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 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, 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 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.
A very small way, maybe.
In a very big significant way to me.
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.
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 kind of a brief introduction of who you are.
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 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 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.
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 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 have in the city of Atlanta. To me, it seems like there was a lot going on in Atlanta at the time.
There really was.
So you ended up in Atlanta when you began your transition, and that was at the age of thirty nine.
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 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.
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.
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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.
They still do not in this state. We still do not have any gender affirming surgeries. Well, which is crazy.
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.
Yeah, because you can see as you want by the way.
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 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 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 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,
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, but it was still quite.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
I've watched the documentary Southern Comfort, and that is a really awesome kind of glimpse into Southern trans life.
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.
Wow. Wow.
I think it was because they were afraid of the police. Nashville had and still has a history of LGBT places mysteriously burning.
Wow.
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 yes with trans and the cast of about twelve.
Yep.
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.
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 cast also featured several trans women such as Seanna Brooks, mother of the House of Brooks, and Heather Daniels, Pam Anderson, bombshell type.
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 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 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.
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
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
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, And in fact, those old labels are becoming antiquated.
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 lot of transactivity going on compared to like, you know, say, the rest of the South. Why Atlanta? What was special about Atlanta?
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.
Really, I'm friends with somebody who one season seven, so you can tell her that, well, we.
Want drag Race Sweden, and drag Race Belgium, and Dragwace Spain.
I love Aspanya, that's my favorite one.
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.
Back up for a second about the Sweet Gum Club, because there's a book actually about.
I just bought that book.
It's a fantastic book.
I may have learned about it from you.
In fact, Oh wow, tell me about Sweet Gum a little bit about it?
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 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.
That Jane County.
Jane County, Yes, I'm sorry, I'm seventy three. That happened sometimes, no worries.
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.
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 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, 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, 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
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 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, 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 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
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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 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,
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 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 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 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 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?
What was that that he took offense?
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
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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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
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 a you know, you're not screwed up to me transsexual mentality.
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.
Well, I have a list. I wrote about it somewhere and you know, if you were me, if you didn't pass.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Art it is so scary.
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.
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 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.
There's banned any public drag which can be applied to a trans woman that they.
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.
Yeah, exactly.
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.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's terrifying.
The two focuses seemed to be well, first was kids. Yeah, you know, we're grooming kids.
Yeah.
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.
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,
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.
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 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 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.
Wow, that's horrible.
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.
And he was a transsexual man, is that right?
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.
Which was a very medical model.
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.
So we're all not on the same track.
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 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 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 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 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.
Began, right, because it's kind of bleming.
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.
Yeah, because that's the important part of informed consent is Yeah.
It is, and you know, and so you need to think about stuff beyond just signing an informed consent agreement.
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.
Yeah. We did medical advisories about hormones, about smoking.
Yeah, about silicone injections, the dangerous curves ahead and silicone.
Yeah, Margo designed that, and she made me aware of the problem with silicone.
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 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 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.
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 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.
You had to hold up her end of the bargain.
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.
Yeah, you also wrote the first scientific literature on transsexualism ever written by a transsexual.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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, 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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 who is transitioning.
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 think it has I think it has utility.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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 plot strategy because there's certainly scheming on the other side what to do.
Yeah, and we don't really see that happening, you know people or.
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.
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.
Well, thank you so much. I had a good time.
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.
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.
Yes, fabulous and also the Transgender Digital Transgender Archive, wonderful wealth of knowledge.
If you google my name there a lot of stuff will come on.
Oh, yes, a lot. It's fun to read. Well, thank you Dallas. It was wonderful talking with you today.
Thank you, Carn.
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 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 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.