Ajita Wilson (1950 – 1987) prolific actress

Original March 2007.

Wilson was born and raised in Brooklyn.

After a start as a transvestite entertainer in New York in the last remaining burlesque spectacles of the time, Wilson also posed for some adult magazines,

Around 1970, bankrolled by a rich boyfriend, said to be from Denmark, Ajita Wilson went to Europe, and had completion surgery. It is rumoured that she was featured in hardcore loops at this period – however such are not documented.

Her first non-porno film was Cesare Caneveri’s La Principessa Nuda,1976. in a leading role as Miriam Zamoto, an African princess on a fund-raising mission who encounters Italy’s La dolce vita. The film is a light Comedy/satire poking fun at celebrities and the so-called jet set. Suddenly Ajita Wilson was a star.

With an uncritical approach to scripts, Ajita was constantly employed throughout the 1970s, in both mainstream genre movies, and also in softcore and even hardcore porno. She was often top-billed.

She often played characters simply named ''Ajita''.

In 1978 she made a crossover into Euro-trash such as women-in-prison flicks, and a number of films directed by Jesus Franco.

There were suggestions that she was trans, but they were not taken too seriously. Some knew, other did not. She was frequently featured in European nudie magazines simply as a woman.

1981 was the year of her best-known film, Jesus Franco’s Sadomania, aka Hellhole Women, where Ajita plays the cruel lesbian prison warden who takes delight in the inmates’ suffering – who is named, for some reason, Magda Urtado (said to be the maiden name of Ajita’s real-life mother). In a confusing scene, director Franco, in the role of a gay brothel owner, is sodomized by Ajita, in a second role as a mustachioed man. 

That year she was featured in magazines: the Afro-American magazine Jet featured Ajita as their “Beauty of the Week”: 

“Beautiful Ajita Wilson from Rome is a movie actress in Europe”. 

She was also featured on the cover of Players Magazine and High Society.

She co-starred opposite trans singer/actress Eva Robin’s in Eva Man (1980) and El Regresso de Eva Man (1982). 

Another Jess Franco film, Macumba Sexual, has Ajita in the role of Princess Obongo, a voodoo princess returning from the dead and haunting a woman by using sexual hallucinations.

In the 1980s she starred again in women-in-prison films such as Hell Behind Bars, Hell Penitentiary and Savage Island (with Linda Blair from The Exorcist, an incoherent production using footage of two other movies from the 1980s).

By the mid-1980s Ajita’s career was declining. She was mainly in obscure Greek softcore films. Part of the decline was that softcore porn was being pushed out by US hardcore porn at this time, and the advent of VHS videos.

In 1986 she was arrested by the carabinieri in a brothel in Florence and tried to escape running naked through the street. In 1987 she died from the complications from a road accident.

The rumour that she was trans was more said after her death.

After Wilson's death, an interviewer for "Sinister Tales" asked director Carlos Aured to comment on speculation as to whether she was a transsexual. Aured simply replied, 

"She was charming, beautiful and very professional. The rest is not important.".

Alternate accounts:

There is an alternate story that says that she is Magda Urtado from Rio, but that is the name of her character in Sadomania – it is also supposedly her mother’s maiden name.

Jesus Franco suggested in the 2003 documentary Sadomaniac, that the mysterious star hailed from Ethiopia.

According the October 1981 edition of the American magazine Players (vol. 8, no. 5), she was born in 1951 in Flint, Michigan, the offspring of a Brazilian mother and a US father. In Marco Giusti's book Dizionario Dei Film Italiani Stracult, Sergio Bergonzelli, who directed her in “La Doppia Bocca di Erika”, said that “Ajita had been a firefighter in an American city".

• “Ajita Wilson, mujer de la noche”. Interviu, 189, 27 diciembre 1979.
• “Beauty of the Week: Roman Beauty”. Jet, August 20, 1981:43. Online.
• “Ajita Wilson la veneren era”. High Society, Edizione Italiana, Settembre, 1981.
• “Film Star: Ajita Wilson Goes Nude”. Players Magazine, 8, 5, October 1981.
• Bob McCann. “Ajita Wilson” in Encyclopedia of African American Actresses in Film and Television. McFarland, 2009.
• Monica Roberts. “Black Trans History-Ajita Wilson”. TransGriot, august 21, 2012. Online. 
• “Before Laverne Cox there was Ajita Wilson”. Welkom, 8.sep, 2015.
• Johnny Stanwick. “Created by Cinema: The Enigma of Ajita Wilson”. The Grindhouse Effect, Online. 
• Matt Richardson. “Ajita Wilson: Blaxploitation, Sexploitation, and the Making of Black Womanhood” Transgender Studies Quarterly, 7, 2, May 2020. Also at edu.
• Sierre B Holt. “Ajita Wilson’s Jet Set Style”. The Stylestorian, July 26, 2020. Online.
• Rebekkah Mulholland. Historical Erasure is Violence: The Lives and Experiences of Black Transgender Women and Gender Nonconforming Women of Color in the 19th And 20th PhD thesis, The University of Memphis, May 2020: 28,38, 63, 69-71,73-4 . Online.

IMDB      EN.WIKIPEDIA       FINDAGRAVE      MySpace       Cult Sirens

La Principessa Nuda (aka The Nude Princess, 1976)
Gola Profonda Nera (aka Black Deep Throat, 1976)
Sylvia im Reich der Wollust (aka The Joy of Flying, 1977)
Candido Erotico (aka Copenhagen Nights/The Exhibitionists, 1977)
La Bravata (1977)
Nel Mirino di Black Afrodite (aka Black Aphrodite, 1978)
Le Notti Porno Nel Mondo nº 2 (1978)
L´Amour Chez Les Poids Lourds (aka Traveling Companions, 1978)
Proibito Erotico (1978)
La Pitoconejo (1979)
Pensione Amore Servizio Completo (1979)
Libidine (1979)
Femmine Infernali (aka Escape from Hell, 1979)
Eros Perversion (aka Twelfth Night, 1979)
Los Energéticos (1979)
Una Donna di Notte (1979)
Luca il Contrabbandiere (aka Contraband, 1980)
Orinoco-Prigioniere Del Sesso (aka Hotel Paradiso, 1980)
Evaman, La Máquina Del Amor (1980)
Erotiki Ekstassi (aka Love, Lust and Ecstasy, 1980)
Sadomania - Hölle der Lust (1981)
Erotiko Pathos (aka Blue Passion, 1981)
Apocalipsis Sexual (1982)
Catherine Chérie (1982)
Triferes... Gatoules (1982)
Bacanales Romanas (1982)
La Amante Ambiciosa (1982)
Macumba Sexual (1983)
Töchter Der Venus (1983, aka The Pussycat Syndrome)
Inferno Dietro Le Sbarre (aka Detenute Violente/Captive Women Hell: Hell Penitentiary/Hell Behind Bars, 1983)
La Doppia Bocca di Erika (aka Naked Wild Erections, 1983)

Anomali Erotes Sti Santorini (1983)
Corpi Nudi (aka Nude Strike, 1983)
Stin Athina Simera... Oles Ton Pernoun Fanera! (1984)
Ke To Proto Pinelo (1984)
Idones Sto Egeo (1984)
Savage Island (1985; re-uses scenes from 1979´s Femmine Infernali)
Bocca Bianca, Bocca Nera (aka Love Boat. 1987)
Joe D'Amato Totally Uncut (1999, stock footage)

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IMDB lists her as appearing almost 50 films. This compares with 6 for Aleshia Brevard, 26 for Eva Robin's, 28 for Holly Woodlawn, 79 for Bibi Anderson and 75 for Alexis Arquette. Most of Alexis' film were in her pre-op phase, so on the crude criteria of counting films Ajita is second only to Bibi as the major transsexual film star of that period.

Martine O'Leary - gay liberation activist.

Original: May 2011.

Martine was a member of Leeds Gay Liberation Front and also of the International Marxist Group. In 1974 she was active at the Third Gay Marxist Conference in Leeds and also at the First National TV.TS Conference sponsered by Leeds GLF.

She was mentioned in The Guardian report on the Conference where she was described as

"a radical drag queen at Leeds, says that he buys old dresses from Oxfam shops, wears neither make-up nor substitute breasts, and tries to shake people out of their preconception of what a man is, a woman is, or more important, what he is."

At the conference those in attendence divided into separate discussion groups, but before they dispersed, two documents were handed to each delegate:  "Competition" by Martine O'Leary and "Attitudes to homosexuality" by N S Love (about the Beaument Society's exclusion of gay persons).  It was considered that the content of these documents was so thought provoking and so excellently set down that as time did not permit the use of them as 'Discussion Topics', they should be reproduced in their entirity in the Conference report.

O'Leary in her document wrote:

" The only way in which our society can cope with us is by treating us as products - as entertainers, as drag contest entrants. It has been frequently enough observed that once a transvestite has got past the stage of only being dressed at home and wants to go public, then practically the only possible outlet is some form of participation in a commercialised scene. This, ultimately, is disastrous. I do not say it is disastrous because I am opposed to commercialism. I say it is so precisely because the commercial situation frustrates and inhibits the essence of transvestism. The transvestite pushes out her feelings, and her public situation promptly pushes them back. In the ensuing conflict, humanity starts to flow away."

and 

"Transsexuals, who by their very nature, are forced to break the magic circle of commercialism, find their lives full of harassment and difficulties. It is important to understand that those attacks are defences of the economic system and that defending the economic system entails such attacks.  Transvestites, on this understanding, face the appalling dilemma of 'Shall I stay in the trap or shall I sink in society's hate?' " 

O'Leary also published a 16-page pamphlet that was originally a paper for the London School of Economics Gay Culture Society the same year entitled, Gay Liberation, reformism and revolution.  It is mainly a call to reclaim the revolutionary impetus of GLF which was already in 1974 being replaced by reformist groups such as Gay News and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality(CHE):

"We have to reclalm our movement from the reformists. A large critically aware Gay Movement has to come in to being out of the shambles that is GLF. This aim needs to be energetically pursued both within the existing groups and outside them.  The sort of GLF needed must have a firm social base founded perhaps on discos and so forth.  Most importantly women must play a central, indeed a determining role.  Transvestism and transsexualsm are very much part of the issue whether we like to face up to it or not, and much heightening of consciousness over that could profitably be done."

*not the Montréal choreographer.

• Michael Parkin. "Mixed Feelings". The Guardian, 4 March 1994. Reprinted as Appendix F(i) of Conference Report: First national TV/TS Conference, Leeds, 1974: 36
• Conference Report: First national TV/TS Conference. Leeds 1974.  Online.
• Martine O'Leary. "Competition" included in Conference Report: First national TV/TS Conference:26-8.
• Martine O'Leary. Gay Liberation, reformism and revolution. LSE-Gay Culture Society. Isophile Pamphlets, 16pp 1974. Online.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. The Transgender Phenomenon. London: Thousand Oaks; California: Sage. 2006: 3.
• Charles Smith.  The Evolution of the Gay Male Public Sphere in England and Wales, 1967-c.1983. PhD Thesis, Loughborough University, 2014: 154. Online.
• Rob M. "Gay Marxist". Splits and Fusions, July 21, 2023.  Online.

____________________________________________________________

A forgotten pioneer.  I wonder what happened to her?

Jeanne Hoff (1938 – 2023) psychiatrist

++original September 2013, revised February 2019 to include extra detail from Gill-Peterson's book, and December 2023 to acknowledge Jeanne's passing.

Eugene Hoff  was born in in St Louis.  Hoff did an MD at Columbia University, College of Physicians And Surgeons 1963 followed by a doctorate in solid state chemistry at University College, London (where he also converted to Catholicism), followed by training and a residency as a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

Hoffinitially thought of himself as homosexual, but in exploring homosexuality found out that he was not. He was introduced to the Harry Benjamin practice, possibly by Wardell Pomeroy of the Kinsey Institute.

Hoff was a guest on the NBC television program Not for Women Only where he (as she was still) explained transsexualism from a medical viewpoint referring to trans women as 'men' as was the then practice.

"You can say that you know that you are a woman, therefore you want to be one. But no woman I have ever asked has been able to tell me what that means, and I doubt that transsexuals will be the first to define it."

Harry Benjamin's successor Charles Ihlenfeld resigned the practice in 1976 to begin a psychiatric residency in the Bronx, and Hoff took over.  This was Hoff's first clinical practice other than the residency in St Louis.  The practice was being managed under the aegis of the Orentreich Medical Group, a dermatology and hair restoration practice, which was located at in the same building as the Benjamin practice at 1 East 72nd St. It was then still administered by Benjamin's office manager and assistant Virginia Allen.

Hoff fired Virginia, the nurse, Mary Ryan, and the physician, Agnes Nagy, and pleased Dr Orentreich by moving the practice downtown to a townhouse behind the Chelsea Hotel, at 223 West 22nd Street.

In this period Dr Hoff confronted the homophobic psychiatrist Charles Socarides in a television debate and challenged his reactionary views that homosexuality can be cured by psychoanalysis. 

Hoff was starting her own transition.

 
Her best known patient was the punk musician Jayne County, who wrote in her autobiography: 

"When I walked into the consulting room for my appointment, I nearly fainted: Dr Jean Hoff was a man who was going through the sex change himself. She looked like a woman in man's clothes, she wore men's clothes and no make-up, and she had short hair that was just beginning to grow out. Later on she went through the full change, changed her name to Janine Hoffand got her own practice.   

The best thing about Dr Hoff was that she kept asking me questions about myself over and over again, to make sure that I really knew what I wanted. She'd say things like, 'Do you think you'd ever go back to wearing men's clothes?' and I'd say, Yeah, sometimes I see a jacket I like and think it might be fun to wear.'  At the time I was talking to her about the full sex change, but I was really quite afraid, and I thought it would cut me offfrom all my folks. She said to me, 'Look, there are different degrees of transsexualism. You are a transsexual, but not all transsexuals have a full sex change. Some people are better offjust taking hormones and dressing as a woman. There are some transsexuals who go back to dressing as men. There are so many different degrees, and you shouldn't just assume that because you are transsexual you have to have a sex change. You should only get a sex change if you are one hundred and twenty five per cent sure about it. If you have the least hesitation about it, don't do it.'  That was one of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me. Dr Hoff also said that, given the kind of circles I was moving in, there really wasn't much need for me to have a sex change." 

Becoming Jeanne, 1979

Hoff completed her transition to Jeanne with surgery with Dr Granato in 1977. She was interviewed at home by Lynn Redgrave and Frank Fields immediately before surgery and two months afterwards. The resulting television program "Becoming Jeanne" won the prestigious Ohio State Broadcasting award in 1979.

It was now the case that for the first time a trans psychiatrist was in charge of a practice for trans persons. Gill-Peterson comments:

"Though the medical model was still based in gatekeeping and an unacknowledged racialization of gender, Hoff cared deeply about the well-being of her clients to a degree that is viscerally embedded in the archive she gifted to the Kinsey Institute. Her work demonstrates a level of empathy entirely absent from transsexual medicine since its advent—not to mention its predecessors in the early twentieth century— an ethic of care that, although greatly constrained by the material circumstances and history of psychiatry and endocrinology, was also entangled with her situated perspective as a trans woman. It is important to underline that Hoff represents yet another trans person who took an active and complicated role in medicine, rather than being its object."

Gill-Peterson has read Hoff's interview notes in her archive papers at the Kinsey Institute, and comments:

"Because she took the time to interview them without only reducing what they said to standard diagnostic biographies, her notes offer comparatively richer glimpses into trans boyhood than those of her predecessors." 

 

In 1978 Hoff became aware of a young black trans woman, then 30, who had been committed to a psychiatric Institution in New Jersey for 15 years.  Initially labeled  ‘schizophrenic’, her gender identity issues were taken as evidence of ‘delusion’, ‘mental retardation’ and ‘sexual perversion’. Hoff interviewed her, and petitioned for her release.

“Through all the florid language of the [psychiatric] reports there is an unmistakable moralistic disapproval of her effeminacy and homosexuality but not the slightest hint that the diagnosis of transsexualism was suspected, even though it was quite evident from the details provided. . . . She should be placed in the community, preferably living by herself” and “she should be permitted to explore the various problems that arise from cross-gender living, hormonal therapy, and surgical gender reassignment.” (quoted in Gill-Peterson)

However by 1980 there were few patients left in the practice, and Hoff had already taken a job in a psych ward in Brooklyn. The next year she sold the building on West 22nd St and moved away, first to Massachusetts and then California.

She became a psychiatrist at San Quentin prison. She was in the news in April-May 1998 when she was the only one of three psychiatrists to testify that murderer Horace Kelly might be competent to be executed, and the defense attorney attempted to impeach Hoff.

She retired after being assaulted during a counseling session by a death-row inmate.

In 2013 she donated her archives to the Kinsey Institute.

Jeanne Hoff died at age 85. 

• "Masculine, Feminine or Androgynous?" Not for Women Only. WNBC 1976  hosted by Polly Bergen and Frank Fields, produced by Madeline Amgott.  Archive 
  
• Becoming Jeanne…A Search for Sexual Identity. NBC 30 June 1978. Jeanne Hoff interviewed by Lynn Redgrave and Frank Fields.
  
• Kathleen Casey.  "Gay Catholics Hear Transsexual's Story".  Asbury Park Press, October 10, 1978: 23. 
• Jeanne Hoff. "Multiple personality disorder?" The Journal of clinical psychiatry, 48(4), Apr 1987. 
• Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995: 99-100.
• Michael Dougan. "Killer's mental records turn up". SFGate, April 17, 1998. Online,
  
• Maria L LaGanga. "Killer Understands He Faces Execution, Prosecutor Says". Los Angeles Times, May 01, 1998. Online.
  
• Michael Dougan. "Sanity trial outcome rests with minutiae". SFGate, May 5, 1998. Online.
  
• Sara Catania. "The Alienists: Where experts divide, jury must decide". LAWeekly, May 13 1998.  Archive.
  
• Andy Humm. "Socarides, Leading Anti-Gay Shrink, Dies". Gay City, 4,52 Dec 29-Jan 4, 2005. 
  
• "Jeanne Hoff Archive". The Kinsey Institute. Online. 
  
• SJ Parker. Emails to Zagria, 15,17 September 2013.
• Julian Gill-Peterson. Histories of the Trangender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018: 159-160, 171, 174, 192-3, 248n105, 251n32, 252n45, 253n79-82, 254n84-5.
• Andy Humm.  "Jeanne Hoff, first trans psychiatrist to serve trans people, dies at 85".  Gay City News, December 5, 2023.  Online. 

____________________________________________________________________________

Although Horace Kelly's lawyer subpoenaed Hoff's prison personnel file in an attempt to impeach her, he presumably hadn't heard rumours that she was transsexual, didn't find it in the file and didn't read her.   Otherwise he probably would have used it to defame her.   She had been in the 1978 television special under the same name, but that was 20 years earlier.   Before the Internet it was much more difficult to make connections.

Jeanne was also, in effect, outed in Jayne County's 1995 autobiography, but presumably the lawyer didn't read punk biographies.  

+++ Other sources led me to write that Hoff left New York in 1981, having sold her building at 223 West 22nd Street.  Gill-Peterson writes that she stayed in practice through the 1980s.  ??

Jenny O. Hushler (1862 - 1953) embroiderer, book seller.

(this article was previously of Jenny O.   However the discovery of her obituary gave us her surname.  Originally post 4/2/2015)

Hushler was born in Vorarlberg, Austria. Hushlet's father, a gamekeeper and horn player, died when Hushler was 5, of consumption, and his mother 1½ years later. Hushler was still wearing a dress after his brother, two years younger, had switched to trousers. The aunts who took in the orphan did not permit him girls' clothing except at Shrovetide (Mardi Gras).

After a few years in an orphanage of the Sisters of Mercy, Hushler stole some clothes from a girl of the same size and took her certificate of domicile and ran off to Switzerland, where she found work as a nanny, and taught herself embroidery. When she was 16, a man tried to force himself on her and denounced her as a 'hermaphrodite'.

Hushler moved to France and found work as an embroiderer. She also worked for a while as a man after a friend's boyfriend threatened to report her to the police. In 1882 Hushler emigrated to New York, and again worked as an embroiderer. A co-worker forced himself on her, and discovering her body, used threats of calling the police to make her an involuntary sex partner. One day when he was away Hushler dressed as a man and fled to Milwaukee and worked in a timber-yard and as a cook.

In 1885 Hushler arrived in San Francisco, where cross-dressing had been a crime since 1863. As a man Hushler became an itinerant bookseller using the name John, invested in property and began traveling for German newspapers. Indoors Hushler, as a woman, helped with children, and provided accommodation for dance-hall women.

In 1905 Hushler  wrote to the new German magazine Mutterschutz (Mother Protection) enclosing an article re feminine boys and men:

"If he is raised as a girl, then he will lose all doubt and will be more stable in his girlishness, so that he will then never will ever want to become a man; if he forced to behave as a boy, then he will feel destroyed and will yearn for the time when he can make a living as maid or something like that".

Despite that Mutterschutz advocated the equality of illegitimate children, legalization of abortion, and sexual education, it was not ready for this, and did not reply. Hushler then wrote to Magnus Hirschfeld enclosing the rejected article. They corresponded.  Jenny is Case 13 in the 1910 Die Transvestiten.  She provided photographs for the 1912 supplement to Die Transvestiten.

++ In 1922 Jenny moved to Mississippi, to the village of Waynesboro, population 700, 30% white.   She was quite accepted, her gender unquestioned, regarded as a spinster recluse.   She died there 31 years later at the age of 91, and only in preparation for burial was her gender history revealed.

• Magnus Hirschfeld. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Material. Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Buffalo: Prometheus Books.  1991: s. 1991: Case 13: 83-93.
• Magnus Hirschfeld & Max Tilke. Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb (Die Transvestiten). Illustrierter Teil. A. Pulvermacher, 1912: plate XXII.
• "Lived as Woman; Buried as One".  Humboldt Standard, March 23, 1953. 
• Clare Sears. Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Duke University Press, 2014: 74, 76, 78-80.

lili-elbe.de   

Thanks to researcher Kyle Phalen for finding the obituary.

_________________________________________________________________________________

If born a century later Jenny would, quite likely, have been an early transitioner. She did as much as she did without estrogens, and probably had no way to find out that there were cities others than San Francisco that did not have such anti-cross-dressing laws.

Brigitte Bond (1944 - ) beat girl, singer, performer

At the beginning of 1964 the then 19-year-old, Brigitte Bond, was signed as a singer by Tom Littlewood of the 2i’s Coffee Bar in London’s Soho which had launched early rock stars such as Tommy Steels and Cliff Richard. Mod, defined by fashionable clothes and modern jazz, was the new thing, and Mod had begun to incorporate the Jamaican music called Ska or Bluebeat. Brigitte had gigs across London with various aspiring musicians, and put out two songs as a 45 rpm single “Blue Beat Baby’ and “Oh Yeah Baby” backed by an impromptu group named the Bluebeats.

25 February 1964, the Jamaican Ska star, Prince Buster, arrived in England. He was met at Heathrow by a crowd of fans including Brigitte who was photographed dancing with him. This photo would later become iconic. The Daily Mirror dubbed her the Queen of Bluebeat. Prince Buster performed that same night at the prestigious May Fair Hotel and Brigitte was again photographed in attendance.

In April the Flamingo Club in Soho began a weekly Blue Beat Night, and Brigitte performed at the second show. Sir John Waller, 7^th Baronet of Braywick Lodge, a noted poet and gay, was not able to claim his full inheritance of £250,000 ( £4 million today adjusted for inflation) until marriage and a male heir. He had rejected many women. One day he walked past the 2i’s coffee bar and saw a poster promoting Brigitte. He already knew her manager Tom Littlewood, who was willing to introduce him to Brigitte. He proposed to her on their first date. She accepted. This did not stop her being featured in Tit-Bits magazine in early May, or attending a Mods gathering on the beach at Margate over the Whitsun Weekend. The engagement was in the press 21 May. However she would not be able to give him a baby, and the engagement was quickly called off. This resulted in press articles stating that Brigitte was trans, that were repeated internationally.

However this did not impede her career. She performed for a week at the prestigious Astor Club in Mayfair where royalty and gangsters mixed (and where the next year the gangsters, the Krays and the Richardsons, would clash and start a gang war). Brigitte transferred her management to the Arthur Lowe Agency who advertised her as “The controversial Sex Change girl with the velvet singing voice”. Other advertisements referred to her as “the Shapely French singer”. This was followed by a short African tour: Mombasa, Nairobi and Salisbury.

On return to London, Brigitte performed regularly at the Pelican Club in Soho, until it was raided for its nude dancers who broke the so-called Windmill Rule, that if nude the performer should not move. Brigitte, while not charged, was mentioned as “the worst”.

In 1965 Brigitte did a tour of South Africa and Rhodesia, and returned to headline at La Dolce Vita in Newcastle. She then did a residency In Madrid. Articles in the Spanish press mentioned her gender transition - although Spain was still ruled by Franco, this did not cause any problems.

In June 1966 US establishment preacher Billy Graham was in London for a month, and had denounced the newly fashionable mini-skirt. On 17 June he visited Soho as announced. Brigitte, who was now calling herself Brigitte St John, climbed on Graham’s car to protest his comments about miniskirts. The Sunday Mirror put her on the front page to make her point.

She moved to live in Spain. She claimed that she was in the 1967 James Bond film, Casino Royale, although she is not in the credits - however given the chaotic nature of the film with its many directors and cutting room compromises, she may well have been.

She is in the credits of three films 1967-1969: Herostratus, 1001 Nights and La muchacha del Nilo playing the role of ‘dancer’ in the first two and ‘Brigitte’ in the third.

By the late 1960s Brigitte St John was a ‘supervedette’ in Spain and elsewhere, mainly appearing in cabaret, and even appearing with Coccinelle. In 1974 she appeared at Madrid’s Gay Club, its first GLBT club as la Transición, the change away from Franco’s repression, was starting. She performed with the heterosexual transformista Paco España.

In April 1976 Brigitte was interviewed for a Spanish paper and revealed that she was married and living in Campania, Italy, and that her real name was Giovanna.

After that nothing was heard about her.

There was a revival of Ska in the late 1970s. The Birmingham band, The Beat, wanted a beat-girl logo for their first album and asked the cartoonist Hunt Emerson to create one. He took the 1964 photograph of Brigitte and Prince Buster dancing, and changed the image of Brigitte into an icon that has since then been that of the Beat Girl.

Melody Maker ran a story on the history in 1979, and included the 1964 photograph.

*not Bridget St John, the folk singer

• Brigitte Bond and The Bluebeats. “Blue Beat Baby / Oh Yeah Baby” 45 single 1964.
• “The King and Queen of Blue Beat meet”. Daily Mirror, 26 February 1964: 26.
• David Hunn. “Brigitte Bond: She has a built-in licence to thrill”. Tit-Bits, 9 May 1964: 13.
• “I’ll be Lady Waller in 4 Months says Brigitte”. The Evening Standard, 21 May 1964.
• “Where Boys Were”. Madera Tribune, 73,20, 10 June 1964, p3. Online
• “The Stripper who cried for shame”. Daily Mirror, November 14, 1964: 3.
• Brigitte St John. “Sin and Mini Skirts”. Sunday Mirror,June 19, 1966 p1.
• John Huston et al (dir). Casino Royal. With Peter Sellers, Orson Wells, Woody Allen etc and possibly Brigitte St John. US 131 mins 1967.
• Don Levy (dir). Herostratus. With Michael Gothard as Max and Brigitte St John as dancer. UK 142 mins 1967.
• José María Elorrieta (dir & scr). 1001 Nights. With Jeff Cooper and Brigitte St John as dancer. Spain & Italy 92 mins 1968.
• José María Elorrieta (dir). La muchacha del Nilo. With Rory Calhoun and Brigitte St John as Brigitte. Spain 81 mins 1969.
• Rachel Hebditch. “For Richer or Poorer .. Sir John weds a bride who could give birth to a £500,000 boy”. Daily Mirror, April 4, 1974 p9.
• “The Story of Ska”. Melody Maker, May 19, 1979.
• Victor Selwyn. “Obituaries: Sir John Waller Bt”. The Independent,21 February 1995. Online.
• Tony van den Bergh. “Obituary: Sir John Waller Bt”. The Independent, 4 March 1995. Online.
• Lloyd Bradley.Reggae: The Story of Jamaican Music. BBC Worldwide, 2002: 25.
• “The Beat Girl - Noted Cartoonist Hunt Emerson Designs a 2-Tone Era Icon”. Marco on the Bass, December 16, 2008.
• Der JB. “Who the f*** is Brigitte Bond?”. Over & Over(setter), 28 mai 2011. Online.
• Heather Augustyn. Women in Jamaican Music. McFarland, 2020: 87.
• Joanna Wallace with Heather Augustyn.Blue Beat Baby: The Untold Story of Brigitte. YouTube
• Heather Augustyn. Rude Girls: Women in 2 Tone and One Step Beyond. Half Pint Press, 2022.

Discogs            IMDB

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Thanks in particular for Joanna Wallace’s 30 minute YouTube documentary in compiling this.

Given the popularity of Brigitte Bardot (same spelling of Brigitte) and James Bond (the 3^rd film was soon to be released) in 1964, one can see how she chose her name.

Sometimes it is said that Brigitte was either Maltese or from Marseilles. Sometimes that she had done British military service as a male. National Service required two years between the ages of 17-20. However it was discontinued in 1960 when Brigitte was 15. She may have volunteered - but how to fit in two such years, and then gender transition and surgery all before arriving at the 2i’s club as age 19?

Heather Augustyn’s new book. Rude Girls, on Ska music has a section on Brigitte Bond.

Wallace says that “Blue Beat Baby” came out in March, after Prince Buster’s tour. However it is referred to in the Daily Mirror article 26/2/64.

The Flamingo Club had become well-known after a fight there in October 1962 between lovers of Christine Keeler led to revelations of her affair with John Profumo, the Minister of War, that in turn led to the defeat of the Conservative Government in 1964. For more on the Flamingo Club see Chp 11 in Rob Baker’s Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics, 2015. Also online.

Both the Wikipedia entry and the first obituary re Waller in the Independent say nothing at all about John Waller being gay and nothing about Brigitte. Both of them skip from the 1950s to the 1970s. Waller did eventually marry in April 1974, and had a daughter. However, due to the sexist nature of aristocracy, this did not count. He died in 1995 without ever getting the full inheritance.

The single:

Brigitte's dance in the film Herostratus:

Joanna Wallace's essential 30 minute documentary 

Albin Pleva (1912 - 194?) dancer

 Albin Pleva was a travelling travesti dancer, who occasionally supplemented her income by some sex work.  She was arrested by the Czech authorities subservient to the Nazi occupation for being "irredeemable" and was interned at a concentration camp, a huge pig farm at Lety.  

There is no further information about her, and so it is assumed that she died there.

• Jan Seidl.  "Legal Imbroglio in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" in Régis Schlagdenhauffen (ed) Queer in Europe During the Second World War.  Council of Europe, 2018: 59.
• "Homosexuel.le.s en Europe Pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale". Mémoire des sexualités.   Online.
• "Albín Pleva, imitátor žen, 30. léta". www.queerpamet.cz.     Online.  

Josefine Meißauer (188? - ?) friar, trader

Original version February 2015. 

Meißauer was born to a devout Catholic family in Mühldorf, Bavaria, the youngest of six children. The father - addicted to drink - left 14 years later.  One brother died of consumption, and one sister of dropsy. Josef (as she then was) went through many illnesses from childhood, including a severe meningitis at the age of 28, which left him unconscious for several weeks. 

Meißauer was an anxious child, who preferred the company of girls, took great pleasure in dolls, learned to cook and embroider at his own request. Even as a boy he secretly dressed in girls' clothes as often as he could and, when his hair was long enough, he braided it, about which he was often ridiculed.  Puberty was late, and there was no beard growth until age 25. Meißauer tried repeatedly to fight his female gender identity, however prolonged abstinence from women's clothing always led to severe mental depression. 

Meißauer had been a sacristan at the local church for seven years, but lost the position after being seen in female clothing during Carnival. He responded by becoming a Trappist friar - possibly because the friars wear robes rather than ordinary male clothing. The Trappist order is severe and requires silence, sleeping in full clothes, vegetarian diet and hard field work. Meißauer was assigned to a friary in Natal, South Africa. However after almost four years, Meißauer fell ill and returned to Bavaria. 

Meißauer then  started wearing a long dark coat and was accused of impersonating a priest but was acquitted. To avoid a repetition Meißauer wore a coloured coat, and was again brought to court. The judge pointed out that there was no law concerning the type of clothing. The only thing was that one was not allowed to wear the costume that characterised a certain class, e.g. a uniform. Meißauer took this to mean that she could dress in normal female clothing.  Also she had heard of that in Schliersee, district office of Miesbach, Upper Bavaria, a ‘lady’ named Rosina Danner had gone dressed as a man without any permission for 30 years until dying in 1908. However Meißauer, dressed female, was accused again in 1910, sentenced in the first and second instance, but acquitted by the Royal High Court of Munich on 24 December 1910.

 

After Magnus Hirschfeld's book Die Transvestiten came out in 1910, Meißauer, who was then 48, contacted him in early September 1911. The Berlin lawyer, Fritz Selten, took the case and submitted the application with a recommendation written by Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch to the Prussian Police Prasidium, which on 27 September 1911, on the basis of the expert opinion, "granted permission to wear women's clothes”.  The same written legitimation was also issued by the Munich police chief.

 

Josefine Meißauer was the first trans woman in Germany to get a Transvestitenshein.

• Magnus Hirschfeld, & Max Tilke. Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb (Die Transvestiten). Illustrierter Teil. A. Pulvermacher, 1912: plate XVIII.
•  Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005: 79-84.

Emi Wolters (Luz Fraumann) performer (186? - ?)

Wolters wore girls’ clothing until the start of school, and still then during vacations: she was called Hanne by the farm personnel and still later by grandfather. At the age of 13, her custody was transferred to an uncle, a professor. And the wearing of female clothing was stopped completely. Wolter’s voice did not change until the age of 20, and there was no beard growth until age 25. 

As a man Wolters took a wife, and developed a career on stage. By 1906 Wolters had written Weiberbeute, a forced-femininity novel about a mannish woman who hypnotises her stepson to think that he is a woman. She then induces a phantom pregnancy on him, and persuades him that her son is his. Her death-bed confession is dismissed by her victim as delusion. The novel was published in Budapest under the pseudonym Luz Fraumann. 

Magnus Hirschfeld included Wolters as Case #3 in his 1910 Die Transvestiten where she is referred to as Mr C. Hirschfeld also gives an extended quotation from Weiberbeute. 

During the Great War, Wolters (under her male name of Emil Mauder) was a senior lieutenant in the German army, and was taken captive by the Russians. 

In the 1920s Wolters became a well-known columnist in the trans magazines, Die Freundin and Das 3, Geschlecht. She wrote the following in Die Freundin in 1931.

“Dear Sister Ilse P.! I am one of the oldest and first cases of medical advisor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and I know from forty years of experience that even this great researcher in sexuality had first had to learn from us and how he changed his original views and findings. [...] But above all, dear fellow sisters, you should read up on the transvestite literature (I mean especially the scientific literature!). Dr. Hirschfeld has worked hard and thoroughly for us. The fact that he previously described the cross-dressing drive as pathological, and coined the not entirely accurate word "transvestitism" etc. is nothing essential, but came from developments in this field.“ 

In 1932 she drew upon more than 100 letters sent into Die Freudin, as well as newspaper reports and Hirschfeld’s Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges (Sexual History of the World War), 1930, to highlight patriotic deeds and courage under fire of both trans men and trans women. Also that year she wrote an account of how the English Queen Elizabeth Tudor had been biologically male.

++The next year, after the Nazi takeover, Wolters was mentioned several times as a correspondent and contributing author during the trial of fellow trans person Anton Maier, but was not herself arrested.

• Luz Frauman.Weiberbeute:Ein merkwürdiger Roman. Budapest: Verlag von M. W. Schneider, 1906.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Materia.  Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910: 18-25, 171-7. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Prometheus Books, 1991: 27-32, 132-9.
• Emi von Wolters. “Die Welt der Transvestism”. Die Freundin, 7, 26, 1931.
• Emi Wolters, “Transvestiten im Weltkriege [8-part series, 24 February to 13April 1932, in ‘Die Welt der Transvestiten’ supplement],” Die Freundin 8, nos. 8 to 15 (1932).
• Emi Wolters. “Ein Transvestit als Königin”. Das 3, Geschlect,5, May 1932: 16-25.
• Annette Runte. Biographische Operationen : Diskurse der Transsexualität.Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996: 131,412, 568, 582.
• Graham Robb. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. WW Norton & Company, 2003: 205.
• Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005: 35.
• Rainer Herrn. "Transvestitismus in der NS-Zeit – Ein Forschungsdesiderat".  Zeitschrift fur Sexualforschung, 26, 2013: 349.
• Katie Sutton. Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s–1930s. University of Michigan Press, 2019: 115, 193, 196, 257n96, 284n109
• “Luz Fraumann (Hirschfeld 3)”. Lili Elbe library. Online.

Gerda von Zobeltitz (1891 – 1963) tailor

Original version November 2014.  Revised March 2022.

G. von Zobeltitz from Weißensee, Berlin, a scion of one of Germany's old noble families with ties to the Hohenzollern court, was making a living in Berlin as Gerda, a women's tailor, by 1910, and she was also sometimes a dancer.

In 1912 she was counselled by Magnus Hirschfeld and his colleague Ernst Burchard, and submitted a request for a Transvestitenschein, which would allow her to legally wear female clothing.  Later that year she was arrested in Berlin for public cross-dressing, as reported in the Berliner Tageblatt: "the alleged culprit was soon released once it was determined that it was a case not of disorderly conduct but instead of transvestism". 

Within a year Gerda had acquired the  Transvestitenschein in Potsdam, and when called for military recruitment in 1913, she appeared as Gerda and was deemed ineligible.

However in 1916 she lost her Transvestitenschein after a grand uncle's denunciatory intervention.

Despite this she did survive the Third Reich, possibly because she married a woman and therefore could not be accused of 'homosexuality'.  She had three wives throughout her life.
… 

At the age of 72 Gerda was run over by a car on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. She is buried in the  Friedhof Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche.

• Berliner Tageblatt, 106, 27 February 1912.
  
• Jens Dobler. Von anderen Ufern. Geschichte der Berliner Lesben und Schwulen in Kreuzberg und Friedrichshain. Berlin: Bruno Gmünder Verlag 2003: 75.
• Katja Koblitz, : „In ihm hat die Natur das berühmte dritte Geschlecht geschaffen“. Gerda von Zobeltitz, ein Transvestit aus Weißensee. In: Sonntags-Club (Hrsg.): Verzaubert in Nord-Ost. Die Geschichte der Berliner Lesben und Schwulen in Prenzlauer Berg, Pankow und Weißensee. Berlin: Bruno Gmünder 2009: 58-80; 
• Letzte Änderung. "Verzaubert in Nord-Ost". Übersicht von Invertito 12, 31.07.2012. www.invertito.de/det3/d_inv1257.html.
  
• Robert Beachy. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. Knopf, 2014: 172.
  
• “Gerda von Zobeltitz”. In: Persönlichkeiten in Berlin 1825 - 2006. Erinnerungen an Lesben, Schwule, Bisexuelle, trans- und intergeschlechtliche Menschen. Senatsverwaltung für Arbeit, Integration und Frauen, Berlin 2015: 82-3. PDF.

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We know of Gerda 1912-16, and of her death in 1963.   But what in-between?   In particular, we know very little of how she survived two world wars and the Nazi regime?

Charlotte Charlaque (1892 - 1963) actress, translator, Hirschfeld patient

Charlaque was born in Berlin-Schöneberg and raised with the name Curt Scharlach. There was a brother Hans, seven years older. The family, who were Jewish, emigrated to the US at the turn of the century and settled in San Francisco, where Edmund Scharlach worked as a sales representative in textiles. However the mother, Jenny, returned to Germany in 1910. Edmund, who had become a US citizen stayed and remarried in 1916. 

Hans returned to Germany shortly after the start of the Great War in 1914. After 1919 he worked as an independent banker, until he sold his business in the mid-1920s. Curt worked briefly as a female impersonator, and consulted Harry Benjamin who suggested Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin.  Curt moved to Berlin in 1922 when Jenny was seriously ill, and lived with Hans for a while, but also spent time in France and became proficient in the language. 

Increasingly Curt was rather Charlotte, and obtained a Transvestitenschein, to legally dress as the woman that she felt she was. She had completion surgery at the Am Urban hospital in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1929-30, under the aegis of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. The surgery was done by Erwin Gohrbandt, and Felix Abraham paid the required 50 Reichsmarks. Like Dörchen Richter, Charlotte worked at the Institute, Dörchen as a maid, Charlotte as a receptionist. Her formal name was now Charlotte Curtis Charlaque. 

Charlotte met Toni Ebel and introduced her to Hirschfeld who accepted her into the surgical program.  Toni had completion surgery in several operations in 1932. By that time Charlotte and Toni had become lovers. The Swedish journalist Ragnar Ahlstedt visited them at their flat at Nollendorfstraße 24 in Berlin-Schöneberg, and wrote about them in his Män som blivit kvinnor, 1933. They lived cheaply: Charlotte said that she was an actress and Toni was able to sell some paintings and drawings. 

Under Charlotte’s guidance, Toni converted to Judaism. In addition Toni had previously been a member of the Socialist USPD. After the Nazi takeover, one of Toni’s half sisters warned them that they were under observance, and they fled to Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, the largest spa town in Europe, in May 1934. Charlotte gave English and French lessons, and Toni painted pictures for guests at the spa. The next year they moved to Prague and then to Brno. However they had to report to the police every fortnight and were advised to leave. 

So they returned to Prague in 1938. Charlotte taught English and French and also gave acting courses and worked as a translator. She translated at least three stage works by the Czech writer Olga Scheinpflugová (1902-1968) into English. These are the dramas Chladné světlo (The Cold Light) , Láska není všecko (Love is not everything) and Pan Grünfeld a strašidla (Mr. Greenfeld and the Ghosts). 

In March 1942 Charlotte was arrested by the Czechoslovak Aliens Police and jailed for being a Jew. Toni managed to persuade the Swiss consul that Charlotte was a US citizen, that she had submitted her documents to the US consul in Vienna and was waiting for a new passport. This resulted in Charlotte being sent to an “American camp” and later deported to the US. She sailed from Lisbon 2 July 1942. Toni attempted to follow but was not approved as Reichsdeutsche, and was not allowed to travel to Lisbon.

In New York Charlotte had to endure an extended medical exam. She was taken in by the Red Cross who housed her in a poor house in Leroy Street, Manhattan. She did some translations but suffered in her gallbladder and she had a stomach ulcer. She corresponded with Toni who settled in East Germany. She could not afford to return to Germany, and as a Jew was reluctant to do so. Later she made a living coaching young actors in “English diction”, and she also acted in several Off-Broadway productions, and was known for a while as the Queen of Brooklyn Heights Promenade. In December 1952 she wrote to Christine Jorgensen’s parents to explain that she too was transsexual.

• Ragnar Ahlstedt. Män som blivit kvinnor. Två fall av könsväxling på operative väg. En study of transvestitism. Tranås: mountain, 1933: 4.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press. 2002: 30, 48, 294n53.
• Raimund Wolfert. “ ‘Sage, Toni, denkt man so bei euch drüben?’ Auf den Spuren von Curt Scharlach alias Charlotte Charlaque (1892 -?) und Toni Ebel (1881-1961)”. Lesbengeschichte, 3/2015. Online. And also at issuu.com   Online.
• Raimund Wolfert. Charlotte Charlaque: Transfrau, Laienschauspielerin, „Königin der Brooklyn Heights Promenade“. Hentrich & Hentrich, 2021.
• Rivka Wolf. “Finding My Queer Heritage: My great-aunt Charlotte was trans and queer. Her story was lost to my family: until now”. Medium.com, Sep 14, 2021. Online.

DE.Wikipedia(Toni Ebel)

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Two Nazi-era German films, Liebe geht - wohin sie will, 1935 and Junges Blut, 1936 feature an actor Hans Scharlach. It is not known whether this is Charlotte’s brother.

Wolfert says of the ‘American camp’ that it was “probably the Liebenau internment camp, which was set up in 1940 in a former sanatorium near Tettnang (Lake Constance district) in southern Germany. Foreign women and children from the entire German Reich or interned in areas occupied by the Wehrmacht, which were intended for exchange with Americans and British of German origin.”

Meyerowitz discusses Charlotte Charlaque under the pseudonym of Carla van Crist.

There is no mention of any Charlotte or ‘queen of Brooklyn Heights’ in Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn was Queer.

Bobbie Spong (191? - 1944) performer, WWII Prisoner of War

Spong was the son of the licencee of the Six Bells, Kings Road, Chelsea. On 7-8^th December 1941 he was a private in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps stationed in Singapore. On that day Japanese forces attacked Thailand, Dutch East Indies, the UK colonies of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya. and the US colonies of the Philippines and Hawai’i.

The 60,000 British empire forces in Singapore and Malaya finally surrendered 15 February 1942, what Churchill called "the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history". Most UK and Australian troops, and later Dutch civilians, were imprisoned in the Selarang Barracks, near to Changi, an existing prison at the east end of Singapore. The Barracks also became referred to as Changi. 850 died in captivity, others were transported to work as forced labour in Japan or on the Thai-Burma railway (which included a bridge over the river Kwai).

Morale was inevitably bad, and the officers encouraged sports and theatricals. One of the first were The Mumming Bees concert parties, and it was at these that Bobbie Spong, who had already made somewhat of a name as a performer, first became well-known. Bobbie impersonated comedienne Beatrice Lillie, film star Marlene Dietrich and female impersonator Douglas Byng. From there Spong branched out into comedy sketches and revues, almost always in female parts. Even the Japanese and Korean guards came to watch. One night her appearance was greeted by a roar of applause that was heard across the island. 

Somehow Spong had managed to bring into the prison camp a full set of female clothing including corsets. He was allowed to grow his hair to a feminine length. Bobbie often stayed in role offstage. In particular she would tour the hospital wards and sing for those too sick to attend the performances. She was so convincing that when she sat on a patient’s bed they would blush and attempt to cover their nakedness. Late in 1943 when Private Spong returned to the Chungkai camp in Thailand from a work-camp up the line, and converted to Bobbie for a show, she was so convincing that the Japanese officers stopped the show and demanded proof of her manhood. Both Japanese and Korean guards often asked Bobbie to give a private performance in their quarters. This she did, graciously accepting fruit and cigarettes, and then would quickly flee back to her own quarters.

On Christmas Day 1943, Bobbie - in a light green and orange frock and hat - was in the hospital to give out cigarettes. Later that day she was at the mock horse races where everybody dressed up the best that they could. She kissed the winners of the races. The day ended with Bobbie under a large tree singing from the Douglas Byng repertoire.

The theatre at Chungkai.  Bobbie sitting front right.

On 29 April 1944 the shows were cancelled because the Japanese had taken all the theatrical paraphernalia for the celebration of the Emperor’s birthday. Bobbie was part of a burlesque football match that was hastily arranged instead.

West London Press, 32/10/1952 p1

Bobbie’s final appearance was in mid-May 1944 at Chungkai camp. Spong then shocked everyone by volunteering for a work detail in Japan because her best friend had been drafted for it. Departure was 8 June. By then Spong had had his hair cut, but managed to pack twenty frocks in his rucksack. 1300 POWs were crammed into an unmarked transport ship. The ship was spotted, torpedoed and sunk by a US submarine - very few survived.

• “Pledge Renewed”, West London Press,October 31, 1952: 1.
• Sears Eldredge. “Wonder Bar: Music and Theatre as Strategies for Survival in a Second World War POW Hospital Camp” in Gilly Carr & Harold Mytum (eds). Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire.Routledge, 2012.
• Sears Eldredge. “ ‘We Girls’: Female Impersonators in Prisoner-of-War Entertainments on the Thailand-Burma Railway”. Popular Entertainment Studies, 5, 1, 2014: 74-99.
• Sears A Eldredge. “The Uncomparable Bobbie” in Captive Audiences / Captive Performers: Music and Theatre as Strategies for Survival on the Thailand-Burma Railway 1942-1945. Macelester College, 2014: 533-8.

The first US Trans Women up to 1966

1966, the date of Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon, and the start of surgeries at John Hopkins and other university clinics is of course the obvious cut-off point.

As in the British list, the criteria for inclusion here are either surgery or living full-time and often both. 

Sophia Gibons social transition by 1860, and continued to her death in 1885.

Mrs Noonan, previously Mrs Clifford and then Mrs Nash - social transition before 1868, and continued through three husbands to her death in 1878.

Peggy Yule social transition at age 15 in 1875, and continued to her death in 1965.

Elizabeth Berger social transition at age 9, and continued until outed at age 57 in 1931.

Frances Anderson social transition before 1890, and continued until death in 1928.

Lucy Hicks Anderson social transition as a child in the 1890s, and continued until death in 1954, despite being outed in the 1940s.

Stella Angel social transition 1894.

Frances Carrick social transition 1903.

Georgia Black social transition in 1921, and continued so until her death in 1951.

Jenny Hushler, immigrated from Austria 1882, oscilated while in San Francisco, full social transition on moving to Mississippi in 1922.

Rachael Watson arrested in 1922. in South Carolina.

Elsie Marks, the Cobra woman who did a snake act, social transition in the 1920s, was married and lived so until her death in 1946 after being bitten by a rattlesnake.

Charlotte Charlaque social transition 1920s, surgery in Berlin 1929-30.

Mary Baker social transition in 1927, and worked as a waitress, laundress, chorine, nurse. She was also married. However in 1937 she was arrested for making "improper advances" on an undercover policeman in Brooklyn.

193?. Dr Stanley, Chief Surgeon of the California State Prison, St. Quentin, while examining an apparently male prisoner, he discovered that the prisoner had been surgically transformed into a woman.

Clarabelle, the queen of Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill, lived full-time as female in the 1930s. Her story has been lost. She was succeeded by Wilhemena and then Carioca (who later died on an operating table in Calexico) of whom we know even less.

Josephine Montgomery social transition in the 1930s. This went well until she was arrested and convicted of strong-arm robbery in 1950. (Bullough p567)

A woman, who had been born with the name William Richeson, had been married for six years before being outed in 1937. Her husband was completely surprised. (Bullough p567)

Adele Best. Vern Bullough tells us “ Mrs. Adele Best lived as a woman for 54 years with no one the wiser, including apparently, at least according to her own testimony, her three husbands”, but gives no dates. (p567)

Barbara Wilcox had social transition before 1941, surgery 1956

Louise Lawrence social transition 1944.

Hedy Jo Star social transition 1945, surgery 1962.

Claire Elgin social transition early 1950s, surgery 1953

Pussy Katt surgery 1945 in Mexico.

Sally Barry had social transition in the 1940s, surgery 1953-8.

Carla Sawyer social transition 1949, surgery 1957?

Jela Hicks social transition circa 1950, outed and charged in 1958.

Christine Jorgensen surgery 1951-2 and 1969, social transition 1952

Charlotte McLeod - surgery and social transition 1953

Dixie MacLane social transition 1953, surgery 1955.

Tamara Rees social transition 1952, surgery 1955 in the Netherlands.

Annette Dolan social transition 195?, surgery 1954.

Patricia Morgan social transition mid 1950s, surgery in 1961 with Elmer Belt.

Agnes  social transition 1956, surgery 1959.

Gayle Sherman sociually transition 1956, surgery late 1960s?

Clara Miller surgery and social transition 1957

The person previously called William O’Connell - surgery 1960 (Benjamin p74-81)

Beverly-Barbara social transition 1958, surgery 1968.

Betty social transition 1961, surgery 1962.

Paula Neilsen surgery 1963.

Abby Sinclair surgery 1963 in Casablanca.

Désirée social transition and marriage in 1960s, murdered by her husband.

Judy Bowden social transition 1965, surgery 1971.

Harriet/Ava surgery 1965 in Europe, later became a wife. (Benjamin p83)

Lorraine Channing social transition mid 1960s, Surgery 1967.

The unnamed actor whose photograph is in Benjamin’s book. Surgery before 1966.

Phyllis Avon Wilson social transition 1960s, surgery 1966 (the first at Johns Hopkins)

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Warner Book, 1966, 1977.
• Vern Bullough. “Transsexualiism in History”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 4,5, 1975.
• Leslie Feinberg. Trans Gender Warriors.Beacon Press, 1996.
• Roberta Perkins. “Famous Trannies” Polare 13, September 2015.

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