Speaker 1: Podcast I am Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, and
Speaker 1: that was another fail to attempt to introduct. Introduce, introduction,
Speaker 1: start my podcast about bad people you shouldn't have acts
Speaker 1: the standard. Man, I really liked it. Yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: a need to change it. Do you get a haircut
Speaker 1: or something? Man, I get a lot of haircuts. I
Speaker 1: don't know. You know something different? You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Go get a mohawk and keep the greeting the same.
Speaker 1: I think frosted mohawk. Technically, yeah, frost to tips. Get
Speaker 1: some frost and tips and leave the lips. No. I
Speaker 1: feel that like George Lucas, like, I'm not really an
Speaker 1: artist unless I am tinkering with my work past the
Speaker 1: point where it works and to the point where no
Speaker 1: one enjoys it anymore. But your real artist man splaining,
Speaker 1: and you still have that. Well, Actually, Sophie, this episode,
Speaker 1: I'm going to have you explained the asterday I wrote
Speaker 1: about who you have never heard of? So this will
Speaker 1: be a short episode of the show. M Hi, I'm
Speaker 1: Sophia Alexander. You guys just out here giving him ship,
Speaker 1: didn't You didn't even enter your guests because I interrupted him?
Speaker 1: It was just a train wreck from the out of
Speaker 1: the jump. Um, good god, you're not even tor like
Speaker 1: shady like eye looks. We keep giving each other about
Speaker 1: all deserved. I'm very hungover right now. Um, so this
Speaker 1: is a ship show in so many ways, Sophia, Hi,
Speaker 1: Alexandra private parts unknown and for fiance, bitch we out,
Speaker 1: that's right, Sophia. Yeah. Do you know about a guy
Speaker 1: named John Ronald Brown? Yeah? I sucked him last week. No,
Speaker 1: I don't know who. I hope not. I really really,
Speaker 1: you will not want to have fucked this guy after
Speaker 1: I'm here. He is, Uh, he is a genocider of
Speaker 1: just babies, And I'm sure that I will want to
Speaker 1: kill myself by the end of this, like I usually do,
Speaker 1: because that's what you do to invite me here. No,
Speaker 1: you know, a genocider of babies. So babies aren't very tough, right,
Speaker 1: So if you're killing babies, it's probably pretty quick, right,
Speaker 1: Like they just can't handle a lot, probably, he said,
Speaker 1: John Ronald Brown. This might be our darkest episode because, um,
Speaker 1: because like the crime is the darkest because like obviously
Speaker 1: we've talked about people have killed a lot more people.
Speaker 1: Georgia Tan killed a lot more people, but the things
Speaker 1: that he did to people are so gruesome and ghastly.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking about a lot of botched surgery today,
Speaker 1: So oh my god, dude, I watched that show Botched
Speaker 1: all the time. This is perfect for me. This is
Speaker 1: like the most the worst version of that. Um we're
Speaker 1: talking about a doctor who abused trans people for years.
Speaker 1: So ah, dude, really, yeah, it's not a good it's
Speaker 1: what I'm not here? Does he talk about he hates
Speaker 1: me the most? I don't like all of the guests.
Speaker 1: Is that what happened? Yeah, it's literally his hobby. You
Speaker 1: are a bastard among bastards. I'm the real bad guy
Speaker 1: of the series, except for in the case of this episode,
Speaker 1: because John Ronald Brown is even worse than I could
Speaker 1: hope to be. All right, let's do this. So, if
Speaker 1: you were like a trans woman in like the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: your options would be pretty much limited to like the
Speaker 1: cosmetic you know, shaving, wearing, you know, the clothing of
Speaker 1: your of your choice makeup. There weren't like options for surgery, right,
Speaker 1: and so even many like pretty woke writers who had
Speaker 1: a deep understanding of the community in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: In early nineteen hundreds would kind of lump transgender women
Speaker 1: in with transvestites and usually just use the word transvestite.
Speaker 1: And nowadays that's like definitely an insult, but kind of
Speaker 1: and you're reading stuff from like the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: a lot of times they actually are trying to be
Speaker 1: like understanding. It's just like the verbage hadn't evolved very
Speaker 1: far at that point. The first person to transition medically
Speaker 1: was probably Lily Elbe, who did so in nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: with the help of pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. In addition
Speaker 1: to having an incredible name, Magnus was one of the
Speaker 1: bravest scientists in history. He was homosexual himself, and he
Speaker 1: had to hide being gay in order to practice medicine
Speaker 1: at the highest levels of German society. Uh and in
Speaker 1: spite of this, he established a career as a tireless
Speaker 1: advocate for LGB in particularly t individuals. In Berlin. In
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety seven, he founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which
Speaker 1: was dedicated to ending the stigma against homosexuality and to
Speaker 1: criminalizing it in germanys this eighteen ninety seven, so Magnus
Speaker 1: ahead of the curve. Big Magnus energy over there, Big
Speaker 1: Magnus energy. It's interesting to me that he's like such
Speaker 1: an advocate while also being a closeted gay man himself,
Speaker 1: because I think there was this understand that, like, well,
Speaker 1: I won't be able to actually do this work very
Speaker 1: effectively if kind of everyone knows. Um, because it's Germany
Speaker 1: and eight. Um, that's an incredible sacrifice to make to
Speaker 1: take closeted so you can help other people be themselves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was an amazing guy. Um. Now. One of Magnus's
Speaker 1: achievements was the establishment of an LGBT self help group
Speaker 1: and probably the first self help group of like sort
Speaker 1: of in the modern sense of the word, where queer
Speaker 1: individuals in Berlin and again in the eighteen nineties and
Speaker 1: early nine hundreds couldn't meet and discuss their issues. By
Speaker 1: creating a space where these people could gather, Magnus also
Speaker 1: gathered for himself the first large sample population of queer
Speaker 1: men and women ever studied in a systematic and scientific way.
Speaker 1: He circulated a questionnaire among them and received answers from
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of people. Um. Because he was able
Speaker 1: to actually do like like longitudinal sort of like survey
Speaker 1: work on the gay community prior to World War One. Um,
Speaker 1: so there's obviously like groundbreaking ship, but obviously, given the
Speaker 1: time it was, it was not perfect and you would
Speaker 1: not consider like the wording that he used for everything
Speaker 1: ideal in the modern sense of the word. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from the Guardian now Elb, who was that uh,
Speaker 1: one of the transgender women that he worked with, was
Speaker 1: reportedly disgusted by the questionnaire and the ambiguity of trans
Speaker 1: sexuality as it was represented in the institute. She described
Speaker 1: being requested to answer all these very rude and strict questions,
Speaker 1: says Rainy or Herne, a sexology researcher at Charite Hospital
Speaker 1: in Berlin, she refused the descriptions of sexual intermediates such
Speaker 1: as transvestites and hermaphrodites was not acceptable for her. For her,
Speaker 1: there was no ambiguity. She was a woman, so she
Speaker 1: was very irritated by the whole process. So even like
Speaker 1: a guy like Herschfeld doesn't really understand like transgender, like that,
Speaker 1: like the like the nature that doesn't understand what's going
Speaker 1: on with Elb. And I don't think anyone really has
Speaker 1: a vocabulary here. So like a lot of people I
Speaker 1: think who were trans back then probably would have called
Speaker 1: themselves something different, just because, like the state of development
Speaker 1: of the vocabulary area was so much more primitive. Um.
Speaker 1: But Hirchfield agreed to help Elb transition, and with his assistance,
Speaker 1: she underwent surgery to have her testicles removed in Berlin,
Speaker 1: and then she underwent further surgeries in Dresden. Now these
Speaker 1: were mostly cosmetic surgeries. Um. But as her points out,
Speaker 1: just cosmetic surgery was not enough for Alb. Quote. Elb
Speaker 1: wanted to have implanted ovaries and a uterus because at
Speaker 1: that time, to be a real woman you had to
Speaker 1: be capable of having children. That was her ideal. She
Speaker 1: was obsessed by this, and Elb's biography, which is based
Speaker 1: on her diaries, she always fantasizes about being a complete woman.
Speaker 1: So obviously then is now technology did not make that possible. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't think we can do that now. In nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty one, it was not a thing medical science was
Speaker 1: up to the task of doing. Uh An Elb's body
Speaker 1: rejected the new womb and she died of heart failure
Speaker 1: on September nineteen thirty one. Yeah, it's a real bummer
Speaker 1: of a story. Um. And there's a there's a good
Speaker 1: book about her, uh, the title of which I thought
Speaker 1: I included in here, but I did not. It'll be
Speaker 1: on Behind the Bastards dot Com in our in our
Speaker 1: Stars notes. So Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research was
Speaker 1: destroyed by the Nazis and his records were destroyed once
Speaker 1: Hitler came to power. If you google Nazi book burning,
Speaker 1: the pictures that you get are the Hirschfeld library being
Speaker 1: burned by the Nazis. And this was a major setback
Speaker 1: for humanity and particularly for LGBT individuals, as much of
Speaker 1: what Magnus had been studying where that was like the
Speaker 1: biological roots of homosexuality. Uh. And in some ways science
Speaker 1: still has not recovered from this loss. It took up
Speaker 1: until like really the last like ten or fifteen years
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, where like we started to
Speaker 1: rebuild to the level that he was he was getting
Speaker 1: to be at in the thirties. Have you seen the
Speaker 1: show Transparent, No, they do flashbacks to to this, to
Speaker 1: the to the whole story, yeah, to all the clear people,
Speaker 1: and then to the book burning. It's not really like
Speaker 1: told and like a chronological kind of like and then
Speaker 1: this happened scene a just a little flashes every episode
Speaker 1: for the season, for this one season anyway. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a bummer of a tail um. So yeah, the Nazis,
Speaker 1: as Nazis do, really uh jammed a finger in the
Speaker 1: eye of progress. But progress did not stand still in
Speaker 1: other developments in the early twentieth century had a major
Speaker 1: impact on the development of gender transitioning. In nine, estrone,
Speaker 1: a female hormone, was isolated, followed by estriol. Eventually both
Speaker 1: hormones were classified together as estrogen. Progesterone was isolated and
Speaker 1: described to the first time in nineteen thirty four, testosterone
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty five. Now, it was not a short
Speaker 1: route from isolating these hormones and tooth figuring out how
Speaker 1: to produce them synthetically, but by the nineteen forties, the
Speaker 1: first injectable hormones had been developed, making what we now
Speaker 1: know as hormone replacement therapy possible. So that's like the
Speaker 1: genesis of of HRT. Now, the first person to receive
Speaker 1: what we'd recognize as a modern gender transition was a
Speaker 1: woman named Christine Jorgensen Um and you you might call
Speaker 1: the first guinea pig for injectable hormones, because like people
Speaker 1: really didn't know like how this was all going to
Speaker 1: work until they tried it on her um. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote now from the book Crossing Sexual Boundaries
Speaker 1: by J. R. Kane Demos quote just how confusing the
Speaker 1: whole situation was at the time, as indicated by the
Speaker 1: fact that the physician involved in the case called Jorgenson
Speaker 1: a transvestite in his official account of the case. His
Speaker 1: treatment of Jorgenson was in part surgical castration and a penectomy,
Speaker 1: but the important thing was the massive hormone treatment. Before
Speaker 1: going to Denmark, Jorgensen had been injecting herself with estrogen
Speaker 1: to bring about physiological changes, and after Hamburger and his
Speaker 1: associate examiner, they decided to treat her with massive injections
Speaker 1: of estrogen, much larger than she had given herself. The
Speaker 1: large dose has just changed the shape of Jourgensen's body
Speaker 1: to a more feminine contour, and her behavior, gait, and
Speaker 1: appearance also became more feminine. As her beard became sparser,
Speaker 1: electrolysis was used to remove the remaining hair. The one
Speaker 1: thing they did not do for her was to give
Speaker 1: her a vagina, a failure that was only later partially
Speaker 1: resolved and not particularly satisfactory. Yet she looked and acted
Speaker 1: like a and something that took considerable practice before she
Speaker 1: was satisfied enough to tell her story. So Christine Jorgensen
Speaker 1: went to the press in nineteen one um explicitly against
Speaker 1: her doctor's wishes UM, and her story was an instant,
Speaker 1: like huge media sensation UM. And while the media at
Speaker 1: the time definitely did not treat it with overwhelming respect UM,
Speaker 1: the fact that she was coming out and talking about
Speaker 1: her experience was one of the most important moments in
Speaker 1: the history of transvisibility. Like it was one of those
Speaker 1: things that like it had to happen and it was
Speaker 1: always going to suck. Kind of the first person to
Speaker 1: do it because the media in nineteen fifty one was
Speaker 1: not going to be very tactful, um. But because whenever
Speaker 1: the Jackie Robinson of anything, it sucks. Yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: a little like what you were talking about earlier, Like
Speaker 1: it is awkward. We're kind of in this awkward period
Speaker 1: now of discussing like non binary gender and like trying
Speaker 1: to figure all this stuff in the terminology out and
Speaker 1: it leads to a lot of arguments, but like you
Speaker 1: have to have these awkward periods before you kind of
Speaker 1: like get people used enough to certain ideas that it
Speaker 1: stops being weird and starts being something that like is
Speaker 1: just life. Um. Yeah, So Jourgensen is as important for
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons UM. And in the wake of
Speaker 1: her transition UM, huge numbers of people started writing to
Speaker 1: her doctor, who was again Danish, UM to request the
Speaker 1: surgery for themselves, and in fact, so many people flooded
Speaker 1: Denmark with requests for gender reassignment surgery that the government
Speaker 1: had to enact a law banning it for non Danish
Speaker 1: people out of a fear that they would just be
Speaker 1: flooded by trans people from around the world looking for
Speaker 1: surgery and hormone replacement therapy. So this is like like
Speaker 1: there's all these people who have clearly always been there,
Speaker 1: and when Jorgensen comes out there like, oh, it wasn't
Speaker 1: just this thing that I alone was dealing with, UM,
Speaker 1: And then they kind of flood Denmark with requests for
Speaker 1: surgery because it's the only place doing it at the time. Now,
Speaker 1: the medical community in the fifties was obviously very much
Speaker 1: mixed on the subject of what precisely Christine Jorgensen was.
Speaker 1: Many chiatrists considered her mentally ill and criticized Dr Hamburger
Speaker 1: for using surgery and hormone replacement therapy instead of psychotherapy
Speaker 1: to correct what was seen as a sexual perversion. Well,
Speaker 1: it took a while for them to take it out
Speaker 1: of the d s M as being something that we
Speaker 1: can consider to be abnormal sexuality. So yeah, yeah, decades
Speaker 1: and decades um. And the whole battle over that is
Speaker 1: is very complicated and again beyond kind of the scope
Speaker 1: of this episode, um. But one of the results of
Speaker 1: this whole thing it was that doctor Harry Benjamin popularized
Speaker 1: the term trans sexualism to replace transvestism. So in like
Speaker 1: trans sexual again, we've moved beyond that term these days
Speaker 1: and it's generally seen as rude, but there was a
Speaker 1: time in which that was like the kind of polite
Speaker 1: and medical term used. Yeah, yeah, that was a gain.
Speaker 1: It was a step forward. So over the following years,
Speaker 1: the first gender identity clinics started to be established, starting
Speaker 1: with Johns Hopkins University and then case Western Reserve University
Speaker 1: and then the University of Minnesota to the University of Oregon,
Speaker 1: and Stanford University. Kind of surprising that Minnesota beat Stanford,
Speaker 1: uh for gender identity clinics, but good for Minnesota. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Stanford should have been first. What the funk California you
Speaker 1: would think, right, I mean, California hasn't always been this
Speaker 1: libertine paradise is today. Yeah. Now, um, these institutions began
Speaker 1: to slowly catch up to where Magnus Hirschfeld had been
Speaker 1: back in the thirties. And while their research focused mostly
Speaker 1: on trying to understand and classify what precisely trans people were, uh,
Speaker 1: they also engaged in early sexual reassignment surgeries. Um. Dallas
Speaker 1: Denny's Dallas Denny sorry, a trans rights activist and writer.
Speaker 1: They did the ship at Denny's. Yeah, that's actually right
Speaker 1: after That's fucking tight. It turns out they were terrible
Speaker 1: at surgery, but really good at cooking omelets, so they
Speaker 1: just sort of moved right into that. Man, kid can't
Speaker 1: make an omelet without breaking a few removing a few eggs.
Speaker 1: Am I right there we go. Sorry, who may have
Speaker 1: actually a wrong idea about what an omelet is. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that way. So um. Now, Dallas Denny, um,
Speaker 1: who was a trans woman who trans rights activist and
Speaker 1: a writer, was very critical about some of their about
Speaker 1: like the efforts of these kind of early gender reassignment
Speaker 1: clinics uh And she wrote this quote. The clinics viewed
Speaker 1: sexual reassignment as a last ditch effort to save those
Speaker 1: with whom other therapies and interventions had failed. Those who
Speaker 1: were accepted for treatment were usually prostitutes, those with substance
Speaker 1: abuse problems, sociopaths, those who were schizophrenics, those who were
Speaker 1: profoundly depressed or suicidal, and others who were considered hopeless
Speaker 1: i e. Likely to die anyway. It was a classics
Speaker 1: application of the triage method, with those most likely to
Speaker 1: benefit from the intervention being turned away and the terminal
Speaker 1: cases receiving treatment. So people who like were relatively emotionally
Speaker 1: stable and healthy would be denied the surgery um because
Speaker 1: they would seems like, well, you're fine, you don't need this,
Speaker 1: and like people who were like clearly for probably a
Speaker 1: lot of other reasons, you know, kind of on the
Speaker 1: edge of suicide emergency cases would be given surgery. So
Speaker 1: it meant that and this has this is like had
Speaker 1: an effect that went onto this day because it means
Speaker 1: that like some of the first you know, transgender like people.
Speaker 1: The first people to go through this surgery that were
Speaker 1: studied were people who had a whole lot of other issues,
Speaker 1: which again lad to like. This reinforced this belief that
Speaker 1: they were like fundamentally unhealthy because they wouldn't let healthy
Speaker 1: trans people have the surgery. Um, so it's kind of
Speaker 1: messed up. It's like when people blame Jews for being
Speaker 1: into money and then the only jobs they could have
Speaker 1: as whereas money lenders. It's like, yeah, now, um. Since
Speaker 1: medical schools were often unwilling to help trans patients, the
Speaker 1: private sectors swooped in to offer assistance, because sweet Lady
Speaker 1: capitalism is nothing if not inclusive. Once money is on
Speaker 1: the line. A small number of surgeons, some motivated by altruism,
Speaker 1: others by a desire for cold, hard cash, began to
Speaker 1: service the needs of the trans community. This was i see,
Speaker 1: legal ground to protect themselves from malpractice claims. Many of
Speaker 1: these surgeons required psychiatric clearances. The ones who did not,
Speaker 1: inevitably tended to be sketchier individuals. And this finally brings
Speaker 1: us to the subject of today's episode, John Ronald Brown.
Speaker 1: The long introduction, Oh and now it's time for ads
Speaker 1: you know who won't perform sketchy unlicensed surgery, Sophia, the
Speaker 1: following goods and services, Yes, only licensed surgery um from
Speaker 1: the following goods and services. Oh boy, it's gonna it's
Speaker 1: not gonna be the last ad transition that's uncomfortable in
Speaker 1: this episode. Was not great, Robert, it was not great.
Speaker 1: It was not great. What do you want? No, No,
Speaker 1: not great. A good add transition on a Sophia episode
Speaker 1: that's not gonna have truth, But don't bring me into it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't loop her unto your us thinking, your battleship. You
Speaker 1: know what didn't kill all those babies, dick pills. Here's
Speaker 1: some products, and we're back, all right. You notice I
Speaker 1: got you saying goods and services? Now I do I do?
Speaker 1: You incepted it? In my mind? I know it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: I'll glow, I'll grow inside of you slowly like a fungus, Robert.
Speaker 1: I love funguses. That's where we get all of our
Speaker 1: best mushrooms. I'm just the mushroom of the heart, Sylvia. Yes,
Speaker 1: we've had a little history lesson, and now it's time
Speaker 1: to talk about a terrible person motherfucker. This whole thing
Speaker 1: is a history lesson. Okay. Yeah, John Ronald Brown. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna continually use his middle name because calling
Speaker 1: him John Brown will very much mix him up with
Speaker 1: the guy that we don't want mixed up in this story,
Speaker 1: the hero John Brown. So, John Ronald Brown was born
Speaker 1: in July fourteenth, nineto. I don't know where, and I
Speaker 1: haven't been able to find much, if any, meaningful tales
Speaker 1: about his childhood. He claims in interviews to have been
Speaker 1: the son of a Mormon physician in Utah, which is
Speaker 1: probably where he comes from. John was apparently something of
Speaker 1: a child genius, and he found academic so easy that
Speaker 1: he graduated high school at age sixteen. He was drafted
Speaker 1: into the army at the start of World War Two.
Speaker 1: And I feel like he would lie about graduating at sixteen.
Speaker 1: But I do not feel like you would lie about
Speaker 1: being from Utah. What do you gain from that? No
Speaker 1: one has ever pretended to be from saying anyway, It's
Speaker 1: like lying about coming from Oklahoma City. Yeah, I trust him.
Speaker 1: So he gets drafted into the army at the start
Speaker 1: of World War two, and as a new soldier, he
Speaker 1: was required to take the General Classification Test, which is
Speaker 1: the precursor to the modern as FAB test, which is like,
Speaker 1: are you are what jobs are you smart enough to do?
Speaker 1: In the army? Um. Now, decades later, in interviews with journalists,
Speaker 1: John Ronald Brown would claim to have scored higher on
Speaker 1: this test than any of the other three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people who had taken it previously in Utah. Now, this
Speaker 1: guy is a liar, so he might be lying, But
Speaker 1: I also don't know that you would lie about being
Speaker 1: the smartest man in Utah. Um. Again, I mean, if
Speaker 1: you're the kind of man who lied about being from Utah,
Speaker 1: you would probably lie about being the smartest man in Utah.
Speaker 1: I think he's probably it's just a pile of lies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe it's undred on your S A T S. But
Speaker 1: only when you're not in your hometown. I like, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be surprised if three hundred thousand people was like
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand times the number of people who could
Speaker 1: read fluently in Utah in the nineteen forties. So a
Speaker 1: lot of Utah shade being thrown in this. It is beautiful,
Speaker 1: but not humans. Nobody goes to Utah for humans. It's
Speaker 1: national park to get away from them. Yeah exactly, so,
Speaker 1: um yeah, whatever the truth about how intelligent he was
Speaker 1: visa v. The rest of Utah. Brown score was high
Speaker 1: enough that the Army sent him to medical school. He
Speaker 1: received his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah and
Speaker 1: his medical degree three months later, because apparently that was
Speaker 1: a lot easier in the What the fuck you just
Speaker 1: had a b A and put in an extra three months.
Speaker 1: That's like a summer. I don't think it was hard
Speaker 1: to be a doctor back then. Um, they had just
Speaker 1: locked down that you shouldn't shoot people for arsenic so
Speaker 1: actually have been born earlier. I get some medical people up.
Speaker 1: Oh man, you'd be a doctor. I'd be a colonel.
Speaker 1: We could. We could have a podcast called The Doctor
Speaker 1: Colonel Our Yeah, and it's still it will still be
Speaker 1: a lot of murder, but in real life because there's
Speaker 1: also no contact lenses back then, and I'm very blind,
Speaker 1: so the doctor would be wild as hell. The doctor
Speaker 1: would be wild the driving as well, because none of
Speaker 1: us are wearing seatbelts. Um, just a bunch of blind
Speaker 1: people crashing into each other at big steel cars. It
Speaker 1: sounds awesome, Yeah, it does. It dool kind of rule Now, um,
Speaker 1: the shitty John Brown, as I like to call him,
Speaker 1: moved to Los Angeles to do his internship at Harvard General.
Speaker 1: He finished his internship at the Queen of Angels Hospital
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, and at this point in his budding
Speaker 1: medical career, there seems to have been no sign that
Speaker 1: John was headed for anything but a productive career as
Speaker 1: a man of medicine. John finished his time in the
Speaker 1: military and went on to work as a general practitioner
Speaker 1: in California, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Marshall Islands. Now it's
Speaker 1: possible that all this moving around was just John taking
Speaker 1: advantage of the fact that his skills as a doctor
Speaker 1: gave him the opportunity to see the world. Given what
Speaker 1: comes next, it's even more possible that he fucked up
Speaker 1: in a number of horrifying ways and had to repeatedly
Speaker 1: switch states. That's the case anytime you've got a doctor
Speaker 1: in the forties that you know, got to move him
Speaker 1: to another parish. God, it would be so like I
Speaker 1: would absolutely have been surgerying people back any kind of surgery.
Speaker 1: You want to just leave. I don't want to stay
Speaker 1: in Mississippi. Like cut off an arm. In the next day,
Speaker 1: it'll be awesome. So, um yeah, we don't know precisely
Speaker 1: what he did in his early career or if he
Speaker 1: was terrible from an early point. We only have one
Speaker 1: example of an early funk up, when he botched a
Speaker 1: thyroid actomy and almost lost a patient. Um, and we
Speaker 1: do know that John shouldn't have attempted to perform that
Speaker 1: surgery because he was not a surgeon and was not
Speaker 1: qualified to perform a surgery so early on in his career.
Speaker 1: There is at least one case of him performing surgery
Speaker 1: without being trained to do so. Sunk you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? Oh yeah, you know surgeries Really it's like driving,
Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, you just gotta get in there and
Speaker 1: do it. Put your foot on the gas, close your eyes,
Speaker 1: and start cutting it white meat. You know, that's the
Speaker 1: way it works. So uh. After botching a surgery, John
Speaker 1: decided that he should get training in the field if
Speaker 1: he was going to start cutting into people, and he
Speaker 1: spent two years in Newark City Hospital as a resident,
Speaker 1: and also attended a plastic surgery program in New York's
Speaker 1: Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Unfortunately, he proved to be terrible at
Speaker 1: all of this. He failed repeatedly. The So he goes
Speaker 1: to surgery school, but he fails constantly the exam that
Speaker 1: would actually certify him to perform plastic surgery um and
Speaker 1: then he later brags about this to journalists. Quote, I
Speaker 1: passed the written part of the exam without cracking a book.
Speaker 1: But he says that he failed his orals because his
Speaker 1: domineering father traumatized him and so he couldn't handle confrontation
Speaker 1: with authority figures. He would say that my brain turns
Speaker 1: into cottage cheese whenever he had to do the practical exam,
Speaker 1: which did also stop bragging about not practicing. For being
Speaker 1: a doctor, he had nobody not make you feel good.
Speaker 1: I want you to practice, Yeah, I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: pick my doctors, Like, who do I think has the
Speaker 1: best gut instinct? I'm like, you could wing it. You
Speaker 1: can be my doctor that I want the guy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not how we choose him. Yeah. I want someone
Speaker 1: who's like, looks exhausted from the sheer number of books
Speaker 1: that they've read. Yeah. I want to come in their
Speaker 1: office and be like, damn, I could never read all
Speaker 1: of these. That's how I want to feel. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So in total, John Ronald Brown failed the general surgery
Speaker 1: oral examination twice and the plastic surgery oral examination three times.
Speaker 1: He's not great. Now, this should have stopped him from
Speaker 1: ever performing surgery in a hospital, but it didn't, largely
Speaker 1: because no one really checked up on him. Since he
Speaker 1: completed specialty residencies, he was still considered bored eligible, and honestly,
Speaker 1: it seems like no one was really paying close attention. UM.
Speaker 1: So John got to work surgery all sorts of people,
Speaker 1: and outside of work, he had a somewhat tumultuous life.
Speaker 1: His first wife left him for one of his friends
Speaker 1: while he was in the army. Second life died of
Speaker 1: breast cancer. John moved back from the East Coast to California,
Speaker 1: where he started a medical surgery practice in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Now we don't know how John first learned about Christine
Speaker 1: Jorgensen's transition or how he felt about it, but it's
Speaker 1: plausible to assume his establishment in San Francisco, which was
Speaker 1: then one of the very few places in America where
Speaker 1: trans people had any visibility um would have keyed him
Speaker 1: in on the fact that there was suddenly a major
Speaker 1: demand in this segment of the population for surgeons. And
Speaker 1: particularly surgeons who might not checked or surgeons who might
Speaker 1: not um you know, wanted you to have a doctor's
Speaker 1: note saying that you, uh, you were prepared for the
Speaker 1: surgery surgeons who might just take the cash and do
Speaker 1: whatever you ask them, Like when you go get button
Speaker 1: plants and they put cement in your butt, Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: just in a hotel in Miami. Yeah, so the first
Speaker 1: vaginta that's that was very specific. I mean, that's a case.
Speaker 1: Remember that Vice documentary about people's like lip injections that
Speaker 1: would rock their faces off, So that sounded I'm assuming
Speaker 1: it's the same kind of thing. Yeah, exactly, just putting
Speaker 1: ship into things that you shouldn't be because you're not
Speaker 1: all licensed person and people just trying to save money
Speaker 1: out there and do it under the table. It's amazing
Speaker 1: the desperation for uh something like thicker lips that would
Speaker 1: allow lead you to just like let somebody in a
Speaker 1: hotel room inject you with nonsense. Like so many of
Speaker 1: the stories are like oh and then I was like,
Speaker 1: is there is there no uh anesthesia? And they're like nah.
Speaker 1: I'm like, well that's a really big sign for when
Speaker 1: you're going to get surgery. That you should be an
Speaker 1: under anesthesia, not for lip injections. But you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying when people are like, yeah, I had to
Speaker 1: get butt injections, and they're just like, well, you're gonna
Speaker 1: be wait during this, and like what that? Yeah? So
Speaker 1: uh yeah, in the nineteen sixties, the late sixties, uh,
Speaker 1: doctor started performing the first vagina plastics UM. And again
Speaker 1: we don't exactly know when Brown got into this line
Speaker 1: of work. He probably started providing minor cosmetic surgery to
Speaker 1: transitioning individuals, like facial surgery and stuff like that, UM,
Speaker 1: but he quickly grew interested in doing more extensive work
Speaker 1: UM and by February of nineteen seventy three, John Ronald
Speaker 1: Brown was established enough in the trans community that he
Speaker 1: gave a presentation at the second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender
Speaker 1: Dysphoria Syndrome sponsored by Stanford. Brown's presentation focused on what
Speaker 1: he called his miniaturization technique, in which he would turn
Speaker 1: a patient's penis into a clitterists, thus guaranteeing them the
Speaker 1: ability to continue to experience sexual climax. UM. So that's
Speaker 1: like the thing he starts like, he's probably for years
Speaker 1: working in the community, but he has this idea to
Speaker 1: basically trim a penis down to a clitterist while doing
Speaker 1: a vagina plastic selling point. I mean, it's a good
Speaker 1: selling point. Yeah, it makes sense. Right If someone was like, oh,
Speaker 1: and you can come, I would be like, I don't
Speaker 1: care what you said before that. So yeah, So by
Speaker 1: the fall of that year, Brown had transitioned his own
Speaker 1: career almost entirely towards that sort of work, very few
Speaker 1: other doctors willing to do it, and most charged prices
Speaker 1: that were far out of the reach of many trans people.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. Access is just not like, yep,
Speaker 1: it's financial and whatever and yeah, yeah, well no, you're right,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're right on the money. Because John Brown
Speaker 1: basically establishes himself as the budget surgeon for gender transition um,
Speaker 1: which is not uh, I mean, it's obviously it's a
Speaker 1: necessary thing to have because there's a lot of desperate
Speaker 1: people who need the surgery, But praying on people who
Speaker 1: are just trying to live their lives like lives and
Speaker 1: ruining them physically and otherwise is just evil. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's what we're getting to this period of time
Speaker 1: is when a guy named Paul Ciotti, a journalist for Time,
Speaker 1: met John Ronald Brown. Now Paul covered the LGBT community
Speaker 1: for Time, and he seems to be one of the
Speaker 1: very few mainstream journalists in that period who legitimately cared
Speaker 1: about queer people. Um, if you read through his old articles, like,
Speaker 1: the terminology he uses is not the terms we use today.
Speaker 1: But he's clearly like trying to be understanding and coming
Speaker 1: at this from a place of knowledge as opposed to sensationalism.
Speaker 1: And he kept his ear to the ground and read
Speaker 1: the mimiographed zines that the LGBT community disseminated during this
Speaker 1: period of time to get out vital information. And as
Speaker 1: a result, he ran across a story about a doctor
Speaker 1: on Lombard Street who was, in the words of one columnist,
Speaker 1: lopping people's penises off. So obviously, as a journalist, uh,
Speaker 1: Paul's like, I want to know what's going on here. Uh,
Speaker 1: So he gives a call to Brown's clinic follow up
Speaker 1: on a lobbing penis's off. Lead. That's very promising. Let's
Speaker 1: let's see what's going on. Um. So he calls Brown's
Speaker 1: clinic and he winds up talking to Brown's partner, a
Speaker 1: guy named Dr James Spence, and I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: Siati's article in l a Weekly. Now, Spence struck me
Speaker 1: as a bit of a hustler, far less polished than
Speaker 1: one would expected someone with a medical degree if he
Speaker 1: had a medical degree. To some people, he gave business
Speaker 1: cards reading Dr James Spence, but to me he said
Speaker 1: he'd earned his medical degree in Africa and thus couldn't
Speaker 1: practice here. I later heard he was an ex con
Speaker 1: who claimed to be a veterinarian, but that degree was
Speaker 1: phony too. The clinic wasn't much, just a few rooms
Speaker 1: on a busy street. It seemed more like a real
Speaker 1: estate office than anything else. Sinsing my skepticism, perhaps Spence
Speaker 1: invited me to an upcoming formal dinner at his hilltop
Speaker 1: home in Burlingham, where he and his partner, the renowned
Speaker 1: plastic surgeon doctor John Ronald Brown, would be explaining his
Speaker 1: new operation to a group of urologists, proctologists and internists,
Speaker 1: some of whom Spence hoped would join him and Dr
Speaker 1: Brown and setting up the finest sex change facility anywhere
Speaker 1: in the country. So there's a lot of information in
Speaker 1: those paragraphs, and probably the most interesting is the fact
Speaker 1: that this guy's business partner, Dr James Spence, is in
Speaker 1: no way a doctor. He's even less of a doctor
Speaker 1: than his non doctor partner. Yeah, he's having lied about
Speaker 1: being a veterinarian. So um. Yeah. Dr Brown's practice was
Speaker 1: not exactly on the up and up. Um. Now, despite
Speaker 1: his sketchiness, Brown needed Spence because the good doctor, the
Speaker 1: actual doctor Brown was terrible at meeting people and had
Speaker 1: no connections in the queer community and it was kind
Speaker 1: of an awkward person, was not very good at building connections.
Speaker 1: And at this point, you're really talking about something very
Speaker 1: similar to being a drug dealer, when you're talking about
Speaker 1: being the kind of medical professional like working with this community.
Speaker 1: And so Brown doesn't have the ability to like kind
Speaker 1: of interface the way that a drug dealer needs to
Speaker 1: to build connections and trust in the community. And Spence,
Speaker 1: who is a literal criminal and not at all the doctor,
Speaker 1: is good at doing that and he's able to build
Speaker 1: connections with the gay community. Um. And he helps broker
Speaker 1: deals between John Brown and queer figures like Angela Brown,
Speaker 1: who was the publisher of Mirage magazine, which was like
Speaker 1: an LGBT focused periodical at the time, John Brown helped
Speaker 1: to fund the magazine in exchange for promotion of his clinic.
Speaker 1: Now Pulsati attended the soire Brown and Spence through to
Speaker 1: publicize the opening their new clinic, and here's how he
Speaker 1: described it. This is interesting to me. After the fruit
Speaker 1: and cheese, we adjourned to the kitchen, where one of
Speaker 1: the waitresses lay on a butcher blocked table and casually
Speaker 1: flipped up her skirt. A goose neck lamp was produced,
Speaker 1: and all the doctors proceeded to examine the kind of
Speaker 1: work currently being done by Dr Brown's competition. I'm no
Speaker 1: expert in female anatomy, but the waitresses genitalia did not
Speaker 1: look like those of any woman I'd ever seen. There
Speaker 1: was no clitterest or anything resembling a vagina. It rather
Speaker 1: looked like someone had taken a pickaxe and neatly poked
Speaker 1: a small square hole and inch on aside directly into
Speaker 1: her growing Either that or like an aerial photograph of
Speaker 1: a Manitoba iron ore mine taken from twenty feet. In contrast,
Speaker 1: Spence maintained Brown had developed a revolutionary technique that would
Speaker 1: give transsexuals fully orgasmic clitteresses and esthetically pleasing vaginas. Later,
Speaker 1: Dr Brown and I stood around the kitchen table while
Speaker 1: he displayed what to me were ghastly photographs of his
Speaker 1: surgical technique. One picture showed a gauze noose holding up
Speaker 1: the head of a bloody penis while Brown sliced away
Speaker 1: at the tendrils of unwanted directile tissue. So, and I
Speaker 1: want to emphasize here, Si is not like a squeamish
Speaker 1: dude about all this, Like he's not the kind of dude.
Speaker 1: He's just squeamish about the idea of trans surgeries. What
Speaker 1: he's seeing in Dr Brown's work is like not good.
Speaker 1: It's not the way it should look. Brown and Spence
Speaker 1: are like when serial killers work together, and like Brown
Speaker 1: is the one that stays home and murders, and then
Speaker 1: like Spence is the one and that goes and gets
Speaker 1: the victims because he's like personal, yeah, yeah, except for
Speaker 1: the victims sort of survive and in some ways get
Speaker 1: brought into the clinic. So like one of the ways,
Speaker 1: one of the ways that actually kind of made sense
Speaker 1: that they ran their clinic. So at this time, if
Speaker 1: you were going to like go the legit way to
Speaker 1: get gender confirmation surgery. UM, you would work with a
Speaker 1: psychiatrist and would essentially spend some time taking hormones and
Speaker 1: living as your new gender UM, and then that psychiatrist
Speaker 1: would be like, Okay, I think you're you're ready, You're
Speaker 1: you've committed, Like this is clearly not a passing thing.
Speaker 1: Let's get you the surge. What Dr Brown and his
Speaker 1: uh and Spence said should be done is instead other
Speaker 1: trans women should meet with the people who wanted surgeries
Speaker 1: and vet them, which, on its face it sounds like, okay,
Speaker 1: that might be one a reasonable way to do it.
Speaker 1: Is like these people know what's really involved in the surgery,
Speaker 1: they might be able to do a better job of
Speaker 1: like judging like when someone's like emotionally like ready to
Speaker 1: undergo this thing, you know, when you're talking about the seventies.
Speaker 1: That seems like a pretty pretty advanced way to look
Speaker 1: at it. But the reality is that, um, those people
Speaker 1: are doctors or professionals. They're just they're not doctors or professionals,
Speaker 1: and they're essentially working for Dr Brown as a way
Speaker 1: to pay off their own surgeries. Yeah, so it's not
Speaker 1: there's there's aspects of what he was saying. He wanted
Speaker 1: to do that. I'm like, yeah, that might make sense,
Speaker 1: and then like you really dig into it and it's like,
Speaker 1: oh no, it was just a grift. Okay, the fucking
Speaker 1: MLM scheme man a little bit, except for I don't like,
Speaker 1: none of them are in it to make a profit.
Speaker 1: They're just trying to get this thing that they like
Speaker 1: literally is life and death for them, this surgery. No.
Speaker 1: I just mean like, once they're in, they're getting other
Speaker 1: people involved, and then those people are going to get
Speaker 1: new people involved, and it's just like witness. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not maybe not the best idea, although you can
Speaker 1: see why when he explains it to other people they
Speaker 1: might be like, oh, yeah, that seems like a reasonable
Speaker 1: way to do it. Yeah, and who would know at
Speaker 1: that point. It's not like exactly, this is revolutionary, so
Speaker 1: could be revolutionary, like we know that this is great
Speaker 1: or revolutionary, Like it's just new, that's it. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: to Layman, at least, what Dr Brown claimed to be
Speaker 1: doing made sense. His patients had penises that they wanted
Speaker 1: to transform into vaginas, so he would basically split the penis,
Speaker 1: saving the nerves and blood supply, and then reposition the
Speaker 1: head under a hood of flesh to create a glutorus.
Speaker 1: The penile skin was used to create labia, and the
Speaker 1: hair was removed from the scrutle skin to create the
Speaker 1: lining of a new vagina. In theory, this is a
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable way to do things. This is on paper
Speaker 1: what is supposed to be happening. There were two problems
Speaker 1: probably him. One was that John Ronald Brown had an
Speaker 1: almost pathological aversion to performing surgery in hospitals, medical clinics,
Speaker 1: and anywhere else you might actually want to have major surgery. Dude,
Speaker 1: that's part of the job. Are you kidding me? That's
Speaker 1: like if I'm like, I want to be a comedian,
Speaker 1: but I do not want to be on a stage
Speaker 1: or in a bar, or in a theater or in
Speaker 1: a club. I want to be a comedian, but I
Speaker 1: would like to tell my jokes to the children of
Speaker 1: strangers who I abduct from their elementary school. Is that
Speaker 1: a job? I It's like, No, that's not the job.
Speaker 1: That's just a crime. Um. Yeah. So instead of working
Speaker 1: in like, you know, a clean operating room where it's
Speaker 1: safe to perform surgery, John Ronald Brown preferred to work
Speaker 1: out of his own home UM, which I prefer to
Speaker 1: work out of my home too. I'm working in my home,
Speaker 1: drinking my coffee and wearing my pajamas right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you can't be a stay at home surgeon. That's
Speaker 1: that's a fucked up dream. Like points for dreaming the
Speaker 1: big dream, But you cannot be a stay at home
Speaker 1: surgeon exactly. I performed surgery less than five times a year,
Speaker 1: I would say, um, and you know, mainly to friends
Speaker 1: and enemies. Um so yeah. One early patient recalled going
Speaker 1: to Brown's home office, assuming that they would just receive
Speaker 1: a checkup on a surgery they'd gotten earlier. Instead, she
Speaker 1: woke up from the anesthetic to find that Brown had
Speaker 1: performed surgery on her in his garage. Jesus not great. Um,
Speaker 1: unsettling as that is. Dr Brown was very popular for
Speaker 1: a while as hiss no frills practice made transitioning much
Speaker 1: more affordable than it had ever been before. John's home
Speaker 1: acquired the nickname the House of Dreams, which is fucking
Speaker 1: heartbreak and given what he takes. Yeah. One of John's
Speaker 1: early patients was a woman named Elizabeth. She was initially
Speaker 1: very happy with her new vagina, but a year after
Speaker 1: receiving the surgery, it began to tighten up and essentially
Speaker 1: heal itself closed. When she freaked out about this, John
Speaker 1: was nowhere to be found. Elizabeth had to find another surgeon,
Speaker 1: Dr Jack Fish, sure to bat clean up. When interviewed later, Fisher,
Speaker 1: who had to clean up for a lot of Brown's patients,
Speaker 1: said this, It's hard to imagine anyone worse than John
Speaker 1: Ronald Brown. He didn't care much for evaluating his patients
Speaker 1: before surgery or for post operative care. He was totally
Speaker 1: focused on the technical procedure itself, and he didn't do
Speaker 1: that very well. So this guy is all about the
Speaker 1: technical details of the surgery, and he's also bad at
Speaker 1: the technical details of the surgery. Uh yeah. Now, In
Speaker 1: spite of the sketchiness of Brown's practice and the bad
Speaker 1: experience of a lot of his patients, he was very
Speaker 1: popular among the trans community for a while. Wendy Davidson,
Speaker 1: who helped to organize peer clinics for the trans community,
Speaker 1: which is like clinics, operated like buy in for trans
Speaker 1: people to like provide each other with life saving healthcare.
Speaker 1: Since the government and society did not give a funk
Speaker 1: about them, so Wendy worked with Dr Brown for a
Speaker 1: while until another activist, Donna Colvin, reported that she'd seen
Speaker 1: Brown shooting up valium before performing surgery on patients, sometimes
Speaker 1: on literal kitchen tables. Required the nickname table to browns Now, Sophia,
Speaker 1: you know who won't shoot up valium and perform unlicensed
Speaker 1: surgery and a kitchen tabletop the following goods and services.
Speaker 1: That's right, we're back. Uh we're talking about tabletop Brown.
Speaker 1: Um a terrible surgeon. So, Sophia, how are you feeling
Speaker 1: so far? Feeling pretty peppy? Good things are on the horizon?
Speaker 1: You are You are fiddling with things with your hand
Speaker 1: in such a way that I can almost like taste
Speaker 1: the discomfort in the room, and that means it's a
Speaker 1: good episode. Question until I can show her what this
Speaker 1: guy looks like. Let's wait until the end of episode one. Okay,
Speaker 1: so excited. Oh my god, Now I'm trying to picture.
Speaker 1: I think you might look like, Yeah, it's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a thing. So uh. These stories, stories of like
Speaker 1: him shooting up valium before performing table surgery, took some
Speaker 1: time to percolate out into the wider community. For one thing,
Speaker 1: most of the women engaging Brown services specifically hired him
Speaker 1: because they couldn't afford to go to professional clinics where surgery,
Speaker 1: for example, was performed in a not in a kitchen.
Speaker 1: The fact that he worked out of his house as
Speaker 1: well as hotel rooms and garages was just something that
Speaker 1: these patients had to accept because they were transmarted in
Speaker 1: the seventies and they just weren't a lot of fucking options.
Speaker 1: You know, it was garbage. It's still garbage, but slightly less. Anyway,
Speaker 1: do you think if you got your surgery done in
Speaker 1: the in the kitchen and then you found out your
Speaker 1: friend got there's in a garage, you were like kind
Speaker 1: of big timing them. You're like, oh, yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: you didn't think you were good enough to operate for
Speaker 1: to operate on in the kitchen. Oh you're a kitchen
Speaker 1: or huh, yeah you're a garage. Yeah I was in
Speaker 1: the kitchen. Sorry about that. Sorry about that nice kitchen.
Speaker 1: He had a juice maker. Um So Paul Ciotti, who
Speaker 1: was like the very first journalist to dig into John
Speaker 1: and really like the source of sixty percent of the
Speaker 1: information for this podcast. I really I have a lot
Speaker 1: of I don't know much about the rest of his career,
Speaker 1: but just based on sort of his work in this
Speaker 1: community in this period. I have a lot of admiration
Speaker 1: for him because he's writing for like, Time fucking magazine,
Speaker 1: and he's covering this group of people that like nobody
Speaker 1: else gives a shit about. So good on you, Paul, Um, Yeah, props.
Speaker 1: So Uh. He found John Ronald Brown impressive at their
Speaker 1: first meeting. Uh, And I'm gonna quote from him here.
Speaker 1: I must say he came across as genial, knowledgeable, and
Speaker 1: obviously quite proud of his technique. There was a certain
Speaker 1: naivete and even passivity about him that struck me as
Speaker 1: surprising and a surgeon. But compared to everything else I
Speaker 1: had seen that night, it didn't warrant a second thought.
Speaker 1: So Paul wrote what he describes as a pretty boring
Speaker 1: article about sexual reassignment surgery for Time, since he didn't
Speaker 1: think that Time would publish the wider details about what
Speaker 1: he'd seen. Um And before it went to print, Dr
Speaker 1: Brown called him to beg that Paul not mentioned his
Speaker 1: name in the article. He informed Paul that he and
Speaker 1: Spence had had a falling out and canceled their plans
Speaker 1: to start a clinic. It is uncertain precisely what happened
Speaker 1: between Spence and Brown, but stories later came out that
Speaker 1: he allowed Spence to carry out his own surgeries, and
Speaker 1: again Spence was a fake veterinarian, uh, not even a
Speaker 1: fake doctor. So like something very very sketchy happened between
Speaker 1: him and Spence and they stopped getting along. By nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven, Dr Brown had botched enough surgeries that a
Speaker 1: bunch of other doctors, the ones who had to correct
Speaker 1: his work largely had complained. The California Board of Medical
Speaker 1: Quality Assurance looked into Dr Brown and was shocked to
Speaker 1: realize that he'd worked with a fake veterinarian turned fake
Speaker 1: doctor and let this person perform surgery. They revoked his
Speaker 1: medical license for quote gross negligence and competence and practicing
Speaker 1: unprofessional medicine in a matter which involved moral turpitude, among
Speaker 1: other things. The board was furious with John for allowing
Speaker 1: his patients to work as clinical assistance in order to
Speaker 1: pay off their medical debts to him. So this is
Speaker 1: again what I'm talking about, Like people can't pay all
Speaker 1: up front, and he's like, why don't you be a nurse? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't you don't need to know to be a nurse.
Speaker 1: My my, my partner here is a fake vets exactly.
Speaker 1: My doctor partner is not a doctor. No amous like
Speaker 1: who we say we are here. You want to pretend
Speaker 1: to be a nurse, You want to pretend to be
Speaker 1: a nurse. I'll shave a couple grand off the cost.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to quote from Palsiati again. Among other things,
Speaker 1: the board charged Brown allowed Spence to hold himself out
Speaker 1: as an m D. He allowed unlicensed people, including other
Speaker 1: transsexual patients, to write prescriptions under his signature, diagnosed patients,
Speaker 1: and provide medical care. He misrepresented sex change surgery and
Speaker 1: insurance forms is corrective surgery for the congenital absence of
Speaker 1: a vagina. He exhibited gross negligence by failing to perform
Speaker 1: sex change operations in an acute care facility. Brown did
Speaker 1: them in his office on an outpatient basis. He unaccountably
Speaker 1: failed to hospitalize a patient who had a life endangering
Speaker 1: and puss infected wound the size of a softball where
Speaker 1: his penis used to be. He failed to take medical
Speaker 1: histories or do physical exams before surgery, and he did
Speaker 1: sex change surgery on virtually anyone who asked for it,
Speaker 1: regardless of whether they were physically or emotionally stable enough
Speaker 1: to cope with it. Um And I think that's uh
Speaker 1: where her penis should be. I'm not really sure about
Speaker 1: how that patient identified. As a general rule, Paul's pretty
Speaker 1: careful about not miss gendering people. But it was the seventies.
Speaker 1: Um And yeah, yeah, I think I think he's better
Speaker 1: than most people. UM. So at that point in history,
Speaker 1: many credible surgeons required their patients to have lived as
Speaker 1: their chosen gender for at least a year prior to
Speaker 1: receiving surgery. There's a lot that makes sense about this practice,
Speaker 1: but it also meant that many of the people who
Speaker 1: most needed to transition never got the opportunity. If your
Speaker 1: life and job and friends and family couldn't accept you
Speaker 1: living as a woman before actually receiving the surgery that
Speaker 1: would that would make it easy to pass, than you
Speaker 1: just couldn't transition. Um. Some people, including some reputable physicians,
Speaker 1: defended Dr Brown for serving the community when no one
Speaker 1: else would. Uh. The judge who revoked his medical license
Speaker 1: actually filed a memorandum opinion for Brown, calling him a
Speaker 1: pioneer who made innovative contributions to trans sexual surgery despite
Speaker 1: difficulties like performing major surgery on a dinner table. The
Speaker 1: judge suggested that Brown should be limited to perform arming
Speaker 1: surgery and a medically recognized organization rather than being drummed
Speaker 1: out of the field entirely. So that's actually a little
Speaker 1: bit surprising to me that, like, yeah, what a weird
Speaker 1: answer to the situation, Like we still want this guy
Speaker 1: on the team, you know. I think it might just
Speaker 1: be a judge who realized that these people were desperate
Speaker 1: and that no one else was serving them, and is like, again,
Speaker 1: the primitive nature of like our understanding of like um
Speaker 1: gender and particularly trains people at this point means that
Speaker 1: like this might not have seemed as brutal because like
Speaker 1: you have to think they think about early treatments for cancer,
Speaker 1: like they're literally like pouring acid into people's wounds, like
Speaker 1: like hydrochloric acid and ship like that, like trying to
Speaker 1: burn it off from the inside. Um, So medicine tends
Speaker 1: to be brutal, and especially medicine that's kind of on
Speaker 1: the cutting edge, and especially in this period, and I
Speaker 1: think probably there were a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: like well, of course he has a lot of patients
Speaker 1: with bad outcomes. This is new, nobody knows how to
Speaker 1: do it. Well, we're still learning this thing. You know.
Speaker 1: We should just try to make sure he works in
Speaker 1: a good, clean space because he's a pioneer. Like I
Speaker 1: think that's the that's the angle at least from the
Speaker 1: people who are like reasonably um, like compassionate, Like I
Speaker 1: I think he kind of tricked some of them and
Speaker 1: they're like, well, yeah, what he did isn't great, but
Speaker 1: like no one else's is doing this work, and it's
Speaker 1: it's no one else is harming this group of people. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you also have to admit there were hundreds of people
Speaker 1: by this point who had horrible at least dozens who
Speaker 1: had horrible John Brown stories, but there were at least
Speaker 1: as many, if not more, people who had good John
Speaker 1: Brown surgeries. Um, because you know, it's it's some people.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing. That's like one of the difficulties today.
Speaker 1: Some people take really easily to this kind of surgery
Speaker 1: and their bodies heal well and it's very simple for them.
Speaker 1: And you know, between like minor surgery and the hormones,
Speaker 1: they have a really easy transition. And some people because
Speaker 1: of their age, because of just their genetics. It's much
Speaker 1: more complicated. And so there are some people who John
Speaker 1: does his thing on and it works out great for them,
Speaker 1: and they get a good deal and they're grateful and
Speaker 1: they speak his praises and they send other people to him. Um.
Speaker 1: And so it's not just people saying he did a
Speaker 1: horrible job on me. I guess I didn't realize how
Speaker 1: many happy customers he ut. Sounds like you're for him.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to point out, like when I was
Speaker 1: here last time, you were like pro a certain kind
Speaker 1: of dog fight. I am, I'm trow a lot of
Speaker 1: kinds of dog fights. I mean, look, we don't need
Speaker 1: to get into that today. No, sorry, go ahead. Hashtag
Speaker 1: not all dog fights. Um. Hashtag Robert, it's a good hashtag. Sophie,
Speaker 1: it's a good hashtag. So Um. The judges like, this
Speaker 1: guy's a pioneer. We got to stop him from doing
Speaker 1: tabletop surgery. But you know, maybe if we can get
Speaker 1: him to just work in an o R, he can
Speaker 1: do good work. Um. But John Brown did not ache
Speaker 1: this advice or this chance to actually improve his skills
Speaker 1: and serve a community in a responsible way. Instead, he
Speaker 1: moved to Hawaii. UH. He almost immediately lost his permission
Speaker 1: to practice medicine in the state by doing something horrible,
Speaker 1: So he moved to Alaska, and he lost his permission
Speaker 1: to practice medicine in Alaska shortly thereafter. The hits kept
Speaker 1: on coming. In nineteen seventy nine, one of his very
Speaker 1: first vaginal plastic patients sued. Julie had initially reached out
Speaker 1: to Dr Brown about getting breast implants. He had convinced
Speaker 1: her that he could make her, into his words, a
Speaker 1: perfect woman with his new techniques UH, and convinced Julie
Speaker 1: to undergo a full operation UH. Dr Brown was assisted
Speaker 1: in this by not a doctor Spence. The surgery did
Speaker 1: not go well, and Julie sued in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: claiming Dr Brown had left her neither male nor female.
Speaker 1: They settled out of court for enough money to provide
Speaker 1: psychiatric care, help for the rest of Julie's life, and
Speaker 1: a new operation. By the time the court battle was done,
Speaker 1: Dr Brown had basically rendered himself unemployable across the entirety
Speaker 1: of the continentally United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. So next
Speaker 1: he moved to the Caribbean. Fuck, Why you got to
Speaker 1: bring the Caribbean into this? Why you gotta do it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: St Lucia to be specifical. Now, when you read other
Speaker 1: doctors talking about John Brown, they'll note that it was
Speaker 1: considered almost impossible to lose your medical license in the
Speaker 1: Caribbean at that point in time. But John did um
Speaker 1: and he is a pen like people talking about like,
Speaker 1: I don't know how he lost his medical license and
Speaker 1: the fucking Caribbean, but he It must have been horrible.
Speaker 1: So uh, St Lucia was not entirely a loss for
Speaker 1: Dr John Ronald Brown, though in ninety one he fell
Speaker 1: in love there for the third and final time. Love
Speaker 1: might be too strong a word for it. Yeah, love,
Speaker 1: love may not be the proper way to describe this,
Speaker 1: I should say. At age fifty nine, doctor John Brown
Speaker 1: contracted and arranged marriage with the parents of a seventeen
Speaker 1: year old girl who did not English. Oh God, would
Speaker 1: I'd call it buying a woman? Oh yeah, buying a
Speaker 1: woman seems accurate. He seems to have basically paid her
Speaker 1: parents for her hand in marriage. She's a child, no, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: He taught his new wife, Julie to speak English. And
Speaker 1: they had two sons. Uh. In an interview with Paul
Speaker 1: Ciotti decades later, here's how Julie recalled their courtship. He
Speaker 1: asked me if I would like to get married. I said,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I was seventeen, he was fifty nine. Still,
Speaker 1: I'd be remiss if I didn't state that. Julie has
Speaker 1: for years been consistent in expressing her gratitude to Dr. Brown.
Speaker 1: Even after they divorced in the nineteen nineties, she insisted
Speaker 1: to reporters that she still loved him. He raised me.
Speaker 1: He taught me to read and write. He's a really
Speaker 1: good man. If I had to do it again, I'd
Speaker 1: marry him in a heartbeat. That's straight up Stockholm syndrome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fucked up. Like he raised me and taught me
Speaker 1: how to read and write. Yeah, that's it's not okay.
Speaker 1: You can't raise someone and at the same time, that's
Speaker 1: not okay. No, No, you cannot, um no, you cannot.
Speaker 1: I don't have a joke for that. Just pickle an,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Now. Once John lost his
Speaker 1: license to practice in the Caribbean, he was left with
Speaker 1: only one possible option for continuing his medical practice. Do
Speaker 1: I even need to say where he moved next? You know,
Speaker 1: no where to where do where does a California doctor
Speaker 1: go with no other place? P? Yeah, that's right, baba baby.
Speaker 1: Uh no longer legally a doctor, Brown established a new
Speaker 1: plastic surgery clinic in Tijuana while he lived in Chula Vista, California.
Speaker 1: In order to dress up the fact that he was
Speaker 1: illegally performing surgery in Mexico. To avoid US law enforcement,
Speaker 1: Brown described his business as an international practice in brochures. Now,
Speaker 1: he was far from the only doctor to use Tijuana
Speaker 1: as a bay of operations for his underground gender reassignment
Speaker 1: surgery business. A number of physicians, some of whom were competent,
Speaker 1: worked out of the city as well. The two most
Speaker 1: prominent were doctors Biber and Barbosa. In short order, Dr
Speaker 1: Brown established himself as the dude you went to when
Speaker 1: you could not afford either of those other better guys. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was the doctor you went with if you wanted
Speaker 1: a surgery fast. He didn't even require hormone treatment, let
Speaker 1: alone a psychiatrist referral beforehand. Over the course of the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, he earned a reputation as tabletop Brown for
Speaker 1: his willingness to perform surgery basically anywhere. Dallas STINNY. A
Speaker 1: transactivist started hearing horrifying stories about Brown During this time, quote,
Speaker 1: patients were waking up in parked cars or abandoned in
Speaker 1: hotel rooms. There was no screening and no aftercare. Anyone
Speaker 1: who walked in the room was a candidate. Some of
Speaker 1: these people, expecting vagina plastics, received simple penectomies, leaving them
Speaker 1: looking somewhat like a Barbie doll. Others ended up with
Speaker 1: something that looked like a penis which has been soon
Speaker 1: and split to their groin, which is essentially what had
Speaker 1: been done. Some ended up with vaginas which were lined
Speaker 1: with hair bearing scrotal skin. These vaginas quickly filled up
Speaker 1: with pubic hair, becoming inflamed and infected. Some ended with
Speaker 1: paradon titus, some with permanent colostomies. Some ran out of money,
Speaker 1: and we're dumped in back alleys and parking lots to
Speaker 1: live or die. Wow? What a yeah, Yeah, it's a nightmare.
Speaker 1: Um Now, Jack Fisher, who's that plastic surgery professor at
Speaker 1: UC San Diego we talked about earlier, the guy who
Speaker 1: batted clean up for John Brown. A lot concurs with
Speaker 1: Dallas's summary of Dr Brown's competence. And again, this is
Speaker 1: the guy who spent years like working on people that
Speaker 1: he had butchered. Um And after correcting what he called
Speaker 1: twelve to fifteen pelvic disasters, he said this, he's a terrible,
Speaker 1: appalling technical surgeon. There is just no other way to
Speaker 1: describe it. He doesn't know how to make a straight incision,
Speaker 1: he doesn't know how to hold a knife, he has
Speaker 1: no regard for limiting blood loss. Uh. And Dr Fisher
Speaker 1: believes Dr Brown's practice amounted to a crime against humanity,
Speaker 1: but I should say not everybody felt this way. Dr
Speaker 1: Brown performed hundreds of gender transition surgeries, and either through
Speaker 1: his own own semi competence or the fact that some
Speaker 1: people really take easily to the surgery, a number of
Speaker 1: these worked out pretty well. Uh. Pulciotti tracked down several
Speaker 1: of these women. And I'm gonna quote from his reportage again.
Speaker 1: One thirty three year old manager for a major airline
Speaker 1: tells me she had Brown do her gender reassignment surgery
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty five when she was only nineteen. It
Speaker 1: was so successful. She says that when she later got married.
Speaker 1: Her husband never guessed that she'd been a male. To
Speaker 1: simulate a period, she used to prick her finger to
Speaker 1: leave bloodstains on the sheets. I also hear from Anne,
Speaker 1: a Cambodian refugee whose father was killed by the Khmer Rouge,
Speaker 1: that Brown had changed her entire, suffering, painful life from
Speaker 1: that of an ugly worm to a beautiful butterfly. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: unlike that of some trans sexuals who have difficulty passing
Speaker 1: as women, her surgery turned out so well she says
Speaker 1: that she got a job as a stripper in Las Vegas, Chinatown. Now,
Speaker 1: while these stories were not necessarily rare, they were not
Speaker 1: the norm either. Cherry, a North California businesswoman, traveled to
Speaker 1: Dr Brown's clinic in nine four to have dual sexual
Speaker 1: reassignment surgery with her brother. She explains he ran specials
Speaker 1: bring a girl for a two for the price of one.
Speaker 1: Cherry backed out at the last moment when she saw
Speaker 1: his actual office. The sewers overflowed constantly and there was
Speaker 1: rarely running water. The O R was just a bedroom
Speaker 1: with an O B G Y N chair in it. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: Cherry claimed, Brown would sip coffee while doing the operation.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from l A Weekly. The
Speaker 1: thing that most bothered Cherry, she says, was Brown's brusque
Speaker 1: attitude after surgery. Would grab the dried, blood clotted bandages
Speaker 1: and ripped them right off. He was always so disheveled
Speaker 1: to his hair went in different directions, his shoes were
Speaker 1: scuffed and worn down. I remember him walking down the
Speaker 1: hall eating raw weenies right out of the package. A
Speaker 1: fucking package of weenies. So. In one case, says Sherry,
Speaker 1: who spent eleven days at Browne's clinic caring for her
Speaker 1: new sister, Brown operated on an HIV positive patient who
Speaker 1: still had pins in her arm from an auto accident.
Speaker 1: She used the insurance settlement to pay for her surgery.
Speaker 1: In another, he used too much erectile tissue to construct
Speaker 1: the genital outer lips. As a result, whenever the girl
Speaker 1: got excited, her labia got hard. So not a great surgeon. Now.
Speaker 1: As the nineteen eighties faded into the night eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: Dr John Brown was probably the most prominent low budget
Speaker 1: gender reassignment surgeon, at least in Mexico, but the growing
Speaker 1: list of people crippled and deformed by his work. We're
Speaker 1: starting to gain notice and speak out against him. Unfortunately
Speaker 1: for everyone, Dr Brown had evolved and his miniaturization technique
Speaker 1: had given away to something vastly more horrifying. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about that and how it all came crashing
Speaker 1: down for John Ronald Brown in part two. How you doing, Sophia,
Speaker 1: Just peachy, everything's super fun and happy. Thanks for having me, Robert.
Speaker 1: You like this guy? Yeah? What ifan? Oh my god,
Speaker 1: that's what he looks like. Yeah? Yeah, you looking at
Speaker 1: his picture? Yeah, he does not look like I would
Speaker 1: trust him. No, how would you describe him? Just like
Speaker 1: an evil old man, like racism personified? I guess. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he looks like he would be like shouting at a
Speaker 1: group of school kids in particularly shouting at the school
Speaker 1: definitely for being on his lawn. Yeah, he's your definitely
Speaker 1: your friends, like grandpa that would molest you. That's what
Speaker 1: he looks. Yeah, he looks very molesty, like profoundly so. So, Sophia,
Speaker 1: are you uh in a good mood? Yeah? Sup? S happy?
Speaker 1: You know, I love love, love love it when a
Speaker 1: group of people just gets terrorized by a fucking murderer
Speaker 1: and they already are the most marginalized group out there,
Speaker 1: So yeah, you know, if you can pretty good. For
Speaker 1: some reason, the most horrifying part of all this, like
Speaker 1: there's a lot of terrible surgery stories in here, but
Speaker 1: the most horrifying thought here is of like a doctor
Speaker 1: sipping coffee and eating cold wienies from a package and
Speaker 1: then immediately performing surgery without washing his hands. Like that's
Speaker 1: the thing that likes. The entire thing is so creepy.
Speaker 1: A doctor's with open sewage around. How can you even
Speaker 1: eat a weenie when they're sewage around? Raw? Or cooks?
Speaker 1: John Brown? God, damn well, you want to plug your
Speaker 1: plugable Sofia before we write out. Yeah, you can find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter and Instagram at the Sophia t h E.
Speaker 1: S so f I y A and I have a
Speaker 1: weekly podcast with Miles Gray from The Daily's Eyegeist. It's
Speaker 1: called Fiance. It's half game show, half recap of our
Speaker 1: favorite trash show ninety Fiance and I have a podcast
Speaker 1: about love and sexuality called Private Parts and now. So
Speaker 1: check both of those out with Courtney Kossak, who did
Speaker 1: Bastards like two episodes ago. She did, she didn't, And
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. I have a podcast. It's this one.
Speaker 1: You can listen to it by continuing to listen to it.
Speaker 1: You can find it online behind the Bastards dot com.
Speaker 1: You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and Bastard's pot.
Speaker 1: I have a political podcast you can listen to about
Speaker 1: this election called Worst Year Epper with my friends Katie
Speaker 1: and Cody. It's on the same network. Um, and I
Speaker 1: will perform surgery on you. Um, but I will eat
Speaker 1: cold Weenies the entire time I'm doing it. Um, any
Speaker 1: kind of surgery, I don't really care. I just love surgery. So, UM,
Speaker 1: come on down, find me in the woods. Um, I'll
Speaker 1: just start cutting. Robert the Cutter, Robert the Cutter, all right,
Speaker 1: that's the episode. Go, um, go listen to something happy
Speaker 1: to wash this out of your brain. Yeah,