Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1800 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.
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Slightly off-topic: Zelda Suplee, later Reed Erickson's office manager, the person who actually ran the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), the first US organization for transsexuals, had managed nudist camps in the 1950-1960s. From this she became the first full-frontal nude in Playboy (in black-and-white).
It is currently being announced by the Playboy publicity department that "Ines Rau is Playboy’s first (sic) transgender Playmate"! This despite Ines' previous appearance in Playboy in 2014, and despite Amanda Lear, Roberta Close, Caroline Cossey and Vittoria Schisano. This false claim is being repeated uncritically by both the mainstream press and by trans bloggers.
Walter Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and played the piano from the age of six. Walter took a bachelor's degree in physics at Brown University, and a master’s in music at Columbia University in 1965.
Working at Gotham Recording Walter became friendly with Robert Moog, the inventor of the synthesizer that is known by his name. Walter took naturally to the instrument, and managed to get a small advance from Columbia records to create what became the best-selling Switched-On Bach - a series of Bach compositions arranged for the synthesizer. This was one of the first classical LPs to sell over a million copies.
By this time, as Wendy, she had become a patient of Dr Harry Benjamin, and completed her transition in 1972. However Wendy was still 'Walter' to her audience. When writing the score for A Clockwork Orange she would dress as a man for meetings with Stanley Kubrick who later commented: 'I could tell he felt something was strange. But I didn't know what.' She appeared on The Dick Cavett Show disguised as man. In 1979 she finally told the world of her gender in an interview with Playboy.
From that point all her albums carry the name ‘Wendy Carlos’.
Her hobby is eclipse chasing which involves flying to obscure parts of the globe.
In 1998 she sued Momus for a silly song called ‘Walter Carlos’ which suggested that Wendy would go back in time and marry Walter. Momus settled out of court, removed the song from the CD and paid legal fees.
'Playboy Interview: Wendy/Walter Carlos' . Playboy. May 1979.
Susan Reed & Barbara Rowes. “After a sex change and several eclipses, Wendy Carlos treads a new digital moonscape”. People Weekly. 24, 1 July 1985.
She started to live as female full time in her teens, and secretly took female hormones. She was exempted from Brazilian national service, after she reported in a dress, which led to her father, a senior army officer, disowning her for many years.
She became famous as a model and actress by the age of 20 using the stage name Roberta Close, and was the first pre-op to appear in Brazilian Playboy. After gender surgery at Charing Cross Hospital in London in 1989 she was featured in a Brazilian men's magazine and voted by readers ‘Most Beautiful Woman in Brazil’.
She tried to challenge Brazilian laws that prevent her from using a female name or listing her gender as female, but lost in the Supreme Court in 1997. In 1999 she was arrested for having a female passport.
She lives in Switzerland, where she married her manager, Roland Granacher in 1993.
In 1998 she published her autobiography in which she claims involvements with Eddie Murphy, Robert de Niro and many others.
Only in 2005 did she acquire female status in Brazil and a new birth certificate.
She has acted in five Brazilian films, mainly in the 1990s.
Roberta Close. Muito Prazer, Roberta Close (Much Pleasure, Roberta Close). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rosa dos Tempos. 1998.
Updated 15 March 2012, 2 Feb 2013, 15 October 2013, 21March 2016.
Zelda was raised in New York City, and did a BA at New Jersey College for Women (now part of Rutgers University).
She was a keen nudist. With her then husband, Reed Suplee (1916-86), she owned and managed three nudist camps in the period 1930s – 1950s, and was in Doris Wishman’s Diary of a Nudist, 1961, and also in The Moving Finger, 1963 and The Parisienne and the Prudes, 1964 – all nudist films. She was the first full-frontal nude in Playboy magazine (in black-and-white).
For 17 years she was editor and researcher of True Story, True Detective and Master Detective Magazine. She was a consulting sexologist, an hypnotist and one of the first to do past-life regressing, and was interested in all kinds of health and psychic phenomena.
In 1965, after Reed Erickson had founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), he hired Zelda to run it. From her office in New York she and lesbian feminist activist Phyllis Saperstein (they had met in a nudist camp) managed the daily operations, and the contacts with transsexuals who asked for help. Erickson made the final decisions about who and what he funded, but spent much of his time in Baton Rouge and then Mexico with his family.
In 1969 EEF and the Albany Trust co-sponsored a symposium, “The First International Congress on Gender Identity" in London. Zelda was the co-ordinator. In 1971 she was part of the First National Conference on Religion and the Homosexual, which took part in New York, and several time attended police conventions where EEF pamphlets were distributed. She compiled the EEF newsletter 1969-76 which reported the ongoing dialogue between EEF, trans people and associated professionals. In 1971 EEF sponsored production of a 28-minute docuentary, I am Not This Body, which featured a discussion in the EEF office between Zelda, Leo Wollman, two trans women and actress Pamela Lincoln (who was purportedly seeking information about transsexuals).
Also around that time Zelda introduced Doris Wishman, whom she had known since Diary of a Nudist, to Leo Wollman, which resulted in the film Adam or Eve, 1971, which was later recut with additional footage and finally released as Let Me Die a Woman, 1978.
Zelda was also Erickson's contact with psychic research and healing. In 1971 her apartment was the location for pioneering infrared photography of psychic energy. In 1976 she was given a pre-publication copy of the book, A Course in Miracles, which she passed on to Reed who financed its printing.
Zelda was the public face of EEF until it closed in 1977.
In 1981, at the 7th International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, HBIGDA presented lifetime achievement awards to Reed Erickson, Zelda and Harry Benjamin.
In 1983 she moved to Los Angeles to handle Erickson's dealings with ONE Inc..
Zelda introduced Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna to some of the transsexuals whom they interviewed for their book, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, 1985.
After EEF, she moved to Galveston to start the Janus Information Facility (JIF) with Paul Walker who was a co-founder of HBIGDA.
She died aged 81 in Los Angeles.
Doris Wishman (dir). Diary of a Nudist, with Zelda R Suplee as the camp director. US 72 mins 1961.
Nicholas Ghosh. "Tribute to Zelda R. Suplee". Gender Review, December 1978.
Walter J. Meyer, Paul A. Walker & Zelda R. Suplee. 1981. "A Survey of Transsexual Hormonal Treatment in Twenty Gender‐treatment Centers". Journal of Sex Research, 17, 4: 344-349. Abstract
Suzanne J. Kessler &Wendy MacKenna. Gender: A Ethnomethodological Approach. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987: xiii.
Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 211-2 ,216, 227, 231, 236, 239-240, 257, 280.
Michael J. Bowen. " 'StrangerHer': The Peculiar Saga of Let Me Die a Woman". Booklet included in Synapse DVD release of Let Me Die a Woman, 2005.
Aaron Devor. "Building a Better World for Transpeople: Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation". International Journal of Transgenderism, 10, 1, 2006: 47-68.
Barry Kenneth Cossey was born in Norfolk, with XXXY chromosomes, Klinefelter’s Syndrome. She started living as Caroline in 1971 at age 17, and began work as a showgirl and topless dancer.
She had breast augmentation and Adam’s Apple reduction surgery, and then genital surgery in 1974, under Dr John Randell at Charing Cross Hospital.
She developed a career as a model, using the professional name Tula. She was featured in fashion advertisements particularly. She was noted in Smirnoff Vodka’s “Well They Said Anything Could Happen” advertisement in 1981 that shows her water-skiing behind the Loch Ness Monster. She was a Page Three Girl for The Sun. This led to a small part in the James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only, 1981, and an associated article in Playboy.
This exposure led to her being outed in The News of the World, a rerun of what had happened to April Ashley in 1962, which ruined her modelling and acting career. She responded with her first autobiography, I am a Woman.
In the mid-1980s she was featured in music videos by Duran Duran and Power Station.
In 1983 she and Count Glauco, an Italian, intended to marry, but UK law at that time did not recognize her as female. She applied to the Registrar General and to her Member of Parliament. She started appeals to the English courts for the right to have her birth certificate re-issued and to marry.
In 1989 her appeal reached the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and the Court ruled in her favour. On this basis she married businessman Elias Fattal, whom she had known for four years, but press attention outed her to his family, and he left her.
The Thatcher government appealed the European Court of Human Rights ruling, and it reversed its decision. This enabled Fattal to have their marriage annulled.
In 1991 she became the first transsexual as such to be featured in Playboy, and also released her second autobiography which featured her legal battle.
In 1992 she married a Canadian man, David Finch under Canadian law, and lives with him in US Georgia. She ranked #24 (1995) in FHM's 100 Sexiest Women.
Lynn-Holly Johnson and Robin Young photographed by Richard Fegley. “For Your Eyes Only (Bond Girls)” including Tula. Playboy. June 1981.
Bill Rankine. “James Bond Girl was a Boy” The News of the World 1981
Tula. I am a Woman. London: Sphere Books: Rainbird, 167 pp 1982. First autobiography.
European Court of Human Rights. Affaire Cossey: arret du 27 septembre 1990. Publications de la Cour européenne des droits de l'homme. Série A, Arrets et décisions, vol. 184. Strasbourg: Greffe de la cour, Conseil de l'Europe, French and English on opposite pages, numbered in duplicate. 54, 54 pp 1990.
Michael Binyon. "Sex Change Woman Loses Legal Case". The Times. 28 September 1990 Home News.
Jane Dunn. "How Barry Became Carrie". Sunday Times. 5 May 1991. Features.
Gretchen Edgren, photographed by Byron Newman. “The Transformations of Tula”. Playboy. September 1991.
Caroline Cossey. My Story. London & Boston: Faber and Faber. xiii, 225pp.1992. Second autobiography.
Jo Alexander. “I'm getting married ... and my sister's having the baby”. Woman 25 May 1992.
Sophie Goodchild. "New Hope for Transsexuals as MPs Move to Change Law on Birth Certificates". The Independent. 23 June 2002 (p. 13).
Both had tiny parts in one the weakest entries in an ongoing film series, April in Road to Hong Kong,1962.
Both were outed in the News of the World.
Both lost their screen credit.
Both suffered in their modelling careers.
Both wrote two autobiographies.
Are Caroline Cossey and other persons with Klinefelter's Syndrome intersex? The question whether April Ashley had Klinefelter's Syndrome was raised during Corbett v. Corbett, but despite her blood being examined by Professor FTG Hayhoe, a chromosome expert at Cambridge, no clear answer was given. Either way, the result of Corbett v. Corbett was to establish a legal criterion for intersex that was not the same as the medical criteria. Because Klinefelter's Syndrome persons have a Y chromosome (no matter how many Xs) they are 'chromosomally male' and therefore concordant in their chromosomal, gonadal and genital sex.
Let us go to Stephen Whittle's Blog, posting of 14 July 2008, where he says that: "In English law, there has been *NO* change of the position of intersex people with the coming into force of the Gender Recognition Act. Since time immemorial, intersex people in the UK have been able to apply to have their birth certificates amended to better reflect the sex they are. This system is still in existence for those who wish to use it." Unfortunately this statement does not distinguish between the medical and the legal concepts of intersex.
Therefore, Caroline Cossey, intersex by common sense and medical opinion, spent six years of her life going through the hassle of court after court because she was not intersex by Justice Ormrod's definition.
It is to Caroline's credit that she is not hung up on these distinctions and in her autobiographies uses the word 'transsexual' of herself.
It is a nasty irony that although Caroline's appeal to the European Court paved the way for Press For Change and the Gender Recognition Act, person's such as herself with Klinefelter’s Syndrome are being given a hard time by the Gender Recognition Board.
Amanda has given out different years (1941, 1945 and even 1948) and places (Hong Kong, Saigon) for her birth.
The most likely story is that she was born Alain Tapp in 1939. He was raised bilingual in French and English, and became fluent also in Italian, Spanish and German as a teenager.
By 1958 Alain was a performer at Le Carrousel in Paris under the name Peki d’Oslo. Peki was a room mate of April Ashley for a Le Carrousel tour of Italy. Alain as Peki is also remembered by Romy Haag from when she performed at Haag’s nightclub and at Chez Nous in Berlin in the early 1960s. Record producer Simon Napier-Bell also met Peki when she was first in London, and then years later made a record with Amanda.
She became a long-time friend of Salvador DalÃ, who may have paid for her operation with Dr Burou in 1963. Some say that her name = ‘a man’ + ‘dali’ or ‘L’amant Dali” (this latter the title of one of her books).
Desiring a UK passport she and April went to a pub in Notting Hill and found a Mr Lear, an Scottish architecture student, who was willing to wed Amanda for ₤50. Mr Lear was dumped right after the ceremony, but Amanda has kept his name to this day.
She became a disco star in the 70s. At this time there were rumours that she was transsexual, but she consistently denied them. She has claimed that the sex-change was merely a publicity stunt thought up by Salvador Dali. In her disco song, ‘Fabulous Lover, Love Me”, she sings: “the surgeon made me so well that you could not tell that I was not somebody else".
She is the model with the black panther on the cover of the Roxy Music album, For Your Pleasure. She dated Brian Jones, Bryan Ferry and David Bowie. She modelled nude for Playboy in 1977.
In 1979 she married Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle, the former beloved for two decades of French writer Roger Peyrefitte, and himself the owner of Le Bronx, one of Paris’ first openly gay nightclubs. He and Amanda were together for 21 years until he died in a fire at their farmhouse near Avignon.
She has released 13 albums and over 50 singles, with sales in the millions. She has written three books about her life with Salvador DalÃ. She has hosted long-running television shows in Germany and Italy. She has exhibited her own paintings and gives lectures on DalÃ.
In 2007 she created a kerfuffle when she refused to perform or appear on stage in Milan because she would be next to a group of transsexuals. She was reported to say ‘Tenete lontani i trans’ (keep the transies far away).
In 2008-9 her Wikipedia page was revised to remove all suggestions that she is transsexual, and in 2009 she published an autobiography with the the tantalizing title of Je ne suis pas celle que vous croyez..
Amanda Lear. Wer Hat Angst Vor Amanda Lear?Berengaria Editions Germany/France. 1979.
Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley. April Ashley's Odyssey.London: Jonathan Cape viii, 287 pp 16 plates 1982: 69,70,120,178-180,196, 241,268. London: Arrow 1983. Also online atwww.antijen.org/Aprilv1.
Amanda Lear. My Life with Dali.London: Virgin Books Ltd, 1985.
Amanda Lear. Persistence of Memory: A Personal Biography of Salvador Dali. Bethesda, Md: National Press, 1987.
Amanda Lear. L'amant-Dalí. Paris: M. Lafon, 1994.
Ian Gibson. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. Faber and Faber. 1997: 527-536
Romy Haag with Martin Schacht.Eine frau und mehr. Berlin: Quadriga 319 pp 1999.
(Much Pleasure, Roberta Close). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rosa dos Tempos. 1998. 
. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 211-2 ,216, 227, 231, 236, 239-240, 257, 280.
. London: Sphere Books: Rainbird, 167 pp 1982. First autobiography.
. London & Boston: Faber and Faber. xiii, 225pp.1992. Second autobiography.
London: Jonathan Cape viii, 287 pp 16 plates 1982: 69,70,120,178-180,196, 241,268. London: Arrow 1983. Also online at 
London: Virgin Books Ltd, 1985.
. Bethesda, Md: National Press, 1987.