Mary Elizabeth Clark

Sister Mary Elizabeth Clark (born 1938 in Pontiac, Michigan) is the main mover of the AIDS Education and Global Information System database, previously a pre-World Wide Web bulletin board system.

Biography Clark was born in June 1938 in Pontiac, Michigan and assigned male at birth.

In 1957, she enlisted in the United States Navy and rose to the rank of chief petty officer (E-7), serving as an instructor in anti-submarine warfare. Clark had an 11-year marriage which produced a son, but ended acrimoniously.

She married again, and later revealed her gender dysphoria to her second wife, who helped her through self-identifying as female. A year and a half later, she was nominated for promotion to warrant officer. Her enlistment was voided when her transgender status became known to higher-ups. She brought suit against the Army and won a settlement of $25,000 and an honorable discharge.

During the 1970s, she was an activist for the rights of transsexual people and was instrumental in winning the right of Californians to have their gender changed on their birth certificates and driver licenses. In 1980, she founded and led the ACLU Transsexual Rights Committee.

She had been raised Southern Baptist, but left the church due to disillusionment with racism in its congregations.

In 1990, inspired by meeting an isolated young man with AIDS in rural Missouri, she returned to her family home in San Juan Capistrano, California, taking on the bulletin board system AEGIS begun by Jamie Jemison and eventually building it into the "most definitive – and perhaps the most accessible – source of information on" AIDS. the Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights from the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care, the Crystal Heart award from the San Diego GLBT Center and the Joan of Arc award from the Orange County Community Foundation.