‘History is repeating itself’: The story of the nation’s first clinic for gender-affirming surgery
Nearly 60 years ago, Johns Hopkins Hospital opened a first-of-its-kind clinic to provide gender-affirming surgery. The Gender Identity Clinic blazed a new trail, with more than a dozen new clinics opening across the country in the decade that followed.
But in 1979, the clinic shut its doors. And while the institution claimed for years that the decision was made based on the evidence — which, they argued, showed such surgeries didn’t benefit patients — new research by a Johns Hopkins medical school student reveals a different story. The student, Walker Magrath, dug through years of archived correspondence and notes at both Johns Hopkins and Harvard University, and found that internal politics and pushback from hospital leadership ultimately caused the clinic to close.
