Timeline – Transgender people and mental health – Transgender History
History Timeline
Timeline of Historical Transgender Events and Mental Health Care
Transgender Zone
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Bible and ancient times
The 18th Dynasty pharaoh Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for two decades (from 1479 to 1458 BC), which makes her the first major female head of state – the first one we know about, anyway. While women could be leaders in ancient Egypt, a pharaoh was by definition male. So Hatshepsut had to invent a hybrid gender, presenting a challenge to the sculptors charged with translating her flesh into stone.
Galli (an ancient name for the eunuch in Asia Minor) were the followers of Cybele in Phrygia. It was believed that a ‘madness’ occurred when the waters of the river Gallus were drunk the result of which caused individuals to castrate themselves.
203 BC
The first Galli arrived in Rome when the Senate officially adopted Cybele as a state goddess in 203 BC. Until the first century AD, Roman citizens were prohibited from becoming Galli. Under Claudius, however, this ban was lifted.
204-222
The Roman Emperor Elagabalus.
577
King Henry III of France frequently cross dressed and while dressed as a woman was referred to as her majesty by his courtiers. Even his male clothes were considered outrageous despite the flamboyant standards of 16th-century France.
1377
Bethlem was used for lunatics from 1377
1421
The Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng Discovered America, Australia and navigates the rest of the World the map was obtained by the Portuguese from the Chinese!
1518
In 1518 King Henry 8th, on the advice of his court physician, founded the Royal College of Physicians (London) to control who practiced as a physician in London and so protect the public from quacks.
1547
3 January: A charter to the City of London made it responsible for Bethlem
1577
King Henry III of France frequently crossdressed and while dressed as a woman was referred to as her majesty by his courtiers. Even his male clothes were considered outrageous despite the flamboyant standards of 16th-century France.
1654
Queen Christina of Sweden (often considered bisexual) abdicated the thrown, dressed in men’s clothing and renamed herself Count Dohna.
1655
Meric Causaubon’s Treatise concerning enthusiasme, as it is an effect of nature, but is mistaken for either divine inspiration or diabolical possession.
1666
2.9.1666 to 6.9.1666 Great Fire of London.
After the Great Fire, Robert Hooke was appointed city surveyor and designed the new Bethlem (Bethlehem Hospital) in Moorfields
1670
In England the earliest records of private madhouses on a regular basis are from 1670 onwards
1673
French explorers Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette come into contact with the Illini Indians in 1673, and are astonished to discover a subset of Illini men who dressed and acted out the social role of women. The Illini termed these men “Ikoneta” while the French referred to them as the “berdache.”
1676
MTF transsexual Abbe Francois Timoleon de Choisy attended Papal inaugural ball in female dress. His memoirs, published postmortem, offer the first written testimony of cross-dressing.
1700s
“Molly houses” provided a space for the English gay community to meet, carouse and relate to one another. “Mollies” were men who often crossdressed and developed their own queer culture.
1728
Chevalier D’Eon, born Charles d’Eon, was a famous French spy/ambassador who was born male but lived a significant part of his/her life as a woman. Chevalier’s birth sex was a hotly debated question.
1750
Female to male transvestites join Nelson’s Navy as did hundreds of others and were only discovered when they were flogged. They were never punished when they were discovered and often went on stage and became celebrities wowing audiences backed by an all singing and all dancing group of crossed dressed transvestite tars. Mary Lacy known as William Chandler who served on the Sandwich as a carpenter is one of the most famous as ‘she’ wrote a biography others include William Brown who served on the Queen Charlotte until being outed by a newspaper in 1815, and Alice Snell AKA James Gray served as a navy marine until 1750.
1774
The 1774 Madhouses Act established a commission of the Royal College of Physicians to license and visit private madhouses in the London area.
The commission could not release a patient improperly confined. This was the traditional role of the High Courts at Westminster, for whose benefit the registers were principally kept. The Westminster courts could also order special visits and reports, and examine those engaged in the execution of the Act.
1777
Beaumont (Eon of)
Éon de Beaumont, Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée
The most famous transvestite of the eighteenth century, French diplomat Chevalier Éon de Beaumont lived the first half of his life as a man and the second as a woman. Charles de Beaumont, Knight of Eon, 1728-1810. As a secret French agent, went to Russia one has secret mission for Louis XV, and was lady companion to the Empress Elisabeth. He fought in the Seven Years war, and was later secretary to the French ambassador to London. On his return to France (1777) Eon was ordered to dress permanently as a woman, which He did until his death.
1804
George Sand, born Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, became an accomplished French romantic writer as famous for her affairs as for her words. She was the first woman in modern European history to frequently wear men’s clothes, shocking her contemporaries.
1828
The 1828 Madhouses Act established:
1832
The 1832 Madhouses Act established: 1839-1844
“Rebecca and her daughters,” a group of male-to-female cross-dressers, battled throughout the Welsh countryside destroying road toll barriers, which were making the poor even poorer. These warriors also adopted the names and identities of women.
1840s
Asylum Care
In the hungry-forties of the 19th century it was believed that by moving mentally unstable people from a community disturbed by poverty, depravity and social unrest to a closed, humane, but disciplined environment in a lunatic asylum early in the development of their insanity they could be cured and the accumulation of chronic lunatics on poor relief halted.
1841
1841 February: The London Statistical Society announced that it intended to collect lunatic asylum statistics during the year.
1842
The 1842 Licensed Lunatic Asylums Bill proposed a Barristers’ Commission as it was thought that county licensing and visiting was defective, it was proposed that the two legal commissioners should visit and report on county houses supplementary to the county visitors. The House of Commons rejected this proposal and an amended bill became the Inquiry Act.
1845
The 1845 County Asylums Act compelled every county and borough in England and Wales to provide asylum treatment for all its pauper lunatics and Lord Ashley told Parliament that this would “effect a cure in seventy cases out of every hundred” (Hansard 6.6.1845 column 193).
The 1845 Lunacy Act established the Lunacy Commission:
The Act named eleven Metropolitan Commissioners as Lunacy Commissioners. Six (three medical and three legal) were to be employed full time at salaries of 1,500 pounds a year. The Lunacy Commission had national authority, under the Lord Chancellor and Home Secretary, over all asylums (except Bedlam until 1853). It shared responsibility with the poor Law Commission/Board etc for pauper lunatics outside asylums. Its principle functions were to monitor the erection of a network of publicly owned county asylums, required under the 1845 County Asylums Act, and the transfer of all pauper lunatics from workhouses and outdoor relief to a public or private asylum; to regulate their treatment in private asylums, and (with the Poor Law Commission) monitor the treatment of any remaining in workhouses or on outdoor relief. The Lunacy Commission was also to monitor the regulation of county asylums and county licensed houses by JPs, and to regulate the conduct of hospitals for the insane. With the JPs it monitored the admission and discharge of patients from all types of asylum. It collected, collated and analysed data on the treatment of lunacy and advised on the development of lunacy law and policy. It also continued to license London’s madhouses.
1850
Crow nation “woman chief” Barcheeampe was spotted by appalled white travelers in Wyoming and Montana; she was renown for her war exploits and for having several wives.
1861
Franklin Thompson, born Sarah Emma Edmonds, fought for the Union Army in the Civil War. During the war, Franklin served as a spy, nurse, dispatch carrier and later was the only woman mustered into the Grand Army of the Republic.
1871
1871 October: St Lawrence’s opened as one of two 1,500 bed custodial asylums designed to relieve London’s other asylums and workhouses of incurable lunatics at the least possible expense.
1879
An ‘asylum for idiots’ was established at Park House, Highgate which later became known as Earlswood Asylum.
1885
Prince Eddy heir to the throne of England (the king we never had) attends Transvestite clubs – some say he was Jack the Ripper – this was proven later to be impossible – a Princess Diana Like character able and compassionate – he died of the flu before he was crowned – a popular and good man.
1886
We’Wha, an accomplished Zuni Weaver and potter, was two spirit – born male but lived as a woman. She spent six months in Washington, DC, and met President Grover Cleveland, who never realized this six-foot Zuni maiden was born male.
1886
The Idiots Act 1886
1896
The National Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded was founded
By the end of the 19th century the failure of asylum therapy had convinced people that insanity is incurable. The insane were sent to even larger asylums for custody, to be protected from exploitation whilst society was protected from them.
During the Victorian period cross-dressing is featured in various publications and transvestites become affectionately known as ‘tight-lacers’.
1897
Henry Havelock Ellis of the Fabian Society, a supporter of sexual liberation. His interests in human biology and his own personal experiences, led Havelock Ellis to write his six volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex. The books, published between 1897 and 1910 caused tremendous controversy and were banned for several years. Other books written by Havelock Ellis included The New Spirit (1890), Man and Woman (1894) Sexual Inversion (1897) and The Erotic Rights of Women (1918). Henry Havelock Ellis died in 1939. His autobiography, My Life was published posthumously in 1940.
1897
Magnus Hirschfeld starts the mostly homosexual Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany.
1899
In Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch Fur Studerende und Aertze, 6th edition, Emil Kraeplin, a Munich professor of psychiatry classifies major psychoses into two groups: dementia praecox (paranoia) and manic-depressive psychosis.
1900
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams revolutionizes psychiatric theory and practice. He is the first to use the unconscious to treat psychiatric illness in patients by using ‘psychoanalysis’ – free association and interpretation of dreams.
1900-1905
Turn of the Century Film Makers Mitchell and Kenyon record a cross-dressing Carnival in Crewe (Nr. Liverpool) in the North of England.
1905
Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality describes the stages of sexual development and explains the effects of infantile sexuality on sexual dysfunction.
1907
Magnus Hirschfeld is introduced to Harry Benjamin
1908
Clifford Beers publishes A Mind That Found Itself, detailing his experiences as a patient in psychiatric hospitals. This work prompts the founding of the mental hygiene movement in the United States.
1913
The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act established The Board of Control. This was the old Lunacy Commission with extended functions with respect to mental deficiency. The Board of Control continued to regulate the mental health system until 1959, but with reduced responsibilities after the National Health Service Act.
Four “classes” of Mental Deficiency were defined:
Idiot ~ unable to protect themselves from common dangers.
Imbecile ~ could protect themselves from common dangers, but unable to take care of themselves.
Feeble-Minded ~ required care to protect themselves.
Moral Defectives ~ criminal or vicious personalities. Unmarried Mothers, homosexuals and transgender people also became absorbed into this category!
The Board of Control was established who took on the powers and responsibilities of the Lunacy Commissioners.
1914
First World War (1914-1918)
Transvestites were being regularly shot charged as spies or cowards.
1917
The Austrian psychiatrist Julius von Wagner-Jauregg becomes the first psychiatrist to win the Nobel prize (1927).
Alfred Adler establishes the school of individual psychology and becomes the first psychoanalyst to challenge Freud. He coins the terms ‘lifestyle’ and ‘inferiority complex’ in his book, Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensations.
1919
Magnus Hirschfeld , becomes one of sexology’s founding fathers when he opened the world’s first sexological institute, the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin – which is later closed by the Nazis
1920
The Menninger Clinic (for mental health patients) is founded in Topeka, Kansas. (Named after William Menninger who pioneered effective treatments for psychiatric casualties in World War II, and Karl Menninger who applied psychoanalytic concepts to American psychiatry.)
Homosexuality and Its Treatment the story of “H”, Dr. Alan Hart’s 1917 Transman is published by Jonathan Gilbert
1920s
In the period between the two world wars, Freudian theory shed a faint glow of hope on the outskirts of the custodial asylum.
From shortly after the first world war moves were made:
away from in-patient treatment
towards outpatient treatment,
towards treatment without certification
towards treatment near to patients’ homes.
But these moves only touched the edge of the mental health system.
1927
The Mental Deficiency Act 1927
Local Authorities were given responsibility for providing occupation and training for those with Mental Deficiency.
Mental Deficiency was defined as “a condition of arrested or incomplete development of mind existing before the age of 18 years whether arising from ‘inherent causes’ or induced by disease or injury.”
1930
Encyclopeadia of Sexual Knowledge by Norman Haire (1930) Published, addresses transvestism in detail.
It also illustrates the First ‘Sex-change’ procedures.
1932
Magnus Hirschfeld lectures in the United States.
Female to Male TS Colonel Sir Victor Barker D.S.O 1895 – 1960 Marries Elfrida Haward in Brighton
Valerie Barker was born in Jersey in 1895 but she was educated in England after her family moved to Surrey. She always wished to have been born a boy.
In 1923 Valerie left her common-law husband and family and with a full set of new suits and shirts, collars and ties moved into the Grand Hotel in Brighton as Sir Victor Barker Bart. DSO where he was joined the next day by his fiancee Elfrida Haward. They were “married” at St Peters Church in Brighton on the 14th of November 1932. Always living above his means Sir Victor was indicted for bankruptcy and discovered to be a woman when imprisoned, eventually being found guilty of “knowingly and willfully causing a false statement to be entered into a register of marriage.” After this Victor Barker was forced into lower and less well paid jobs; changing his name he took more and more menial work and in 1934 served a sentence for petty theft when living as John Hill in Henfield. Three times in his life he sold his story to the popular press for money and even appeared as a circus attraction as The Man-Woman, but eventually died poor but forgotten in 1960 as Geoffrey Norton. At his own request he is buried in an unmarked grave in Kessingland churchyard near Lowestoft.
1932
Man Into Woman, the story of Lili Elbe’s life, MTF transition, and Sex Reassignment Surgery is published.
1933
The Second World War (1939-1945)
Eugenics
Nazis abuse, murder and sterilise transgender people. The Institute for Sexology is raided, shut down, and its records destroyed by the Nazis in 1933 . Physicians and researchers involved in the clinic flee Germany. Some, unable to escape, commit suicide in the coming years.
1935
Magnus Hirschfeld dies in exile in France after The Institute for Sexual Science was destroyed by Nazis in 1933.
Aversion Therapy is first used to eliminate homosexuality and later is used on transgender people.
1937
Karen Horney, a German-born psychiatrist challenges Freud’s theory of the castration complex in women and his theory that Oedipal complex and female sexuality influences neurosis. In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, she argues that neurosis largely is determined by the society in which one lives.
1938
Electroshock is first used by Ugo Cerletti to produce convulsions that he thought would alleviate schizophrenic and manic-depressive psychosis; it was later found to be more effective in the latter illness and is still in use today. Commonly used on transgender people!
1939
World War II begins and Hitler decrees that patients with incurable medical illnesses be killed because they are ‘biologically unfit.’ Approximately 270,000 patients with mental illness are killed by physicians and medical personnel complying with the Nazi doctrine of racial purity.
1941
Premarin, conjugated estrogens is extracted from pregnant mares is sold in Canada. Followed by the US
1945
In 1945, Sir Harold Gillies and his colleague Ralph Millard carry out the world’s first sex change of a woman into a man on the young aristocrat, Michael Dillon. Sir Harold Gillies, internationally renowned as the father of modern plastic surgery, played a pioneering wartime role in Britain developing pedicle flap surgery. Gillies later performed surgery on the United Kingdom’s first male-to-female transsexual – Roberta Cowell.
1946
Congress passes the National Mental Health Act which, for the first time in US history, provides generous funding for psychiatric education and research. This act leads to the creation in 1949 of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Also in 1946, Anna Freud, the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, publishes The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children, which introduces basic concepts in the theory and practice of child psychoanalysis.
*The therapeutic asylums planned in the 1840s failed monumentally, the monuments being a network of large asylums full of long-stay patients with little or no hope of rehabilitation. In post war Britain the National Health Service inherited these asylum which still stood in open countryside outside the towns, or had been engrossed by the expanding suburbs. Transgender people were considered insane and housed in them.
The 1946 National Health Service Act stripped the Board of Control of nearly all its functions except those of providing an inspectorate of mental hospitals (particularly with respect to compulsory detention).
1947
25 November: Foundation of National Association for Mental Health
1948 National Health Service Act came into operation
The National Health Service took over from county councils and boroughs the major responsibility for mental health. The reforms of the 1920s and 1930s had only touched the edge of the mental health system. The main inheritance of the NHS was a system of over 100 asylums, or “mental hospitals”, with an average population of over 1,000 patients in each.
The integration of the mental hospitals into the NHS was possibly the most decisive factor leading to a general move away from institutional policies in the 1950s. See 1959
1949
Harry Benjamin treat transsexuals in the US with hormones.
1950
In Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson restates Freud’s concepts of infantile sexuality and develops the concepts of ‘adult identity,’ and ‘identity crisis.’
1951
May 15th, Robert Cowell became Roberta Cowell the United Kingdom’s first full surgically altered transsexual
1952
Christine Jorgensen becomes an American transsexual media sensation.
The French psychiatrists Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker report that chlorpromazine (Thorazine ®) calms hospitalized chronic schizophrenic patients without causing clinically significant depression. The drug is called ‘hibernotherapie’ because patients became quiet, like animals in hibernation.
1953
“Mental Millions”
BF Skinner publishes Science and Human Behavior, describing his theory of operant conditioning, an important concept in the development of behavior therapy.
1954
Royal Commission on the Mental Health Laws (1954 to 1957 ), under Lord Percy, appointed.
Peak of numbers resident (falling since)
1957
The first effective pharmacologic treatment for depression is reported with the work of Kuhn on the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine and of Loomer, Saunders and Kline on the monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitor iproniazid.
May 1957: Royal Commission on the Mental Health Laws reported. The key themes of the Percy Report were:
That ‘mental disorder’ should be regarded “in much the same way as physical illness and disability” (paragraph 5)
That hospitals for mental illness should be run as nearly as possible like those for physical disorders. See 1959
1959
By 1959 only 12% of admissions to mental illness hospitals were compulsory, and the trend was towards shorter periods of in-patient treatment and towards outpatient treatment. Whilst in 1930 there had been practically no outpatients, by 1959 there were 144,000 attendances at outpatient clinics. ( Maclay, W.S. 1961, p.98)
The 1959 Mental Health Act
Two years after the Percy Report, the 1959 Mental health Act sought to create a legal framework within which the hospital treatment of mental disorder could approximate as closely as possible to that of physical illness. Its two main objectives were:
To allow admissions for psychiatric reasons to be, wherever possible, as informal as those for physical reasons.
To make councils responsible for the social care of people who did not need in-patient medical treatment.
The 1959 Mental Health Act abolished the Board of Control.
1960’S
In the 1960s despite the hostility to cross dressing within mental health services, every week in the UK’s booming holiday camps topsy turvy nights encouraged men and women to dress in each others clothes at least once during their stay.
1960
Scientists at the American pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-LaRoche develop the benzodiazepines chlordiazepoxide (Librium ®) (1960) and diazepam (Valium ®) (1963), which becomes widely prescribed for patients with nonpsychotic anxiety.
Also in 1963, Action for Mental Health recommends that the care of the mentally ill be moved from large mental hospitals to community mental health clinics. That same year, ‘deinstitutionalization’ is mandated by the Community Mental Health Centers Act.
March 1961: Enoch Powell’s Water Tower Speech:
The full scope of the community care policy for the mentally ill adopted in the 1960s was revealed in 1966 when the Minister of Health, Enoch Powell, opened a conference of the National Association for Mental Health with a speech on how his forthcoming Hospital Plan would affect psychiatric services.
The Percy Report contrasted community care with hospital care. Phrases like in the community have generally been used to mean outside hospital. However, from the Water Tower speech until the 1980s, community care policy was to have as its central feature, the transfer of hospital treatment from isolated mental hospitals to local hospitals. The two main features of the policy were:
That hospital treatment should be in Psychiatric Units in District General Hospitals.
That as much care and treatment as possible should be provided outside hospital.
1962
Michael Dillon dies (1915-1962).
The Hospital Plan
1966
Beaumont Society Founded
1966
Harry Benjamin publishes The Transsexual Phenomenon..
1968
The International Olympic Committee tests chromosomes of athletes, and puts a stop to transsexuals competing.
Universities operate on non-intersexed transsexuals.
1969
Stonewall riots 1969 Transgender and gender-noncomforming people are among those who resisted arrest in a routine bar raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village, thus helping to ignite the modern LGBT rights movement.
The UK Hospital Scandals (1967-1969).
November 1969 Establishment of ‘Hospital Advisory Service’.
1970
February, 1970. Corbett v. Corbett (otherwise Ashley). The judgment by Justice Ormrod sets the precedent that will leave UK post-op transsexual people unable to marry until the 21st Century – In September 1963 the parties went through a ceremony of marriage. April Corbett’s (neé Ashley) marriage is annulled and declared to be legally still a man despite sex reassignment.
The Food and Drug Administration approves lithium to treat patients with manic-depressive illness. The Australian psychiatrist John Cade had shown 20 years earlier (1949) that lithium quieted manic patients, and Mogens Schou in Denmark had confirmed Cade’s findings in a double-blind study in 1954.
1970
William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s work revolutionizes knowledge and attitudes about sex. They revise Freud’s theories of orgasm, report on sexual relationships in geriatrics, and find counseling helps most people with sexual dysfunctions. Sex therapy as a psychiatric specialty follows.
1971
December: Hospital Services for the Mentally Ill
This stated that the development of psychiatric methods, and increase in psychiatric units, had brought things to a point where it was thought possible: “to accelerate developments … towards the eventual replacement of the large separate mental hospitals by a service based on general hospitals”
1972
October: Services for Mental Illness Related to Old Age
Patients begin to challenge
SUMP (Scottish Union of Mental Patients) formed by Tommy Ritchie and Robin Farqhuarson. This was the first union of psychiatric patients in the United Kingdom that I know of.
December: A group of people in the London area produced a pamphlet on The Need for a Mental Patient’s Union arguing that “psychiatry is one of the most subtle methods of repression in advanced Capitalist society”. This was circulated to psychiatric hospitals and various places where ex-patients were likely to congregate, together with notices of a meeting to be held during March 1973 to discuss the formation of a union.
1973
Political pressure from the National Gay Task Force, the American Psychiatric Association changes the diagnosis of homosexuality from a disease to a ‘condition’.
The NHS cuts
Wednesday 21.3.1973
150 people attended a meeting at Paddington Day Hospital to discuss forming a Mental Patient’s Union (MPU). Over 100 were patients or ex-patients, some coming from as far afield as Scotland. A working party of some two dozen full members was formed and not long after set up office in a London squat. This nucleus was given the task of producing a statement of the union’s intent and drafting a proposed organisational framework for MPU.
1974
February: Labour Government
Jan Morris, one of Britain’s top journalists who covered wars and rebellions around the globe and even climbed Mount Everest, published Conundrum, a personal account of her transition. The book is now considered a classic.
1976
Tennis Ace Reneé Richards is ‘outed’ and barred from competition when she attempts to enter a women’s’ tennis tournament. Her subsequent legal battle establishes that transsexuals are legally, accepted in their new identity after reassignment, in the US.
1979
Thatcher Government
In 1979 a series of programs entitled ‘A Change of Sex’ are aired on the BBC – viewers could for the first time follow pre-op transsexual Julia Grant through her transition. It also highlighted the arrogance at that time of psychiatrists based at the Gender Identity Clinic, Charing Cross Hospital, London
July: NHS Commission on the National Health Service report
December: Patients first
1980
October: MIND Conference
Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association to promote standards of care founded.
1981
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and HIV virus begins.
1987
Harry Benjamin dies (1885-1987)
1987
The serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) fluoxetine (Prozac ®), paroxetine (Paxil ®), and sertraline (Zoloft ®) are developed by several American pharmaceutical companies to treat patients with depression.
1989 Christine Jorgensen dies (1927 – 1989)
1989 Celebrated jazz musician Billy Tipton died in Spokane, Washington, revealing that he was a woman. Tipton, who played in big bands in the 40s and 50s, lived for 56 years as a man, marrying several times and raising children.
1990
The NHS and Community Care Act 1990
1991
Transvestite comedian Eddie Izzard receives a nomination for the Prestigious Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival.
Gender Trust is Founded.
FTM activist Jamison “James” Green took over Lou Sullivan’s FTM newsletter and transformed it into FTM International, Inc., the world’s largest information and networking group for female-to-male transgender people and transsexual men.
1992
Press For Change is founded on the 27th February in a London Coffee House.
1993
Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) to build awareness and offer support to intersex people.
Transgender youth Brandon Teena was raped and murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska. This hate crime brought widespread attention to transgender discrimination and violence and became the subject of the award-winning film, Boys Don’t Cry.
1993
Transgender youth Brandon Teena was raped and murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska. This hate crime brought widespread attention to transgender discrimination and violence and became the subject of the award-winning film, Boys Don’t Cry.
1997
Trans activist Leslie Feinberg published Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, a who’s who of transgender people throughout world history that traces the roots of transgender oppression.
1998
Julie Hesmondhalgh Joins the Coronation St (Britain’s longest running television soap) as transsexual character Hayley Patterson. Transgender Zone were the First to run her interview in the TG press!
Dana International becomes the first transsexual woman to win the Eurovision Song Contest singing a song called ‘Diva’.
1999
Brain material provided by the Netherlands Brain Bank demonstrates transsexualism is a medical condition and not a ‘state-of-mind’. The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions and point to a neurobiological basis of gender identity disorder.
Texas, USA – Littleton vs. Prang, Christine Littleton, a post-op MTF transsexual loses her negligence case against the doctor who allowed her husband to die, defence lawyers argue that she was never married to her late husband since her Texas birth certificate, though now amended to read female, originally read male. Post-Op US transsexual legal status is a legal limbo.
The UK Sex Discrimination Act is amended to include protections on the basis of Gender Reassignment. Sex Discrimination (Gender Reassignment) Regulations 1999
http://www.hmso.gov.uk/ Statutory Instrument 1999 No. 1102
2002
In a judgment delivered at Strasbourg on 11 July 2002 in the case of Christine Goodwin v. the United Kingdom (application no. 28957/95), the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that:
there had been a violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights;
there had been a violation of Article 12 (right to marry and to found a family);
no separate issue had arisen under Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination);
there had been no violation of Article 13 (right to an effective remedy).
The Court held, unanimously, that the finding of violation constituted in itself sufficient just satisfaction for the non-pecuniary damage sustained by the applicant and awarded the applicant 39,000 euros for costs and expenses.
This led the way for the later Gender Recognition Act Act to become UK law.
The Full Legal Judgement is available here: http://www.echr.coe.int/
2003
The Draft [Gender Recognition] Bill is the Government’s response to decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and the House of Lords holding that aspects of English legislation violate rights under ECHR Article 8 (respect for private life) and Article 12 (right to marry) so far as it refuses to give legal recognition to a transsexual person’s reassigned gender.
On Dec 7th 2003 British transvestite potter Grayson Perry, 43 scooped the controversial Turner prize, and collected £20,000 at a ceremony at Tate Britain in London, dressed as alter ego Claire.
2004
The United Kingdom Gender Recognition Act becomes law on the 10th February. Offering transgender people full legal recognition of change of gender.
LAUSANNE, Switzerland – Transsexuals will be able to compete at the Athens Olympics if they have had appropriate surgery and are legally recognized as members of their new sex the International Olympic Committee decides.
On Friday the 6th August Portuguese post-operative transsexual Nadia Almada aged 27 of Surrey won the United Kingdom reality Game show Big Brother 5 and took away prize money of £63,500 pounds and the hearts of the nation.
2005
September 6 – 2005 Mercury Music Prize New York-based but English born frontman Antony Hegarty was declared winner at the ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London with their album ‘I am a Bird now’.”To what degree does Antony himself feel female, or at least latently, potentially so? “Do I feel female? Y’know, I feel like a mixture. I feel pretty mixed. I probably would identify as transgender.” (Quote from NME).
2006
Gwen Amber Rose (Aged 17 Years Old) was beaten and strangled in the USA October 2002 resulting in world wide outrage
After a retrial the Jury Found (2) Defendants Guilty Of Second Degree Murder
Michael Magidson and Jose Merel – Jason Cazares Pleaded Guilty to Voluntary Manslaughter Sentences Delivered on January 27, 2006:
Michael Magidson – Age 25 [Murder 2] Mandadory 15 years to life
Jose Merel – Age 26 [Murder 2] Mandadory 15 years to life
Jason Cazares – Age 26 [Voluntary Manslaughter] 6 years
Jaron Nabors – Age 24 [Voluntary Manslaughter] is serving an 11 year sentence
Felicity Huffman is nominated for an Oscar for her role as Bree in the worldwide hit road movie Transamerica
The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association is renamed to The World professional Association for Transgender Health – the ommission of the the term ‘Social Care’ from the title having angered many non medical support workers worldwide.
Jacqueline Dufresnoy aka Coccinelle dies at 75.
Star of the famous Le Carrousel nightclub in Paris in the 1950s at the time when April Ashley and Amanda Lear were also there.
She was hailed as the first TS woman in France to undergo SRS with Dr Burou in Casablanca in 1958.
1931-2006
2007
London-based The Wagner Journal includes a previously unpublished letter by German composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner (May 22, 1813 – February 13, 1883) to a couturier in Milan, in which the composer requests “something graceful for evenings at home … The bodice will have a high collar, with a lace jabot and ribbons; close-fitting sleeves; the dress trimmed with puffed flounces — of the same satin material — no basque at the front (the dress must be very wide and have a train) but a rich bustle with a bow at the back, like the one at the front) …” The letter, written in January 1874 (and now in a private collection in the U.S.), “adds weight to the theory that the composer exhibited the tendencies of a cross-dresser.”
Ireland violated transsexual’s right to new birth certificate under EU law, judge rules
DUBLIN, Ireland: Ireland violated European human rights law by refusing to give a transsexual a new birth certificate recording her new gender and name, a Dublin judge ruled Friday in a landmark judgment.
The ruling by High Court Justice Liam McKechnie was the first time that an Irish judge has found Ireland in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. It means the government of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern must pass legislation amending the law or risk a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.
“This is such a wonderful breakthrough after such a long, long time,” said Dr. Lydia Foy, a 60-year-old dentist who began her case in 1997, five years after undergoing a sex-change operation to become a woman. Adoption of the UK Gender Recognition Act is likely
2008
‘The Pregnant Man’
Some transmen (female-to-male transgender people) who interrupt hormone treatments can become pregnant, while still identifying and living as male. This is possible for individuals who still have functioning ovaries.Although these individuals have XX chromosomes, from the standpoint of gender identity they are pregnant men.
Matt Rice bore a child in 1999 by artificial insemination during his relationship with writer Patrick Califia.Thomas Beatie, who chose to become pregnant because his wife was infertile, wrote an article about his pregnancy in The Advocate. The Washington Post further broadened the story on March 25 when blogger Emil Steiner called Beatie’s pregnancy the first “legal” male pregnancy on record, in reference to the state of Oregon recognizing Beatie as male.He gave birth to a girl (Susan Juliette Beatie) on June 29, 2008.Beatie is now pregnant again, as announced by Barbara Walters on The View.
Mr Beatie, born a woman, has had a chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy, but decided to keep his female reproductive organs.
2009
Eddie Izzard completes 43 marathons in seven weeks as part of a gruelling charity run for Sport Relief.
2010
UK Cage Fighter and crossdresser Alex Reid wins the United Kingdom reality Game show Celebrity Big Brother and later marries his Girlfriend celebrity glamour model and business woman Katie Price.
2011
With the help of the community, and archive footage provided by Transgender Zone, Trans Media Watch (TMW) manage to persuade Channel 4 (UK} to sign the Memorandum of Understanding.
2012
Channel 5 and Production company Endemol – Both award winners in our annual Transgender Television Awards – select a transgender Housemate from the thousands of hopefuls named Luke Anderson, the first FTM (Female-to-Male) to appear in its history. He later goes on to win the show and you can follow his whole story and journey here.
2013
Grayson Perry wins a BAFTA for the series, ‘all in the Best Possible Taste’. Link.
Lucy Meadows commits suicide and the Daily Mail Newspaper (amongst others) are named by the Coroner as having a part to play by the way they reported her story in the UK press. This caused a national outcry over salacious publishing of stories deemed not in the public interest and for nothing more than salacious reporting to sell papers! We illustrated this with this cartoon here.
Lauren Harries makes a comeback to take part in Celebrity Big Brother 2013. She comes third despite being a rank outsider when she went in. Read her entire journey here.
Paris Lees tops the Independent Newspaper’s ‘Pink List’. This year’s Pink List was very transgender heavy, with many, many transgender people listed.
2014