Is Ann Coulter transsexual? Judge for yourself.
"Cherish forever what makes you unique, 'cuz you're really a yawn if it goes." --Bette Midler
I was reading the page of successful transsexual women (you can find it on my Links page--or down below if you keep reading), and I came across someone named Calpernia Addams. Of course, I immediately thought of The Addams Family. Then, just as immediately, I realized that unlike most Addamses, she must be relieved when someone's only making fun of her name. At least, if my last name were Addams and I became transsexual, I'd be relieved. Or I'd pick a new last name, perhaps a grandmother's maiden name or something. (Some transsexuals who keep their last names regret it because it can lead to them being found out.)
This got me thinking. Most of the famous transsexuals we hear about aren't really famous for anything else; many of them are seen by most people as nothing more than a circus sideshow. The ones we see on the Jerry Springer show are just as trashy as Mr. Springer's other guests. The ones we hear about in the news are mostly "she-male" prostitutes, murder victims (who are seen in the same light as drug dealers who get murdered), and activists (who are seen as acting out of self-interest). All in all, there aren't many positive images of transsexuals, or of transgendered people in general; there are more positive images of Arabs (Disney's Aladdin, for one). This can lead transgendered people, even those who don't change their bodies, to question their own sanity.
But why bother making a list? Positive images help any minority. Statues and surviving physical descriptions show that Imhotep, who singlehandedly greatly advanced Egyptian medical practices thousands of years ago, was black. This discovery still inspires African-Americans to go into science. It's kind of sad that they need to be told that it's possible for black people to be scientists. Like them, we need to be told that people like us can be scientists--and royalty, successful artists, members of Parliament, composers, mathematicians, national heroes, and even popes! We also need to be told that people like us can live their entire lives without transitioning; the fact that some of these people lived in a time before transitioning was even possible, and managed to live happy lives, or at least not kill themselves, is proof.
So, here are some who are known for something other than being transgendered or transsexual:
*this person has transitioned
For more, visit Transsexual Women's Successes. (There are also some successful female-to-male transsexuals on that site.) Just remember that their results are not typical.
And, of course, there are many successful people who are transgendered or even transsexual but manage to keep this fact a secret from most of the world. Attorney/political author Ann Coulter, one of the best-selling authors of the conservative movement, is suspected by some people of being transsexual. She has a heavy brow ridge, a strong jaw, big hands, big feet, a thick waist (in spite of the fact that she is generally thin), and an Adam's apple, and she is taller than most genetic women; in this way, she resembles the kathoey. Also, there are no records of an Ann Coulter born in Connecticut in 1962-63. It is thought she was born Arthur Coltrane, but no one has been able to verify this. Personally, I find it hard to imagine that a transsexual can be so actively conservative, even going so far as to say, "I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment." (As my mom pointed out, it's only the First Amendment that allows her to say that.) I'm conservative, but I have chosen not to rtransition. Besides, some genetic women have been wrongly labeled transsexual; if she's a genetic woman, then I feel really sorry for her. I'd say the jury's still out on this one, but you never know...
Is Ann Coulter transsexual? Judge for yourself.
Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe has this to say about J. H. M. Whiteman:
[I]n his 1961 book The Mystical Life, mathematician J. H. M. Whiteman revealed that he experienced at least two [out-of-body experiences] a month and recorded over two thousand such incidents. He also disclosed that he always felt like a woman trapped in a man's body, and during separation this sometimes resulted in his finding himself in female form. Whiteman experienced various other forms as well during his [out-of-body] adventures, including children's bodies, and concluded that beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, were the determining factors in the form the second body assumed. (Emphasis added.)
If he hadn't written that book, who would have guessed?
Then there's late-night comedian Craig Ferguson, who adds lots of jokes about male homosexuality and cross-dressing to his comedy routine... and once said, "Go ahead, make fun of me, I'm just a scared little girl on the inside..." He may just be doing that for effect, but I find it hard to imagine a man without gender issues would even consider saying such a thing.
Later on, I'll explain why I think Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda series, is also transgendered.
Not all famous transgendered people are positive role models. Michael Jackson is suspected of being transgendered (because of his facial feminization surgery and his effeminate clothes), and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) claimed that his frustrated desire for a sex change was what made him a killer. Unfortunately, some people learning this would question the sanity and morality of all transgendered people because of these two... while the sanity and morality of people who conform to gender norms isn't questioned even when a man commits rape or murder to prove he's a man.
Historical Figures
It is often difficult to ascertain the gender identity of pre-modern people, so the list below is far from complete. They're more interesting, because many of them managed to live full lives without changing their bodies. Most of the people on this list were men in women's bodies; because they lived as men, they are better represented in history, just like any other men. The women in men's bodies are marked with an asterisk.
According to Lynn Conway, Danielle Bunton Berry "was a computer scientist, and was the pioneer of multi-player computer games. She was widely known and greatly respected as a major innovator in her field. Multi-player computer games have become an underpinning for much of modern computer-collaboration technology, and thus her work has had a great impact on computing in general."
A note about those who were biologically female but passed as men: Many people think they just did it to assume male privilege, just as many think female-to-male transsexuals today are altering their bodies to assume male privilege. But even for relatively masculine women, this is not easy. Norah Vincent tried to pass as a man for a year and a half, and wrote about it in Self-Made Man, and she had to stop because she ended up having a nervous breakdown from having to pretend to be another person. She had to get lots of training and needed a really good makeup artist. Those soldiers had to pass as male for years, sleeping and living in close quarters with men. I can't imagine that they could manage to pass so long as men without being transgendered.
Furthermore, there are examples of men who lived as women, but they were not famous enough to put on the above list. For example, Mlle. Jenny Savalette de Lange was biologically male (this fact was only discovered after her death in 1858); she managed to somehow get a birth certificate that said she was female, she was engaged six times, and the king of France gave her a pension and a free apartment! There was a woman who was married for six years before being exposed as male in 1937. Josephine Montgomery was discovered by authorities in a San Quentin women's prison. Mrs. Adele Best lived as a woman for 54 years and was married to men three times. (Archives of Sexual Behavior 4.5 (1975), 566-67) It used to be really easy to live in stealth.
Some suspect Einstein was transgendered, because of this excerpt from the autobiography of transsexual Englishwoman April Ashley:
But I did meet a famous scientist in a restaurant in Dean Street.
"Is it Mr Einstein?"
He turned and said, "Are you a boy or a girl?"
"I think I'm a girl."
"Whatever you are, you should be Madame Butterfly with those long eyelashes."
"Can I have your autograph?"
"But I don't like to do that, it embarrasses me so much."
"Oh, go on..."
"Oh, all right..." He gave me five, one each for our table, some kind of record for him.
It was not Einstein's policy to give autographs, and some people suspect that he felt a connection with this girl in a boy's body because he was transgendered himself. While this is suspicious, I have not found anything else to back up this claim.
Someone wrote an e-mail to me with information suggesting that Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote many fairy tales, including "The Ugly Duckling," "The Little Mermaid," and "The Emperor's New Clothes," was also transgendered--as that person says, it's probably no coincidence that I love The Little Mermaid so much! According to the Wikipedia article:
He later worked in a cigarette factory where his fellow workers humiliated him by betting on whether he was in fact a girl, pulling down his trousers to check. At the age of fourteen... He had a pleasant soprano voice and succeeded in being admitted to the Royal Danish Theatre. This career stopped short when his voice broke.
Later, in a letter to a male friend:
"... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery."
This has caused some people to suspect that Hans Christian Andersen was gay. But since "he" was actually female inside, I'd say that made "him" as straight as any other straight woman.
It has been speculated that Lewis Carroll (author of Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass) was transgendered, because he enjoyed the company of little girls, but not little boys, and his most famous books were about a little girl; the idea is that this was the closest he could come to recapturing the childhood that was forbidden to him because of his male body. (I know firsthand how that is.) Some say Newton was the same way. Many have accused both of being child molesters for this; such is society's opinion of transgendered people. And given how many classic Disney animated features had female protagonists and plots that were more interesting to girls than to boys--something not usually done in the era of the classic cartoons--I wonder about Walt Disney.
Interestingly, neither Anderson nor Carroll were interested in sex. This is fairly common among transgendered people, because many don't like to be in the sexual role of their birth sex (which most potential partners, even same-sex ones, require). If you're curious about me, I'm the same way. You might like a blog entry I wrote on this topic.
If you know of anyone who needs to be added to either list, please e-mail me the name and some supporting evidence.
Fictional Characters
It is just as important to list transgendered fictional characters, because how many of them there are and how they are depicted shows us the status of transgendered people in our society. As things currently stand, a character in a work of fiction is only transgendered if the work of fiction is about the character being transgendered (Luna: A Novel), or if the character is insane (like the villain from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective); such fiction is beyond the scope of this page. (If you know of a fictional character who is transgendered, and the work of fiction could still work if the character were not transgendered--and the character is not depicted as insane--please e-mail me.)
Still, some manage to smuggle a few transgendered characters into their work. According to Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne by Sarah E. Shea, Kevin Gordon, Ann Hawkins, Janet Kawchuk, and Donna Smith, Christopher Robin is suspected to be transgendered. Of course, they call it "Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood." They also add that it's just a provisional diagnosis. While he looks masculine enough in the Disney cartoon, he looks like a girl in the original Winnie-the-Pooh books.
Sesamstrasse, the German Sesame Street, apparently has a 3-year-old transgendered snail, according to the Muppet Wiki:
Finchen is a character on Sesamstrasse, the German co-production of Sesame Street. She is an orange snail with a yellow shell on her back.
Finchen was added to the Sesamstrasse cast after Samson and Tiffy as a male. He started as a weak, tiny snail who lived in the forest, outside Sesamstrasse. For the past few seasons, Finchen has inexplicably turned into a younger girl character with a really wild imagination, representing the psychological age of a three year old.
The sex-change might have something to do with the fact that "Schnecke", the German word for snail, is a female word in the German language, succeeded by the definite article "die". Another reason might be that Finchen's original performer was male puppeteer Lothar Klose, but for several years now, Finchen has been performed by singer and female puppeteer Andrea Bongers.
Or maybe she's been a girl in a boy's body all along and started living as a girl at the age of 3. Let's hope she doesn't get into the same kind of trouble as Aurora Lipscomb. (And no, neither Bert nor Ernie make this list. Despite what you may have seen at Bert Is Evil (read at your own risk), Bert is not a transsexual. He and Ernie aren't even gay; several episodes show that Bert is attracted to women. And why is transsexuality offered as evidence that someone is evil?)
A far better example is Nermal from the Garfield comic strip and animated series. According to Wikipedia:
A cute gray kitten who's the self-proclaimed "World's Cutest Kitty Cat". Nermal seems kind and playful, but likes to annoy Garfield and brag about how much cuter he is. Garfield often attempts (usually unsuccessfully) to mail him to Abu Dhabi as a result. Nermal's arguably feminine preoccupation with being cute, and the fact that a woman provides the voice for Nermal, caused many viewers to mistake him for a girl at first, though he is actually male.
I'm sure Nermal is a girl cat in a boy cat's body; after all, many male cartoon characters are voiced by women but are still unmistakably male. And Garfield's reaction to him is very similar to how boys usually react to girls in boys' bodies. Given how bad things are in countries in that region (like Kuwait--Abu Dhabi is in the United Arab Emirates, in the northern coast near that pointy part of the Arabian Peninsula) for transgendered people, it may be a good thing that Garfield never succeeds at sending Nermal to Abu Dhabi.
On the popular show The Simpsons, there are two characters of interest to anyone reading this page. The first is Waylon Smithers, personal assistant to Homer's boss, Mr. Burns. Throughout the series, we see that he is attracted to men, and in particular, to Mr. Burns, so we assume he's just gay. But like Hans Christian Andersen, he's actually a straight woman in a man's body. In "We're On The Road to D'oh-where," he buys estrogen from Marge:
Smithers: How much for this estrogen?
Marge: But that's a female replacement hormone.
Smithers: Uh-huh, it's for a friend who's trapped in the body of another friend.
In "When You Dish Upon a Star," Smithers asks Kim Basinger about her shoes from L.A. Confidential mentioning that he wants a pair for his, uh, mother. (Not all cross-dressers are transgendered, but there is some overlap.) In "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy," it is revealed that he owns the world's largest collection of Malibu Stacy dolls; many transgendered adults (myself included) own large collections of children's toys appropriate to their internal gender.
Smithers
The other is Milhouse, Bart's best friend. In one episode ("Lisa's Date With Density"), it is revealed that even though he is in love with Lisa, she sees him as a big sister; when she tells him this, he asks, in frustration, "Why does everyone keep saying that?" In another ("Lisa's Sax"), it is revealed that Milhouse has been diagnosed with a lot of "homosexual tendencies." On occasion he has been shown to enjoy cross-dressing, and in one of the comics, he and Bart are in the school's theater room trying on costumes; Milhouse puts on a wedding dress and gets tears in his eyes, and when Bart asks him what he's so weepy about, he answers, "A boy can dream, can't he?"
Milhouse's character makes a lot more sense when seen in this light, as do other people's reactions to him. He is always bullied by boys at school, Homer refers to him as "Bart's little weenie friend," and in the episode "Lisa's Wedding" (which takes place fifteen years in the future, counting from when the episode was written), it is implied that Lisa loses her virginity to Milhouse, but according to Marge, "Milhouse doesn't count."
However, I don't think Matt Groening is transgendered. I think he's just gay. Not only is a lot of his humor very male, he also makes a lot of jokes about seemingly straight men having occasional attractions to other men and displaying ocasional feminine behaviors, and has done a few episodes about gay men (Homer's Phobia," for one) and homosexuality in general. There's at least one gay reference in almost every episode. In addition, in his book "Love Is Hell," he made a chart of the advantages and disadvantages of homosexual and heterosexual relationships.
In the young adult novel Pants on Fire by Meg Cabot, the main character mentions a student named Brian McFadden, "who is kind of a girl." This character is also kind of a spear carrier; that's literally all she wrote. In another young adult novel, Is He Or Isn't He? by John Hall, the character Anthony is depicted as a gay boy. However, his attitude toward romantic relationships and the nature of his friendships with girls strongly suggest that he is not a gay boy, but a straight girl. The fact tht the author's real last name is Italian and the character is Italian-American leads me to think that perhaps Anthony is the author's alter ego.
I, and a few others, suspect that Tinky Winky, a character on The Teletubbies, is a little girl in a little boy's body. My page The Early Years starts with a description of him, quoted from Jennifer Diane Reitz:
I cannot imagine but that Tinky Winky is the first behaviorally transgendered character ever shown in a children's program designed for very young children.
Tinky Winky fits the classic model of the transgendered, especially the transsexual child. Tinky Winky is very quiet and reserved, but not especially shy. He is very lingustically advanced, and delicate of behavior and manner. He is a bit awkward, as though not entirely comfortable with his body. He has an early fascination with things that are bright and pretty, and associates mostly with females, and with artifacts generally associated with females. He is not otherwise especially effeminate ...just gentle and delicate and reserved.
These are all the standard, recognized qualities and behaviors of children who later turn out to be transgendered or transsexual.
The same page talks about how I always chose to be the princess when I played Super Mario Bros. 2. It's fitting that this is the same game that features Birdo, the first transgendered video game character.
Birdo is a "mini-boss" from Super Mario Bros. 2. The original first edition instruction booklet describes Birdo this way:
"He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He'd rather be called 'Birdetta.'"
The later edition omits the last sentence, but keeps the initial description. Unlike Bowser (the giant turtle who always kidnaps the princess), Birdo isn't evil. (Actually, looking at the first game, maybe Mario's the evil one, not Bowser. Maybe Bowser and the princess are in love, sort of a Beauty and the Beast-type couple, and Mario's trying to kidnap the princess, just as he kidnapped Donkey Kong in Donkey Kong, Jr. Hmmm...) The instruction booklet tells us her reason for trying to defeat Mario and the others:
"Ooh, you are so cute, I am NEVER going to let you go!"
In Mario Tennis, Birdo has a boyfriend: Yoshi, the green dinosaur who accompanied Mario in Super Mario World and saved him as a baby in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The instruction manual uses feminine pronouns when talking about Birdo; presumably, she found a way to magically change her biological sex. (I don't imagine they have hormones and sex reassignment surgery in the Mushroom Kingdom, especially not for reptiles.) She still goes by Birdo, though; I guess "Birdetta" sounded too silly.
Aren't they a cute couple?
It's interesting to note that the people at Video Game Cats made a joke about Birdo being a "transsexual Yoshi." (Warning: many of the jokes at Video Game Cats are very disgusting. The author clearly has issues; for example, Mario is consistently depicted as a gay sex maniac. Read the archive at your own risk.) In Japan, Birdo is named "Katherine." Birdo has also appeared in Wario's Woods, Super Mario RPG, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, Mario Kart: Double Dash, and Mario & Luigi. In the last game, Birdo is in love with Popple (no relation to the Popples), a thief--an inter-species romance. I wonder what happened to Yoshi.
This is a picture of Mario riding Yoshi in Super Mario World.
Yoshi also needs to be mentioned here, because Yoshi is male (in every game, masculine pronouns are used for him--and he is Birdo's boyfriend, after all), and yet, he lays eggs. Perhaps Yoshi is a female-to-male transsexual; some human female-to-male transsexuals get pregnant after becoming male. It could just be that Yoshi's sex-change spell was incomplete, Yoshi is intersexed (born with both sets of genitalia), or Yoshi's species has an unusual biology. I guess this is why Yoshi and Birdo picked each other.
If not for Birdo, this would not be of interest; it would just be an inconsistency. But in a video game series with a character like Birdo, it raises some questions. Especially since this series was created by the same person who made all the Legend of Zelda games, one of which (The Ocarina of Time) has Princess Zelda disguised as a man for seven years. Also, some elements of the Mario games seem to have been inspired by elements of the Disney animated features with female protagonists. The Super Mario Bros. bear an amazing resemblance to the two Italian chefs from Lady and the Tramp; the castle from Super Mario Bros. looks quite a bit like the castle from Sleeping Beauty (the movie from which Aurora Lipscomb got her name); the concept of mushrooms that make a person bigger comes from Alice In Wonderland (by his own admission). Also, the character Marin of Link's Awakening seems to be based on Ariel (of The Little Mermaid), and the Zora King of The Ocarina of Time seems to be based on King Triton. There aren't a whole lot of elements from the more male-oriented Disney movies.
Plus, a lot of male-to-female transsexuals work in the computer industry, particularly on the creative side. At least 14 of the world's top computer game designers are male-to-female transsexuals. (I have no idea what it is that draws them to this line of work; there are probably many more women with unaltered male bodies in the computer game industry. I considered such a career for a while in my teen years.)
Hmmm... transgendered characters... inspiration from "girls' Disney movies"... a profession known to be commonly chosen by male-to-female transsexuals...
Maybe Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario games, is one of us? It's an interesting thought.
