Edited slightly, to eliminate some rather embarrassing errors your gentle writer has found...
Well, it does seem that I made my debut here with a bang, did I not? The massive response to my debut blog entry, on the supposed dearth of disabled protagonists in TG fiction, was completely unexpected. I thank those of you who responded, and especially those inspired to write (such as Bailey Summers and Raff01). This tells me I've chosen the right corner of the Internet in which to kick back and relax.
Some of you have no doubt wondered why I don't attempt such a story myself.
Well, I have, though I can't say I'm satisfied with the result. I wrote an SRU story (I have a soft spot in my heart for that crusty old wizard) in which the Wizard grants a disabled man's desire to be the little girl he never got to be. That seems to be a recurring theme in the stories I've attempted--my protagonists are children, or adults who regress to that age, because for me it's a vicarious way of experiencing the little-girlhood I was never able to have.
It's a tricky sub-genre, to be sure, as there can be no sex, or even the suggestion of sex, for obvious reasons. (Unless one is writing a child-abuse scene, as Little Katie had done in the concluding novel of her "God Bless The Child" trilogy--and it can be potential minefield if done wrong, to say the least.) Meaning I've already lost the segment of potential readers who like the more erotic TG fiction.
I even wrote TG fiction in high school, which I'm sure caused my English teacher to raise an eyebrow. (I am grateful he chose not to read it to the class, as at that time, only a handful of people knew I had any transgender inclinations at all). My senior year I started to develop a "to hell with them all" attitude--I'd already been put through all manner of hell by bullies, and I would soon be gone anyway. What more could they do?
I became bold enough to show the TG side of myself, if in a highly veiled fashion (I did such things as bring my crocheting to school during a six-week teachers' strike. A timid act of defiance, I admit, but defiance nonetheless.) Hence, my story, which concerned a depressed artist and closet transgendered person who, while attempting to commit suicide, unintentionally rams his car into an oncoming vehicle containing a family with a six-year-old daughter.
He awakens to find himself in the hospital--in that same little girl's body. At first he's overjoyed that his dream has finally come true, but in my attempt at a Twilight Zone-type twist, the accident had paralyzed the little girl's body for life. Further, he would have to live with the guilt of having killed the "real" little girl, and would be unable to tell anyone.
I felt compelled to tack on that little moral to make it more palatable to the mainstream (in this case, my teacher, who was about as "mainstream" as one could get) but I'd always ached to do a story of a child who's allowed to revel in her transgenderedness without such moralistic elements. That story still waits to be written.
I have no shortage of ideas. But ideas are to stories what blueprints are to a house; they're only the first step. It's just in my case, the construction workers are on strike--I don't know how to turn an *idea* into a workable, *plausible* story (even a story with magical elements has to follow rules of logic). I know how to start a story, but not how to end one.
One idea in particular has nagged at me for years, as it takes place in one of my favorite historical eras, the Roaring Twenties (specifically, 1920s Berlin) and includes references to Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institut fá¼r SexualwiáŸenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Science, in English. I could simply have said that, I suppose, but I wanted to show off my meager German a bit).
Let's start with a woman who's something of a rebel, avant-garde for her time. She's a cabaret performer of so-so talent who runs off to Paris just after the First World War. She has a child, a boy, the product of a one-night stand, that she dotes on--and who adamantly insists that he is in fact a girl.
Because the mother *is* unconventional, she's unfazed, treating her child like the girl he insists he is, and dressing him accordingly. But as the child gets older, she grows more agitated, knowing that eventually, puberty will commence, and what her mother told her would happen as a result. Through one of her nightclub contacts, the mother hears of Hirschfeld's clinic in Berlin, meaning that the child would be one of his first transgendered patients, even before Lili Elbe.
We're thrust into the atmosphere of the city in that time period, about the time everything is about to all come crashing down. I thought it might be interesting to have the child be an eyewitness to the destruction of the clinic by the Nazis. but that might be a bit much.
Two things stopped me--the sheer mountain of research the story would require, and as always, the lack of what I considered a suitable ending. I toyed with the idea of making the child's fate uncertain, but realized I couldn't do that to the reader.
I also don't know if it would be historically plausible, given that the character is a child. Sex-reassignment surgery was still highly experimental and primitive, and whether such a procedure would have been done on a child is highly doubtful.
Yet it's still too good an idea to completely throw away. Therein lies my dilemma.
Comments
That sounds like an awesome story Rachel
I for one would definitely read it if you published it!
Cliff
Go for it!
Have a go, sister.
I for one would be happy to read such a story.
As long as you keep MOST of it factually accurate, most readers will be only too happy to ignore a few facts for a good yarn. Especially here, I think many BCTS readers and writers both are of the persuasion that facts be damned, just tell me a juicy story.
Honestly, I don't get hesitancy to write because of research needed. I'm only too happy to research anything and everything already, so if I need to research some things for a story? Excellent! I have an excuse to do what I love most anyways!
Abigail Drew.
Abigail Drew.
For want of a less suggestive way to put it...
That *ahem* filled the hole rather nicely. =)
*Blush*
Thanks again for inspiring Bailey and the others. ^_^
*More HuggleSnugglePurrs* <3
- - -
Vampire Catgirl. I love huggles, and drinking blood out of a saucer on the floor! ^_^
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! :D
It's odd
The next story I was planning on doing had nothing to do with CP or anything like that. But the blog just spurred something and the mind went into overdrive.
More than 1800 Years ago
The earliest sex reasignment surgery that I know of occurred before 200 C. E. It is recorded in the Mishna (finished by about 200), book Nasheem(Women) that a Roman emperor had one of his slaves changed from a man to a woman. It is not noted how successful it was, nor if the victim survived.
shalimar
My, my, what my little post has wrought....
If you post it, it will be read.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
Magnus Hirschfeld et al
Rachel
You might want to look at http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/31621/other-side-wire-...
Nancy has done an awful lot of research in this field and period and is currently well into a novel on the subject.
Persephone
Persephone
Non sum qualis eram
Book Burning
Here is what I came across concerning the book burning while poking about in my efforts to write 'THe Other Side of the Wire,' which is now up to Chapter 8.
Nancy Cole
www.nancycole.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebelplatz
The Bebelplatz is known as the site of the infamous Nazi book burning ceremony held in the evening of May 10, 1933 by members of the SA ("brownshirts"), SS, Nazi students and Hitler Youth groups, on the instigation of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis under the leadership of Adolf Hitler burned around 20,000 books, including works by Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and many other authors.
Some days earlier, on May 6, the students had also dragged the contents library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft into the square, burning them on May 10.
Today a memorial by Micha Ullman consisting of a glass plate set into the cobbles, giving a view of empty bookcases, commemorates the book burning. Furthermore, a line of Heinrich Heine is engraved, stating "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" (in English: "Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people"). Students at Humboldt University hold a book sale in the square every year to mark the anniversary.
"You may be what you resolve to be."
T.J. Jackson
Early Surgery
Rachel,
Some follow up on material I came across researching 'The Other Side of the Wire.' The techniques and results pioneered by these men was actually far more advanced than I had originally thought.
Google the name of the surgeons and poke about yourself. You'll see what you wish to do is perfectly well within the realm of possible.
Nancy Cole
www.nancycole.org
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(1889 - 1976)
He was head of the Institute's gynaecological department between 1925 and 1933 and became actively involved in sexual counselling. He drew up expert forensic reports, published on abortion techniques and worked as the editor of the Institute's popular journal: "Die Ehe" ("Marriage").
Levy-Lenz performed the first sex-change operations on tranvestites. Furthermore, he ran a private clinic for sexual disorders in Berlin. In 1939, he was deprived of his citizenship. He went to Cairo in exile.
After the war, he practiced alternately in Cairo and Baden-Baden (West-Germany) as a famous cosmetic surgeon.
The gynecologist Levy-Lenz worked at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexology. During this time, he was one of the first physicians to perform genital reassignment surgery. He also wrote educational materials for the general public, for example about the prevention of STDs. In 1933, he fled to Paris, where he acquired new skills as a cosmetic surgeon. He returned to Berlin in 1935, taking advantage of a sudden climate of tolerance before the Olympic games and opened a surgical practice on the fashionable Kurfürstendamm. He fled Nazi persecution again in late 1936, this time going to Egypt, where he had a very successful career (his first patient was the great singer Om Kalthoum). After WWII, while maintaining his residence in Cairo, he regularly returned to Germany, teaching cosmetic surgery at various hospitals and writing one of the first German textbook on the subject. His "Memoirs of a Sexologist" contain, among other things, descriptions of his work at Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexology. He also wrote fiction. Several unpublished manuscripts can be studied at our Archive.
Rudolph, who even early on in childhood - displayed a "tendency to act and carry on in a feminine way", was castrated at his own request in 1922.
He worked as a domestic at the Institute, dressed as a woman and generally called Dora.
Hirschfeld affectionately called her Dorchen (little Dora) and published her transformation process as a transvestite in his work on gender studies "Geschlechtskunde". Institute physician Felix Abraham published Dorchen's gender transformation as case-study: "Her castration had the effect - albeit not very extensive - of making her body became fuller, restricting her beard growth, making visible the first signs of breast development, and giving the pelvic fat pad... a more feminine shape."
In 1931, when Dora, is about forty, her penis was amputated by the Institute physician Dr. Levy-Lenz, and then an artificial vagina was surgically grafted by the Berlin surgeon Prof. Dr. Gohrbandt. Dorchen was one of the first sex changes altogether.
The sexual physician Dr. Levy-Lenz, who joined the Institute in 1925, recalls the domestic personnel as follows:
"It was, moreover, very difficult for transvestites to find a job.(...) As we knew this and as only few places of work were willing to employ transvestites, we did everything we could to give such people a job at our Institute. For instance, we had five maids - all of them male transvestites, and I shall never forget the sight one day when I happened to go into the Institute's kitchen after work: there they sat close together, the five "girls", peacefully knitting and sewing and singing old folk-songs. These were, in any case, the best, most hardworking and conscientious domestic workers we ever had. Never ever did a stranger visiting us notice anything..."
In the 1910s, Hirschfeld began to explore the idea of a surgical solution to some of these cases.
Hirschfeld began working with a Vienna physician, Eugen Steinach (who later penned the 1940 book, Sex and Life. Forty years of biological and medical experiments). Steinach had experimented with gonadal transplantation in attempts to cure a variety of sexual disorders (ranging from homosexuality to transvestism). His early papers (Arbitrary Transformation of Male Animals into Animals with Pronounced Female Sex Characteristics and Feminine Psyche, and Feminization of Males and Masculinization of Females) detailed his experiments with transplantation on guinea pigs. He was the first to theorize that the sex glands contained secretions that made men act like men, and women act like women. Later, in the 20s and 30s, the blooming field of endocrinology would discover androgens and estrogens.
In 1918, Hirschfeld reported in Sexuelle Zwischenstufen: Sexualpathologie that the first incomplete sex-reassignment surgeries in female-to-male patients were performed in Berlin in 1912. In 1916, Max Marcuse published an article on Geschlechtsumwandlungstrieb, the desire of some to have their sex changed. In 1926, R. Muehsam reported (in Chirurgische Eingriffe bei Anomalien des Sexuallebens: Therapie der Gegenwart 67: 451-455) that in 1920, Hirschfeld referred the first male-to-female patient to a surgeon, Dr. Felix Abraham.
In 1921, the first private surgeon, Gohrbandt, began to practice early forms of sexual reassignment in Berlin.
These initial attempts at SRS were incomplete, usually entailing simply the removal of the sexual organs of the patient. Further enhancements to the procedure were developed in the following years. Most notable were the first attempts at vaginoplasty. Initially vaginoplasty was performed using skin grafts from the legs and/or lower abdomens. Further enhancements would not come along for over twenty years.
The first complete male-to-female SRS was reported in 1931, and it was performed based on Hirschfeld´s recommendation by two of his co-workers in his institute, Dr. Levy-Lenz, and Dr. Felix Abraham. The patient, Rudolph Richter, later living with the female first name Dorchen, lived and worked in Hirschfeld´s institute for more than 10 years as a housemaid (R. Herrn (1995) Vom Geschlechtsumwandlungswahn zur Geschlechtsumwandlung. pro famila magazin 23(2): 14-18). In 1922, Richter underwent castration, followed in 1931 with a penectomy and the construction of an artificial vagina.
Also that year, Dr. Abraham reported the details of two men undergoing sex reassignment surgery in his 1931 article Genitalumwandlung an zwei maenlichen transvestiten. (Zeitschrift fur Sexualwissenschaft 18:223-226) A translation of his article can be read at http://www.symposion.com/ijt/ijtc0302.htm.
In the Spring of 1930, Lili Elbe (formerly the Dutch painter, Einar Wegener), referred by Hirschfeld, had SRS under Dr. Gohrbandt in Dresden. She died the following year of complications from the surgery, but not before being heralded as the world's first transsexual. Dutch newspapers began reporting the news at the end of 1930, and her posthumous autobiography, Man into Woman (under the pseudonym of Niels Hoyer), was published two years after her death.
Some early female-to-male transexuals include Claire Schreckengost and Henri Acces (formerly Alice Henriette Acces). In 1935, a Czechoslovakian runner by the name of Zdenka Koubkova became Zdenek Koubkov. British athlete Mary Edith Louise Weston became Mark Weston in the mid-1930s. In 1937, Belgian cycling champion Elvira de Brujin became Willy de Brujin.
On May 6th, 1933, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science was raided and destroyed by Nazis. Hirschfeld, in exile, died two years later. Writings on sexology were burnt, and sexologists were persecuted. Soon, even Hirschfeld's World League of Sex Research was disbanded.
Due to the political events in Europe, SRS was placed on a back burner. Only a handful of sex reassignment operations would be performed until the next decade. Clinics in Denmark and Norway resume some of the work halted by Germany, performing theraputic penectomies and castration.
However, the early years of WWII were also a time of medical advancement which would help future transexuals. It was at this time that the first estrogens became available, with the introduction of Di-Ethyl Stilbesterol in 1938 (originally for use in chicken feed!), and Premarin in 1941.
In 1944-5, a British surgeon, Harold Gillies, performed some initial operations on Michael Dillon (formerly Laura). He used the wartime technique of flap surgery, which proved to be a crucial advancement for FTM surgery.
"You may be what you resolve to be."
T.J. Jackson