Penny's Believe It Or Not

By Penny from Edinburgh 

Facing three years in prison, a young con man goes on the run. To avoid being caught by the police, he disguises himself as a woman. Because he bears a strong resemblance to his sister, he is able to use her identity and ID card. As time passes, he medically transitions.

Eight years later, the authorities finally catch up with him—or perhaps I should say her—after discovering that the sister’s credit card is being used locally while she is out of the country.

It sounds like a plot from Fictionmania, BigCloset or some other trans-fiction website, but according to a report by Turkey’s Dunya News, it actually happened in Istanbul.

Of course, most plots on trans-fiction sites are complete nonsense, but a few have actually played out in real life.

John “Virginia” Bone

I came across several examples while browsing old press clippings at the Digital Transgender Archive. These particular stories are British because that is the part of the archive on which I focused, but I am sure it contains many similar reports from the United States and elsewhere.

I found two stories about young men who dragged up and won conventional beauty contests. In 1968, John Bone got all glammed up as Virginia and was crowned Essex University’s Charity Queen. The following year, 17-year-old Harry Blathwayt won the beauty competition at the Horning Regatta in the English county of Norfolk and became Miss Horning.

“Head Made Boy Dress as a Girl,” reported the News of the World in 1968. The reason for the punishment? The 12-year-old boy’s hair was too long!

The boy was mortified, and his father removed him from the school. I suspect more than a few readers of this blog are thinking, “If only it had been me.”

The rather more upmarket Daily Telegraph reported in 1985: “Handbag Attack by Sex-Change Actress Over PC’s ‘He’ Jibe.”

The actress in question was April Ashley, one of the earliest Britons to undergo gender-confirmation surgery. She had been one of the parties in the 1970 English legal case Corbett v Corbett, which ruled that a person could not legally change sex. On that basis, her marriage to the Honourable Arthur Corbett was annulled. It would be many years before legislation overturned the effects of that decision.

In 2013, Rupert Murdoch’s famously sensationalist Sun newspaper ran the headline “Sex-Swop Doc in Stag-Gore Horror” after a red deer stag attacked scientist Dr. Kate Stone. This report did not come from the Digital Transgender Archive.

Stone subsequently complained that publishing her transgender status was an intrusion because it was irrelevant to the story. However, it may have been relevant in an unexpected way: It was suggested that the stag singled her out because she was the tallest member of her walking group.

My favorite transgender newspaper clipping, however, has to be the 1985 story of Dean—later Dena—Steers, a young preoperative transsexual who was taking hormones and always wore women’s clothing.

Dena was arrested for using the ladies’ restroom. Then, while out on bail for that offense, she was arrested again—this time for using the men’s restroom!

Sometimes truth really is stranger than trans-fiction.

Wearing Boston Proper

Femulating in Mount Enterprise, Texas in 1981