Me wearing My White and White with Flowers Fruit Of The Loom Fit For Me ...

Me wearing My White and White with Flowers Fruit Of The Loom Fit For Me ...

Avon Wilson

One of the things that I've lamented in terms of being a transwoman of African descent is that unlike my white sisters, I don't have marquee transwomen to point to such as the Christine Jorgenson's, April Ashley's and Coccinelle's of the world. We know from Teenie Harris' Pittsburgh Courier photos of the Pittsburgh TBLG/SGL community, the coverage of Finnie's ball in Chicago and the New York balls that we existed during that time period, so why didn't a Black transwoman emerge with the same kind of star power? In October 1966 transsistah Avon Wilson was revealed by a New York Daily News gossip columnist as being the first client of the Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic in Baltimore. "a stunning girl who admits that she was once male less than one year ago had her sex change surgery done at, of all places Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore." I always wondered since I discovered that tidbit of information what happened to her. Recently I received a tip that shed some more clues toward what happened to Avon Wilson. Johnson Publishing Company cut a deal with Google to digitize Ebony and Jet magazine back issues for easy web searching. One of the commenters on a Racialicious thread discussing Tami's post on whether Ebony/Jet magazines should be saved left a link to that, and after clicking on that link just for grins I Googled Avon Wilson's name to see what would pop up. In addition to some other African-American transgender stuff I'll share with you in later posts, the July 13, 1967 issue of JET popped up as well. This interesting note pops up after you scroll down to page 58 of that issue with the late Yvonne Brathwaite Burke on the cover. A former New York City dancer who appeared under the name of Avon Wilson underwent special treatment at the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital and married a man in Baltimore, MD. A hospital official disclosed that Wilson had undergone treatment at the clinic whose pioneering also includes 'sex changing' techniques. The former dancer became the bride of Warren Combs, a musician. So far that's the extent of what I know happened to the first African-American to undergo SRS at the now closed Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic. (no thanks to right wing Catholic transphobe Dr. Paul McHugh, the Vatican advisor on transgender issues). But it still leaves a lot of unanswered questions for me. The obvious one is if she's still alive. Was her marriage a happy one? Did she stay married or did the transsexual history play a role in breaking them up? What were her thoughts and feelings as she lived out her life as a married transwoman? It would have been nice to know the answers to those questions and had a role model that shared my heritage to follow.

Chanelle and Gabrielle Pickett

In November 1995, Chanelle Pickett, an African-American transsexual woman, was strangled to death at age 23. At her service, Chanelle's twin sister, Gabrielle, also a transsexual woman, remembered her as a vibrant person, "full of life... high-spirited... with many goals."

Chanelle Pickett's murder illustrates why we fought so hard to stay in ENDA. When we say having gender identity language as part of ENDA is a life or death situation, we ain't kidding. Chanelle's murder graphically illustrates the connections between violence and pervasive employment discrimination.

This tragic story begins in 1994, the year prior to Chanelle's murder. The sisters and New York natives were both working steadily at NYNEX in Brookline, MA, (now Verizon's Northeast Bureau) until they were outed in November 2004 as transsexuals. The outing made both of them targets for harassment.

Chanelle sought help from a supervisor for relief but was ignored. She transferred to a different department, but the harassment continued openly and unabated until she and Gabrielle were terminated six weeks later in February 2005 because she got fed up and started standing up to co-workers who subjected her and her sister to gender harassment.

Stunned, unable to find work, feeling hopeless and desperate, having exhausted their options for legitimate employment elsewhere, and free falling toward a desperate poverty, Chanelle finally turned to the risky and dangerous last resort for young and beautiful transwomen trying to survive: Prostitution.

All because she and her twin sister were harassed out of a good job.

Then came the fateful meeting at Playland with William Palmer, a 34 year old computer programmer. Prior to that November 20 night, according to Newsweekly, Chanelle told Natoyear Sherarrion, her friend of eight years, that she had been having nightmares that someone was going to hurt her. They were similar to the fears that another transmurder victim, Amanda Milan would express five years later.

Playland, which opened in 1937 was one of Boston's original gay bars. Until it closed in 1998 it was located in the Combat Zone on Essex Street and had evolved to include a multicultural crowd. While William Palmer tried to deny that he knew Chanelle was transsexual, or that he enjoys the company of transsexuals, he's as familiar to the Boston transgender community that frequented the bar as Norm from Cheers was. He not only knew what and who a transsexual was, he frequently dated them.

Chanelle and Palmer had been seeing each other for some time and they had met at Playland on a number of occasions. Friends say that she really liked Palmer and wanted to have a more serious relationship with him. Palmer had written a letter to Chanelle not only expressing his affection for her, but had promised to help her get back on her feet and to take care of her.

On this particular night Chanelle, Gabrielle and Palmer went to the twins Chelsea area apartment first after leaving Playland and spent 90 minutes trying to convince them to have a three way with him. For some reason Chanelle agreed to go with Palmer to his home in Watertown, MA where he strangled her to death in the early morning hours on November 20. Palmer slept for six hours with Chanelle's dead body lying beside his bed before he turned himself in to a lawyer who informed the police.

According to the coroner, Chanelle's body was found with "bruised face and lips," and her "brain was badly swollen, the neck muscles were bruised, and there was hemorrhaging in the eyes."

With this overwhelming evidence, the letters to Chanelle and being seen in the company of her and other transwomen prior to the murder, Palmer's defense attorney came up with a then new variation of the 'homosexual panic' defense. He claimed that he'd never met Pickett until the night of the murder and because she didn't reveal her transgender status to him, he was overcome with such an uncontrollable rage that he killed her.

In other words, what he was arguing was that his attraction to Chanelle, and Chanelle's very existence as another human being on this planet, upset his white-collar sensibilities to the point where her death was both justifiable and necessary.

Psychologists, the denizens of the Playland, who corroborated the fact that Palmer was their version of Norm from 'Cheers' and the evidence debunked that, but the defense is designed to stir up whatever anti-GLBT feelings are in the juror's minds. In addition to that race reared its ugly head in this trial.

Palmer was portrayed in the Boston media as an average white-collar guy who was an upstanding member of his community. On the other hand, they saddled Chanelle with all the negativity directed at African-American transwomen. They never once pointed out her side of the story or thought of her as a human being who was a valued member of society.

One Boston Herald front-page story at the time described Palmer as a polite, clean-cut preppy. The article went on to describe the murder sympathetically as the only natural reaction any self-respecting, red-blooded, heterosexual man would have.

Despite the strong physical evidence against Palmer, unbelievably the 'trans panic defense worked and he was found not guilty of murder in April 1997. Palmer was convicted only of assault and battery. He received 2 years of jail time, a longer sentence than the prosecutor had requested, with Judge Robert A. Barton acknowledging the particularly "vicious" nature of the killing.

On the heels of the May 15 Deborah Forte strangulation killing and what happened to Tyra Hunter only three months later in August 1995, the verdict outraged the Boston and national transgender communities. Prior to the sentencing a month later, about 45 demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse and handed out leaflets that read "Jury Upholds Death Penalty for Transexualism" and carrying signs with pictures of Chanelle and saying "Justice: A Rich White Man's Game" and "End Violence Against Transgenders". The judge requested a copy of the flyer by courier, and was accommodated by the activists on the scene.

The judge sentenced Palmer in May 1997 to 2 years incarceration (2 1/2 years with 6 months suspended) and 5 years probation. In delivering the sentence, Judge Barton commented bitterly to the defendant "Mr. Palmer should kiss the ground the defense counsel walks on." Judge Barton also cited the gruesome pictures of the victim which, by his own ruling, the jury did not see, leading some observers to speculate that the judge had made an error in not allowing the jury to see the photographs.

Gabrielle Pickett gave moving testimony to the judge, saying "it's hell being transsexual", and "Chanelle wasn't just a sister, she was my best friend. We grew up together, took hormones together, transitioned together..."

While William Palmer successfully avoided contact with the press, outside the Middlesex County Courthouse, Gabrielle declared to reporters, "This isn't the end of it. I will continue to work to end violence against transgender people." She later told reporters outside the courtroom "There was some satisfaction in the sentence, but it doesn't make up for the fact that the verdict was only assault and battery."

Then GenderTalk radio host and activist Nancy Nangeroni told the reporters gathered outside the courtroom, "The judge, by this sentence, has made an unmistakable statement about the injustice of the verdict."

It's a theme that we have seen far too many times in this community. The discrimination that transgender people face leading to loss of employment that exponentially amplifies their vulnerability to violent crime.

Chanelle's sudden fall from life with a steady job and a bright future into poverty, desperation, and violent victimhood is a shocking story that is faced by far too many transpeople, and especially too many transwomen of color. The ever growing Remembering our Dead list and the TDOR's have depressingly pointed out this fact over the years.

Sherarrion sums it up in her comments to a Newsweekly reporter when she said, "She was a good, sweet, loving person. She didn't get her chance to shine. God didn't take my Chanelle, he [Palmer] did...and he won't get the punishment he deserves."

Amy Schneider is an American engineering manager and game show contestant. She had a 40-game winning streak on the game show Jeopardy! from November 2021 to January 2022, the second-longest win streak in the show's history, behind only Ken Jennings (74 games), who hosted the show as she competed. She is the most successful woman ever to compete on the show, in terms of both her streak and her $1.3 million in winnings.

Schneider is known for her skill in the Final Jeopardy! round,[3] having responded correctly 30 out of 41 times in her run. She lives in Oakland, California.[4] Across all American game shows, she is the 11th highest-earning contestant of all time.

Contents

1 Early and personal life

2 Jeopardy! streak

2.1 End of streak

2.2 Strategy

3 See also

4 References

Early and personal life

Schneider grew up in Dayton, Ohio,[5] and attended Chaminade-Julienne High School.[6] In eighth grade, she was voted "Most likely to appear on Jeopardy!" by her classmates.[7]

Throughout her run on Jeopardy!, she expressed admiration for past champions Ken Jennings, James Holzhauer, Matt Amodio, and Julia Collins (the first woman to win 20 games in a row, at the time Jeopardy's second longest streak). On a January 2022 episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Schneider said that she hoped Jennings would become the permanent host of the program, citing his comforting and empathetic presence.[8]

Schneider has a cat named Meep; during the 17th game, when host Ken Jennings asked why the cat had this name, Schneider responded, "It was the name they gave her at the shelter, because the only noise she would make was 'meep'. Me and my girlfriend said we would find another name for her, but she kept making that noise, and we realized it was the right name."[3]

Schneider is a trans woman;[9] she completed gender transition in 2017.[10] On January 19, 2022, Schneider was awarded a GLAAD Special Recognition honor for her Jeopardy! performance.[11]

Jeopardy! streak

Schneider's first victory occurred on the November 17, 2021, episode, dethroning five-day champion Andrew He.[12] In the following 14 games, she only missed one Final Jeopardy! question. She missed a second in her 16th win. In total, Schneider has won over $1 million on Jeopardy!,[13] the fifth-most winnings of any contestant on the show in all play.[14] Schneider is the first openly transgender contestant to qualify for the Tournament of Champions.[5] Her winning streak came one year after the first openly transgender contestant, Kate Freeman, competed and won on the show.[15] Schneider, who viewed Freeman's victory and several other trans contestants' losing appearances on the show as inspiration, has described the significance of having a trans identity: "The fact is, I don't actually think about being trans all that often, and so when appearing on national television, I wanted to represent that part of my identity accurately: as important, but also relatively minor."[9] After surpassing Matt Amodio's 38-game winning streak in the January 24, 2022, episode, Schneider took second place for the most consecutive wins in Jeopardy! history at 39, only behind Jennings's 74 consecutive wins.[16][17]

End of streak

Schneider was defeated in her 41st episode, aired on January 26, 2022, finishing second behind Rhone Talsma, a librarian from Chicago, Illinois.[18][19] The "Final Jeopardy!" clue was, "The only nation in the world whose name in English ends in an H, it's also one of the 10 most populous.". Talsma responded, "What is Bangladesh?", which was correct, putting him ahead of Schneider who had no response.[20] Her winnings totaled over $1,300,000, ranking her fourth in most money won in regular-season play behind Jennings, Holzhauer, and Amodio.[14]

Strategy

Schneider has explained that when she sees a category where she is weak, she gets it "out of the way first. That way, if there were any doubles in that category, they would come up when there wasn't as much money to be wagered."[21] Later, she described her wagering strategy in a runaway game with little competition: "round up the second place score to the nearest thousand, double it, subtract it from my score, and then subtract another thousand in case I'd messed something up.[22] Schneider said that doing crossword puzzles helps her think of words "as both a concept and a collection of letters at the same time".[23]

Angela Keyes Douglas

n July 2019 a Gender Critical Reddit thread  linked to this posting.  Apparently some anti-trans women think that a letter, be it satirical or whatever, from 42 years ago, written by someone who died 12 years ago, and who never worked well with other trans activists, is a relevant document in discussing trans activism today!!!!                         My Reply.

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Unlike some of the persons whom I have featured in this series, Angela Douglas had, before her recent death, been recently posting on the web, and has a new CD out. The last item may surprise those who have read the account of Angela Douglas either on Kay Brown's now defunct Transsexual, Transgender and Intersex History site, or in Joanne Meyerowitz: How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, neither of which mentions her musical career.

As an exercise, I am going to write a sketch of Douglas taking facts only from Brown and Mayerowitz, and then again from Douglas' web postings. The two versions are radically different.

Brown and Mayerowitz version:

Born: Carl Czinki. A hippie and aspiring rock musician who came out as transgender in 1969. She became the radical transy leader in Transsexual Action Organization (TAO)--the major US transgender group other than Reed Erickson's EEF at that time-- in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and then in Florida. She emphasized the importance of working with both Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation groups. She deplored the medical model and pathologization of transgenderism, and called on the American Psychiatric Association to remove transsexuality from its list of mental disorders. She was antagonistic to the Erickson Education Foundation which she found patronizing and too close to the medical establishment. Satire that Douglas wrote about the exclusion of transies from the lesbian community was recycled misleadingly and out of context by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire, and also by Catherine Millots in Horsex. She later won a lottery prize, obtained surgery, and moved back to Florida.

The contentious writing quoted in Raymond and Millots was originally published in Sister Aug-Sep 1977, p7. As quoted by Raymond p xvii it goes: "Free from the chains of menstruation and child-bearing, transsexual women are obviously far superior to Gennys in many ways .... Genetic women are becoming quite obsolete, which is obvious, and the future belongs to transsexual women. We know this and, and perhaps some of you suspect it. All you have left is your 'ability' to bear children, and in a world which will groan to feed 6 billion by the year 2000, that's a negative asset."

From Douglas's own postings we get a certainly different slant:

Born: Douglas Carl Czinki in Detroit in 1943 to Hungarian immigrants. Raised on US Air Force bases. He completed his education in Tokyo where he was in his first rock band. Served in the US Air Force. In the late 1960s, using the name Doug Delain, he briefly played guitar with Arthur Lee and Love, with Euphoria and then with Warren Zevon. He had a cameo as a pot smoker and did art work for the 1967 film The Trip. Provided his home for a Jimi Hendrix television special. His Cuban wife left him in 1967. Began transition in 1969. She ran TAO which had over 1000 members in 5 countries. She was frequently attacked, and was beaten unconscious 6 times. She dismisses the idea that the letter sent to Sister was satire, and has made comments that are homophobic, misogynist and anti-feminist. She has been an FBI informant since 1972. She had surgery courtesy of John Brown in 1977, which left her mutilated. She helped to get him arrested. She dissolved TAO in 1978. Douglas has lived as a man since 1982, homeless and celibate, except for two years after winning a lottery in 1991. The money ran out when he had a stroke. He also has diabetes. In 1998 he returned to performing as a man, Last Drop Douglas, and and issued a solo CD, Cosmo Alley, in 2003.

Emails and postings consulted:

Douglas Carl Czinki to Kay Brown- no date - included on Brown's site.  Archive. 

A.L. Douglas posting on Sympathy on Milli Vanilli Jul 7, 2000.

Angela Lynn Douglas posting on dev.greenspun.com November 10, 2002.

Angela Douglas 2 postings on "Transsexuals allowed in Olympics" Amorous Propensities May 21, 2004 and October 21, 2004.

A.L. posting on band family tree.com 5/28/2005.

Tanglehead posting on Messageboard for Love Fans 16/11/2005.

Angela Douglas posting on Arthur Lee Tribute June 27, 2006.

Angela Douglas (Tanglehead) posting on Yellow Swordfish>>Arthur Lee and Love 2006-08-26.

Angela Douglas posting on the Cindi Lauper web page. 14 March 2007.

Tanglehead posting on ufowatch no date.

Angela Douglas died in 2007.

Here is an obituary by Mark Hinson in the Tallahassee Democrat on August 24, 2007. It is no longer available on the original site:

Angela's ashes: Farewell to a wild pen pal

LET'S GO BLOG WILD: My mail box is a lot emptier now that self-described "notorious transsexual," rock musician, lottery-winner, lottery-squanderer and prolific letter-writer Angela Douglas has died.

Douglas, who lived in Sneads in Jackson County, died of complications from heart trouble earlier this month. She was 64. As she said in one of her last communiqués: "I am 64 and Paul McCartney doesn't care."

In the above photo are Stuttering John, left, from "The Howard Stern Show" and, right, Angela Douglas. The picture was taken in Panama City Beach, circa 2000.

When I was a young reporter in the '80s, Douglas used to phone me in the newsroom of the Tallahassee Democrat and launch into wild, rambling monologues that were part performance art and part paranoid fantasy. She was always convinced someone had stolen her life story.

When "Top Gun" became a monster box-office smash in 1986, Douglas wanted to sue Tom Cruise for pilfering her self-published autobiography "Triple Jeopardy" from 1982. (I don't remember many trannies flying fighter jets in that pic, unless Goose wasn't telling us something, do you?) Famous musicians such as Warren Zevon, she claimed, had stolen her songs without payment.

Mostly, I just let her vent. As I learned long ago in bartending class, you let the customer talk while you just wipe the bar with a rag and keep saying, "Yep, I know what you mean."

Getting flaky phone calls in a newsroom is nothing new. For a few months, a caller identifying himself as God would phone up to predict the day's weather. And, you know, most of the time he was more accurate than the professional meteorologists we paid to do the same job. (God says it's going to be hot this weekend, by the way.)

I was prepared to write Angela off as just another kook. But then I did a little research and found out she really had worked on the fringes of the music and movies industries in Los Angeles during the '60s and early '70s. She'd worked with Arthur Lee before he formed Love and really did know Zevon (in his starving-artist days). Jimi Hendrix may or may not have recorded one promo at her home in L.A. That house was also used as a set for Roger Corman's 1967 acid-dropping classic "The Trip" with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

Douglas started life as Carl Czinki - and played guitar under the name Doug Delain in the L.A. band called Euphoria - but decided to switch sexes in 1969. The transformation was complete by 1977, when Douglas had become an outspoken writer/journalist for the transgender community. This is the same time period she became convinced television and movie producers were stealing her life story.

I have no idea how or why Douglas ended up in rural Jackson County in the late '80s.She settled in dinky Grand Ridge near Sneads and lived in impoverished conditions. This made her very bitter and she often lashed out at gays and blacks when she called me with another rant.

When her phone calls from pay phones suddenly stopped, they were replaced by a stream of letters. I still have stacks of the things. Some are coherent, some are funny, some are hand-scrawled screeds that are impossible to read.

Then, in the summer of 1991, Douglas had a rare stroke of good fortune. She won $232,567 in the Fantasy Five lottery game. After taxes, the lottery cut her a check for $186,000.

In a newsletter published by the lottery, Douglas crowed that she was going to buy an electric guitar, a used red Corvette, tell everyone in Grand Ridge to kiss her you-know-what and move to Key West.

And that is exactly what she did.

A few months later, she was back in Jackson County living in poverty. Again. She'd found plenty of friends in Key West who were more than happy to help her spend her free money.

Occasionally, I'd get good news from Douglas. In 1997, she wrote a twisted little novelty song called "Andrew Cunanan" and it end up on Dr. Demento's nationally syndicated radio show. (She also penned parody tunes with titles such as "Ghost Eunuchs in the Sky.") In 2003, she released a CD called "Cosmo Alley" under the name Last Drop Douglas. She even played a few live shows at festivals around North Florida and drove to Panama City to meet Stuttering John from Howard Stern's radio show. Douglas both loved and hated Howard Stern.

Most of the Douglas letters, however, were depressing. Naturally, the FBI was after her. She railed against doctors (many of whom I knew personally in Marianna) who were allegedly conspiring against her by denying her treatment. Her surgery from the '60s and '70s had left her with many medical complications, which she discussed at length and I won't repeat. It wasn't pretty, I'll tell you that. I hope sexual-reassingment surgery has gotten a little better since the '60s.

Earlier this year, Douglas sent me a tape she'd recorded while she was in the hospital. It starts with the chilling intro: "This Angela Douglas and I am dying." The rest of the message is classic Douglas - nutty accusations, bold claims, too much personal information about her medical conditions, crazy tales of her musical past. All classic Angela.

As I listened to the tape, it suddenly dawned on me: "Hey, her life story really would make for an interesting movie or play. Wonder why anyone hasn't done it before?"

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PS The British actress Angela Douglas, whose first fame was in several Carry On films, is a different person.

PPS Kay Brown's page includes stories, "probably apocryphal" she says, about Douglas as a transactivist at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and at the Stonewall riot in 1969. These do seem implausible, and in writing the above, I have ignored them.

There was a British branch of TAO. Amazingly Stephen Whittle was involved in it. For details see p192-3 of Ekins & King The Transgender Phenomenon, 2006.

I certainly agree that someone should write a book about Angela Douglas and TAO.