A Gender Variance Who's Who

Mary Mudge (1804-1889) dairy maid

In the 1850s Mary Mudge was running a small dairy farm of nine acres and three cows in a village close to Tavistock, Devon. She lived with her sister and also took in lodgers.

By 1871 she was living alone in a cottage on the Duke of Bedford’s estate. By 1881 she was living with a 31-year-old gardener and his family, and was described as an aunt.

In 1885 she was taken sick, and was recommended to the workhouse in Tavistock.

She died there age 85, and as her body was being prepared for burial, was discovered to be male-bodied.

• “A Man Eighty Five Years in Woman’s Clothes”. Raynold’s Newspaper, 31 March 1889.
• Peter Stubley. “Mary Mudge: Cross-dressing in the 19th Century”. History Hack, December 18, 2012. Online.

Charley Wilson (1834 - ?) master painter

Catherine Coombs, from Somerset, educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, was married at 16 to a first cousin, 23 years older. He ill-treated her, and she ran away to her brother in West Bromwich. He was a painter and decorator, and helping him she learned the trade.

Twice the husband forced her return. On the third run-away, Coombes bought a suit of boy’s clothes, and took the name Charley Wilson.

Wilson obtained work as a painter and joined the painters’ union.

For 14 years he worked as a painter in Yorkshire.

For 13 years he was a painter in London with the Penninsula and Oriental (P & O) Company : most of the ships of their line bore his handiwork. He worked on the Rome, The Victoria, The Oceana and the Arcadia. The elaborate ornamentation was largely Wilson’s work, done in enamelling – a distinct branch of the painter’s craft.

Wilson was stand-offish with regard to socialising with other men, and in particular avoided coarse and vulgar conversation. He owned a little house near the Victoria Docks, and for 22 years his niece kept house for him, being taken by the neighbours to be his wife.

In July 1896, at the age of 62, Wilson fell from a scaffold, and fractured his ribs. The attending doctor did not notice anything discrepant about his sex. However being unable to work, Wilson fell into destitution and was admitted to the West Ham workhouse. He was put in the male ward but, before the compulsory stripping, requested to see the matron and doctor, and stated: ‘I am a woman”, and then made a statement about her life.

Wilson told the Telegraph reporter that he felt very uncomfortable in the female workhouse uniform.

• “Stranger than Fiction: Authenticated Story of a Singular Woman’s Life” The Daily Telegrath, 3 November 1897. Online.
• “A Woman’s Strange Career: Forty-Two Years Disguised in Male Attire”. Kalgoorlie Miner, 10 November 1897. Online.
• “In Man’s Attire: Catherine Coombs Worked With Men for Years”. Wichita Daily Eagle, Nov 12, 1897.  Online.
• “Men in Women’s Guise”. Drag: The International Tranvestite Quarterly, 5, 18, 1975: 27. Online. 
• Louis Sullivan.  Information for the Female-To-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual, 1985:21. Online. 

Paul Doulman grew up in Bathurst, New South Wales, a farming community known for the Mount Panorama motor racing circuit. Like most males in Bathurst he became involved in the car-racing culture. He later moved to Sydney and became a bus driver.

In 2001 film producer-director Ruth Cullen approached Sydney’s The Gender Centre and interviewed a number of persons beginning transition. She chose Paul.

"Paul's initial appeal to me was that he seemed to epitomise the typical Aussie bloke in so many ways yet she had no doubt that she was a woman. I was interested in exploring the contrast between the butch, male exterior and her inner feminine world."

Ruth and Julia

With a camera, Ruth followed Paul who became Julia over a period of two years. Julia was filmed having her hairline lowered, having voice lessons, makeup lessons and dress advice. She changed her legal name, and then changed bus garage so that her new co-workers knew her only as Julia. It is stated but not shown in the film that her family have rejected her. The film also shows her realizing that becoming a woman does not mean that she has to reject her past as a petrol-head, and she is shown attending a race meeting, where she gains the fastest lap time, and is addressed by one and all as Julia. However she does exchange her off-track car for one that she considers to be more ‘girly’.

After filming was complete, Julia lost her bus driving job after abuse from passengers led her to respond. However she then found a job driving for a private bus company.

The film, Becoming Julia, was shown at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2003, where it received a standing ovation. In October Julia returned to Bathurst for a screening which again was well received (although her family stayed away). In April 2004 the film was shown on the SBS television channel.


*Not to be confused with Being Julia, a 2004 commercial film based on a Somerset Maugham story; nor with the novel Becoming Julia by Chris Westwood; nor Becoming Julia de Burgos by Vanessa Perez Rosario; nor the play Becoming Julia Morgan, about the California architect; nor Just Julia, the autobiography by UK trans woman Julia Grant (who was featured in the 1980 BBC pioneering documentary A Change of Sex).

• Katherine Cummings. “Julia: In Control of her Life”. Polare, 52, June 2003. PDF.
• Ruth Cullen (dir). Becoming Julia, with Julia Doulman. Australia 50 mins 2003.
• Alex Mitchell. “Bus driver's quest to become a woman captured on film”. Sydney Morning Herald, June 19 2003. www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/17/1055815317167.html.
• “Julia’s Hometown Welcomes Her Back”. Polare, 55, January 2004. PDF.
• David Coad. “The politics of Home in Becoming Julia: Transsexual Experience in Australia”. In Chantal Zabus & Davif Coad (eds). Transgender Experience: Place, Ethnicity, and Visibility. Routladge, 2014: 123-136.

IMDB

McGonigal was raised in Gisborne, north-east New Zealand. He cross-dressed from age 7, but also played in the school's rugby first 15 and was head prefect.

At 21 he consulted a doctor about feeling female, and was advised to grow a beard.

He became a farmer and business man who was married for 14 years, and with his wife had two children. He experimented with female hormones even before divorce.

Afterwards McGonigal had relationships with women while also investigating transsexuality online.

His then girlfriend found out and there was a revelation at his daughter's 21^st birthday, and within days all the family knew. His father died 10 days later. Rejected by the children, whom she has not seen since, McGonigal lost 20kg (3 stones) in weight.

Racheal, as she became, had genital surgery and breast augmentation with Dr Sanguan Kunaporn in Phuket, Thailand, February, 2006. The operation was filmed.

Racheal became a prostitute under the name of Storm. With Summer Bardot she escorted across Australia and New Zealand. She later returned to New Zealand and lived in Auckland where she opened a brothel.

She was featured in Rachel Francis &  Michael Larsen's 2012 book about the sex industry in New Zealand.

Racheal has published 6 books: 2 volumes of autobiography, a novel, a book of photographs from Andrew to Racheal; a collection of articles on trans topics and a short guide to transition.

"The only things I'm missing are my kids and a partner. I love my kids and I think about them every day. I'm their father, always was and always will be."

• Racheal McGonigal. "Rachael's story: A minority within a minority". GayNZ, 19^th September 2009. www.gaynz.com/articles/publish/36/article_7920.php.
  
• Racheal McGonigal. Patient testimonial for Dr Sanguan and staff, 26/09/2006. http://www.phuket-plasticsurgery.com/testimonials.html.
  
• Natalie Scarr. "Sex-change dad: I went from a prop to a hooker: After 50 years as a man, this father became a woman". Yahoo, February 11, 2011. http://nz.lifestyle.yahoo.com/new-idea/real-life/article/-/8816024/sex-change-dad-i-went-from-a-prop-to-a-hooker.
  
• Rachel Francis &  Michael Larsen.  Naked truth: lifting the lid on the New Zealand sex industry.  Auckland, Penguin, 2012: 79-97. 
  
• Racheal McGonigal. A Pictorial Transformation - Him to Her (Transsexual Transition). Kindle, 2012.
  
• Racheal McGonigal. Country Boy to City Girl (Transsexual Transtion). Kindle, 2012.
  
• Racheal Storm McGonigal. Summer Storm (Transsexual Transition Book 2). Kindle, 2012.
  
• Racheal McGonigal. The Transgender Guide (Transsexual transition). Kindle, 2012.
  
• Racheal McGonigal. "Misunderstandings: Transsexual vs transgender". Stuff, 11/01/2013. www.stuff.co.nz/stuff-nation/8162944/Misunderstandings-Transsexual-vs-transgender.
  
• Racheal McGonigal. Be Careful What You Wish For. Kindle, 2013.
  
• Racheal McGonigal. Reflections. Kindle, 2013.
  
• http://transgenderstorm.yolasite.com. No Longer available.
  
• http://acquiringavagina.blogspot.com. No longer available.
  

Transgenderstorm    Rachealstorm    Amazon Biography    LinkedIn



_________________________________________________________

Racheal describes herself as a ‘sex-change female', not a phrase that has caught on. 

Top marks to Racheal for her transsexual pride and her willingness to show photographs of her male phase.

Stanley Biber was raised in Des Moines, Iowa by a father who owned a furniture store. He trained as a concert pianist and attended a rabbinical seminary. During World War II he was a civilian employee of the Office of Stategic Services and stationed in Alaska and the Northwest Territories. He graduated from the University of Iowa Medical School in 1948. He was an outstanding weight-lifter and just failed to make the US Olympic team. He was a MASH chief surgeon with the US army in the Korean War.

In 1954 he took a job at a United Mine Workers clinic in Trinidad, Colorado, a town where Frenchy Vosbaugh had operated a restaurant in the late nineteenth century, where Malvina Perry had been taken to court for her circus act, and just east of Segundo where Alice Baker had worked as a male teacher. Biber was the only surgeon in town, doing everything from gunshot wounds to Caesarian births to appendectomies.

He bought a small ranch and 25 head of cattle, and then expanded it. One year he took a bull to the Colorado State Fair and placed second in his class.

Biber did his first sex change surgery in 1968 for Ann, a social-worker friend who had been completing her real-life test without his realizing. Biber consulted with Harry Benjamin, who had started Ann on estrogens, and then sent to the Johns Hopkins Hospital for diagrams describing Dr. Georges Burou's technique.

Trinidad's only hospital was Mount San Rafael, a Roman Catholic hospital. After hiding the first few cases because of possible objections, Biber gave a series of lectures to the local Ministerial Alliance about the psychological needs of transsexuals and what his surgery entailed.

"Much to my amazement, there was no opposition. They were very understanding and accepting. All of a sudden, townspeople became very sophisticated and knew everything about transsexuals."

However there was some reaction: a colleague resigned, in part because of the transgender surgeries, he had problems with insurance, and was admonished for poor record keeping. On the other hand the surgeries brought in almost a million dollars a year and definitely helped the hospital remain financially viable. A local was reported as saying:

"After my hysterectomy, I went to Denver, and one of my friends said, 'You didn't let that doctor do it.' And I said, 'I certainly did.' They looked at me funny. 'But he does that kind of surgery.' And I said, 'Which proves how good he is. You have to be darn good to do that.' They never thought of it that way."

In the late-1970s when the Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic and others closed, Dr Biber became the major alternate source of transgender surgery in the US. Fletcher summarizes Biber's approach:

"First, patients must pass at least two psychiatric evaluations ensuring that they're not homosexuals or transvestites or simply people seeking fame and fortune on the talk-show circuit. True transsexuals, Biber says, are not attracted to members of the same sex and do not become aroused by wearing clothes of the opposite sex. True transsexuals consciously and subconsciously believe they are members of the opposite sex, trapped in the wrong body. ... Next, patients must receive hormone therapy for at least a year and live in the role of the opposite sex for the same period. If the adjustment is successful and another evaluation approved, plastic surgery is recommended. Then, and only then, will they get a consultation with Biber, who makes the final call. If he senses doubt, hesitation or confusion, which he does about 5 percent of the time, he sends patients home. As a consolation, he often performs minor cosmetic surgery first, such as an Adam's-apple reduction or breast augmentation."

He quotes the doctor:

"After doing so many of these, you develop a gut feeling. A bell will go off and you'll know something is wrong, even if they came with good evaluations. You certainly don't want to make a mistake. You've got to have a feel for if they're really worried about being a transsexual or if they're just scared of the surgery. It helps me in my own mind to know I'm doing the right thing."

Dr Biber went on to do thousands of the operation, resulting in Trinidad, Colorado becoming known as the “Sex-Change Capital of the World”, and also trained other surgeons in transgender surgery. He  became a celebrity and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Sally Jessy Raphael Show, Geraldo Rivera Show, the Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Playboy channel and the Guinness World Records Primetime TV show.

He and his wife had seven children, he owned the largest cattle ranch in the county, and served as a Las Animas County commissioner from 1990 to 1996.

Notable patients include:
1968 Ann.
1976 Yasmene Jabar,
1978 Diane Delia,
1979 Nancy Ledins,
        Joseph Cluse,
1980 Edie Lane,
1981 Susan Faye Cannon,

The marriage of Lule Bikaj to Katerinë, both of the Catholic Kelmëndi tribe of northern Albania, was delayed 12 years when Bikaj was arrested for his part in the struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Initially sentenced to death, he served 12 years penal servitude in Anatolia.

Their first child was Tonë. She was followed by two sons and two more daughters. However the two sons both succumbed to malaria at an early age. At the age of 9 Tonë decided to be the son his parents and sisters needed so much. He switched to male clothes and male tasks, but never did masculinize his name (to Ton). Lule introduced his 'new son' to neighbours, and like all other sons in the region Tonë received weapons from his father on becoming 15.

In 1921, when Tonë was 20, his 49-year-old mother gave birth to a son who was named Gjelosh. Tonë was pleased to be the older brother. The Kelmëndi recognized and honoured him as a man, and his posture and voice were increasingly male. When his sisters reached marriageable age, Tonë handed them to their grooms as an older brother would.

Both Tonë and Gjelosh fought with the Albanian partisans against the Italian and German invaders 1939-44. Tonë was a unit commander. However his unit was with Balli Kombëtar, which opposed the Communists because they did not demand that Kosovo be part of Albania, and lost its credibility by allying with Nazi Germany. Katerinë was shot for refusing to persuade her sons to join the cease-fire. When Tonë did surrender he was imprisoned for a year. During confinement he was deeply upset at being treated as a woman and being separated from his comrades. Lule died just after the war finished and Gjelosh was released in 1951. Tonë and Gjelosh crossed the border to Montenegro, Yugoslavia.

They settled among the Grudë. Gjelosh married in 1953 and Tonë acted as vëllam, the elder male relative who goes for the bride and leads her to the groom. Tonë lived with Gjelosh and his wife. Their children referred to him as babá, and some younger members of the family did not realize that he was female-bodied until after his death.

Tonë, in Herdt p258.

Gjelosh commuted to Titograd where he worked as a carpenter, and Tonë worked locally mowing and hay-stacking (male tasks). He did cooking but not any other female tasks. He attended gatherings of the male heads of households, and was popular as a singer and musician.

Tonë died at age 70 after three years of illness, with several nuns at his bedside. At the cemetery some men, friends and relatives, wanted to start a traditional lamentation, but objections were raised by the Grudë who would not allow such for a woman. Gjelosh felt that Tonë was therefore deprived of the last honours of a man to which he was entitled.

• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:150-2. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 253-6.
  

Joe Monahan arrived in Owyhee County, Idaho Territory in the early 1867. He tried mining, than worked in a mill, and then tried farming, selling produce in Silver City. Around 1800, he moved across the line into Oregon and worked with horses. Later he moved back to Idaho, and built a small ranch where he herded horses and cattle. He always made a point to vote, and served on juries, but avoided most social interaction.

In January 1904, he succumbed to pneumonia while driving his herd to winter pasture. While being laid out for burial he was discovered to be female-bodied. The neighbors were unsure what to do, and Monahan was buried perfunctorily, with neither a prayer, nor a reading.

As Monahan had been known to receive mail from Buffalo, New York, a neighbor wrote to the police chief there, who passed the letter on the local paper which printed it in the front page. In response one Katherine Walter stepped forward claiming that she had been foster mother to Joanna Monahan for six years, because of the child's stepfather being a habitual drunkard. Joanna had headed west just after turning 14 hoping to to do well. Katherine and her daughter Anna had kept up correspondence with Monahan, last receiving a letter a few days prior to Christmas 1903. In another letter to the merchant who had taken charge of Monahan's estate, Walter explained that Johanna's mother had dressed her in boys' clothes and let her earn a living running errands and selling newspapers.

However this was not enough and the newspaper accounts of Monahan grew. In March 1904 the American Journal Examiner dropped the 'e' and told how Jo had been deceived by a man who abandoned her and her baby. When their parents died, Jo's sister took in the baby and Jo headed west. Other papers suggested that Jo had an affair with a Chinese cook that she hired. In 1981 Barbara Lebow dramatised the story, with the baby and a disguised trip back East to see her son. The story was filmed by Maggie Greenwald in 1993, with the baby, the cook-lover and the female spelling of 'Jo'.

*not the New Mexico politician, nor the herpetologist.

• "Cowboy Jo –Was a Woman". American Journal Examiner, March 6, 1904.
  
• Mildretta Hamilton Adams. Historic Silver City: The story of the Owyhees. Owyhee chronicle, 1960. Schwartz Print , 1969. Summarized in Jacquie Rogers. Women Won the West. www.jacquierogers.com/Women_Won_the_West.pdf.
  
• Barbara Lebow. Little Joe Monaghan. First performed in 1981.
  
• Maggie Greenwald (dir & scr). The Ballad of Little Jo, with Suzy Amis as Josephine Monaghan, David Chung as Tinman Wong, Ian McKellen as Percy Corcoran. US 121 mins 1993.
  
• Jason Cromwell. Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities. University of Illinois Press, 1999: 75-6.
  
• Lynn Bragg. More than Petticoats: Remarkable Idaho Women. TwoDot, 2001.
  
• Marjorie K Lorenz. "Josephine Monahan: 'Little Jo' and Other Cowgirls". Notorious Women of the West: The Good, The Bad and the Eccentric. Cherokee Books, 2005: 88-9.
  
• Jacquie Rogers. "Scandal: Joe Monaghan". Unusual Historicals, 08 September 2009. http://unusualhistoricals.blogspot.ca/2009/09/scandal-joe-monaghan.html.
  
• Erin H Turner. "Jo Monaghan". Cowgirls: Stories of Trick Riders, Sharp Shooters, and Untamed Women. Twodot, 2009: 1-8.
  
• Peter Boag. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011: 95-104, 109, 129.
  

____________________________________________________________

The film sold well with GLBT audiences and had Ian McKellen in the cast.  However it was a heterosexualization of the story, and denied that Joe was a trans man.

Peter Boag examined the 1860 Buffalo census returns but did not find a Joanna Monahan, but did find a Peter Reily, a saloon keeper living with his wife and her two children Ann and Mary Manumon (aged 8).  They also had a 13-year-old servant Johanna Burke.  It is not clear whether Joe was originally Mary or Johanna. 

Berta Martin was born in Nodaway County, Missouri. As cousin Nancy Martin put it when interviewed in 1900: “she had many attributes of a male person and other peculiar characteristics”. Nancy attributed this strangeness as “owing to her mother having been badly frightened by a bear while hunting berries in Missouri a few months before the child was born”. From prison Martin remembered that as a youngster she felt that she was “not more than half a woman”.

Image from Nebraska State Historical Society

Martin grew up and became a man, Bert. He worked for a cattle-dealing firm, until he arrived at a farm in Ashland, Nebraska. He signed on as a farmhand, and soon the farmer’s daughter Lena was found to be pregnant.  In late 1899, Bert and Lena were married, and the next February they had a child, Dewey.

In 1900 Bert was arrested and convicted of horse stealing. After eleven months in the Nebraska penitentiary, his cell-mate spoke to a guard that he suspected Martin of being a woman. The officials investigated, redressed Martin accordingly and transferred him to the women’s section. The press and public wondered how this could have happened as all new arrivals at the prison were required to strip for a bath and an inspection. The prison physician became the butt of many jokes, and journalists dug up the information that the new arrivals were allowed a towel for modesty’s sake. Several of the press accounts refer to the prisoner as Lena.

Early in 1902, the Governor of Nebraska, Ezra Perin Savage, called the prisoner “a sexual monstrosity, unfit for association with men or women ... and that prison morals imperatively demanded its removal”. He commuted Martin’s sentence to 18 months on condition that she promised to be honest, and had him released immediately.

Bert’s marriage to Lena ended. Lena’s parents moved to Iowa , and took Dewey with them. Bert remarried in about 1907 and they they had at least two children.

• “Horse Thief was a Thief-ette”. The Nebraska State Journal, Oct 4, 1901.
• “Convict a Woman”. Lima Times Democrat, Oct 4, 1901.
• “Woman Convicted as Man: Her Sex Discovered Only After She Had Remained in the Penitentiary Eleven Months”. Daily Iowa State Press, Nov 1, 1901.
• “Pardons Disguised Woman”. Fort Wayne News, Jun 23, 1902. All the above online at: http://yesteryearsnews.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/horse-thief-was-a-thief-ette.
• Peter Boag. Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011: 60, 86-9.

____________________________________________________________

None of Nodaway County, Ashland and Nebraska penitentiary list Bert Martin as a prominent resident on their Wikipedia pages.

Marie-Marguerite was raised in Bû, in the then newly created département of Eure-et-Loir, France.

At age 13 she started to suffer from groin hernias on both sides, and consulted a surgeon who prescribed a truss, to no avail. Marie-Marguerite was blonde and attractive, and a good housekeeper, so the son of a neighbouring farmer proposed when she was 16. However this fell through for reasons of family interests. At age 19 another engagement was broken off at the signing of the contract.

Her charm was disappearing, and her clothes no longer seemed to suit her. She expressed a preference for outdoor tasks such as sowing and harrowing, rather than milking cows and nursing chickens.

She consulted Dr Worbe who examined her and concluded that she was male. She shed tears, and exclaimed: : "So I'll never be able to settle down!" It took several months to become used to the idea that he was not a woman. Finally he took the decision ‘to make a solemn proclamation’ that he was male, and obtained a court ruling to that effect. Then he presented himself to the community. As Worbe tells it:

“Making a masculine entrance in the village whose inhabitants had until then only seen him in woman's clothing was extremely embarrassing for Marie; but over-coming any false shame, he went to mass on Sunday, passed through to the choir of the church, and took his place among the men. After this bold and decisive act, protected by one who was not long ago his lover, Marie went to the places frequented by young men of his age, and shared in their entertainments. Marie soon abandoned all feminine habits: an excellent domestic worker, he became a good labourer in very little time.”

• Worbe. “Sur un individu rendu par jugement á l’état viril, après avoir été vingt-deux ans réputé du sexe féminin; cas médico-légal”. Bulletin de la faculté de médecine de Paris, XI, 4:10, 1815: 479-92.
• Geertje Mak. Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories. Manchester University Press, 2012: 51-3.

____________________________________________________________

After his consultation Dr Worbe refers to Marie as ‘he’, which is good, but still calls him Marie!!  It is not known what male name he adopted, although it was probably stated in the court ruling.

It is likely that the groin hernias were likely late-descending testicles.

This account is one of very few from the period which recounts what happened after the patient was told that he was a man.  Typically for the period, Dr Worbe has no interest in and does not ask about whether Marie regards himself as a man.

Marie took the initiative to change gender and to have it legally confirmed.  At this period – before 1870 or so – intersex persons were allowed to choose whether to change or to stay with the gender of rearing. 

For most of his life, up to 1815, France was at war.  Fortunately, becoming a man did not mean joining the army.

David and Thelma Walter were roommates at the University of California in 1940.

By 1947 David had transitioned as much as was possible at that time, and had a small farm outside Sonoma, California where he raised chickens, rabbits and Chinchillas. Thelma was a teacher at Sonoma Valley Union High School. They were married in June 1947 in San Francisco.

"We couldn't figure out any other way to live. Under our code, we decided that marriage was the only course. We considered living together without being married very improper."

Later that year the FBI visited to find out why David had not registered for the draft. They discovered that David was legally female, and both were charged under an 1872 law against impersonating another person and making false affidavits to marry.

Walter lost her teaching job after their story was in the local newspaper. A San Francisco psychologist interviewed the couple, and recommended that all charges against Mr. and Mrs. David Warren be dropped because no laws had been broken.

Their marriage license was never voided by the court and is still on file at the Sonoma County Courthouse.

• “Thelma Jane Walter and Marietta Cook (aka David Warren)”. Girl Who 'Wed' Another Girl: Pre-1950 Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Marriages in the U.S. http://pre-1950sgaymarriage.org.
• Nan Almilla Boyd. “The Materiality of Gender: Looking for Lesbian Bodies in Transgender History. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Lesbian Studies, 3, 3, 1999: 73-81; and Dawn Atkins (ed): Lesbian Sex Scandals: Sexual Practices, Identities, and Politics. The Haworth Press, Inc., 1999: 73-81. 
• Larry Harnisch. Comment. 1947Project, Nov 29, 2005. http://1947project.blogspot.ca/2005/11/mystery-of-vanishing-cash.html.
• Nicoletta Karam. “Hidden history of gay marriage”. The Bay Area Reporter, 10 May 2012. www.ebar.com/openforum/opforum.php?sec=guest_op&id=150.

Milica was born in the village of Hanovi (later Žabljak) in Crna Gora (Montenegro). Her father, a celebrated hero, was killed in battle against the Ottoman Empire. The widow having no other male to be head of the family, renamed her child Mikas and dressed him as a boy.

Mikas got used to it. He played with boys and tended sheep. When the other boys put on a belt with arms, Mikas did likewise. No-one was allowed to mention his origins, and Mikas would not have it otherwise. It was assumed that with adulthood Mikas would return to being a woman, but when this did not happen, his mother and other near kin approved, but the Karadzic clan leaders were embarrassed, and reprimanded him. However the more they did so, the more stubborn he became. He expostulated that he would rather lose his head than become a woman.

Around 1880 the leaders of the three clans of Jezera put the problem of Mikas to the Bishop Visarion Ljubisa (1823-84) when he visited. After a talk with Mikas, Ljubisa instructed that Mikas was not ever to be insulted. However he told Mikas to never drink brandy in that it might bring shame.

In 1885 the doctor Milan Jovanović-Batut (1847-1940) was to examine the soldiers of Zabljak, who included Mikas Karadzic. He was informed that Mikas was a ‘wonder of the world’ and had a private consultation with him. He was able to get Mikas to admit to being a woman, and asked how he hid the menses. Mikas insisted that he never had such since age 13.

After military service, Mikas farmed the family land. He had a flock of fifty sheep of the highest quality. He also bred and traded cattle. This occupied him so much that he leased out the arable land.

When in 1916 the occupying Austrian army interned and deported all the local soldiers, a neighbour applied to the Wachtmeister and informed him about Mikas’ sex. The Austrians refused to believe this without a medical examination. Mikas unlike his comrades was released.

In the 1920s, when Crna Gora had become part of Yugoslavia, there was a drought of several years, and Mikas was reduced to three cows and a much smaller farm. He was still doing the hard masculine tasks: mowing, stacking, ploughing and harvesting. He did his own cooking, but other female tasks were done by female relatives and neighbours, usually for a small fee.

Photo by Branimir Gušić 1929, printed in Herdt p249.

In 1929 the Croatian ethnographer, Marijana Gušić (1901-87), attempted to visit Mikas. But he refused her as she was a woman. However her husband Branimir was allowed to sit with him and take photographs.

Each November 8 Mikas officiated as the head male in the family at the Feast of the Archangel Michael. He also voted.

In 1933 a sick and weakened Mikas was taken on ox-back to the home of his paternal aunt’s grandson, where he was referred to as svekar (father-in-law). He requested that his daughter-in-law not disgrace him. She bought him a new manly suit which he was buried in, with the approval of the local priest.

• Milan Jovanović-Batut. “Cudna prilika (S moga puta po Crnoj Gori)” Branik, Dec 12-24, 1885.
• Marijana Gušić. "Etnografski prikaz Pive i Drobnjake" Narodna starina 9 (1930): 198; "Ostajnica-tombelija-virdzin kao drustvcna pojava," in Treci kongres folklorista Jugoslavije (Celinje: Obod, 1958): 57-58, and "Pravni polozaj ostajnice-virdjincse u stocarskom drustvu regije Dinarida," in Vasa Cubrilovic (ed.), Odredbe pozitivnog zakonodavstva i obicajnog prava o sezonskim
  kretanjima stocara u jugoistocnoj Evropi kioz vekove (Belgrade: Srpska akademija,
  1976): 280.
• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:144-9. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 246-253.

Teresa Pla Meseguer was born on a small farm in Castellón, Spain. Her parents, upon seeing her genital malformation, raised her as a girl, so that she would not have to do military service. As she grew older, her parents put her to work as a shepherdess - she went to school for only two weeks, and as she grew older still and somewhat masculine, they called her Teresot.

At the age of 32 in 1949, the Francoist Guardia Civil picked up on the local village gibe and took Teresa in for interrogation. On release, Meseguer never dressed as female again. He took the name Florencio. He joined the Spanish Maquis which was still fighting the Fascist government although it had been abandoned by the Allies who had cut off their supply lines after 1948.

The journalist Enrique Rubio (1920-2005), described Meseguer as a “La Pastora (Shepherdess)” and as a lesbian woman with criminal tendencies. Florencio took the name Durruti after the famed Barcelona anarchist (1896 – 1936), and became La Pastora Durruti. He survived alone in the mountains for many years, doing some smuggling.

In 1960 he was arrested in Andorra, tried for atrocities that he nothing to do with, and was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted, and he was included in the general amnesty of 1977. He had nowhere to go, so one of his jailers hired Florencio to work on his land.

Florencio finally moved back to his home province. He died aged 87.

His story was converted into a novel Donde nadie te encuentre by Alicia Giménez Bartlett, which won the Nadal Prize in 2011.

• “"La Pastora Durrut" of the Maquis a heroic story of autonomy”. Intersex News. Jan 18, 2009. http://intersexnews.blogspot.com/2009/01/la-pastora-durrut-of-maquis-heroic.html.
• Jose Calvo Segarra. La pastora, del monte al mito: Teresa/ Florencio Pla Meseguer, La Pastora que siguió al maquis de la AGLA. Vinaros: Antinea, 2009.
• “Teresa Pla Meseguer”. Viquipèdia: L’enciclopèdia Iliure. ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Pla_Meseguer

________________________________________

There are a couple of odd bits in the en.wikipedia article on The Spanish Maquis.  a) All of a sudden in section “The end of the maquis” the word “fascist” referring to the Francoist government is in quotes as if the writer does not consider it to be fascist.  b) of Florencio Pla Meseguer it says: “who used to disguise as a female” – which seems to be missing the point.

The es.wikipedia article on Enrique Rubio avoids completely how he got on with the Francoist state.  His comments about Pla Meseguer seem to be homophobic.  Did he make similar comments about other people?

Fatime was the fourth daughter of a Muslim peasant family in Kosova. Lacking a son, the parents deemed the child to be a boy, Fetah.

Widowed at an early age, the mother was left the difficult task of guiding her son through the rites of boyhood. This was essential in that a widow with only daughters had no right to retain her husband's house and land. She managed to avoid the synét (circumcision) and postponed the search for a bride indefinitely.

In 1944 the 18-year-old Fetah was recruited by Tito's People's Liberation Army to fight the Axis occupation. Only after two years in the army was he examined by a doctor, who declared that he was a woman, and he was discharged.

Back in his village he was appointed to the revolutionary community council where he campaigned for rights for Muslim women, in particular the ending of veils and seclusion.

The village became aware that Fetah was a 'woman'.  In 1951 Asllan Asllani decided to marry Fetah. He was still in male clothing and resisted. Asllan 'seized' Fetah and made her his bride. At the wedding she returned to the name Fatime and changed to wearing the wide harem trousers.

They had a son and two daughters. Fatime later claimed to a journalist that she was content. The mother died without granting forgiveness for the loss of her only son.

• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:162-3. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 270-1.

____________________________________________________________

Fetah was not a typical sworn virgin in that he was raised as a boy from birth.  Grémaux suggests that Fetah switching back to Fatime indicates that the Sworn Virgin tradition was already in decline by the 1950s, however Fatime’s untypicality means that her case does not support the suggestion.

Note that the gender changes are both initiated by men, the father and then Asllan.  Fetah’s only time of choice was that he chose to stay a man after being discharged from the Army.

One of the earliest reports was by Edith Durham, who at the beginning of chapter IV of her book reports of an incident in 1908:

We left early next morning for Seltze-Kilmeni, piloted by the old man, and followed a stony track to Rapsha whose people derive from Laj Gheg, son of Gheg Laz.

Here we found one of the Albanian virgins who wear male attire. While we halted to water the horses she came up—a lean, wiry, active woman of forty-seven, clad in very ragged garments, breeches and coat. She was highly amused at being photographed, and the men chaffed her about her " beauty." Had dressed as a boy she said, ever since she was quite a child because she had wanted to, and her father had let her. Of matrimony she was very derisive—all her sisters were married, but she had known better. Her brother, with whom she lived—a delicate-looking fellow, much younger than she —came up to see what was happening. She treated me with the contempt she appeared to think all petticoats deserved—turned her back on me, and exchanged cigar­ettes with the men, with whom she was hail-fellow-well-met. In a land where each man wears a moustache, her little, hairless, wizened face looked very odd above masculine garb, as did also the fact that she was unarmed.

• Edith Durham. High Albania. London: E. Arnold, 1909. Reprinted:Virago travellers. London: Virago, 1985: 80.

William Smith worked in Queensland as a farm labourer, drover, railway navvy and cane cutter in the 1920s. He obtained 851 acres of land, but lost it and his cattle after a severe drought. He returned to labouring and moved with the seasonal farm work.

In 1928 he rode into New South Wales.  He took employment at the Waterside Estates. He agreed to a pay cut in the middle of a drought on agreement of higher wages afterwards. The drought broke in March 1929 but from then on he was not paid at all. He quit in May, and in June took legal action claiming £39 12s 3d.

Thomas Waters, the employer, first avoided the claim by transferring the property to his wife, and declaring bankruptcy, and then by claiming that William Smith was a woman. Smith gave interviews to a few newspapers in which he admitted that he might not be male. He was admired as a “plucky Sydney girl” trying to survive.

The first court case was on 28 August 1929 and Matilda Waters, now the owner of the farm, made a counter claim of £45 12s 3d for the keep of Smith and his horse. The defence solicitor pursued the argument that Smith was a woman based on the newspapers articles. Smith conceded that he he might be a ‘half-and-half’ or a hermaphrodite. The agreed wages had been at a male rate.

There were several adjournments and the second hearing was heard on 13 November. A doctor testified that Smith was a woman but with the muscular development of a man and capable of doing physical work as well as a man.

Evidence was also admitted through cross-examination that Thomas Waters had a previous conviction of obtaining £350 through false pretences, was a declared bankrupt and had been committed for trial on two charges of false pretences. The magistrate criticized Smith as “not an entirely truthful witness”, but but awarded him the full amount claimed plus £1 5s 3d cost. The counter claim was denied.

*Not the jockey, Bill Smith.

• Ruth Ford. “'Prove first you're a male': A Farmhand's Claim for Wages in 1929 Australia”. Labour History 90 2006: 52. www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/90/ford.html.

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

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

After school he went to Africa to work on the family’s cattle farm, where he was also a big game hunter.

He did National service in the Life Guards, part of the Household Cavalry, and stayed for ten years rising to the rank of captain and serving in Egypt and Aden, where he was almost killed when his vehicle was blown up. He escorted the Queen, was in the guards at Whitehall, and played polo.

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

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

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

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

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

She published her autobiography in 2009.

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

Murphy was born to a privileged family in Melbourne and finished his education at Oxford University, England. Before university and during the vacations he acquired considerable experience on ships particularly on expeditions in the Arctic.

He played a female role in a Greek play while at Oxford, and on that basis was recruited by military intelligence. He already was an officer in the territorial army. His task was to live as a woman in Belgium and France. He was trained to be a woman by a family friend, Lady Broughton – he found entering and leaving hansom cabs to be the most difficult. As Edith Murphy, he closely studied the French and Belgian railways. He enjoyed the assignment which continued for five years. A French lieutenant proposed to Edith in Paris. It is also said that Edith ran into Herbert's mother in London. Mother, after recognizing Edith, smoothed things over by saying that she had always wanted a daughter.

He always maintained that the woman with a white parasol in the painting, ‘The Arbour’ by Phillip Fox, originally sketched at Bath in 1902, was himself, Fox accepting Edith as a young woman.

After a few years the assignment was becoming more difficult as he lost his youth. Returning to being a man, he worked in whaling and voyages to the polar regions. He was rejected for Ernest Shackleton’s 1908 Antarctic expedition for supposed effeminacy, but was accepted on Douglas Mawson’s 1911-4 expedition.
He joined the Australian Imperial force in 1916, but was dismissed for inferior vision.

He bought a country property where he ran sheep and turned it into a holiday centre for poor Melbourne children. A High-Anglican, he was for 35 years a member of synod, and was also a shire councillor for 10 years. He was in demand as a speaker and as a singer of shanties. For three months annually, he sailed to Antarctica with the Norwegian whaling fleet. He claimed that he continued doing this until the age of 85 by lying about his age.

Like Robert Baden-Powell, Murphy married late in in life, in 1934 at the age of 54. He and his wife had no children.

The character of the transgender Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith Twyborn in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair, 1979, is at least partly based on Herbert Murphy as Edith, and especially on his encounter with his mother.

• S. Murray-Smith, 'Murphy, Herbert Dyce (1879 - 1971)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, Melbourne University Press, 1986, pp 637-638. www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A100622b.htm.
• Heather Rossiter. Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer: The Life of Herbert Dyce Murphy. Jane Curry Publishing. 2005.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

This is an odd story. In some ways there is either too little or too much cross-dressing. If he was so at home as a woman, how could he do it for five years, and then never again. Maybe the years as a 'Lady Spy' never happened. There are no official records of the medals he was supposedly awarded.

Murray-Smith says:

"Something of a Munchhausen perhaps—some of his claims appear to be fantasies. However, much of even his most outrageous stories 'check out', and in his embellishments he was striving for the symmetry of art."

Murray-Smith also quotes the naturalist, C.F. Laseron:

"He [Murphy] holds himself up to ridicule as well as his other characters. Yet he never loses his air of diffidence; his whole method is apologetic. His stories have a curious suggestion of truth; they are convincing and at the same time too impossible to be true."

So Murphy, a good story teller, span a yarn of his years in skirts, and White, Murray-Smith and Rossiter were all too happy to just accept it. Five years was a long time to live as female without hormones and shaving daily. Of male-born non-intersex persons of Murphy's generation, very few succeded in living full-time as female. Would the androgyny of youth make Murphy feminine enough?


A review of Rossiter's biography by Crusader Hills makes a point:

As a distant relative, Rossiter has done Murphy’s life a disservice by reducing it to one without any discernible psychosexual colour. Rossiter works on the basis that because Murphy married late in life he was undoubtedly and exclusively heterosexual. Maybe he was, but she wouldn’t know that. In describing his reasons for cross-dressing in public (two times of which were documented extensively, including in a photograph) she posits that he was testing whether or not he would get away with it. Any biographer with her salt would have at least entertained the notion that Murphy’s cross-dressing was probably not confined to once or twice in public, plus the several spying missions he did for the British government on the continent. Nor does she consider the significance of his pursuance of homosocial settings, such as the sailing and whaling ships, and exploring expeditions he joined. Ultimately though, the fault of this biography is not in its blindness to alternative readings of Murphy’s life or the bland lack of curiosity that Rossiter displays, it is simply a piece of vanity writing from the perspective of unexplored privilege.

Marion Edwards was born to a Welsh-born blacksmith outside Melbourne. At 1896 she transitioned to William, giving the rational of earning more money. William acquired a horse and male clothing and headed for the bush, working on sheep stations. He learned to shoot, and to fight. Although only 5”4’ the work and exercise brought his weight up to 10st 4lb (65.3 kg).

On New Year’s Day 1900 Bill married a 30-year-old widow in a Catholic church, but they soon separated. In April 1905 he was arrested for burglary when found in a hotel at 3 am. He explained that he was trying to catch a prowler, but absconded to Queensland before his gender was outed. His wife who had put up £50 bail, was sentenced to one month’s gaol for his default.

In Queensland he worked in house painting, and as a barman. However an old associate outed him. In October 1906 Bill was arrested and returned to Melbourne as a celebrity. With the publicity, he performed as a sharpshooter at the Fitzroy cinema between film shows, and at the waxworks billed as 'The Far-famed Male Impersonator'. At his trial in November, he was found not guilty.

The police tried to make him live as a woman, but he would not. He also published his memoirs, with photographs of himself in both male and in female garb. He also claimed to have worked as a female impersonator entertaining troops in South Africa during the Boer War and to have delivered horses to India.

In 1927, he was working as pony trainer. In the 1930s, he worked in hotels, iron foundries and factories, and as a bookie. He was listed on the electoral roll as a dyer. Later in life neighbours described him as an ‘old gentleman’, although apparently most of them knew his original gender.

He finally entered the Mount Royal Geriatric Home in Melbourne, where they forced him to wear women’s clothes.

In 1984 he was the subject of a play, In Male Attire.

• Marion Bill Edwards. Life and Adventures of Marion-Bill-Edwards. Melbourne 1907.
• Mimi Colligan, 'Edwards, Marion (Bill) (1874 - 1956)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary Volume, Melbourne University Press, 2005, pp 113-114. www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/AS10143b.htm.
• “Bill Edwards: Gender Rebel (1881-1956)”. Radical Tradition. www.takver.com/history/edwards.htm.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

The accounts in the ADB and Radical Tradition are contradictory in several details, including Edwards' birth year. I have taken from both accounts.

He was Angela until he left school at 14. Passing as male, he built up his muscles doing farm work around Thedford, Ontario. He had both male and female lovers, and was controlling and abusive with both. He starved a male lover until the latter lost 45 kg.

He met Elizabeth Rudavsky in 2002. He was working on a farm, and she was travelling to farms to sell dogs. She left a common-law husband of five years to move in with Angelo. He followed her everywhere and she lost her job. He locked the fridge and beat her often. Her weight fell from 91 to 59 kg. After five months she finally killed him with a knife. It then came out that Angelo was female-bodied. A judge, Crown prosecutors and the police investigators agreed that Rudavsky had acted in self-defence and dropped the second-degree murder charge.

• Colin Freeze. “Woman kills abusive lover, finds 'he's' female”. The Globe and Mail. Apr 5, 2003.

________________________________________

With lots of good reason, we are suspicious when the killer of a trans person is let go, but on the evidence here this is probably an exception.