Gender Fakers

According to legend, Pope Joan was a woman who concealed her gender and ruled as pope for two years during the 9th Century. Her identity was exposed when, riding one day from St. Peter's to the Lateran, she stopped by the side of the road and, to the astonishment of everyone, gave birth to a child. The legend is unconfirmed. Skeptics note that the first references to Pope Joan only appear hundreds of years after her supposed reign. More…

Tanis Chandler was a 20-year-old woman working as a teletypist in a Hollywood brokerage office, but dreaming of becoming a movie star. However, she was having trouble getting any roles, until she realized she might have better luck as a man, due to the shortage of male actors in 1943 because of the war. She put on a pair of pants, presented herself at a casting office as "Robert Archer," and soon began appearing in films. More…

When the University of Southern California held its 1944 Campus Queens beauty contest, twenty contestants vied for the title. Six winners were to be selected. The prize was that their full-length portrait would appear in the yearbook. But that year an imposter appeared among the candidates. The odd-woman-out (or rather, odd-man-out) was Sylvia Jones. She was actually a he — a male USC student who had dressed up as a woman in order to enter the contest. More…

When Billy Tipton got his start in jazz during the 1930s, he made a name for himself as a saxophone and piano player. During the 1950s, he formed his own group, the Billy Tipton Trio (shown in the thumbnail, with Tipton in the center). He had a number of wives and adopted three sons. So when he died in 1989 at the age of 74, it shocked almost everyone to learn that Billy Tipton was a woman. Even his wives claimed not to have known his true gender. He guarded the secret so closely, that he even refused medical treatment for the bleeding ulcer that killed him because doing so would have required disclosing his gender to the hospital staff. More…

Carina Guillot and her daughter made national headlines when they found a Ken doll for sale at a Florida Toys 'R' Us that was dressed in a purple tank top, lace apron, and polka-dotted skirt. The doll was still inside its factory packaging, so it appeared to be a valid, untampered product. Mattel was at a loss to explain how Ken had come to be wearing a dress. The Guillots turned down thousand-dollar offers for the doll. The mystery was solved when a Toys 'R' Us night clerk admitted he had dressed up Ken as a prank and carefully resealed the package with glue. More…

JT LeRoy was a transgendered, homosexual, drug-addicted, pathologically shy teenager who had been living on the streets, forced into a life of truck-stop prostitution by his mother. But through his writing, he seemed to have escaped that life. His first novel was a critical success, and more books followed. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, his stature as a literary star appeared to be secure. But this stature was shaken when New York Magazine published an article that asked a simple question: Was JT LeRoy a real person? More…