This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.

There is a detailed Index arranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

30 August 2016

Audrey Tang 唐鳳 (1981 - ) Perl programmer.

++ original October 2010; revised August 2016.

Táng Zōnghàn 唐宗漢,  who later took the English name Autrijus Tang, was born in Taiwan, learnt the Perl programming language at 12, dropped out of school at 14, founded a business at age 16 and by the age of 19 had worked in California as a software entrepreneur. 

In 2005 she transitioned and changed her Chinese name to Táng Fèng 唐鳳 and her English name to Audrey Tang.  Her parents backed her unconditionally. 

She has done pioneering work especially in Perl, Haskell and open source programming. She has translated related textbooks into Chinese. She is a proponent of autodidactism and individualist anarchism.

In 2014, Tang announced her retirement as an entrepreneur, and devoted her time to internet public welfare projects in Taiwan such as g0v.tw and the vTaiwan platform, as well as working on a contract for Apple.  

In August 2016 Audrey was named a minister without portfolio to mange digital information for the Taiwanese government.

*Not the Malaysian jazz musician

  EN.Wikipedia      pugs.

25 August 2016

as if the last several decades had never happened

In May 2011, I wrote about Albert Cashier, a trans man combatant in the US Civil War.   

That war has become noted for the large number of born-female persons who served as men on both sides.  The same phenomenon has not been as documented for the Franco-Prussian War or the Crimean War, both also in the mid-nineteenth century.    It is generally assumed that such cross-dressing was not possible in the Great War, 1914-18, and later, as medical inspections of new recruits became common (however see Julie Wheelwright's Amazons and Military Maids: Women who dressed as men in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness for several who did so anyway).

Most such persons were temporary transvestites, who, if they survived, reverted to living as women after the war.   There has been some debate about how many should be considered transgender, but there is considerable agreement that Albert Cashier is the strongest candidate in that he never reverted, never used his girl name again, and was outed only at the age of 70 in 1914 when he was taken into the State Hospital and coerced into female clothing.   He died a few months later.

Albert Cashier is frequently mentioned as a trans man pioneer, and is featured in Wheelwright's book, in Richard Hall's Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War, and has a book-length biography, Lon P. Dawson's Also Known As Albert D.J. Cashier.    

Cashier's girl name was Jennie Hodgers.

 
So it was with some surprise that I, this week, received an email from one Elizabeth Martins advertising a US Civil War novel by a John William Huelskamp. She writes:
"I’d like to introduce you to Jennie Hodgers, one of the few known women to dress as a man and fight in battle during the Civil War. It was only later on in life that Jennie’s true identity was discovered (otherwise, she would have been dismissed from battle). This begs the question: how many more women fought in battle that have gone unrecognized?"
I have bolded 6 errors in this introductory paragraph.  Martins continues her misgendering, and insists again that Cashier's "true identity" was as a woman.
"Jennie’s story is a classic Civil War story. Move over Scarlett O’Hara – this story is true." 
For some reason I have never though of Scarlett O'Hara as a trans man!!


Obviously Martins never read my article on Mr Albert Cashier.   She does include a passing reference to the LGBTQ community - which again she obviously does not understand.   

She also says that Huelskamp is "fighting to erect a memorial in her [that is Jennie Hodgers, Cashier's girl name] honor in Chicago". While a memorial to Albert Cashier would be quite welcome, one to Jennie Hodgers would be divisive and create a lot of conflict. Remember the 10-year struggle in Portland, Oregon, to get Alan Hart honoured as Alan and not by his girlname.

In previous decades books such as this that ignore the trans identity of historical persons were quite common.   It is very disappointing that it is still going on.   Whether one regards it as impertinent, arrogant, naive or willful ignorance.

23 August 2016

Alice Lyman Miller (1944 - ) intelligence analyst, academic

Harold Lyman Miller grew up in rural western New York state, where as a young teenager he would take a dress when fossil hunting in the wild.

Then he put away childish things and set out to prove his manliness. He played high-school basketball, chased girls, did a BA in Oriental Studies, 1966 at the then all-male Princeton University, and a PhD in history at George Washington University, DC, 1974, and married.

A fluent Mandarin speaker, Miller worked as an analyst of Chinese foreign policy at the Central Intelligence Agency 1974-1990. His second wife was also a CIA analyst. They had a son and a daughter.

From 1990-2000 he worked as professor of China studies and for most of that period, director of the China Studies Program at the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University (which, unlike the rest of Johns Hopkins, is located in Washington, DC).

Not until he was 52 did Miller catch an episode of the Phil Donahue show on TV about transsexuals and realize that was what he was. He also discovered the book True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism by Mildred Brown. Miller discussed his feelings with his second wife, and started wearing female clothes.

Approaching 60, Miller got a new position as a visiting fellow at the conservative think tank, the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, and also as senior lecturer at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

At the urging of the wife, Miller consulted local gender counselor Judy Van Maasdam, the co-ordinator at Stanford’s Gender Dysphoria Clinic. Alice, as Miller became, underwent 250 hours of electrolyis and in total spent over $100,000 transitioning. She was able to transition on the job in both positions. Both institutions had had previous employees transition.

Alice had surgery at the Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California in August 2007.

In May 2015, Alice gave a talk on transition at the TEDx event at Stanford University.

*not Alice Miller the child psychologist
  • Harold Lyman Miller. Factional Conflict and the Integration of Ch'ing Politics, 1661-1690. Phd thesis, George Washington University,1974.
  • H. Lyman Miller. Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Knowledge. University of Washington Press, 1996.
  • Alice Lyman Miller. "Some Things We Used to Know About China's Past and Present (But Now, Not So Much)". Journal of American-East Asian Relations. 16, 1, 2009: 41-68.
  • Alice Lyman Miller & Richard Wich. Becoming Asia: Change and Continuity in Asian International Relations Since World War II. Stanford University Press, 2011.
  • Tracie White. “Transition Point: The Unmet Medicak Needs of Transgender people”. Stanford Medicine, Spring 2012. http://sm.stanford.edu/archive/stanmed/2012spring/article7.html.
  • Stacy Trevenon. “The importance of being Alice: Moss Beach woman embraces transition”. Half Moon Bay Review, June 24, 2015. www.hmbreview.com/community/the-importance-of-being-alice/article_2a66a04c-1aa9-11e5-af30-af09569bfe4b.html.
EN.Wikipedia     HooverInstitute    
_____________________________

The EN.Wikipedia article on Alice has no mention at all of her gender change despite the fact that she is quite open about it. Nor does it list her first two books.  The page was written by the now blocked author Occultzone

Amazon has H Lymon Miller and Alice Miller as two separate authors.

It is ironic that Miller spent 10 years at Johns Hopkins University without being aware of its pioneering gender clinic.


21 August 2016

Parinya Charoenphon ปริญญา เจริญผล (1981–) boxer, actress, singer.

Parinya Charoenphol was born into a family of nomads who settled in Chang Mai province, Thailand. When he was eight, his parents worked looking after an orchard, not knowing that the owners were involved in illegal logging and smuggling. When caught the owners bribed the police to blame Charoenphol’s mother. After three-months imprisonment, the mother was released, and Charoenphol, as is normal for a boy of that age entered a Buddhist monastery. He was expelled at age 12 for being absent attempting to raise money for his family.

At a temple fair, goaded by a competitor, Parinya entered a Muay Thai (kick-boxing) match and won 500 baht. Charoenphol then trained for the sport, where women are not permitted, using the name Nong Tum น้องตุ้ม. The instructor’s wife noticed Tum’s femininity and bought makeup for him, and took him shopping. Tum then was able able to come out to the co-students, and was allowed to wear make-up while fighting. Tum was also attracted to the side of Muay Thai not usually featured in martial arts films: the ancient ritualistic dance moves.

Tum was openly a kathoey and wore makeup for her first victory at Bangkok’s Lumpini Stadium in 1998, and went on to win 22 fights. After each fight she kissed her opponent to show no ill feelings. Although the Thai government had previously banned kathoey athletes from the national volleyball team, the Muay Thai officials welcomed Nong Tum. The Thai tourist industry used her in their advertising.
“I don't equate femininity with weakness. I also knew that I had to be strong, and to protect myself and the people I loved. I was born into poverty and there weren't many ways I could earn a lot of money. I don't think about gender. I think about winning.” (Hodgkinson)
In 1998 Nong Tum was invited to Tokyo to fight Kyoko Inoue, Japan’s top female wrestler, in a higher weight category, and who, like Nong Tum, had defeated male opponents. Both used the movements of their respective traditions. Charoenphol won. After the match, a young Thai woman approached Charoenphol and slapped her for the gender insult to Muay Thai.

In 1999, after a one-year professional career, Parinya announced her retirement from Muay Thai, her new career as a singer, and her intended surgery. She appeared in several music videos. She was initially declined by some of the Thai surgeons, but surgery was performed at Yanhee Hospital, Bangkok in late 1999 when she was 18.

She then found work as a cabaret performer, and continued to support her family. Her life was documented in the film Beautiful Boxer, 2003 (she was portrayed by a male Muay Thai fighter, with Kyoko Inoue as herself and Parinya in a small part as a masseuse under the name of Parinya Kiatbusaba) and Hidden Genders, 2003.

In 2004 she opened a Muay Thai camp for children, and continued to do special fights. As a kickboxer she has fought exhibition matches, and appeared in the film Mercury Man, 2006, as the hero’s transgender sibling, again using the name of Parinya Kiatbusaba.

She runs a chain of beauty parlors, and adopted a daughter, the child of a teenager who was arrested for drug offences.
“I have witnessed the terrible effects social pressure can have on younger ladyboys. I think that some of them just haven’t received any guidance in life so they choose to express themselves negatively as a form of rebellion. Many of them turn into screaming, promiscuous attention-seeking drug addicts who have lost touch with the world around them. I was also surprised to find that a lot of ladyboys don’t like women, and call them chanis (screaming monkeys). I think this dislaike is a result of their own insecurities. I have always felt a deep connection with women, even when I was still living as a man.” (Aldous & Sereemongkonpol: 251)
  • Ekachai Uekrongtham (dir). Beautiful Boxer. Scr: Desmond Sim & Ekachai Uekrongtham, with Asanee Suwan as Nong Tum, Kyoko Inoue as herself and Nong Tum as a masseuse. Thailand 118 mins 2003. Best Actor Award at the Supannahongsa Film Awards.
  • Eric Lim, Suresh Menon & Ajay Singh (dir). Hidden Genders. Scr: Adrian Ong, with Nong Tum and others. Singapore National Geographic TV 47 mins 2003.
  • Laura Green. “Thai "Ladyboy" Kickboxer Is Gender-Bending Knockout”. National Geographic. March 25, 2004. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/03/0325_040325_TVthirdsex.html.
  • Will Hodgkinson. "I don't think about gender. I think about winning". The Guardian, 19 August 2005. www.theguardian.com/film/2005/aug/19/2
  • Somporn Suphop. “Sex-change boxer back in the ring: The world of muay Thai is agog. Transsexual boxer Parinya Kiartbussaba, better known as Nong Tum, is making a comeback”. The Nation, February 23, 2006. www.nationmultimedia.com/2006/02/22/headlines/headlines_20001353.php.
  • LeeRay M. Costa & Andrew Matzner. Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth. Haworth Press, 2007: 17, 27-8.
  • Susan Aldous & Pornchai Sereemongkonpol. Ladyboys: The Secret World of Thailand's Third Gender. Dunboyne: Maverick House, 2008: 225-255.
AsianWiki    OwnRules     EN.Wikipedia      TH.Wikipedia    IMDB(Tum)    IMDB(Kiatbusaba)


The actual fight with Kyoko Inoue


The movie version

07 August 2016

Kay Kwarta (1928 – 1999) engineer, salesman, monkey keeper

Casimir Kwarta, a first-generation Polish-American, trained as an engineer. In 1960 he met Ursula, a recent immigrant from Poland, although by origin a Berliner whose first husband had been the Polish artist, Ryszard Kryszczuk, whom she had hidden to protect from enlistment in the German army in the Nazi period. Casimir and Ursula married in 1963.

They felt pity for monkeys, then frequently found in pet stores, and bought several. Word got out and individuals, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and zoos asked them to take more. They became a chapter of the National Simian Society. Ursula’s favorites were woolly monkeys from Brazil and capuchins. They renovated the garage with large cages, but a few lived in their house in St James, Long Island.

The monkeys could cause chaos by opening jars, and hanging jewelry and even car keys in the trees. Each monkey had a name that s/he responded to. In the wild woolly monkeys live 40 years or so, but in the northern climate only 20. The Kwartas and their monkeys were featured in an article in the New York Times in November 1978.

Casimir, who had become a sales representative with an electronics company subsidized the sanctuary which barely broke even. Ursula worked around the clock looking after the monkeys.

Casimir was trans, and Ursula gave full support. They ran a trans social group from 1980-1988 that was listed in TVTS Tapestry and elsewhere. Casimir, as Kay, was on hormones prescribed by Dr David Wesser.

In 1982, budding journalist James Boylan (the future Jennifer Boylan) had become friends with a trans woman photographer she refers to as ‘Casey’ - although she did not then realize that Casey was trans. They visited the Kwartas for an article for American Bystander, and Casey realized that Kwarta was trans, especially when she discovered the hormones in the bathroom.

In 1989, Casimir retired and they desired somewhere warmer. They eventually found a place in South Carolina with privacy and room for lots of animals. In addition to the monkeys, they had dogs, horses, chickens and a parrot.

Casimir died in 1999 at age 71 from a brain tumor. Ursula died in 2008.
______________

The Kwartas are not listed among the notable residents of St James in Wikipedia.

A note re the anecdote in Jennifer Boylan’s autobiography. She renames the Kwarta’s as D’Angelo, and relocates them to Philadelphia. She also claims to have read Kay and claims it was she who spotted the hormones in the bathroom cabinet.

06 August 2016

Ira B Pauly (1930–) psychiatrist, sex-change doctor

(All quotations from Anderson 2015, unless otherwise specified).

Ira’s father was a successful bookmaker who raised his three sons and a daughter in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. Ira was the youngest, and the first in the family to go to university. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1953. He was a noted rugby and US football player. In the latter, he was on the UCLA winning team of 1953, and Pauly was the B’nai B’rith 1953 Los Angeles Jewish Collegiate Athlete of the Year.
 “I applied to medical school. And even though my, I had a pretty good GPA, probably 3.4, 3.5. But the guys that were getting in had 3.8 and 4.0s. But you know, because by then I had become known as a football player, I was the first one to get accepted at UCLA, I was told. So that didn’t hurt. They were looking for people who were so-called well-rounded.“ (Interview with Maija Anderson p2)
He graduated from the UCLA School of Medicine in 1958. After doing a surgical internship at UCLA, he was accepted for a psychiatric residency at Cornell Medical Center in New York. He married in 1960, and he and his wife had four sons.

In 1961 he was doing a rotation in the consultation service when he was called to urology to counsel a trans man who was in for a hysterectomy. He attempted research in the hospital library but found material on transsexualism only in French and German. He had patients who were willing to do longhand translations for him.

He then discovered a paper by Cauldwell.
“And then there was a brief article by someone named Harry Benjamin. And in those days, it was in a somewhat obscure journal. I don’t quite remember which journal it was. But it had his address. And it was an address that was about five blocks away from the hospital that I was working at. So I looked up his name in the phone book and told him that I was a psychiatry resident, and I had a little experience with a transgender, transsexual patient. And was there any way I could come over and talk to him, because I had read—he was an endocrinologist. And a lot of these folks, the first step in the physical transition is taking the contrary hormone.” (Interview with Maija Anderson p6)
For much of that year, he attended Benjamin's Wednesday afternoon clinic.
 “So every Wednesday afternoon, through the generosity and mentorship of Harry Benjamin, I was able to see probably more transsexual patients than any psychiatrist in North America. … As I got to know the patients, they uniformly described being happier into the gender role that they felt they were in from the very beginning. And that the only thing that needed to be done as far as treatment was concerned was to get the body on board with the gender of their choice.“ (Interview with Maija Anderson p6)
Pauly set out to aggregate 100 cases from the literature and from among Benjamin’s patients.

He had been in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at UCLA and would normally have done military service at the end of his education, but he had developed glaucoma, and the army no longer wanted him. In 1962 he obtained a position at the University of Oregon Medical School.

He completed "Male Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. A Review of 100 Cases" in 1963, but it was not published until 1965. He concluded that that gender surgery had positive results and that trans patients should be supported by medical professionals in their quest to live as the gender of their identity. He then received a thousand requests from doctors around the world for offprints of his article. It also resulted in a job interview at Johns Hopkins, but Oregon doubled his salary to keep him.

++His presentation at the American Psychiatric Association in 1964 led to a sensationalized article in the National Insider that while quoting him that the desire to change is found in childhood, it then blames alcoholic fathers who punished their children, and that "It apparently gave them a reason to escape from responsibility and from being a man".

However, Harry Benjamin, in his 1966 The Transsexual Phenomenon, quotes Pauly as saying:
“Because of his isolation, the transsexual has not developed interpersonal skills, and frequently presents the picture of a schizoid or inadequate personality.” (p71-2/33).
Speaking to the American Psychiatric Association in May 1964, Pauly said:
“The transsexual attempts to deny and reverse his biological sex and pass into and maintain the opposite gender role identification. Claims of organic or genetic etiology have not been substantiated. … Although psychosis is not frequent in the schizophrenic sense, in its most extreme form, transsexualism can be interpreted as an unusual paranoid state, characterized by a well-circumscribed delusional system in which the individual attempts to deny the physical reality of his body. The term Paranoia Transsexualis has been suggested as an appropriate descriptive term for this syndrome. Psychosexual inversion is seen as a spectrum of disorders, from mild effeminacy to homosexuality, transvestism, and finally transsexualism, each representing a more extreme form, and often including the previous manifestation.” (quoted in Benjamin, 162-3/76)
He proposed the term ‘pseudotranssexual’ for those who sought transition to justify their
homosexuality.

He was one of the first doctors to point out that transsexuals tell the doctor what he wants to hear. He called them “unreliable historians”. (Benjamin, 164/76)

Pauly also saw private patients.
“But these folks were, among other things, very grateful because they had great difficulty getting a physician to empathize with their situation, let alone treat them. And prescribe hormones and refer them to the surgeon for surgery. So the word got around. So I probably treated everybody in the Portland area on a one-to-one basis.” (p12)
Oregon had no surgeon performing transgender surgery, so at first patients were referred to San Francisco, and then to Dr Biber in Trinidad, Colorado. Pauly did his own endocrinology prescriptions. In that period he also attempted to treat gay persons wishing to become heterosexual.
“And there was the occasional transgender person that wanted to go back to accept himself in the gender role that was consistent with what his body said. And some of us tried to help out in that regard. But I personally tried to do that with a couple of patients. And the only thing I really accomplished was to kind of push them into a psychosis. So that, by trial and error, I learned that I certainly didn’t have the ability to help them with that problem.” (p19)
In 1969 he contributed two papers to Green & Money’s Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment, one on trans women, one on trans men; each includes four case studies, and an overview.

Paul McHugh, who would close down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins after 1975, was dean of the University of Oregon Medical School until 1975.

In 1975 Pauly’s student Thomas Lindgren, wanting something more objective than a patient’s self-history, developed a body-image scale where patient’s rated how they felt about different parts of their body. Not surprisingly pre-op transsexuals rated their genitals worse than their arms or legs. However it was also used for anorexia and other conditions, including those wanting homeogender surgery.

In 1978 Pauly became chair of the University of Nevada Medical School. He was a founding member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, (now WPATH) in 1979, and served as president of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association from 1985 to 1987.

In the late 1980s, Louis Sullivan was lobbying the American Psychiatric Association and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association and the gender identity clinics to recognize the existence of gay trans men. Pauly was one of the few psychiatrists to respond, and made a three-hour video interview with him.

Pauly retired in 1995, did sabbatical work in New Zealand, and returned to work in the state hospital in Reno, Nevada and became medical director for the Northern Nevada Adult Mental Health Service.

In 2004, Pauly was inducted into the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

He retired again in 2010.
  • Ira B Pauly. "Female Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. Read before the American Psychiatric Ass., St. Louis, May 1963.
  • Arnold Wells. “Exclusive! MD Reveals The Fourth Sex! Not Male, Not Female, And Not Homosexual”. The National Insider, 5, 3, July 19, 1964. Online.
  • Ira B Pauly. "Male Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. A Review of 100 Cases". Archives of General Psychology, 13, 1965:172-181.
  • Ira B Pauly. “The current status of the change of sex operation”. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Nov;147, 5, 1968:460-71.
  • Ira B Pauly. “Female Transsexualism”. Archives of Sexual Behavior,3, 1974:487-526.
  • Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. Warner Books Edition 1977, with a bibliography and appendix by Richard Green.  PDF (with different pagination): 71-2/33, 162-3/76, 164/76, 179/84, 181/84.
  • Ira B Pauly. “Adult Manifestations of Male Transsexualism” and “Adult Manifestations of Female Transsexualism”. In Richard Green & John Money (ed). Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969: 37-87.
  • Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 123, 124, 125, 174.
  • Amy Bloom. Normal: Transsexual CEO's, Cross-Dressing Cops, Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and More. Vintage, 2014: 18-22.
  • Maija Anderson. Interview with Ira B. Pauly, MD. Oregon Health & Science University, Oral History program, Februray 18, 2015. Online
TSRoadmap
______________________

For some reason Harry Benjamin calls Pauly “Ira S Pauly”. 

The EN.Wikipedia article is almost the same as the TSRoadmap article.

At the end of Maija Anderson’s interview, Pauly is asked what he thinks about Alan Hart, the famous trans doctor from Portland, Oregon, who transitioned in 1917. Despite having lived in Portland for 16 years where Hart is remembered, he replies: “No. I wish I had seen that. Where was it published again”, and then “And as far as I knew, the first published female to male, as we referred to it, was the patient I described in the New York Hospital”. Obviously he does not spend much time reading trans history.







04 August 2016

Announcement re year-end review

Announcement

At the end of each year from 2008 to 2015 I did a year-end review of trans persons and events around the world.   Each year it became bigger, and it has really become too big a task for one person.   I hereby give notice that I will not be doing such a year-end review this year, or in future.

I will do some bits, especially the list of new books, but not the comprehensive survey that I have previously done.