Reddit reviews Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology

-1931 (Germany)- Dora Richter likely becomes the first person to undergo a vaginoplasty. This was an experimental procedure & extremely groundbreaking in its success. Richter had previously undergone the prerequisite operation of castration in 1922. Then she underwent the penectomy & vaginoplasty in this single surgery. Unfortunately she’s thought to have died in the 1933 incident mentioned later. Her patient details are here.

-1931 (Germany)- The 1st transgender celebrity, Lili Elbe becomes the second trans woman to undergo a vaginoplasty. Elbe is quite famously the subject of the 2015 Oscar garnering film “The Danish Girl”. Her penectomy and castration was performed a year prior. She underwent further operations after the vaginoplasty also in 1931 that included an orchiectomy, an ovary transplant, & an ultimately unsuccessful experimental uterine transplant which caused her death from infection, in that era where many antibiotics & anti-rejection drugs did not exist. She was likely the first attempted uterine transplant patient. (That particular procedure is something we are only now finding success on in our time.) A Telegraph article on her story.

-1932 & 1933 (Germany)- Non-medical but related events: With the rise of Adolf Hitler to chancellor and an increasingly extreme political atmosphere in Germany, Dr. Magnus Hirschfield (a gay man himself) is continuously persecuted for his progressive work and ultimately is forced to flee the country in 1932. Then in 1933 Nazi authorities organized attacks on Hirschfield’s Institute (mentioned here), destroying the building, burning its records, & overtaking anyone present. (Actual photo of the record & book burning). Former patient Dora Richter worked as a maid at the institute at this time. Along with other employees & patients she was attacked during the ransacking & is not known to have survived. These events effectively halted the progress of this work in Germany for the duration of the 2nd World War &the reconstruction afterward. Indeed many such transgender people of the country would come to be killed in the The Holocaust. They were included in the “Pink Triangle” classification of Nazi prisoners.

-1936 (London)- Olympic champion Mark Weston (won his medals as Mary Louise Edith Weston) undergoes reassignment surgery, in what is likely the first one performed in England. [Note we now begin to see the ripple effect process of the work done in Germany, having been shared & studied by other practitioners, begin to spread further throughout Europe.] A contemporaneous newspaper account of him from the Reading Eagle is here.

-1936 (Russia)- Dr. N. Bogoras (full name- Nikolaj A. Bogoraz) publishes the details of the first attempted total phalloplasty using skin grafts. (Many of the articles on him are locked behind research site access blocking walls, like these, but if you have academic access to them through a university affiliation you can read them in full, if not check the abstracts for summaries.)

-1939 (England)- By the end of the 1930s, a total of 25 "sex change" report stories have appeared in British newspapers. 11 having occurred in Britain, while the rest were mainly European. (Per "Bodies, Sex & Desire from the Renaissance to the Present" by Fisher & Toulanan, 2011, p. 107.)

-1943 (England)- Sir Lennox Ross Broster is sensationally reported to be performing sex change operations by The News of the World, that’s not exactly correct. But Broster is performing numerous genital operations on intersex patients. And would come to treat transgender patients later on in the 1950s, when he collaborates with psychiatrist John Randell. Broster is mentioned here.

-1946 (England)- Michael Dillon publishes the first major English language work recalling transgender patients experiences in “Self: A Study in Ethics & Endocrinology”. It is still available for purchase on Kindle here.

-1946-49 (England)- Michael Dillon becomes the 1st female-to-male patient to undergo phalloplasty performed & pioneered by Sir Harold Gillies, it is the 1st total technique for female-to-male sexual reassignment surgery. This is the exact procedure is still the modern standard. A NY Times article.

-1948 (USA)- Famous American sexologist Alfred Kinsey comes across a transgender patient, a child who expresses they "wanted to become a girl”. He met them in the course of working on his seminal research “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”. This is the 1st known reference to a youth transgender person. Kinsey had not see a such patient of the age of the child before & so consults with specialist Dr. Harry Benjamin about them.

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(Edits: spelling/grammar)

If you're into history I'd suggest grabbing a copy of "Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology" by Michael Dillon written in 1946 by a physician who also happened to be one of the first (known) British FTM people to under go corrective surgery. Dillon also later assisted Roberta Cowell with her corrective surgery. The book itself is quite easy to read, though there are a few sections that may be difficult unless you know your biology. Fascinating frontier work.