If someone doesn’t want to become the posterchild of transgender surgery, it is understandable. Asking people to shut up gets tiresome after a while.
If she doesn’t want that sort of traffic she’d better take out the word “backdoor” then.
Unless you had a typo, she is understating her age by 10 years.
However, given that it is a fact, there is no moral transgression on the part of authors or publications that mention it, unless they drag it in by the hair when it’s not relevant just to sensationalize. And considering that apparently many people are unaware of the situation, it’s not like there’s a major concerted campaign to remind us of it.
The problem is, it becomes our only defining feature, no matter what else we do, so I understand Wendy Carlos’ frustration, though she is being naive and ingenuous if she thinks she can erase her past. My friend Jan Morris is one of the world’s leading travel writers and historians, but she’s known as “that transsexual writer.” She’s told me she is just sick to death of the whole subject, as that’s all anyone wants to talk about. Although she and I have that in common, we never discuss it: we’re both writers, that’s what we talk about.
Even if you’re “open and proud,” imagine how tiresome it gets: you’ve just won the Nobel Prize or an Oscar or cured cancer, and you know your obituaries will headline a surgical procedure you underwent 30 years ago.
She was born in '39?
2004-1949 = 55
So she’s understating it by nine, if she claims to be 46. Or eight if she now admits 47.
I agree. Spy magazine was great.
That’s what I thought. The reason it was confusing is that adam yax preceeded the line I quoted with a quote from Exapno saying he’d searched and found her birthday given as Nov. 13, 1949. Now I realize adam meant that she says her birthday is in '59…
Change keys?
Tsk. Tonality is just so pre-modern, y’know. 
I just finished reading She’s Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan. In it, she quotes Morris as saying, “When I hear the word ‘gender’ I reach for my pistol.”
I realize this thread is nine years old, but with Wendy Carlos turning 75 this year, it will be a year of revisiting her contributions to music and technology. Since this thread is one of the first items that comes up when one searches for her recordings having been released under the name Walter, it is worth noting the facts.
By the time Switched-On Bach was released, in 1968, Wendy had already been in treatment at the Benjamin Foundation for a year, and she began living permanently as a woman in May of 1969. When S-OB required her to appear in the press, she had been on hormone treatments for enough time that her body and facial appearance had already undergone significant changes.
Over the following ten years, her publicity photos were indeed doctored to make her look like a man, adding facial hair and other masculine traits that had already largely disappeared or were not particularly prevalent to begin with, and her few public appearances and professional trips were conducted in male drag, with her 1969 live performance with the St. Louis Symphony conducted in a short hair wig, false sideburns, and five o’clock shadow applied with an eyebrow pencil. Her staff made increasing excuses to keep her out of the public eye, and her career stagnated to some extent as a result.
Wendy’s transition has virtually nothing to do with the charade that she was forced to undergo to receive professional recognition. By the time her music become known, she was already living as Wendy. But producers and the industry as a whole preferred to work with a man, and there was no acceptable way to discuss transitioning in a way that would not become sensational and jeopardize her career, and so Wendy was forced to put the Walter identity back on over and over again, and essentially conduct her public and professional identity in male drag.
This decade of hiding and mummery is what she is referring to. It is not “revisionism” or “pretending that it never happened” with respect to her transition. It is, rather, recognition that her gender identity before she became well known was really rather inconsequential, and that after her rise to popularity, when she was already female in her private life, she was forced to endure an absurd set of charades to present a false male identity due to the industry’s attitudes about gender and, especially, about women in relation to technology. When she writes that every one of her recordings was recorded as Wendy Carlos, she is telling the truth.
As anyone who is a friend or family member of a transgendered person could tell you, surgery is the least important part of transitioning. Many transgendered people skip it altogether. Hormone therapy is much more important, but still more important is simply living as the gender one innately identifies as. Had Switched-On Bach been released a few years later, when Wendy’s legal name had already been changed, none of this might have been an issue. As it is, the unfortunate climate of sensationalism surrounding other transitions stifled and limited the career of one of the most influential individuals in musical technology.
As to the seeming paradox of her granting Playboy her coming out interview but then classing Playboy’s editors as “arrogant, selfish prig[s], with a genuine sadistic streak” – the introduction to the Playboy interview states that the unedited interview transcript took up eight hundred manuscript pages. The final interview as printed was ten pages in Playboy, several of them talking exclusively about the composer’s sexuality and reassignment surgery. The rest of those eight hundred pages, certainly what Wendy would have considered the important parts, were written off by the editors in the preface as “cosmic ramblings… relevant to Wendy but irrelevant to the interview.”
It is no great stretch to see how this could be construed as extremely bad faith on the part of the editors and interviewer, a sort of double-cross that played on her insecurities and desire for a safe space in which to discuss her music and her life free of judgement or focus on her transition. This first interview she granted was to have been the opportunity to acknowledge and move past her transition and resume her career, and instead became a single-minded essay on the transition topic and that topic alone. Those few times Wendy was comfortable enough to speak incidentally about sexual matters were edited down into the lion’s share of the interview, reducing her to the subject of lurid curiosity by simple omission of nearly anything else that rounds her out as a person or focuses on her career.
It is interesting as well, in light of Wendy’s prescience in other areas, that she states in this 1979 Playboy interview that, “I wish the word transsexual hadn’t become current. Transgender is a better description, because sexuality per se is only one factor in the spectrum of feelings and needs that led me to this step.” (In step with the rest of the editors’ decisions, the interview goes on, in the next sentence, to use the term “transsexual” again.)
Wendy says other remarkably forward-thinking things in the article about sexual orientation and the spectrum of sexual attraction, which are only now being acknowledged as normative, and she does have some opportunity to speak very briefly about what appears to have been a prototype microcomputer-driven full Fourier synthesis instrument she was working on, but what remains to the reader of the article is the sense that some enormous percentage of what Wendy Carlos really wanted to talk about was summarily omitted, and that when she agreed to an interview, expecting to talk largely about technology, music, and all the other topics she remains, at 75, remarkably adept at discussing, she could not have anticipated that she would be instead stripped of her voice, and reduced to a sexual curiosity, by those she had entrusted with her coming out – exactly the fear that had kept her sequestered for the better part of a decade.
So when Wendy Carlos decries this line of inquiry as “someone else’s fetishistic hang-ups” on her website, she is so right. She’s not a prude or a crazy person, she’s not deluded, or revisionist. She’s just tired of being reduced to one prurient fact. As she says in the Playboy interview, “I mean, who cares? I’ve gone through a procedure. It’s done with. Just let me live my goddamn life and I will let you live yours.”
That was fascinating, nphoenix. I’ve been a fan of her recordings since high school but had no idea of the convoluted lengths she was forced to go to have a public career.
Who twisted her arm to give that interview, who forced her to reveal all the personal information she gave in that interview, and why should Playboy be considered the villain for publishing that interview?
Did you not read any of that post?
I’ve worked on Wendy’s Wikipedia page, and added the bulk of the information about the Playboy interview. At the time, she said: “The magazine has always been concerned with liberation, and I’m anxious to liberate myself.”
I’m sure she considers the Wikipedia editors cruel as well, but we do not have the option of ignoring facts just because the subject of an article would prefer that fact to not exist.
On the other hand, not a month goes by without some cretin coming in and changing all the female pronouns to male ones.
I certainly did.
I would not call editing 800 manuscript pages(800 pages?) down to 10 pages the work of " “arrogant, selfish prig[s], with a genuine sadistic streak”-I would call it reality. Here is the intro written by those “arrogant, selfish prigs” and an excerpt from that interview. If someone could find a link to the whole interview it would help matters. Also, is ten pages insultingly short for an interview, really?
Nobody was going to publish an 800 page interview, period. That is a book, maybe the basis of an autobiography.
Can anyone find a standard Playboy interview contract…or is it negotiated for each interview?