1st Ed With Jacket

Competing against 10,000 others in a nationwide talent contest in the late 1960s, Danny won first prize, was named “Best Teenage Male Vocalist in America”, and landed a recording contract with Capitol Records in the late 1960s. Judges included Dick Clark, Quincy Jones, and Mason Williams. 

Realizing that she was miserable as a man, Danny separated from her wife and decided to undergo the first stage of a sex-change operation. She had the procedure performed in Tijuana, Mexico. Two years later, Canary could afford the second-stage procedure. However, living as both male and female and, at the same time, as neither, coupled with working many jobs to save money, and being alone nearly led her to commit suicide.

Inscription & Autograph 

The book is inscribed, “Bob, enjoyed meeting & talking with you yesterday. You seemed interested & I thought I’d  give you a copy of my first book to help answer some of the questions. Best Wishes Canary (The Bird) 9/20/76″  This rare edition is now available for review in the Transgender Archive located at the TFA Transgender Center in Houston, Texas.

The Transgender Foundation of Americ has acquired a first edition copy of Havelock Ellis’ “Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume VII Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies”. This volume is significant to both the transgender lexicon and the development of the understanding of transgender expression.

Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis were the first to really look at transgenders. Both initially concluded the phenomenon of transgender behavior was grounded in sexuality. It is easy t understand why this happened: There are many crossdressers who dress for sexual reasons; and, Freudian psychology was the gold standard of the day for psychological professionals. In 1910, Hirschfel published, The Transvestites: An Investigation of th Erotic Desire to Cross Dress and in 1913, Ellis published a paper in which he looked into the issue of those with a ‘sexo-aesthetic inversion’.

In this book, Ellis states that his term, ‘sexo-aesthetic inversion’ was misleading and should not be used. Through this book, Ellis entered a new term into the transgender lexicon: ‘Eonism’, after the French transwoman, Chevalier d’Eon.

Ellis and Hirschfeld’s work was groundbreaking in that it mainly interested in simply gathering information about transgender people instead of trying to design a cure. Freud and his followers, on the other hand, felt that transgender behavior was a pathology and that it likely stemmed from small boys seeing their mother’s genitalia which created a deep anxiety about the notion of losing his own penis.

Emil Gutheil used the work of Ellis and Hirschfeld to bring the psychological world out of the dark ages of Freudian views of gender normative behavior and into an enlightened age where there was room for a view of transgenders that was not completely driven by the assumption that transgenders are essentially the same in that they are all motivated through fetishistic drive.

This is an incredibly important work in the history of the modern transgender theory. Without the work of Ellis, and the complementary work of Hirschfeld, Freudian views of transgender behavior would have been the only voice driving transgender care when Harry Benjamin decided to begin his historic work with the transgender community.

TG Historical Archive Committee

If you would like to be a part of the TG Archive Committee, please sign up during one of the meetings at the TG Center. TFA is continuing to aggressively seek out and acquire items of historical significance to the transgender community.

During the last Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting, the HTGA representative noted that meetings are sometimes interrupted by noise from downstairs. To address this issue, French doors were installed in the main upstairs meeting room in order to reduce noise from downstairs interrupting the meetings upstairs:

Transgender Historical Archive

An archive committee is forming to work with the TG Archive. If you would like to be a part of this committee, please sign up during one of the meetings at the TG Center. TFA is continuing to aggressively seek out and acquire items of historical significance to the transgender community. Recently, the TFA
Archive made the following acquisitions:

Acquired on 10/06/2008: March 8, 1953 copy of the American Weekly magazine. “How I Became A Woman” by Christine Jorgenson.

Acquired on 10/06/2008: July 16, 1970 autograph by Christine Jorgenson.

Acquired on 10/07/2008: October 1982 copy of Psychology Today magazine. “Transsexual Passages: The ordeal of a Brilliant Scholar”

Acquired on 10/08/2008: October 1978 copy of the World Tennis magazine. “From Man To Woman”