The rise and fall of gender identity clinics in the 1960s and 1970s

Editor’s note: This article is based on the second-place poster in the American College of Surgeons History of Surgery poster contest at the virtual Clinical Congress 2020. The authors note that as the field of medicine and society have evolved to better understand the experiences of transgender individuals, terminology has changed significantly. The authors have kept the original wording of direct quotes, but elsewhere in the article terminology is used that is consistent with present-day standards; that is, “transgender” or “transgender and gender nonbinary.”

Transgender and gender nonbinary (TGNB) individuals have existed for thousands of years and in cultures throughout the world. In Western medicine, however, the modern era of gender-affirming surgery (GAS) began at the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin, Germany, under the leadership of Magnus Hirschfeld, MD. Surgeons at the institute performed the earliest vaginal constructions in the 1930s. Early patients included an employee of the facility, known by the last name of Dorchen, and the Danish painter Lili Elbe, whose story was depicted in the 2015 film The Danish Girl.¹

Around the same time that Dr. Hirschfeld’s institute began performing vaginoplasties, the father of plastic surgery, Sir Harold Gillies, OBE, FRCS, had been refining techniques for genital construction in Britain. He did so primarily by operating on British men who had sustained genital injuries during wartime and subsequently presented to him for assistance. In the 1940s, he performed the first known phalloplasty for a transgender patient on Michael Dillon, MD, a British physician. Dr. Gillies later performed a vaginoplasty on patient Roberta Cowell, who gained some renown in Britain.²

In the 1950s, Georges Burou, MD, began performing vaginoplasty operations in Casablanca, Morocco, and is widely credited with inventing the anteriorly pedicled penile skin flap inversion vaginoplasty.³

Increased awareness in the U.S.

One of the earliest known GAS procedures performed in the U.S. was for patient Alan Hart, MD, a transgender man and physician, who underwent a hysterectomy in 1910.¹

The field of GAS subsequently remained dormant in the U.S. until the 1950s, when pioneers like Elmer Belt, MD, University of California Los Angeles, and Milton Edgerton, MD, Johns Hopkins University (JHU) began performing GAS.^4,5

The work of sexologist and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, MD, in the 1950s and 1960s provided additional momentum to the field within the medical community. At the time, many psychiatrists and physicians believed that the correct approach to treating transgender patients was exclusively through psychoanalytic therapy aimed at altering the desire to live as a different gender. Dr. Benjamin is attributed with being one of the first physicians to challenge this notion.

In 1966, he published The Transsexual Phenomenon, which detailed the era’s approach to GAS.⁴ Notably, this text includes far more detail about male-to-female (MTF) surgical operations, such as vaginoplasty, than female-to-male (FTM) operations, such as phalloplasty or metoidioplasty. At the time, transgender men were incorrectly believed to be less common than transgender women, and surgeons were reluctant to perform FTM GAS procedures. Based on writings from the era, some of this reluctance stemmed from uncertainty as to whether surgical techniques were capable of constructing a neophallus that would be satisfactory to the patient.⁶

A boom of awareness of GAS within both the field of medicine and the larger U.S. public can primarily be attributed to one individual: Christine Jorgensen. Ms. Jorgensen was a transgender woman who captured the attention and interest of the general public after undergoing a series of operations for GAS in Denmark from 1951 to 1952.⁴ Her coming out story and transition were covered extensively in popular media, appearing in the New York Daily News under the eye-catching headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty.”⁷

Wave of clinics providing GAS

Publication of Dr. Benjamin’s book coincided with the public announcement of JHU Gender Identity Clinic in November 1966.⁸ While several major academic centers had internally discussed the formation of research institutes to study the treatment of transgender patients since the early 1960s, the opening of the JHU clinic marked a transition from quiet deliberation to public recruitment for research on GAS. Initiatives quickly sprung up at many major universities and hospitals, marked by interdisciplinary collaboration between psychiatrists, urologists, plastic surgeons, gynecologists, and social workers. While estimates vary, the increase in U.S. patients who underwent GAS was dramatic, growing to more than 1,000 by the end of the 1970s from approximately 100 patients in 1969.^5,9

Producing positive results in a stigmatized field

Whereas GAS was a new endeavor for U.S. physicians, these clinics primarily operated as research programs. As a new field of practice, the physicians involved in the clinics faced significant skepticism from colleagues, such as psychiatrist Joost Meerloo, MD, who outlined his concerns in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1967. Dr. Meerloo wrote, “Unwittingly, many a physician does not treat the disease as such but treats, rather, the fantasy a patient develops about his disease…I believe the surgical treatment of transsexual yearnings easily falls into this trap…. What about our medical responsibility and ethics? Do we have to collaborate with the sexual delusions of our patients?”¹⁰

Understandably, physicians involved in these gender identity clinics described feeling pressure to demonstrate successful postoperative outcomes in order to justify their work. In the introduction to a published case series on GAS, Norman Fisk, MD, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, CA, wrote, “In our efforts we were preoccupied with obtaining good results. This preoccupation, we believed, would enable us to continue our work in an area where many professional colleagues had, and retain, serious doubts as to the validity of gender reorientation.”¹¹

In an attempt to obtain good results, these clinics often maintained rigorous selection criteria that excluded a number of patients. The evaluation process required that patients undergo hormone treatment and live for a set period of time as the gender to which they intended to transition. This period of time could extend up to five years depending on the clinic, imposing a significant burden on patients. As one patient, transgender man Mario Martino, stated, “One talks of a period of two to five years. I agree that people should be tested. I think that they should be tested in every way possible before being accepted as a candidate for treatment. However, one of the problems that people tend to forget is that a female with a 48-inch bust cannot pass as a male for one day, much less for one year or five years, no matter how much he tries.”¹²

Individuals who were considered traditionally attractive and were expected to be easily perceived as a member of the other sex, as well as individuals who were heterosexual per their gender identity, were considered better surgical candidates. To demonstrate the scale of this selectivity, out of 2,000 applications sent to JHU within two years of opening, only 24 patients underwent an operation.^5,11,13

Though early studies were small, many did, in fact, demonstrate successful psychiatric outcomes. A report from Edgerton and colleagues in 1970 found that at one to two years postoperatively, of nine patients who underwent GAS, all were glad to have undergone surgery, had greater self-confidence, and held “a brighter outlook for their future.”⁵ When considering the competing demands of producing positive outcomes and providing GAS to patients in need, it’s clear how physicians working in these clinics were confronted with challenges in their roles. They were advocates for a marginalized population, and yet they also functioned as gatekeepers for thousands of transgender patients desperate for surgery and who faced reinforced gender-based stereotypes as described earlier in the eligibility criteria.

Timeline and clinic closure

Toward the end of the 1970s, many centers closed their doors to new patients. These closures often were kept out of the public eye, making it difficult to discern precise timing or causes. There were, however, two notable exceptions to the pattern of patient enrollment quietly declining and ceasing.

At JHU, a new chair of psychiatry, Paul McHugh, MD, was hired in 1975. Dr. McHugh disapproved of offering GAS to transgender patients and acknowledged that from the moment he was hired, he intended to stop this practice at the clinic. Under his leadership, JHU psychiatrist Jon Meyer, MD, published a study of 50 surgical patients from the JHU clinic, which concluded that GAS offered “no objective benefit” for transgender people. Although this claim directly contradicted a growing body of evidence that found significant benefit for transgender patients, the publication sparked the rapid closure of the JHU clinic in 1979.¹⁴

FIGURE 1. GENDER IDENTITY CLINIC TIMELINE

Another gender identity clinic where operations were abruptly terminated was the Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City. The Gender Identity Foundation at the center had offered a variety of services for transgender patients, including GAS, since 1973, under the radar of local religious leaders. In 1977, however, the issue of GAS was brought to the attention of the board of directors of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. The physicians involved fervently advocated to be allowed to continue their practice, including surgeons Charles L. Reynolds, Jr., MD, FACS, and David W. Foerster, MD, FACS, who issued a joint statement that said, “[I]f Jesus Christ were alive today, undoubtedly he would render help and comfort to the transsexual.” Despite these appeals, the board of directors voted 54–2 to ban GAS at the Baptist Medical Center.¹⁵

Given the known timing of when these two clinics closed, they are marked with a box in a timeline constructed by the authors (see Figure 1). The remaining end dates are estimates derived from the latest reported operations in the medical literature and news articles, which likely underestimate the length of time the clinics were in operation. The reasons for closure of the remaining clinics appear to be multifactorial.

The publicity around the Meyer paper that led to JHU’s clinic closure may have played a role in the decision to close other clinics.¹⁶ In addition, some clinics described financial challenges during this time, as patients often were unable to afford the expensive operations, and insurance companies refused to cover them. For example, at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, clinic, the first two dozen operations were funded by a research grant at the expense of the state, but a news article from 1972 suggests that funding difficulties were exacerbated when the state no longer wanted to fund the project.⁹ Institutional pushback, such as that experienced at JHU, and the retirement of leading surgeons also may have played a role in the closure of gender identity clinics across the nation.

Even though many clinics’ GAS-related research was winding down in the late 1970s, the last 15 years of academic interest motivated the 1979 establishment of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. This organization, formed with the goal of organizing professionals who were “interested in the study and care of transexualism and gender dysphoria,” has since been renamed the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and has grown into an international interdisciplinary organization.¹⁷ WPATH has established internationally accepted guidelines for treating individuals with gender dysphoria, which are periodically updated. The most recent of these guidelines is the Standards of Care Version 7 (SOC7).¹⁸ Today, insurance companies, national payors, and treatment teams in both the U.S. and Europe use the WPATH SOC7 guidelines for establishing surgical eligibility.

Present day significance

The contemporaneous evolution of the first wave of gender identity clinics generated a rich field for refinement of surgical technique, as well as the assessment of postoperative outcomes, and produced a foundation of scientific literature demonstrating successful psychiatric outcomes for transgender people undergoing GAS. These milestones foreshadowed a resurgence of multidisciplinary clinics for TGNB individuals in academic centers and paved the way for private practitioners to specialize in GAS. For example, Stanley Biber, MD, a private practice surgeon in Colorado, performed more than 5,000 GAS operations during his 35 years in practice.¹⁹

Many centers for transgender medicine and surgery now exist across the U.S., and the number of GAS operations being performed in the U.S. has increased substantially, along with expanded insurance coverage. In 2015, the U.S. Transgender Survey found that 25 percent of TGNB individuals had one or more gender-affirming operations.²⁰ Similar to the earlier wave of clinics, present-day clinics still are frequently composed of an interdisciplinary team of primary care, surgical, and mental health professionals.

Although the number of GAS continues to increase, the current discourse echoes earlier concerns about how to limit barriers for this marginalized population while prioritizing positive surgical outcomes. The WPATH standards of care often function as guides to assist health care centers in creating TGNB health programs.²¹ The WPATH SOCs have evolved since their establishment and presently tend to include fewer preoperative requirements for TGNB patients than in the 1970s and 1980s.

However, TGNB patients continue to face significant barriers to accessing GAS. A 2018 survey of TGNB patients found that the most commonly cited barriers to gender-affirming care are financial concerns, access to physicians who are knowledgeable about GAS, and access to reliable information.²² These financial concerns can be exacerbated by the cost of obtaining the mental health evaluations recommended by WPATH SOC7, and challenges associated with insurance coverage.²³ To address these barriers, institutions are considering preoperative models besides the WPATH SOC7 to potentially reduce challenges.

Moreover, general medical education initiatives are under way to increase provider knowledge about this population.^24,25 As the field of GAS continues to evolve in the present day, we look forward to seeing how the surgical and medical community partners with patients to minimize these barriers and promote access to these essential surgical treatments.

References

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