July 12, 2023 • 51 mins
This week Carmen speaks with the woman who was connecting the trans community with the information and resources before the internet existed, Dallas Denny. Carmen talks with Dallas about her life's work - Creating the American Educational Gender Information Service, Chrysalis magazine, and Southern Comfort conference and what the trans community was like here in the South at that time.
For more from Carmen and Beauty Translated follow @thecarmenlaurent & @beautytranslatedpod.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, beauties. I'm very excited about today's episode and I
want to get right into it. Season two is coming
to a close with next week's episode. I hope you
all will enjoy these next prolific trans trailblazers that I
have lined up. Today's conversation is with Dallas Denny, a
legend in the trans community that many young ones may
(00:30):
not be aware of. She is the woman who created Aegis,
Chrysalis magazine and Southern Comfort Conference, to name a few.
Listen up for some hearts to read kids. Hello listeners,
(00:56):
and welcome to another episode of Beauty Translated. This week,
I have another legendary trans elder here with me. She's
a woman who paved the way and building trans community
before trans people were visible as they were today, before
the Internet connected us instantly with our community. Today I'm
speaking with the prolific columnist, writer, activist, and teacher. Her
(01:18):
name is Dallas Dinny. Please welcome her. Hi, Dallas Hikram. Yeah,
we have a legend with us today. I'm I'm thrilled.
I'm thrilled. Thank you for being in.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
A very small way, maybe.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
In a very big significant way to me.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted to
be rich, but it is nice to have when people
know who you are. And so I got what I wanted.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Dallas, you have a prolific legacy of writing, you know,
all throughout like the eighties and nineties going into today.
But I want to make sure that the listeners who
are not familiar with who you are, are not familiar
with your work kind of have an idea of who
you are. So could you starting with kind of maybe
where you're from and where you're raised, tell the listeners
(02:04):
kind of a brief introduction of who you are.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Sure. I was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and lived
there on and off growing up. My father was in
the US Army, so we lived a lot of places.
We lived in Orleans, France for four years, lived in
Arizona twice, lived in Georgia, and when he would be
stationed in Korea because it was the media post Korean
(02:30):
conflict period, we would be in Nashville for a year
or two. Wow. Yeah, so I bounced all around when
I was The day I finished the eighth grade, my
parents picked me up and instead of going home, we
drove through Atlanta to Murphysboro, just south of Nashville. My
father had taken a job with the Park Service. So
(02:51):
from age fourteen until I transitioned at age thirty nine,
I lived in Tennessee. And when I transitioned, rather than
do it where I was known, and I moved to
Atlanta where there was some support, first support I ever found.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah, and I'm learning a little bit about that. You know,
nowadays trans people are not as familiar with the concept
of having to necessarily move away from home in order
to be accepted you in your transition, because one of
the benefits of moving away from home is that nobody
knows who you are. You can kind of start over
fresh where nobody has to dead name you or misgender
(03:29):
you or things like that. And you can also, like
you said, get more access to support, which was here
in Atlanta. And I lived in Atlanta my entire life.
I'm going to be thirty this year, and I have
been researching and reading your writing, and I've been fascinated
by the amount of history we have trans history we
(03:53):
have in the city of Atlanta. To me, it seems
like there was a lot going on in Atlanta at
the time.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
There really was.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
So you ended up in Atlanta when you began your transition,
and that was at the age of thirty nine.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah. I had been on hormones for ten years. Okay, wow,
and my name was always Dallas. I didn't have to
change my name, and I seemed to pass very easily,
So I had hopes. I didn't want to be unemployed,
and I worked before. I worked as a psychological examin
or in Tennessee. But I didn't care. I was ready
(04:29):
to transition. Was I needed to transition, And I didn't
know if I'd ever work in a professional capacity again.
But within two weeks I found a job that I
worked until I retired with the Stage of Georgia, doing
essentially the same thing I'd done in Tennessee, which gave
me a stable base to do activism. I had a
place to sleep at night, for instance.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Right, and Atlanta really did become a stable base for
a lot of the work that you were doing at
the time. I want to talk more about that, but
can you before we get into your w work with
ages and the other several publications that you had, can
you kind of paint a picture for us of what
the Atlanta trans community was like at that time.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Now, all my life, I'd been looking for the community
and couldn't find it. I went to the Vanderbilt Gender
Identity program in the late seventies, where they told me
I was not dysfunctional enough to be transsexual. In other words,
I had a job, I had to college degrees, so
they weren't going to help me with transition. And I
went and read the literature at the adjacent medical library there,
(05:36):
which suggested they were right, and I realized they wrote
it so they had this idea that if you weren't
entirely dysfunctional in the male role or female role vice versa,
then you weren't really trans And I had questioned myself
about that, read the literature and decided they were full
of bull. And I put myself on hormones at age
twenty nine, so by age thirty nine, I was quite feminized.
(06:00):
I got rid of my facial hair and moved to Atlanta,
and having looked for community, the only thing I identified
was the Society for the Second Self, which was the
organization founded by Virginia Prince and Carol b Croft for
heterosexual cross dressers. And I was not welcome as a member.
And I knew that because they were upfront stating that
(06:21):
it was, and so the only identified community and people
even remotely like myself I could find didn't want me.
But I finally sort of held my breath and joined
after ten years because my reasoning was they have to
know people like me. And sure enough, after a few months,
incomes a woman named Jessica Britton with a copy of
(06:44):
Transgender Tapestry then it was TVTS Tapestry, and there in
the back was a listing of support groups. I looked
through it avidly, and there was a transsexual support group
in Atlanta called the Montgomery Medical and Psychological Institute, and
I call him every day for about two months before
(07:04):
someone picked up the phone. We ranged for an interview.
I came down and they almost immediately drafted me to
run their group because both of the founders had health
issues and they liked my credentials. All I was looking
for was a little bit of just ability to be myself.
I wasn't looking to be an activist necessarily, but I
realized that all my training and all my skills really
(07:27):
were a good fit. So Jerry Lynn Montgomery wore couple.
Jerry was he died recently, was a transman. Lynn had
worked in the gender Identity Clinic, which was co run
by Emory University and Georgia Mental Health Institute. There was
a when I got to Atlanta, there was a physical
(07:47):
building about a half mile from the center of Emory
and they were still doing gender reassignments there. I don't
know if they didn't do the surgery because it was
a big brew haha.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
They still do not in this state. We still do
not have any gender affirming surgeries. Well, which is crazy.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Back and must have been the seventies, they the Department
of Vocational Rehabilitation funded one or two surgeries and it
just the brown stuff hit the fan.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, because you can see as you want by the way.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, the ship hit the fan. Everyone was outraged. The
governor was deluged with letters, but the clinic was still open.
They were not surgical. I learned there were surgeries done
because immediately after my genital surgery, I went to Michael
Seegers and Brussels and he told me that there's a
(08:45):
chance that I would start that I would start having
difficulty urinating after a couple of months because the scar
tissue will form, and he says a simple dilation will
fix it. And it did. But the first place I
went was to a doc who other people had I
knew had seen, and he said his partners had sort
of forced him out into not treating transsexual people, so
(09:08):
I couldn't see him. I went to another place and
they sort of ran around waving their hands in the
air and decided they were going to put me under
into an exploratory procedure instead of fixing the problem. I
remember being in the lobby. I don't usually cry, but
I don't remember being in the lobby crying, and I
decided again that this is bull. And the third place
(09:29):
I went was a surgeon called Stephen Morgenstern who had
an office on the North Side. He was known for
like penal enhancements at that time. But I went to him.
He fixed the problem immediately, and he told me that
he had done surgery back in the day, you know,
(09:49):
probably in the eighties. So I never found out, you know,
exactly where he was based to do that, probably at
Georgia Mental Health Institute, because they might have done some
surger from people who were able to get it covered
under private insurance, which only rarely happened then, or had
the money not nearly as expensive then as it is now,
(10:11):
but it was still quite.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Expensive, right, And I mean just hearing that whole history
of you trying to even seek out that treatment here
in Georgia, it amazes me just because today not that
much has changed unfortunately here in Georgia. And I mean
even famously, I don't know if this was around the
(10:32):
same time, but famously Robert Eves, who died of ovarian cancer,
could not find any treatment in this state. Robert Eves
was a transsexual man from Tacoa, Georgia, who died trying
to find treatment for his advanced ovarian cancer. More than
twenty doctors turned him away, many because they were practicing
(10:55):
obgi ns and did not want to be associated with
treating a man such as him. You can watch the
documentary Southern Comfort, following the last four seasons of Robert
Eves's life, for free on YouTube. It is an amazing
film that I highly recommend, and a link will be
in today's episode description. If you want to know what
(11:15):
trans medical discrimination looks like, just a little bit of it,
and what life for trans people was like in the
South in the nineties, you must see the documentary Southern Comfort.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I was running easiest at the time, I had compiled
a list of places to go for help for treatment
for support groups all over the country, and I knew
Robert from Southern Comfort. Why was one of the many
people who started that conference, and as was Robert. And
Robert called me one day and he wanted to referral
(11:50):
to a guynecologist. I gave him three names. One was
the guynecologists I saw after my surgery after I'd been
to Dr Morgenstern. The second had just done a HYS
directory on another transman, and I forget the third. But
I don't know what happened that he couldn't get treatment
from someone, especially from the you know, although it could
(12:11):
have been people's partners freaking out and saying, you know,
we're not going to be appreciated with you if you
do this again. But yeah, and then, and of course
Robert developed ovarian cancer and died, and everyone loved him
at Southern Comfort. He was such a Southern, classic Southern gentleman.
He was always so polite to me.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I've watched the documentary Southern Comfort, and that is a
really awesome kind of glimpse into Southern trans life.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
At the time, I had never been to clubs because
in Nashville they wouldn't let me in. Wow, you know,
because I had a male id.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Wow. Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
I think it was because they were afraid of the police.
Nashville had and still has a history of LGBT places
mysteriously burning.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
So it was it was to me. So I had
no experience, So I got to go to the clubs
when I transitioned and came to Atlanta. There were some
fabulous entertainment at the clubs. But aside from that, and
there were a lot of trans women that were drag
queens at the time. There still are and I believe
in the last season of RuPaul's Drag Race four people
(13:21):
yes with trans and the cast of about twelve.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
So the clubs had a scene. You know. There was
a nurse who used to go around doing silicon pumping
in the back rooms of bars and hotel rooms.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah. Perhaps the most famous in all the South, hosted
at Atlanta's very own Backstreet, Charlie Brown's Cabaret was the
pinnacle of drag entertainment. Most of the cast members were
sis came in. It even featured the Goddess Raven friend
of the pod Beyunknn called Bowser's drag Mother, but the
(13:55):
cast also featured several trans women such as Seanna Brooks,
mother of the House of Brooks, and Heather Daniels, Pam Anderson,
bombshell type.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
And I had some friends in that community. And then
there was the Montgomery Institute, and you know, they had
a monthly support group meeting which I said they drafted
me to run and based upon sort of tapestries publishing.
Of all these other organizations, there was a pretty lively
(14:26):
national scene of people doing zines, you know, little newsletters
and little magazines, and there was a lot of discussion.
One of the things that was under discussion was why
do we call ourselves? Because we have these medical names.
You know. Anne Boleyn, an anthropologist I know, called them
slave names or similar to slave names. You know. We've
(14:47):
even names like transsexual and transvestite, you know, and those
were not the names we chose for ourselves. You know,
we were living with those names, but they weren't. So
what do we want to call our And I believe
it was out of that discussion that the term transgender arose.
(15:07):
It was one of many terms tossed out. I remember
Virginia Prince, who founded that, you know, homophobic, transphobic organization
back in the seventies. I guess it was she suggested
by genderist. She was always making up words, and someone
moved the hyphen to make it big enderous, and that
(15:27):
was sort of the end of that. About the time
of the March on Washington, Philis Fry and a couple
of other activists were really up in the face of
the organizers, and suddenly all of the gay meteor were
talking about transgender, which was functioning as an umbrella to
describe everybody under the term. Although it was not yet
(15:49):
an identity. It was a descriptor. If you were a
drag queen, you could be under the umbrella, if you
were a cross dresser, if you were transsexual, And of
course it quickly became an identity, and a lot of
people today who might have identified as either a cross
stress or transsexual or today identifying as trans or non binary. Right,
(16:10):
And in fact, those old labels are becoming antiquated.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Well, I want to talk more about that in just
a second, because they're actually coming back in a lot
of ways. But I want to back up here just
something that I've noticed, you know, like I said, eighties
and nineties. From what I've read, Atlanta had a lot
of conventions. It had a lot of publications, as you said,
zines and magazines and things like that. It had a
(16:36):
lot of transactivity going on compared to like, you know, say,
the rest of the South. Why Atlanta? What was special
about Atlanta?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
You think, Well, I think for the same reason San
Francisco and New York or centers. It's a place where
people can come from their rural towns. It's sort of amazing.
On RuPaul's drag Race, I'm married to someone who's infatuated
with RuPaul's drag Race.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Really, I'm friends with somebody who one season seven, so
you can tell her that, well, we.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Want drag Race Sweden, and drag Race Belgium, and Dragwace Spain.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I love Aspanya, that's my favorite one.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
She's a virtuoso with a VPN. So we lug in
so that that scene was going on. You know, there
was the Sweet Gumhead, which was famous. It it just closed,
I believe before I came RuPaul worked in the clubs
before he became famous.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Back up for a second about the Sweet Gum Club,
because there's a book actually about.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
I just bought that book.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's a fantastic book.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I may have learned about it from you.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
In fact, Oh wow, tell me about Sweet Gum a
little bit about it?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Well, no, I did. I never went because close there
was a place called, at various times Lipsticks and Levitas,
next to the Terra Theater, and they had some fabulous
shows there. Or they did, like the Phantom of the
Opera that I might as well have been on Broadway,
it was that good. Yeah, they had pageants, so I
would go to the pageants sometimes and be there five
(17:59):
in the morning while I was working my full time
job and running the Montgomery group. But except for that scene,
and of course you know, I'm liking on the name
of the punk singer.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
That Jane County.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Jane County, Yes, I'm sorry, I'm seventy three. That happened sometimes,
no worries.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Jane County is a living legend from Dallas, Georgia, and
the first trans woman to front a punk rock band.
She was one of the trans women present at the
Stonewall Riots of nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
You know, and Rue Paul was waiting in the clubs,
waited on some friends of mine, you know, before he
became famous. But except for that, it was just the
Montgomery Institute and there was a gay center, and Lynn
and Jerry had been working with the center to educate
the lgb people, and b was at that time recently
(18:57):
tacked on, so it was fairly new, and the tea
wasn't yet associated. It was not LGBT in any measure
at that time, because even the tea word was not there.
And that was sort of it for the scene. But
Sabrina Marcus was a trans woman from Florida, and she
went to the headquarters of the International Foundation for Gender Education,
(19:20):
which published Tapestry, and said, you know, there are these
conventions in other places around the US. Why isn't there
one in the South? Once, do one in Atlanta. It
seems like a central location. That's another thing about Atlanta.
It's a day's drive from the majority of the population
of the United States. And if to E said, no,
(19:42):
we won't put one on, but we'll show you how
to do it, if you'll just get a bunch of
people together. So using the resource list and I have
to E had something called the Congress of Organizations, and
you know, everyone was sort of at their conferences. Congress
would meet and people will would meet one another and talk,
and we were talking in all the newsletters, which is
(20:04):
a slow way to go. Article comes out, you write
it in two months later you see it your letter
in the letter's column. But all of the organizations in
the South met in Atlanta at Piedmont Boulevard. It was
then a Lakina. I don't know what it is now.
Hotels have a habit of changing through three years. And
(20:27):
we met and we said, well, what are we going
to call this conference? You know, what's the what's the function?
What are we going to do? And out of that
came Southern Comfort and that was just such impetus. Also
at the time, the groups, a lot of the groups
in Southern Comfort would kind of I'm sorry, a lot
of the groups in Trias a society for the second self,
(20:49):
the heterosexual cross dresser group, we'd go wild and just
let anybody go and anybody participate who wanted. So they
were having like weekend long mini conferences every week, and
every trans person in town would sort of show up.
It didn't cost any money, and you know, people would
go shopping and they would go out to eat and
sit around and shoot the bull and play music, So
(21:11):
Southern Comfort was a huge drive. I think we had
one hundred and fifty people maybe the first year, and
you know, they were up to nine hundred at the
peak before it sort of imploded. And that just made
for synergy, you know, and I within a year I
had split from Linen Jerry. They were very old school
(21:32):
about transsexualism. You know, our girls have a birthday fact
and we fix them and then they're normal, and I
was that was not where I was coming from. I
was first I wanted to be inclusive. I didn't want
anyone to be cut out, and I got a lot
of sniping from the lines when I was running the group,
So and so is not really a transsexual, They're just
(21:54):
a cross dresser. And then someone else will say so
and so is just really a drag queen, And I'm like,
any one, you know that once treatment should be able
to get it, and there's no reason to not have
an open group. And open groups were sort of rare
at the time, but so for about a year or two,
the Triass group function as an open group, and Montgomery's
(22:16):
weren't an open group. But eventually one of the founders
was sort of organic. She had chronic fatigue syndrome and
was having some brain issues and she got very paranoid,
and so I moved out. And I continued to go
to their meetings until they told me I couldn't come
because I was a threat because I was writing. So
(22:40):
I founded the Atlanta Gender Exploration Support Group, which ran
until recently. It was an open group. And I founded
the Atlanta Educational Gender Information Service when I chose that
acronym because it could easily become America. And I launched
Chrysalis Quarterly and it was It started is two sheets
(23:01):
of paper, one for Chrystalis and one for AGIS, and
I launched it, and a woman called a trans woman
called Margot Schaeffer sort of did a design for us.
She gave us like a font and a look for
the magazine and a look for our letter head. And
I guess because of my professional credentials, you know, I
had masters in in psychology and had a license. I
(23:25):
was licensed in Tennessee, which is one of the few
states that would license master's level psychologists. I just had
this instant credibility. It was just amazing, you know. So
I had all these big professionals on the advisory board.
Chrysalis was a theme based magazine, and it was glossy
at a time when everybody some people were still mimeographing
(23:46):
magazines in the early nineties. I just had this credibility,
you know, when I was writing. I was writing stuff
to go in Atlanta's gay papers that would help gay
men and lesbians understand the trans experience, and it just
sort of just sort of bloomed. Jamie Roberts came to
(24:06):
the Atlanta Gender Explorations Group and she just flourished, and
Aaron Swinson, who's a therapist, did and they all started
creating things on their own. After a while, it was
just fueling other organizations, and with the adoption of the transidentity,
we just sort of exploded all over the country, all
over the world.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Really, hey, listeners, we're going to take one quick break
here and we'll be right back with more from Dallas.
Denny and we're back. Can you talk just a little
(24:49):
bit more about what the purpose, just maybe define a
little bit more of what the philosophy and the goal
of Chrysalis and Aegis were at the time.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Well, one of my motives was, I mean, all I
really wanted to do was transition and I find myself drafted,
and I'm realizing, you know, I'm good at this. You know,
I can type, I can write, I know computers. You
know I have a background as a mental health professional.
But I was really looking for was to transition. But
(25:19):
I quickly realized, you know, all my life, I could
find new information. You know, I was smart, I was
well educated, I was I just couldn't. I just couldn't
find it. And there are people there have to be
people like me all around who I mean, I'd finally
found my tribe, there have to be all those people
who have not found that tribe yet. And I couldn't,
(25:42):
in good conscious just walk away from that. And so
when I founded as it was with the idea that
you know, I found that the ordinary rules of comportment,
even among medical professionals, sort of went by the wayside
when it came to us, and that they would say
things and do things that they would never do to
(26:04):
any other marginalized group of people. And I wanted to
stop that, and that was the mission statement of aegis.
And I decided that Christlus would be theme based. So
we had an issue on transsexual surgery. We had an
issue on spirituality. I hated God growing up that my
parents sent me to Baptist Bible School, and God was
(26:27):
just this horrible person who had his own son killed
and played head games with Adam and Eve and told
Abraham to kill a son, just kidding Abraham. Who is this?
You know? I was pretty hostile towards God until I realized,
who are the Baptists to have any real idea about
who God is exactly? You know? And I would reconnect
(26:51):
with my spirituality and I felt there was a feminine
or non binary nature that God wasn't some angry old
white man. Imagine that that was good for my soul,
I think. But the magazine just took off and I
was able to do so much running you I had
an influence on the It was then w Path was
(27:11):
then the Harry Benjamin International Gendernice for Association. First, the
director took offense at something I put in Chrystalis and
would not process my application. What was a member?
Speaker 1 (27:24):
What was that that he took offense?
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Well? And the first issue of Chrystalis I had a
dumb ass quotation of the month and the smart ass
quotation of the month and the dumb ass quotation was
by a really good man, Donald Lobb, and I think
he wrote it to broach the subject to his fellow surgeons,
who probably weren't positive to the idea of reconstructive surgery
(27:46):
for trans people. But he opened an article in the
Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery with a sentence to
change in individuals God given sex as a repugnant concept,
which is an amazing thing to appear in a medical journal.
And so I called, he got the dumbass quote. The
(28:06):
director of HABIGDA was Judy van Masdam, who was the
office manager for LOB and my smart ass quote was
of Money, who said, you know, essentially money and Primrose
is the paper he said. Now that transsexuals know that
they have an interest in says just they'll all start
(28:28):
presenting with this and this, because they read the literature
as if that were something anybody else didn't do. I mean,
I can you imagine having cancer and not reading up
about it. We were at fault for reading up about
our own condition. But Judy took offense at me taking
potshots at two people. And I finally, I've sent ten applications,
(28:51):
I wrote, I called, and finally I caught her live
and she proceeds to tell me who am I? I'm
you just a consumer, you know? And I'm well, you know,
I have met I have my professional credentials too, and yeah,
I'm a consumer. What's the problem with that? And she
told me love and money were gods and said they're
just people. Know they're gods, you know, and you will
(29:12):
never be in a bigdom. So I'm like, well, we'll
see about that. So Leah Schaeffer was the board chair.
She was a very wonderful psychiatrist in New York City.
And I wrote her a letter and I attached all
my letters and a list of phone calls in a
description of my phone call with Judy, and I said,
(29:33):
you know, I've been trying to join this organization, and
this is the response to my request. At this point,
I don't even know if I want to join the organization,
but I wanted you to be aware this is going on.
So I get an application from Lee in the mail,
and suddenly Judy is no longer the executive director. And
(29:53):
I don't know if it was an oath to this day,
if it wasn't over my dead body thing, or if
it was just time for her to go. But then
I got in wpath and from the inside I was
able to say, you cannot make special requirements for people
because they're transsexual that you do not require by the
(30:14):
groups of people. You know, why should you. I mean
they were making you have letters for breast surgery either
augmentation or reduction, mammoplasty for the men, and I'm like,
you have to have data to justify this, and that
was an alien concept to them because they were Thus,
those people were remnants of the old gender clinics with
(30:36):
a you know, you're not screwed up to me transsexual mentality.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Right, And that was at the time kind of there
were a lot of gatekeeping measures like, for example, if
you were a trans woman and you were attracted to women,
that was considered a reason.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Well, I have a list. I wrote about it somewhere
and you know, if you were me, if you didn't pass.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yeah, you know, well, I have a couple of I
have a couple of things that you've written that I
wanted to ask you about. I have your Steps to
the Transsexual Autobiography.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
We had a narrative and it was based on Christine Jorgenson,
and it was you had to follow that narrative to
be accepted by the gender clinics. And I knew that,
and I wasn't gonna fake my narrative to them because
I was looking for authenticity and not wanting to tell
lies about myself. So there were just hundreds and now
(31:34):
there may be thousands of autobiographies that follow the wrong
body narrative. Now, certainly the anguish we feel, the pain,
the rejection is characteristic of us. But there's more to
life than just that, you know, And we don't all
decide to have the transition or have surgery at the
(31:58):
end of a barrel of a gun or the point
of the knife. And I, you know, I was a
big champion of the healthy transgender model that arose I
call it in the nineties. I don't want us to
be mentally ill because we're not. I don't want us
to have to pretend to be mentally ill to get
the same sorts of treatments people with other conditions might have.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Do you see that happening today in the arguments. It's
a controversial topic, but there's arguments you know, in every state, well,
especially in the South, lots of.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
Art it is so scary.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yeah, and banning trans healthcare for first, it starts with
children and then it ends up, you know, coming for adults.
But I was going to ask you, do you think
that there's kind of a parallel there in what we
see today and back then.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Also, well, you know, I wrote an article about sort
of the openness of the Weimar Republic in Germany after
World War One, and there was a flourishing scene with
people publishing, you know, clubs, and people doing newsletters and
people doing political activism. And then the Nazis came in
and it changed like that, And that worries me about
(33:06):
this country because we you know, suddenly you know, Franklin, Tennessee,
where I drove through when I was on a trip
to the South, that's not just baned pride, Yeah, because
so many you know, misinformed, hateful minded people just playing
to the city management.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
There's banned any public drag which can be applied to
a trans woman that they.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Exactly, you know, who are you to say, you know,
you look like you were born male or born female
to me, so cops aren't going to differentiate that.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
It's very scary and I've not been I've not been
scared for a long time. But this is This does
not bode well. I mean, democracy itself is under an
attack in this country and considerable portion of the population
is swallowing the big lie.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah. Absolutely, it's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
The two focuses seemed to be well, first was kids. Yeah,
you know, we're grooming kids.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
You know, when I was a trans kid, I knew
exactly who I was and what I wanted. Yeah, it
was young. But we're grooming kids and we're ruining them
and most of them desist, which is not true. And
now it's on drag queens and they're indecent for some reason.
They can't quite explain exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
In some of your previous Poe or not post publishings,
you used pseudonyms to talk about, you know, specific instances.
One instance of like a woman having silicone injections that
went wrong. Another instance of a woman named Sharon and
her experience at a gender clinic, and I just find it,
(34:58):
I found it really fascinating, this little tidbit. But it's
about Sharon, who underwent post operative surgery as a male
to female transsexual, and she went to the gender clinics
to try and be treated, but they refused to treat her.
Because once again they were saying the same thing. Tell
me just about the use of the pseudonyms and your writing.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
At the time, there were people I did not want
to identify by name because it might put them into
danger or embarrassed them. And that's the only time I did.
Most of the authors were in that contributed to the
magazine were happy to use their names. And that's some time.
A lot of people who were not transitioned had two
names anyway, right, so they didn't risk a lot by
(35:43):
using the they call them fem names, but by using
their second name. And when I wrote about my own,
my own experience, I went to Michael Segers and Brussels
for my genital surgery. I wrote an article and etc.
Magazine in Atlanta, I called my sex change in Brussels,
and I used the pseudonym for myself because I was
(36:06):
working and I did not want to kind of push
that button too hard. No one where I worked had
any idea about me. Yeah, until someone out in me.
It was Montgomery's. They were mad at me.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Wow, that's horrible.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Well, I was competition and anyone who had ever crossed
paths with them, they ran them out of town. And
I was the first one that they couldn't run out
of town. So I became an enemy.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
And he was a transsexual man, is that right?
Speaker 2 (36:33):
He was the transman. She was a woman that worked
at the clinic. Yeah, okay, but you know, I became
a threat because I challenged her model, really yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Which was a very medical model.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
It was a very medical model. And I was, I was,
I mean, obviously, we need medical treatment, but we don't
have to. We shouldn't have to be pathologized to get it.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
So we're all not on the same track.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Also, And yeah, I why should you know? And I
wrote one piece about two very different approaches to women
took towards their non traditional ways they approached their own transition.
One just could not stand it any longer. And she
worked at AT and T. And she walked into the office,
and she had every sort of unfortunate male characteristic a
(37:20):
transsexual woman could have. So she was really tall, and
she had really big hands and feet. She'd lost her hair,
she had a big, square jaw. And this is not
anything that was her fault. We just get to genetics,
we get she reached your bawling point. I think she
had genderedice for you all a lot more than I did.
She walks into AT and T and clocks in the
(37:44):
Montgomerys had been working with her therapists to educate the
management of AT and T and she sort of blew
it by walking in the next taste, she walks in
and three thousand people are lined up to watch her
walk in and punch the card and they just stood
there and said not word one. That was enough to
put her in the mental hospital for a week, because
(38:06):
you know, she was very vulnerable at that point, but
she did what she needed to do. Another woman, she
just she started hormones. She was working for the state.
She was actually doing working in a state garage, but
she and she looked almost exactly like Reba McIntyre. So
(38:29):
all the after a while on hormones, everyone thinks she's
a female. Anyway, she's wearing coveralls, so dresses in an
issue and so it was never even addressed at work.
And I knew a trans man who did the same
thing at work. And who's to say when her real
life experience.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Began, right, because it's kind of bleming.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
I was just always questioning artificial limits upon us, arbitrarily
placed upon us by professionals At the same time, I
really believe you need to be educated before you make
permanent changes to your body. You need to understand any
risks that you take.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Yeah, because that's the important part of informed consent is Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
It is, and you know, and so you need to
think about stuff beyond just signing an informed consent agreement.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
One of the agous advertisements of the day, the PSA
of the day was don't be sorry, be sure test
drive your new equipment before you, you know, purchase.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah. We did medical advisories about hormones, about smoking.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yeah, about silicone injections, the dangerous curves ahead and silicone.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Yeah, Margo designed that, and she made me aware of
the problem with silicone.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
But well even today, not even just injectable silicone. But
I've been more. I know three trans women now who
have had breast and plants removed from breast and plant illness,
which is not really recognized. Still, so we're on the
still on the cutting edge of this kind of stuff
in a way, Hey, listeners, we're going to take our
(40:09):
last break of the episode here. Stay tuned as we
wrap up our conversation with Dallas. Denny, welcome back. Just
before we kind of wrap up. I want to talk
(40:29):
about some of the highlights of your career, because you
have some, I mean two very significant. I mean everything
we've talked about so far is significant. But you, of
course founded the first Southern Comfort conference, but you also
found one of many, yeah, one of and you also
started the first ever FtM Conference of the Americas.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
I did a challenge grant and then I called jameson
Green of FtM International you might not even done international
at the time in San Francisco, and gave him a
heads up because I said we would. He just would
pay five hundred bucks, which I didn't have to any
nonprofit that would match it for putting on a national
(41:11):
conference for trans man and Jamison left the room that
night with five hundred dollars in pledges. Wow, I got
the I had to send the money into installments a
couple of sports.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
You had to hold up her end of the bargain.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
I mean the trans with the exception of the of IFGE.
None of the trans organizations had a budget over twenty
five thousand dollars and most of that was going into
printing and equipment right supplies.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Yeah, you also wrote the first scientific literature on transsexualism
ever written by a transsexual.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Once I started finding material, I just started accumulating this
big database. And Vern Bullow, who was a sexologist in California,
I was giving it away with subscriptions to Chrysalist and
he said you should if you thought about publishing this,
and I said, I'd love to publish it, and in
the mail I get a contract from Garland and I
did a second book for them, which was an edited
(42:12):
textbook with chapters by all kinds of people that sort
of looked at the state of things. Richard Green and
John Monny's book nineteen sixty nine book Transsexualism and Sex
or Assignment sort of laid out a multidisciplinary approach to
treating trans people and so I want to really revisited
(42:32):
that a little bit and how things had changed. And
so I'm very proud of those two books. And for
a long time I didn't have a second book because
I sold a couple of copies and the Lesbian Herstory
Archives in Brooklyn contacted me and said, well, we didn't
get ours, So I got lost in the mail and
I sent them my last copy, and then buying copy
of the book was, you know, was like one hundred
(42:53):
and fifty dollars, so I didn't have a copy of
my own book for nearly two hours. Now it's a
text fortunately expensive.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah, textbooks are not cheap. Well, that is fantastic. And
as we've established, you know, and everything we've talked about already,
all of the understanding of trans people up to that
point really was shaped by CIS individuals and the medical
profession and kind of those gatekeeping models. So fantastic work
(43:22):
and kind of opening up the access to care and stuff,
I think for future generations of trans people. But I
want to talk to you about something that comes up
in modern day in the trans community. You know, how
we have As you said, back in the day, it
would take months for the things you're writing to show
(43:42):
up in print and stuff. But now we have discourse
you know, online in chat rooms things like that, and
people are often say that gender dysphoria is not real,
gender dysphoia does not exist. Just what are your thoughts
on that? Because you wrote a book about gender justice,
that was the term at the time.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah, you know, I think it works as a descriptive
term for the anguish and pain we feel when we
can't live authentically Yeah, in terms of it being a
male illness, no, I don't think so, although it can
be debilitating depending on how strongly you feel it. I mean,
(44:23):
it was enough from the woman I talked about who
went into AT and T for her to make a
sort of a rash personal decision. But people do that
all the time anyway, right, So yeah, we need to
move beyond it. There's a lot of history with that
term too. You know, it's evolved over the years from
the seventies.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
So when you say, like, move beyond it, like just well,
people I think are replacing it more with like the
term like gender euphoria. What do you feel about that
instead of gener That.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Was the name of a newsletter in the nineties. Oh really,
And when you find resolution for those feelings and are
able to express them, there's absolutely a feeling of euphoria.
I'm involved with a transconference called Fantasia Fair, which is
now Transgender Week, which has been happening on the tip
(45:14):
of Cape cod since nineteen seventy five, and it's a
week long and many people who go it's their first
chance to express themselves authentically and they can for an
entire week in the entire town because no one looks
twice at anybody in that town, Profitstown, And so we
actually have a workshop which we urge them to kind
(45:36):
of let things simmer down for a couple of weeks
before they make life altering decisions, because they're going to
be euphoric when they get home. They're so wow. You know,
this is wonderful. I don't want it to.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Stop, right, But you can't let that euphoria lead you,
as you know, as much as you can't let the
dysphoria lead you either. You kind of have to find
the balance between the two.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Term euphoria. I think it's mostly transitory. It's just sort
of like you can get that kind of euphor you
if you get any pony, you know. Yeah, I think
it's similar to that, but it's certainly not a harmful
term in any way. I think it's a useful term.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
I agree. Yeah, I want to ask more on language here,
because language is ever evolving and the euphemism treadmill and
all of that. But we talked, we hinted at it
the word transsexual how in the nineties, and you can
actually read and kind of watch the progression of from
reading the publications Christlis and all of that. You can
(46:35):
watch the progression of the word transsexual too, transgender. What
do you think of the erasure of the word transsexual
and then the current rebirth that we are experiencing of
the word transsexual. People are reidentifying with that term to
state that they are a trans person, who is someone
(46:57):
who is transitioning.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
I think think there is utility in differentiating people who
transition and change their bodies medically from other gender variant
people because they have different medical needs, they have different
psychological needs. So I identify both as transsexual and transgender
and probably always will maintain a transsexual identity because I
(47:23):
think it has I think it has utility.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Absolutely, I agree with that too. So did you feel
like when like there was a period of time when
the word transsexual was almost considered like canceled.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
I guess you would go, has word sex in it,
you know, and it was bestowed upon us. I remember
I have a transsexual menace T shirt in my collap two.
Actually we spelled it with one s, just as a
fuck you to the medical community.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Gotcha. Yeah, I love that. I just want to wrap
up with this last little thought here. What are your
thoughts on the current state of transactivism and what are
your Do you have any advice for the future of transactivism.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, I mean we all do what we can. Sometimes
people don't feel safe doing certain things. Well, if you
don't feel safe getting your name out there, fund someone
who does. I think our primary need at this point
in time is to have a cohesive national strategy to
combat all this hysteria about drag queens and trans kids,
(48:32):
because if we just go about it piecemeal, we're gonna
sort of fizzle out. I think, so ACLS doing some
legendary work in that Transgender Legal Defense Fund, you know,
support those organizations, and we need to probably have a
national conference to plots of people in leadership positions to
(48:53):
plot strategy because there's certainly scheming on the other side
what to do.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Yeah, and we don't really see that happening, you know
people or.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Jamison Green was that creating change last year and he
said just what I just said, and everyone's laughing because
they couldn't kind of conceive it. But I mean, this
is a very real threat. It's liable to get worse,
and it can get dangerous for us, not that it's
not already dangerous, but it can get far more dangerous us.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
Right, yeah, and we want to protect our future. Well, Dallas,
thank you for spending the time with us today. I
really appreciate you sharing your words and thoughts and everything
with us.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Well, thank you so much. I had a good time.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Can I don't know if you have social media, but
can you tell us where listeners can find you and
engage with your work.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, I'm on Facebook, okay, And I have a website
where all my work or almost all my work is archived,
and that's just my name dot com Dallas Danny dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
Yes, fabulous and also the Transgender Digital Transgender Archive, wonderful
wealth of knowledge.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
If you google my name there a lot of stuff
will come on.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Oh, yes, a lot. It's fun to read. Well, thank
you Dallas. It was wonderful talking with you today.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Thank you, Carn.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Thank you all so much for tuning into this week's episode.
I was so thrilled to be able to sit down
with the Dallas Denny to talk to her about her
life's work and all of the contributions she's made to
the community, especially here in the South. I hope you
all have a fabulous week. I will see you on
Monday for another Beauty Translated minisode and please, if you
(50:32):
haven't already, leave us a rating and review over on
Apple podcast. It means the world to me. Thank you
so much and have a fabulous week. Beauty Translated is
hosted by me Carmen Laurent and produced by Kurt Garen
and Jessica Crinchicch, with production assistance from Jennifer Bassett. Special
(50:54):
thanks to Ali Perry and Alie Canter for their support.
Our theme song is composed by Aaron Kaufman. Beauty Translated
is proud to be part of the outspoken network from
iHeart Podcasts. For more iHeart Podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, beauties. I'm very excited about today's episode and I
want to get right into it. Season two is coming
to a close with next week's episode. I hope you
all will enjoy these next prolific trans trailblazers that I
have lined up. Today's conversation is with Dallas Denny, a
legend in the trans community that many young ones may
(00:30):
not be aware of. She is the woman who created Aegis,
Chrysalis magazine and Southern Comfort Conference, to name a few.
Listen up for some hearts to read kids. Hello listeners,
(00:56):
and welcome to another episode of Beauty Translated. This week,
I have another legendary trans elder here with me. She's
a woman who paved the way and building trans community
before trans people were visible as they were today, before
the Internet connected us instantly with our community. Today I'm
speaking with the prolific columnist, writer, activist, and teacher. Her
(01:18):
name is Dallas Dinny. Please welcome her. Hi, Dallas Hikram. Yeah,
we have a legend with us today. I'm I'm thrilled.
I'm thrilled. Thank you for being in.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
A very small way, maybe.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
In a very big significant way to me.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted to
be rich, but it is nice to have when people
know who you are. And so I got what I wanted.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Dallas, you have a prolific legacy of writing, you know,
all throughout like the eighties and nineties going into today.
But I want to make sure that the listeners who
are not familiar with who you are, are not familiar
with your work kind of have an idea of who
you are. So could you starting with kind of maybe
where you're from and where you're raised, tell the listeners
(02:04):
kind of a brief introduction of who you are.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Sure. I was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and lived
there on and off growing up. My father was in
the US Army, so we lived a lot of places.
We lived in Orleans, France for four years, lived in
Arizona twice, lived in Georgia, and when he would be
stationed in Korea because it was the media post Korean
(02:30):
conflict period, we would be in Nashville for a year
or two. Wow. Yeah, so I bounced all around when
I was The day I finished the eighth grade, my
parents picked me up and instead of going home, we
drove through Atlanta to Murphysboro, just south of Nashville. My
father had taken a job with the Park Service. So
(02:51):
from age fourteen until I transitioned at age thirty nine,
I lived in Tennessee. And when I transitioned, rather than
do it where I was known, and I moved to
Atlanta where there was some support, first support I ever found.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah, and I'm learning a little bit about that. You know,
nowadays trans people are not as familiar with the concept
of having to necessarily move away from home in order
to be accepted you in your transition, because one of
the benefits of moving away from home is that nobody
knows who you are. You can kind of start over
fresh where nobody has to dead name you or misgender
(03:29):
you or things like that. And you can also, like
you said, get more access to support, which was here
in Atlanta. And I lived in Atlanta my entire life.
I'm going to be thirty this year, and I have
been researching and reading your writing, and I've been fascinated
by the amount of history we have trans history we
(03:53):
have in the city of Atlanta. To me, it seems
like there was a lot going on in Atlanta at
the time.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
There really was.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
So you ended up in Atlanta when you began your transition,
and that was at the age of thirty nine.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah. I had been on hormones for ten years. Okay, wow,
and my name was always Dallas. I didn't have to
change my name, and I seemed to pass very easily,
So I had hopes. I didn't want to be unemployed,
and I worked before. I worked as a psychological examin
or in Tennessee. But I didn't care. I was ready
(04:29):
to transition. Was I needed to transition, And I didn't
know if I'd ever work in a professional capacity again.
But within two weeks I found a job that I
worked until I retired with the Stage of Georgia, doing
essentially the same thing I'd done in Tennessee, which gave
me a stable base to do activism. I had a
place to sleep at night, for instance.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Right, and Atlanta really did become a stable base for
a lot of the work that you were doing at
the time. I want to talk more about that, but
can you before we get into your w work with
ages and the other several publications that you had, can
you kind of paint a picture for us of what
the Atlanta trans community was like at that time.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Now, all my life, I'd been looking for the community
and couldn't find it. I went to the Vanderbilt Gender
Identity program in the late seventies, where they told me
I was not dysfunctional enough to be transsexual. In other words,
I had a job, I had to college degrees, so
they weren't going to help me with transition. And I
went and read the literature at the adjacent medical library there,
(05:36):
which suggested they were right, and I realized they wrote
it so they had this idea that if you weren't
entirely dysfunctional in the male role or female role vice versa,
then you weren't really trans And I had questioned myself
about that, read the literature and decided they were full
of bull. And I put myself on hormones at age
twenty nine, so by age thirty nine, I was quite feminized.
(06:00):
I got rid of my facial hair and moved to Atlanta,
and having looked for community, the only thing I identified
was the Society for the Second Self, which was the
organization founded by Virginia Prince and Carol b Croft for
heterosexual cross dressers. And I was not welcome as a member.
And I knew that because they were upfront stating that
(06:21):
it was, and so the only identified community and people
even remotely like myself I could find didn't want me.
But I finally sort of held my breath and joined
after ten years because my reasoning was they have to
know people like me. And sure enough, after a few months,
incomes a woman named Jessica Britton with a copy of
(06:44):
Transgender Tapestry then it was TVTS Tapestry, and there in
the back was a listing of support groups. I looked
through it avidly, and there was a transsexual support group
in Atlanta called the Montgomery Medical and Psychological Institute, and
I call him every day for about two months before
(07:04):
someone picked up the phone. We ranged for an interview.
I came down and they almost immediately drafted me to
run their group because both of the founders had health
issues and they liked my credentials. All I was looking
for was a little bit of just ability to be myself.
I wasn't looking to be an activist necessarily, but I
realized that all my training and all my skills really
(07:27):
were a good fit. So Jerry Lynn Montgomery wore couple.
Jerry was he died recently, was a transman. Lynn had
worked in the gender Identity Clinic, which was co run
by Emory University and Georgia Mental Health Institute. There was
a when I got to Atlanta, there was a physical
(07:47):
building about a half mile from the center of Emory
and they were still doing gender reassignments there. I don't
know if they didn't do the surgery because it was
a big brew haha.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
They still do not in this state. We still do
not have any gender affirming surgeries. Well, which is crazy.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Back and must have been the seventies, they the Department
of Vocational Rehabilitation funded one or two surgeries and it
just the brown stuff hit the fan.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, because you can see as you want by the way.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, the ship hit the fan. Everyone was outraged. The
governor was deluged with letters, but the clinic was still open.
They were not surgical. I learned there were surgeries done
because immediately after my genital surgery, I went to Michael
Seegers and Brussels and he told me that there's a
(08:45):
chance that I would start that I would start having
difficulty urinating after a couple of months because the scar
tissue will form, and he says a simple dilation will
fix it. And it did. But the first place I
went was to a doc who other people had I
knew had seen, and he said his partners had sort
of forced him out into not treating transsexual people, so
(09:08):
I couldn't see him. I went to another place and
they sort of ran around waving their hands in the
air and decided they were going to put me under
into an exploratory procedure instead of fixing the problem. I
remember being in the lobby. I don't usually cry, but
I don't remember being in the lobby crying, and I
decided again that this is bull. And the third place
(09:29):
I went was a surgeon called Stephen Morgenstern who had
an office on the North Side. He was known for
like penal enhancements at that time. But I went to him.
He fixed the problem immediately, and he told me that
he had done surgery back in the day, you know,
(09:49):
probably in the eighties. So I never found out, you know,
exactly where he was based to do that, probably at
Georgia Mental Health Institute, because they might have done some
surger from people who were able to get it covered
under private insurance, which only rarely happened then, or had
the money not nearly as expensive then as it is now,
(10:11):
but it was still quite.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Expensive, right, And I mean just hearing that whole history
of you trying to even seek out that treatment here
in Georgia, it amazes me just because today not that
much has changed unfortunately here in Georgia. And I mean
even famously, I don't know if this was around the
(10:32):
same time, but famously Robert Eves, who died of ovarian cancer,
could not find any treatment in this state. Robert Eves
was a transsexual man from Tacoa, Georgia, who died trying
to find treatment for his advanced ovarian cancer. More than
twenty doctors turned him away, many because they were practicing
(10:55):
obgi ns and did not want to be associated with
treating a man such as him. You can watch the
documentary Southern Comfort, following the last four seasons of Robert
Eves's life, for free on YouTube. It is an amazing
film that I highly recommend, and a link will be
in today's episode description. If you want to know what
(11:15):
trans medical discrimination looks like, just a little bit of it,
and what life for trans people was like in the
South in the nineties, you must see the documentary Southern Comfort.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I was running easiest at the time, I had compiled
a list of places to go for help for treatment
for support groups all over the country, and I knew
Robert from Southern Comfort. Why was one of the many
people who started that conference, and as was Robert. And
Robert called me one day and he wanted to referral
(11:50):
to a guynecologist. I gave him three names. One was
the guynecologists I saw after my surgery after I'd been
to Dr Morgenstern. The second had just done a HYS
directory on another transman, and I forget the third. But
I don't know what happened that he couldn't get treatment
from someone, especially from the you know, although it could
(12:11):
have been people's partners freaking out and saying, you know,
we're not going to be appreciated with you if you
do this again. But yeah, and then, and of course
Robert developed ovarian cancer and died, and everyone loved him
at Southern Comfort. He was such a Southern, classic Southern gentleman.
He was always so polite to me.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I've watched the documentary Southern Comfort, and that is a
really awesome kind of glimpse into Southern trans life.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
At the time, I had never been to clubs because
in Nashville they wouldn't let me in. Wow, you know,
because I had a male id.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Wow. Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
I think it was because they were afraid of the police.
Nashville had and still has a history of LGBT places
mysteriously burning.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
So it was it was to me. So I had
no experience, So I got to go to the clubs
when I transitioned and came to Atlanta. There were some
fabulous entertainment at the clubs. But aside from that, and
there were a lot of trans women that were drag
queens at the time. There still are and I believe
in the last season of RuPaul's Drag Race four people
(13:21):
yes with trans and the cast of about twelve.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
So the clubs had a scene. You know. There was
a nurse who used to go around doing silicon pumping
in the back rooms of bars and hotel rooms.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah. Perhaps the most famous in all the South, hosted
at Atlanta's very own Backstreet, Charlie Brown's Cabaret was the
pinnacle of drag entertainment. Most of the cast members were
sis came in. It even featured the Goddess Raven friend
of the pod Beyunknn called Bowser's drag Mother, but the
(13:55):
cast also featured several trans women such as Seanna Brooks,
mother of the House of Brooks, and Heather Daniels, Pam Anderson,
bombshell type.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
And I had some friends in that community. And then
there was the Montgomery Institute, and you know, they had
a monthly support group meeting which I said they drafted
me to run and based upon sort of tapestries publishing.
Of all these other organizations, there was a pretty lively
(14:26):
national scene of people doing zines, you know, little newsletters
and little magazines, and there was a lot of discussion.
One of the things that was under discussion was why
do we call ourselves? Because we have these medical names.
You know. Anne Boleyn, an anthropologist I know, called them
slave names or similar to slave names. You know. We've
(14:47):
even names like transsexual and transvestite, you know, and those
were not the names we chose for ourselves. You know,
we were living with those names, but they weren't. So
what do we want to call our And I believe
it was out of that discussion that the term transgender arose.
(15:07):
It was one of many terms tossed out. I remember
Virginia Prince, who founded that, you know, homophobic, transphobic organization
back in the seventies. I guess it was she suggested
by genderist. She was always making up words, and someone
moved the hyphen to make it big enderous, and that
(15:27):
was sort of the end of that. About the time
of the March on Washington, Philis Fry and a couple
of other activists were really up in the face of
the organizers, and suddenly all of the gay meteor were
talking about transgender, which was functioning as an umbrella to
describe everybody under the term. Although it was not yet
(15:49):
an identity. It was a descriptor. If you were a
drag queen, you could be under the umbrella, if you
were a cross dresser, if you were transsexual, And of
course it quickly became an identity, and a lot of
people today who might have identified as either a cross
stress or transsexual or today identifying as trans or non binary. Right,
(16:10):
And in fact, those old labels are becoming antiquated.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Well, I want to talk more about that in just
a second, because they're actually coming back in a lot
of ways. But I want to back up here just
something that I've noticed, you know, like I said, eighties
and nineties. From what I've read, Atlanta had a lot
of conventions. It had a lot of publications, as you said,
zines and magazines and things like that. It had a
(16:36):
lot of transactivity going on compared to like, you know, say,
the rest of the South. Why Atlanta? What was special
about Atlanta?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
You think, Well, I think for the same reason San
Francisco and New York or centers. It's a place where
people can come from their rural towns. It's sort of amazing.
On RuPaul's drag Race, I'm married to someone who's infatuated
with RuPaul's drag Race.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Really, I'm friends with somebody who one season seven, so
you can tell her that, well, we.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Want drag Race Sweden, and drag Race Belgium, and Dragwace Spain.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I love Aspanya, that's my favorite one.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
She's a virtuoso with a VPN. So we lug in
so that that scene was going on. You know, there
was the Sweet Gumhead, which was famous. It it just closed,
I believe before I came RuPaul worked in the clubs
before he became famous.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Back up for a second about the Sweet Gum Club,
because there's a book actually about.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
I just bought that book.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
It's a fantastic book.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I may have learned about it from you.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
In fact, Oh wow, tell me about Sweet Gum a
little bit about it?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Well, no, I did. I never went because close there
was a place called, at various times Lipsticks and Levitas,
next to the Terra Theater, and they had some fabulous
shows there. Or they did, like the Phantom of the
Opera that I might as well have been on Broadway,
it was that good. Yeah, they had pageants, so I
would go to the pageants sometimes and be there five
(17:59):
in the morning while I was working my full time
job and running the Montgomery group. But except for that scene,
and of course you know, I'm liking on the name
of the punk singer.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
That Jane County.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Jane County, Yes, I'm sorry, I'm seventy three. That happened sometimes,
no worries.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Jane County is a living legend from Dallas, Georgia, and
the first trans woman to front a punk rock band.
She was one of the trans women present at the
Stonewall Riots of nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
You know, and Rue Paul was waiting in the clubs,
waited on some friends of mine, you know, before he
became famous. But except for that, it was just the
Montgomery Institute and there was a gay center, and Lynn
and Jerry had been working with the center to educate
the lgb people, and b was at that time recently
(18:57):
tacked on, so it was fairly new, and the tea
wasn't yet associated. It was not LGBT in any measure
at that time, because even the tea word was not there.
And that was sort of it for the scene. But
Sabrina Marcus was a trans woman from Florida, and she
went to the headquarters of the International Foundation for Gender Education,
(19:20):
which published Tapestry, and said, you know, there are these
conventions in other places around the US. Why isn't there
one in the South? Once, do one in Atlanta. It
seems like a central location. That's another thing about Atlanta.
It's a day's drive from the majority of the population
of the United States. And if to E said, no,
(19:42):
we won't put one on, but we'll show you how
to do it, if you'll just get a bunch of
people together. So using the resource list and I have
to E had something called the Congress of Organizations, and
you know, everyone was sort of at their conferences. Congress
would meet and people will would meet one another and talk,
and we were talking in all the newsletters, which is
(20:04):
a slow way to go. Article comes out, you write
it in two months later you see it your letter
in the letter's column. But all of the organizations in
the South met in Atlanta at Piedmont Boulevard. It was
then a Lakina. I don't know what it is now.
Hotels have a habit of changing through three years. And
(20:27):
we met and we said, well, what are we going
to call this conference? You know, what's the what's the function?
What are we going to do? And out of that
came Southern Comfort and that was just such impetus. Also
at the time, the groups, a lot of the groups
in Southern Comfort would kind of I'm sorry, a lot
of the groups in Trias a society for the second self,
(20:49):
the heterosexual cross dresser group, we'd go wild and just
let anybody go and anybody participate who wanted. So they
were having like weekend long mini conferences every week, and
every trans person in town would sort of show up.
It didn't cost any money, and you know, people would
go shopping and they would go out to eat and
sit around and shoot the bull and play music, So
(21:11):
Southern Comfort was a huge drive. I think we had
one hundred and fifty people maybe the first year, and
you know, they were up to nine hundred at the
peak before it sort of imploded. And that just made
for synergy, you know, and I within a year I
had split from Linen Jerry. They were very old school
(21:32):
about transsexualism. You know, our girls have a birthday fact
and we fix them and then they're normal, and I
was that was not where I was coming from. I
was first I wanted to be inclusive. I didn't want
anyone to be cut out, and I got a lot
of sniping from the lines when I was running the group,
So and so is not really a transsexual, They're just
(21:54):
a cross dresser. And then someone else will say so
and so is just really a drag queen, And I'm like,
any one, you know that once treatment should be able
to get it, and there's no reason to not have
an open group. And open groups were sort of rare
at the time, but so for about a year or two,
the Triass group function as an open group, and Montgomery's
(22:16):
weren't an open group. But eventually one of the founders
was sort of organic. She had chronic fatigue syndrome and
was having some brain issues and she got very paranoid,
and so I moved out. And I continued to go
to their meetings until they told me I couldn't come
because I was a threat because I was writing. So
(22:40):
I founded the Atlanta Gender Exploration Support Group, which ran
until recently. It was an open group. And I founded
the Atlanta Educational Gender Information Service when I chose that
acronym because it could easily become America. And I launched
Chrysalis Quarterly and it was It started is two sheets
(23:01):
of paper, one for Chrystalis and one for AGIS, and
I launched it, and a woman called a trans woman
called Margot Schaeffer sort of did a design for us.
She gave us like a font and a look for
the magazine and a look for our letter head. And
I guess because of my professional credentials, you know, I
had masters in in psychology and had a license. I
(23:25):
was licensed in Tennessee, which is one of the few
states that would license master's level psychologists. I just had
this instant credibility. It was just amazing, you know. So
I had all these big professionals on the advisory board.
Chrysalis was a theme based magazine, and it was glossy
at a time when everybody some people were still mimeographing
(23:46):
magazines in the early nineties. I just had this credibility,
you know, when I was writing. I was writing stuff
to go in Atlanta's gay papers that would help gay
men and lesbians understand the trans experience, and it just
sort of just sort of bloomed. Jamie Roberts came to
(24:06):
the Atlanta Gender Explorations Group and she just flourished, and
Aaron Swinson, who's a therapist, did and they all started
creating things on their own. After a while, it was
just fueling other organizations, and with the adoption of the transidentity,
we just sort of exploded all over the country, all
over the world.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Really, hey, listeners, we're going to take one quick break
here and we'll be right back with more from Dallas.
Denny and we're back. Can you talk just a little
(24:49):
bit more about what the purpose, just maybe define a
little bit more of what the philosophy and the goal
of Chrysalis and Aegis were at the time.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Well, one of my motives was, I mean, all I
really wanted to do was transition and I find myself drafted,
and I'm realizing, you know, I'm good at this. You know,
I can type, I can write, I know computers. You
know I have a background as a mental health professional.
But I was really looking for was to transition. But
(25:19):
I quickly realized, you know, all my life, I could
find new information. You know, I was smart, I was
well educated, I was I just couldn't. I just couldn't
find it. And there are people there have to be
people like me all around who I mean, I'd finally
found my tribe, there have to be all those people
who have not found that tribe yet. And I couldn't,
(25:42):
in good conscious just walk away from that. And so
when I founded as it was with the idea that
you know, I found that the ordinary rules of comportment,
even among medical professionals, sort of went by the wayside
when it came to us, and that they would say
things and do things that they would never do to
(26:04):
any other marginalized group of people. And I wanted to
stop that, and that was the mission statement of aegis.
And I decided that Christlus would be theme based. So
we had an issue on transsexual surgery. We had an
issue on spirituality. I hated God growing up that my
parents sent me to Baptist Bible School, and God was
(26:27):
just this horrible person who had his own son killed
and played head games with Adam and Eve and told
Abraham to kill a son, just kidding Abraham. Who is this?
You know? I was pretty hostile towards God until I realized,
who are the Baptists to have any real idea about
who God is exactly? You know? And I would reconnect
(26:51):
with my spirituality and I felt there was a feminine
or non binary nature that God wasn't some angry old
white man. Imagine that that was good for my soul,
I think. But the magazine just took off and I
was able to do so much running you I had
an influence on the It was then w Path was
(27:11):
then the Harry Benjamin International Gendernice for Association. First, the
director took offense at something I put in Chrystalis and
would not process my application. What was a member?
Speaker 1 (27:24):
What was that that he took offense?
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Well? And the first issue of Chrystalis I had a
dumb ass quotation of the month and the smart ass
quotation of the month and the dumb ass quotation was
by a really good man, Donald Lobb, and I think
he wrote it to broach the subject to his fellow surgeons,
who probably weren't positive to the idea of reconstructive surgery
(27:46):
for trans people. But he opened an article in the
Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery with a sentence to
change in individuals God given sex as a repugnant concept,
which is an amazing thing to appear in a medical journal.
And so I called, he got the dumbass quote. The
(28:06):
director of HABIGDA was Judy van Masdam, who was the
office manager for LOB and my smart ass quote was
of Money, who said, you know, essentially money and Primrose
is the paper he said. Now that transsexuals know that
they have an interest in says just they'll all start
(28:28):
presenting with this and this, because they read the literature
as if that were something anybody else didn't do. I mean,
I can you imagine having cancer and not reading up
about it. We were at fault for reading up about
our own condition. But Judy took offense at me taking
potshots at two people. And I finally, I've sent ten applications,
(28:51):
I wrote, I called, and finally I caught her live
and she proceeds to tell me who am I? I'm
you just a consumer, you know? And I'm well, you know,
I have met I have my professional credentials too, and yeah,
I'm a consumer. What's the problem with that? And she
told me love and money were gods and said they're
just people. Know they're gods, you know, and you will
(29:12):
never be in a bigdom. So I'm like, well, we'll
see about that. So Leah Schaeffer was the board chair.
She was a very wonderful psychiatrist in New York City.
And I wrote her a letter and I attached all
my letters and a list of phone calls in a
description of my phone call with Judy, and I said,
(29:33):
you know, I've been trying to join this organization, and
this is the response to my request. At this point,
I don't even know if I want to join the organization,
but I wanted you to be aware this is going on.
So I get an application from Lee in the mail,
and suddenly Judy is no longer the executive director. And
(29:53):
I don't know if it was an oath to this day,
if it wasn't over my dead body thing, or if
it was just time for her to go. But then
I got in wpath and from the inside I was
able to say, you cannot make special requirements for people
because they're transsexual that you do not require by the
(30:14):
groups of people. You know, why should you. I mean
they were making you have letters for breast surgery either
augmentation or reduction, mammoplasty for the men, and I'm like,
you have to have data to justify this, and that
was an alien concept to them because they were Thus,
those people were remnants of the old gender clinics with
(30:36):
a you know, you're not screwed up to me transsexual mentality.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Right, And that was at the time kind of there
were a lot of gatekeeping measures like, for example, if
you were a trans woman and you were attracted to women,
that was considered a reason.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Well, I have a list. I wrote about it somewhere
and you know, if you were me, if you didn't pass.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yeah, you know, well, I have a couple of I
have a couple of things that you've written that I
wanted to ask you about. I have your Steps to
the Transsexual Autobiography.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
We had a narrative and it was based on Christine Jorgenson,
and it was you had to follow that narrative to
be accepted by the gender clinics. And I knew that,
and I wasn't gonna fake my narrative to them because
I was looking for authenticity and not wanting to tell
lies about myself. So there were just hundreds and now
(31:34):
there may be thousands of autobiographies that follow the wrong
body narrative. Now, certainly the anguish we feel, the pain,
the rejection is characteristic of us. But there's more to
life than just that, you know, And we don't all
decide to have the transition or have surgery at the
(31:58):
end of a barrel of a gun or the point
of the knife. And I, you know, I was a
big champion of the healthy transgender model that arose I
call it in the nineties. I don't want us to
be mentally ill because we're not. I don't want us
to have to pretend to be mentally ill to get
the same sorts of treatments people with other conditions might have.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Do you see that happening today in the arguments. It's
a controversial topic, but there's arguments you know, in every state, well,
especially in the South, lots of.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
Art it is so scary.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yeah, and banning trans healthcare for first, it starts with
children and then it ends up, you know, coming for adults.
But I was going to ask you, do you think
that there's kind of a parallel there in what we
see today and back then.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Also, well, you know, I wrote an article about sort
of the openness of the Weimar Republic in Germany after
World War One, and there was a flourishing scene with
people publishing, you know, clubs, and people doing newsletters and
people doing political activism. And then the Nazis came in
and it changed like that, And that worries me about
(33:06):
this country because we you know, suddenly you know, Franklin, Tennessee,
where I drove through when I was on a trip
to the South, that's not just baned pride, Yeah, because
so many you know, misinformed, hateful minded people just playing
to the city management.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
There's banned any public drag which can be applied to
a trans woman that they.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Exactly, you know, who are you to say, you know,
you look like you were born male or born female
to me, so cops aren't going to differentiate that.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
It's very scary and I've not been I've not been
scared for a long time. But this is This does
not bode well. I mean, democracy itself is under an
attack in this country and considerable portion of the population
is swallowing the big lie.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah. Absolutely, it's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
The two focuses seemed to be well, first was kids. Yeah,
you know, we're grooming kids.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
You know, when I was a trans kid, I knew
exactly who I was and what I wanted. Yeah, it
was young. But we're grooming kids and we're ruining them
and most of them desist, which is not true. And
now it's on drag queens and they're indecent for some reason.
They can't quite explain exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
In some of your previous Poe or not post publishings,
you used pseudonyms to talk about, you know, specific instances.
One instance of like a woman having silicone injections that
went wrong. Another instance of a woman named Sharon and
her experience at a gender clinic, and I just find it,
(34:58):
I found it really fascinating, this little tidbit. But it's
about Sharon, who underwent post operative surgery as a male
to female transsexual, and she went to the gender clinics
to try and be treated, but they refused to treat her.
Because once again they were saying the same thing. Tell
me just about the use of the pseudonyms and your writing.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
At the time, there were people I did not want
to identify by name because it might put them into
danger or embarrassed them. And that's the only time I did.
Most of the authors were in that contributed to the
magazine were happy to use their names. And that's some time.
A lot of people who were not transitioned had two
names anyway, right, so they didn't risk a lot by
(35:43):
using the they call them fem names, but by using
their second name. And when I wrote about my own,
my own experience, I went to Michael Segers and Brussels
for my genital surgery. I wrote an article and etc.
Magazine in Atlanta, I called my sex change in Brussels,
and I used the pseudonym for myself because I was
(36:06):
working and I did not want to kind of push
that button too hard. No one where I worked had
any idea about me. Yeah, until someone out in me.
It was Montgomery's. They were mad at me.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Wow, that's horrible.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Well, I was competition and anyone who had ever crossed
paths with them, they ran them out of town. And
I was the first one that they couldn't run out
of town. So I became an enemy.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
And he was a transsexual man, is that right?
Speaker 2 (36:33):
He was the transman. She was a woman that worked
at the clinic. Yeah, okay, but you know, I became
a threat because I challenged her model, really yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Which was a very medical model.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
It was a very medical model. And I was, I was,
I mean, obviously, we need medical treatment, but we don't
have to. We shouldn't have to be pathologized to get it.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
So we're all not on the same track.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Also, And yeah, I why should you know? And I
wrote one piece about two very different approaches to women
took towards their non traditional ways they approached their own transition.
One just could not stand it any longer. And she
worked at AT and T. And she walked into the office,
and she had every sort of unfortunate male characteristic a
(37:20):
transsexual woman could have. So she was really tall, and
she had really big hands and feet. She'd lost her hair,
she had a big, square jaw. And this is not
anything that was her fault. We just get to genetics,
we get she reached your bawling point. I think she
had genderedice for you all a lot more than I did.
She walks into AT and T and clocks in the
(37:44):
Montgomerys had been working with her therapists to educate the
management of AT and T and she sort of blew
it by walking in the next taste, she walks in
and three thousand people are lined up to watch her
walk in and punch the card and they just stood
there and said not word one. That was enough to
put her in the mental hospital for a week, because
(38:06):
you know, she was very vulnerable at that point, but
she did what she needed to do. Another woman, she
just she started hormones. She was working for the state.
She was actually doing working in a state garage, but
she and she looked almost exactly like Reba McIntyre. So
(38:29):
all the after a while on hormones, everyone thinks she's
a female. Anyway, she's wearing coveralls, so dresses in an
issue and so it was never even addressed at work.
And I knew a trans man who did the same
thing at work. And who's to say when her real
life experience.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Began, right, because it's kind of bleming.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
I was just always questioning artificial limits upon us, arbitrarily
placed upon us by professionals At the same time, I
really believe you need to be educated before you make
permanent changes to your body. You need to understand any
risks that you take.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Yeah, because that's the important part of informed consent is Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
It is, and you know, and so you need to
think about stuff beyond just signing an informed consent agreement.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
One of the agous advertisements of the day, the PSA
of the day was don't be sorry, be sure test
drive your new equipment before you, you know, purchase.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah. We did medical advisories about hormones, about smoking.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yeah, about silicone injections, the dangerous curves ahead and silicone.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Yeah, Margo designed that, and she made me aware of
the problem with silicone.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
But well even today, not even just injectable silicone. But
I've been more. I know three trans women now who
have had breast and plants removed from breast and plant illness,
which is not really recognized. Still, so we're on the
still on the cutting edge of this kind of stuff
in a way, Hey, listeners, we're going to take our
(40:09):
last break of the episode here. Stay tuned as we
wrap up our conversation with Dallas. Denny, welcome back. Just
before we kind of wrap up. I want to talk
(40:29):
about some of the highlights of your career, because you
have some, I mean two very significant. I mean everything
we've talked about so far is significant. But you, of
course founded the first Southern Comfort conference, but you also
found one of many, yeah, one of and you also
started the first ever FtM Conference of the Americas.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
I did a challenge grant and then I called jameson
Green of FtM International you might not even done international
at the time in San Francisco, and gave him a
heads up because I said we would. He just would
pay five hundred bucks, which I didn't have to any
nonprofit that would match it for putting on a national
(41:11):
conference for trans man and Jamison left the room that
night with five hundred dollars in pledges. Wow, I got
the I had to send the money into installments a
couple of sports.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
You had to hold up her end of the bargain.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
I mean the trans with the exception of the of IFGE.
None of the trans organizations had a budget over twenty
five thousand dollars and most of that was going into
printing and equipment right supplies.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Yeah, you also wrote the first scientific literature on transsexualism
ever written by a transsexual.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Once I started finding material, I just started accumulating this
big database. And Vern Bullow, who was a sexologist in California,
I was giving it away with subscriptions to Chrysalist and
he said you should if you thought about publishing this,
and I said, I'd love to publish it, and in
the mail I get a contract from Garland and I
did a second book for them, which was an edited
(42:12):
textbook with chapters by all kinds of people that sort
of looked at the state of things. Richard Green and
John Monny's book nineteen sixty nine book Transsexualism and Sex
or Assignment sort of laid out a multidisciplinary approach to
treating trans people and so I want to really revisited
(42:32):
that a little bit and how things had changed. And
so I'm very proud of those two books. And for
a long time I didn't have a second book because
I sold a couple of copies and the Lesbian Herstory
Archives in Brooklyn contacted me and said, well, we didn't
get ours, So I got lost in the mail and
I sent them my last copy, and then buying copy
of the book was, you know, was like one hundred
(42:53):
and fifty dollars, so I didn't have a copy of
my own book for nearly two hours. Now it's a
text fortunately expensive.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah, textbooks are not cheap. Well, that is fantastic. And
as we've established, you know, and everything we've talked about already,
all of the understanding of trans people up to that
point really was shaped by CIS individuals and the medical
profession and kind of those gatekeeping models. So fantastic work
(43:22):
and kind of opening up the access to care and stuff,
I think for future generations of trans people. But I
want to talk to you about something that comes up
in modern day in the trans community. You know, how
we have As you said, back in the day, it
would take months for the things you're writing to show
(43:42):
up in print and stuff. But now we have discourse
you know, online in chat rooms things like that, and
people are often say that gender dysphoria is not real,
gender dysphoia does not exist. Just what are your thoughts
on that? Because you wrote a book about gender justice,
that was the term at the time.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah, you know, I think it works as a descriptive
term for the anguish and pain we feel when we
can't live authentically Yeah, in terms of it being a
male illness, no, I don't think so, although it can
be debilitating depending on how strongly you feel it. I mean,
(44:23):
it was enough from the woman I talked about who
went into AT and T for her to make a
sort of a rash personal decision. But people do that
all the time anyway, right, So yeah, we need to
move beyond it. There's a lot of history with that
term too. You know, it's evolved over the years from
the seventies.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
So when you say, like, move beyond it, like just well,
people I think are replacing it more with like the
term like gender euphoria. What do you feel about that
instead of gener That.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Was the name of a newsletter in the nineties. Oh really,
And when you find resolution for those feelings and are
able to express them, there's absolutely a feeling of euphoria.
I'm involved with a transconference called Fantasia Fair, which is
now Transgender Week, which has been happening on the tip
(45:14):
of Cape cod since nineteen seventy five, and it's a
week long and many people who go it's their first
chance to express themselves authentically and they can for an
entire week in the entire town because no one looks
twice at anybody in that town, Profitstown, And so we
actually have a workshop which we urge them to kind
(45:36):
of let things simmer down for a couple of weeks
before they make life altering decisions, because they're going to
be euphoric when they get home. They're so wow. You know,
this is wonderful. I don't want it to.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Stop, right, But you can't let that euphoria lead you,
as you know, as much as you can't let the
dysphoria lead you either. You kind of have to find
the balance between the two.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Term euphoria. I think it's mostly transitory. It's just sort
of like you can get that kind of euphor you
if you get any pony, you know. Yeah, I think
it's similar to that, but it's certainly not a harmful
term in any way. I think it's a useful term.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
I agree. Yeah, I want to ask more on language here,
because language is ever evolving and the euphemism treadmill and
all of that. But we talked, we hinted at it
the word transsexual how in the nineties, and you can
actually read and kind of watch the progression of from
reading the publications Christlis and all of that. You can
(46:35):
watch the progression of the word transsexual too, transgender. What
do you think of the erasure of the word transsexual
and then the current rebirth that we are experiencing of
the word transsexual. People are reidentifying with that term to
state that they are a trans person, who is someone
(46:57):
who is transitioning.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
I think think there is utility in differentiating people who
transition and change their bodies medically from other gender variant
people because they have different medical needs, they have different
psychological needs. So I identify both as transsexual and transgender
and probably always will maintain a transsexual identity because I
(47:23):
think it has I think it has utility.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Absolutely, I agree with that too. So did you feel
like when like there was a period of time when
the word transsexual was almost considered like canceled.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
I guess you would go, has word sex in it,
you know, and it was bestowed upon us. I remember
I have a transsexual menace T shirt in my collap two.
Actually we spelled it with one s, just as a
fuck you to the medical community.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Gotcha. Yeah, I love that. I just want to wrap
up with this last little thought here. What are your
thoughts on the current state of transactivism and what are
your Do you have any advice for the future of transactivism.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, I mean we all do what we can. Sometimes
people don't feel safe doing certain things. Well, if you
don't feel safe getting your name out there, fund someone
who does. I think our primary need at this point
in time is to have a cohesive national strategy to
combat all this hysteria about drag queens and trans kids,
(48:32):
because if we just go about it piecemeal, we're gonna
sort of fizzle out. I think, so ACLS doing some
legendary work in that Transgender Legal Defense Fund, you know,
support those organizations, and we need to probably have a
national conference to plots of people in leadership positions to
(48:53):
plot strategy because there's certainly scheming on the other side
what to do.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Yeah, and we don't really see that happening, you know
people or.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Jamison Green was that creating change last year and he
said just what I just said, and everyone's laughing because
they couldn't kind of conceive it. But I mean, this
is a very real threat. It's liable to get worse,
and it can get dangerous for us, not that it's
not already dangerous, but it can get far more dangerous us.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
Right, yeah, and we want to protect our future. Well, Dallas,
thank you for spending the time with us today. I
really appreciate you sharing your words and thoughts and everything
with us.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Well, thank you so much. I had a good time.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Can I don't know if you have social media, but
can you tell us where listeners can find you and
engage with your work.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, I'm on Facebook, okay, And I have a website
where all my work or almost all my work is archived,
and that's just my name dot com Dallas Danny dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
Yes, fabulous and also the Transgender Digital Transgender Archive, wonderful
wealth of knowledge.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
If you google my name there a lot of stuff
will come on.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Oh, yes, a lot. It's fun to read. Well, thank
you Dallas. It was wonderful talking with you today.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Thank you, Carn.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Thank you all so much for tuning into this week's episode.
I was so thrilled to be able to sit down
with the Dallas Denny to talk to her about her
life's work and all of the contributions she's made to
the community, especially here in the South. I hope you
all have a fabulous week. I will see you on
Monday for another Beauty Translated minisode and please, if you
(50:32):
haven't already, leave us a rating and review over on
Apple podcast. It means the world to me. Thank you
so much and have a fabulous week. Beauty Translated is
hosted by me Carmen Laurent and produced by Kurt Garen
and Jessica Crinchicch, with production assistance from Jennifer Bassett. Special
(50:54):
thanks to Ali Perry and Alie Canter for their support.
Our theme song is composed by Aaron Kaufman. Beauty Translated
is proud to be part of the outspoken network from
iHeart Podcasts. For more iHeart Podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
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