The full tale is still not told. These items will be added to the full timeline, and are published here so that they will be noticed.
Netherlands, Arnheim
Municipal Hospital 1959 –
plastic surgeon S.T. Woudstra did a phalloplasty for a
trans man. This was published in the Dutch Journal of Medicine resulting in
letters of protest and questions in Parliament. Woudstra never did a second such
surgery.
Akiko Nagai had an orchiectomy, a penectomy
and breast augmentation.
Japan Tokyo - 1964.
Gynecologist Taro Kono performed sex change operations on
three trans women at a Tokyo clinic — and was arrested the following year and
charged with violations of the Eugenics and Motherhood Protection Act of
1948, as well as an unrelated violation of the Controlled Substances Act.
In 1969 he was found guilty of all charges , sentenced to two years and fined
Ɏ400,000. The case attached a stigma to transsexualism and made it taboo for
medical professionals for many years to provide adequate care or even
information. This lasted until the late 1990s.
Billings & Urban
A history of transgender surgery that I did not consult for my transgender
surgery timeline was,
- Dwight B. Billings and Thomas Urban. “The Socio-Medical Construction of
Transsexualism: An Interpretation and Critique”. Social Problems, 29, 3,
Feb., 1982: 266-282.
This was reprinted in In Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds),
Blending
Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing, Routledge 1996:
99-117, and various other places. It is much cited.
Here is the abstract:
“This article examines transexualism and its treatment by sex-reassignment
surgery. Physicians have drawn upon their previous experience with
hermaphrodites and the psychological benefits of elective surgery to legitimate
sex-change surgery for what they view as a distinct patient population,
transexuals. We demonstrate that transexualism is a socially constructed reality
which only exists in and through medical practice. Furthermore, we contend that
sex-change surgery reflects and extends late-capitalist logics of reification
and commodification, while simultaneously reaffirming traditional male and
female gender roles.”
The paper closes with:
“But rather than support contemporary movements aimed at reorganising gender
and parenting roles and repudiating the either/or logic of gender development,
sex-change proponents support sex-reassignment surgery. By substituting medical
terminology for political discourse, the medical profession has indirectly tamed
and transformed a potential wildcat strike at the gender factory”.
This was published only three years after Raymond’s
The Transsexual
Empire, and agrees with it that transsexuals would not exist without pushy
profit-oriented doctors. !!
Billings & Urban are not incorrect in what they write, although they
twist the interpretation as indicated. They are extremely US-centric and have no
interest at all in the work done by
Gillies,
Fogh-Andersen,
Burou,
Randel,
Steiner or
Ratnam.
What facts they do have that are not in my timeline are those relating to the
opposition by psychiatrists. That is another tale. I am first concentrating on
the surgeons who made transgender surgery what it is.
However there are two items in their footnotes which are not mentioned
anywhere else.
1) “Thomas Urban was a participant observer for three years (1978–80) in a
sex-change clinic”.
But they do not say which one or otherwise elaborate. Did he leave, as did
Grant
Williams from the Charing Cross Clinic, because he disagreed with the
program? This is an unknown.
2) Footnote 8 reads:
“Other university hospitals, such as the University of Minnesota’s, began
surgical treatment at roughly the same time but avoided public disclosure. In
addition, a few operations were secretly performed in the 1950s at the
University of California at San Francisco. We have learned that Cook County
Hospital in Chicago was performing sex-change operations as early as 1947,
predating Jorgensen’s famous European surgery by five years.”
We know that
Elmer Belt (not mentioned at all in Billings & Urban) was
doing such operations at the University of California at Los Angeles in the
1950s. Do they have the wrong city, or is this something lost to history?
Louise Lawrence worked with Alfred Kinsey and Harry Benjamin in San Francisco in the 1950s. If these surgeries happened there is strange that neither Lawrence nor Benjamin knew about them. The Langley Porter Clinic, while admitting that psychotherapy did not work, generally would not recommend surgery, although it is said that they did arrange surgery in a couple of cases.
Dr Frank Hinman, urologist, author of “Advisability of Surgical Reversal of Sex in Female Pseudohermaphroditism”, 1951, was brought in in 1953 to save
Caren Ecker after an auto-orchiectomy, which was felt to require a penectomy.
I cannot find any account of transgender surgery at Cook County Hospital in
1947.
Orion
Stuteville who did transgender surgery at Cook County and Northwestern
University Medical School twenty years later was already a surgeon there, but in the dental
school. Was it he who did the transgender surgery, or someone else? Harry Benjamin had requested
Max Thorek, a renowned surgeon in Chicago to do an operation, but, after consulting his lawyer, he declined. Again what Billings and Urban are referring to seems to be lost to history.
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