Part I: early life Part II: publications Part III:  comments and bibliography  In 1907 Mowry Saben wrote a short newspaper article.  'Woman – An Age-Haunting Problem' which was published in the Detroit Free Press and elsewhere. In it he proposed that all of our culture comes from men:  “Turn where we will, the objects of our veneration are all the monuments of man. From man have come the cities and the industries of the globe: all the great inventions are his; of him are all the religions, the ethical systems, the sciences and philosophies; he has created all the gr ..read more

(This article builds on the October 2022 article in OutHistory “Who Was Jennie June?” by Channing Gerard Joseph Online.  I accept Joseph’s argument that Mowry Saben and Jennie June were the same person, and integrate the two biographies. June – in her Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Female Impersonators – slightly altered the facts of her life such as claiming to be from Connecticut rather than Massachusetts, and that she attended an “uptown” university (presumably Columbia) in New York rather than Harvard. She also altered her birth year from 1870 to 1874. This creates problems: i ..read more

Part I: life until first visit to Benjamin clinic  Part II: Transition Part III: comments If Lyn Raskin is still alive she will be 93/4. One hopes that she did not come to a bad end, but overestimating how well ones passes and having sex with straight men is a dangerous game. We know of other trans women who were murdered in such circumstances. ---- January 1969-July 1970. That is certainly a fast-track transition. Several surgeons would not accept her as she had not done a 12-month real-life test – “capacity to earn, dress and live as a female” as Money put it. Burou did n ..read more

 Part I: life until first visit to Benjamin clinic  Part II: Transition Part III: comments Raskin was looking for a writer to write her biography, and a friend suggested Irmis Johnson, a noted journalist whom the Hearst company had sent to Copenhagen in 1953 to meet Christine Jorgensen. This had resulted in five consecutive weekly articles in the the American Weekly, actually written by Johnson but attributed to Jorgensen. Johnson expressed interest and even gave Jorgensen’s contact details. Raskin as Edward phoned several times starting the next day, and Christine tol ..read more

Part I: life until first visit to Benjamin clinic Part II: Transition Part III: comments (Citation dates refer to entries in Raskin's book,  Diary of a Transsexual) Edward Raskin, originally from Pennsylvania, was the fourth child of a father who became a Miami hotel keeper. He did an accounting degree at the University of Miami, where he was seduced by one of the professors. He then slept with many of the other students, and also with guests in his father’s hotel.  In 1950 with dreams of making it as a playwright and lyricist for musicals, Raskin spent three months in New ..read more

Mikki started playing Scrabble in 2005 after discovering the game online. By 2010 she was coming first in  tournaments including the British National Championship, which provided her with £1,500 so that she could compete in Malaysia later that year. In 2012 she was the clear winner at the 4th European Open Championship held that year in Malta. She was ranked as the fourth best Scrabble player in the world. Mikki was living in social housing in Carlisle, Cumbria (population 74,000), where she was receiving psychiatric treatment, and had spent time as an inpatient at Carlisle's Carleton Cli ..read more

Manuel was raised by a single mother in Santa Monica, California, and was five times the women’s national amateur boxing champion, and also competed in the 2012 Women’s US Olympic Trials until forced to withdraw with a shoulder injury.  “I’ve never really felt any sort of relation to being a girl or a woman or really being female. I would identify myself as a boy or a man in my head even if I didn’t say it out loud to other people.” He began hormone therapy in 2013, and had top surgery in Salt Lake City in 2014. “I don’t really think of it as difficult because it’s been so fun. People ..read more

Original version: December 2009 David Martin was born in Paddington, London, and was educated at the Finsbury Park comprehensive school. He was trained as a motor mechanic. However he also started stealing things. By 1968 he was in a borstal serving time for 30 cases of theft. There he studied electronics, to better understand alarm systems. He managed to spring a lock, and escaped. In 1972 he was on remand for more burglaries. In the prison van he picked the lock of his cubicle, and then did the same for the other prisoners. In 1973 he was in Brixton Prison. He and 20 others hijacked a dustca ..read more

 Tom’s father, Benjamin Davies, was the minister at Caersalem Baptist Chapel in the coal-ming village of Abergwynfi, Naeth Port Talbot, South Wales, and was a prominent figure in the local temperance movement. However by age eleven, young Tom was drinking beer with a next-door neighbour. He was also transvesting.  “I was awfully interested in ladies clothes, and always dressing up as a woman, before I left school really. So now, and if my sisters had anything new, a hat, a coat, or a dress … I wasn’t happy until I tried it on.”  He avoided the cricket and football that the boy ..read more

Cimino grew up in Long Island, New York. He was educated in private schools and then attended first Michigan State University and then Yale. At the latter he took a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 1961 and an MFA in 1963. He was also in the US Army reserve where he did a month of medical training.  He found work in New York City with a small company that made documentary and industrial films, and from there progressed into making commercials. He then attempted scriptwriting, and created Thunderbolt and Lightfoot which was at first about outlaws in Ireland, but he was persuaded to revise it ..read more