| -------
|
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
|
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.
|
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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. |
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