Eight years in the making, A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States: From Margins to Mainstream (editors Carolyn Wolf-Gould, Dallas Denny, Jamison Green, and Kyan Lynch) is a riveting and comprehensive look at the history of gender-affirming medical care.
Responses to the needs of trans and gender non-conforming people by the medical community have ranged from ambivalence to disrespect to emotional violence. This book chronicles the sociopolitical environments of different decades and how colonialism, racism, prevailing religious doctrine and homophobia affected standards of care.
With pieces written by more than 40 authors who are members of the transgender and gender-diverse community or committed allies in healthcare, it includes profiles of the pioneers of contemporary surgical practices and also of trans activists like Marsha P. Johnson and lesser-known trans figures dating as far back as the 1700s.
More than a medical text, the book is also rife with documented scandals and hypocrisies, and impassioned and poetic descriptions of the varied trans experience.
Windy City Times spoke with one of the book’s editors, author, legal scholar, and longtime trans activist, Jamison Green, PhD.
Windy City Times: What was the sociopolitical climate like around the time of your own transition? Did you have access to resources?
Jamison Green: Sort of. And that’s partly because of certain privileges I had. But, in general, the climate for most trans people was there was very little information available. And few people had access to services. It was 1988 when I technically began my medical transition. I’d discovered that there were actually other people who’d transitioned from female to male in the 70s. But I was really scared, even though I already knew that I was—as I called myself in the ‘60s—“cross-gendered,” because I didn’t know any language, and I didn’t know anybody else like me.
WCT: Thinking about language, the book talks about the importance of historically contextualizing all terminology related to the trans experience. Can you speak to the editorial conundrum that the team faced with wording?
JG: We have to use language that applied to the people at the time that we’re writing about in order to understand their social context. Yet we also, in order to be understood by the contemporary audience, need to use language that speaks to them. And we have to sort of parse that out as clearly as possible, so that people would understand what we’re talking about.
WCT: And how did you do that?
JG: We held focus groups with various trans conferences. And we asked, “What do you think we should do about these things…about dead names, for example, or about outing somebody who lived in stealth when they were alive?” Ultimately, everybody agreed that we should just do what we think is right. People are gonna get mad at us no matter what. We did the best we could, and we have good intentions.
WCT: This book is so complex and interesting in different ways. One thing that stuck out was how trans men were understudied, neglected and, early on, considered rare.
JG: Well, the whole field has been.
WCT: Between [Havelock] Ellis making the case that female homosexuality was more widespread than most people assumed at the time, yet it remained hidden from the public eye by some combination of ignorance and indifference. Or, in the early stages of trans-affirming care, doctors rarely attempted genital surgery for those assigned female at birth.
JG: Right.
WCT: Even [Alfred] Kinsey’s reluctance to accept the existence of transgender individuals—and doctors in the US not even taking an interest in the medical care of trans men until the 1960s. What do you think is the reason behind it?
JG: My theory is that it’s misogyny. And the fascination with people who are male bodied actually chopping off their privilege, if you will. I think that’s both fascinating and repulsive, which again makes it more fascinating. Women were viewed as “diminished,” and so, of course they want to be men. And they’ll never be men, so why bother looking at them? Or bother thinking about them?
WCT: Similarly, there was a chapter on activist Monica Roberts lamenting the dearth of the documented history of Black trans people.
JG: Exactly, yes. Now there’s much more good scholarship being done that is inclusive of Black and other races of trans people; but also, by Black scholars like Monica Roberts, which is great. I’m thinking particularly of C. Riley Snorton, who wrote a great book called Black on Both Sides [: A Racial History of Trans Identity]. It’s very academic.
WCT: Some of the ways that clinicians openly talked about trans people in medical texts was appalling. It reminded me of something in Harriet Washington’s book, Medical Apartheid, how past medical abuse is actually hidden in plain sight.
JG: I was struck by David Cauldwell’s 1949 essay called, “Psychopathia Transexualis,” in which he documented the case of a person who was desperate to transition from female to male. Cauldwell basically said this person was from a wealthy white family and that we would never see this kind of “psychopathology” in a poor person or a person of color because they’re too busy trying to survive and don’t have the wherewithal to indulge in these kinds of fantasies. Which is completely appalling to me.
WCT: What do you hope this book accomplishes?
JG: I really hope it encourages young scholars to look deeper into different aspects of the stories in this book. From my perspective, this book just scraped the surface. And there’s so much richness underneath. I think it’s readable enough that the average person can both learn something and be amazed at how much we’ve struggled to understand this aspect of humanity.
And, also, to recognize how trans people have really helped create this field. It’s not like these scientists and researchers came in and said, ‘Oh, well, here’s an interesting thing. Let’s work on this.’ No; it was trans people going to them and saying, “We need help.”
WCT: The book ends with a promising and hopeful contemplation of the future. Now, in 2025…seeing where we are is terrifying. What do you think is the future of transgender medicine?
JG: To be perfectly honest, we’ve been here before. The first time someone went to Congress and said that we should be legislated out of existence was in 1981; that was Janice Raymond. So, we’ve been here before in the sense that now we’re being oppressed in a way we’ve already been oppressed. Because of the progress that we made through the 1990s into the first part of the 21st century, we have more allies now than we have ever had before.
Parents are recognizing and listening to their trans children. And not all those children are going to turn out to be trans or want medical intervention. That doesn’t matter. What they’re listening to is their children’s desire to express themselves in ways that they were never allowed to do, and they’re letting them do it. And that is a beautiful thing.
WCT: Ending this conversation on a beautiful thing is good.
JG: Yes! And I want to emphasize how reading this book can convey the humanity of trans people and the fact that no matter how the vocabulary describing us changes or if our category is erased, we have always been here. We will continue to be born, and we will find ways to thrive.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Paperback and hardcover copies of A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States: From Margins to Mainstream, published by SUNY Press, can be purchased at: https://sunypress.edu/Books/A/A-History-of-Transgender-Medicine-in-the-United-States