Tell Me, David
Listen to queer stories — past and present. Produced by journalist David Hunt, a regular contributor to This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.
Tell Me, David
A History of Transgender Medicine
In more than three decades as a proud transgender man, Jamison Green has worked to advance the social, legal and civil rights of the trans community. Now he’s moved from making history to writing history as one of the authors and editors of a new book, “A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States.”
The book, eight years in the making, includes the voices of 42 contributing authors. In nearly 800 pages, it spans more than a century and includes profiles of transgender pioneers, a dive into the history of trans-focused psychiatry and psychology, and chapters on research ethics, the biological underpinnings of gender identity, the history of voice and communication interventions, and the treatment of gender-diverse children — among other topics.
Green spoke with David Hunt about the importance of trans history in the face of growing intolerance on the right. Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. "A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States" is published by SUNY Press.
David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.
David Hunt:
There are competing narratives about transgender people. On the right, the message is simple: gender is fixed and immutable, decided at birth. The transgender craze, as some have called it, is a new and dangerous ideology that ignores the biological reality of sex.
According to this narrative, transgender people are perpetuating a fraud on themselves and society. They simply do not exist. The problem with this narrative is not just that it’s false. It’s that it fails to account for the expansive expression of the human spirit.
I’m David Hunt. Join me as I explore a different, more complex and far more interesting narrative about transgender people, a narrative that’s taken eight years and nearly 800 pages to express.
It’s a book called A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States, From Margins to Mainstream, published by SUNY Press, that includes the voices of 42 contributing authors. It’s edited by Carolyn Wolf-Gould, Dallas Denny, Kyan Lynch and my guest for this program, Jamison Green.
Green is a longtime trans author, educator, and policy adviser — and the first person in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in law specializing in trans issues.
I asked Green who the book is for.
Jamison Green:
It's for anyone who's interested in gender and interested in this history, and I think all trans people need to realize there's a lot of mythology out there, and some of it's perpetuated by out-of-date things that are on the internet … I just think that it's helpful to really actually know your history. And I think that there are a lot of young people these days who are desperate to know that there is a history for them, that they have ancestors.
David Hunt:
The stories of many of those ancestors are told in the book’s 21 chapters. In Chapter 5, Trudie Jackson, a member of the Navajo nation, recounts the history of gender diversity among America’s indigenous communities. Jackson, who describes herself as “a proud Diné Two Spirit transgender woman of color,” writes that her history has been largely neglected by scholars.
“Neither colonial histories nor contemporary queer theories accurately reflect my experience of race, nation, sexuality or gender,” she says.
It’s a challenge that’s confronted trans people in the United States for generations, the challenge of visibility; of being seen and heard. Of having a voice — not just in how their stories are told, but in how their lives and identities are shaped and defined by the medical profession.
It hasn’t been an easy journey. But it’s been part of the American experience for far longer than most people know. Jamison Green explains.
Jamison Green:
The first known trans person in the United States to be medically treated would be Alan Hart, who was an MD himself … He was born and raised in a, in Oregon, and went to medical school at the University of Oregon and at Stanford, and transitioned by way of having, basically asking for a hysterectomy. And he used a eugenics-based argument for that. He said, I am so extremely inverted, which is the way people described homosexuality in that time. I'm so much of an invert that it would be better if I don't reproduce. So please give me a hysterectomy. And he was, he was successful at that. And 1917, he had a hysterectomy. And from that day forward, he lived completely as a man.
David Hunt:
While Hart was making history in the U.S., the emerging field of sexology had its roots across the Atlantic, in Germany, where physician Magnus Hirschfeld — a gay man — performed some of the world’s first gender affirming surgeries in the early twentieth century.
Jamison Green:
He was the one who started to really look at the difference between straight gay, lesbian, trans. And the, the whole purpose for what he was doing, and he had a more nuanced understanding than the typical cis, straight person. He was trying to help people be comfortable in their bodies and exist in society. And he was fighting for gay rights very much, very openly, and wasn't afraid of that sexual expression, but understood the difference between that sexual expression and the person's relationship to their body and how they fit into society.
David Hunt:
Hirschfeld’s work influenced a German endocrinologist, Harry Benjamin, who spent much of his career in the United States, where he — in turn — influenced the work of Alfred Kinsey, the American biologist who founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947. Kinsey’s studies of American sexual behavior shocked and enlightened postwar America at a time when gender norms were rigidly enforced.
The first transgender person to gain national notoriety in the conformist fifties was Christine Jorgensen. She ignited a media firestorm in 1953, mobbed by reporters on the tarmac at New York’s Idlewild Airport, as she returned home from Demark, where she had undergone one of a series of gender affirming medical procedures. The former American G.I., born George Jorgensen, was now shy, soft-spoken, and very feminine.
David Hunt:
That was by design. In the early days of transgender medicine, the purpose of care — of hormone treatments and surgical procedures — was to make a trans person “normal” and above all, “straight.” And that meant aligning with society’s very fixed ideas about the gender binary.
Jamison Green:
And they subscribed to a lot of those stereotypes. And you had to meet those stereotypes. Trans women were, were supposed to be, you know, Jane Fonda and trans men were supposed to be Robert Redford, or trans women were Maureen O'Hara. And trans men were John Wayne. And they thought, they actually thought trans men didn't need any, any support groups because they were so macho. So, they wouldn't sit for a support group and learn how to put on their shoes and this sort of thing. But trans women, were encouraged to participate in support groups to learn feminine comportment.
David Hunt:
You’re listening to This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. I’m David Hunt, continuing my conversation with Jamison Green, one of the authors and editors of a new book, A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States.
In the postwar America of the 1950s and 60s, transgender people were — in the eyes of the medical establishment — suffering from an illness. An illness of the mind.
Jamison Green:
It was thought of as a mental illness because people could not understand how a man might feel like a woman. That was, that that must be, they must be crazy. And the stereotypes were so rigidly driven and so supported by spiritual teachings and by the categories that the medical establishment had created and taught over and over and over again. And it took pretty special individuals, meeting trans individuals and realizing this person is not mentally ill. So what is this? And that's really how the medical establishment became interested. More and more people realized that trans people were not ill finding each other and sharing their experience and their research with each other.
David Hunt:
A growing grassroots movement began to take shape across the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s, fostering communities of transgender people, eager to connect with and support each other. Pioneers included Lou Sullivan, founder of an FTM (female-to-male) support group in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve Dain, a California high school teacher who was fired after undergoing gender affirming surgery in 1975.
I asked Green to talk about the growing visibility of trans people — especially trans men — in this era. It turns out he was well acquainted with both Sullivan and Dain, and not just from his work as an academic researcher.
Jamison Green:
I was subscribing to a little newsletter from Atlanta, Georgia called The Transsexual Voice. It was published by a trans woman who was pretty conscious about the fact that trans men existed and did include con content that was pr pertained to trans men. And I saw a little ad in there. It said, information for the female to male cross dresser and transsexual, send $5 to L Sullivan, PO Box, blah, blah, San Francisco. And I thought, why do I have to find this in Atlanta? You know, and when it's just a, it's in my backyard. What is this about? I wrote, I sent my $5, and because I was local, Lou wrote back to me, sent the booklet, which was very informative. And then he you know, wrote that, you know, we're starting to have some meetings and every three months, and if you are interested in coming, you know, give me a call. 'cause He screened everybody who came to the groups in those days … And then, so we became friends because we were both writers and interested in history and all that kind of jazz. And, and and the, the reason that I went to the, the meeting that I went to was because he told me that Steve Dane was going to be the speaker.
Steve and I were neighbors only, we didn't know each other. We actually grew up pretty close to each other. Went to a lot of the same schools, had a lot of the same teachers. We were 11, I think 11 years apart. So our paths didn't cross until I sought him out in the 1980s to ask questions about transition, because I was pretty sure that's what I needed to do. But I was pretty scared. I was very timid about it.
David Hunt:
Lou Sullivan, who died of AIDS complications in 1991, was a pioneer in two respects. He was both comfortably transmasculine and comfortably gay. He challenged a longstanding practice in the medical community of denying gender affirming care to gay and bisexual people.
Jamison Green:
Lou identified as a gay man and felt himself to be a gay man from the get go. Never was really attracted to girls when he was in a female body. Never thought of himself as a lesbian, knew about the gay community, knew lesbians, but was only attracted to men. And the doctors told him he was not eligible for, for genital reconstruction because If he wanted to be with men, he should just stay a woman. But he was a gay man. And gay men are not interested in female bodies.
David Hunt:
Green continued Sullivan’s groundbreaking work, by editing the FTM Newsletter after Sullivan died. And by taking a leadership role in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, where Green was instrumental in revising the standards of care that medical professionals follow in treating transgender people.
He notes that the medical community was not always welcoming of trans perspectives in its professional deliberations.
Jamison Green:
You know, you can't have the inmates running the asylum. Had they, that was the way they maintained their authority was by not including very many trans people. Now, ultimately, there were trans people involved in the organization who were clinicians, who were MDs. They weren't necessarily providing care for trans people, but because they were trans people themselves, they joined out of their own self-interest.
David Hunt:
With the establishment of the first gender clinics in the U.S. in the mid 1960s, came strict treatment protocols, rules dictating who qualified for gender affirming care. The doctors and administrators of these clinics were the gatekeepers of the system, rejecting patients for a wide variety of reasons. Among the reasons you could be rejected? If you were married, a parent, too young, too old, poor, unattractive, or physically impaired.
In short, anything that affected your ability to pass in cisgender, heteronormative society, put gender affirming care out of reach for you, regardless of your wishes.
Jamison Green:
In the beginning, the treatment was all about making trans people normal. And you were supposed to make up a, a story about your history so that if you got into a conversation with somebody about being in the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts, depending on what you, how you were presenting, you would say the right thing. You had to have a story that included, that supported your entire history as what you were presenting as now. And to me, that's, to actually suggests that seems mentally unhealthy.
David Hunt:
Ultimately, thanks to the patience and perseverance of people like Jamison Green, the lived experiences of transgender people have gained a measure of respect among medical professionals.
There’s more — much more — in A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States. There’s a look at transgender veterans and the Veterans Health Administration, a dive into the history of trans-focused psychiatry and psychology, and chapters on research ethics, the biological underpinnings of gender identity, the history of voice and communication interventions, and the treatment of gender-diverse children.
The book could hardly be more timely, with measures targeting the rights — and even the existence — of transgender people growing by the day. Green recognizes the danger.
Jamison Green:
Well, we're a political football, really, and we we're being used essentially to generate moral panic and, and donations for people who, who think we should be eliminated, which is very, very troubling. I mean, this is, it's a genocidal movement, and I, I don't think there's that they'll stop there if they are successful.
David Hunt:
But if he’s learned anything from his research — and from his own experiences as a trans man, it’s that trans people have endured and advanced in the face of nearly insurmountable challenges. His advice to other transgender people?
Jamison Green:
Be be connected to people who are supportive of you. Be connected to build to anyone that you can build a relationship with and your family. Stay connected. Stay connected and let people know who you are as you feel safe to do so. And especially stay connected within the community. Because if you are, if you are in a transition, you actually are doing a medical transition, you definitely need medical support. And you need, need, need proper medical care, and trans people can live a good life. And you just, and you, if you take care of yourself and treat yourself and others well, and be honest with, with yourself about who you are.
David Hunt:
I’d like to thank Jamison Green for speaking with me for this program. Green is one of the editors and authors of A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States, From Margins to Mainstream, published by SUNY Press. Find the book online at SUNYpress (S-U-N-Y press) dot edu.
For This Way Out, I’m David Hunt.
