Proctor was raised in Kaikoura on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, the second of four children. After a difficult adolescence he was drug dependent for seven years, culminating in a suicide attempt. Neither parent accepted his femininity, and both died before he transitioned.
In 1980s, Proctor worked as a crane driver at the port of Lyttelton outside Christchurch during a period of strikes.
He starting female hormones and became Joanne when she started a BA at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and then qualified as a lawyer in 1990 at the University of Waikato Law School.
An unsympathetic psychiatrist told her emphatically that her stature and looks eliminated her as a potential candidate. However she persevered. She was on an invalid's benefit when she was scheduled to have surgery at Waikato Hospital in May 1997, but the local health authority decided to stop funding sex changes less than a week before.
In 2000 the Chief Ombudsman, Brian Elwood, ruled that Joanne had been unfairly treated, but it still took two more years before the surgery was done by New Zealand's sole sex-change surgeon, Peter Walker. Without consulting her, Walker decided to do a colovaginoplasty rather than a penile inversion, and left Joanne with post-surgical complications, which ended up costing the New Zealand Health Service as much again as the vaginoplasty had done.
The Chief Ombudsman had to appeal to the Broadcasting Standards Authority in that TVNZ edited an interview with him about Joanne to imply that the decision was a landmark and unusual when Elwood had in fact emphasized that it was neither.
Joanne lived at an isolated country home with minimal human interaction: "six or seven 'contact hours' with people a month, including grocery shopping and GP visits" (Martin 1/6/02).
She became an HBS activist on the internet, and the HBS liaison to OII in February 2009. She was also active on TS-SI, and was one of the major authors of the short-lived HBS Wikipedia page.
In 2010 she closed down her personal blog, and the New Zealand HBS site, and wrote Trans-Fried-Fluff, then deleted its contents, and rewrote it as Trans-FriedFluff. She has claimed that Wikipedia should be treated as the publishing arm of CAMH, she was an admirer of Jan Wålinder, and of Thomas Szasz, and presented 'gender' as a creation of Robert Stoller and her co-patriate John Money, and transgenderism as a social construct similar to multiple-personality disorder and false memory syndrome. Sometimes she posted using the name P. J. Schrödinger.
"Professor Wålinder’s definition fell out of favour solely due to John Money’s duplicity over the outcome of the Reimer case. It was not the definition that was wrong. It was John Money. (Schrödinger,2010)"
Joanne died at age 63 of medical problems.
- Paul Yandall. "Roller-coaster week for sex swap candidate". NZHerald, Nov 27, 2000. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=162082.
- "TVNZ ordered to hand over tapes from news interview". NZ Herald, Aug 8, 2001. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=205498.
- Yvonne Martin. "$24,000 sex change surgery on the State". The Press, 06 April 2002. Online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transgendernews/message/125.
- Yvonne Martin. "Jo's vagina monologue". The Press, 01 June 2002. Online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transgendernews/message/382.
- Joanne Proctor. "Gender inquiry loses plot". The Press, 15 Aug 2007. Online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transgendernews/message/22135.
- "Use of Govt funds for sex-change surgery upheld ". Stuff. 19/01/2008. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/223145.
- "Joanne Proctor, Noted IS/TS Advocate, Passes Away". TS-SI, 10 March 2011. http://ts-si.org/the-dialogue/29251-joanne-proctor-noted-ists-advocate-passes-away.
- www.harrybenjaminsyndrome-nz.co.nz. Removed.
- http://joanneproctor-hbs.blogspot.com. Removed.
- http://trans-fried-fluff.blogspot.com. Empty.
- P.J. Schrödinger. Comment on Paul Burkhart. "Open Mic: A Prolegomena of Transgenderism(pt.ii)". The Long Way Home. http://paulburkhart.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/open-mic-a-prolegomena-of-transgenderism-pt-ii.
- http://trans-friedfluff.blogspot.com.
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The TS-Si obituary says that Joanne served "with distinction as a barrister". However this is not confirmed by the numerous articles in the NZ press.
"Wikipedia should be treated as the publishing arm of CAMH". Does this mean that she thought that, say, Andrea James, is a spokesperson for the CAMH?
Wålinder's definition of transsexualism was:
1. A sense of belonging to the opposite sex, of having been born into the wrong sex, of being one of nature’s extant errors.
2. A sense of estrangement with one's own body; all indications of sex differentiation are considered as afflictions and repugnant.
3. A strong desire to resemble physically the opposite sex via therapy including surgery.
4. A desire to be accepted in the community as belonging to the opposite sex.
I agree that Jan Wålinder should not be so forgotten. Even the Swedish Wikipedia does not have an entry for him. However to connect his lapse into obscurity and Money's behaviour in the Reimer case is going out on a limb. True, the ICD definition of transsexualism was originally that of Wålinder and later adopted a John Money type wording based on gender identity, but that was because Wålinder had slipped into obscurity.
She doesn't apologize for, explain or even mention Szasz's transphobia.
Joanne's account of 'gender' totally ignores its use before the 19th century when it was reduced in scope to grammar, and also ignores how feminists took the concept and turned it into something quite different from what Money had intended.
