TransHistory - A Colourful Past and Present

I spent 50 years in the closet, terrified to let anyone but a handful of people I shared a relationship with know that I was trans. When I finally faced myself and decided that to live the rest of my life in fear was not an option, I was free to openly explore the rich and colourful past and present of trans people.

This research has given me great pride in who I am and huge respect for the trans men and trans women who have faced extreme prejudice and risked their lives to be themselves, and it is time that their stories were celebrates and remembered.

I now conduct TransAwareness seminars for a variety of private, public and voluntary and community organisations to help trans people to better manage the process of social integration and to dispel the misinformation and misunderstandings in non trans people that so often lead to discrimination and harassment.

Increasingly everyone is going to find themselves meeting trans people and having a better understanding of our condition and our rich history will make the process of acceptance and integration much easier.

I have produced this lens as a convenient place to start researching the topic and as a support site for people who have attended my workshops to follow up their learning and develop their understanding. I am adding material almost daily as I discover more and more - so please do bookmark it and pop back from time to time.

Oh and do tell your friends about it -

If you would like to attend a Trans Awareness Workshop or arrange one for your organisation you can find more details here at the GenderShift Website

Gender crossing has a long history in the Theatre where for thousands of years it was considered far more appropriate for boys or men to play female roles than to allow women to appear on the stage - this was because theatre was grounded in religion, an exclusive preserve of men.

In Greek Theatre, not only were women not allowed to act, it was considered that because they lacked reason, women would be unable to comprehend theatrical presentations and they were not allowed to even attend a theatre.

Womens roles in Greek theatre were often brutally violent and destructive towards men - what was being portrayed of course was not women, but mens's perceptions and fears of women's sexuality, a recurring theme even today.

In sixteenth and seventeenth century England due to religious pressure, women were still not able to act and the parts of women were played by boy actors who became very famous for their ability to play women.

Shakespeare would have been very comfortable with this gender changing and in fact explored it within the plots of his plays. In Twelfth Night, Viola, a leading female character played by a boy, spent most of the plot disguised as a man facing all manner of relationship difficulties as a result.

It is also worth remembering that at this time in England Sumptuary Laws existed, which defined what type of clothes, colours and materials an individual was allowed to wear according to their social standing or class - with very little opportunity to move between classes.

Henry Wriothesley was a great friend and patron of William Shakespeare. How great the friendship is debatable, but almost half of Shakespeare's sonnets were dedicated to "WH" - strongly believed to be Henry Wriothesley.

Just a few years ago a painting (shown bottom right), in the possession of the decendents of 3rd Earl of Southampton and believed to be an unknown female member of the family, was revealed to be more likely a painting of the Earl him self, as a woman. Judge for youself from pictures here.

Is it possible that the Earl was a Transvestite or Transsexual and there may have been a relationship of some kind. There is no doubt that Shakespeare spent a great deal of time staying with Henry Wriothesley when in London for the Globe Theatre productions, and then there are the sonnets. One hundred and twenty-six are addressed to a young man known as the Fair Lord and believed to convey far more than friendship.

This is Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 20 - dedicated to WH - which leaves me in no doubt.

A woman's face with natures own hand painted
Hast though the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not aquainted
With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth
A man in hue all hues in his controlling
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert though first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee,fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
While adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

MARY FRITH, otherwise called Moll Cutpurse, a 17th century term for pickpocket was a notorious underworld figure who robbed travellers on Hounslow Heath, including Oliver Cromwell's associate, General Fairfax, for which she was sent to England's most notorious prison, Newgate Gaol.

In the attire of a man, she plied her trade as Britain's first 'highwayman', as well as a fence and petty thief. Moll became the subject of a play written within her lifetime, The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker.

"She was a very tomrig or hoyden, and delighted only in boys' play and pastime, not minding or companying with the girls. Many a bang and blow this hoyting procured her, but she was not so to be tamed, or taken off from her rude inclinations. She could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching; a sampler was as grievous to her as a winding sheet; and on her needle, bodkin and thimble she could not think quietly, wishing them changed into sword and dagger for a bout at cudgels. Her headgear and handkerchief (or what the fashion of those times was for girls to be dressed in) were alike tedious to her, she wearing them as handsomely as a dog would a doublet%u2026She would fight with boys, and courageously beat them; run, jump, leap or hop with any of her contrary sex, or recreate herself with any other play whatsoever."

Moll lived to be 75, and her last request was to be buried face down, in order to be rebellious even after death.

Lawyer, diplomat, confidential envoy to Louis XI, and one of the finest swordsman in Europe, Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Andre Timothee de Beaumont is best remembered for concurring with a 1777 court verdict that he had been masquerading and he was actually a women. After his death this was found to be untrue.

In 1966, the UK's largest Transgender support organisation the Beaumont Society was set up naming itself after him.

London gossip of the 1770s would have it that the Chevalier had assumed the disguise of a women as a member of the French Embassy and Secret Service in Russia from 1757 to 1760. This was unfounded. Later exiled during a period of French court intrigue, heavy betting in London regarding the question of his sex prompted a court case for which, in July 1777, the Court of King's Bench recorded its verdict that the Chevalier was a women.

He was permitted to return to France and receive a pension with the condition that "she resumed the garments of her sex" and never appear in any part of the kingdom except in garments befitting a female. The Chevalier, who was also a Freemason (the illustration was produced as a jest on Freemasonry), after accepting this condition, never again attempted to enter a Masonic lodge.

"She was a remarkable woman, a fine blanket and sash maker, an excellent cook, an adept in all the work of her sex, and yet strange to say, she was a man." (Roscoe)

We'wha was what anthropologists call a berdache and what the Zuni people call an lhamana. The French explorers in the "New World" applied the name "berdache" to those men in the tribes they encountered who defied their Western conception of "normal" sexuality and gender.

According to linguist Claude Courouve, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of French exploration, the term "bardache" had an explicit definition of same-sex behaviour in its European usage. But the French observed another strange Native American practice, that of cross-dressing, which they mistakenly termed hermaphrodism.

Simply put, according to the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century anthropologist Matilda Cox Stevenson, berdaches were men who do woman's work and wear woman's dress. In the way Stevenson's statement overlooks the complexity of the berdache, it reveals some of the problems in Western conceptualization of the berdache role in Native American society.

A German sexologist in the early 20th Century, and himself a transvestite, Hirschfeld was the first man to systematically describe and work with transvestites and transsexuals both terms that he coined in his books in 1910 and 1923 respectively.

Until Hirschfeld trans people had largely been considered homosexual and often treated that way. However in Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a strong political campaign to decriminalise homosexuality and it was felt that "men dressed as women" was damaging their campaign. Labeling transvestites as different from Homosexual was considered an essential political move. That same argument still often finds favour amongst some gay activists.

There had been an attempt by Havelock Ellis another sexologist to introduce term 'Eonism' after the Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, following the lead of renowned sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing who had used the names of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, well-known models of sexual behaviour, to describe 'sadism' and 'masochism'. However the term transvestism was preferred though is tending to give way to a generic term of transgenderism today.

Hirschfeld considered transvestite and transsexual persons to be a form of intersex. Working with surgeons in Berlin through his "Institute for Sexual Science" (Institut füer Sexualwissenschaft) he established and operated the world's first, modern medical, gender clinic. One of Hirschfeld's clients was Lili Elbe. The Institute was founded in 1919 and targeted and closed down by the Nazis in 1933 who burned all the contents of it's famous library. Thousands of homosexual men and transsexual women were subsequently sent to concentration camps and the few who survived were re-imprisoned by the allies after the liberation.

Hirschfeld was an openly gay man who visited the gay and transgender bars and nightclubs of Berlin. His nickname in the gay community was "Aunt Magnesia." The rise of the Nazis forced him, as an openly gay jew, to leave Germany in 1930, never to return. He died in Paris in 1935.

Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin met in 1907, when Benjamin was still a medical student and later when Benjamin arranged for him to visit America on a speaking tour. Thus, Magnus Hirschfeld really deserves the appellation of "The Father of modern Transsexualism."

Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener in 1886, began part time transition while living with her life long companion Gerda Wegener in the 'teens, and had surgery and full time transition in early 1930. Her marriage to Gerda was invalidated by the King of Denmark in October of 1930.

Outed in the press, she may have faked her death in 1931, or may have really died months after her fifth operation, an operation that she hoped would allow her to have intercourse with the man to whom she was engaged to be married... Her story is told in frank and loving terms in her book, Man Into Woman, edited by Niels Hoyer, 1933.

Both Lili and her partner, and legal wife before her surgery, Gerda Wegener, were well known painters and illustrators. But Gerda had far better commercial success and is still recognized today as one of the leading Art Deco artists of the early twentieth century.

Lili was one of Gerda's favorite models, wearing women's high fashion or nude. As a fashion designer in Paris, Gerda was influential in setting fashion trends. It is amusing to consider that the 1920's small breasted feminine ideal may have been influenced by Lili's figure.

Born William Julian Dalton, Julian Eltinge was the most famous of the Vaudeville female impersonator subsequently developing a career as a stage and screen actor. His first recorded appearance was in the Boston Cadets Revue at the age of ten in feminine garb where he was notices by other producers leading to his first appearance on Broadway in 1904.

After appearing in vaudeville he toured Europe and the United States even giving a command performance before King Edward VII. Eltinge appeared in a series of musical comedies written specifically for his talents starting in 1910 with The Fascinating Widow.

In 1917 he appeared in his first feature film, The Countess Charming which led to other films including The Isle of Love with Rudolf Valentino in 1918 making him one of the highest paid actors on the American stage but with the arrival of the Great Depression and the death of vaudeville his star began to fade.

Julian Eltinge leaves a legacy as one of the greatest female impersonators of the 20th century.

A minor, but well respected, jazz musician and travelling entertainer before settling down as an entertainment agent, Billy Tipton was born female but from the age of 19 lived as a man, marrying five women, adopting and fathering three boys. His first wife knew of his transgender status... the rest did not%u2026 And after his death still people refuse to accept it.

Tipton died in 1989 and was 'outed' by the coroner. Soon after, non-transgender people speculated as to why a "woman" would live fifty-six years as a man, not telling even his wife and kids! The notion that he was transgender did not often enter their thoughts.

Diane Wood Middlebrook has written a well researched book, Suits Me, on Mr. Tipton's life and times... unfortunately, she is unable to acknowledge Tipton as a transgender man, taking great pains to 'prove' that this was a woman who needed to present as a man in order to survive... and failing miserably.

Middlebrook argues that Tipton was trapped by his success at passing as a man, but Tipton had many opportunities to step back from his life as a man, and refused to his dying day. Many of Tipton's friends, his ex-wives, and his children, now knowing full well that he was female bodied, insist that he was a man in the psychological and spiritual sense. His friends speak for him... now that he can not speak for himself.

Originally a German national, Harry Benjamin emigrated to the U.S. just before the first world war in 1913. The medical standards and ethics body that governs treatment of transsexuals today is named after Dr. Benjamin: The "Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association".

Harry Benjamin did much to develop medical treatment of transsexuality and related TG issues in the United States & Canada, bringing the German knowledge to North America in the early to mid 20th Century.

Benjamin was on good terms with Magnus Hirschfeld the famous German sexologist who coined the terms "Transvestite" and "Transsexual," and Alfred Kinsey, the famous American sexologist, and agreed with Hirschfeld that transsexuals were a form of neurological intersex.

In 1966, Benjamin published the seminal book, The Transsexual Phenomena. It is unfortunate that he followed the lamentable practice of the first half of the century of using gender pronouns consistent with sex assignment at birth even after transition.

Benjamin was a gerontologist, considered an expert on life extension, as well as an endocrinologist and sexologist. Considering that he lived to be 100 years old, the claim may be valid.

Dr. Benjamin was a personal friend of Christine Jorgensen.

Christine Jorgensen is undoubtedly the most famous transsexual figure in the 20th Century. Her very public life after her 1952 transition and surgery was a model for other transsexuals for decades.

She was a tireless lecturer on the subject of transsexuality, pleading for understanding from a public that all too often wanted to see transsexuals as freaks or perverts. Although she considered herself primarily a photographer, she toured as a stage actress and singer. Ms. Jorgensen's poise, charm, and wit won the hearts of millions.

Christine Jorgensen once appeared on the Dick Cavett talk show. He insulted her by asking about the status of her romantic life with her "wife" and she walked off the show! Since she was the only guest scheduled, Cavett spent the rest of that show talking about how he had not meant to offend her.

Christine Jorgensen died in 1989, tragically of cancer, at the age of only 62.

Following the sensationalism of transsexualism in 1952 with the media coverage of Christine Jorgensen's 'sex change,' Virginia (Charles) Prince emerged as a champion of transvestism. In 1960 she formed a transvestite support group based on the idea of a sorority, Phi Pi Epsilon (or FPE for Full Personal Expression) which grew to become a national organisation in the USA for heterosexual transvestites now called Tri-ess

Following her second divorce in 1964, Prince began living full-time as a woman and in searching for a term to describe her decision to become a woman without changing her genitals, introduced the term transgender, which has subsequenly become a generic term often used to describe all trans people.

It was as a direct result of Virginia Princes work that the Beaumont Society in Britain was formed to provide support for heterosexual cross dressers, taking it's name from the Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont and setting membership rules to exclude homosexual or bi-sexual cross-dressers and transsexuals although it now supports all trans people.

Born Daniel Patrick Carroll in County Cork, Republic of Ireland, Danny la Rue served in the Royal Navy as a young man following his father's footsteps, but appearing in concert party entertainment eventually led to an acting and performing career as Britains most famous female impersonator.

Danny La Rue made Drag family entertainment in the sixties and his famous nightclub in Hanover Square attracted celebrity patrons such as Judy Garland, Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLean, Dorothy Squires, Shirley Bassey, Noel Coward, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Dame Elizabeth Taylor.

In the 1960s he was among England's highest-paid entertainers. In 1982 he played 'Dolly Levi' in the famous musical Hello Dolly! But he is probably most famous as Britains most glamourous Pantomime Dame and is still a regular performer in traditional Christmas pantomime shows.

For most of his career, Danny implied that beneath his costume he was a "normal" heterosexual man. Unlike many drag performers, he would always perform parts of his show in men's clothes, and was often seen out of costume on television. More recently, he has been more candid about his private life and the fact that he is gay.

Born in Liverpool, April Ashley grew up to become not only one of the most beautiful Transsexual women in the world, but one of the most beautiful women.

April moved to Paris in the 1950s and joined the cast of the cabaret show at the Carousel theater. She had an early sex reassignment procedure in 1960 in Casablanca, Morocco and moved back to England where she became a successful supermodel.

However in 1961 she was outed by the Sunday People causing a great scandal and ending her modeling career instantly. Her modeling contracts were all cancelled the following day and she never received another modeling contract.

She married Lord Arthur Corbett in 1963, a marriage that lasted just six days, but in 1970 the Corbett family successfully sought to have the marriage annulled on the grounds that Ashley had been born male. Lord Justice Ormrod in the High Court went beyond this and constructed a medical test and definition by which the sex in such cases was to be determined, denying trans people their basic human right for over 30 years until the passing of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004.

After many years in San Diego April Ashley currently lives in the South of France with her cat Lily. In 2006, she released her updated autobiography First Lady and made TV appearances on Channel Five News, This Morning and BBC News. In one interview, she said, "This is the real story and contains a lot of things I just couldn't say in 1982".

Silvia Rivera literally led the charge at the Stonewall Inn, New York City, on the night of 27th of June, 1969, the night that a riot at the bar, touched off the open radicalization of the Gay Liberation Movement fighting back against police harassment directed at the most visible members of the community.

Rivera spent most of her life at the forefront of both transgender and gay activism, tirelessly advocating and demonstrating for LGBT rights, inclusive social policies and struggling against transphobia.

In 1970 Rivera formed a group called S.T.A.R. - Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries - to fight for the civil rights of transgender people, and provide them with social services support. The S.T.A.R. House lasted for two years until her crack habit caused her to lose the house. It was the first institution of its kind in New York City, and inspired the creation of future shelters for homeless street queens.

In 2000, she reformed S.T.A.R. pressuring the Human Rights Campaign to be more inclusive of transgender people. Even when hospitalized with liver cancer, Rivera never stopped working for the civil rights of transgender people and several hours before she passed away on February 19, 2002 she was meeting with LGBT community leaders.

Stephen Whittle is probably the most famous of Britain's Trans Men and certainly the most influencial. Professor of Equalities Law in the School of Law at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-ordinator of the United Kingdom's FTM Network, he is best known as founder and vice-president of TransActivist organisation Press for Change and his work and a activist on behalf of the trans community since the age of twenty, in 1975.

Stephen and his wife Sarah Rutherford have four children by artificial insemination but were unable to marry legally in the UK due to the infamous Corbet V Corbet Judgement in 1970. This led to significant legal efforts by him to become the children's legal father and considerable legal and political work leading to the successful passage of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004.

Following the passing of the Act in October 2004, Stephen and Sarah legally married on June 18, 2005 the first legal marriage in the UK of a transsexual person and their opposite gender partner.

In 2002 Stephen was awarded the Human Rights Award by the Civil Rights group Liberty and in the Queen's New Year's honours list in 2005 was made an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) for his services to gender issues.