[quote AtTheDickensDesk]@NiceGerbil I'm not certain it's what Bigotryisbad is referring to, but this looks vaguely relevant (and an interesting story): theidlewoman.net/2017/02/28/the-swashbuckling-life-of-the-chevalier-deon/[/quote]
The Beaumont Society is named after Chevalier d'Eon.
Alice Purnell:
Anyway, I searched and searched through bookshops, and of course I read Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud, and everybody you could think of. And always they associated anything to do with gender variance as a type of deviance, and I got more and more horrified by this and I thought, what the hell am I going to do, and I came across ... would you believe it, in a dirty book shop in Soho, a magazine called Transvestia and I thought, what? And this was a magazine produced by a Dr Virginia Prince, who was an American pharmacist, and she had organised a thing called Phi Pi Epsilon, very American, which stands for Full Personality Expression. And the essence of her thesis was that you could be a woman, though male. So the goal of her organisation was to try to maintain marriages or relationships between men and women when one or the other, usually the one that was officially male, gender migrated by cross-dressing or by being what eventually we came to know as transsexual. The whole vocabulary of gender was a dreadful, dreadful nuisance.
However, what I learnt was that in the States there were about 500 people like that. And they would seem vaguely ... you know, it rang bells. Anyway, Virginia Prince's organisation, she called Phi Pi Epsilon, standing for Full Personality Expression, she ran it like a secret society, a sort of sorority. In those initial days the majority of members were US but they had an overseas chapter, a European chapter if you like, and I discovered that there were two or three people in France, and I speak French which is helpful, and there were other people, one in Ireland and two in England. And so we wrote to each other through the contact system. And the leading light then was a person called Olga Campbell, who was from the Republic of Ireland, and there was a Belgian called Lucy and another Brit called Sylvia. And we corresponded and corresponded and there was an initial first meeting in 1966, just before I got married, where they first of all had a meeting in London and then we had our first real full meeting in a hotel in Southampton. And Olga, being Irish, came up with this brilliant idea, we'll call our organisation, which will be afilliated to Phi Pi Epsilon, The Beaumont Society after the Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, who was a French spy who had spied in Russia, in Imperial Russia, disguised as a woman. Quite possibly was intersex and there are lots of very interesting books about the Chevalier. Chevalier actually earned a living by sword fencing and the betting as to which gender the Chevalier was, was phenomenal, equivalent to millions of pounds when she died. That's another story.
Anyway, The Beaumont Society sounded like a respectable thing because Beaumont is an old French aristocratic surname ... [continues]
There's quite a lot to unpick in this interview
soundcloud.com/justplainsense/jps90-alice