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Must have been April Ashley I didnt know too much about her but I remember being fascinated to read in a uk Sunday newspaper about Dawn Simmonds who was an adoptive relative of the actress Margaret Rutherford. A little bit later I read with wonderment about the marvellous transition of Barry Cosey who became the bond girl Tula.

I suppose today transition is all the more remarakable with transexuals tranisitoning and changing sex early like Kim Petras.

This is going to age me, but Christine Jorgensen.....

for me two come to mind and i am not sure which i read about first
walter carlos who is now wendy from switched on bach(clockwork orange music)
or renee richards

for me it was Christine Jorgensen.

Leeza

I clearly remember the first time I heard about Wendy Carlos, and when I rediscovered her story almost a decade later. Neither time featured much of her perspective but drove home the point that she was considered somewhat of a reclusive oddball. That message probably set my own transition back years if not a decade or more.

kimberly i agree wendy/walter was definitely an odd ball but reading about his transition in playboy magazine was definitely a turn on for me!

Christine Jorgensen, 1952-'53. Saw a sound bite on a kinda propaganda thing run at the movies called MovieTone in the News. May of 1953 I sat through a really crummy movie twice to see the same 90 second sound bite three times. Then when I got home and to the library I poured through the "Look" and "Life" magazines digging for more information and photos, and finally dug through the archives of the newspapers in the library. I was 10 years old but already a researcher. I recognized some of myself in bits of what she gave out in the story, as she described how she had felt all her life. Much later, I read her biography. Had never heard of April Ashley.

In August of the same 1953, I went to the local fair/Carney in Apache, OK. One of the side show attractions was billed as being half man and half woman. I tried to sneak in since they wouldn't let me pay and go in. Got caught and sent away. A local doctor was to examine her (her name was "Diane") and render an opinion on her status. I desperately wanted to see that, but was again chased away and thwarted. I knew the Carney dressing rooms were on the train cars parked on a siding, and figured she would be going back there when she was through with the performance, so while my parents and cousins were at the Rodeo, I staked out the rear of the tent, sitting under a tree. It took several hours, but finally she came out, and I had sorta worked myself into a frenzy by then. Instead of going toward the railroad cars she was walking at an angle to me towards a tent with quite a few men around it. I intercepted her, and asked her to tell me what I was, and gasped out my story about how I wasn't normal "down there". Big tears started streaking her makeup and she said she had no answers for me and put her hand on my cheek and told me to go find my parents and stay with them, and then continued walking toward the men and tent. I was crying and I wandered around for awhile and found our car ( a new '53 Ford) and crawled in it and finally cried myself to sleep.

It wasn't until many years later I understood that:

"Diane" was likely one flavor or another intersexed, as am I, and

She was walking to the tent with the men to earn some money satisfying their prurient interests and maybe the desires of some of them.

If I had not been so young and naive at the time and able to recognized why she was going there, I would have felt even worse, as I felt that I could never be "normal" even at 10 years old, and after two surgeries to correct my "little anomaly" as they tried to make a "pole" rather than a "hole".

From the age of three after a bath with a female cousin, I knew I was going to be a girl and just didn't understand why the family and others called me a boy and he and him. Very confusing for a child. Oh I tried to be him through the years, I really did, but I was never comfortable in my skin nor being around people except if I held them at arms length and lived behind a mask.

Such has been life for some of us.

thanks carolynn very moving and touching story of ur youth
although i dont feel like a woman trapped in a mans body i can relate to the fascination as a youth to those stories!

It was Christine Jorgensen, and I didn't follow up on it. Jan Morris intrigued me more, because I read her Rolling Stone articles. I knew she had been on the Everest expedition with Hillary. Her articles were about travel; she didn't talk about her personal life. Somehow, I knew her background.

My real reading experience came in 1993, when our local weekly did a lead article on transgender women in the East Bay. I told myself that I understood something about them because of my teen crossdressing, and that was true. No warning bells went off at that time. Three years later, they were beginning to sound, though. Ding! It was another four years before the sirens went off. (My, I'm being dramatic.)

I'm just surprised I didn't have enough curiosity to really read about trans women. I made up for years later.

Christine Jorgensen was the first one that i had read about and ever since then i was hoping that some day i could do the same.

Denise

I lost my original reply, and had to re-type it. I see that I forgot to mention that I was very moved by Carolynn's story. I felt that while it belongs here, it could also be the basis for a whole other thread. I could vividly see the whole story from the way you told it.

I'm not good with remembering names 5 minutes after hearing it, much less one or two so many years ago. But I know it was in a men's magazine

For me it was Christine Jorgensen. I saw an article while sneaking in to read the adult magazines in the local drugstore.

Like many others of my generation, it was George/Christine Jorgensen. I was enthralled with the idea that this could happen. Not that I would ever do it myself. If I did do it, I would probably have been a lesbian, as almost all of my sexual thoughts are about being with other women. Then again, who knows what hormones would have done, I don't think that it would change mind patterns.

Christine Jorgensen, you couldn't avoid it in the 1950's, and I envied her. Jan Morris's book Conundrum, however, had far more influence on me.

Carolynn, that was a powerful reminiscence.