Angela Lynn Douglas

Angela Lynn Douglas (1943–2007) was an American transgender activist and guitarist. She was a trans woman who performed as a rock musician and was a prominent pioneering figure in trans activism during the 1970s. She founded the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO), the first international trans organization. She wrote articles about the state of trans politics at the time for the Berkeley Barb, The Advocate, the Bay Area Reporter, Come Out! and Everywoman, in addition to TAO's Mirage magazine and Moonshadow Bulletin. She expressed racist attitudes at various points in her life, and at one point became active with the Nazi party.

Early life

Douglas was born in Detroit in March 1943. Her father, Charles Joseph Czinky Jr., son of Hungarian immigrants was in Air Force Intelligence and her mother, Deloris Coffey, was a folk singer in The Coffey Trio. Douglas would claim that she had her first UFO sighting at the age of 13 vacationing in Traverse City, likely being related to her later life paranormal interests, paranoia and other mental health struggles. In 1966-1967, Rodríguez, pregnant, left Douglas to pursue a lesbian relationship with a woman named Joan Black.

The Advocate published the headline "Gay Lib survives bitch fit", detailing her departure from the GLF to found the TAO while misgendering her. She later wrote for the same magazine in 1973 to defend Sylvia Rivera, critiquing her exclusion from the mainstream gay rights movement and trans people's exclusion from Pride. She denounced the "attacks on transsexualism and transvestism made by lesbian feminist leaders, such as Jean O'Leary", and concluded the piece by stating "it is encouraging to find so many transsexuals and transvestites willing to tear down the crosses which were used to burn and crucify Joan of Arc and Christine Jorgensen, among countless others, and beat their oppressors over the head with them."

In 1970, the TAO persuaded the Californian Peace and Freedom Party to include "the right to determine the uses of one's body, as in sex changes operations and others" in its platform and the Socialist Workers Party to denounce arrests for "cross-dressing."

Douglas announced the TAO would no longer support the Black Panther Party due to its refusal to respond to the concerns of lesbians and sexism at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention at Temple University in Philadelphia in September 1970.

In 1971, TAO was renamed to the Transsexual Action Organization, stating some transsexuals call themselves transvestites for simplicity but distinguishing transsexuals as those who live as they are permanently and transvestites who dress up temporarily then resume living as a man.

Later life

In 1977, Douglas wrote a satirical letter to the lesbian journal Sister about how transsexual women were superior to cisgender women and would replace them when technology and medical science allowed trans women to give birth in response to the firing of Sandy Stone from Olivia Records. This was quoted as serious evidence that trans women hated cis women by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire, which led to critiques of intellectual dishonesty for misquoting.

Due to her popularity as a rock musician and writer, she faced a lot of speculation about her surgical transition, which was completed by John Ronald Brown in 1977. However, she said the results left her mutilated and helped get him arrested.

In 1978, Stan Grossman with Newcastle Publishing Company profited off of featuring her in an X-rated magazine, using erotic photos of her pre- and post-operation, without paying her any royalties. Douglas attempted to sue him, but the results are unknown.

In 2007, Douglas died from heart complications.