{"id":27696,"date":"2024-06-27T05:30:14","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T09:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=27696"},"modified":"2024-06-28T08:31:54","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T12:31:54","slug":"welcome-to-girl-island-the-odyssey-of-sandy-stone-part-2-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/27\/welcome-to-girl-island-the-odyssey-of-sandy-stone-part-2-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Girl Island: The Odyssey of Sandy Stone (Part 2 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

Stone soon relocated to the West coast. Over the next few years, she would work closely with some of the biggest names in popular music. Her r\u00e9sum\u00e9 includes sessions for Van Morrison, The Byrds, Crosby and Nash, Joni Mitchell and many others; some of the more off-the-wall and obscure artists included Lothar and the Hand People, a group that made use of the otherworldly Theremin. \u201cIt was a grand and glorious time,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

At the same time that Stone was working in recording studios, she launched a literary career. Using the pen name Sandy Fisher, she wrote several science fiction pieces; those were published in popular sci-fi magazines of the era. Looking back on that period, Stone doesn\u2019t draw a distinction between her writing and her studio work; it was all part of one creative journey. \u201cWhatever came by that I felt I could do something with, I did it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

All through those years, Stone had feelings that she didn\u2019t fully understand. She says that the New York scene was populated by many gay and bisexual people. \u201cThey were hitting on me, and I had no idea why,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause I wasn\u2019t yet facing what was going on with me.\u201d Eventually she realized she was unknowingly giving off signals. \u201cBut nobody had a language for that,\u201d she says, \u201cso it was interpreted as gay.\u201d It wasn\u2019t until Stone relocated to San Francisco in the 1970s that she came to terms with her gender identity.<\/p>\n

Gender Confirmation<\/b>
\nDr. Stone recounts a recurring dream she had as a young boy. \u201cI used to dream of this place that I called Girl Island,\u201d she says. \u201cThere were a lot of other people with whom I was doing all sorts of strenuous, nature-type things: swimming swift rivers, building canoes, learning to climb trees, talking to animals.\u201d In the dream Sandy was a girl, too. \u201cWe were all<\/i> little girls,\u201d she emphasizes, \u201cbut we were not doing anything that little girls at that time did.\u201d She says that while the dream was persistent, those thoughts never entered her waking mind. But they remained a part of her subconscious.<\/p>\n

Stone left the world of mainstream studio production and engineering in 1974. To make ends meet, she took a job at a stereo repair shop in Santa Cruz. She began identifying as a woman, but when she went public with her transition, Stone was immediately fired. \u201cSo I scuttled across the street like a little crab,\u201d she recalls, \u201crented a storefront and opened my own stereo repair business!\u201d Her business thrived while her former employer\u2019s shop went bankrupt.<\/p>\n

Stone\u2019s shop eventually attracted the attention of what she calls \u201cthe queer element in town.\u201d Her storefront became a popular LGBT space. Soon, members of Olivia Records approached her with an offer to collaborate. A lesbian separatist collective, Olivia Records was a label dedicated to women artists. \u201cOh, great!\u201d Stone thought to herself. \u201cAnother adventure! When I got to the collective, I looked around and thought, \u2018This is Girl Island!\u2019 They were a bunch of strong women, working together on a high and common purpose, and it had nothing to do with being a stereotypical woman in society.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Olivia, Stone taught many of its members electronics repair. \u201cMy store, The Wizard of Aud, was perking along very well on its own,\u201d she says. \u201cWe had a bunch of women in there who were learning electronic skills. I started out with, \u2018Here\u2019s how you repair stereos. Here\u2019s how a transistor circuit works.\u2019\u201d Eventually she trained some members of the collective on recording techniques.<\/p>\n

Stone was living as a woman, but she hadn\u2019t yet undergone any medical procedures to make that a full reality. \u201cI had been approved by Stanford a long time previous, but I didn\u2019t have the money for the surgery,\u201d she explains. \u201cSo in the meantime, I was trying to live my life as best I could. I had all this talent, and here was a way that I could use it in a way that not only helped the collective, but that agreed with my politics at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

But eventually, Stone realized that her then-current biological status put the collective at risk. After three years working with Olivia Records, Stone scheduled gender confirmation surgery at the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program in Palo Alto. But she made that journey largely on her own. Lacking the funds for the operation, she revealed her status to the core collective. \u201cThey were angry and horrified,\u201d she says today, \u201cbecause I didn\u2019t trust them to tell them originally.\u201d<\/p>\n

The collective offered to provide the gap funds needed, on one condition. \u201cDo it in secret,\u201d she was told. \u201cNobody knows: not your family, not your friends, not the rest of the collective. Nobody<\/i>.\u201d Surgery was scheduled for September 1977. \u201cAnd the core collective worked out a way for me to disappear,\u201d Stone says.<\/p>\n

Because of some legal matters at the time, Stanford\u2019s gender confirmation surgery program had been relocated to Chope Community Hospital (now San Mateo Medical Center). Stone says that the change of setting posed some challenges for the medical staff: \u201cWhere do we put a trans person?\u201d The answer was the hospital\u2019s prison ward. \u201cSo on top of everything else,\u201d Stone says, \u201cwith no support network and all this weird, dis-affirming stuff, I just went straight ahead and went through the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lesbian feminist scholar Janice Raymond published her book The Transsexual Empire<\/i> in 1979. Highly critical of trans persons, the book included a specific and scathing attack on Stone. While the collective initially defended her, in the face of a boycott against Olivia Records, Stone left the collective in 1979, returning to Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n

click here to continue<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… Stone soon relocated to the West coast. Over the next few years, she would work closely with some of the biggest names in popular music. Her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27706,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,3668],"tags":[5446],"class_list":["post-27696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-music-business","tag-sandy-stone","cat-41-id","cat-3668-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27696"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27750,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27696\/revisions\/27750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}