Sex Reassignment Surgery (male-to-female) - History

History

Lili Elbe was the first known recipient of male-to-female sex reassignment surgery in Germany in 1930. She was the subject of five surgeries: one of penectomy and orchiectomy, one intended to transplant ovaries, two to remove the ovaries after transplant rejection, and vaginoplasty. However, she died three months after her fifth operation.

Christine Jørgensen was likely the most famous recipient of sex reassignment surgery, having her surgery done in Denmark in late 1952 and being outed right afterwards. She was a strong advocate for the rights of transsexual people.

Another famous person to undergo male-to-female sex reassignment surgery was Renée Richards. She transitioned and had surgery in the mid-1970s, and successfully fought to have transsexual people recognized in their new sex.

The first male-to-female surgeries in the United States took place in 1966 at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. The first physician who performed sex reassignment surgeries in the United States was the late Dr. Elmer Belt. He stopped doing these surgeries in the late sixties.

Read more about this topic:  Sex Reassignment Surgery (male-to-female)

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race.
    Eliza Archard Connor, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 9, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)