It all started when I got a Friend Request through my MySpace account from a woman who said she had known me in graduate school. I didn't recognize her from her picture for one simple reason: when I knew her, she was a man.
Then, my friend Pagan Kennedy published a biography entitled, The First Man-Made Man, about the person who underwent the first female-to-male sex change operation.
Lastly and most recently, a guy I know who publishes a magazine called LEMON, asked if I wanted to write a fairly short piece about the classical composer and electronic music pioneer, Wendy Carlos, who began this life as Walter Carlos.
In the latter case, Wendy had had an established brand as "Walter" - she had produced the first ever platinum classical record, Switched-ON Bach, and composed the music for A Clockwork Orange under that name - and then went through a re-branding exercise that involved a very public disclosure (in Playboy, of all places) of a very private and personal matter.
All's well that ends well, of course. Wendy Carlos is simply Wendy Carlos nowadays, even on her earlier recordings, and what may have seemed scandalous or shocking even in the seventies, is today, well, while still surprising, at least not completely out of the ordinary.
This got me thinking. What brands have gone through "gender-reassignment"? That is, are there well-known brands that started out as "male" or "female" and have now switched? There are certainly brands like Jockey, which was traditionally male (when you think of "Jockey shorts," who do you picture in them?) and now go both ways, but is there a brand that went one way and now goes the other?
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