Famous Trannies

by Roberta Perkins

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries gender crossing became better known and more prominent in western society. To Victorian society it was an embarrassment, but to the post "sexual revolution" generation it has become increasingly fascinating and even something to symbolically emulate. Then in the last half of the present century came the medical phenomenon commonly called the "sex-change".

Dr. James Barry

Famous Trannies In the 19th Century

Perhaps the best known 19th century trannie is Dr. James Barry, who was born a female in 1795. Much of James' early life remains a mystery, so skilful did he disguise his biological sex that we don't even know what his given female name was. The earliest record of any certainty that we have of him was his graduation from the Edinburgh Medical College in 1812, at a time when women were forbidden in the medical profession. A year later he joined the British army as a medical officer. After a few years in the home guard, James was promoted to staff-surgeon in 1819 and sent to the Cape of Good Hope as medical advisor to the Governor. A few more years later he was serving on St. Helena and Malta, and was elevated to Surgeon Major in 1827. After that his rise was meteoric in the army medical corps, and he served in the West Indies as chief medical officer. James was prickly in temperament and quick to lose his temper. People said of him that he was guarded and secretive. His slight frame, small limbs, short height and smooth face aroused the suspicion of some of his colleagues, arousing the curiosity of outsiders, one of whom remarked resembled a woman, with small limbs in good proportion. His voice was shrill and squeaky and quite unlike the voice of a man, The impression left after speaking with him was that he laboured under some sexual malformation. Whatever people thought of him, there is no doubt that he was admired for his medical skills. In 1851 he became Deputy Inspector-General and in this capacity served in the Crimean War in charge of the medical corps. It is interesting to speculate on the type of professional relationship Dr. Barry and Florence Nightingale, as his nurse in charge, might have had throughout the war. After the war James reached the top in his profession by becoming the Inspector-General of Hospitals in 1858. He spent his remaining years in London, and died at home in 1865 A post-mortem revealed that James Barry was indeed of the female sex, the first time this was publicly confirmed.

Whilst a cloud of doubt surrounded James Barry's sex for much of his life, there were many other females who lived their lives as men without the slightest suspicion in most people's minds, including Charley Wilson, alias Catherine Coombes, a painter and decorator by trade for 42 years, John Coulter, who amazingly was married to a woman for 29 years without her being aware he was a female, Charles Durkee Pankhurst, a stagecoach driver in the American west, and "Mountain" Charley, a Rocky Mountain trapper of many years. The tradition of females entering the military as men continued into the 19th Century. Nadezha Duron was a peasant girl who married and had a son before running away dressed as a boy to join the Russian Army in 1805. As Aleksandr Aleksandrov he saw action in 1807 and took a part in the campaign against Napoleon in 1812. He left the army four years later and in 1836 began working on his manuscript with writer Aleksandr Pushkin, who persuaded him to revert to a female sex role, in which state she remained until her death in 1866. Another female-soldier was Loreta Janet Velazquez, who joined the Confederate Army during the American Civil War disguised as a man purportedly to find her husband. In the process Loreta ended up in a number of battles and was wounded twice.

Jenny de Savalette de Lange lived as a woman most of her life and even had a birth certificate designating her a female. She became engaged to marry a cavalry officer, bur managed to avoid actually marrying, and she had a number of other suitors, all of whom she rejected. One of her discarded lovers had some unkind words to say of her: "[She was] tall, thin and lop-sided, and she leaned on an umbrella. Her features were hard; her look stern and her voice shrill and cracked. She took snuff frequently and had such a masculine appearance that people who passed in the street used to say how much she resembles a man." But Jenny obviously had some influence in high places because Napoleon granted her a pension in 1812 and even rooms in the palace of Versailles. Although this pension ceased with the fall of the Empire in 1822 she was paid the salary of a postmistresses, even though she never actually took up a position in the mail service. Her pension and the Versailles chambers were returned to her in 1825, but in 1853 she lost her rooms at Versailles when the palace was turned into a museum. Five years later Jenny died in a little apartment in Paris, and upon examination her body was found to be that of a male, but no-one knew her original name nor identity.

Sexology and Trannies In the Early 20th Century

Maria Bochkareva, continued fighting in WW1 despite being discovered as female

Around the turn of the century the new science of psychology introduced some new concepts on gender crossing and cross-dressing. But the first attempts at scientifically investigating sexual variations were made by a German physician, Carl Westphal, who wrote the earliest scientific publication on cross dressing in 1969 Richard von Krafft-Ebing is the foremost sexologist whose milestone book Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1887, established the concept of sexual perversion, which included everything apart from heterosexual activity for the purpose of procreation. Sigmund Freud did not investigate cross dressing as a subject of psychoanalysis, although he considered it a form of fetishism and an outcome of penis envy in females or castration anxiety in males. Iwan Bloch demonstrated the universality of cross dressing. But it was Magnus Hirschfeld who first described cross-dressing as a different phenomenon to homosexuality and fetishism. Some say his own homosexual orientation gave him an insight into the area referred to as sexual deviancy in his day than any other contemporary scientist. In his major work on the subject in 1910 he tried to view cross-dressing as a variation on a sexual theme, rather than as a perversion, and in 17 cases closely examined by him 12 were heterosexual, two bisexual, two autosexual and one homosexual. Hirschfeld called the phenomenon transvestism [literally: cross­dressing]. Another prominent sexologist of the early 20th century is Havelock Ellis, who preferred the term eonism [after the Chevalier d'Eon] to describe cross-dressing. But, more importantly was his recognition that more extreme forms of cross-dressing, that is where someone actually wants to be of the opposite sex and is not just satisfied with donning the clothes of the opposite sex, may be a separate phenomenon.

With or without scientific terminology to describe their behaviour females and males continued the long tradition of gender crossing in western society into the 20th century. Female soldiers passing as men fought alongside their male comrades in World War I and were occasionally discovered, such as Maria Bochkareva, who fought as a man in the Russian Army in the war and was allowed to continue in the trenches even after she was found to be a female. Later she would lead the Petrograd Women's Battalion of Death in the Russian Revolution in 1917 in support of the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. Of all the female-to-male trannies in the pre-"sex-change" period Billy Tipton, who became a prominent jazz musician with his own trio in the 1930s and was married with two adopted sons who called him "father", is probably the most successful. None of his close musical colleagues suspected his biological sex, and anyone who suggested he was effeminate looking was challenged by Tipton to fisticuffs.

There were some very successful male-to-female trannies in the pre-"sex-change" era too, like Adele Best, who lived as a woman for 54 years without detection, which included three husbands who were none the wiser either. Georgia Black also married, and was widowed twice, and had an adopted son who knew her only as his mother. One of Iwan Bloch's cases, Frederica, provides a clue to how these trannies might have kept their biological sex a secret from their husbands; she managed to have many lovers who never doubted she was a woman by using her anus as a vagina. In 1923 a pretty young woman was detained by Chicago police as a murder suspect after she was identified at the scene of the crime. But as she sat in her cell in her nightgown and kimono the police noticed the young woman sprouting a stubble beneath her make-up. The woman turned out to be a noted gangster who frequently dressed as a woman. In Court she appeared in make-up, satin slacks and silken top, but managed to achieve an acquittal because the witness who positively identified her said her eyes were blue, whereas, in fact, they were grey. Another example of trannie variance was the tragic case of a Parisian public servant found hanged in his room attired in lingerie, hosiery and make-up in 1926. On investigation police found that this quiet unassuming little man was none other than the notorious Madame Cartier, who frequented the night life of Montmartre and was well known for dancing and dining the evening away and, like Cinderella, disappearing into the night at midnight. Next morning the little public servant would make his way back to his office in the morning, that is, until that fateful morning of his suicide. The authorities wrote the case off as just one more deranged homosexual killing himself out of shame.

Came the "Sex-Change"

Danish Trans Woman, Lili Elbe, one of the first identifyable recipients of male to female sex reassignment surery in 1932

For many trannies in the past their greatest desire was to change their genitals to the shape of their desired sex. That desire would become reality for thousands following the so-called sex reassignment surgery of the mid 20th century, during what I have referred to as the "sex change" period. But this period began at the end of more than half a century of experimenting. Perhaps the earliest attempt at reconstructing genitals to shape them like the opposite sex took place in 1882 when a German woman Sophia Hedwig's genitalia was operated on to try and give them a semblance of a male's. Although it was not very successful, Sophia's sex was changed, officially and she became Herman Karl for the rest of his life. In 1917 another woman, Alberta Hart, herself a physician, underwent a hysterectomy and thereafter lived as a man known as Alan. The next most important case occurred in 1931 when Margrith Businger was granted the full status of female by a Swiss Canton court following a castration operation. Two years later Danish artist Einar Wagener underwent an operation in Berlin by surgeon Francis Abraham, who removed both his testes and penis, and he became Lili Elbe when given the official status of female in Denmark. Poor Lili died only six months later while waiting for vaginoplasty [a constructed vagina]. During the war a repulsive experiment was carried out by a Nazi surgeon who reshaped the genitals of a male Jew prisoner who had no intention of changing his gender. About the same time Arnold-Leon Leber was castrated in Switzerland, but an attempt at vaginoplasty was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, he was legally proclaimed a female by a Swiss court and she took the name of Arlene-Irene. By this time the issue of sex-change" was becoming much discussed in the medical journals and one writer Dr. David Cauldwell coined the term by which people came to know those who sought "sex-change" surgery when he spoke about "psychopathia trans-sexualis" in a 1949 edition of Sexology.

In the same year of Cauldwell's article a female called Laura Dillon completed the first "sex change" that involved a reconstructed phallus. She had undergone a mastectomy and a phalloplasty, but not a hysterectomy nor oophorectomy [removal of the ovaries]. Laura became Michael, entered medical college and served as a ship's doctor before disappearing into oblivion as a Buddhist monk in India, where he eventually died. In 1951 an ex-R.A.F. pilot during the war and more recently a racing car driver, Robert Cowell, was operated on but was not given a vaginoplasty. Nevertheless he changed his identity and became known as Roberta for the rest of her life. The most celebrated "sex-change" was that of Christine Jorgensen, a one-time U.S. soldier called George, who was operated on by the Danish surgeon Christian Hamburger in 1953. Jorgensen had an orchidectomy [removal of testes] and penectomy [removal of penis], but a reconstructed vagina was not completed. However, she was the first trannie to undergo extensive oestrogen therapy, and her case became the model on which all subsequent "sex-change" treatments were based. Following the immense publicity of the Jorgensen case, Dr. Hamburger received 465 written requests for surgery from women and men all over the world. For the first time society was beginning to grasp the extent of the transgender phenomenon. The focus moved from Europe's experimental surgery to the United States and "sex-change" as an acceptable practice in medicine. Endocrinologist Harry Benjamin took it up as a major cause with his well-known statement of "if the mind cannot be changed to suit the body, then let the body be changed to suit the mind." He was granted funds by the Erikson Educational Foundation to pursue research into transsexualism further and eventually established the guidelines upon which modern-day "sex changes" take place. The first operation in the U.S.A. was carried out on a female-to-male, who had a mastectomy and oophorectomy in 1960, but the first fully successful conversion took place with a negro male-to-female trannie in 1965. Since then medical institutions in many parts of the world have carried out "sex-change" operations as a normal part of their medical and health services. And, as they say, the rest is now history!

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.