A Gender Variance Who's Who

"I would say that, in my experience, these kinds of sentiments are taking hold once again among young trans people. I know both HBSers and self-identified HSTS and AGP who are my age. This comes with many online fights and flame wars, namely between those who identify as autogynephiles and those who identify as lesbians. Interestingly, the majority of the soi-disant autogynephiles in my generation (bear in mind I am quite young, going on 20 right now) seem to be exclusively attracted to other trans women. I have a boyfriend at the moment, but sometimes a relationship with a non-op trans woman does seem appealing. I am not attracted to genetic females or anyone with a vagina even if surgically constructed. I'm early in transition and still primarily present as a feminine male so I often simply say I'm a gay boy."

"100% while I do believe that autogynephilic arousal is a real phenomenon, I have experienced it, I starkly oppose Blanchard's idea that its related to attraction to female bodies. I'm not attracted to cisgender women at all. Even within Blanchard's schema, its stated that the majority of autogynephiles are gynandromorphophilic (and thus the majority of them prefer trans woman/trans woman relationships). This is decidedly not heterosexuality even if you view them as men.

I feel that Blanchard's strict two-type schema erases my personal experience, as it claims that all transsexual women who aren't hyper-feminine are gynephilic, and thus that I'm only "pseudo-androphilic". I begun as a nerdy gay boy, I was teased for being not masculine enough but it wasn't because I played with barbies it was because I played with telescopes. I also became aware of my transsexuality during adolescence, not early childhood as all the androphiles supposedly do. I was 13 when I realized I was a girl trapped in a boy's body. But I'm not gynephilic. I'd be open to a relationship with a non-operative trans woman but not with a cisgender woman or anyone who possesses a vulva really. Ergo I do not identify as gynephilic.

It is my belief that the majority of "AGP" trans women are primarily attracted to other trans women, and only force themselves to sexually interact with cis women out of heteronormativity and internalized homophobia. You can see many cases where they divorce their cis wives if they had one and partner with another trans woman after transitioning, [various examples are named].

Then there's those who were heterosexually married prior to their transition, but are androphilic afterwards. Examples include Lynn Conway, Canary Conn, Tamara Rees Stevenson, Nancy Hunt Bowman, Danielle Bunten Berry. I tend to assume they were closeted gays the whole time as men, but Blanchard would put them in the "pseudo-androphilic" category."

"Two trans women attracted to each other is a type of homosexuality. 'homo' = 'same' not 'male'. If they also self-id as AGP then they are homosexual AGPs, but Blanchard's definition of AGP (bi, hetero and asexual) is that AGPs are non-homosexual. So here we have an interesting contradiction of terms. Blanchard is apparently a closeted gay man who has made comments outside his theoretical works that are even more anti-trans. His whole schema is a cisplaining using insulting terms/exonyms derived from the dubious concept of 'fetishism', and he has even refused to restate it in more polite terms.

Your homosexual AGPs are deconstructing his schema, and that is good in itself.

It is also good that gynephilic (not 'autogynephilic') trans women coming of age and feeling accepted as such do not feel obliged to marry a cis woman and have children to prove something as many in my generation did. It was usually quite unfair to the cis woman who found herself in such a situation.

... 

"Take the "gyne" out of the word. "gyne' means 'woman'. Come up with better jargon."

Word games can so easily become sterile, but this suggestion is provocative.   What do you think? 

When I go to Amazon.books and type in 'transgender' the top item shown is this year's most hyped transphobic screed: A Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

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On page 100 of Kay Brown's new book, named after her blog as On the Science of Changing Sex, she mentions that "Meyer at Hopkins" labelled a group of transkids as 'Eonists'.  She then adds, in brackets: "Ironically, he used the term 'Eonist' which was named after a famous historically significant cross-dresser, who by his history, is easily recognizably autogynephilic".   

Now this is not a surprising claim from Brown who after all declared Christine Jorgensen to be autogynephilic.

Some of the problems in applying a 21st-century concept like 'autogynephilia' to the 18th century:

1. A lack of early-transitioners to compare to.   Quite likely there were many early-transitioners in India and South-East Asia - although this remains undocumented.   In Christian Europe where sex and gender expression had been so repressed, it is almost impossible to name any at all.  
2. The major development of gay/trans expression at that period was the molly houses.  There is no mention that d'Eon was ever seen at one.  However given his high diplomatic rank, he would be very constrained in what he might do.
3. Nor is there any evidence of female lovers.   It is true that the more sensational elaborations of d'Eon's life added such titillations as the claim that d'Eon was the father of George IV, but the more reliable books reject such claims.
4. Vern Bullough makes the claim – that surprisingly has been ignored in the debate about social construction - that “there is no evidence in Western culture of what might be called a heterosexual transvestite consciousness before the twentieth century”, and probably not before Magnus Hirschfield modified the term 'transvestite' in 1910.   Those such as Brown who conflate heterosexual transvestity and autogynephilia are notable in not having even discussed this.
5. Brown seems to regard autogynephilia as sort of an essentialism, that is a resultant from DNA modified by epigenetics.  If so why are there not loads of such persons in the 18th century?  Is modern pollution the required epigenetic? The best known transvestites in 18th century London are George Selwyn, who loved to attend public executions in drag, and Horace Walpole who dressed as an old woman for masquerade balls. Neither ever married and historians discuss whether Walpole was gay.   So how do they fit into the 21st century social construction of  HSTS/AGP?

I have previously written about Autogynephilia, and developed a chronology of its major events and persons up to 2010. 

The Autogynephilia syndrome and meme was a major brouhaha in the early 2000s, especially after Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen was published in 2003. While many dismissed the concept as pseudo-science, it came to dominate discussions of typology of trans women to the extent that alternate discussions of such typologies were drowned out. While there is an intuitive difference between early transitioners and those who first became husbands and fathers before transitioning, the model as laid out by Freund, then Blanchard and then Bailey aligns each type with a sexual orientation (a mistake earlier made by Harry Benjamin), erases late transition androphiles and early transition gynephiles, insists on referring to heterosexual trans women as ‘homosexual’ and defines the gynephilic late transitioners as ‘fetishistic’ (again a mistake made by Harry Benjamin). The Clarke Institute (later CAMH) in Toronto is especially identified with the syndrome as Freund and Blanchard had top positions there. And, like it or not, the history of trans in North America in this century cannot be told without reference to the debate over Autogynephilia.

However there are writers, both trans and cis, who leave out what we would expect here, even though many of them quietly put Bailey’s book in their bibliography or further reading while saying nothing about it in the text.

This article discusses writings that nevertheless:

1. distinguish two types of trans women, such that the reader would expect a discussion of how this is similar to or different from the concept of Autogynephilia – but this is not discussed;
2. discuss the Clarke Instritute/CAMH, particularly the GIC, but say not a single word about Blanchard or Autogynephilia;
3. retell the histories of US/Canadian trans persons and politics in the 21^st century but say not a single word about Blanchard or Autogynephilia.

The writings in question are indented to the Right.

The basic events of the Autogynephilia debate are here (not indented) to give a context.

1985. 

Betty W. Steiner (ed) Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management. The first book from the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto. The full model HSTS-Autogynephilia is explained by Kurt Freund, although at this stage without the word ‘autogynephilia’.

1989

Ray Blanchard. “The concept of autogynephilia and the typology of male gender dysphoria”. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 177, 616-623. 

1990

Ray Blanchard & Betty W. Steiner (eds.). Clinical management of gender identity disorders in children and adults. A followup to the 1985 book.

1994

Betty Steiner and her husband die from fumes from car running in their garage. 

Ray Blanchard on the gender dysphoria sub-working group for the DSM-IV, 1994.

1995

Kurt Freund retires, and Ray Blanchard becomes Head of Clinical Sexology Services at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. 

Viviane Namaste wrote a report “Access Denied” funded by Health Canada to do needs assessment for trans persons in Toronto. Of her sample of 33, 19 were enrolled at the Clarke GIC. The trans academic also visited the Clarke and spoke to some of the staff. There is no mention of Blanchard, Autogynephila or the 1985 book.

1996

Kurt Freund, suffering from lung cancer, takes his own life.

1998

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is formed from a merger of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the Addiction Research Foundation and the Queen Street Mental Health Centre.

2000

Ray Blanchard. “Autogynephilia and the Taxonomy of Gender Identity Disorders in Biological Males”. International Academy of Sex Research. Paris 2000. 

Viviane K. Namaste. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Again, neither Blanchard nor autogynephilia mentioned in discussion of CAMH GIC.

2002

The CAMH GIC awarded a Presidential Citation from Div 44 of the American Psychological Association. Ray Blanchard accepted the award on behalf of CAMH.

2003

Michael Bailey. The Man Who Would Be Queen: the science of gender-bending and transsexualism. The popularization of Blanchard’s ideas.

Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), the professional organization for service providers criticizes the Bailey book.

Ray Blanchard resigns from HBIGDA, calling its criticism ‘appalling’.

Andrea James and Lynn Conway set up web pages to alert trans women about Bailey’s book.

Anjelica Kieltyka complains about how she was misrepresented in Bailey’s book.

Willow Arune and others start Autogynephilia Yahoo group.

Deirdre McCloskey. "Queer Science: A data-bending psychologist confirms what he already knew about gays and transsexuals". Reasononline. November. https://reason.com/2003/11/01/queer-science-2/

2004

Joan Roughgarden writes open letter to the National Academy. "I wonder if many psychologists fully grasp the image some of their colleagues are projecting---psychology as a discipline without standards, nourishing a clique of dumbly insensitive bigots. These psychologists don’t seek to help people, but to dominate them by controlling the definition of normalcy. Their bogus categories and made-up diseases are intended to subordinate, not to describe."

Lambda Literary Foundation nominated Bailey’s book as a finalist in the transgender category.

Christine Burns initiates an online petition which gathers thousands of signatures in just a few days, and the nomination is withdrawn

Jim Marks, Executive Director of Lambda Literary Foundation resigns.

J Michael Bailey steps down as Chair of Psychology at Northwestern.

Kiira Triea sets up transkids.us with Jennifer Ross for Homosexual-Transsexual women (Blanchard's term for heterosexual trans women). Bailey immediately links to the site.

Ray Blanchard. “Origins of the Concept of Autogynephilia”. Feb. Archive.

Ray Blanchard quoted: “A man without a penis has certain disadvantages in this world, and this is in reality what you're creating”. Jane Armstrong. “The Body within, the body without”. The Globe and Mail, 12 June 2004, p. F1. 

2005

Ray Blanchard. “Early History of the Concept of Autogynephilia. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 34.

Alice/Richard Novic. “The Two Types of Transwomen”.

https://www.aliceingenderland.com/twotypesoftranswomen. "In my eye, we MTFs come in two varieties: started-out-straight and started-out-gay.”

2006

Melanie Anne Philips apologized to customers of her voice instruction in that she now realizes that for many it cannot work: “out of all those who have sex reassignment surgery, only a very few have female minds. All the rest, no matter how feminine they have become, have male minds – they don't just think like men, then think as men”.

Philips has two children, and is gynephilic. She definitely avoids any mention of Autogynephilia.

2008

Susan Stryker. Transgender History. The trans academic makes no mention at all of the Blanchard binary and the upsets that it has caused among transsexuals. However Bailey’s book on the topic is quietly found in the book’s further reading section.

2010

Anne Vitale. Gendered Self: Further Commentary on the Transsexual Phenomenon. Trans therapist Anne Vital proposes a typology of three types with Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD) of whom the third approximates Blanchard’s Autogynephiles. She treats this deprivation, not a person’s gender identity. Many readers regard her typology as a humane improvement on Blanchard’s. The citation notes to her book include both Blanchard and Zucker, and the reading list on her website includes the Clarke Institute’s 1990 book, Clinical Management of Gender Identity Disorder in Children and Adults. However there is no mention of Blanchard in the text, and thus neither acceptance nor rejection of the inevitable notion that her 3 categories are a rewrite of Blanchard’s.

2012

Darryl Hill. Trans Toronto: An Oral History. Hill does have a short summary of autogynephilia, but refers to Blanchard only once in passing and then by his surname only; only his late 2005 paper is listed and Bailey is not mentioned at all.

2014

Dana/Thomas E. Bevan. The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism: A New View Based on Scientific Evidence. Bevan, late transition, two wives, two daughters, writes: “it is clear that the concept of Autogynephilia is not well defined and cannot be easily operationalized. For this reason alone, it does not constitute a scientific theory”. However she writes as if Autogynephilia is being considered as a, or even the, cause of transsexuality rather than as a second type of transsexuality with a different etiology. She does not mention Michael Bailey’s 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. She does mention – actually she cites – Bailey with reference to twins, sexual orientation, and sibling order. But she totally ignores his book on Autogynephilia.

Will Rowe “Auditioning for Care” in Dan Irving & Rupert Raj (eds). Trans Activism in Canada: A Reader. This is the major discussion in the book of Toronto’s CAMH, the ground zero of autogynephilia. He writes of the "incredibly transphobic history of CAMH's GIC". He interviewed four trans men about their current experiences with the CAMH GIC. For an earlier period, the 1990s, he relies on Namaste's writings only. Namaste, as per her usual approach, never told us whether she was actually a patient at CAMH, although, as she lived in Ottawa and then Toronto while she transitioned, she quite likely was. No other trans women or other earlier patients are cited or discussed. It is particularly odd in Rowe's account that there is no mention of autogynephilia, and no mention of Blanchard.

2020

Barry Reay. Trans America: A Counter-History. Reay cites the title of Steiner’s 1985 book as an early usage of the term “Gender Dysphoria”, but says nothing at all about its contents. There is no mention at all of Autogynephilia, nor its proponents, nor of those who rallied against it. While this recent book continues until almost now, it also erases HBS and Cross-Dreaming.

Note also that the EN.Wikipedia article on CAMH says nothing at all about Steiner, Freund, Blanchard or Autogynephilia.

See also A Rejoinder to Kay Brown's What is a Transsexual?

Kay’s description of typical gynephilic transsexuals is:

“The prototypical autogynephilic transsexual was accepted as a boy as a child.  She was often a “loner”, finding her hobbies and reading to be more rewarding, but still willing and ready to participate in rough & tumble play.  She often envied girls and observed them more often than most masculine boys.  As she entered puberty, she began erotic cross-dressing in private, often masturbating while dressed, usually with lingerie.  She found this shameful and hid her cross-dressing as best she could.  She entertained thoughts of living as a woman, often in very idealized situations.  As a young adult, she dated women, often finding it necessary to imagine that she was female to “perform”.  She typically hid this fact from her dates.  She fell in love and found that the previously growing desire to live as a woman abated for a while.  She married and had children.  Her need to cross-dress and use autogynephilic ideation grew, as the first blush of their romance matured into committed love.  She agonized about it obsessively, trying alternatively to push it out of her thoughts and trying to appease it by cross-dressing.  At one point, perhaps in her early 30s, or in her late 50s, a set-back or other significant personal change brought all of these feelings to the fore… and she made the fateful decision that she could no longer ignore her sexuality.  After having tried to ignore the cognitive dissonance between her successful social identity as a man, husband, and father, and her obligatory autogynephilic image of being female, concluded that the female image is her “true” image.  She then made steps to begin counseling with a gender therapist, obtained prescription for feminizing hormones, and then began the painful steps to living full time as a “transsexual”, since she didn’t pass very well and had too many social connections who know of her previous status as a man to be truly stealth.  She had SRS within a short time of nominally living as a woman, as she was impatient, feeling like she had waited long enough in her previous life as a man.  Her wife may or may not have demanded a divorce.”

Just as the previous type had to be ‘homosexual transsexual’ rather than just ‘androphilic’, this type must be ‘autogynephilic’ rather than just ‘gynephilic’.  I find it very difficult to accept that an entire category of people should be defined by the details of how they masturbate.  In addition to the common sense rejection of the notion, as a historian I also know that I rarely have information of how people masturbate.

What I do have though is mention that people marry and have children.  Thus I can identify gynephilic persons who later progress to being women.   There are many of these, more than gay transsexuals.  As more people are heterosexual and not gay, it is not a surprise that more trans women previously had a wife than previously had a husband.  Some examples of transsexuals known to be gynephilic before transition:  Jan Morris, Rennee Richards, Katherine Cummings, Gloria Hemingway, Jane Fae, Nancy Hunt, Rachel Webb, Susan Huxford, Judy Cousins; a surprisingly large number of the better known HBS women: Rose White, Cathryn Platine, Jennifer Usher, Tabatha Basco; and the soi-disant or professional autogynephiles: Anne Lawrence, Willow Arune, Maxine Petersen.

Are these women autogynephilic as opposed to gynephilic, now or pre-surgery? I certainly would not say that, and I really don’t think that Blanchard or Brown would come out and say it either, although their theoretical position implies that they should be willing to say that.  But if they are not willing to say that, what does it mean to say that late transitioners are autogynephilic?

Aspersions have been cast against a few of the women, the term ‘autogynephile’ has become an insult term, especially from the HBS women whom others suspect of trying to divert attention from themselves, but where something has been said about a person it is rarely other than hearsay, and as such not admissible as evidence.

It is common sense that cis men and cis women vary in the degree that they are aroused by being the man or the women that they are.  This is particularly intense in teenagers after puberty.  If we are to have concepts such as autogynephilia and autoandrophilia then the concepts should be applied to cis persons as well.  There has been a small amount of investigation of cis autogynephilia in recent years, but the Blanchardians are still in the situation of applying the term to trans women without any idea of how the phenomenon manifests in cis women.  Brown poo-poos a study done by Charles Moser who used a semi-Blanchardian approach to the question.

Brown and Blanchard reject the idea that there is such a thing as cis autogynephilia, because if there were, trans autogynephilia would also be normal.

Brown and Blanchard take the abnormality of trans autogynephilia even further.  They regard it as a subtype of Erotic Target Location Error (ETLE).  The other two types that they identify are autopedophilia and the desire to be an amputee.  It is of course heterosexist to assume that the correct erotic target for a person born male is an woman of similar age.  It is sexist to insist that there is any correct erotic target.  Nature is full of variations and gynephilic transsexuality is as natural as homosexuality.

Their heterosexism also comes out when Brown criticizes the “obvious lack of naturally feminine behavior” in gynephilic trans women – she writes as if the feminist critique of the social construction of artificial femininity had never happened.

In summary, the concept is not at all useful to anybody writing biographical and history essays.

See also:  A Blanchard-Binary Timeline

          What is Autogynephilia?

Part 1 – Youth and First marriage
Bibliography
Part II – Second Marriage
Part III – Femmiphilic activist
Part IV – Full-time Living
Part V – Transgenderist dowager
Jargon terms and general comments

In 1985 Virginia and Christine Jorgensen appeared in Lee Grant's documentary, What Sex Am I?    Dorothy Marie Shepherd, Arnold's first wife, died the same year.

This was also the year that the Clarke Institute in Toronto published Gender Dysphoria which laid out the dichotomy between heterosexual autogynephilics and 'homosexual transsexuals'. While this corresponded to Prince's insistence that homosexuals and femmiphics were, to use her term, "separate breeds of cat" there is no record that I have found of either Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard of the Clarke on one side or Virginia Prince on the other discussing how femmiphilia and autogynephilia are different or similar, although later writers see them as two aspects of the same thing.

Frederick Whitam published his Male Homosexuality in Four Societies in 1986. He argues that homosexuality and transvestic homosexuality are as natural as heterosexuality and occur in all societies, and homosexuals in general tend to patterns of early cross-gender behavior. He sees heterosexual transvestites as a different category and protests their appropriation of the word 'transvestite'. "Some heterosexual transvestites, not wanting to be identified as being homosexual, have insisted that they are the 'true transvestites' and take a demeaning attitude towards drag queens and female impersonators". (p80) We now had three solitudes that should have been talking to each other, but did not.

IFGE (International Foundation for Gender Education) was founded by Merrisa Sherrill Lynn in 1987, initially as an outgrowth from Boston's Tiffany Club. Although proclaimed as a group for both transsexuals and transvestites, they built in a heterosexual transvestite bias by creating a Virginia Prince Award, and, apparently with no sense of irony, actually awarded the first one to Virginia Prince. The next two went to Merrisa Sherrill Lynn and Ariadne Kane.

Richard F. Docter published his Transvestites and Transsexuals: Toward a Theory of Cross-Gender Behavior in 1988. He gathered data from 110 male transvestites. He found that even after excluding those who were exclusively gay, 28% of the rest had some sexual experience with men. He purports a 5-part typology for heterosexual transvestites: fetishism, fetishistic transvestism, marginal transvestism, transgenderism and secondary transsexualism. He conceives these as stages which an individual can progress through. He has a 4-part typology for homosexual transvestites: primary transsexualism, secondary transsexualism, "so-called drag queens" and female impersonators. This is not a progression in the same sense. He treats Prince as one source among many and does not indicate that he knows her personally. Certainly he does not stick to her usage of the term 'transgender', although he credits Prince with coining it in her Understanding Cross Dressing, 1977 (but without giving a page reference and Google Books Search is unable to find it). He notes that his ‘transgenderism’ category corresponds to Benjamin's Type IV, Nonsurgical Transsexual. According to the diagram on p25, it is an heterosexual variation as in Prince, but Docter discusses only one example, a then 22-year-old Everett/Angela who is androphilic, sexually active and will probably shortly have transsexual surgery. (p21-5)

Robert Stoller died in a traffic accident in 1991. His wife returned the tapes and transcription of their 29 years of sessions to Virginia, who later passed them on to Docter for his biography.

By 1992, Yvonne Cook-Riley (who was awarded the Virginia Prince Award in 1995) was lobbying for the use of ‘transgender’ within IFGE, and would later, with willful ignorance, claim that she and Prince had created the ‘transgender community’.

In 1993 Vern and Bonnie Bullough returned to Los Angeles after his retirement. Vern again taught at Northridge as an adjunct professor until 2003. Their new book, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, while totally ignoring Reed Erickson and April Ashley, reducing Lou Sullivan to an erotic cross dresser, and refusing to give Jacqueline Dufresnoy's female name, builds up the importance of Prince. They claim that Prince was the only transvestite organizer of note from 1952 to the 1980s. They do see through Prince's claims: "Prince's quest for respectability led her to exclude cross dressers who were homosexuals, sadomaschists, women, prostitutes, or even partial cross dressers. Because the psychiatrists accepted Prince's definition of transvestism and incorporated it into the DSM-III-R, behavioral scientists, including the authors, blindly followed the accepted definition by studying club members as if they were the universe of cross dressers." (p302) They follow with a summary of Frederick Whitam's work in the third world, but do not name any European or North American gay transvestites. The organizing work by Sylvia Rivera in New York or of Rachel Pollack or later Yvonne Sinclair in London is certainly not mentioned, and, as I have mentioned before, there is a recurring pattern in Bullough's work of not mentioning either transvestites or transsexuals who have a male lover or spouse. The Bulloughs, despite knowing Prince personally, do not claim the she coined 'transgender', or even associate her with the word at all. They do use the word when referring to Ariadne Kane. The Bulloughs note "Originally, we planned to publish Virginia/Charles's original name, but she regards this part of her past a closed book she would rather not reopen." (308n5)

The internet forum, alt.transgendered, was launched 1992, did not even mention Prince until 1995 when Kimberleigh Richards, editor of Cross-Talk, entered to promote Prince as a pioneer of ‘transgendered’, but with almost no success.

Prince sold most of the remaining copies of Transvestia and the copyright on her major books to Sandy Thomas, an old colleague. There are now available along with Thomas' transvestite fantasy titles from Lulu.com.

By 1996, the claims by Cook-Riley and Richards that Prince had coined ‘transgender’ were becoming widely known, and were repeated without citation in Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors: “But the word transgender is increasingly being used in a more specific way as well. The term transgenderist was first introduced into the English language by trans warrior Virginia Prince. Virginia told me, ‘I coined the noun transgenderist in 1987 or ’88. There had to be some name for people like myself who trans the gender barrier’ (p x) “. This is her only appearance in the book: Feinberg does not care to demonstrate Prince as a ‘trans warrior’. This seems to be the major source from which people claim that Prince coined the word. However there is no record of Prince using the word in 1987/8. This led to mainstream, albeit uncritical, acceptance of the claim.¹

The same year, Prince published “Gender Fundamentalists” in Richards’ Cross-Talk, where she rejected the inclusions that IFGE and Feinberg had been putting out in her name and reasserted her separatism and her transgenderphobia. "It is strange but true that the ones who are most vocal, most in print and most publicly active are the transsexuals. Their main point of attack is Tri-Ess because of the policy (which in their anointed wisdom they like to term "exclusionary") of selecting heterosexuals only, which conflicts with what they proclaim to be the only right way for a group to be ... open to all comers." Prince is complaining that transsexuals are trying to include her and her group in an umbrella.

Bonnie Bullough died, just before the publication of Gender Blending edited by herself, Vern and James Elias. The tome is inclusivist except for the contributions by Prince and Kimberleigh Richards. In "Seventy Years in the Trenches of the Gender Wars" Prince actually claims: "As a matter of fact, I coined the words 'transgenderism' and 'transgenderist' as nouns describing people like myself who have breasts and live full time as woman, but who have no intention of having genital surgery". However she does not say where, and she objects to the inclusivist usage of ‘transgender’. She plays with the idea of adopting  ‘transposeur’, although she never returned to this term. She is also emphatic that she is a "congenital heterosexual" (perhaps having forgotten her claim to be a woman). She re-asserts her objection to the notion of "fetishistic cross-dressing", and asserts again that she is a pioneer of men's liberation.

On the other hand in 1999, in a meeting with Vanessa Foster: "She was bemused by my use (and the community's) of the word transgender, and how the story affixed its authorship to her, even though she'd referred to it as transgenderist as a self-descriptor once she'd moved from occasional crossdressing to living as female, though not transsexual (she was quick to correct that!)".

In 2000 Prince sold four sets of Transvestia, photographs and personal papers to Rikki Swin. They were initially in the Rikki Swin Institute in Chicago, and are now at the University of Victoria. Other files and papers were donated to the Special Collections Department at California State University, Northridge.

In 2003, Michael Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen, revived the Freund-Blanchard notion of autogynephilia to much alarm and controversy, but still there was no dialectic with the notion of femmiphilia

Virginia with Richard Docter

In 2004, Richard F. Docter, who had become a friend of Prince and the Bulloughs, at the urging of Vern, wrote and self-published his biography of her. Bullough provided a Preface. Unlike her reluctance in Bullough's book a decade earlier, Prince was now willing that her original name of Arnold Lowman, not mentioned outside her inner circle since the court appearance in 1961, should be used. While Docter had developed a 5-part typology in his Transvestites and Transsexuals, 1988, he does not locate Prince within it, although in chapter 13 he does discuss Step a: from being a fetishistic cross dresser to being a transgender women and then Step b: from being a woman in public to having the gender identity of a woman.

From 2005 the so-called Harry Benjamin Syndrome movement was developed. The European branch had little to say about Virginia Prince: Charlotte Goiar's bête noire is rather Carla Antonelli. The US HBS people following Diane Kearny set up Prince as that which they are not. It is therefore ironic that in several respects they follow Prince more than they do Benjamin:

• they deny that there is a continuum from transvestite to transsexual
  
• they disassociate from trans women who pass less well, and whom they regard as fetishistic
  
• they disassociate from gays and lesbians
  
• they disassociate from the transgender umbrella
They are also more like Prince than Robert Stoller in talking only of Gender but not Gender Identity.

 

Vern Bullough died in 2006. In his final book, Crossing Sexual Boundaries, co-edited with Aridane Kane, Bullough still does not use Prince's original name. His take on the term 'transgender' has now altered to: "In fact, Virginia was a main source of the popularization of gender as applied to cross-dressing. She and Ariadne popularized the term transgender, which has been a more encompassing term than cross-dresser."

Prince lived till 2009 and the age of 96, lastly in a retirement home in Los Angeles, and according to her friend, Richard Docter, she developed a taste for she-male pornography. She also dabbled in astrophysics and led a discussion group on being and consciousness in her retirement complex. She willed her body to the UCLA medical school. (Hill:39)
____________________________________________________________

1. This is comparable to the way that Agnes Gonxha (generally known as Mother Teresa) was uncritically treated as a saint after being endorsed by Malcolm Muggeridge.

See also:  Did Virginia Prince have Harry Benjamin Syndrome?
and The Myth That Transgender is a Princian Concept.

Previously in April 2008, I wrote an account of Virginia Prince, who started life as Arnold Lowman. With all due modesty I think that it still stands as the best short account of her.  I wrote it based mainly on the books by Richard Docter, Richard Ekins and Vern Bullough.  Particularly after I wrote my TG, Words and Concepts series, I realized that my account of Prince could be much improved.  This realization was further developed by reading Robert Hill’s dissertation which is largely based on a close reading of Transvestia magazine.   One problem with most accounts of Virginia Prince is that they are not integrated into GLBT and general history.  Hence I have included background events below, mainly of what else was going on in Los Angeles, but also elsewhere when it seemed appropriate, to give a contextualization.

Part 1 – Youth and First marriage
Bibliography
Part II – Second Marriage
Part III – Femmiphilic activist
Part IV – Full-time Living
Part V – Transgenderist dowager
Jargon terms and general comments

Charles Leroy Lowman (1879-1977) was born in Park Ridge, Illinois. Both his paternal grandparents were physicians. He trained as doctor at the University of Southern California, interned at California Lutheran Hospital and studied orthopedic surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Children’s Hospital in Boston. In 1909 he started a small out-patient clinic for handicapped children, and was the only orthopedist between San Francisco and New Orleans, traveling through five states to practice. He married Elizabeth Hudson Arnold (1882-1968), the daughter of a prosperous Indiana farmer and Ella Gifford Ferris, who was a cousin of George Ferris, the inventor the Big Wheel that first appeared at the 1893 Chicago Exposition¹. Charles and Elizabeth Lowman had two children: Arnold born in 1912 and Elizabeth born four years later.²

The owner of the building where Charles Lowman had his clinic made an offer that if Lowman could establish a functioning hospital within 15 years, he would donate clear title to the building and its gardens. This was done and further expansion of the Los Angeles Orthopedic Hospital was being discussed when the 15 years had passed in 1922. Lowman pioneered aquatherapy for poliomyelitis patients, and devised motor-driven lifts to get the patients in and out of the water. He pioneered fascia lata strap transplants which enabled wheelchair-bound patients to walk with crutches.

Elizabeth Sr contributed to the home by shrewd investments in property and stocks. For grades 3-7 Arnold was transferred from his local public school to the residential Glendora Foothill Christian School, fifty miles to the east. On Thanksgiving Day in his seventh grade, the school burnt down, and he was transferred back to a local school.

Arnold developed a fixation with high-heeled shoes. They were of course not welcome in the home of an orthopedist. He moved on to his mother's clothes, and then started collecting his own. By the age of 12 Arnold was an accomplished cross-dresser and could pass in public as a girl. He used the name Muriel.(Docter:41-2)    As Prince wrote in 1979:

"Starting at the age of about twelve I found myself fascinated with wearing my mother's clothes on all occasions when the family would be out. It was sexually exciting and thrilling but it was also frightening and it gave rise to a tremendous load of guilt and shame. With that kind of pressure I should have quit – and I did – many times, I felt terrible about it, guilt ridden and wondering what was wrong with me – an otherwise normal, functional boy. For a while I supposed that I must be a homosexual – though I had no interest in boys sexually. When I got that straightened out in my head I decided that I must be psychopathic. But on the other hand, I was an intelligent, above-average student, an athlete, member of clubs, etc. But even if I was not either of those two two things surely I must be the only otherwise normal boy who was so weird as to want to wear girl's clothes. I went through adolescence with those worries, and I kept on dressing on every occasion when I thought I could do so safely. While it started out as an erotic experience each time, there came a time when, after eroticism had run its course, I discovered that there was still a very special pleasure in 'being' a 'girl'. Instead of just being an erotically aroused male in a dress, I found that I was somehow different. I did not know for years what was going on – or more properly what was coming out. It was that part of myself that had been hidden and suppressed in all my growing years – just as it is in all men. It was my other half, that half that when openly expressed is termed feminine."

In 1922, the Los Angeles City Council had revised its anti-masquerading law of 1898. It now stated that if one dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex on the streets, a penalty of up to six-months in jail or a fine of up to $500 could be imposed. By 1924 the Los Angeles drag culture was dominated by Clarabelle, who was regarded as the queen mother of Bunker Hill. Arnold never spoke of this. That was also the year that male-impersonator Jean Southern accosted a police officer who failed to read her, and the encounter made headlines in the Los Angeles Times. Julian Eltinge was the US's top female impersonator and was playing to sell-out audiences at the Los Angeles Orpheum Theater.

Charles Lowman was a prolific author and innovator in the field of orthopedic medicine. He published A Collection of Papers Dealing with Some Physical, Educational, Physiotherapeutic & Orthopaedic Problems in 1924, persuaded the California legislature to provide teachers for handicapped children in hospital in 1927 and co-published Corrective Physical Education for Groups: A Text Book of Organization, Theory, and Practice in 1928.

At age 18, in drag, Arnold won a prize for best costume at his church Halloween party. He did his BA at Pomona College, Los Angeles where by chance he shared a dorm with Edward Richards, the future Barbara Wilcox, although they did not know each other.

Whether young Arnold knew or not, 1932 was a peak year for pansy revues (which featured female impersonation) with appearances in Los Angeles by Karyl Norman and Jean Malin, and the next year Hollywood made a record number of films with pansy content. However, from 1932 onwards, and especially after the end of Alcohol Prohibition in 1933, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) started busting the pansy clubs. BBB's Cellar and Jimmie's Back Yard were raided repeatedly. The raid on The Big House in fall 1932 met resistance: the patrons fought back and a female impersonator attempted to escape through a window. The bar, renamed Buddy's Rendezvous, reopened, and the police returned eight months later and arrested five transvestites on vagrancy charges. In November 1933 another raid on Jimmie's Back Yard resulted in 90-day sentences for the owner, the mistress of ceremonies and the piano player. Three other female impersonators were each sentenced to six months – the maximum penalty. Harold Brown, arrested on suspicion of posing as a narcotics officer, was discovered to be female bodied and got a suspended 30-day sentence for masquerading. Three pansy bars were shut down in 1936, and another three the next year. Frank Shaw, the Los Angeles Mayor, ran a notably corrupt administration from 1933 until he was recalled in 1938. He was opposed by Clifford Clinton, a restaurateur, who with others filed a grand jury report that led to the recall. Part of Shaw's fight back was to step up the attack on 'sex pervert' bars. This was reinforced in 1937 by a national sex panic after children were killed in New York, and J Edgar Hoover declared 'War on the Sex Criminal'. In 1940 even Julian Eltinge was prevented from appearing on stage in Los Angeles in female clothes, and was obliged to do his act in a tuxedo with his dresses on mannequins.

However private parties in Hollywood and even public appearances by its stars were another matter. Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburn were known for their male attire, both on screen and when out socializing. Film director, Dorothy Arzner, the only female director in Hollywood, was known for dressing in men's clothes. In 1937, Howard Greer, the Hollywood fashion designer who did the costumes for Bringing Up Baby and My Favorite Wife, threw a drag party at which he hired female impersonators to sing a Cole Porter song in front of the real Cole Porter (Gay LA: 46) In 1938 Los Angeles resident Michael Higgins was arrested on charges of grand theft and fraud, and discovered to be female-bodied.

Meanwhile Arnold graduated from Pomona College in 1935 and did postgraduate studies in pharmacology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Charles Lowman published Balance skills in physical education in 1935, and the next year Arnold co-published with a fellow student a paper on lactic dehydrogenase. In 1937 Charles Lowman published The Therapeutic Theatre, and contributed to Technique of Underwater Gymnastics; A Study in Practical Application. Arnold's MS thesis was on lactic dehydrogenase, and the fellow student and he published a book on the topic in 1939. Arnold's PhD thesis, Carbohydrate Metabolism and Its Relation to the Cancer Problem, was completed in the same year.

Elizabeth followed her brother to Pomona College and then Berkeley. She later met and married a mining engineer, and they moved to Nevada. They had three children.

Fletcher Bowron, who was mayor of Los Angeles 1938-53, had a particular antipathy to women in trousers. In 1942 he declared to the city council that he loathed "to see masculine women much more than feminine traits in men" and got them to pass a regulation barring female employees at City Hall from wearing pants.

In 1941 Arnold outed himself as a transvestite to his father after a trip to San Francisco, by being his femme self when his father arrived to pick him up. This was just before his first marriage, to Dorothy Shepherd (1909 – 1985) a secretary from Anoka, Minnesota, whom he had met at church. The wedding was held in the Lowman home, the day after Arnold burned all his female clothing. Mr and Mrs Lowman then moved to San Francisco where Arnold had a job with Del Monte Foods, and later on a medical research project for one of his professors who was now at the University of California Medical School at San Francisco.

Arnold researched transvestism in the medical library. He noted two case studies of interest being presented in the psychiatry department, and attended both. The first was by Barbara Wilcox who had been his classmate at Pomona College, and was by then living as a woman and had petitioned the Superior Court of California to change her name and to become legally a woman. The second presentation was by Louise Lawrence, the pioneering transvestite organizer who put transvestites in touch with each other, and with sympathetic doctors. Either Arnold badgered the lecture organizer to reveal Louise's home address, and Louise took in the nervous young man on her doorstep (Stryker, 2005: xv); or he sneaked a look in the case file to obtain her address, and telephoned and asked to meet (Docter: 45). In either case Lawrence introduced Virginia Prince as Arnold named himself (he lived on Prince Street) to other transvestites in San Francisco, and provided contacts in Los Angeles. Through her he became a patient of Karl Bowman of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic, the seventh psychiatrist that he consulted, who told him to “relax and learn to accept yourself” (TV&Wife: 5-6). She also introduced him, in the late 1940s, to a doctor who spent each summer in San Francisco, and was starting to build a practice with transvestite clients: Harry Benjamin.

In 1945 the millionaire Howard Hughes went to San Francisco's famous Finocchio's female impersonation revue and night club where he met performer Pussy Katt. Shortly afterwards he flew her to Mexico City for an operation that made her America's first surgical transsexual. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Clarabelle, the queen of Bunker Hill was no more. Her successors were Wilhemena, and then Carioca (who later died on an operating table in Calexico). The inter-racial Club Alabam on Los Angeles' Central Avenue continued to sponsor an annual drag ball contest.

When the research project was over Arnold and Dorothy returned to Los Angeles where Arnold found work as a chemist. Their only son, Brent, was born in 1946. For the first five or six years of their marriage, Arnold kept his cross-dressing from Dorothy, but then got it into his head that he was going as a half man/half woman to the church Halloween party. Dorothy was not thrilled. Afterward they had a long talk and agreed that Arnold was not to dress in her presence, but that she would do his clothing shopping, to avoid one risk. Then Arnold got to be Virginia about once every two weeks. He started spending time with Edith Ferguson and other transvestites. They attended meetings at the Long Beach home of Joan Thornton, who shared the same interest.

Virginia Prince, 1948.  Plate 1 in JJ Allen, The Man in the Red Velvet Dress

William Parker (played by Nick Nolte in the film Gangster Squad) was Los Angeles Police Chief from 1950 until his death in 1966. He repeatedly sent his men to raid gay and lesbian bars and to treat gays and lesbians as if they were criminals. So many arrests occurred that an entire section of the Lincoln Heights jail was reserved for gay and trans inmates, nicknamed the "fruit tank". One case that made the newspapers in 1950 was of three Negro domestic servants who were arrested for dressing as female.

That year two lesbians, in separate cases, challenged the Los Angeles anti-masquerading law, and in both cases the courts declared that cross-dressing alone did not constitute guilt under the ordinance unless there was further intent to conceal one's identity. However the LAPD and the local politicians simply ignored these two rulings.

By 1951 Dorothy Lowman felt unable to cope with her husband’s cross-dressing, and saw a psychiatrist who explained that Arnold was homosexual. She sued for divorce mainly citing her husband’s “admitted propensity for feminine apparel”. Arnold was ordered to pay $50 a month for his son’s support and $50 for his wife’s. His transvestism was publicized during the proceedings, which led to contacts with more transvestites. (Docter: 29-35, 47-8)

One who did not establish contact was Gigi Hemingway who was arrested en femme in the women’s restroom of a Los Angeles movie theater. Many gays and trans were incarcerated in Atasceradero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility, which came to be known as the 'Dachau for queers'. Atasceradero was frequently visited by Dr Walter Freeman who specialized in ice-pick lobotomies. This was done through the eye socket. Of the 4,000 patients he treated this way, over 30% were diagnosed as homosexual (which included transvestites).  Another of his victims may have been the film star, Francis Farmer.

Charles Lowman co-published Therapeutic Use of Pools and Tanks in 1952. The same year the group meeting at Joan Thornton’s created a mimeographed newsletter: Transvestia: Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress – a name suggested by Joan, who was the major editor. The initial subscription list was built around Louise Lawrence’s address book, and the subscription list for Edith Ferguson’s instruction course. Arnold contributed under the name Muriel. While only two issues were made, they were mailed to all the cross-dressers that they could identify in the United States and to sympathetic doctors and sexologists including Alfred Kinsey. Without paid subscriptions, the project proved to be too expensive to continue. This was at the same time as the fledgling homophile organization, ONE, Inc started selling its magazine. The first attempt to ban it by the US Post Office occurred a year later. At the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine Elmer Belt had started doing controversial sex change operations.

For the group at Joan Thornton's, there was a question of who was a transvestite. Louise Lawrence had written that the group includes "heterosexuals, there are definite fetishists, sadists, masochists, voyeurs, homosexuals, etc.", and Edith Ferguson had previously been a female impersonator. However there were cross-dressers who were not invited such as fellow Angeleno and heterosexual Edward D. Wood, Angeleno Sascha Brastoff, José Sarria who was starting to organize fellow drag queens in San Francisco, and the majority of female impersonators, such as those who performed at Finocchio's in San Francisco. Nor was the invitation extended to female cross-dressers. While Lowman maintained that women were free to wear what they liked, many women in Los Angeles, mainly lesbians, were being arrested for 'masquerading' and dumped in the Daddy Tank at Lincoln Heights jail. One of these was Nancy Valverde who was arrested many times in this period.

In 1953 when Arnold was attempting to modify his visiting rights and reduce his alimony, he was again named in the press as a transvestite and his father threatened to disown him. This was at the same time that Christine Jorgensen was in the news after returning from Denmark, and it was announced that Bela Lugosi’s next film would be called Transvestite. The director, Edward D Wood, announced that the film, which was eventually called Glen or Glenda, would have no relation to the transvestite divorce story then in the Los Angeles newspapers. The judge ruled in favor of Arnold who was allowed custody one day a week and alternate holidays, increased the son’s support to $60 and discontinued the alimony payments. However Dorothy moved back to Minnesota with Brent. Arnold called on her some years later. They had a cordial evening, but then never saw each other again.

Harry Benjamin had helped Lowman with “parental and marital problems” (TV&Wife: 6, Ekins & King, 2006: 81), and put him on female hormones, which he continued for a few years. As Virginia, Arnold wrote to Christine Jorgensen that he had "a missionary complex" and hoped to "alleviate the lot of our kind in the social scheme" (quoted in Meyerowitz:182). Benjamin arranged for Virginia to have a personal interview with Christine and her mother while they were in Los Angeles ( Ekins & King, 2006: 235n4; Docter 2008:xii). As Prince later admitted, at this time he was considering sexual surgery: "If I had had the money at the time, I would have taken the boat to Europe". ("The Life and Times of Virginia", Transvestia, 100, 1979; TS&PseudoTS :271).

In 1954 the LAPD raided LaVie Cafe in Altadena and arrested five 'men' for wearing women's clothes. Tamara Rees, another ex-GI turned female was in town to do a burlesque show. Elmer Belt discontinued doing sex-change operations after a committee of doctors decided against it, but restarted a few years later.

---

 1. Docter:18 says that George Washington Ferris was Arnold's great-great grandfather. As George Ferris lived 1859-96 this seemed improbable. With the aid of genealogy sites I was able to construct the following:

                                        Silvanus Ferris (1773-1861)
                                                        |
                                          _______________________
                                          |                                   |
            Henry Ferris (1809 -1891)                       George Ferris (1818 - 1895)
                                          |                                    |
            Ella Ferris Arnold (1842 – 1929)               George Ferris (1859 – 1896)
                                          |
            Elizabeth Arnold (1899 - 1968)
                                          |
                       Arnold Lowman

Hence George Ferris was Arnold's grandmother's cousin. While he built the first Ferris Wheel, he died alone and impoverished, of typhoid at age 37.

2. Docter:19 says that the Lowmans lived at 123 South Hobart Avenue until Arnold was eight. According to Google Maps, there is no such address. It must be South Hobart Boulevard. However ferristree.com says that the first address was 7121 Senalda Road which is in the Hollywood Hills.

They then moved to 867 Victoria Avenue "two blocks off Wilshire Boulevard … in the Hancock Park neighborhood". There is such an address, in the Venice district. However South Victoria Avenue is close to Wilshire Boulevard.

_________________

Arnold went to a Christian School, met his wife in church, did his early drag appearances at church Halloween socials, and as we will see in Part II the first meeting of the Hose and Heel club was in a church building. After that we hear no more about any involvement with a church.

Arnold completed his PhD in 1939 at the age of 27. The US joined WWII two years later. There is no mention in any of the sources that he was called to be inducted into the military. Did the military not want qualified pharmacists? It is difficult to believe that the Arnold who had not yet met Louise Lawrence avoided service by confessing his transvestism, and being refused.

For some reason the Find-a-Grave page on Elizabeth Arnold does not link to either husband or children (although it does say "cremains buried with the Prince family - Ferris family relations ").

There is a misconception by some of those who prefer biologistic or even essentialist explanations that they therefore should reject social construction explanations.  For over 150 years now various writers have been proposing that homosexuality, transvestity and/or transsexuality are caused by some mixture of genetics and pre-natal experience, and for 150 years of effort very little has been established, especially in identifying which factors might make someone gay rather than trans or vice versa.  Every now and then some suggestive aspect of brain anatomy/chemistry such as H-Y Antigens or BTSc neurons is accepted uncritically as an explanation.  However these never seem to move on any next stage so that gender variance is as well explained as say autism or schizophrenia, or be developed to be used as a test,  and indeed attempts at replication of the original results by other scientists often fail.

Biologistic explanations have two serious weaknesses.  They cannot explain the dramatic increase in the percentage of us who are trans.  Add up all the known trans people in the entire nineteenth century and you have fewer than the transsexuals who are the newspapers in any one year in the 21st century.

Secondly biologistic factors do not at all explain the cultural changes of how trans persons are perceived and what options are available to trans persons at any time.  The biology was presumably similar for Lavinia Edwards in 1833, Charlotte Charlaque in 1930, Norma Jackson in 1931, Christine Jorgensen in 1953, Bibíana Fernández in 1977 and Jin Xing in 1995, but the social constructions in which they lived have changed enormously.

In the mid 19th century, a person whom we would now regard as transsexual was regarded as an invert, a category that also included what we now regard as homosexual.  In fact the first usage of the concept of a female trapped in a male body, anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, was to explain male homosexuality.
In the mid 20th century persons like Jorgenson were generally described as transvestists, before the term ‘transsexual’ came into use.

Let us take a small double wave in the sea of social construction.

The HSTS/Autogynephilia distinction was developed by Kurt Freund at what was then the Clarke Institute of Psychology Gender Identity Clinic, and appears in that institute’s Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management 1985, edited by Betty W. Steiner - although different terms are used.   Freund’s protégé and eventual replacement,  Ray Blanchard took the idea and renamed it with the terms that we now use.  Blanchard published papers in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (edited by Richard Green until 2001, and then by Kenneth Zucker) and similar journals that were not read by most trans persons.  However one who did and proclaimed herself to be an autogynephile, was Anne Lawrence who studied for a PhD at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality at San Francisco.  Michael Bailey was one of her thesis advisors.  Speculations continue as to which influenced the other more.  In 2003 Bailey published The Man Who Would Be Queen, and the concept became a public controversy.

Willow Arune, Lisanne Anderson and others set up the Autogynephilia Yahoo group, and a small but significant number of trans women self-identified as autogynephiles.   The group was apparently destroyed by Jennifer Usher manipulating the Yahoo complaints policy.

There were fewer trans women self-identifying as HSTS (homosexual transsexuals).   The most prominent was Kiira Triea, which was odd in that she had previously identified as a lesbian intersex.  She was the prime mover behind transkids.us.  Others involved included Jennifer Ross, Hontas Farmer and Heike Bödeker none of whom still speaks up for HSTS.

Very shortly afterwards, in 2005, Charlotte Goiar met Diane Kearny online, and then they split and founded two competing groups both using the term Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS).  The term had been proposed by Tom Reucher a decade before, but they turned its meaning upside down by applying it to emotions that had been previously expressed by Betty Cowell and Margaret O’Hartigan. The concern here is that most HBS advocates took up the term ‘autogynephile’  (Rose White, the author of the only book on HBS says rather ‘autogyne’ instead implying that she does not properly understand the concept).  It was stated in the short-lived HBS-written Wikipedia page on HBS that non-HBS MTF persons who have gender surgery were either autogynephiles or possibly gay men (no self-identified HSTS woman has ever claimed to be  or to have previously been a gay man).  Kearny claimed that non-HBS transsexuals were autogynephiles and fetishists.  The vast majority of trans women who do not fit these categories were defined out of existence, just as in the Freund-Blanchard-Bailey schema the same vast majority also disappears.

By syllogistic logic, HSTS = not autogynephile = HBS.  However this never worked psychologically.   A small number of HBS persons, could, if you force the HSTS/AGP dichotomy, be considered HSTS.  Diane Kearny who transitioned relatively early and later married a man, is the best candidate.   However most HBSers were first husbands and fathers, and transitioned only later. Thus if we force the dichotomy they would be AGP. Examples include Joanne Proctor, Tabatha Basco, Jennifer Usher, Cathryn Platine.  Rose White’s accounts of her life exclude what she did between the ages of 14 and 57, and it seems reasonable to assume that she fits here also.

The link between autogynephile and HBS was kept alive by the mutual antipathyof Willow Arune and Jennifer Usher across various Usenet fora.

In 2009 the Transkids site was revived by Kay Brown, the author of Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, writing as Cloudy. She also started a blog: On the Science of Changing Sex.  "I slept through the controversy surrounding the publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen. ... Prof. Bailey graciously gave me access to an online version of the book and I read it from front to back in nearly one sitting. Although I disagreed with several minor points, I felt I could have written the book myself. I agreed with each and every major point. Who wouldn't, if they knew what I know."

Of course the problem with HSTS is that it means ‘homosexual transsexual’, which is a confusing term for women who are mainly heterosexual (some are non-sexual).  It is also a very rude term in that it defines a trans women’s orientation by her birth gender.  There have been attempts to make Blanchard’s system less rude by proposing alternate terms, usually that HSTS should be called by the neutral term ‘androphilic’.  Alice Novic also proposed the terms Love-to-be-femme and Act-femme for AGP and HSTS respectively.  However these terms have not caught on.

The insistence on the term HSTS has kept away those HBSers who might have adopted it and also many others (myself included, even though unlike Triea and Brown, I am a graduate of gay lib).   The transkids.us site includes a page strongly insisting that HSTS and not androphilic is the right term.  Kay Brown/Cloudy continues the insistence in her FAQ:   “Transsexuals with this etiology are most often called, “homosexual transsexuals” (HSTS) or “early onset” in the scientific literature.  (This does not imply that they act like, nor identify, as “homosexual”.  It only means that they are sexually and affectionally attracted to the same natal sex.)” And goes on to refer to AGPs as non-homosexuals.   This is the same Kay Brown who in her Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History was critical of Harry Benjamin for using the term ‘male transsexual’ for a trans woman.

Anyway the tents are rolled up, and the circus has almost left town. 

• The Kearny web site and forum are derelict sites.
• The Goiar web site stands, but the forum has become inactive.
• The Rose White book caused such embarrassment that most HBS-ers declined to even mention it.  There has not been a second HBS book from anybody else.
• TS-Si which was initially proudly HBS, later removed the term and denied being HBS, and has now closed.
• Suzan Cooke, who initially labelled Women Born Transsexual an HBS site, later realized that she did not really identify with the HBSers and removed the label.
• In 2009 various HBSers wrote pages for the English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Simple Wikipedias, but were unable/refused to include critical opinions, give a history of HBS or support their claims.
• Alice Novic has removed almost all content from her web site.
• Cathryn Platine has announced that all “trans themed blog entries“ have been removed from radicalbitch.wordpress.com.
• Joanne Proctor and Tiira Triea are no longer with us.

Charlotte Goiar, who is the youngest person mentioned here, is now 40.  I don’t think that I have seen any enthusiasm for either HSTS/AGP or HBS among persons under 40. Their time is over

• Andrea James. “Denise Magner aka Kiira Triea: fabrications and hoaxes”.  Transsexual Road Map, 12 November 2012.  www.tsroadmap.com/info/transkids/denise-magner.html
• Kay Brown/Cloudy.  “FAQ on the Science”. On the Science of Changing Sex.  http://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/
• Zagria.  “A Blanchard-Binary Timeline”.   A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 20/10/2010.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/10/blanchard-binary-timeline-part-1-to.html  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/10/blanchard-binary-timeline-part-2-2001.html.
• Zagria.  “What is Autogynephilia?” A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 22/02/2009.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-is-autogynephilia.html
• Zagria. “A short history of (Harry) Benjamin Syndrome.”, A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 24 April 2012.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2012/04/short-history-of-harry-benjamin.html.
• “Harry Benjamin Syndrome“.  Wikibin. http://wikibin.org/articles/harry-benjamin-syndrome.html.