Famous Trans People Quiz

[transward (imported)]

BuzzFeed had an article about, "24 Americans Who Changed The Way We Think About Transgender Rights." http://www.buzzfeed.com/thomaspagemcbee ... ameri-9bf1

. Sylvia Rivera

Sylvia Rivera was integral to trans civil rights, but until recently she was all but erased from history. She was a loud voice for the most marginalized: trans people of color and those with low incomes, and it’s been said that she was the first bottle-thrower at the Stonewall Rebellion. Rivera co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970 with Marsha P. Johnson, a radical group that picketed, protested, and connected queens on the street with food and shelter. She died in 2002 but lives on as the namesake of today’s vibrant Sylvia Rivera Law Project.

2. Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson (the P stood for “pay it no mind”) was a “drag mother” to many, and a mentor to Rivera, with whom she co-founded STAR. Like Rivera, she’s also been mentioned as a veteran of the Stonewall Riots, and she was deeply concerned with street kids. She was a model for Andy Warhol, the subject of the documentary Pay It No Mind, and the band Antony and the Johnsons is named in homage to her.

3. Christine Jorgensen

Christine Jorgensen was an ex-GI who became a cover girl and celebrity in 1952 as the first trans woman to receive hormone therapy (in addition to surgery) — which the media christened the first “sex change.” She embraced the attention and made classy use of the platform to draw visibility to trans folks as well as to work as an actress, singer (her nightclub act famously featured “I Enjoy Being a Girl”), and entertainer. She died in 1989, and The New York Times wrote her obituary.

4. Billy Tipton

Billy Tipton hit it big as a jazz musician and band leader in the ’40s and ’50s, and then a stint in the house band at Tin Pan Alley. Things went downhill for Billy, sadly, and he died in poverty. His son only learned he had female anatomy on his deathbed in 1989 — the revelation of which caused a distasteful tabloid stir — but also introduced mainstream America to a passing trans man.

5. Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn

Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling were Warhol “superstars” and co-starred in Paul Morrissey’s 1971 film Women in Revolt. The trans women enjoyed a level of hipness, if not notoriety. Candy Darling was a muse to The Velvet Underground, and acted alongside Jane Fonda and Sophia Loren. She died of lymphoma at 29. Holly Woodlawn achieved less success but was featured in Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss and is often interviewed regarding the influence of Andy Warhol.

6. Lou Sullivan

Lou Sullivan founded FTM International, the first FTM-only organization, in 1986, and is considered a driving force behind the modern understanding that sexuality and gender identity are two different dimensions. He was a gay trans man who advocated for trans men in general, and was crucial in “proving” the existence of gay men in particular. He died of AIDS in 1991 at 39.

7. Jamison Green

Jamison Green, author of the seminal 2004 trans memoir Becoming a Visible Man, took over FTM International when Lou Sullivan passed away and carried on his vision. He spearheaded the passage of San Francisco’s Transgender Protection Ordinance in the ’90s and is now a policy expert and speaker on transgender issues.

8. Renée Richards

Renée Richards was a pro tennis player who began her transition in 1975. She was then banned from the 1976 US Open, which created a “woman born woman” policy to justify the exclusion of trans athletes. She sued, and the New York Supreme Court ultimately ruled in her favor, a huge step in trans rights. She played from 1977–1981 and went on to become a coach.

9. Lee Brewster

Lee Brewster founded the Queens Liberation Front in 1970 with Bunny Eisenhower, which was instrumental in getting cross-dressing decriminalized in New York. Brewster also ran the New York drag emporium Mardi Gras, published the political magazine Drag throughout the ’70s, and organized drag balls. He died in 2000 at 57.

10. Sandy Stone

Sandy Stone is an artist and new media professor who was targeted by Janice Raymond in her infamously transphobic 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire. In response, Stone wrote the crucial 1987 essay, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” which encouraged trans people to come out and encouraged transgender scholarship. It has since been cited as the origin of transgender studies.

11. Riki Wilchins

Riki Wilchins founded the first transgender activist organization, GenderPAC, in 1995, and then went on to co-found the Transsexual Menace and Camp Trans (an educational protest to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s “women born women” policy), and compiled and published the first national survey of violence against trans people. Though she’s taken heat for recent Advocate op-eds, her early work changed the way the world viewed transgender people.

12. Loren Cameron

Loren Cameron is a portrait photographer whose 1996 book Body Alchemy documented his transition and the lives of other trans men he knew, bringing visibility to the beauty of trans male bodies.

13. Gwendolyn Ann Smith

Gwendolyn Ann Smith is an activist and writer. She founded the first Transgender Day of Remembrance in 1999 in memory of Rita Hester, who’d been killed the prior November. The memorials are now held internationally every November, and they provide the trans community a space to grieve the shocking amount of violence still perpetrated against trans people.

14. Miss Major

Miss Major is the executive director of the Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project (TGI Justice Project). She was present at the Stonewall Uprising and has long worked on behalf of low-income, incarcerated trans women of color and their families.

15. Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah

Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker are activists and academics, and together are the founding editors of the just-launched Transgender Studies Quarterly — the first journal of its kind. Currah is a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute and chair of the Department of Political Science at Brooklyn College, while Stryker is an associate professor at the University of Arizona and prolific author of work about trans and queer culture, as well as a filmmaker.

16. Kate Bornstein

Kate Bornstein is an author and gender theorist best known for bringing visibility to a genderqueer approach to trans dialogue, highlighted by 1994’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and 1998’s My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely, which she’s currently updating. She’s also an anti-bully advocate, speaker, and performance artist.

17. Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of many books, including the memoir She’s Not There, which was the first book by an American transgender person to become a best seller. Her recent title about parenting while trans, Stuck in the Middle with You, has gained media attention from the Today show and Brian Williams. She’s also an advocate for trans issues, a professor, a New York Times contributor, and a board member of GLAAD.

18. Masen Davis

Masen Davis is the executive director of the 10-year-old Transgender Law Center, which advocates for legal and policy progress to better the lives of trans people. Davis took up his role in 2007 and led the charge that secured last year’s crucial federal employment protections for trans and gender-nonconforming people. He’s also worked to better trans lives through health-care access in California, where the center is based.

19. Kylar Broadus

Attorney and activist Kylar Broadus was the first trans person to testify before Congress last year, in support of the Employment Non-Discrimation Act. Broadus founded the Trans People of Color Coalition in 2010 and was appointed to the Rules Committee for the 2012 DNC Convention, making him part of a historic delegation of 13 openly trans candidates in attendance.

20. Lana Wachowski

Lana Wachowski’s entrance into trans advocacy is almost certainly reluctant. The famously private director revealed her trans status last year via a profile in The New Yorker, but her profound and moving speech in acceptance of the HRC Visibility Award was a surprising game-changer for trans visibility. With grace, wit, and courage, she told her very personal story without compromise, resisted a connect-the-dots trans narrative, and — when the speech went viral — endeared herself to people the world over.

21. Dean Spade

Dean Spade is an academic, lawyer, writer, and activist. He founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal aid and advocacy organization for low-income, trans, and gender-nonconforming people of color. He was named by The Advocate as one of its “Forty under 40” in 2010 and released his first book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, in 2011.

22. Janet Mock

Janet Mock was working as a staff editor for People.com when she shared her transition story with Marie Claire in 2011. After that, she left her job at People.com to work as a media activist, speaker, and writer. Her #GirlsLikeUs Twitter campaign galvanized a diverse and large group of trans women online, and she has become a fierce critic of tired media tropes regarding trans bodies. Mock is a national speaker and commentator featured everywhere from NPR to the Melissa Harris-Perry show, advocating for diverse representations of womanhood.

This is a comment I posted on the article.

I am trans. I applaud all these pioneers. But there is a certain irony in the fact that the increasing acceptance of trans people in American society probably has far more to do with all the trans porn stars that straight men are getting off watching on the internet and the trans hookers that celebrities keep getting caught with, than with all of these positive role models combined. Few in the general society have ever heard of many of these. I ran trans support groups for a decade, and am pretty well read on the literature, but of these people I only knew directly of eleven, slightly less than 50%

My question is: How many of these 24 have you heard of and how much influence do people you have never heard of have on your opinions?

And yet we are being more accepted even in some Red States.

Transward

[JesusA (imported)]

It's an interesting list. Without reading the brief descriptions, I only recognized eight of the names, though I have met and spent time with two of them and exchanged emails with a third.

I would certainly have included Stephen Whittle, OBE on any such list. Stephen is a former "radical lesbian" professor of law who is a major force behind improved transgender rights (and all LGBT rights) in the UK. He's well recognized on that side of the Pond. In the 2005 New Year Honours, Stephen was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, an important recognition of his work.

Marci Bowers should also be a candidate for her TV appearances that introduced a great many of the general public to trans issues. I have met people whose only knowledge of trans issues comes from Christine Jorgensen and Marci Bowers.

While our Transward will probably gag at the suggestion, Anne Lawrence might also be a candidate for her academic work on the subject that is widely read and cited. I respect some (but certainly not all) of her academic work, though I find her personally very unpleasant.

I do know all three of these individuals, and I have listed them in what I consider to be their order of importance.

[cheetaking243 (imported)]

Regrettably, I've only ever heard of Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards, and Lana Wachowski. And the first two, I only know because I specifically went searching for famous trans people. The third, on the other hand, I was a big fan of before I even knew that she was trans, because I was a big fan of the Matrix trilogy, so when I heard about her transitioning, that was totally an "OMG, no way!" moment. (Granted, I'm still a freaking kid, and most of the people on this list are from the 1970's and 1980's, so I really haven't had a chance to know any of them. I wasn't even alive when most of these events happened.)

One thing I've noticed, though, is that in the past the only famous trans people tended to be those who were famous specifically because they were trans. Where now recently, for the first time there are starting to be people who were famous before beginning transition, and do so very publically, which I believe is a BIG step, because now everyone is starting to see that we're just normal people rather than just some outlying group over there somewhere that only makes a fuss when it comes to rights. The big three nowadays that people say they find inspirational are Lana Wachowski, Chaz Bono, and Laura Jane Grace... all three of which were famous long before transitioning.

I REALLY feel like the tide is starting to turn now. I have been seeing a LOT of stories about trans rights in the mainstream media recently... specifically in regards to the Fallon Fox controversy, the HUGE bathroom rights issues that are going through a lot of state senates, the controversy with Coy Mathis in Colorado, and Anderson Cooper's big interview with ex-Navy Seal Kristin Beck. That is a LOT of publicity recently, which I don't EVER recall seeing before, even when I was going through my biggest period of gender dysphoria back as a teenager in the early 2000's. And there were also recent episodes of ABC's "What Would You Do," MTV's "True Life," and TLC's "What Not to Wear" featuring trans people. So yeah... I'm actually feeling VERY good about the level of visibility we've been getting recently.

[Dave (imported)]

There's Wendy Carlos a modern composer and musician notable for electronic music.

[Uncle Flo (imported)]

I only recognized eight of the names as I read the list. There are other names not on the list that I would recognize if I saw them - and yet I do not know a single name among trans porn stars. --FLO--

[janekane (imported)]

I have been vividly aware of six people on that list, and vaguely aware of, perhaps, another six.

I sometimes tell the story of my learning of one of them, Christine Jorgensen, in December of 1952, and repeat it here:

One Sunday evening in December, 1952, as was a family tradition, we did Sunday supper, timed so as to be able to listen to the Jack Benny radio program. On the December, 1952, Jack Benny program that etched itself into my indelible memory space, the program began with a joke told by Don Wilson. The joke that particular Sunday evening was about taking a trip to Europe, to London, where "a man was a man," to Paris, where "a woman was a woman," and to Copenhagen, where "a man was a woman."

The studio audience burst out with laughter. The audience in our living room did not. During supper, it had come to my attention that I would soon wisely use a version of that invention of Thomas Crapper, which, in our house, was upstairs. After Don Wilson told that joke, I excused myself, went upstairs, used the aforementioned water closet facility, and then went into my bedroom, which was directly above the living room, and in which I could clearly hear the living room radio. Lying down on my bed, I cried, cried more, and cried as though to cry my heart out. I cried, not with sadness, sorrow. or grief. I cried with the joy of knowing, recognizing, and understanding, that, in this world, I was no longer as though alone.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a few hours in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in Joannes Park, at the annual Pride Alive event. Fair Wisconsin had a "booth," as did the Human Rights Campaign, as did three Green Bay area local churches, as did one Wisconsin legislator; there was a Pflag booth (I am a Pflag member).

Exactly three Green Bay area churches had booths at Pride Alive, one being a Metropolitan Community Church congregation, one being a Unitarian-Universalist congregation, and one being a United Church of Christ congregation.

At Pride Alive, I wore a "pin" on my shirt that depicts a partly open closet door, the door being painted the traditional LGBT rainbow colors, with the words above the door, "I'M OUT."

In 1974, I met, through a mutual friend (and, in actual fact) "Jewish matchmaker," an XX chromosome person with whom I observed that "the mutual pheromones" were working to my biological satisfaction. "She" had been about as much a tomboy in childhood as I had been a sissy. We were married in 1975. More than 38 years later, the pheromones are still working, the evidence of same being our having been married continuously ever since we were married in 1975.

While we lived in the Chicago, Illinois area, I was active in the Chicago Gender Society (CGS). At one meeting, a friend there once asked me, "Why don't you cross-dress?" To which I replied, "What makes you think I am not cross-dressed now?" Often, when I tell that true story to people, many people laugh. My CGS friend did not laugh.

I use the name janekane here, a mix of the feminine and the mascuine. I tend to sense that my actual personhood is plausibly about 75% feminine and about 25% masculine, as social convention may tend to define those terms. So, as a person of far more feminine than masculine identity, and in protest of prejudice and stigma, I cross-dress consistently in supposedly masculine attire, while being out, really out, as trans.

At Pride Alive, while chatting with people, some people had the kindness and decency to inquire of my LGBT situation. I have a reason for consistently cross-dressing the way I do, it is my way of defying while surviving the social atrocities of stigma and prejudice.

The only people who attempt to tell me who I am contrary to who I am, are people who do not know me. People who do know me know better than to attempt to tell me who I am; they ask me. People who do not know me cannot tell me who I am because hey do not know who I am because they have not asked me and listened to me. No one has the ability or the capacity to successfully tell me who I am, to define me, to project their self-image onto me, or to otherwise delimit who I am; not even I, myself can actually do that.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech in which he said, "I have a dream..." He was not alone in having a dream.

I am also able to state, as fact, "I have a dream." Every moment of my life, as I actually live my life, an aspect of that dream becomes realized, becomes actualized. My actual life, as i live it, moment by moment, is identically that dream, neither more nor less, and naught else.

The dream? That, through the living of my life, I may play a useful part in solving the biological enigma of addiction and its ilk. "Addiction and its ilk?" By that, I include more than the ending of prejudice, stigma, hatred, crime war, terrorism, retribution deceptively masquerading as justice, and every other form of abuse, neglect, and destructive violence ever to enjoin itself with the human condition.

In grade school, I read (in the manner of independent study) about every field of human scholarly endeavor that I could identify, psychology, sociology, biology, history, law, and more, only to recognize that the field of human endeavor that would have the tools needed for solving the enigma of human hatred apparently did not yet exist. While a physics major at Carleton College in the 1950s, it became blatantly obvious to me that the realm of physics was far too tiny a realm to ever contain anything that could ever actually contain a "theory of everything," and that biology alone had access to the dimensionality required for the development of a viable theory of everything. I also recognized that, of all the learned professions, only engineering had the mindset required for the design and development of an authentic and verifiable theory of everything. When I finally found a bioengineering curriculum that portended of the tools required for the design and development of an authentic theory of everything, at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC), I transferred my three years of Carleton college credits to UICC.

I understand that the term, "biosemiotics" was coined in the early 1960s. A Wikipedia search for that word may inform, as may searching worldcat.org, amazon.com, and bookfinder.com via the Internet.

One particular, fairly recent, book on biosemiotics that I find may be usefully informative is available on Amazon Kindle, that is how I got my copy of it:

Nature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion How Industrial Society Lost Touch with Reality David W. Kidner Nottingham Trent University, UK

Kidner, Dr David W. (2012-03-06). Nature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion: How Industrial Society Lost Touch with Reality . Palgrave Macmillan Monographs. Kindle Edition.

My work, as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, having bachelors and doctoral degrees in bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle/The University of Illinois at Chicago, is that of biosemiotics significantly focused on the culture of deception as a property of the imputed by rule of law alleged social contract.

I find that "the rule of law" as espoused and in use by the present Anglo-American Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence is an addiction in the form of an actually-unconstitutional established religious cartel the basis of which is effectively unadulterated addiction, given that the mechanism of addiction is the reality-distorting psychological defense of displacement (see the book by Lance Dodes, "The Heart of Addiction: A New Approach to Understanding and Managing Alcoholism and Other Addictive Behaviors, William Morrow, 2002), which also happens to be available via Amazon Kindle (I have the print edition).

Addiction, in every form I have ever come across, is ultimately, and originally, grounded in the mistaken notion that actually avoidable mistakes can ever actually happen, and as a corollary, that actually avoidable accidents can ever actually happen.

Believing that avoidable mistakes and/or avoidable accidents actually happen is shatteringly traumatic to human brain function; such shattered human brain function is the essence of human deception and the whole of its ilk. Babies are not born deceived, in those people who become deceived, it is the infant-child transition (also known as the terrible twos) that is the brain function shattering event.

What qualifies me to make such a claim? I never went through the infant child transition or the terrible twos. However it happened, I recognized the infant-child transition as something I would not likely be able to survive because it would cause me such intense neurological (mainly within my brain) pain as to almost certainly kill me. That is, as best I can yet guess, something inseparable from the way in which my brain is inescapably autistic.

I study and do research about biosemiotics, and have done so starting very soon after I was born, and well before I learned to say two English words in any sort of intelligible sentence, because it is the only way I have found to survive living while being surrounded by human society in its present form and function.

If, as I plan to do, I am able to live long enough, my dream informs me that it will complete itself as I live my life. When does the future happen? Now, moment by moment? My dream is my life, my life is my dream.

Trans people who have helped me learn ways of taking yet another breath include such folks as the late Gloria Hemingway. There are hundreds upon thousands more, none of whom are on that Famous Trans People list, people whose gender-diverse lives have helped sustain mine.