the truth: she deducts 15 years from her age; she claims that she was treated at the women’s clinic rather than the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital; that Isabel Whitney was a cousin; that she was raped and assaulted by a mafia thug hired by Albert Goldman (only in Jack Hitt’s later version); and that she was descended from Spanish nobility on her mother’s side.  She says nothing about a sex life before transition, but Ball is able to find gay men who had been with Gordon, and the 1959 novella is consistent with Gordon being a gay man at that time. If Gordon had been  intersex, the testimony of the Charleston gay men would be different, as would that of Dr Milton Edgerton.

Then there is the question of finances. Many people blur the facts of their own finances, but if Isabel Whitney did leave over $1 million (equivalent to over $7 million today) to Gordon, where did it all go? Why did Gordon need a mortgage to buy the house in Charleston? Yes, John-Paul wasted some of it on boats and cars. But what happened to the 40-room mansion in New York? Was it turned into apartments? Did Gordon or Dawn sell their interest? There is no discussion of moving back there after being driven out of Charleston. While Dawn talks of poverty, of selling antiques and jewellery for a pittance, of accepting charity and then getting on the food-stamps program, she then flies to London with Natasha, takes a taxi (not a bus or a train) from Heathrow to central London and stays at the Hotel Washington. The hotel is still going: it is in Mayfair, close to Park Lane and Green Park. Here is its web site and rates. Rooms today start at £325 a day. Quite a splashing out for someone on welfare. All for Love finishes mysteriously when she escapes welfare in Charleston by buying a historic house in the Catskills. Ball says that she got it for $200 down, but this still seems odd.

Their marriage was blessed in an Anglican church in England. This is, of course, the same Anglican Church which demanded an exception in the Gender Recognition Act, 2004, so that it could refuse to marry transsexuals.

I was quite impressed that the African Methodist Episcopal Church was so accepting of Dawn.   I hope that that is still true today.

What to my mind is Dawn’s first big achievement is that she was a working-class child who managed to become a well-known writer. She herself does not seem to be proud of that.  She drops hints to Jack Hitt that she was an unrecognized aristocrat and frequently drops the names of the rich and titled. On the other hand, she never even once mentions another transsexual, not even Christine Jorgensen or April Ashley. Did she get her UK birth certificate re-issued before Corbett v. Corbett stopped the process in 1969? She seems as lonely in her gender journey as was Agnes.

Re the Harley St gynaecologist.  There is a Elliot Elias Philipp who wrote Childlessness: its Causes and What to do About them, and co-authored Scientific Foundations of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 1970.

I bought my copy of The Peninsula of Lies through Amazon Marketplace. My copy is stamped Charleston County Library, S.C.

The anecdote with Carson McCullers is found in her biography by Virginia Carr.  Both Ball and Hitt repeat it with variations, without citing this source.  It seems that it was also repeated as gossip in Charleston.

There is an entry for Dawn in Wikipedia (here).  You may like to compare it with what is written here.  The authors of the entry accept her reduction of her age by 15 years, mention nothing about her pre-transition sex life, and refer to her as 'Simmons' (never Mrs Simmons) even before she met Mr Simmons, even when she was a child.

Dawn Langley Simmons (1922- 2000) part 1: celebrity biographer, antiques dealer.

Gordon Kenneth Ticehurst was born to an unmarried teenager in the village of Heathfield, Sussex. He was raised by his grandmother. His mother subsequently married, and she and her husband were servants at Sissinghurst in Kent, the home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. Gordon visited his mother at Sissinghurst where he was known as Dinky. In later life he would compare his own life to Orlando, the magic-sex-change novel written by Vita’s lover Virginia Woolf, and based on Vita.

At 17 he re-registered his birth with his mother’s husband listed as his father. He started using the name Gordon Langley Hall, Hall being his grandmother’s maiden name.

In 1946 Gordon did a year as a teacher on an Ojibwe reservation at Lake Nipigon in north-western Ontario. He returned to England and taught for two years in Croydon, and did some society journalism.

In 1950 he emigrated to the US and became society editor for The Nevada Daily Mail in Missouri. In 1952 he became a society columnist for the New York suburban Port Chester Daily Item. One evening he attended an art showing and took up with the artist Isabel Whitney (1878 – 1962), a descendant of Eli Whitney (1765 – 1825), the inventor of the cotton gin. Gordon moved into her 40-room mansion on West 10^th Street.and became her companion.

In 1955 he published Me Papoose Sitter based on his experiences with the Ojibwe. In 1957 his play about interracial same-sex love between soldiers, Saraband for a Saint, was performed in Harlem, and attracted celebrity attention. He also started a career as a celebrity biographer with books on US first ladies and British royalty, and through colleagues on the Villager newspaper was able to meet the actress Bette Davis (1908 – 1989).

In 1959 he wrote a never-published 150-page novella about a 40-year-old writer who picks up a 19-year-old man and makes him his secretary and lover. The young man eventually leaves, and later the older man strangles him and goes to death row.

In 1960 Gordon met the noted actress Margaret Rutherford (1892 – 1972), then 68. Rutherford and her husband Stringer Davis(1899 –1973) adopted Hall two years later, as they had done with three other adults.

As Isabel aged, she and Gordon decided to buy a pink stucco house in the gay area of Charleston, North Carolina, but she died before they could move. Hall flew her body to Heathfield for burial, although she had never been there in life. Whitney left him an estate reportedly worth over $1 million.

Gordon renovated the house in Charleston, filled it with antiques, and became part of Charleston society. In 1963 the aging Carson McCullers visited Charleston and met Gordon at a party. She is reputed to have taken him aside and said to him: “You are really a little girl”.

Not being married, he did not really fit in with the Charleston gay scene, but he cruised the nearby bus station. At a time when Charleston white gay men rarely went with black men, Gordon was smitten when he met the 18-year-old John-Paul Simmons (1948 – ).

Hall first courted John-Paul as a man, but without success, and then as a woman. She persuaded John-Paul to start living in her house. By 1967 Hall had been accepted in the new Gender Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. John-Paul went with her to the Clinic. Dr Milton Edgerton told her that the operation would be a mistake, but they would do it if she insisted.

John-Paul left her, but came back when she said that she would not have the operation, but then she had it anyway in 1968. She was one of the first to have surgery with Dr Howard Jones under the Johns Hopkins program. She changed her name to Dawn Pepita Langley Hall (Pepita was the grandmother of Vita Sackville-West).

John-Paul left her again, and again she pestered him to return. Dawn had to hire a lawyer to persuade the judge to issue a marriage license. On the license she claimed to be 31. South Carolina still had a law forbidding interracial marriage, but a similar law in Virginia had been struck down by the US Supreme Court. The engagement photograph was printed in the UK on the front page of the News of the World. The marriage was held in their home on 22 January 1969 presided over by a pastor from the Shiloh African Methodist Episcopal Church of which Dawn had recently become the sole white member.

It was international news featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, the black weekly, Jet, and the tabloid, National Insider; the Japanese tabloid Shukan Shincho, and in the UK, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express and the Sussex Express. The People paid her ₤3750 for a series on her life, and supported her claim to have been examined by a Harley Street surgeon (Dawn later said that this was Dr Elliot Phillip) who said that she had been wrongly sexed at birth and was capable of becoming pregnant. She was also on radio and television in the UK and Canada, but not in the US where her story was too hot.

Dawn’s mother died, and Mr and Mrs Simmons planned a visit to her grave. Margaret Rutherford enabled a blessing of their marriage in an Anglican church in Hastings, Kent.

Continued in Part 2.

Luiza Bambine Moreira (1964 - ) model, performer.

Luís Roberto Gambine Moreira was born in Rio.

She started to live as female full time in her teens, and secretly took female hormones. She was exempted from Brazilian national service, after she reported in a dress, which led to her father, a senior army officer, disowning her for many years.

She became famous as a model and actress by the age of 20 using the stage name Roberta Close, and was the first pre-op to appear in Brazilian Playboy. After gender surgery at Charing Cross Hospital in London in 1989 she was featured in a Brazilian men's magazine and voted by readers ‘Most Beautiful Woman in Brazil’.

She tried to challenge Brazilian laws that prevent her from using a female name or listing her gender as female, but lost in the Supreme Court in 1997. In 1999 she was arrested for having a female passport.

She lives in Switzerland, where she married her manager, Roland Granacher in 1993.

In 1998 she published her autobiography in which she claims involvements with Eddie Murphy, Robert de Niro and many others.

Only in 2005 did she acquire female status in Brazil and a new birth certificate.

She has acted in five Brazilian films, mainly in the 1990s.

• Roberta Close. Muito Prazer, Roberta Close (Much Pleasure, Roberta Close). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rosa dos Tempos. 1998.
• Jen Star. “Luiza Bambine Moreira - - ‘Roberta Close’”. Antijen. http://antijen.org/Articles/RC1.html.
• “Roberta Close”. Internet Movie DataBase. www.imdb.com/name/nm0167103. 5 films.
• “Roberta Close – A pantera virou uma lady”.   Closes no blog.  20 August 2008.  http://closesnoblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/roberta-close-pantera-virou-uma-lady.html

Nicholas de Raylan (1873 - 1906) secretary, soldier.

Well educated and obviously a graduate of a Russian university, Nicholas de Raylan declared himself to be the son of a Russian admiral. He was the confidential secretary to the Russian Consul in Chicago.

He enlisted in the U.S. army during the Spanish-American war.

He married twice. The first wife obtained a divorce after ten years of marriage on the grounds of cruelty and misconduct with chorus girls.

His second wife was a chorus girl and brought a child from a previous marriage.

Suffering from tuberculosis, de Raylan went to Phoenix, Arizona hoping for a cure, but died there. The telegram that announced his death also declared him to be a woman. Both wives insisted that this must be nonsense.

• Havelock Ellis. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol 2, part 2. Sexual Inversion 3^rd edition. NY: Random House. 1936:248.
• Eugene de Savitsch. Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex. Springfield Ill: Charles C. Thomas 1958: 6-7.
• Jonathan Katz. Gay American History: Lesbians And Gay Men In The U.S.A. New York: Crowell 1976. New York: A Discus Book.1978: 379-381. Online at www.outhistory.org/wiki/New_York_Times:_death_of_Nicolai_de_Raylan,_June_26,_1907.

Miranda Ponsonby (1933 - ) soldier, farmer, nurse.

Rhodri Davies was raised in a house on Wimbledon Common. His father was a fighter pilot in the Great War, and reservist who died in the Second World War. His mother died in an air accident over Frankfurt in 1952.

He had sexual experiences at his boys public school, where he gained respect by becoming the captain of the cricket XI.

After school he went to Africa to work on the family’s cattle farm, where he was also a big game hunter.
He did National service in the Life Guards, part of the Household Cavalry, and stayed for ten years rising to the rank of captain and serving in Egypt and Aden, where he was almost killed when his vehicle was blown up. He escorted the Queen, was in the guards at Whitehall, and played polo.

He then took over the family farm in Leicestershire. He met his wife, June, on a course for riding instructors. They had two sons.

After 30 years of marriage they divorced and his oldest son took over the farm. In 1994 Rhodri decided that it was time to become Miranda Ponsonby (Ponsonby being her mother's maiden name). She couldn’t be bothered with a real life test:

“I said bugger that to all that messing about. I saw this chap, a cosmetic surgeon, at a clinic in Huntingdon. I don't think he's practising any more. I asked him how much to skip all that bloody nonsense. He said £6,000. About a week later, I went up to some dreadful place called Rotherham. I hadn't ever dressed as a woman before. So I bought some women's clothes, put them in a suitcase, and drove up on a rainy, awful day. It was a horrifying operation. They managed to leave part of one of my testicles behind. Which was a bit careless. After a day, I decided to go home."

Miranda trained as a nurse at Guys Hospital, and is the oldest nurse ever to qualify in the National Health Service. She has now worked at the Kettering General Hospital for 10 years, and is currently in the coronary care unit.

She is quite open about her past. Her family, her regiment and the hunting set all cut her off. She claims that she is no happier now than she was before the operation. Her advice to those contemplating sex change surgery is "I would say don't do it. I am a very strong person and if you are not you will be destroyed by it”.
She published her autobiography in 2009.

• Miranda Ponsonby. The Making of Miranda: From Gentleman to Gentlewoman in One Lifetime. Gretton: Noble, 2009. www.themakingofmiranda.com.
• “Why I had a sex change operation. Rhodri's tranformation into Miranda”. Evening Telegraph. 10 Oct 2009. http://www.northantset.co.uk/features/Why-I-had-a-sex.5457923.jp.
• Peter Stanford. “The day Rhodri became Miranda”. The Daily Telegraph. 29 Jun 2007. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/3633175/The-day-Rhodri-became-Miranda.html.
• Damian Whitworth. “An officer and a gentle woman: the sex-change aristocrat”. The Times. July 13, 2009. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6694517.ece
• ” New book tells extraordinary tale of sex change nurse”. Nursing Times. 10 October 2009. http://www.nursingtimes.net/most-popular/off-duty/new-book-tells-extraordinary-tale-of-sex-change-nurse/5007155.article.
• “Miranda Ponsonby”. Nona-people. July 17, 2009. http://nona-people.blogspot.com/2009/07/miranda-ponsonby.html.

Thomas Szasz (1920 - ) psychiatry professor.

Thomas Szasz was born in Budapest. He earned  a degree in physics from the University of Cincinnati in 1941, and a medical degree from the same university in 1944. His residency was in psychiatry. He was professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York, and Professor Emeritus after retirement.


He is a prominent theorist in the anti-psychiatry movement and a critic of medicine as social control. His best known books are The Myth of Mental Illness, 1960, and The Manufacture of Madness, 1970.

Szasz has gained a reputation as a libertarian critic of psychiatric practice. He speaks against the coercive psychiatric practice which he calls 'the Therapeutic State', although many critics while not defending the abuses in mental hospitals, regard his attack as on a straw man. While his attack on the state's interference in addiction, suicide and homosexuality can easily be accepted, there is an enormous area of psychiatry which he does not discuss.

Sedgwick says: 'Phobics, depressives, manics, schizophrenics and anxiety neurotics - in short, the general run of psychiatric patients who, in addition to having 'life problems' do happen to feel distinctly unwell, rarely if ever enter Dr Szasz's casebook'.

Szasz’ solution of Contractual Psychotherapy is not available to those of limited means. Nor does he attack those of his colleagues who keep a patient in therapy for decades.

In 1969 he co-founded, with the Church of Scientology, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR).

In 1973, the American Humanist Association named Szasz, Humanist of the Year.   Note that not even one GLBT person has been so named.

Szasz's attack on psychiatry's invention of homosexuality as a disease was congruent with the rise of gay activism in the 1970s leading to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM III in 1974.

However he has come out strongly against the right of people to change their sex. He refers to trans women as ‘he’ etc; compares the operation to clitorectomy: sees sex change as a fraud, accepts uncritically the study that justified the ending of surgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, ignoring all the methodological problems that have been raised, but does not respect the decision made by the individual transsexual. He embraces Janice Raymond's pretence that sex changes are anti-feminist, and his review of her book is quoted on both its front and back pages. He has said “If a man cuts off his own penis psychiatrists call him a schizophrenic, but it he can persuade a surgeon to cut it off for him, then they call him a transsexual”.

• Thomas Szasz, “Male and Female He Created Them: review of The Transsexual Empire: The Making Of The She-Male by Janice G. Raymond”, New York Times Book Review, June 10, 1979: 11, 39. Reprinted in Thomas Szasz. The Therapeutic State. Buffalo: Prometheus Books.. 1984: 327-9.
• Thomas Szasz. Sex by Prescription. New York: AnchorPress/Doubleday 198 pp 1980: 86-92.
• Peter Sedgwick. Psycho Politics. Pluto Press. 1982: chp 6.
• “Thomas Szasz & Scientology”. TimBoucher/Journal. Dec 27, 2005. www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/12/27/thomas-szasz-scientology.
• www.szasz.com.
• “Thomas Szasz”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz.

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Charlotte Goiar is a member of CCHR, and features a 90 minute CCHR video on her HBS home page.  I have yet to find any pro-transsexual or pro-HBS material from CCHR, the Church of Scientology or Thomas Szasz.