The Fall of the Nation's First Gender-Affirming Surgery Clinic

Johns Hopkins Hospital established the first gender-affirming surgery (GAS) clinic in the United States in 1966. Operating for more than 13 years, the clinic was abruptly closed in 1979. According to the hospital, the decision was made in response to objective evidence claiming that GAS was ineffective. However, this evidence directly contradicted many contemporaneous studies and faced immediate criticism from the scientific community. Despite this resistance, it took the hospital nearly 40 years to resume performing GAS. Scientific evidence-imbued in scandal, bias, and moralism-was instrumentalized to serve broader institutional interests. The burgeoning field of plastic surgery tethered and then untethered GAS from its auspices in response to poor technical outcomes and transphobia. No longer serving surgeons' interests, the clinic was marginalized to "barely minimal facilities" in 1974, five years before GAS was formally banned. Over the next 5 years, the clinic co-inhabited space with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Simultaneously, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology navigated scandals related to reproductive technology (namely, the Dalkon Shield [A.H. Robins] controversy) until the clinic space was demolished in 1979. The study that informed the GAS ban was preferentially funded in keeping with the political economy of biomedical research. This article presents a spatial argument for how the closure of the nation's first GAS clinic was not based in empirical data alone but was manipulated to fuel political and institutional agendas.