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

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

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

28 April 2007

What is Gender Dysphoria?

'Dysphoria' is Greek for discomfort. Some dictionaries list 'fidget' as among its meanings. I quite like the idea of being a gender fidget - it has a nice implication of every-day subversion of imposed gender. I am certainly uncomfortable with gender as it is constructed in post-industrial societies, and probably with most pre-industrial societies. However 'gender dysphoria' as used is not this innocent. 'Transvestism' and 'transsexualism' (note the *ism*) were used by medical men to describe a pathology, the former by Hirschfeld and the latter by Cauldwell and Benjamin independently. The two terms were taken on by society at large and applied to any form of cross-dressing or sex-change respectively whether pathological or not. By the early 1970s doctors were terminologically dysphoric particularly about the word 'transsexualism' because it had lost its medical connotations, and so Norman Fisk (1973) proposed 'gender dysphoria syndrome' to remedicalize the concept. It was then intended to be an umbrella phrase for all the gender disorders, but with time has become particularly associated with the desire for a sex-change.

I do not use 'gender dysphoria syndrome' or 'gender dysphoria' as it is commonly abbreviated, because its users normally assume that transsexuality is a pathology. To use 'gender dysphoria' and not to mean a pathological state is to ask to be misunderstood.

'Dysphoria' as a general concept is psycho-babble that cries out for us to take the piss. A few sentences above I referred to 'terminological dysphoria'. Equally any circumstances leading to any kind of change could be referred to as a dysphoria. People change jobs because they have occupational dysphoria, they move to live elsewhere because they have geographical dysphoria, they channel surf because of signal dysphoria, and so on. The fact that only 'gender dysphoria' is regarded as a pathology is a political fact.

01 April 2007

The Goon Show

The Goon Show, first on radio in the 1950s and then on television in the 1960s was very influential on young persons then growing up, and also on the later British comedy shows such as Monty Python.


It was also of interest in having two transsexual persons in the crew.

The musical director was Wally Stott, who in the mid 1970s would become Angela Morley.

The puppets for the Telegoons were designed by Eric Rutherford who became Erica about the same time.