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!

25 August 2009

Ewa Kłobukowska (1946 - ) athlete.

Ewa was raised in Warsaw.
She became a champion sprinter and won a gold and a bronze medal for Poland in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. In 1965 she set a world record for 100 metres with a time of 11.1 seconds. In 1966 she won two gold medals at the European Athletics Championships in Budapest.

In 1967 she failed the new Olympics gender test when she was discovered to have an XXY phenotype. Her Olympic medals were taken back. She was subsequently banned from professional sports.

She later married and gave birth to a son.

She was rehabilitated in 1999.

24 August 2009

Stella Walsh (Olson) (1911 –1980) athlete.

Stanisława Walasiewiczówna was born near Rypin, Poland. Her family emigrated to the United Sates when she was three months old. They lived in Cleveland.

In 1927 she won a place on the US Olympic team, but was disqualified in that she was not a citizen, and could not become one until age 21. So she ran in Polish diaspora sporting events, and won five gold medals at the Pan Slavic games in Poznań. She then joined the Polish national team. She also continued to run in US amateur events under the name of Stella Walsh.

In 1930 she was voted the most popular Polish athlete. She ran for Poland in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics winning five gold, three silver and one bronze medal.
At the time it was commented that she had rather extraordinary musculature and excessive body hair, and that she ran like a man. At the 1936 games, Walasiewiczówna was narrowly beaten by Helen Stephens of the US. This aroused suspicion and Stephens was obliged to submit to a genital inspection.

After 1936, Stella competed only in amateur events. In 1947 she became a US citizen. She won her last US title at age 40.

In 1956 she married boxer Neil Olson; they separated after eight weeks, but never divorced, and she continued to use his surname.

In 1975 she was inducted into the US Track and Field Hall of Fame. She retired to a suburb in Cleveland and dedicated herself to working with children in athletics.

In 1981, as a bystander, she was fatally shot during a robbery at a Cleveland department store. It came out during the autopsy that she had both male and female chromosomes, mosaicism, and ambiguous genitals. The US Olympic Committee announced that there would be no attempt to posthumously retract Walsh's Olympic medals.

Walsh was sometimes beaten by other women, and her finishing times were in line with the women's statistics of the thirties - not the men's.

23 August 2009

Santhi Soundarajan (1981 - ) athlete.

Santhi was born and raised in Tamil Nadu, the daughter of parents who worked in a brick kiln.

She competed in the middle distance track events. She holds the national record for the women’s 3000 metres steeplechase clocking 10:44.65 seconds, and in 2005 at Bangalore she won the 880 metres, 1,500 m and 3,000 m events. At the Asian Championships in 2005 at Incheon, South Korea she won the 800 m silver medal.

She won the same silver medal at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar. However she then failed a subsequent sex test and was stripped of the medal, despite the fact that persons with similar intersex conditions are now accepted by the Olympics.

She later attempted suicide. However the Tamil Nadu government stood by her and awarded her 1.5 million rupees for her Asiad performance. She now is working as a coach in her home district of Pudukottai.

22 August 2009

Louis Gooren (1943 - ) endocrinologist.

Louis Gooren was born in Wanssum, in the Netherlands. He was educated at the medical school of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, 1962-70, and then trained in internal medicine and endocrinology at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) of Amsterdam, 1972-6.

In 1975 he founded the gender clinic at the Free University Hospital. In 1976 he studied with John Money at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was registered as a specialist in in internal medicine and endocrinology in 1977, and completed his PhD on testicular hormones in 1981.

In 1988 he became the Professor of Endocrinology at the special chair of Transsexology at the Free University.

He is also interested in male aging, and co-edited two books on the subject.

He is highly critical of Michael Bailey’s book. He was featured in the 2005 television film, Middle Sexes.

He has treated over 2,200 transsexuals. He was one of the first sex-change doctors to accept patients as young as five years old.

He retired in 2008, but still works at the Free University, and also works as a consultant in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Patients include: Veronique RenardRachel Pollack

María José Martínez Patiño (1961 - ) athlete.

Patiño was Spain’s best female hurdler. She competed at the 1983 World Track and Field Championships in Helsinki, where she passed the Barr Body test based on a buccal smear and was given a Certificate of Femininity.

In 1985, at the Kobe World University Games, she had forgotten her Certificate and was retested. This time she failed the Barr Body test. She was subjected to a complete karotype analysis which took two months to complete, and she was prevented from competing. The Spanish officials asked her to fake an injury, and she did so.

The karotype analysis showed that she was 46,XY, that she is a woman with Androgen-Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). For the January 1986 Spanish National Games, she was again told to feign an injury, but she insisted on competing, and she came first in the 60m hurdles. Her test result was revealed to the press, and she lost her medals, the running times were erased, she lost her scholarship, her fiancé and was ejected from the national team.

She was supported by Albert de la Chappelle, the Finnish geneticist, and Alison Carlson, the US coach and journalist. A Spanish professor presented the medical evidence to the Olympic Medical Commission at Seoul in 1988. She was reinstated on the grounds that her body could not use the extra testosterone, and thus she had no unfair advantage. She was given a new Certificate of Femininity that exempted her from further sex testing. However her momentum as an athlete was lost. She failed to qualify for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics by hundredths of a second.

She then retired from sports and did a PhD on women in sports. She teaches at the University of Vigo.

*Not the Spanish television personality.
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It is a shame that all this nonsense is happening again with Caster Semenya.

15 August 2009

Patsy Valdalia (1921 - 1982) performer.

Irving Ale was born in Vacherie, midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. His father died and his mother took him to New Orleans.

After seeing female impersonators, of whom one of the most prominant was Caldonia, he decided to become one and took his name from the sweet Vidalia onion, that was also slang for a prostitute.

After stints at various clubs in the mid-1940s, he joined the Dew Drop Inn, which was developing as New Orleans’ premier black club, and stayed for over 25 years as emcee, resident singer, waiter and bartender.

He often performed with Bobby Marchan. He also hosted the New Orleans Gay Ball every year at Halloween.

When the club went into decline in the mid-1960s, he took care of his mother whose health was failing, and then after that his own health.

He was an inspiration on the young Little Richard Penniman, who saw Patsy many times.

13 August 2009

Francis Francine (? - ) film actor.

Frank di Giovanni, elevator operator, was the first of the Andy Warhol transvestite superstars.

Francine had been intended as the star of Flaming Creatures, 1962, but disappeared partway through filming, leaving Mario Montez the throne.

He was given star treatment in the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey film Lonesome Cowboys, 1968, as a the transvestite sheriff. The camera lingers as he puts on drag and makeup. This in a cowboy village partly owned by John Wayne.

He is the subject of Coming Attractions, a poignant documentary about growing old without much to look forward to.
  • Beverly Conrad (dir). Coming Attractions. With Francis Francine. US 78 mins 1970.
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One wonders if there is any connection with Francis Francine Hodgkiss? Had Frank di Giovanni perhaps caught her show and remembered her name? Maybe.

11 August 2009

Francis-Francine Hodgkiss (192? - ?) carnie.

Unlike most half-and-halfs in carnival, Francis-Francine was female. However she had a large clitoris that passed as a penis, and she had a male gait and never grew breasts. She was ostracized by the other kids.

At 12 her mother took her to a doctor. The doctor showed her to another, and then she was being shown at medical exhibitions. On one of these trips the mother spoke to a man who worked in sideshows. As she enjoyed travelling, the mother arranged for her daughter to join a sideshow.
In the 1940s Francis-Francine was earning $500 a week and essentially supported the entire cast. She added silicone to her left breast to heighten the half-man/half women effect, and did a simple striptease which quite confused the punters. Her relatives joined the show to get a cut. She generously obliged. She was also known for her gifts to young children, and as her appearance frightened some children, she had some one else do the giving.
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If she had been born a generation later, she would likely have been subjected to ‘corrective’ surgery and hormones. It is a shame that the only niche open at that time was carnival.

09 August 2009

Numbers and HBS

Previously I had commented that it was particularly rude of HBS persons to pretend that non-HBS transsexuals do not exist when non-HBS are over 99% of transsexuals. I received a couple of replies that my figures were way off, but now I see that Charlotte Goiar agrees with me. She has revamped her web site and now says that HBS is “an extremely rare condition [1:100,000]”. (She previously used the now discredited 1:30,000.)

Let us spell this out.

I am assuming that transsexuals are 1:500, a cautious ratio from the Conway-Olyslager study.

A transsexual is someone who has sexual affirmation surgery and does not regret it afterwards.

1:100,000 is 10 in a million.

1:500 is 2000 in a million.

Thus there are 200 transsexuals for every HBS if Goiar is right (although she gives no rational for her number).

HBS are only a fraction of 1% of transsexuals.

Patricia Morgan (1939 - 1986) sex worker, business woman.

Henry Peter Glavocich was born in Jersey City, and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey. His mother left his father soon after his birth because he refused to feed them. At fifteen months Henry was put in an orphanage. When his mother remarried, she took him out of the orphanage, but he did not get on with his stepfather, and stayed with aunts and uncles.

At age eleven, after a mutual undressing with a girl downstairs, the juvenile authorities put him in a boys home. Each time he ran away they put him in the home’s jail, where he was raped.

After three years he was released to live with an aunt, where he was raped by her husband. Later, living with another aunt, he tried on his female cousin’s clothes.

At fourteen he started shining shoes, first in Hoboken, and then on 42nd St in Manhattan. He became friends with Shelley, a male prostitute. He made good tips from gay men but refused their sexual offers. At fifteen he ran away and as Pat became a male prostitute.

Six months later he started dressing as female. With some friends he went shoplifting, and then with Shelley robbed a prospective trick. Pat was sentenced to three years at Elmira Reformatory, where he met the man he loved, William Hurst. William got out first, but was back inside by the time that Pat got out.

Pat returned to male sex work. He met a transsexual for the first time, and then Shelley and another of his friends went to California and returned as women.

Pat started taking female hormones, and began living full-time as female. She learned how to have sex with a man without his realizing that she had male organs. She was saving seriously for the $5,000 plus expenses for the operation. She was arrested as a female prostitute, got through the strip search without being read, and declared herself as a ‘boy’ only in court. She was released in that the prostitution law applied only to women.

She made arrangements through Harry Benjamin, and flew to Los Angeles in 1961 for surgery with Dr Elmer Belt. While waiting for a hospital bed, she was in a car crash with a drunken john. She sued the john, a movie producer, to cover her medical bills, and they settled out of court.

After four months in Los Angeles, Pat had a penectomy and her testicles implanted in her abdomen. Two months after that she had a vaginoplasty. Afterwards she was in pain, very weak and her money had run out.

She moved in with Shelley, but was gang raped by two of Shelley’s tricks. Later they were arrested and Pat was charged with living in a house of prostitution. She served 30 days in the prison hospital. She developed urinary problems and had to have a third operation with Dr Belt.

She hustled to raise the airfare to go home. Back in New York she took up prostitution again. She had breast implants to 42DD but then reduced to 38D. She also had her nose straightened. She was booked for prostitution when she accepted a ride in the rain. Her lawyer tried to get her off on the technicality that she was still a man, not having changed her name or birth certificate. The judge ruled that she was a female anyway, and gave her a suspended sentence.

She did change her name shortly afterwards to Patricia Anne Glavocich. Patricia Morgan was her professional name. She started a business of limousines with female chauffeurs, but it lasted only a year. She also did modeling.

Returning to prostitution she tricked with many celebrities, whom she diplomatically does not name. In 1971 William Hurst escaped from prison just before he was due to released. Pat thought that he was released, but he had changed so much that she did not love him any more. He was re-arrested for bank robbery and murder.

Pat developed a friendship with an older man who put up money for her to buy a candy store, and then the building that it was in, and the one next door. She became a landlady.

++In 1973 she published her autobiography as told to Paul Hoffman.

++Apparently she died in 1986, as there is a grave in the name of Patricia Glavocich in New Arlington, New Jersey.   She was then 46.

*Not the keynote speaker, nor the sociologist, nor the artist.
  • Patricia Ann Morgan.  "How I Changed My Sex".  Female Mimics, 1,3, 1963. Online.
  • Patricia Morgan as told to Paul Hoffman. The Man-maid Doll. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, Inc 123 pp 1973.
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Arrangements were made in advance, but she still had to wait four months after arrival in Los Angeles before the operation. This would exhaust most people’s savings, and anyone in a more conventional line of work would lose their job!

According to this site, the US inflation factor from 1961 to 2007 is 7.1210. Therefore Belt’s operations cost over $35,600 in modern money.

On the second prostitution trial, the judge ruled that Pat was a woman. Another legal precedent that was never used elsewhere. See also Francis Carrick.

In my article on Elmer Belt, I mentioned that it was his standard procedure to push the testicles into the abdomen. Diane Kearney replied to this: “Pat Morgan was a friend of mine and she did have the final surgery but you make it seem she was simply a half woman for her entire life with testicles in her abdomen. Not true!”. If Diane is in Pat’s book under a pseudonym, she is well disguised. If she ever ever read Pat’s book, she must have forgotten it. On page 53 Pat summarizes what Dr Belt does with the testicles. I couldn’t find the reference when I first replied to Diane.

Now, which movie producers are known to have had a car crash in Los Angeles in 1961?

07 August 2009

An Egyptian housewife.

In the Egypt Today article on Sally Mursi, Drs Abdel Monem El-Gergawy, the head of urology, and Magdi El-Aqad, the Deputy Dean of Medicine at Assiut University Hospital, discussing other cases, tells how some boys are raised as girls. In most of these cases, they and their colleagues offer the patient surgery and turn them into men.
Yet the biggest complication El-Gergawy has to contend with in Upper Egypt isn't genetic, but cultural: female circumcision. The doctor notes that many of the genetically male children his team has treated have had their penises amputated at a young age because they were mistakenly identified as females. The penis, seen as an oversized clitoris, was simply reduced or excised completely.
Circumcision is an informal law in Upper Egyptian families. In most villages, they circumcise the girl 40 days after her birth. So in intersexed cases, they simply cut off the penis, putting us and the patient in a more difficult situation, he says. We then have to start from scratch, constructing a new penis. Female circumcision is a crime that should be banned by all means. As you can see, it doesn't only damage a girls life, it can also destroy the future of a male.
…. 
But not all patients jump at the chance of becoming men, El-Aqad notes, recalling Fatma, a masculine but attractive married woman referred by her gynecologist, to whom she went complaining of amenorrhea and problems getting pregnant.
The gynecologist quickly determined that Fatma had no vagina. Worse, she had been having intercourse with her husband through her abnormally large urethra, which was stretched and torn by the act.
It was intolerably painful and inhumane, El-Aqad says, but strangely enough, they satisfied each other sexually. Our [genetic and physical] tests indicated Fatma was born as a boy, but her penis was amputated during circumcision. Ignorance on her part and that of her husband to say nothing of her physician and parents saw the problem go from bad to worse. In her case, we kept her a female.
At the end of the day, its the patient who makes the final decision. She loved her husband and was [sexually] excited by being with a man, so we removed the remains of the testicles and constructed a vagina. Now, she's having intercourse in a much more pleasurable environment, which is better for her. We gave her female hormones, so her breasts grew bigger and her body hair thinned. Her husband married another woman so he could have a child, but he didn't divorce her, El-Aqad says.
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This is one case where John Money’s assumptions pan out.

As intersex activists have pointed out many times, surgical mutilation of intersexed babies and traditional (female) circumcision are related issues. Here we see circumcision mutilating male babies who may not even be intersex.

04 August 2009

Susan Huxford-Westall (1921 – 2009) school teacher.

Edward Westall was born in Portsmouth. When he was 10, the year that Susan later remembered as when Ted started cross-dressing, the family moved to London.

In 1938 he won a two-week trip to Canada from the W.H. Rhodes Educational Trust. He arrived back in England just four hours before the UK declared war in September 1939. On the ship he met Edith from Hamilton, Ontario.

As soon as he was 18, Ted joined the Royal Corps of Signals. He and Edith became engaged in 1941, and he spent the rest of the war in India as a staff officer.

Ted and Edith married in June 1945. While the pregnant Edith was visiting Hamilton, Ted enquired about emigration to Ontario, was accepted, and completed his teacher training at the Hamilton Normal School. He went on to teach chemistry, geography, mathematics and music. He was also a lay-reader in the Anglican Church.

Dealing with a growing desire to be female, he separated from his wife in 1974, and they were divorced three years later, the year that he retired from teaching.

As Susan Huxford (Huxford was her mother’s maiden name) Westall moved to Toronto, and was accepted into the program at the Gender Identity Clinic of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and had surgery in 1980.

She moved back to Hamilton in 1982, the same year as she took over from Rupert Raj as Director of FACT. She renamed it from 'Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Transsexuals' to 'Federation of American and Canadian Transsexuals', although she claimed to dislike the term ‘transsexual’, and preferred to be regarded as a ‘gender dysphoric’. Her wife and one of her daughters broke off contact with her.
Susan Huxford, centre

Susan ran FACT in an authoritarian fashion, got on well with Betty Steiner, the head of the Clarke Institute GIC, and acted more as an agent of the Clarke Institute Gender Clinic, than on the behalf of members. She advocated an old-fashioned concept of femininity. She withheld information in the meetings and in the newsletter, and also ran a separate counselling service, Gender Serve, for which she charged, although she was not qualified as a counsellor.

After FACT imploded and re-organized without her in 1986, she tried to restart another group with an exclusion of gays, and where members were vetted.

Later she directed her energies into the Anglican Church in Hamilton and changed her name to Susan Huxford-Westall. Edith died in 2005, and Susan moved back into the family home.

Susan died at age 87.
  • John Fitzgerald. “Transsexuals tread a path fraught with doubt, pain”. The Globe and Mail. Oct 27, 1983.
  • Ian Brown. “Altered States”. The Globe and Mail. Nov 15, 1986.
  • Fran Darlington. “Getting to know you: Susan Huxford-Westall”. Niagara Anglican Online. May 2008. http://www.niagara.anglican.ca/newspaper/article.cfm?article=Getting%20to%20know%20you%3A%20Susan%20Huxford-Westall.
  • Paul Wilson. “A most remarkable Anglican: Susan Westall kept the faith as she challenged the church”. The Hamilton Spectator. May 04, 2009. www.thespec.com/article/559674.
  • Claude Forand.  "Changer de sexe: difficile mais satisfaisant".  In Agence Science-Presse.  Le Sexe de la science.  Éditions Multimondes Inc, 2003: 99-100.  

02 August 2009

Chris Shaw (1936 - 2010) female impersonator.

Roger Wyatt was raised in London with eleven sisters and two brothers. One of his jobs after school was as an elephant groom with the Bertram Mills Circus.

He did his National Service in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Afterwards he changed his name to Chris Shaw, and started working pubs and workingman’s clubs doing a drag and singing act with bits of comedy and opera. He also took dance and singing lessons. He had a high counter-tenor voice.


He teamed with Peter King, a piano accompanist, and they had a successful double act. In 1959 they started King Shaw Productions with an office in Bond Street. They produced all-male variety shows, drag acts and fancy dress balls. In the early 1960s Chris performed at the Hoxton Music Hall with Dorothy Ward (1890 – 1987). In 1965 he performed in the West End in The It Girl for six months.

In 1966 Chris and Peter published a pictorial book on female impersonation.

King Shaw productions started the drag shows at the Vauxhall Tavern in south London; they put on Holiday Showboat at The Playhouse Theatre in Jersey for three years; they organized drag balls at various London town halls.

In 1967 Chris did a tour of South Africa and Rhodesia called Boys Will Be Girls. He fell in love with a Rhodesian, sold his half of the agency and his house in London. He opened a nightclub in Salisbury (now Harare) and brought out top cabaret acts from the UK. However as the struggle for Zimbabwean independence developed, Chris moved to Cape Town in South Africa, and in 1973 he moved to Sydney, Australia.

He was soon top of the bill in Sydney nightclubs, and performed Cinderfella at the Bull and Bush for over a year. He worked for the next 30 years on Sitmar and P&O cruise ships. He did a pantomime in the UK most years. In the late 1990s he played Al Jolson in an Australian minstrel tour, and also in mufti did a concert tour playing music hall songs. He was still performing in his 70s, but died age 74.