Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1800 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.
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Frank was raised in a Baltimore orphanage. It was known that he was ‘physically abnormal’, and at age 7 he was diagnosed with hypospadias and undescended testicles, and taken to the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The doctors, including Hugh Hampton Young, found a vagina, uterus, left ovary and Fallopian tubes, and decided that the child was definitely female. What had previously been seen as his penis was now declared to be an enlarged clitoris.
The child’s guardians were informed and Frank became Frances. Two years later Frances returned to Johns Hopkins with the complaint that she felt pressure to keep her clitoris hidden. It was mentioned that she had a “terrible habit” of masturbation. It made sense to the doctors that her clitoris should be removed, and they did so remarking that it was the size of a penis of a boy of the same age.
Frances next returned four years later at age 16, complaining of a mass in her lower abdomen. She had announced that when she turned 18 she would assume male attire and learn a mechanical trade. She was already 5’11” (1.8 m) and 125 lb (57 kg). She had beard growth on her chin and the ‘mammary regions were entirely masculine’, although her pubic hair was female in distribution. This time surgery found testicular tissue. Given that the damage had been done four years earlier, they excised all the testicular tissue and a rudimentary vas deferens.
The patient was last heard of in 1935. He had changed his name to John, and was working as a truck driver. He was reportedly happy.
Hugh Hampton Young, Genital Abnormalities, Hermaphroditism & Related Adrenal Diseases. Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins company, 1937: 84-91.
Elizabeth Reis. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, Paperback 2012: 93-5.
Dr Young finishes his account by speculating: 'If implantation of ovaries ever becomes successful in the human should this be done?' He was still not accepting John's decision to be a man. I think that we can assume that he knew about the failure to implant ovaries into Lili Elvenes (Elbe) as the English translation of Man into Woman had been available since 1933.
Carl Rollins Hammonds was born in Prague, Oklahoma, the eldest of seven children. He grew small breasts as a teenager, and his mother took him to several doctors including a ‘brain specialist’, but would not consent to exploratory surgery. She was told that Carl would not live past 35, or that he would go insane.
From age 17 Hammonds worked as a half-man-half-woman in carnival, and then as an ‘exotic dancer’, and took the name Hedy Jo Star.
Hedy was drafted in 1942, and was in the press after making a fuss about not cutting her long hair. She served as a female impersonator in the US Army shows.
After the war, she returned to carnival life. She was a friend and colleague with Tony Midnite, and both of them made costumes for other people. Hedy was the owner-manager of the Hollywood State Revue, a troupe of female dancers, one of whom was Vicki Marlane. They played state fairs in summer, and in winter Hedy worked as a hypnotist in nightclubs.
Just after Christine Jorgensen was in the news in 1954 Hedi wrote her autobiography, I Changed My Sex!, which was only a slight exaggeration.
In 1956 she saw a female endocrinologist in New York.
“My face was covered during the examination with a sheet. Then my doctor and her colleagues examined me. Later my doctor explained to me that what she was planning to do was illegal under New York law, which is the reason the other specialists she consulted wished to remain anonymous.”
The doctor put Hedy on estrogen and arranged breast-enhancement. Despite testimony from twelve physicians that Hedy should have gender surgery, the New York State Medical Society refused permission because of the mayhem laws.
In 1958 Hedy, by then two years on estrogen, applied to the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She received an answer by letter three months later:
“We do realize that you are psychologically more comfortable in your role as a female and perhaps it would be wise for you to continue as you have done in the past”
but her request was refused on the grounds of her not being intersex, and that the surgery “might in actuality constitute mayhem”.
A few years later she saw Dr Harry Benjamin who referred her to Elmer Belt in Los Angeles. She was saving up for this when, early in 1962 and just before Belt discontinued doing genital surgery, a friend referred her to a doctor in Chicago who, after an examination, phoned the Methodist Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and she had an appointment. The Memphis doctor and four colleagues examined her and then warned her that the operation was extremely dangerous, that she might not survive, and if so may not be able to walk. However the operation was done the next day. Hedy prayed to God “not to let her live to leave the operating table if she was doing wrong and going against His will”. One of the doctors punctured her urinary track and corrective surgery was needed. She was in hospital for 45 days.
Novel Books, associated with The National Insider republished her 1955 autobiography, and she wrote an advice column for the National Insider which also was later published as a book.
Hedy married a doctor from Boston, Dr Ralph Bucinskas (1943 - 2003). They moved to Las Vegas where she developed her career as a costumier. One of her first clients was the impersonator, Kenny Kerr, then just starting his career. She was known for her expensive costumes for dancers, strippers, female impersonators, clowns, burlesque and circus performers, and for Elvis Presley and Anne Margaret.
She died at age 79.
Hedy Jo Star with an Introduction by Dr Edwin Poole. I Changed My Sex! Chicago: Allied Books 158pp 1955. Novel Books 1963. Reissued as "I changed my sex!": the autobiography of stripper Hedy Jo Star formerly Carl Hammonds; with an introduction by Edwin Poole. Allied, 158 pp 1980.
Hedy Jo Star. “Both Sides of Love”. National Insider. Early 1960s. Advice column.
Hedy Jo Star. Sequel:I Changed My Sex! Chicago: Novel Books 1964. The advice columns that Hedy wrote for the National Insider.
H.J Star/ Carl Hammonds. My Unique Change Chicago: Novel Books 128 pp 1965. Online.
Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 198-9, 218-9,325n85.
Deborah Rudacille. The Riddle of Gender. New York: Pantheon Books. 2005: 102, 113-9.
Some say that her birth name was Joseph Starke. This is repeated by Ward Hall in his comment on the article in Tribe. When his comment was reprinted in Side Show World, this datum was removed. Roy Richmond is Hedy’s nephew and he is able to assure us that this rumor is untrue.
Does anybody have any idea who the female endocrinologist in New York in 1956 was?
Likewise who was the surgeon in Memphis in 1962? Did he ever do another sex change operation?
Why does nobody mention that I Changed My Sex! precedes Hedy’s operation by 7 years?
Notes towards the social construction of intersex: Teenage Carl grew small breasts and his mother, being freaked out by that took him to a series of doctors. However in 1958 the doctors at Johns Hopkins found that Hedy did not meet their definition of intersex.
There are comments in some sources about Hedy having America's first complete sex change even though she did not have genital surgery until 1962. The implication here is that Christine Jorgensen did not have vaginoplasty in Denmark, and not until a date in the 1960s that is not specified in most sources. However to even bring up this claim is to totally ignore a) all the persons who had surgery with Elmer Belt b) those who had already gone to Dr Burou in Casablanca c) those who had had surgery in Europe e.g Tamara Rees in the Netherlands in 1954 and Sally Berry in Sweden in 1953-8.
Sandy Stone mentions Hedy Jo Star in her "The Empire Strikes Back", with the quote: "I wanted the sensual feel of lingerie against my skin, I wanted to brighten my face with cosmetics. I wanted a strong man to protect me." This kind of stereotyped femininity was expected of 1950s women, cis and trans alike, but nowadays is rather suspect and is even liable to be labeled 'autogynephilic', even in androphilic early transitioners as Hedy definitely was.
Denise Magner has claimed that she was born at the US Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, but also that she was born in Finland. Either at birth or aged 2 she was assigned as a boy. He grew up in the Baltimore area. After puberty, as Denise, she became a lesbian-separatist, and also a hard rock musician.
Later, in 1993, as Denise Tree she became editor of Linux News, and at this time was using a jhu.edu id (Johns Hopkins University). She was also a bicycle maker and metalworker. She took the name Kiira from the character in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Kiira Triea was an early member with Cheryl Chase (Bo Laurent) of the Intersex Society of North America, (ISNA) and had an article in the first issue, 1994, of Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and maintained their website. In 1997 she founded the Coalition for Intersex Support Activism & Education (CISAE). Her essay of that year, “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”, about her experiences at Johns Hopkins and being forced to be either male or female, was originally published by Dallas Denny in Chrysalis and reprinted in Dreger's Intersex in the Age of Ethics. The essay says that she was 14 when she went to Johns Hopkins.
She is credited with the design of the Phall-O-Meter, a useful tool for intersex activists to mock the doctors’ obsession that a clitoris must be less that 0.9 cm and penis more than 2.5 cm.
In her essay "Learning about transsexuality from transsexuals", Kiira explains that after she became an intersex activist, she was approached by supposed intersex persons, and claims that over 99% of them were lying. Many claimed to be true hermaphrodites or Klinefelter's but were obviously not.
"Finally, I began to understand transsexuality, as it was expressed by socially privileged former men, in terms of being antithetical to my understanding of the underlying socio-political causes of intersex oppression and at odds with my goals as an intersex activist. Certainly there are many conceptual frameworks within which intersex can be understood but I found feminism to be useful because it addressed the core issues of what sexualities and what bodies are allowable by an androcentric technocracy and answered questions like why would doctors create non-functional female genitals in children, not bothering to determine the results of those interventions for decades. I also began to wonder why the natural biological variation of intersex, which did not actually result in socially expressed 'gender variance', was not allowed while the biological variation and socially obvious gender variance that resulted when adult men attempted to modify their bodies to become female was allowed."
"I began then in 1997 to understand transsexuality and its supporting model of 'gender identity' not as medical syndrome but as a social instrument which eradicated understanding in order to preserve social privilege".
On the other hand, she found that HSTS or trans-kids were quite different:
"None of them had tried to write to me for several reasons, first was that they were not motivated to acquire any other legitimizing identity as were autogynephilic transsexuals because their social identities and personal identities were congruent. They simply seemed like normal feminine girls or women whose social ‘gender’ or what Suzanne Kessler calls ‘gender attribution’ was immediately obvious both in their appearance and behavior and required no theoretical explanation. They did not present themselves to me as intersex nor did they advocate for transsexuality to be classified as an ‘intersex condition’ because, in common with intersex children, they were a socially devalued population who were often medicalized harmfully as children."
These persons she had invited to her intersex groups. Kiira herself was invited by Michael Bailey to join his closed SEXNET mailing list. She became an advocate for Bailey's variation on Blanchard's ideas.
In 2004 Kiira launched the transkids.us website which endorsed the Blanchardian concept of 'homosexual transsexual' in distinction to autogynephiles. It was very quickly linked to by the Anne Lawrence and Michael Bailey websites. Kiira became the one and only public HSTS, although people pointed out that if she were a lesbian intersex, she could hardly be an HSTS (= heterosexual trans woman).
Kiira died from cancer at age 61.
Kiira Triea. “Power, Orgasm and the Psychohormonal Research Unit”. http://www.isna.org/books/chrysalis/triea_pru. Also in Alice Domurat
Dreger (ed) Intersex in the Age of Ethics (pp. 141-144). Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group. 1999.
John Colapinto. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. Toronto & New York: HarperCollins, London: Quartet xvii, 279 pp 2001: 259.
This is an overview of Kiira. See the Andrea James pages for the details of her alternate autobiographies.
Triea, Dreger, Kessler all moved from ISNA to the Bailey camp.
Born in 1951, Triea was 61 when she died. The only photographs available are from decades ago.
Dreger’s first essay is a defense of Triea after what James wrote. However it merely dismisses ‘loony things said about Kiira on certain sites’ and does not address the issues. Nor does she give any explanation at all why an intersex woman would be running an HSTS site.
Sophia Siedlberg has problems with intersex activism as radical-feminism. Feminism is many things, not just trade-union activism for women. One of the other things is a radical deconstruction of the sex-gender system. Intersex activism also deconstructs the sex-gender system.
++Psychiatrist Ira Pauly had published the first aggregation study of transsexual cases in 1965,
"Male
Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. A Review of 100 Cases". This resulted in a job offer from Johns Hopkins, but, after a pay rise, Pauly decided to stay at the University of Oregon Medical School.
It was to Johns Hopkins that underground film star Holly Woodlawn went for the operation in 1966, but she was denied it in that she had not been in the program for at least a year. She went on a shopping spree instead with the money that her boyfriend had provided for the operation.
One-year-old Bruce Reimer was brought to see Dr Money and surgically reassigned to female as Brenda in 1967, and continued annual visits for almost 10 years, until Brenda began to refuse, and started to change back to male as David.
++The same year Barbara Dayton moved to Baltimore with wife and children, and started living as female. The Clinic declined her application based on age, appearance and numerous tattoos. Also Barbara could not afford the fee.
The most prominent patient in the Gender Identity Clinic was writer Dawn Langley Hall who had surgery in 1968, married an African-American the next year, and publically announced the birth of a daughter in 1971 (a claim that the Gender Identity Clinic said was “definitely impossible”). ++This was also the year that Roberta White was admitted for surgery.
In 1969, transsexual pioneer Christine Jorgensen came to Johns Hopkins for corrective surgery. Future showgirl Michelle Brinkle ran away to Baltimore intending to register at the Clinic, but never did, and ended up at Dr Burou’s Clinic in Casablanca instead. Psychiatrist Jon Meyer became chairman of the Gender Identity Clinic, and his predecessor, John Hoopes wrote: “The surgery, often considered outrageously excessive and meddlesome by the uninformed, must be undertaken regardless of the censure and taboos of present society”. Also in 1969, Richard Green and John Money co-edited Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, with a preface by Reed Erickson, an introduction by Harry Benjamin, and published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
John Money conducted a follow-up study of ‘17 male and seven female patients’, and found that after surgery nine patients had improved their occupational status and none declined. “Seven male and three female patients married for the first time” and “All of the 17 are unequivocally sure they have done for themselves the right thing”.
In 1970, Dr Edgerton left for the University of Virginia, where he established a Gender Identity Clinic, and Dr Hoopes returned to Johns Hopkins to replace him as Chief of Plastic Surgery. Dr Meyer started his own study of the benefits of surgery.
In 1972 future doctor Dana Beyer, then a student, came to the Clinic but found the intake application so off-putting that she fled before seeing a doctor.
In 1974, 23-year-old future intersex-cum-HSTS activist Denise Tree (Kiira Triea) had surgery with Dr Howard Jones after years of therapy from Dr Money.
In a paper with John Hoopes, Meyer wrote: “Most of the patients continue to be emotionally and socially much the same as they were in the pre-operative phase”.
In 1975, Catholic psychiatrist Dr Paul McHugh became head of the Psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins. He later wrote that he intended from the start to put an end to sex change surgeries which he described as “the most radical therapy ever encouraged by 20th-century psychiatrists— with perhaps the exception of lobotomies”.
In 1976 Charles Annicello from the clinic testified in a New Jersey court on behalf of M.T., a trans woman who was suing for alimony. Louis Gooren, who would develop the Gender Clinic at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, studied at Johns Hopkins in 1976, as did Russell Reid who later became a consultant at Charing Cross Hospital.
The clinic was also featured as the location of a rather unusual at-knife-point FTM operation in John Walters’ film Desperate Living, 1977.
The Joneses retired from Johns Hopkins in 1978, and became professors of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia Medical School, where they established the first in vitro fertilization program in the United States.
In 1979, (the same year that Janice Raymond published the transphobic The Transsexual Empire) psychiatrist Jon Meyers and co-author Donna Reter reporting to Paul McHugh, finished their evaluation of fifty post and pre-op patients they saw as still deeply disturbed. “To say that this type of surgery cures psychiatric disturbance is incorrect. We now have objective evidence that there is no real difference in the transsexual’s adjustment to life in terms of jobs, educational attainment, marital adjustment and social stability,” he said. He later told The New York Times, “My personal feeling is that surgery is not a proper treatment for a psychiatric disorder, and it’s clear to me that these patients have severe psychological problems that don’t go away following surgery.” He even referred directly to “one case”, probably Reed Erickson, “In which a woman required hospitalization for drug dependency and suicidal intentions after being changed to a man”.
John Hoopes also changed his mind: “Prior to the surgery, these patients were at least male or female, but after the surgery the males converted to females weren’t really females and the females converted to males weren’t really males. . . You’ve created a new breed. You’ve created something you don’t know what to do with. … I never saw a successful patient. For the most part they remained misfits”.
The Meyer study has not been supported by later studies. Its methodology has been strongly criticized, especially the vagueness of some of its scoring, and that it does not include any measure of personal satisfaction. None of the post-operatives regretted the operation (as Meyers and Reter acknowledged). However, citing the study, the hospital administration closed the program.
The Johns Hopkins program was never important in terms of numbers, in fourteen years they provided surgery to only thirty people (compare to Dr Biber who would do many more than that every year), but in that it was the first clinic it was felt as a loss when it closed.
Even so, Johns Hopkins' reputation was such that transsexuals continued to apply to the Hospital. They were seen in the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit at $150 a time, but no referrals for surgery were made after 1979.
John Money stayed at the PRU, even after 1986 when it was moved to smaller premises outside the Hospital.
As late as 2005, a group of Christian ministers went to Trinidad, Colorado and tried to use the Meyer study to force Marci Bowers to stop performing gender surgery.
Thomas Buckley “A Changing
of Sex by Surgery Begun at Johns Hopkins”. New York Times. Nov
21, 1966.
“Sex-Change Operations at a
U.S. Hospital”. US News & World Report. Dec 5, 1966: 13.
Charles W. Slack.
"Life's Such a Drag, They'd Rather Switch". The
Village Voice. Nov 6, 1969, vol XIV, 56. Archive.
John Colapinto. As
Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. London:
Quartet xvii, 279 pp. Toronto & New York: HarperCollins, 2001:
especially chp2.
Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex
Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge,
Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 7, 80, 114, 142, 211,
218-223, 251, 266-270
Edward Ball,. Peninsula of
Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2004: 84, 157-160, 244-9.
Deborah Rudacille. The
Riddle of Gender. New York: Pantheon Books. 2005: 104-110, 111-113, 116-8,
119, 121-8, 131-3, 143, 169, 238.
The Wikipedia article, "History of Intersex Surgery", should be called "Intersex Surgery at Johns Hopkins"; as it completely ignores work done elsewhere. The work of Lennox Broster in particular is scandalously missing.
For those who like to perceive patterns in history, it is remarkable how the Johns Hopkins GIC falls between the publications of The Transsexual Phenomenon and The Transsexual Empire.
R.S. an 11-years old boy, was brought to Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1915. With his parents’ consent, exploratory surgery found that he had a uterus and ovaries. The parents insisted that he not be told that he was female. Twenty years later he returned. He was now a business man with an active sex life, and intending to marry, except that his local priest refused to marry him as he was female. The doctors examined him again, and again found female internal organs. They confirmed that he was female. Three days later he was dead by suicide.
++ In 1925 an orphan Frank was examined and a vagina, uterus, left ovary and Fallopian tubes were found. Two years later, Frances had her clitoris removed. At age 18 Frances became John and became a truck driver.
Genital reconstructive surgery was pioneered by urologist Hugh Hampton Young at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore between 1930 and his death in 1945.
Gynecologist Howard Jones had done his M.D. at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1935. In 1948 he and his wife Georgeanna became part-time faculty in the department of gynecology and obstetrics in the school of medicine.
Around 1950 there was a better understanding of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and doctors were able to treat it with cortisone. Lawson Wilkins set up a new pediatric endocrinology clinic where it was recognized that doctors could not tell a person’s sex just by looking at external genitalia, and in some cases recommended to the child and parents that the child’s sex be reversed.
Milton Edgerton became Chief of Johns Hopkins first division of plastic surgery in 1951. Shortly afterwards he met his first transsexual: “When I went in to see the patient, who was in every outward appearance female, I began to get the request for the removal of male genitalia, and if possible, the construction of a vagina”. Patients began to arrive in his office asking for corrections to botched gender surgery that had been performed elsewhere, usually out-of-country. “Not a single patient, no matter how bad the surgery that had been performed, regretted his or her trip to have the operation. And that was pretty impressive”.
John Money, who wrote his PhD thesis on hermaphrodites (the term then in use), was recruited in 1951 also by Lawson Wilkins to be professor of pediatrics and medical psychology at the newly formed Psychohormonal Research Unit (PRU) in the Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Teamed with Drs Joan and John Hampson he spent six years studying 131 intersex persons, children and adults, who had been treated at Johns Hopkins. They found persons with identical genitals and chromosomes but raised as the other gender fared equally well psychologically. On this basis Money recommended that an intersex child be steered to a chosen gender, which was usually female as the surgery was easier, but it must be done within the first two and a half years, and that the child must not be confused by being told. Their paper won a prize from the American Psychiatric Association in 1955. Soon afterwards, the Hampsons left to take up positions at Washington State University.
In 1956, performer Ray Bourbon approached the hospital to see about a sex change, but was told that it was impossible.
From 1957 to 1961, Richard Green, the future head of Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, was a student at the Johns Hopkins medical school, and worked with John Money.
In 1958, circus performer Hedy Jo Star, after a couple of years on female hormones, presented at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The doctors in the PRU examined her for five days and then sent her home to await a letter. Three months later the letter advised her not to go ahead with surgery as she had no internal female structures.
At about the same time however, the doctors evaluated a female-to-male patient, and in 1960 did a bilateral mastectomy on him.
In 1960 The Joneses left their private practice to become full-time faculty. Howard started doing ‘corrective’ surgery on intersex infants. Money became the director of the PRU in 1962 when Lawson Wilkins retired and died shortly afterwards. Money was awarded considerable grants by the National Institutes of Health, and was also subsidized by wealthy trans man Reed Erickson (who also subsidized Harry Benjamin and Vern Bullough). John Money attended monthly meetings in New York with Harry Benjamin and Richard Green under the auspices of Reed Erickson’s EEF, where the idea was raised of applying the kind of surgery being done on intersex patients to transsexuals as well.
++In 1961 Roberta White arrived without an appointment and managed to obtain an interview with John Money who admitted her for three weeks for detailed evaluation.
In 1964, a 17-year-old transsexual referred to as G.L. who had been convicted of stealing women’s clothing and $800 worth of wigs was ordered by the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City to have sex reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins. Her probation officer delivered her to the Johns Hopkins Women’s Clinic where Howard Jones was to do the surgery. However the psychiatry department intervened at the last moment, and had G.L. referred to them for therapy instead.
The next year John Money pioneered and cajoled the first Gender Identity Clinic in the US. He brought three postoperative patients of Harry Benjamin to meet with Howard Jones and Milton Edgerton. This was the same year that the Joneses with Edmund Novak published their gynecology textbook. That would go through several editions and in its time outsell all other such textbooks combined. Reed Erickson donated $85,000 to the Gender Identity Clinic over years, and became quite friendly with John Money. In addition he went to Johns Hopkins for a double mastectomy repair in 1965 after having had a mastectomy in Mexico and a hysterectomy in New York, and is arguably the first transsexual patient at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic.
However the first patient is usually taken to be an African-American referred by Harry Benjamin, Phyllis Avon Wilson (more) who was operated on by Howard Jones at around the same time. Phyllis became a dancer in New York, and on Oct 4, 1966 a gossip column in the New York Daily News carried the item: “Making the rounds of the Manhattan clubs these nights is a stunning girl who admits she was male less than a year ago and that she underwent a sex change operation at, of all places, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore”.
This caused Dr Edgerton to get a phone call from Dr Russell Nelson, president of Johns Hopkins Hospital, to find out if the story were true. Edgerton made a tactical decision and gave an exclusive to Tom Buckley of The New York Times, which ran the story on the front page on Nov 21, 1966. A press conference was called on the same day, where Edgerton and several colleagues announced at a press conference the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic under the chairmanship of plastic surgeon John Hoopes. To an audience of 100 reporters, the doctors defined transsexuals, “physically normal people who are psychologically the opposite sex”, explained that “psychotherapy has not so far solved the problem”, and that they had already operated on 10 patients, all of whom were happy with the outcome. Three were already married, and three more were engaged.
This was the same year that Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon had been published. Shortly afterwards, the Universities of Minnesota, Stanford, Northwestern and Washington at Seattle (headed by John Hampson) also opened Gender Identity Clinics.
Within a year, over 700 desperate transsexuals wrote and implored the doctors at the Johns Hopkins Clinic to help them. However the Clinic would approve for surgery only those whom they unanimously deemed to be ‘good candidates’. They devised four criteria: Is the patient a candidate for psychotherapy? Is the patient authentically motivated? Is the patient psychotic? Will the patient undergo a sociocultural crisis after receiving the operation? This left much room for the doctors’ opinions, and they often chose to err on the side of wait-and-see, recommending therapy rather than progressing a patient on to surgery.
++Previously, vaginoplasty, where it was done in the US had taken skin from the patient's thigh to construct the vagina. However patients who had had surgery in Casablanca from Dr Burou were able to demonstrate the advantages of Burou's penile inversion method. Dr Edgerton adopted and adapted this method. When he was contacted by Dr Stanley Biber in 1968, this was the method that was recommended.
Dr Hoopes, the chairman, recalled that Money was often the advocate for progression: “John Money would argue very forcefully that someone was a candidate ... that he knew the patient very well and if this program was going to make any headway this patient should be accepted”. Not surprisingly, many of the patients did not want to see a psychiatrist. This was based on previous experience with psychiatrists, in that it implied that they had a mental problem, and that they knew within themselves that what they needed was surgery. Most patients soon realized that they should read the medical literature about transsexualism and impersonate ‘textbook transsexuals’ if they wished to be progressed to the next stage.
However the doctors were willing to consider patients with what was described in 1968 as “inadequate social and moral judgment and a long history of petty and sometimes major criminal offenses”. This included transvestites, gay men and strippers, many associated with The Block, a part of downtown Baltimore with many nightclubs, bars and sex workers. The doctors realized that their patients were at risk of arrest for cross-dressing and so issued identity cards with a Johns Hopkins phone number provided by The Erickson Foundation. Dr Edgerton had several calls from police officers, and after an arrest in 1971 helped to get a female transsexual transferred to the women’s facility. Some patients dropped out during the stage where they were taking hormones. In some cases this was because they could not afford the $2,000 to $10,000 for the surgery.
Born possibly as Hal Wadell in Texarkana, Texas in 1892, or as Ramon Icarez near Chihuahua, Texas in 1898, Ray Bourbon enjoyed embellishing his life story. He claimed that his first lover was the ranch foreman who was subsequently murdered, that Pancho Villa helped his mother at this time, and that he ran guns (in drag) for Pancho Villa, as the mysterious ‘La Senora Diablo’, that he was the illegitimate son of Franz Joseph of Austria and Louisa Bourbon, and that he was a student at the Tulane Medical School in New Orleans.
It does seem that he was in England in 1913 and managed to get small roles in shows in Music Hall. He returned to the US in 1917, and began using the name Ray or Rae Bourbon. He married for the first time, and a son was born in 1918.
Ray may have won a Photoplay contest resulting in work at a Hollywood studio. He had cameos in a variety of silent films, including as the stuntman for Estelle Taylor and a stand in for Clara Bow. He has been identified in some of the Rudolph Valentino pictures, and played an old woman in Pola Negri’s Bella Donna, 1923. As Ramon Icarez he was a ‘fire dancer’ at the opening of the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1923.
In the mid-1920s he was working with Bert Sherry and later toured with the Martin Sisters. By 1932 he was working fulltime as a female impersonator. His performance at Tait’s in San Francisco in 1933 was being broadcast live when the club was raided by the police. He was one of the big names of the Pansy Craze of the last years of Prohibition. He had a small role as a dancer in the film Golddiggers of 1937. He worked at Finocchio’s drag nightclub in San Francisco, and with Mae West in her shows Catherine was Great, 1944, and Diamond Lil, 1948.
After arraignment, 1956 Beverly Hills
In 1956 Rae claimed he had approached Johns Hopkins Hospital to have had a sex change, but was told that it was impossible. He then went to Dr Emerick Szekely, a Hungarian refugee from the Nazis living in Juarez, who had performed the operation. Rae at different times claimed that she had had the operation to avoid cancer, and to avoid local laws against cross-dressing. However he still stood to urinate, and off-stage still lived as man. In a club in West Hollywood in 1956, Rae was billed as ‘not a female impersonator’, and was charged and convicted of impersonating a female.
Rae was also charged with female impersonation in Seattle, El Paso and New Orleans in the next few years. However in Miami she was arrested for impersonating a man.
In the mid-1960s he toured with the Jewel Box Revue. He released dozens of LPs, probably more than any other female impersonator. He toured more than other female impersonators, and for many gay men in the US at that time, Ray Bourbon was the only drag act that they ever saw.
In 1967 his car caught fire in Texas. Rae saved his dogs, and lodged them with Blount’s Pat-A-Zoo. Rae couldn’t pay the bill and A.D. Blount sold them for medical research. Rae was upset by this and wrote to the Governor of Texas and the newspapers about it. In December 1968, two young acquaintances drove Rae’s car to Texas using his money, and, while roughing him up, one of them killed Blount. The two young men were convicted of murder with malice, and Rae, accused of paying the men to kill Blount, was convicted of accomplice to murder. Rae was 75 and in ill health: he had a serious heart attack while awaiting trial. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
He accidentally escaped once when a door was left open, but merely went to sleep around the corner. He obtained a typewriter from his lawyer, and started writing his memoirs. He wrote 300 pages before dying of leukemia complicated by a heart condition.
He was married twice to women, and fathered a son. He had both male and female lovers, and was said to fancy young men, but never referred to himself as gay or bisexual.
George Capozi Jr. ‘Female Impersonator Needn’t Fake Again – Says Surgery Made Him a Her’. New York Journal America. May 28, 1956. On the back of the LP sleeve to Let Me Tell You About My Operation. Online at www.coolcatdaddy.com/bourbon-doc-operat-ja.jpg.
Don Romesburg. Ray Bourbon : a queer sort of biography. PhD University of Colorado. 2000.
Randy A. Riddle. Don't Call Me Madam: The Life And Work Of Ray Bourbon. www.coolcatdaddy.com/bourbon.html. Includes discography, and a list of possible films.
Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 86, 89.
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. He died in 2012.
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. "Dawn Arises in Aeistocratic Charleston: The Gordon Langley Hall Affair". In Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1997: 163-184.
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.
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 10th 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 South 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”.
Dawn and John-Paul
Not being married, Gordon 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 – 2012).
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 (Loving v. Virginia 1967). 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.
Dawn with Margaret Rutherford
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.
Rita Alma Erickson was born in El Paso, Texas, of German descent, and raised in Philadelphia. In 1946 she was the first woman to graduate from Louisiana State University in mechanical engineering.
Reed as a teenager
She was already involved with a New York woman who was a left wing activist. Rita worked as an engineer, until she was fired for refusing to fire a woman suspected of being a communist. The FBI kept her under surveillance, and recorded in 1954, that she refused to become an informant.
She started her own company making stadium bleachers. In 1962, when her father died Erickson inherited the majority of the family businesses, Schuylkill Products Co., Inc. and Schuylkill Lead Corp.
In 1963, at the age of 46, she became a patient of Harry Benjamin, and started living as a man. Reed legally transitioned the same year, and had an hysterectomy in New York, and double mastectomy at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, both in 1965 – which was a legal precedent in Louisiana. Also in 1963 he married his first legal wife, who was in the entertainment industry, but they divorced in 1965.
In 1964 he founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), financed entirely by himself. That year he also met Aileen Ashton, a New Zealander who was working as a dancer in New York City. He proposed on their second date, and they had a lavish wedding in Christchurch, New Zealand. They lived in Baton Rouge, and within a few years they had a son and a daughter, and Reed had started doing recreational drugs.
++Reed employed Zelda Suplee to run the Erickson Educational Foundation. She had managed nudist camps, and was the first full-frontal nude in Playboy magazine (in black-and-white). From her office in New York she and lesbian feminist activist Phyllis Saperstein (they had met in a nudist camp) managed the daily operations, and the contacts with transsexuals who asked for help. Erickson made the final decisions about who and what he funded, but spent much of his time in Baton Rouge and then Mexico with his family.
Reed in 1962
In 1969 he sold the Schuylkill business for $5million and went on to amass over $40 million, mainly from investments in oil-rich real estate. In 1973 the family, including his pet panther, moved to Mazatlan, Sinola, Mexico. By the end of 1974, Reed and Aileen were divorced. She took the children to Ojai, California, and he followed to be near the children. He married his third wife, a Mexican, Evangelina Trujillo Armendariz, in 1977, but she also left him, in 1983, because of his drug usage.
Though the EEF he financed gay and trans organizations, and research into New Age activities such as acupuncture, homeopathy, dolphin communication and altered states of consciousness. The EEF published booklets on various aspects of transsexuality, sponsored addresses to various professionals, and sponsored two of John Money’s books, and three of Vern Bullough’s. It donated money to the Harry Benjamin Foundation, but fell out with Benjamin in 1968. It subsidized the transsexuality program at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. It sponsored three symposia that grew into the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA).
The longest-running recipient of financial support was ONE Inc of Los Angeles, founded in 1952 and still running, the pioneer homophile organization. Erickson had advised them to create a non-profit tax-exempt charitable arm, the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR). Erickson was president of ISHR from 1964 till 1977. He donated 70-80% of the budget, some $200,000. In 1981 ONE was accredited as a graduate degree-granting institution. Erickson suggested that the college needed a proper campus, and for $1.9 million purchased a 3.5 acre property from the religious leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. ONE moved its large library and archives into the campus. However by this time Erickson had apparently soured on the organization. He failed to turn over the property deed as previously agreed, and began filing legal suits against ONE to remove them from the campus. The expense of the move and the cut of funding from EEF almost bankrupted ONE, and the defensive efforts paralyzed its operations. The battle continued for over 10 years, with Erickson’s daughter continuing his fight. In 1992 a settlement was reached whereby ONE received $1 million, the property was sold and ONE came under the auspices of the University of Southern California.
By the end of his life Erickson was addicted to drugs, and a fugitive from US drug agents.He was
arrested for cocaine possession in Ojai, in 1983. After two more arrests he retreated to Mexico.
He died in January 1992, aged 74.
Aaron Devor writing as Holly Devor. "Reed Erickson (1912-1992): How One Transsexed Man Supported ONE." In Vern Bullough (ed). Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context. New York: Haworth. 2002. Online at: http://web.uvic.ca/~ahdevor/ReedErickson.pdf
Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 210-2, 215-6, 219, 223, 258, 268, 327n5,8, 336n6.
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Vern Bullough's stipend from Reed Erickson was $70,000 (almost $1 million in today's money), and the ingrate completely leaves Erickson out of his Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender.