The authors of April Ashley’s autobiographies

There are now three book-length (auto)biographies of April Ashley – Odyssey, The First Lady and Inside Out - and two major newspaper versions written by interviewing April (The News of the World. 6 May – 10 June 1962, and Sunday Mirror, 8 & 15 February 1970). This article compares how they were written, and tells of the very different (but all-male) authors – some gay, some straight. 

There are several other newspaper accounts, some based on an interview with April – the 12 May 1982 account in the Daily Mirror with Marjorie Proops is of note – but they did not add anything of significance, and are not discussed below.

Noyes Thomas ( 1916 - 2001)

Noyes Thomas was named after Alfred Noyes the Welsh poet, his uncle.

He became a leading foreign correspondent in the 1930s. In World War II he joined the Ghurkas, served in east Asia, and rose to Lieutenant Colonel. Afterwards, he returned to the News of the World.

In the 1960s, the News of the World, which was a Sunday paper then selling for 6d, was the biggest-selling newspaper in the world normally selling over 8 million copies of each edition. It was known for its emphasis on sex and scandal. Its major competitor was The People, also a Sunday paper, which had outed April Ashley 19 November 1961. 

In May 1962:

“The News of the World wanted to buy my story. They weren't the first but they were the most organised. I flew to London and took on as my manager a friend of Ronnie Cogan's. This was my first disastrous contract - but not my last. The paper offered £3,000. I demanded £15,000. They retired, returned, and suggested £10,000 which I accepted. My manager took £3,000 of it, an exaggerated percentage which didn't exactly endear him to me.

Noyes Thomas did the story. It was the classic, six-part sensationalisation of a short ragged life. My aristocratic associations gave it piquancy. England was unbelievably ho-ho in those days and I was pilloried for having the nerve to make friendships among the upper classes. The series, via sex and drugs and violence, but no names, ended with a reference to my liaison with Arthur.” (Odyssey p136-7)

In 1963, during the Christine Keeler/John Profumo scandal, the News of the World paid Keeler £24,000, and Peter Earle and Noyes Thomas spirited her away so that journalists from other papers could not interview her.

“And then the Profumo scandal had broken. I'd been spotted in Madrid with Noyes Thomas and Kim Proctor, the third Profumo girl. The press laid siege to the Villa Antoinette in pursuit of any details of these three stories. I was even thought to have harboured Christine Keeler when she vanished somewhere along the Costa del Sol. Day and night, reporters would pop up from behind bushes when I least expected it and start ranting at me. (Odyssey p144)

However Noyes Thomas had, despite his experiences with April and Christine, a rather old-fashioned attitude to sex:

“In July 1964 the News of the World’s Noyes Thomas warned readers about the ‘creeping menace of homosexuality in Britain today’. There was, he added, ‘a vast “queer” brotherhood with tentacles reaching around the globe’.” (Joyce p167) In August he published a check list in how to spot a homosexual. (Joyce p233-4).

• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. “My Strange Life”. The News of the World. 6 May 1962.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "Goodbye M'sieu, hello Mamsells, the doctor said". News of the World, 13 May 1962.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "Roman Scandal – hotel throws us out". News of the World, 27 May 1962.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "The Operation". News of the World, 3 June 1962.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "There, in a crowded pub, Arthur told me he loved me". News of the World, 10 June 1962.
• Noyes Thomas, ‘Into the Twilight World’, News of the World, 26 July 
• Noyes Thomas, ‘The Men Behind the Mask’, News of the World, 2 August 
• Robert Warren. “Noyes Thomas” Press Gazette, June 26, 2001. Online. Obituary.
• John-Pierre Joyce. Odd Men Out: Male Homosexuality in Britain from Wolfenden to Gay Liberation, 1954-1970. The Book Guild Ltd, 2019:167.

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In 1962/3 when April was paid £10,000, and Christine Keeler £24,000, many were working for £15 a week or less (£800 per annum).

Robin Maugham (1916 – 1981)

Robin Maugham, the gay nephew of the gay writer Somerset Maugham, was educated at Eton and Cambridge and trained as a barrister. During World War II, he declined a commission in the Hussars and instead joined up as an ordinary trooper in the 4th County of London Yeomanry tank regiment bound for North Africa. Later, his commanding officer recorded in dispatches that Maugham had saved the lives of perhaps 40 men by pulling them from destroyed tanks.

He started spending time at Ibiza, which was just becoming fashionable in the mid-1960s. There he met April Ashley. In 1967 he got it into his head that he should write her biography.

The Odyssey version:

“Robin wanted to write my life story. We met at the Ivy Restaurant where I often went with 'Daddy Pat' Dolin, and it was arranged that I go out to Ibiza to discuss it. When I arrived his first question on the subject was unbelievably tactless.

'Mind your own bloody business!' I replied.

He flew into a tantrum and I was banished to the back of the house. Robin often threw tantrums, especially after drinking too much. 'I'm the Viscount Maugham! How dare you speak to me like that!' “ (Odyssey p189)

The First Lady version:

“Robin wanted to write my life story and we agreed to talk about at his house. His first question on the subject was unbelievable tactless. ‘How often do you masturbate?’

‘Mind your own bloody business!’

Robin went into a tantrum of epic proportions. I was banished from the main house to a cottage at the back. It was a short-lived exile. He often threw tantrums, especially after drinking too much.” (First Lady p244)

The Peter Burton version:

“I knew that another friend of mine - the late Robin Maugham - had already relinquished the task after a row with April over a question, asked by Maugham's research assistant Derek Peel ("When you were a boy, April" he had queried, "did you masturbate?"), which Maugham thought vital and April thought an impertinence.” (Burton)

Maugham wrote a mini biography of April for the People newspaper in early 1970 after the divorce trial.

Maugham later came to know Peter Burton:

“Then, in 1968, his friend Colin Spencer introduced him to the novelist Robin Maugham, whose literary talents had been steadily eroded by his fondness for "just another little drink". For more than a decade, Burton learned to cope with Maugham's alcohol-fuelled whims and rages. He helped him complete a number of books and articles, and at least one, Conversations With Willie (WH Allen 1978), was entirely Burton's work.” (Collis, 2011)

• Robin Maugham. “Why I think the judge was wrong over April”. The People, 8 February 1970. Online.
• Peter Burton. “The star who never was”. Gay News, ??. Online
• Rose Collis. “Peter Burton: Writer and publisher who championed gay literature for over 35 years”. The Independent, 19 November 2011. Online.

EN.Wikipedia(Robin Maugham)

Ronald Maxwell

“As April left the court room at the conclusion of Corbett v Corbett, “There was a scuffling press conference but April said little, committed as she was to an exclusive telling of her courtroom experience, in return for five thousand pounds. It was quickly done. … On 8 February 1970, the Sunday Mirror printed conversations with the accomplished interviewer Ronald Maxwell.” (Inside Out p167-8)

• Ronald Maxwell & April Ashley. “I am a woman: April Ashley’s Own Story: I am not a monster”. Sunday Mirror, 8 February 1970. Online.
• Ronald Maxwell & April Ashley. “April Ashley’s Own Story: The next man I marry”. Sunday Mirror, 15 February 1970. Online.

Peter Burton ( 1945 - 2011)

Early in 1973, April made her first attempt at writing her memoirs. The gay journalist Peter Burton was contacted by her solicitor, Peter Madok and asked if he were interested in being her co-author. 

“I expressed interest in the project and after initial discussions with both April and Peter, a contract was drawn up. I started a series of interviews with April at her Chelsea flat — but somewhere along the line, I realised, after all, that I was not the right person to co-write the book. April saw her autobiography as bright and glamorous — our working title, I seem to remember, was April: The Star Who Never Was; I saw the book as a tragedy enlightened by moments of high comedy — in cinematic terms, a movie by Bergman rather than Lubitsch. I wrote to Peter and April expressing my doubts, returned a suitcase full of research material and considered the project abandoned.”

• Peter Burton. “The star who never was”. Gay News, ??. Online

Duncan Fallowell (1948 - )

April first met Duncan Fallowell on her first visit to Oxford in the late 1960s. He later said: “I must have been the first Oxford undergraduate to be caught with a transsexual in my rooms. We met through friends and I invited her to dinner at Magdalen.” (Kirby, 2006)

On leaving university in 1970, Fallowell wrote to the Spectator on a hunch asking to write a rock column for them. They accepted on the condition that it be called ‘pop’. He was later their film and then fiction critic. He wrote about and then became involved with the German avant-garde group Can. He also became known from his writings as bisexual.

April re-met Duncan several times over the next decade. (Odyssey 204-5, 219-20, 231, 253, 261)

In 1976, after a heart attack after running a restaurant, after the divorce case, April retired to the bookshop town of Hay-on-Rye on the Welsh border. 

“I was in bed for five months. I had just arrived in Hay and I hardly knew anyone, I did not know what to do with my time so I began to write down my life. I sent off the manuscript and though people liked the content, they said I was no writer, which I knew. But Jonathan Cape did show an interest and now the book is being reworked with a professional writer called Duncan Fallowell.” (Williamson)

Fallowell moved in with her in Hay-on-Wye, which caused comments from the neighbours. He stayed for two years, and the book, April Ashley’s Odyssey was the result.

Fallowell later commented: 

“I’d known April since my teens and she often asked me to write her life story. So when I burned up in London at the end of the 1970s I moved to Hay-on-Wye to do it. April had moved there when she too had burned up in London, some years earlier. We were both good friends of Richard Booth who’d already started the book business in Hay, which was still in its early, wildly eccentric phase; so the place suited April and me very well. I told April I could never be a ghost writer and only agreed to do it if my name came first as author. She agreed. She had the title set in stone: April Ashley’s Odyssey. I didn’t want to write it in the third person, so interviewed her exhaustively, researched widely, and took all the material to a flat in the Hay workhouse, which I’d rented for the purpose, and wrote it pretending to be April. She was already well into her exiled duchess manner, so I took that and added an educated underpinning.” (Wisniewski)

Anthony Andrew commented in 2000: 

“Duncan Fallowell, co-author of April Ashley’s Odyssey, says that in his experience few transsexuals harbour dreams of being a ‘normal’ woman. ‘They aspire to this sort of glamourised ideal of womanhood’ “.

Roz Kaveney’s review: 

“April Ashley's Odyssey is essentially a bit of social chit-chat rags to riches to sadder but wiser - but it is readable and amusing and a superior example of its kind. It does convey a sense of time passing and society changing. It also has the major merit of lack of pretension; it is the life of one transsexual whose life has been interesting for reasons other than simply being a transsexual's life. April is more interested in her status as a socialite than in her sexuality and there are times when this attitude becomes a refreshing corrective to too much earnestness. … How much Duncan Fallowell contributed to the book's structure how much he improved April Ashley's memory with research is neither here nor there. His achievement in helping her with the book has been largely to disappear from the end product and leave it recognisably hers. The result is as stylish as the pair of them.”

• Richard Williamson. “The book that will put April Ashley in the news again”. Sunday Mercury, 29 June 1980: 10.
• Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley. April Ashley’s Odyssey. Jonathan Cape, 1982.
• Peter Bradshaw. “The invasion of Tuscany-on-Wye”. The Evening Standard, 2 June 1992.
• Roz Kaveney. “The unsinkable April Ashley”. Gay News, ??. Online.
• Andrew Anthony. “At the court of Queen Lear”. The Observer, 24 December 2000: 12. Online.
• Terry Kirby, “April Ashley: the first Briton to undergo a sex change”. The Independent, 2 February 2006. Online.
• John Wisniewski. “Writer DUNCAN FALLOWELL: On The New Journalism Movement And Upcoming Projects”. AMFM magazine. March 17, 2021. Online.

EN.Wikipedia(Duncan Fallowell)

Douglas Thompson (? - )

In the mid 2000s April spent some time in the south of France with friends where she was introduced to Lesley Thompson and her husband Douglas, who had authored books on a variety of subjects. They agreed to produce a second April autobiography, which was released in 2006.

“April Ashley, the first Briton to undergo a sex change, has co-authored a new autobiography, ‘The First Lady’, with one Douglas Thompson. This has come as a surprise to her old friend (and former lover) Duncan Fallowell, who collaborated with her on an earlier book, ‘My Odyssey’, which was published back in 1982. After all, Fallowell and Ashley are still in touch and she has said nothing to him about it. Surprise has turned to dismay now that Fallowell has seen the new book, for it contains vast swaths of material that have simply been lifted from the earlier book. ‘April has been very naughty,’ he tells me. ‘She seems to think that she owns the copyright to a book of which we were joint authors, which was almost entirely written by me.’ John Blake Publishing, the firm behind ‘The First Lady’, can expect firm action from Fallowell. He has already consulted the Society of Authors and prepared a dossier for his agent Gillon Aitken showing the extent of the alleged infringement of copyright.” (Silvester, August 2006)

“So how come Ashley and Thompson thought they could help themselves to so much of Fallowell's prose? Step forward Robert Smith, Thompson's agent, who describes what has happened as a ‘terrible error’. Three years ago he wrote to the publishers, Cape, asking if they would relinquish the rights to the book. Smith told me last week that Cape said they had already been returned to Fallowell and Ashley, but that he (Smith) didn’t know how to get hold of Fallowell. This is curious, given Fallowell has a website, writes book reviews for national papers and has lived at the same Notting Hill address for more than 30 years. But another question occurs. Why, in his initial letter to Cape, did Smith claim he was acting for ‘the above authors’, i.e. Fallowell and Ashley? ‘I did not claim to be representing Fallowell,’ says Smith. It's all very mysterious”. (Silvester, December 2006)

After taking legal action for plagiarism, Fallowell received damages, costs, and the reaffirmation of his intellectual property rights; and a public apology from the authors and John Blake Publishing was printed in The Bookseller 1 December 2006.

Remaining copies were pulped. However many copies had already been sold, and even today copies are available on the second-hand market.

In 2024 Douglas Thompson released a second book on April, this time written in the third person.

• April Ashley with Douglas Thompson. The First Lady. John Blake Publishing, 2006.
• Christopher Silvester. “A new autobiography, The First Lady”. The Independent, 20 August, 2006: 32.
• Christopher Silvester. “Congratulations to Duncan Fallowell”. The Independent, 3 December 2006: 43.
• Douglas Thompson. Inside Out: The Extraordinary Lagacy of April Ashley. Gemini Books, 2024.

https://dougiethomp

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The First Lady and Inside Out somehow avoid mentioning Duncan Fallowell at all, despite his friendship with April over the years, and avoid mentioning Odyssey.

Both Odyssey and First Lady do not mention the Sunday Mirror interview with Ronald Maxwell.

One thing that I liked about the first two books, unlike so many auto/biographies, is that they have an index, and one can find persons etc. Inside Out does not.

The reviews of Inside Out that I have seen all seem to have never heard of April Ashley before, and certainly do not compare the new book with the previous two. Goodreads.

There are two books that give a history of the News of the World:

• Cyril Bainbridge & Roy Stockdill.  The News of the World Story: 150 Years of the World's Bestselling Newspaper. Harper Collins, 1993.
• Laurel Brake, Chandrika Kaul & Mark W Turner. The News of the World and the British Press, 1843-2011: Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Neither of them mentions April Ashley. Come to that no transsexuals at all are mentioned.  

However see Alison Oram's Her Husband was a Woman!: Women's gender-crossing in modern British popular culture, Routledge, 2007 which, although confined to trans men, does detailed comparisons on how The People and The News of the World differ in how they reported trans stories.

Mowry Saben/Ralph Werther/Earl Lind/Jennie June: Part II - publications

 Part I: early life

Part II: publications

Part III:  comments and bibliography 

In 1907 Mowry Saben wrote a short newspaper article.  'Woman – An Age-Haunting Problem' which was published in the Detroit Free Press and elsewhere. In it he proposed that all of our culture comes from men: 

“Turn where we will, the objects of our veneration are all the monuments of man. From man have come the cities and the industries of the globe: all the great inventions are his; of him are all the religions, the ethical systems, the sciences and philosophies; he has created all the great poems, paintings, sculpture, architecture and music of the world.”

He further declared: 

“The woman of the Feminist is a fiction: she forms no part of manifested reality.” 

Six years later he expanded the same sentiments to a five-page article in Neale’s Monthly called simply ‘Feminism’. 

“I hold, indeed, that man's indebtedness to woman is a very large and deep one. There is nothing finer in Nature than motherhood; and feminine influence at its best, like masculine influence at its best, is always of a divine quality. But I will say that the history of the world gives no sanction to the claims put forth by Feminists. In her sphere woman is supreme; but her sphere is not man's. … Our Feminists have indulged in loud talk, but they have proved nothing and accomplished nothing. Women are quite as free as men. There is nothing but their lack of innate capacity to prevent them from becoming the great Poets, Musicians, Artists, Scientists, Philosophers, Inventors, and Reformers of the race.”

That was the polite version. Werther-June had already written in Autobiography of an Androgyne: 

“I have always felt that a woman should adore her husband so much as to delight in being treated as a slave, and to suffer gladly any abuse by her lord”. (p98) 

And there is no mention in either of their books of the ongoing campaign for female suffrage.

In that year, 1913 the editors of Neale’s Monthly described Saben as “one of the most vigorous essayists of our day”. They also published a long essay by Saben, “Broken Lights”, 78 pages in five chapters and seven parts, wherein he examines the ideas of his time and finds most of them lacking.

Saben’s major book under his male name was The Spirit of Life: A Book of Essays, which came out in 1914 and had a chapter on morals, and another on sex. In the latter we find:

“I do not object to sex-worship in itself. I have stood at its altar; have myself been a worshipper, and am, in a measure, one even yet. But I am not a Monotheist; I am a Polytheist. I have many gods, and some goddesses. My temple is the Pantheon. I bow low whenever I stand before a Holy Image. But I am a Catholic, and insist that there shall be no neglect of any divinity or saint.” (p138-9).

“The tenderness of Gautama was feminine, and was not Jesus very much of a woman in some of his characteristics? Goethe said that there was something

feminine in all genius, while Coleridge went further, declaring that the mind of a genius must be androgynous. Tennyson dared in The Princess to prophesy that the sexes were destined to become more and more alike” (p151)

“It will not do for the man or woman who indulge from necessity their hetero-sexual tastes to throw stones at the man or woman who indulge from necessity their homo-sexual tastes”. (p160-1)

A paragraph by Saben, published in Mitchell Kennerley’s The Forum, was reprinted in many newspapers across the country in 1915: 

“Our moral codes were invented, not to prepare man for heaven, or for Utopia; they were invented by men who were none too good themselves for people who were not much worse. There are great differences in human beings as to the amount of knowledge and wisdom which they possess, but there is small difference in regard to the amount of goodness or rascality that they manifest”.

 

1917: Werther-June was diagnosed with gonhorrhea.

In 1918 Saben wrote to a friend: 

“Germany did me a lot of good, a fact to which I am still bound to bear witness even in this terrible twilight hour of the ages. One of these days, if life and health are spared to me, you shall know all about it, for I am preparing the material for a book of confessions — ‘The Confessions of a Philosopher,’ I call it, using the word ‘philosopher’ in the original, or Socratic, sense. I believe that the book will be a big one, if I have all the courage requisite for my task.”

The autobiography - by Werther-June rather than Saben - was finally accepted by the Medico-Legal Press, whose new editor, Alfred Herzog, wrote an introduction. The book, Autobiography of an Androgyne, carried a publication date of 1918, but was not actually sold until January 1919. Only 1,000 copies were printed and it was sold through the mail [despite Comstock’s refusal of the text] only to “physicians, lawyers, legislators, psychologists, and sociologists”. Herzog wrote: 

“For, although I hope to fill with the Autobiography of an Androgyne a void; yet, had this void been recognized, were the want felt to have this void filled, my task would be easier of accomplishment. The void whereof I speak is the colossal ignorance of the reasons for homosexual practices on one side, and the pharisaical pulchritude on the other side, which, although knowing that homosexuality has been practiced uninterruptedly from biblical times up to the present, refuses to study its causes or its devotees; and while not endeavouring to make this world a better place to live in through its own abandoning unwholesome practices, vices and other actions which, although approved, condoned or ignored by the multitude —because these actions are popular —are condemned by philosophers and thinkers, yet will crucify those whose vices are much less harmful, because they are vices for which this pharisaical pulchritude has no taste, which therefore it cannot understand, and not understanding them, cannot condone.”

1918-20 Werther-June wrote and had published a series of articles in American Journal of Urology and Sexology, Medical Review of Reviews and Medical Life. They were mainly self-case studies, explaining to doctors what it was like to be Werther-June. 

Of particular interest is “Studies in Androgynism”, in Medical Life, 1920, which is Werther-June’s summary of the topic. They write: 

“As in this article I have to refer to the fact that I myself have had an extensive experience as a fairie, I think it wise to state at the outset that this line of conduct was not mine because of moral depravity, but because of irrepressible instinct, and that though my open career lasted twelve years, I made a gainful occupation of my propensities for only the nine weeks during which otherwise I would have been penniless. From the age of nineteen to thirty-one, obedience, to these propensities was absolutely essential for living out the scholarly life that I was regularly privileged to do. … Psychicly fairies have always felt that they belong to the female sex. They always adopt feminine names during the periods while they are under the influence of the sexual movings. Particularly they borrow the names of star actresses. With the more cultured, it has been a lifelong regret that they had not been born physical females, as well as psychic. As to the age of professional fairies, one over thirty is almost unknown. Nearly all appear to be between eighteen and twenty-five. Their career must be confined to youth. But they retain the freshness, slenderness, and litheness of youth-what might be described as "the small-boy appearance" – an abnormally long time, at least until the age of thirty. They are like women in that they have little tendency to baldness. … To sum up the natural endowment of fairies: they are not merely humans with a female soul in a male body, but they have, from the sexual point of view, never grown out of babyhood. Their craze for fellatio is only the abnormal survival through adulthood of the infant's feeding instinct. … As to the frequency of fairie-ism , I estimate that the raw material that is, the congenital girl -boys or androgynes throughout the world, one to every three hundred physical males. The writer has resided in fifteen different civilized countries, and in many of these countries has explored the underworlds of the great cities. The conditions as to fairies are about the same in all civilized countries. For fairie-ism is not due to example or moral degradation; but entirely to Mother Nature. At the dawning of adolescence, either because afflicted with congenital psychic nymphomania, or because thrown into intimate contact with a band of tremendously virile young bachelors, about one girl-boy out of every ten becomes extensively promiscuous-in other words a fairie. … Fairies may be divided into high-class and low-class. The former are for the most part recruited from the middle class of society, and have at least a grammar-school education, and rarely a high -school. As a rule, the high-class fairies are decided æsthetes. In embellishment of both their dress and their living apartments, most people would judge that they go to extremes. The author is the only university graduate he himself has encountered in the ranks of intensive fairies. But he has been acquainted with a number of such graduates who were addicted to fellatio with one or two trusted ultra-virile friends. The combination of high intellectuality with the frivolousness of the fairie is perhaps unique in the case of the present author. … The low-class type were born and brought up in the slums, and are much inferior in intelligence-not to say culture. While the high-class are subject to spells of acute melancholia in the realization of their condition of being misunderstood by their sexually normal fellows, and being pariahs, and from time to time even resort to suicide, the low-class fairie is perfectly contented with the niche in life which Mother Nature intended "him-her" to fill. Low-class fairies are likely to be deeply depraved. But this depravity has supervened upon their congenital effeminacy, and is something separate and apart.”

In addition to writing about Androgynes, in 1919 and 1921 Saben did some editing/writing work for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. This involved so little work that he was able to complete Werther/Junes’ next book, The Female Impersonators – which was published in 1922, again with the restriction that it was to be sold only to “physicians, lawyers, legislators, psychologists, and sociologists” despite Werther-June having written it in a popular style for the benefit of general readers. It contained nude photographs taken by Dr Shufeldt and also by Dr Alfred Herzog. 

It also contained an account of Columbus Hall better known as Paresis Hall, presented as 

“the headquarters for avocational female-impersonators of the upper and middle classes … In front was a modest bar-room; behind, a small beer-garden … A score of us have formed a little club, the Cercle Hermaphroditos. For we need to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution of bisexuals. We care to admit only extreme types —such as like to doll themselves up in feminine finery.” (p146-156)

There was a third volume by Werther-June, Riddle of the Underworld, to complete the trilogy. However, it was never published. It was partially rediscovered in the 21^st century.

In 1924 Saben spent several months in Montreal, but returned for medical treatment on an anal fistula. He told the publisher Mitchell Kennerley that some mistakenly viewed him as “an almost saintly individual”, and continued: 

“If I were to write an absolutely truthful book of confessions, telling what I have done, etc., they would refuse to believe it, and they would try to convince the public that my mind, at the time of writing the book, had become unhinged.” 

From 1926-29 Saben worked as assistant to Secretary of Labor James J. Davis with the title “Commissioner of Conciliation” – where his main job was writing the Secretary’s speeches, etc. He then ghosted for a senator for a year. In 1934 he became editor of The Argonaut, based in San Francisco.

In September 1950, Saben was hospitalized with heart, liver and kidney ailments, and died a few weeks later. Apparently, he was given a blood transfusion of the wrong blood type – however the inquest ruled that this did not hasten his death.

He was 80 years old.

An unnamed friend was said to have removed Saben’s personal papers from his San Francisco apartment after his death. They were never seen again.

Publications by Saben/Werther/Lind/June:

• Mowry Saben. The twilight of the gods: an essay.  Unity Pub House, 1903. Online. 
• Mowry Saben. “Woman – An Age-Haunting Problem”. Detroit Free Press, Aug 04, 1907: 42. 
• Mowry Saben. “Feminism”. Neale’s Monthly, July 1913. Online.
• Mowry Saben. “Broken Lights”. Neale’s Monthly, In seven parts, September 1913 - March 1914. Online: 1913 1914.
• Mowry Saben. The Spirit of Life: A Book of Essays. Mitchell Kennerley, 1914. Online. 
• Ralph Werther --Jennie June. "The Fairie Boy. An Autobiographical Sketch." American Journal of Urology and Sexology (October 1918) v. 14, n. 10: 433-37.
• Ralph Werther --Jennie June. "The Girl-Boy's Suicide." American Journal of Urology and Sexology, v. 14, n. 11 (November 1918): 495-99.
• Earl Lind (“Ralph Werther” – “Jennie June”) Autobiography of an Androgyne. Ed., with an Introduction by Alfred W Herzog. The Medico-Legal Journal, 1918 (but not published until January 1919. Reprinted Arno Press, 1975. Digital Transgender Archive. Wikisource.
• Ralph Werther --Jennie June. "Boy – But Never Man“. American Journal of Urology and Sexology, v. 15, (March 1919): 97-100.
• Ralph Werther --Jennie June. "The Sorrows of Jennie June“. American Journal of Urology and Sexology, v. 15, (April 1919): 160-4.
• Ralph Werther --Jennie June. "The Female Impersonator “. American Journal of Urology and Sexology , v. 15, (June 1919): 241-5.
• Ralph Werther --Jennie June. "Protest from an Androgyne“. American Journal of Urology and Sexology, v. 15, (July 1919): 313-5.
• Ralph Werther -Jennie June. "The Biological Sport of Fairie-ism." Written 1920 for Victor Robinson. Published in: Medical Review of Reviews (Anthropos 2) 40 2, (1934) 40: 185-96.1934).
• Ralph Werther -Jennie June. "Studies in Androgynism." Medical Life (NY), (1920) 27: 235-46. Online.
• Ralph Werther-Jennie June (“Earl Lind”). The Female Impersonators; a sequel to the Autobiography of an androgyne and an account of some of the author's experiences during his six years' career as instinctive female-impersonator in New York's underworld. Ed., with an introduction, by Alfred W. Herzog. The Medico-Legal Journal. 1922. Reprinted Arno Press, 1975. Digital Transgender Archive. Wikisource.
• Ralph Werther. The Riddle of the Underworld, 1921. Unpublished. Online.
• Mowry Saben. “Socialism and Freedom of the Press”. The National Republican, February 11, 1922. Online.

Samantha Kane (1960 - ) executive.

Original version 6/10/2011, revised March 2017, September 2023.

Sam Hashimi was born and raised in Zofaranaya, a suburb to the south of Baghdad. When the family was out, he would dress in his sister’s clothes, until caught by his brother. His one masculine interest at school was football. However he was perceived as feminine by the other boys, and started having sex with them in the passive role.

At age 16, he moved to England, to Swindon where he took a National Diploma in engineering. He financed it by selling hot food at night from a van. He met a woman in a disco, and eventually married her in 1984 in a Anglican church in a village outside Swindon. They soon had two children. He launched two companies: one importing fruit and vegetables, and the other making computers.

He later met an Arabian sheikh and they created a property and investment company. This company thrived. Hashimi became known for negotiating on behalf of wealthy Arabs. He also ran a club and a restaurant in Mayfair. In 1990 he had the opportunity of investing in Manchester United Football Club, but was unable to raise the required ₤10 million in the specified 24 hours. Later the same year he launched an unsuccessful takeover bid for Sheffield United FC, at a time - unlike today - when foreign ownership of British football clubs was not done. The bid resulted in much publicity. It was discussed in the House of Commons, and the Saudi King expressed his disapproval. Coincidentally it came out that a Sheffield company was supplying materials for Iraq to build a ‘supergun’, and then Iraq invaded Kuwait. The deal was off; his major investor pulled out; Hashimi was bankrupt.

For the first time he told his wife that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. She was at first sympathetic and helped him to cross-dress, but quickly segued to divorce, and, once she found another rich man to keep her, ousted Sam from the family home, and obtained injunctions to keep him from seeing the children. In violation of those injunctions he was arrested and served a few months in HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

During a subsequent period of depression and living at the Ealing YMCA, he started going to gay and trans clubs and was told how great it was to be a woman. He applied through his doctor to be evaluated by the Gender Identity Clinic at the Charing Cross Hospital. However the wait would be over a year, and if he were to become a woman he needed money.

Through his old contacts he was able to get restarted as a property refurbisher. In the course of that work he met an Israeli divorcee, and they became both business partners and spouses. However that was short lived, and a second divorce ensued.

He then contacted Dr Russell Reid and was accepted as a private transsexual patient.

"First of all, I thought I would do my nose to make it look more feminine. I had eye correction surgery to get rid of my glasses. Then I did my teeth to give me a better smile and I had electrolysis all round my face to remove the masculine beard. I had my Adam's apple removed and my vocal chords tightened. I had breast implants, all before the sex change surgery to remodel my genitalia".

Six months after first seeing Dr Reid, in December 1997 Samantha Kane had genital surgery with Michael Royle. She spent over £100,000 in total on her transition.

She had not seen her family for 10 years. She contacted them and, because of the situation in Iraq, they arranged to meet in Amman, Jordan. They did not know about her change until they actually met at Amman airport, but they did accept her.

Samantha wrote an autobiography, A Two-Tiered Existence, when she was trying to launch a football magazine to take advantage of the 1998 World Cup. She was even considered as chief executive at Sheffield United FC because of the possibility that she could attract supporters in Asia and the Middle East who would watch on subscription television. She built a new career in interior design, and lived an expensive life in London and Spain.

Within four years he regretted the mistake, as he missed being one of the boys talking football, business and girls.

"In fact, I found being a woman rather shallow and limiting. So much depends on your appearance, at the expense of everything else. I wasn't interested in shopping. My female friends would spend hours shopping for clothes, trying on different outfits. But having been a man I knew exactly what would suit me and appeal to men. I could walk into a shop and be out again in five minutes with the right dress. Nor have I ever been interested in celebrity magazines or the things that interest other women, but when I tried to talk to men about blokey things they didn't take me seriously.”

In 2004, after the collapse of her engagement to a wealthy landowner when it became apparent that he did not regard her as a ‘real’ woman, Kane decided that it had been a mistake, and as Charles Kane reverted to male. He complained, at the time that the Gender Recognition Bill was going through Parliament, to the General Medical Council that Russell Reid had been too easy in accepting him. Charles was referred to the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, and as a private patient spent a further £25,000 on breast removal and phalloplasty.

"After what I've been through, I now think that sex-change operations shouldn't be allowed. They should be banned. We live today in a consumerist society where we all believe we can have everything we want, but too much choice can be a dangerous thing."

However when Russell Reid was found guilty of misconduct by the General Medical Council, Kane was quoted in the Guardian: 

"I think generally he [Dr Reid] is a kind-hearted doctor and he didn't really mean to be malicious to the patient. Most of the patients came here to support him because of this quality in him. He is a caring, almost father-figure."

Charles prospered again in the property market, and by 2010 was living in a £2.6 million property in west London, and had recently announced his engagement to a 28-year-old woman, Victoria. His son, then 25, reconciled with his father. Charles  completed a novel, and was seeking funding for a

documentary on the “the Sex Change Delusion”.

“In many ways I see myself a victim of the medical profession. Even with the glamour of Samantha Kane and the £100,000 I spent on myself, I had people shouting abuse at me and builders throwing stones at me from rooftops.”

Charles was featured in 2004 in “Make me a man again” in the BBC documentary series One Life directed by Todd Austin.  A reviewer in the Guardian wrote: 

“Austin’s film managed to make Charles a likeable creature and by the end I was rooting for him. Austin allowed Charles the dignity of privacy and that, in TV-land, is a rare and precious commodity.”

In 2011 the US ABC’s Primetime Nightline featured teenaged trans kids, and as ‘balance’ Charles Kane who never was a trans kid, and who objected to children being given gender assertive therapy. 

In March 2017, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Kane announced a return to being a woman, and a change of name to Sam Kane,

"The reversal operation did not return me to the man I once was, just an approximation.  With the exception of Victoria, I was rejected by both men and women. The original surgery was effectively irreversible. You can’t turn back into a man because whatever defines the male has been completely removed, so how can you bring it back?

‘I discovered to my detriment that there is only so far medical science can go.  As Charles, I still sometimes wanted to wear a blouse or a pretty ring, and wear my hair long.  Having become Samantha, I should have stayed Samantha. When I told Victoria how I was feeling, it effectively ended the relationship.  She said she preferred men and did not want to live with a woman, but we are still friends."

In 2018 she published the novel that she had been working on.  Called Mohammed and Susan, the plot is: 

“Susan Green is an Iraqi British architect and the only witness to a fatal accident on a building site in West London. A suspicious police detective discovers a book written by Susan, revealing huge secrets about her life and narrating a story of love, taboos, desire and murder.”

By 2022 Samantha had a considerable property portfolio in London.  She spotted an article about the sale of Carbisdale Castle in Ayrshire.  This intrigued her: "So I took a last-minute flight to Inverness and made my first trip to that far north in the Highlands”.  The castle had been built during the first world war for Mary Caroline, Duchess of Sutherland.  In 1933 it was purchased by a Scots-Norwegian millionaire, and in 1945 it was donated to the Scottish Youth Hostels Association. By the 2010s it needed extensive renovations, and the SYHA attempted to sell it in 2014 because of the cost.  It was purchased by a corporation in 2016, but their plans fell through, and they sold it to Samantha Kane.  She is using her London property portfolio to finance further renovations, and is now known as Lady Carbisdale.

*Not the romance novelist, Samantha Kane, nor Charles Kane the protagonist in Citizen Kane, 1941, nor the character in Tomb Raider, nor the boxer, nor the President of One Laptop Per Child.

• Samantha Kane edited by Sarah Harding. Two-Tiered Existence. London: Writers and Artists. 130 pp. 1998. Review.
• Jack O’Sullivan. “Cold Call: Jack O'Sullivan rings Samantha Kane”. The Guardian, 24 Oct 1998. Online.
• Todd Austin (dir) One Life: Make me a Man Again. UK BBC1 19 Oct 2004.
• David Batty. “Sex-change patient complains to GMC “. The Guardian, 18 Feb 2004. Online.
• Helen Weathers. “A British tycoon and father of two has been a man and a woman ... and a man again ... and knows which sex he'd rather be”. Daily Mail, June 14, 2008. Online.
• Helen Weathers. “A VERY peculiar engagement: Charles had a sex change - then hated being Samantha so became a man again. Now he's getting married. So is his fiancée barmy, brave... or just in love?”. Daily Mail, 7th Dec 2010. Online
• "My (Extra) Ordinary Family: My Kid is Transgender".  Primetime Nightline. US ABC 6 August 31, 2011.  Review.
• Helen Weathers.  "The top London lawyer who's changed gender THREE times: Extraordinary tale of transgender career woman, 57, who's spent more than £100,000 switching sex - and why she believes life's easier for men than women".  The Daily Mail, 21 March 2017.   Online.
• Samantha Kane.  Mohammed and Susan.  Diversity Books, 2018. Blurb.
• Helen Weathers. “Samantha changed gender three times and is 'happier than ever' in her new Highland castle home”. The Daily Mail, 3 Oct 2022.  Online.
• Lara Wildenberg. “Dream comes true for castle’s new lady”.  The Times, October 05 2022.  Online. 
• Steven McKenzie. 'I booked a last-minute flight and bought a castle'.  BBC News, 26 Aug 2023.  Online. 

Amazon   Wealthy Peeps  

____________________________________________________________

I also had the surgery only six months after first meeting Russell Reid, but unlike
Hashimi/Kane I had by that point been on female hormones for some years, was living full-time as female and working as female.

Why is it that many of those who change back, then feel that they want to ban the operation for everyone?

Aleksa Lundberg (1981 - ) actress, author, activist

Original version May 2014.

All quotes from Bögtjejen via Collmar via Google Translator.

Lundberg’s father was a union organizer, but despite this the parents rejected her gender expressions. However there was an accepting grandmother, and it was a friend of the grandmother who introduced the child to a video of the drag show After Dark with Christer Lindarw.

At the age of 15, Lundberg was able to start an acting career with a recurring small male part in the Swedish television series, Kenny Starfighter.

Lundberg first came out as gay, then that she felt like a girl, and finally that she wanted correction surgery.  However Aleksa did not really fit in with the other trans women.

 “The difference between being transsexual and transvestite was important to point out. In no circumstances did I want to be taken to be like Birgitta or the other ladies. … In addition, I thought that the aunties at Gyllene Gåsen looked like boys in dress, which I myself was terrified to be perceived as. I was a girl born in the wrong body and otherwise normal. … It felt insanely sad not to order a large portion of meat. I had always loved luxurious steaks, clove potatoes and fatty sauces. But I had decided to appear as a woman in every conceivable part of my life.”

Transition was completed by 2002. In 2003 she was in the television miniseries, Veganspöket Lisa, but uncredited.

After 13 attempts she was accepted in 2006 to study drama at Teaterhögskolan, Göteborg. As she grew older she came to resent that Swedish law had prohibited her from freezing sperm before transition, and therefore from having children. She stopped hiding that she had been born male, and launched a one-woman show, Infestus, which told of her life as a boy, her transition, and life as a grown woman. She played this all over Sweden to acclaim.

In 2009 she graduated in drama, the first known trans person to do so in Sweden. However she found that she was not able to obtain work with any of the institutional theatres.

By 2010, apart from the Christian Democrats, the main political parties supported repeal of the 1972 law which prohibited transsexuals from having children after surgery. In 2011 Aleksa played in a stage version of Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf.

The ban on freezing eggs or sperm was removed in 2013. Aleksa, and another 141 transsexuals claimed damages of 300.000 kronor each, but received neither damages nor an apology.

In 2014 she was cast in Jean Genet's The Maids, but after a few weeks of rehearsal realized that she could not play the transgender implications of the play. Then, in three days, she wrote Maids! The transgender version and premiered it at Stockholm's Theatre Three.

At that point she was insistent that she would never reveal her boy name, but, of course, as her first acting gig had been as a boy her name was available in IMDB.

In 2018 she published her autobiography, Bögtjejen (=gay girl). Here she first expressed some degree

of regret:

“I regret it. I'm not a woman. Never been”. although she quickly adds: "My temporary stage of regret passed so quickly".   

As Collmer paraphrases: “She questions the image of herself - the simplified narrative of being born in the wrong body, and she questions the value of being normal. She puts words on the internalized transphobia that requires her to be exaggerated and purely feminine, and instead tries to embrace that she also has masculine sides. Gradually, she seems to stop looking for something that already exists, and instead start looking for opportunities to change attitudes at the community level. She goes from wanting to fit in to wanting to change.”

In October 2019 Aleksa apologised for not having been sufficiently open about the depression she had felt after her operation.

“I would probably not undergo corrective surgery if I had the same choice today,” she wrote. “And I want to apologise to those who perhaps needed to hear that story earlier.”

• Ann Tornkvist. "Aleksa Lundberg, Swedish Transgender Actress, Mourns Forced Sterilization". Huffington Post, 11/02/2011. Online.
• "Sterilized transsexuals sue Swedish government". The Local: Sweden's News in English, 24 Jun 2013. Online.
• Karin Thunberg. ”Vår sexualitet väljer inte kvinnor eller män”. SvD Kultur, 13 April 2014. Online.
• “'It means it a lot': Sweden compensates transgender people for forced sterilization” CBC, Mar 29, 2017. Online.
• Aleksa Lundberg. Bögtjejen. Brombergs, 2018.
• Marcus Joons. “En bögtjejs uppväxt”. Göteborgs-Posten, 22 sep, 2018. Online. Review of Bögtjejen. Translation.
• Katie Collmar.  “En bögtjej med lesbiska erfarenheter väcker tankar om vad kön är”.  Dagensbok.com, 2018.10.22.  Online.  Review of Bögtjejen. Translation.
• Cecilia Nelson. “Medryckande om en bögtjejs uppväxt“. Göteborgs-Posten, 5 nov, 2018. Online.  Review of Bögtjejen. Translation.
• “Hear Aleksa Lundberg - the gender dysphoria remained after the operation: ‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’”. Teller Report, 10/9/2019. Online.
• Richard Orange. “Teenage transgender row splits Sweden as dysphoria diagnoses soar by 1,500%”. The Guardian, 22 Feb 2020. Online.

IMDB    MySpace    LinkedIn    SV.Wikipedia    Twitter   Facebook

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Genet’s The Maids need not be cast for male or trans actors. The 1974 film version featured Glenda Jackson and Susannah York as the maids, and the 2013 Sydney Theatre Company version starred Cate Blanchette and Isabelle Huppert.

Barbara Buick (1928 - ?) performer, factory worker

Buick was the child of Colonel and Madame Gaston Joly of Paris. At the end of the Second World War the child went with the parents to Bad Ems, Germany as part of the army of occupation, but then returned to Paris alone to pursue a theatrical career. A manager commented on her beauty and delicacy of features and suggested working as a female impersonator. She  was pleased with the observation and took the name Barbara Buick.

She was working at Le Carrousel in 1949 when the Prefecture of Police banned, temporarily as it turned out, wigs, fake breasts, high heels and dresses. The artists of course circumvented this by growing their own hair, taking hormones and wearing flat heels with feminine trousers. In all Buick stayed ten years at Le Carrousel, often working alongside lesbian singer Suzy Solidor. In the late 1950s she went for surgical confirmation from Dr Burou in Casablanca.

By this time her father, Colonel Joly had left his wife and disowned his daughter. While holidaying with her mother in Avignon, Barbara met Monsieur H, a French aristocrat. She told him of her past, and he was in shock, but he came round and still wanted to marry her. However she ran into problems trying to get her birth certificate re-issued.  In the early 1960s Barbara was sufficiently well known that she was featured in the English-language press as an epitome of a trans woman.

Later she  worked in the factory where her mother worked. This went well until a serious accident put her in hospital with first and second degree burns. After a month in hospital, Barbara returned to the factory and was summoned to see the boss – who had not visited her in hospital even once. He had become aware of the gender on her official papers. While the authorities had also become aware of her situation, they had decided on discretion and not interfered. The employer decided differently, and she was dismissed.

Barbara published her autobiography in 1971. Afterwards she disappeared from public view.

• “Sex-Change Girl Barbara Plans Gretna Wedding”. The News of the World, 13 August 1961. Online.
• Arnold Wells. “Exclusive! MD Reveals The Fourth Sex! Not Male, Not Female, And Not Homosexual”. The National Insider, 5, 3, July 19, 1964. Online.
•  Barbara Buick. L’Eiquette. La Jeune Parque, 1971.
• Annette Runte. Biographische Operationen: Diskurse der Transsexualität. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996: 22, 114f., 117, 128f., 218, 239, 242,275,294,314,444,450,479,490,492,495, 502,553,619.
• Maxime Foester. Histoire des transsexuels en France. H&O éditions, 2006: 86, 92, 93.

Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez (1964 - 2016 ) sex worker, singer, prisoner.

++I originally wrote about Cristina Otiz in May 2008.  A lot has happened to her since then.

Cristina was born José Antonio Ortiz Rodriguez, the fourth of six children, in Adra, Almeria, Andalusia. Jose became known as Joselita.  From an early age Joselita showed talent in fashion design.  She was never accepted because of her gender expression and was attacked and mistreated, but as a man was considered to have good physique and was awarded the title Mister Andalusia in 1989 at the age of 24.  Still as José Antonio, Ortiz entered a competition on television in 1991 and won a trip to Thailand.

Ortiz had been secretly dressing as a woman, and in January 1992 she went to Madrid and began  transition.

Cristina was working as a prostitute in 1996 when she was discovered by television host and journalist Pepe Navarro who was doing a story on trans people. He hired her, and she became famous on his television shows Esta noche cruzamos el Mississippi and La sonrisa del pelícano, and with a music single ‘Veneno pa tu piel’ (Poison in your skin). She became known as Cristina La Veneno (the poison).

There was a plan to make a film about her life, but it did not happen. She starred in two porn films:  El secreto de la Veneno and La venganza de la Veneno, both 1997.  She toured Spain as a singer, and in 1998 was on television in Buenos Aires for a month.

In 1999, Cristina was arrested in an insurance scam, accused of arson, after an anonymous denunciation by her Italian ex-boyfriend. Investigation uncovered other crimes and she was sentenced to three years in a men’s prison, 2003-6, where she was frequently attacked and raped, and was incommunicado to her family for many months. Her weight doubled from 60 to 122 kg, and she suffered obvious physical deterioration.

After release she appeared on television gossip shows, complaining about her treatment in prison. The Instituciones Penitenciarias denounced her statement as calumny, but later in 2006 the Socialist Workers Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (no relation) introduced a new policy of respecting a prisoner's gender and changed name, and placing trans women in women's prisons.

She was confronted by other trans activists in that she gave a bad image to the trans community.   In 2010 she was challenged on television to lose the weight that she had gained in prison, and some months later had lost 35kg.  But she was still suffering from bulimia and depression. 

In 2013 Cristina presented her 23-year-old boyfriend.   However he disappeared with her savings of €60,000.   But she was hired as one of the stars of the show Que trabajo Rita. From the end of 2013 to 2014, La Veneno made stellar appearances in some of the concerts of the tour.

In October 2016 her long-promised memoirs, ¡Digo! ni puta ni santa, appeared.  It was co-written with Valeria Vegas, a friend, and self-published through the Bigcartel web site.  She gave the initials of many famous politicians and footballers who had had sex with her.    This resulted in death threats.

In November that year she was found at home with bruises, unconscious and with a serious bruise on her head.  She was rushed to hospital, put into an induced coma, and died a few days later.  She was 52.  Officially she was deemed to have suffered a fall after massive consumption of pills, but there are suspicions that one of the death threats was acted on. Her family attempted to re-open the case in 2017 to show that it was murder.

A plaque has been mounted in Cristina's Honour in Madrid's Parque del Oeste where she worked as a prostitute.

In 2019, Cristina's sister attempted to again re-open the case with the support of Dr Luis Frontela, a prestigious forensic doctor, who pointed out defence wounds on Cristina's hand.  However the attempt was without success.

*Not the  University professor.

• "Los buenos modales son Veneno". Perlas ensangrentadas. Online.
• "La Veneno pasa factura".  Interviu, 24/04/2006.  Online. 
• "La Veneno, su infierno en la cárcel" Entrevista en “Qué me dices”, 3 de abril de 2006. Archive. 
• "Prisiones denuncia a «La Veneno» por decir que sufrió abusos en la cárcel" ABC, 21 de abril de 2006. Online. 
• «La Veneno, perdida por los hombres de mal vivir». El Mundo. 12 de noviembre de 2016. Online. 
• CristinaOrtiz & Valeria Vegas. ¡Digo! ni puta ni santa: las memorias de la Veneno. Roi Porto DL, 2016.
• "La Veneno murió por una caída accidental".  El Periodico, 10/11/2018.  Online.
• " 'La Veneno' pudo ser asesinada, según un nuevo análisis forense".  La Opinion de Tenerife, 09.01.2019.  Online.

  ES.WIKIPEDIA    IMDB     

---------------------------------

The ES.Wikipedia page on Adra does list Cristina among its citizens of note.

Case of Sheffield and Horsham v. The United Kingdom, 1998

Rachel Horsham (1946 - )

Horsham was raised in a small village in Surrey, with a father who had been born in India, and a mother from Ireland. Horsham knew from an early age that she was not really male. As Rachel she emigrated to the Netherlands in 1974 because that country recognised trans women as women at a time when the UK did not.

She became a patient of Professor Dr Louis Gooren at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) of Amsterdam, wrote the first version of her autobiography in 1991, and completed transition in 1992.

She applied to the UK Consulate for a re-issued UK passport in her new name and gender:

“During an interview with the Consul, I was informed that it was not possible to be issued with a new passport reflecting my current status, at the time. Nor would they accept a letter of Deed Poll from a Solicitor for a change of forenames. Their reasoning: that the issuing of passports to transsexuals in the United Kingdom, showing their female status, on production of a letter of Deed Poll from a Solicitor, and a letter of acknowledgement from a qualified doctor, that the bearer was a transsexual, was not legal outside of the United Kingdom.” (Plaintiff’s Observations)

She was told that she needed an order from a Dutch Court. This was obtained and the passport re-issued. She became a Dutch citizen in 1993, and obtained a ruling in a Dutch court that her UK birth certificate should be amended. As this did not happen she initiated legal proceedings in the UK. This was appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 1994.

Kristina Sheffield (also born 1946)

Sheffield was a pilot with Brittania Airways, and had 34 years experience when she transitioned in 1986.

Kristina divorced from her wife as was almost always required in the 1990s (in retrospect she felt that she had been coerced into it underhandedly), and a judge also granted an injunction banning Kristina from seeing her daughter as “transsexuals are not suitable company for children”.

She applied to every UK airline, but was always obliged to show her birth certificate which said that she was born male, which resulted in her not getting employment.

While her passport was re-issued in her new name, she was still unable to obtain a US visa, and twice in court to stand surety for a friend, was obliged to reveal her previous name. A misunderstanding with the police with regards to a replica firearm indicated that they were aware of her gender change although the topic had not come up. A request under the Data Protection Act 1984 would have required her to state all previous names.

She also appealed through the UK court system and then to the ECHR.
 

And then

 
Both cases were initially accepted by the ECHR in 1994. Kristina met with Rachel in Amsterdam. Following advice from Rachel, Kristina revised the statement of her case. This made the two cases rather similar although the circumstances were different, in that Rachel wanted to marry and Kristina to find employment. The ECHR decided to couple both appeals.

Rachel, with Kristina’s assistance researched the Ewan Forbes-Sempill case and the Corbett divorce case. They obtained the birth certificates for April Ashley, Roberta Cowell, Michael Dillon and Georgina Turtle, and the marriage certificates for Georgina Turtle and April Ashley. Only April had not had her birth certificate amended re her name and sex. From this they were able to conclude that the Corbetts’ divorce trial could have been quickly concluded in that April was still legally male and thus the marriage was invalid according to the law at that time. There was no need for the detailed medical examinations that were done. Unless, of course, something other than an annulment of marriage was being enacted.

The original birth certificate for Ewan Forbes-Sempill proved impossible to obtain, however a copy specifying his male sex and name was available. The Sempill and Corbett cases had been more about establishing the boundaries of aristocratic privilege than of determining the best governance of transsexuals.

“It was also found, that there had been prior knowledge of these birth certificates by the plaintiffs of former cases that had gone to the ECHR. They were the cases of Rees and later Cossey. None of the fact that it was possible to amend a birth certificate, within existing statute law, was ever presented to the ECHR in those cases. They were based on a demand that the UK government must change the law. The court in those cases was not prepared to demand that a government must restructure its laws. Both cases lost and this created a case law in the ECHR upon which any further cases from the UK would be accepted and judged. The ECHR works on the basis of creating its own case law upon which to judge a case presented to them and where they have none they create it. If a case challenges existing case law, then the court can examine the situation.” (Rachel Horsham .4)

In May 1996, Rachel wrote an anonymous article that was published in The Independent, "Trapped in a man's body with a woman's mind". She detailed the then lack of human rights for transsexuals in the UK; explained how HRT and reconstructive surgery have a 97% success rate and attributed the condition to an incongruence of pre-natal hormones (a theory that was accepted in the late 1990s). She rightly points to the 1970 Corbett v Corbett divorce case as the point where things went wrong.

“All that is required is for government to accept a return to the pre-1970 status quo, a move that is supported by medicine, a large section of legal opinion and many parliamentarians. There is no need for new legislation or new administrative systems; the Birth Certificate still contains a column where errors at registration can be corrected as they were before 1970. Time has shown that there were no practical complications with those corrections, and thus there is no realistic argument for not reinstating the practice. Indeed, there is every reason for regarding it as an urgent necessity.”

The ECHR gave its judgement 30 July 1998. By 11 to 9 it voted that the Article 8 right to respect for a private life was not violated (although the court noted “no steps taken by respondent State to keep need for appropriate legal measures in this area under review despite Court’s view to that effect in Rees and Cossey judgments — Court reiterates that view”). By 18 votes to 2 it voted that the Article 12 right to contract lawful marriage was not violated. Unanimously it voted that Article 14, the right not to be subjected to difference in treatment was not violated. The judgment does not address Horsham’s argument that Corbett vs Corbett was a bad judgment and a simple reversal would solve the problems.

As Rachel summarises the result on her home page:

“The United Kingdom rejected [the plaintiffs’ plea] on the grounds that under British law a person’s sex is fixed at birth and cannot be amended or changed and argued that the Court of Human Rights had given two Judgments in their favour upholding this contention in two previous cases, Rees and Cossey. The plaintiff, in her submissions, proved that the government had lied to the court in those previous cases, and that English Statute law did have the required legislation to amend a person's birth certificate, in such cases. In 1998 the court decided to uphold its case law based on Rees and Cossey and the case of Rachel Horsham was never judged on the facts presented to them.”

Rachel expanded her autobiography to include the appeal to ECHR, and published it, also in 1998.
Kristina won an employment discrimination case in 1998 at an industrial tribunal in that she was unable to obtain even an interview with Easyjet to be a pilot despite her 34 years’ experience.

Context

In 1997, after 18 years of homophobic Conservative misrule, the Labour Party became the new government. Initially it continued the Conservatives’ homophobic policies, one of which was to oppose appeals such as that by Horsham & Sheffield. The GLBT censorship known as Section 28 was not repealed until 2003.

While government lawyers were in Strasburg arguing against the petitions of Horsham and Sheffield, Petra Henderson, British but resident in Germany, had completed surgical transition and wished to be recognised legally as female, which the government quietly permitted. She had threatened to go to the ECHR and the Government wished to keep her out of the newspapers. It was insisted that this was a one-off exemption and did not set a precedent. There were some other similar one-offs, such as the UK citizen in Paris who was able to obtain a similar result with Petra's assistance. Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of ‘joined-up government’, but this was one area where it was definitely not so.

Press for Change had been founded in 1992. It engaged with lawyers and Members of Parliament. Inevitably a slow process. A private member's bill was introduced in 1996, but as the then Conservative Government refused to endorse it, it was without success. In 2002, another appeal to the ECHR finally met with success, and two years after that the Labour Government passed the Gender Recognition Act – not perfect, but the best in the world at that time.

Comments

Rachel’s book is not listed in either Amazon or Abebooks. It is on the Dwarf Empire web page.












In recent years Rachel has self-identified as HBS, although independently of the two major strands thereof.   In 1998 the only Benjamin Syndrome movement was the Association du Syndrome de Benjamin in Paris run by Tom Reucher, Diane Potiron, Hugues Cariou, and which was inclusive unlike the HBS movement which developed after 2005.

• "Trapped in a man's body with a woman's mind", The Independent, 1 May 1996. Online.
• Rosa Prince. “Transsexuals in test case”. The Independent, 22 February 1998. Online.
• “British Pilot Wins Discrimination Case”. NewsPlanet, June 1, 1998. Online.
• Case of Sheffield and Horsham v. The United Kingdom. European Court of Human Rights, 30 July 1998. Online.
• “UK Transsexuals lose court case”. BBC News, July 30, 1998. Online.
• Christine Burns. “Court Judgement Criticises UK Government's Lack of Action”. PFC, 9^th August 1998. Online.
• Rachel Horsham. Release of the Dove. Dwarf Empire, 1991 and 1998.

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