Move To South Carolina
The mansion Simmons purchased with Whitney, was located in the Ansonborough neighborhood of Charleston, a neighborhood known for housing the city's queer elite. Simmons began restoring the house, and designed the interior with early American antiques and furniture by Thomas Chippendale. Her pursuit of Chippendale pieces brought her into contact with Edward Ball, a journalist who owned a Chippendale commode and who would later write a biography about her.
In her autobiographical books, Simmons said she was born intersex with ambiguous genitalia, as well as an internal uterus and ovaries, and was inappropriately assigned male at birth. Simmons underwent sex reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1968, carried out by Dr. Milton Edgerton in 1968. In Ball's Peninsula of Lies, he disputes Simmons claim that she was intersex, suggesting instead that Simmons had male genitalia and was unable to bear children.
Read more about this topic: Dawn Langley Simmons
Famous quotes containing the words move, south and/or carolina:
“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“I don’t have any doubts that there will be a place for progressive white people in this country in the future. I think the paranoia common among white people is very unfounded. I have always organized my life so that I could focus on political work. That’s all I want to do, and that’s all that makes me happy.”
—Hettie V., South African white anti-apartheid activist and feminist. As quoted in Lives of Courage, ch. 21, by Diana E. H. Russell (1989)
“I hear ... foreigners, who would boycott an employer if he hired a colored workman, complain of wrong and oppression, of low wages and long hours, clamoring for eight-hour systems ... ah, come with me, I feel like saying, I can show you workingmen’s wrong and workingmen’s toil which, could it speak, would send up a wail that might be heard from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; and should it unite and act, would shake this country from Carolina to California.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)