The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [101]
This new breed of transsexual activist rejected the attempts of doctors and researchers to define transsexuality as a form of control— well before Janice Raymond burst onto the scene. “By the mid-sixties, I think that transsexuals were using the scientific discourse as received for their own ends,” says Stryker. “They were saying, ‘Because I am a transsexual, I should be allowed to change my legal identification paperwork. Because I am a transsexual, I am going to work with the neighborhood legal defense fund, and we’re going to wage this case and change employment law. Because I am a transsexual, I should have my medical needs met; therefore the city clinic should give me hormones.’ So the classic transsexual medical discourse was being deployed for purposes of gaining civil and human rights. That started in ‘65 to ‘66 here in San Francisco.”
Rather than applying to one of the university gender clinics, with their stringent criteria for acceptance, many transsexuals began to seek out private surgeons who were willing to perform surgery on demand. The most infamous of these, John Ronald Brown, “presented himself as the champion of transsexuals,” says Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed, “but he also won a well-earned reputation as the back-alley butcher of transsexual surgery.” But more reputable doctors and surgeons also began working with transsexual clients, and it became somewhat easier for people to access the services they required—if they had the money. Others traveled overseas for surgery, effectively subverting the medical model by contracting for services with health care providers who did not share American physicians’ views of the need for an extended period of “real-life” experimentation prior to surgery. A number of transsexual memoirists have written of their surgeries with “Dr. B” in Casablanca, Morocco. Dr. Georges Borou was for many years the surgeon of choice for affluent transsexual people, such as British journalist Jan (nee James) Morris. “He was exceedingly handsome,” Morris writes in Conundrum. “He was small, dark, rather intense of feature, and was dressed as if for some kind of beach activity. He wore a dark blue open-necked shirt, sports trousers, and game shoes, and he was very bronzed. He welcomed me with a bemused smile, as though his mind were in Saint-Tropez.”
Meanwhile, John Money’s erstwhile benefactor, Reed Erickson, continued to fund research and public education on transsexualism through the Erickson Educational Foundation throughout the seventies. “What Erickson did on a small scale in Harry Benjamin’s office in the sixties they did on a much larger scale later,” says Aaron Devor. “The first three international conferences on transsexuality were all funded by the EEF.” The first symposium was held in London, in 1969; the second in Denmark, in 1971; and the third in Yugoslavia, in 1973. A fourth conference, named the Harry Benjamin Fourth International Conference on Gender Identity, in honor of Benjamin’s ninetieth birthday, was held in 1975. The EEF, says Devor, “chose the locations, invited the people, did the advertising. That synergy created a whole new field of research. He [Erickson] created a whole new discipline, as well as a support network for transsexuals themselves who would call the EEF to find out where they could find a doctor or a therapist.”
The Erickson Educational Foundation also produced numerous publications for transsexual people and their families, brochures and pamphlets that explained in everyday language what transsexualism was and offered effective strategies for treatment. “In