Queer > Trans Archives - Infinite Women

Leslie Feinberg

American butch lesbian, transgender activist, author, and communist. Her notable works include “Stone Butch Blues” (1993) and “Transgender Warriors” (1996), which played a significant role in gender studies.

Nadezhda Durova

Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova, under the guise of a man, achieved distinction as a decorated soldier within the Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars. She was one of the earliest documented female officers in the Russian military.

Catalina de Erauso

Spanish-American military heroine

Sophie Cook

Transgender former Labour Party Parliamentary candidate, RAF veteran, Premier League Football photographer, self harm and suicide survivor

Dr James Barry

Army doctor

Marsha P Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson was one of the most prominent figures of the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. Always sporting a smile, Johnson was an important advocate for homeless LGBTQ+ youth, those effected by H.I.V. and AIDS, and gay and transgender rights.

Carmen Tione Rupe

Carmen Rupe was a trailblazing transgender woman and entertainer, a larger-than-life personality, sex worker, and celebrated LGBTIQ+ icon. Proprietor of several notorious Wellington nightspots and one-time mayoral candidate, she pushed the boundaries of Wellington nightlife and both entertained and outraged New Zealanders during the 1960s and 1970s. The most visible transgender New Zealander of her time, she used her celebrity to advocate for LGBTIQ+ rights. She was well-known for helping homeless people and others in need.

Sylvia Rivera

A veteran of the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising, Sylvia Rivera was a tireless advocate for those silenced and disregarded by larger movements. Throughout her life, she fought against the exclusion of transgender people, especially transgender people of color, from the larger movement for gay rights.

Albert Cashier

Albert D. J. Cashier was an Irish-born American immigrant who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Born Jennie Irene Hodgers, Cashier took on the identity of a man even before enlisting on August 6, 1862, and maintained that identity until their death in 1915. Cashier became famous as one of the more than 250 women soldiers who served as men during the Civil War, but the consistent and long-term commitment to a male identity indicates a strong likelihood that Cashier was a trans man. Cashier’s uncle or stepfather reportedly dressed his charge in male clothing so that the teen could find work in an all-male shoe factory in Illinois, and Cashier had adopted their male identity in order to live independently. During the war, Cashier’s regiment was part of the Army of the Tennessee serving under Ulysses S. Grant and fought in approximately 40 battles, including the siege at Vicksburg. During this campaign, Cashier was captured while performing reconnaissance, but escaped and return to the regiment. Cashier managed to hide their birth gender even when hospitalised and fought with the regiment through the war until they were honorably discharged with all of the other soldiers on August 17, 1865. It was only at age 70, suffering from dementia and living in a veterans’ hspice, that Cashier’s biological sex was revealed and they were forced to wear women’s clothing once again. When they diedthe following year, Albert Cashier was buried in uniform with full military honors and their tombstone inscribed “Albert D. J. Cashier, Co. G, 95 Ill. Inf.”

Lili Elbe

Lili Elbe was a Danish painter – successful under her birth name Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener – and transgender woman who was an early recipient of sex reassignment surgery.
Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb while they were studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and they married in 1904. They worked as illustrators, Elbe specialising in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. The couple travelled through Italy and France before settling in 1912 in Paris, where Elbe could live more openly as a woman and posed as Gottlieb’s sister-in-law. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d’Automne in Paris. Elbe stopped painting after her transition.
Elbe started dressing in women’s clothes after she found she enjoyed the stockings and heels she wore to fill in for Gottlieb’s model who was late for a sitting. By the 1920s, Elbe regularly presented as Lili, attending various parties and entertaining guests in her house. Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting, almond-shaped eyes, dressed in chic apparel, petites femmes fatales with Elbe as model.
Elbe went to Germany in 1930 for sex reassignment surgery, which was highly experimental at the time. She underwent four operations over two years and her case became a sensation in Danish and German newspapers. A Danish court annulled the Elbe and Gottelieb’s marriage in October 1930 and Elbe was able to have her sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Ilse Elvenes. She returned to Dresden and adopted the surname Elbe in honor of the Elbe River. In 1931, she had her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal, which made her the second transgender woman to undergo a vaginoplasty surgery, a few weeks after Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt performed the experimental procedure on Dora Richter.
Elbe’s immune system rejected the transplanted uterus, and the operation and a subsequent surgical revision caused infection, leading to her death from cardiac arrest on 13 September 1931, three months after the surgery.The US and UK English versions of her semi-autobiographical narrative were published posthumously in 1933 under the title Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. In 2000, The Danish Girl, a fictionalised account of Elbe’s life, became an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. In 2015, it was made into a film of the same title – although critically acclaimed, the film was criticised for casting an English cisgender man (Eddie Redmayne) to play a Danish transgender woman.