Rupert Raj (born 1952) is a Canadian trans activist and a transgender man. His work since his own gender transition in 1971 has been recognized by several awards, as well as his inclusion in the National Portrait Collection of The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives.
Personal life
Raj was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1952. His father was East Indian and his mother Polish; they met in Stockholm where Raj's father, Amal Chandra Ghosh, worked as a nuclear physicist. After the birth of their first child, the family moved to Ottawa, Canada, where Amal took up a position as a professor of physics at Carleton University. Both parents were killed in a car accident in August 1968, when Raj was sixteen, and the five children (three brothers and one sister) moved into four different homes until they respectively reached 18 or 21 years of age.
In 1971, at age 19, Raj scheduled an appointment with the Harry Benjamin Foundation's endocrinologist, Dr. Charles Ihlenfeld. Since Raj was not yet 21, the age of majority in New York, his older brother provided consent. Dr. Ihlenfeld examined Raj and administered his first shot of testosterone.
Raj graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Carleton University in 1975, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, following two friends, both trans women activists who had been involved in the Association of Canadian Transsexuals (A.C.T.) in Toronto. Raj continued his activism by starting a petition to get Ontario to cover sex-reassignment surgery through the provincial health insurance plan, OHIP—an effort that was unsuccessful at the time.
In May 1977, Raj moved with his partner (a pansexual trans man) and the partner's two children to Calgary, Alberta, because they had learned that surgeons at the Foothills Hospital, in affiliation with the University of Calgary's gender clinic were performing phalloplasties for female-to-male (FTM) transsexuals. While they were both approved for phalloplasty, neither of them had the surgery at that time; at only 100 pounds, the surgeons concluded that Raj did not have enough tissue to work with. Raj did, however, undergo the panhysterectomy at this time. After waiting for another 34 years, he finally underwent "bottom surgery" (not phalloplasty, but metoidioplasty) in Montreal, Quebec in 2012 at age 60.
Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Transsexuals and Gender Review
In January 1978, Raj started an organization for trans people (including trans men and women, as well as cross-dressers), the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Transsexuals (FACT); the organization's newsletter was Gender Review: A FACTual Journal. FACT continued some of the earlier work of the ACT. The first issue of Gender Review was published in June 1978 and included a story on “Transsexual Oppression” concerning Montrealer Inge Stephens; information about transsexual resources; a listing of publications by Dr. Harry Benjamin and Dr. Charles L. Ihlenfeld; a bibliography of books and articles by and about trans people; and news items about Mario Martino, trans woman Canary Conn's appearance on the Phil Donahue show, and other notices. Raj moved back to Ottawa and then to Toronto in the following years, but continued to edit the journal until February 1982.
In December 1981 Raj decided to focus on the unique, specific needs of trans men. At the time, there were very few trans advocacy groups for trans men in particular. Raj's work, based in Toronto, Canada, joined that of Mario and Becky Martino's Labyrinth Foundation's Counseling Services (Yonkers, NY); Johnny A's F2M (meetings in New York, NY; Rites of Passage newsletter out of Tenafly, NJ); Jude Patton's Renaissance group in Santa Ana, CA; and Jeff S.’s group in Southern California. Raj resigned from his role at both FACT and Gender Review, and both were taken over by Susan Huxford, a trans woman from Hamilton, ON with whom Raj had begun working in late 1979.