Aleshia Brevard
This Pride history fact card goes out to all the DC Comics fans who read Playground Of Nations fact cards. Did you know that Giganta from the Legion of Doom was at one point played by a transwoman named Aleshia Brevard? Let’s learn about her now!
Aleshia Brevard was born in Erwin in the US State of Tennessee on 9th December 1937 to a religious family who always said their prayers every night. Aleshia always felt that she was different in comparison to the other children she knew because she felt like a girl inside. She had been assigned male at birth and that upset her, so every night, she prayed that she would wake up as a girl in a girl’s body. The gender dysphoria (extreme discomfort due to identity not matching one’s body) she felt growing up during the 1940s and 1950s saw her experience awkwardness in her teens and a disappointing romance in secondary school. To improve her life, she moved to the West Coast after graduating and became a drag queen in a nightclub in San Francisco. One of her routines was impersonating famous movie star Marilyn Monroe and she was SO GOOD at it that the real Marilyn Monroe even showed up to watch her perform! Fancy that!
At the age of 21, Aleshia began her transgender journey thanks to Harry Benjamin, a renowned gender specialist. It was through Benjamin’s recommendation that Aleshia woke up from gender reassignment surgery that was performed by Elmer Belt as the woman she always felt she should’ve been born as back in 1937! Her gender dysphoria became gender euphoria! She got married and started taking acting lessons and even got a master’s degree in Theatre from Middle Tennessee State. She even befriended Benjamin’s fellow transgender patients like Charlotte Frances McLeod and Kathy Taylor. The women became her support network for Aleshia and they had lunches with their specialist. It should be noted that Aleshia became transgender before the word transgender existed. Back then, someone like her whether a transwoman or a transman were called transsexual.
She took part in many Hollywood films and even modelled for Playboy magazine, the same Playboy magazine Marilyn Monroe was featured in! One person who read her autobiography noted that she had a great sense of humour and should have done comedy because of how brilliant funny and insightful with telling her life story. Aleshia chose to keep the transgender part of her story private so as to blend into a conservative bible thumping and God fearing United States. Everyone just assumed that she was cisgender until she published her memoirs in the early 2000s. That’s how she was able to play Giganta (alter ego: Doris Zeul) for Legends of the Superfriends in January 1979. She was tall and attractive as well as talented. It was those three qualities that made the casting directors at Hanna-Barbera cast her as Giganta. They never knew that they had hired the first trans actress in a DC project. That came 13 years before DC Comics had Kevin Conroy, the first gay actor to play Batman and he kept his sexuality a secret until society was more welcome to people like him too!
As we had previously mentioned, Aleshia revealed herself to the public as a transwoman in the 2000s. It was around this time that she first heard of the phrase transgender and she also first came across a welcoming and very open transgender community. While she was previously happy to live as her desired gender when she first transitioned, she was now happier that she could now tell someone that she was trans and no one was going to shame her over it. Later in life, she worked in community theatre and took up the odd substitute teacher positions. She died in Scotts Valley in the US State of California on 1st July 2017 after living for 79 years. Her role as Giganta has become the upmost defining part of her legacy as well as the fact that she was the first transwomen to surgically transition in the United States of America.