From Hell to the Hall of Fame: The astonishing story of Sandy Stone

On March 5, Sandy Stone had the kind of peak experience that, for many, marks the supreme validation from one’s peers of a life well-lived, a kind of eternal standing ovation from the world. 

She became a Hall of Famer.

She flew from her home in the hills near Aptos to New York City, where she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, based in Seneca Falls, the widely recognized birthplace of the women’s rights movement. 

“Yep, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt … and me,” she said several weeks after the event, with a kind of bewildered irony, as if relating a particularly absurd dream. “That really staggers me. I mean, what the hell am I doing there?”

But it gets even more astounding. Stone carries a distinction even within the elite of the more than 300 accomplished and celebrated women in the National Women’s Hall of Fame — a roster of names that goes back as far as Abigail Adams. She is the first and thus far only transgender woman to be inducted into the hall.

“I’m the first — that they know of,” she added, “because trans people have been in every culture since the beginning of time.”

Because of that distinction, much of her time in the spotlight in New York was devoted to her status as a trans woman. “That meant I had to talk about — not had to, but I wanted to talk about how trans women and other kinds of women interact and join together, where our goals come together, where they separate. Everybody’s fighting bigotry.”

That “had to” is telling. Those close to Sandy (full name: Allucquere Rosanne Stone) know that she’s not a particularly demonstrative person. She is, in her way, unassuming and low-profile. Today, she is known locally for her work as the chief engineer and board member at KSQD community radio. At the station, she is a casual and matter-of-fact figure who tends to dress in black. A few people have heard a vague reference or two that she once worked with the legendary Jimi Hendrix. But few know the depth and breadth of the life story that propelled her into the Hall of Fame. 

A unique CV

To be sure, Stone, 87, is not in the National Women’s Hall of Fame because she is trans, nor despite it. She is there because of a wide range of remarkable accomplishments that are so diverse as to seem incongruous. The rumors about Hendrix, for example, are true. She was a gifted recording engineer who worked with many of the most luminous names of the ’60s counterculture heyday, including Hendrix and David Crosby. That led to a productive, if volatile, career at Olivia Records, which established the genre of women’s music, allowing lesbian and bisexual women to express themselves artistically in a way that mainstream culture did not allow. 

On top of that, Stone was also a pioneering figure in computer science, a programmer in the early days of software development, who founded the ACTLab (Advanced Communications Technologies Laboratory) at the University of Texas in 1993, during the infancy of the worldwide communications revolution. ACTLab broke new ground by bringing in artists and other visionaries into the digital age, and inspired generations of renegade coders and computer artists. She is also a writer of fiction, nonfiction and drama, having published everything from science fiction to experimental essays such as “The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age,” the promotional material for which calls it “not a traditional text but rather a series of intellectual provocations.”

Yet perhaps Stone’s greatest accomplishment came almost by accident. Attempting to defend herself against a high-profile attack by an academic named Janice Raymond in a book titled “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male,” Stone wrote an explosive response in the form of an essay titled “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” It was a bold and unapologetic call for transgender empowerment. It was so influential, in fact, that it became the basis for an entire, heretofore unrecognized academic field, transgender studies. 

(Confronting scorched-earth attacks on her gender identity has been a consistent theme of Stone’s career. While “The Empire Strikes Back” inspired an effort to view the transgender life as a legitimate arena of academic study, Raymond’s book is known mostly as one of the first contemporary expressions of anti-trans bigotry, prefiguring the current MAGA-inspired attacks on trans rights.)

A visit to ‘Girl Island’

Stone’s amazing life story will, in fact, soon be the subject of a new documentary film. The veteran visual artist and curator Marjorie Vecchio is in the midst of creating her first film, a biographical profile of Stone titled “Girl Island,” which she hopes will be done and ready for audiences by the end of 2025. 

Vecchio was a friend who was invited to Stone’s 80th birthday party in 2016. She knew the general outline of Stone’s story, but much of it she learned during the party. Inspired, Vecchio wrote a letter to Stone the very next day, essentially asking Stone: Has anyone thought of making a movie about her life? Stone’s response: “Sure, all the time, but nothing ever happens.”

Soon thereafter, the life partners of both Vecchio and Stone died, and the two women shared the common experience of grief (Stone’s longtime spouse was the well-known computer programmer, a renegade in his own right, Cynbe ru Taren). “We built a lot of trust as we mourned together,” said Vecchio. The two took to regular correspondence via FaceTime, during which Stone filled in the colors on her childhood in New York and other parts of her background, including her first coming to Santa Cruz in the 1970s. “It was a very emotional journey that we took together,” said Vecchio.

The title “Girl Island” is a reference to a common fantastical dream that Stone would have many times during her childhood, when she was a boy. “When I was 5 or 6 years old,” she said, “I used to have dreams in which I was on an island, and I was with other people and we were swimming fast rivers and climbing mountains and trees, meeting animals and learning to talk with them. And all the other people were girls. And I was too. I have no idea where that came from. I mean, no girl in the real world in the 1940s did anything like that, that I knew of. And that image carried me for most of my life.”

Vecchio said that the girl-island dream was a motif that gave her an artistic avenue into a potential film. “It took me a while to realize it,” said Vecchio, “but that island is what Sandy actually created in her life, over and over again.” Vecchio is still in the midst of raising money for the film, but she said that it will contain a substantial amount of animation to bring to life Girl Island. 

The transition story

Just a couple years shy of her 90th birthday, Sandy Stone is a storehouse of astounding stories, any one of which represents a rabbit hole of life as an insistent outsider in 20th-century America. From her earliest days of childhood, she was obsessed with sound recording, and followed that passion to the door of her childhood hero, the recording pioneer Emory Cook. There’s the story in which she opened a record store south of the Mason-Dixon Line, bringing counterculture rock ’n’ roll to Southerners, and the backlash against those efforts by conservatives. Her first trip to the Bay Area took place during the “acid-soaked madness” of an alternative media conference in Vermont; she made the impromptu decision to jump on a charter flight to San Jose with “some of Ram Dass’ people and some Hog Farm people and a huge assortment of other weirdos.” And then there’s, of course, the Hendrix story in which she was called on to record the great guitarist when his regular engineer suddenly had to leave the sessions. At the time, Stone was actually sleeping in the studio on a pile of ornate capes that belonged to Hendrix.

Each of these stories, and others, can stand alone as amazing tales in their own right. But no story is more central to Stone’s life than her transitioning story. Her journey to gender surgery took place in the early 1970s, the Nixon years, in many ways the Dark Ages of gender transitioning, and indeed Stone’s tale at times sounds downright medieval.

At the time, she was in her 30s living in San Francisco, still in a male body, the Girl Island ideas still holding sway, at least in her subconscious: “I was having thoughts such as, ‘Do I really want to wake up at 65 one day and think I never became who I really am, who I was meant to be?’”

She was, she said, ignorant of transitioning, knowing only the term “transsexual,” though unclear on what exactly it meant, and vaguely the story of trangender pioneer Christine Jorgensen. “I had no idea how to talk about it, or with whom to talk about it.”

Intent on exploring how to become a woman, she called quasi-underground social/political organizations such as the gay men’s Mattachine Society and the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis. Neither of them was particularly helpful … except for one unconventional, even shocking lead.

“They said, ‘Have you thought of calling the police?’”

That was a reference to one specific police officer, Sgt. Elliott Blackstone, a compassionate advocate for LGBTQ people who had links to a counseling organization called the Transsexual Counseling Unit (TCU). Though Blackstone was a friend and a helping hand, not all those associated with the TCU were. At one point, another TCU person escorted Stone through what were called “trans houses” in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. “It was like Dante being led through Hell by Virgil,” said Stone.

The houses were occupied by people at various points during gender transition. Some had gone through early stages and had run out of money to continue, leaving them in an awkward limbo. Others had undergone procedures such as electrolysis, Stone said, “from some off-book, cheap practitioner who wrecked their faces so they weren’t presentable in public. None of them could get work.”

Many of these people stayed in their homes, some in rooms with red light bulbs in the ceiling. After a while, Stone confronted her tour guide. “I said, ‘Why the hell are you showing me this?’ And she said, ‘Because I want you to know what you’re going to become.’”

Still essentially wandering in the dark, Stone was then led to an organization established by the San Francisco Department of Public Health called, astoundingly, the Center for Special Problems. It was there that she was given the hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen prescribed to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages. 

It’s here where the story veers into what could have been a tragic turn. One day, while driving with a friend in her Volkswagen bus on Mount Hermon Road between Felton and Scotts Valley, she was hit by a guy in a Ford Fairlane with no driver’s license or insurance. Stone was critically injured, with 27 broken bones. At this point, Stone was still presenting as a male, with facial hair. When she told the doctors on duty that she was taking DES, “they assume I’m an addict, and they’re treating me like a freak. And that means, I can’t get pain meds.”

Then, showing up at the hospital are rock stars and friends David Crosby and Graham Nash. Crosby in particular, she said, completely lost his temper at the treatment Stone was receiving, unleashing both his fury and his celebrity star power on her behalf. “After that, they treated me very well,” she said.

Eventually, Stone found Stanford’s gender dysphoria program. The car accident put her in a wheelchair for about a year. She made enough money working as an engineer on a Crosby project that she could get serious about transition surgery. She moved to the San Lorenzo Valley and cut off relations with many in the music industry. And she went through with the procedure.

Afterward, Santa Cruz became her landing spot. 

“I chose to transition here because I thought it would be majorly accepting,” Stone said, “and it was.”

Santa Cruz was her haven when a controversy about her gender identity threatened to sink the lesbian-based Olivia Collective, from which she eventually resigned. The women of Olivia, said Stone, were fully supportive of her (“They were true to me through the whole thing”), but the Janice Raymond controversy had led to a threatened boycott, which became an existential crisis at Olivia. 

“I certainly met my share of trans folks,” she said of those early, post-surgery years in Santa Cruz. “But I also met so many [non-trans] people who were very supportive. And sometimes, I was surprised. Some of the people who you were sure would leave you, they stuck around. And some of the people who you were just as sure would be friends of life, left.”

She returned to Santa Cruz County in 2010 after her often thrilling but more often stormy period as a tenured academic at the University of Texas. (It was at UC Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program where she met social-science scholar and ally Donna Haraway, who helped her launch her career as a maverick academic. But that’s yet another story.) 

On stage, during her acceptance speech at her Hall of Fame induction, Stone stood before a supporting crowd that included more than a dozen family members, articulating a vision of a fulfilling trans life impossible to envision back when she was negotiating Dante’s tour of the trans Dark Ages. 

“Part of the trans experience,” she said, “is to transform our vision, to learn to see beneath the smooth surface of our world, and help remake it in ways that are not warped by political power. That’s trans-vision — to learn to see, and then to be a light by which others can see.”

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