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Trans History - People, Cultures & Events
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People
The contributions transgender and gender non-conforming people have made to the world are far too numerous to comprehensively list here. Instead, we will feature a few of the individuals who are either courageous examples of self-determination or significant historical figures as a result of events in their lives.
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Albert D. J. Cashier (1843 - 1915) On August 6, 1862, Albert Cashier enlisted into the 95th Illinois Infantry Regiment and was assigned to Company G. The regiment was part of the Union Army and fought in approximately forty battles. He was once captured, but escaped back to Union lines after overpowering a prison guard. On May 5, 1911, Cashier was moved to the Soldier and Sailors home in Quincy, Illinois. He lived there until he was moved to the Watertown State Hospital. A couple of attendants there discovered his biological sex (female) when they tried to give him a bath, and he was forced to wear a dress. |
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Lili Elbe (1882 - 1931) Lili Elbe was a trans woman and one of the first identifiable recipients of male to female sex reassignment surgery. It is believed that Elbe was probably intersexual and may have had Klinefelter's Syndrome or some other SRY gene transfer condition. In 1930 Elbe went to Germany for surgery, which was only in an experimental state at the time. A series of five operations were carried out over a period of two years. The first surgery was made under the supervision of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. The rest of Elbe's surgeries were carried out by Dr. Kurt Warnekros in the Dresden Municipal Women's Clinic. Elbe died in 1931, due to complications three months after her fifth and last operation. The cause of death is believed to have been transplant rejection. She is buried in Dresden, Germany. |
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Dr. Alan L. Hart |
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Roberta Cowell Roberta is well known both for being the first UK trans person to undergo gender confirmation surgery (in 1951, two years before Christine Jorgensen in the US) and for her colorful existence as fighter pilot, prisoner of war and race car driver. Roberta was able to change her birth certificate fairly easily in those far flung days (this was in the days before the judgment in Corbett v Corbett) changed trans people's lives until the advent of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004. |
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Michael Dillon In the early 1940's, Dillon sought out Sir Harold Gillies, Britain's top plastic surgeon. Gillies had reconstructed the genitals of wounded soldiers but he had never built a penis from scratch on a woman's body. It would be a grueling process and Gillies could not guarantee the results. Dillon eventually underwent a series of thirteen operations to construct a penis. He began the treatments in 1946 and he finished his surgeries in1949, a year before he met Roberta Cowell (see above). |
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Christine Jorgensen Christine Jorgensen was a major contributor to the unfolding of the so-called "sexual revolution" in America. The first widely known person to have sex reassignment surgery, Jorgensen heard about the possibility of surgery and began taking the female hormone ethinyl estradiol on her own. During a trip to Copenhagen to visit relatives Jorgensen met Dr. Christian Hamburger, a Danish endocrinologist and specialist in rehabilitative hormonal therapy. Jorgensen ended up staying in Denmark, eventually undergoing a series of surgeries. A media sensation developed on December 1, 1952 when the New York Daily News carried a front-page story (under the headline "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty") announcing that Jorgensen had become the recipient of the first "sex change". This claim is not true, however, as the type of surgery in question had actually been performed by pioneering German doctors in the late 1920s and early 1930s. |
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April Ashley (1935 - Present) 'It always makes me laugh when people say I was born a man," says April Ashley. "I was born a baby, not a man. From the year dot, I knew I was female, so as soon as I could kneel down to say my prayers, it would be 'God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy, and please let me wake up and be a girl.' " The case of Corbett v Corbett is a divorce case involving Ms. Ashley (then married to plaintiff Arthur Corbett) which set a legal precedent regarding the identity status of transsexuals in the United Kingdom. The result of this case (which defined April Ashley as a man) was then used to define the sex of transsexual people for many purposes until the introduction of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. |
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David Reimer (1965 - 2004) David Reimer was a Canadian man who was born as a healthy male (with a twin brother named Brian), but was sexually reassigned and raised as female named "Brenda" after his penis was accidentally destroyed during circumcision. Psychologist and researcher John Money oversaw the case and falsely reported the reassignment as successful, and evidence that gender identity is primarily a learned behavior. It was called the "John/Joan" case. The case came to international attention in 1997 when he told his story to Milton Diamond, an academic sexologist who persuaded Reimer to allow him to report the outcome in order to dissuade physicians from treating other infants similarly. Soon after, Reimer went public with his story and author John Colapinto published a widely disseminated and influential account in Rolling Stone magazine in December 1997. They went on to elaborate the story in a book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. On the morning of May 5, 2004 David Reimer drove to the parking lot of a nearby grocery store, parked his car and fatally shot himself. |
Cultures
Called Kathoey, Fa'afafine, Two-Spirit, Kinnar, Muxe, GenderQueer or some other culturally specific name, transgender individuals have always been an important part of the global human fabric.
Events
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Murder of Brandon Teena (1993) Brandon was an American trans man who was raped and murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska in December 1993. His life and death were the subject of the Academy Award-winning 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, which was based on the documentary film The Brandon Teena Story. Teena's violent death, along with the murder of Matthew Shepard, led to increased lobbying for hate crime laws in the United States. Brandon Teena is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Lincoln, Nebraska, his headstone inscribed with his birth name and the epitaph "daughter, sister, & friend." |
