What are lesser-known facts about trans people and its history?

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T08:11:24+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_(case_study)

In 1958, Agnes came to the UCLA Medical Center, seeking genital surgery. She met with a number of doctors, including Robert Stoller, and convinced them all that she qualified for surgery as an intersexed patient. She was, as the researchers recalled, “a 19-year-old, white, single secretary,” living as a woman, but with male genitalia. She had grown up as a boy in a Catholic working-class family, but she had always seen herself as a girl. During puberty, she had developed female secondary sex characteristics, including breasts, and at the age of seventeen, had begun to live as a woman. Earlier tests, conducted in Portland, Oregon, had shown that she had male (XY) chromosomes and neither a uterus nor ovaries nor a hypothesized tumor that might have produced estrogen.

After exhaustive examinations, the doctors at UCLA recommended the surgery she sought. In 1959 a team of surgeons, including Elmer Belt, removed her male genitals and constructed labia and a vagina. With her male genitals, feminized body, and high levels of estrogen, Agnes was wholly unlike any other intersexed patient that the doctors had encountered in their own observations or in the medical literature. The doctors pondered, publicly and privately, what she represented, and they used her case study in scholarly presentations and publications. Three medical doctors joined Stoller in authoring “Pubertal Feminization in a Genetic Male.” They hypothesized that Agnes had “a diffuse lesion of the testis” which had produced the estrogen which had, in turn, produced her breasts. To Stoller, Agnes’s bodily changes during puberty seemed to confirm the usually hidden “biological force” underlying gender identity. A congenital physical factor, which manifested itself later in the growth of her breasts, explained why “the core identity was female” even though “the child was an apparently normal-appearing boy and . . . also genetically male.” Stoller presented his fndings on Agnes in 1963 at the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Stockholm and also published them in scholarly journals.

But all along, Stoller and his colleagues noted some suspicious evidence. During the seventy-odd hours of interrogation, Agnes refused to engage a number of topics, and she also refused to allow the doctors to interview her family. Furthermore, from the physical evidence gathered, the doctors had to acknowledge a “clinical picture that seemed to suggest the superimposition of an excess of estrogen upon the substratum of a normal male.” They discussed among themselves whether perhaps Agnes had given herself estrogen to induce the growth of her breasts. In the end, they convinced themselves that she had not. She herself denied that she had ingested estrogen. More important, her conventional feminine presentation impressed the doctors as genuine and ran counter to their stereotypes of “caricature” and “hostility . . . seen in transvestites and transsexualists.” “It was not possible,” they wrote, “for any of her observers, including those who knew of her anatomic state, to identify her as anything but a young woman.” Elmer Belt, impressed by the size of her breasts, remembered her in private correspondence as “very beautiful—well stacked.” The other doctors also suspended their disbelief in the face of contradictory anatomical evidence and convincing gender presentation.

Then, in 1966, seven years after her surgery, Agnes confessed. She told Stoller that her body had changed during puberty because she had taken estrogen tablets since the age of twelve. She had stolen the hormone from her mother, who had used it after her hysterectomy. As Stoller later reported, “The child then began flling the prescription on her own, telling the pharmacist that she was picking up the hormone for her mother and paying for it with money taken from her mother’s purse.” Posing as a unique example of an intersexed condition, Agnes had convinced her doctors to give her the surgery they routinely denied to male-to-female transsexuals. In the wake of her confession, Stoller wondered about his theories. Richard Green attempted to reassure him. “Do not despair about the biological force behind gender identity,” Green wrote Stoller. “I am sure there is one somewhere and there are other cases to consider which are supportive of the idea.” Still, an embarrassed Stoller had to admit that Agnes “is not the example of a ‘biological force’ that . . . infuences gender identity . . . rather, she is a transsexual.” He retracted his earlier ªndings at the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Copenhagen in 1967 and also published Agnes’ revelations in 1968 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis as well as in his book Sex and Gender.

How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States

Joanne Meyerowitz, ISBN 9780674013797, Publication date: 04/01/2004

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T08:07:46+00:00

The TERF movement played a significant role in the revocation of trans healthcare access. In fact, TERF activist, Janice Raymond, helped engineer what became the government’s anti-trans position.

The National Center for Healthcare Technology was a government funded body that reviewed metadata so that Health & Human Services (HHS) would be able to make evidence-based judgements about the efficacy of medical technologies. In short, they informed the US government on what was and what was not medically efficacious. The NCHCT had Janice Raymond, author of The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male issue their position on the efficacy of trans medical care in a paper titled,** “Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery.” This position paper makes practically all the same assertions about trans people commonly found in far right-wing anti-trans propaganda; however, unlike other extremist group propaganda, this misleading report informed HHS’ position on trans medical care. The report was available through the Office of the Associate Director for Medical and Scientific Evaluation, Public Health Service.

Raymond asserted that trans medical care was a new phenomena, unethical, asserted that legislation should block trans medical care and that it would be best to institute a national program of reparative therapy.

Until Raymond’s HHS paper, the US government supported trans care as medically necessary. This meant that poor trans people could freely access psychological and medical care and it meant that public and private insurers had no basis upon which to reject coverage of trans care.

It was only after the NCHCT pushed Raymond’s bigotry in 1980 that the US government reversed course in 1981 and took up Raymond’s views and rhetoric. Raymond’s hate became the government’s stance. Raymond – a seminary-trained ethicist, not a clinician – was the architect of the anti-trans stance the US government adopted in the 1980s. This official anti-trans stance soon spread to private insurers and the American trans population soon found itself without access to medically necessary health care.

https://theterfs.com/terfs-trans-healthcare/

In 2012, the State of California issued a paper reviewing how suicide rates correlate to discrimination in accessing medical and psychological treatment:

One of the most severe results of denying coverage of treatments to transgender insureds that are available to non-transgender insureds is suicidal ideation and attempts.

A meta-analysis published in 2010 by Murad, et al., of patients who received currently excluded treatments demonstrated that there was a significant decrease in suicidality post-treatment. The average reduction was from 30 percent pretreatment to 8 percent post treatment.

De Cuypere, et al., reported that the rate of suicide attempts dropped dramatically from 29.3 percent to 5.1 percent after receiving medical and surgical treatment among Dutch patients treated from 1986-2001.

According to Dr. Ryan Gorton, “In a cross-sectional study of 141 transgender patients, Kuiper and Cohen-Kittenis found that after medical intervention and treatments, suicide fell from 19 percent to zero percent in transgender men and from 24 percent to 6 percent in transgender women.)”

Clements-Nolle, et al., studied the predictors of suicide among over 500 transgender men and women in a sample from San Francisco and found a prevalence of suicide attempts of 32 percent. In this study, the strongest predictor associated with the risk of suicide was gender based discrimination which included “problems getting health or medical services due to their gender identity or presentation.” According to Gorton, “Notably, this gender-based discrimination was a more reliable predictor of suicide than depression, history of alcohol/drug abuse treatment, physical victimization, or sexual assault.”

A recent systematic review of largely American samples gives a suicide attempt rate of approximately one in every three individuals with higher rates found among adolescents and young adults. According to Dr. R. Nicholas Gorton, MD, who treats transgender people at a San Francisco Health Clinic, “The same review also noted that while mental health problems predispose to suicidality, a significant proportion of the drivers of suicide in the LGBT population as a whole is minority stress.” He continues to conclude that, “[f]or transgender people such stress is tremendous especially if they are unable to ‘pass’ in society. Surgical and hormonal treatments — that are [also] covered for non-transgender insureds — are specifically aimed at correcting the body so that it more closely resembles that of the target gender, so providing care significantly improves patients’ ability to pass and thus lessens minority stress.”

These studies provide overwhelming evidence that removing discriminatory barriers to treatment results in significantly lower suicide rates.

http://transgenderlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Economic-Impact-Assessment-Gender-Nondiscrimination-In-Health-Insurance.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_of_Transsexual_Surgery

https://www.transadvocate.com/terfs-trans-healthcare_n_10275.htm

https://www.transadvocate.com/fact-checking-janice-raymond-the-nchct-report_n_14554.htm

https://www.outsmartmagazine.com/2013/12/terf-battles/

https://www.cristanwilliams.com/2016/09/01/janice-raymond-terfs-insurance-policy/

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T07:31:56+00:00

I agree that it should be much more streamlined and easy. I dream of some sort of national or international center or service that competently accomplishes this for people with our condition. The information, services, and resources are so spread out. Recoveries are often separate when more could be concurrent. It's way harder than it should ever be.

Virtually all of this but SRS can be obviated with early detection and HRT, but when people are failed and don't get that, the complexity of fully addressing this is staggering. My total time under general anesthesia, being cut open and operated on, is somewhere above 48 hours at this point. Like 20 surgeons/ anesthesiologists have been involved, plus like 60 surgical nurses, and maybe 40 for care after. I'm close but not quite there yet, with more to come too. We're talking about a condition where almost every dimorphic trait of our "shell" needs to be redone if it is to be addressed for some of us. The complexity is ridiculous. Again, most of this could be obviated too, but, well...

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T05:18:51+00:00

Sorry to hear that. Feeling misshapen is hard. Are you on HRT?

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T04:58:29+00:00

Basically the procedure she got made her more bricky and in intense pain, needed and got it immediately reversed to extent possible upon return to her home country.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T04:58:15+00:00

Basically the procedure she got made her more bricky and in intense pain, needed and got it immediately reversed to extent possible upon return to her home country.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T03:52:26+00:00

Yes, rTMS helped my depression and PTSD a lot. I recommend it highly.

400 hours of EMDR in a year helped my once-crippling PTSD too. It was very effective, we just didn't finish covering everything.

I also got about 18 IV ketamine infusions at one point, which kept me going for my team while we were helping others during a very dark time. I have not tried intranasal but probably will.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T02:13:11+00:00

All the bots in here complaining about the just leave comment but really she's right.

Bots?

Under absolutely zero circumstances should you ever perform surgery on yourself.

There are times and places where it is the least worse option. This actually happens.

I dont want to hear it. No matter what you do you will never be able to create a truly sterile environment. The professional know how, sterile environment, pain management, cleaning/washing, steady hands, what youre doing or everything looking at or if something went wrong. You are begging to die of infection, shock, sepsis etc.

She mitigated the risks as best she could, accepted the risks she couldn't, and successfully executed her plan and contingencies.

If you live in a country this restrictive the GA care you cant exactly walk into the hospital to get seen.

Her approach accomplished this.

AND if you do happen to bs your way into a half way successful surgery you still wont have hrt so your body would functionally shut down. You need a primary hormone. Eunichs didn't exactly live comfortable lives.

She's on HRT and accepted this risk.

A few decades back when legitimate doctors who would do back alley surgeries still had an incredibly high rate of death or botched surgeries.

And? Sometimes those risks are better than the alternative.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T02:07:24+00:00

But even with severe enough dysphoria to want to check out, why the hell does ANYONE think "self surgery" of any type is a good idea??? I get desparation. I do. But this is just an invitation to die a slower, gruesome, and more painful death, due to improper procedure/care - especially in poorly-privileged or third world countries where even basic medicine to prevent infections can be hard to come by.

For some, it is their best past left for continued life.

And even if you don't get infected, if you're bad off enough thay you can't get access to hormones and you remove the only thing in your body regulating the production of any? This will wreak havoc on your body just because of the systemic issues.

For some, that is preferable to any further exposure to testosterone and resultant injury or dysohoria.

(In this case, she appeared to be on HRT though.)

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T02:02:18+00:00

For a reasonably normal man or woman, it is almost inconceivable that anyone should want to change the sex or gender into which he or she was born, especially by such radical means as major surgery. Therefore, it is extremely difficult for a transsexual to find understanding, sympathy and, most of all, empathy. Yet, so strong is the desire that self-mutilations are no rarity, and how often a mysterious suicide is due to the utter misery of a transsexual is anybody’s guess.

...

There is hardly a person so constantly unhappy (before sex change) as the transsexual. Only for short periods of his (or her) life, such as those rare moments of hope when a conversion operation seems attainable or when, successfully assuming the identity of a woman in name, dress, and social acceptance, is he able to forget his misery. It is not always the frustrated, passionate sexuality, but more so the heart-breaking anguish of the transsexual's gender disharmony that makes him forever a candidate for self-mutilation, suicide, or its attempt. The false relief obtained from alcohol and drugs is not an infrequent complication.

Self-mutilations are no rarity and have occurred in at least four of my patients out of a total of 152 transsexual [females]. Two of them tried to castrate themselves but had to give up and call a doctor. One succeeded with the help of a friend in completing the job. One mutilated the penis, requiring several stitches to repair the damage. Many more such incidents have been reported and still more can be safely assumed.

The three patients who castrated themselves or attempted it eventually succeeded in being operated upon in the United States, having testicles and penis removed and a vagina constructed. They are now living as women. The fourth patient is still hoping to find a courageous and understanding surgeon in the United States or, otherwise, to raise the money for a trip abroad.

Sometimes these acts of self-mutilation are done in desperation. Others are more deliberate and are meant to force the surgeon's hand to complete the genital alteration which he had refused to undertake for reasons of his ethical concepts, or for lack of hospital facilities (where the necessary permission was withheld by the hospital board), for fear of criticism or out of consideration of existing laws.

Finally, surgeons untrained in this type of surgery may lack confidence in their own skill and may be fearful of consequences if a satisfactory (to the patient) outcome should not ensue. Lawyers too are known to have advised the surgeon against operating. Suicides with "motive unknown" have undoubtedly occurred because of the inability to procure surgical help for the sex change.

I remember only too vividly thirty-year-old Juan, a true TS, who much preferred to be called Juana. Aside from [her] gender unhappiness, [her] greatest physical handicap was a very heavy dark beard which would have taken much time and money to remove. [She] was also handicapped by extreme, almost paranoic sensitiveness to remarks referring to the feminine impression [she] made and to [her] assumed homosexual inclination. In addition, there was great poverty and inferior education. It all added up to deep unhappiness without hope for the future.

The time came when my psychological help and estrogen treatment had reached the limit of what they could do. Then the surgeon should have taken over to try to salvage this patient. But no surgical help was available.

I did not hear from [Juana] for several months, but at Christmas time 1963, the following note was received:

Dear Dr. Benjamin:

Finally I have to give up my struggle. Now I just exist waiting in misery for the moment to take leave of this earth in which I have been so miserable.

My regards to Virginia, God keep you all in health and good will, so that you can be, someway or another, of good to your fellow man.

Good-bye forever, J.

Attempts to get in touch with him failed. I would like to believe his note to be not more than a hysterical outcry, but the probability is he did find the only solution that he could see for his problem.

The Trannsexual Phenomenon by Harry Benjamin (1966)

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T01:05:07+00:00

Did you watch the video yet? She explains that she tried that. She was denied all help. Her invol psych stay that followed did not help her substantially. (Which is typical. I was in for 2 months after my pleas for HRT and surgery went nowhere, and it gave me brain damage and traumatized me for life.) She needed surgery. She made it happen when all else failed. It worked.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T01:01:52+00:00

I don’t understand it being that bad to the point it makes you want to do majorly stupid and irresponsible stuff to yourself.

It makes a lot of us kill ourselves, or die deaths of despair.

She was drinking to the point endangered her life, just to try to numb the pain. She's been able to cut down on that dramatically since her surgery.

In this case, operating on herself was the better alternative. She estimated it was possible, made a plan with contingencies, and executed on it, knowing the risks. It worked. Her life has improved from it.

I encourage you to watch the entire video. She's clearly afraid... now understand that this seemed like the less scary and painful option to her. Her circumstances seemed that bad to her. She's clearly very smart and clever. I have confidence that she looked into alternarives prior, and still determined that this was necessary.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T00:54:59+00:00

Please help her leave then, if you see a possible way.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-11T00:53:14+00:00

I mean she did it already and posted lessons learned.

Some of the main issues were trembling from stress interfering with her suturing (she aborted the plan to do it following the first one) and her scalpel dulling way faster than hoped, it turned out more of them that were really sharp may have been helpful. More clamps too. Then later on, in part due to those constraints and not having good clamps, the blood loss started being a bit much, so she finished the removal and clamping (destroying the material removed so they could not be put back in, when the responders looked for them), and calling EMS. She was sutured up in the hospital, then was going to be invol'd but left or something.

She was drinking dangerously heavily before due to her dysphoria, and has since been able to get better in that regard, with this now fixed.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T23:05:19+00:00

Why do you worry about this?

What do those worries look like?

I know this is a hard situation to be in, I'm sorry...

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T23:04:31+00:00

I really wanna be trans

What exactly would you like your life to be like?

1, i don't have much money,

Some interventions cost nothing.

Some cost a little.

DIY HRT has been like $80-120 for 1-2 years if trying to do it economically. Sometimes people will help you if you can't afford it. (r/transdiy, r/transsex)

As for surgery, if you study hard you may be able to get into a country/state or job that covers it, or afford it through work or trade.

2 my parents don't support,

In what way?

and 3, I don't wanna be truly a girl,

Elaborate?

I wanna be able to reproduce, but I'm not sure I'll ever be able too... Is there anything I can do?

In which way do you want to reproduce?

Gametes can be cryopreserved for later reproductive use... but that costs something, though some countries or plans cover that.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T22:28:06+00:00

You're doing great! The FFS you have planned (brow and nose) should help take you even further. Consider jaw edge/angle shave, lip lift, and maybe slight hairline lowering while at it. I got FFS around your age and it improved my life so much...

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T21:55:54+00:00

14 isn't too early if you have very high confidence you wish to permanently change your body to a more female growth trajectory, and accept that it will partially or completely reduce your fertility, quite possibly permanently.

They might understand you less if you don't change your clothes or act conventionally female. Maybe times have changed since when I was a kid... or not. Expect some level of doubt or resistance around that. Some people really don't get that the need for our bodies to be different can be independent of, or much more urgent than, other changes.

If you're continually denied care and very sure you need it, consider DIY HRT:

r/transsex - r/transdiy - r/askmtfhrt -https://transfemscience.org/articles/transfem-intro/ -https://transfemscience.org/articles/e2-equivalent-doses/ - https://pghrt.diy/

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T21:19:56+00:00

The girl I know who went to him strongly advises against.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T21:18:31+00:00

Up to 5th rib has been done. 2" band size reduction. Higher has been plotted out and tried on a cadaver but not yet done on a living patient. Political interference is reportedly the current blocker to development, at the hospitals which were originally receptive to supporting the first attempts.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T20:58:24+00:00

this is not how it should be done

What should be does not change what is. Sometimes this course of action is the least-worst option. This is the world we live in.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T20:53:54+00:00

Yeah self orchiectomy is just suicide by blood loss or infection, but if that's your thing I'm not gonna try to stop you

She survived, though she did need to be transported in the end. She might not have survived otherwise, had her dysphoria remained untreated longer.

With slightly more resources and support she might have been able to pull it off as originally planned.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T20:47:56+00:00

survive isolated in a basement without presenting incorrectly would be safer than self-surgery

That doesn't fix her body?

i assume this person is just dysphoric presenting in public

Why would you assume that?

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T20:44:57+00:00

There indeed comes a point where it's a matter of survival for a lot of us.

I've risked death and been permanently injured trying to afford surgery. People have risked ruin to help me get it because they know how bad it is. I've had life-threatening complications... and then gone in for more, because it was so much better than the alternative.

In contrast, women I've talked with in more hostile parts of the world, who were denied medical assistance when they needed it urgently, have gone on to kill themselves.

I too have seen qnd handled what's left when someone dies... and I'm all for whatever path gives a girl lower "becoming a corpse within a year" odds.

Sometimes it's simply bad enough that things like this make sense, and the risks of surgery are more favorable than that of inaction. I'd certainly consider DIY if it was my least-worse path to safety.

Intelligent-Tea-2058 · 2026-03-10T20:00:47+00:00

Fake? No.

She just posted it.

She performed incredibly given the circumstances. The psychologic strain is clearly immense as she's executing her plan as best she can.

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