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By Root 1902 0

as psychiatrists. We’re not happy doctors. We’re not out there saying, ‘What do you think would make you happy? Would you like a third arm?’ That’s not what we are,” he says. “The best will in the world would be to say, ‘These people have psychological problems that are dependent on the fact that they are fixed in the wrong body, and their psychological problems will melt away if we treat this. If we do this, it will make them better.’ But we found that they were no better! So we thought, ‘Maybe we’re just masquerading here. We’d like to think that they are better and they aren’t.’” McHugh dismisses sex-change surgery and the misery that drives it as “a craze” that started in the sixties and has been gathering steam ever since. “Crazes are crazes,” he says. “They build up, and they build up in a particular kind of way. We’ve been sold a bill of goods, and vulnerable people are picking this up and running with it. And it will continue to be a craze for a while as they support one another and as our communication systems, for example the Internet, promote it.”

McHugh’s perspective is anathema to most transgendered people, and yet one can find support for certain elements of his critique in the literature of the community itself. In her memoir, The Man-Made Doll, for example, author Patricia Morgan tells a harrowing tale of prostitution, rape, and abuse—both before and after her surgery with Elmer Belt in the seventies—and of the way that sex-reassignment surgery became popular among the crowd of gay and transgendered prostitutes with whom she worked the streets. Morgan says that despite her struggles she was able to make the transition to “straight” life because she had a realistic view of what to expect. Others were not so fortunate, she claims. “There are far too many fags and TVs [transves-tites] around today who think that sex-change surgery is the answer to all their problems,” Morgan writes.

For most of them, it merely means trading one set of problems for another. They’ve lived so long in the underworld of fags and TVs, of pimps and prostitutes, that they’re not equipped to cope with the everyday world. They have no idea of what “straight” society is like. To them, it’s a fantasy land, like a child’s conception of the grown-up world. Many of those who go through sex-change surgery think they’ll wind up as sex symbols, love goddesses, movie stars. They think they’ll be transformed overnight into dazzling creatures who’ll sweep men off their feet and have millionaires clamoring to set them up in penthouses. It’s quite a comedown for someone who has such illusions to find out she’s just another broad—and not necessarily a very good-looking one—and that she still has to hustle to make a living.

Morgan also has sharp words for the underground surgeons who were beginning to offer sex-change surgery on demand. “A dozen years ago, when I had my operation, it was a rare thing. Now sex-change surgery has become as common as blue jeans, and many people are getting it who shouldn’t,” she charges. “For this I blame the doctors. Once I thought highly of doctors who did sex-change surgery. I regarded them as saviors of souls. Now I realize that they’re rip-off artists just like everyone else. … Very few of them send their patients to psychiatric counseling to find out if they’ll be able to function as women.” Bluntly, she lists the challenges that confronted transwomen after reassignment in that era. “The girl who had sex-change surgery gets rejected by her family. She isn’t able to hold a job. Most don’t have experience or education. Some have legal problems, because their papers still list them as men. Others get fired when their bosses find out. She can’t live the life of a normal woman. A man might fall for her, but when he finds out what she is, he says goodbye.”

Patricia Morgan’s assessment is couched in the tough talk of the streets, not the formal language of academia, but she reaches a conclusion similar to that of Jon Meyer’s infamous study. Far from solving their problems, sex reassignment created a whole new set