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Transsexual Research Project

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Lenette and Lauraine Lee

Lenette and Lauraine Lee, 1970. Published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on July 26, 1970, with the article “Brothers Become Sisters: Transsexual Operations End ‘Years of Torment.’”

The University of Minnesota performed sex-reassignment surgeries (as they were called at the time) on twenty-five trans women from 1966 to the mid 1970s as part of a program called the Transsexual Research Project. Helmed by psychiatrist Donald W. Hastings and surgeon Colin Markland, the project sought to alleviate the gender dysphoria of its patients through hormone treatment, psychotherapy, and surgery. At the same time, it tried to reform them into middle-class, heterosexual, conventionally respectable members of American society. Fueled by a complex mix of empathy, sensationalized concern, and pity, the project established Minnesota as the center of trans life it remains today.

See editor’s note on language below.

Trans medicine became a legitimate field of study in the United States in the 1950s through the work of sexologists (like John Money and Harry Benjamin) as well as trans people themselves, who demanded recognition across the country. Christine Jorgensen inspired a sensationalist media frenzy when she returned to the US after receiving sex-reassignment surgery in Denmark in 1953, and the attention made trans issues more visible. In this context, however, “trans” was transsexuality— a rigid condition of mind-body incongruence named by doctors. Trans people, the doctors believed, could be “cured” of sexual and behavioral pathologies deemed deviant or unacceptable through hormones, surgery, and social reconditioning.

In December of 1964, a thirty-eight-year-old trans woman was admitted to the University of Minnesota Hospitals’ psychiatric wing. Psychiatrist Donald W. Hastings was deeply affected by her distress and desire for surgery. In response, he and colleagues designed a multi-year research project “to determine whether such surgery is a worthwhile approach to an otherwise untreatable condition.” They planned to study Hastings’ initial patient and twenty-four others during surgery and additional treatments, and then track their life progress over the next ten years.

After getting approval from higher-ups, Hastings, Markland, and other medical faculty began to implement the project in 1966. A gender committee vetted and interviewed trans women before enrolling them in intensive psychotherapy. Eventually, the patients began a six-month regimen of hormone treatments and then surgery. While gender-affirming surgeries had been performed for years in Europe, Morocco, and Mexico, and in secret in some major American cities, the University of Minnesota (U of M) became only the second American health system to provide them openly, beaten by Johns Hopkins by less than two months. The project accepted Minnesota residents free of charge, but it rejected people who were married or assigned female at birth, as well as those with criminal records unrelated to cross-dressing.

As patients received their operations and were discharged, project staff followed up every six months, recording patient progress according to a graded scale. “A” patients married heterosexual men, became professionals or housewives, passed as cisgender women, and abandoned their gay or trans friends. “Fail” patients did sex work, relied on welfare, failed to marry, and became “well-known to [the] morals squad of local police.” Implicit in this scale was the project’s secondary goal: to make acceptable the unacceptable, to erase homosexuality and gender difference, and to “treat” transsexuality by rendering it invisible.

The final days of the project exemplify its complex legacy. By the mid-1970s, despite a lack of public pushback, the university began charging high fees for access to surgery “...so that transsexual surgery would not be at the expense of the Minnesota taxpayer.” At this point, local trans women found it increasingly difficult to access the services so readily offered just a few years prior. The change damaged the relationship between the U of M and the community for decades to come. Hastings died of a heart attack in 1977, marking the official end of the project.

Despite its shortcomings, the Transsexual Research Project was revolutionary in its delivery of essential, low-cost medical services to trans patients. Patients awoke with tears of relief streaming down their cheeks; as of 1978, project staff could not find a participant who regretted their surgery, and half the group reported, unprompted, that the procedure had saved their lives. Many people in the trans community viewed Hastings positively. Patient Dona Ewing (aka Big Mama, a coat-check lady at the Gay ‘90s,) reported, “He was like a father to us…very kind and very accepting, and he was all for us.” Though the project ended in relative disfavor, it cemented the Twin Cities’ place in trans American history.

Editor’s note: Doctors began using the word “transsexual” in the 1950s to refer to a person who sought out medicine and/or surgery to change their sex so that it aligned with their gender identity. Because of this clinical association, many trans people stopped using “transsexual” in the 1990s in favor of a word they chose for themselves: “transgender.” That word (and eventually its abbreviation, trans) included people who did not identify as transsexual or seek out medical treatment. It now includes gender-non-conforming people who identify as non-binary, agender, and genderqueer. This article uses “trans” in recognition of the shared history of these groups; it retains “transsexual” in some instances to reflect the historical use of that word. It similarly uses the historical term “sex-reassignment surgery” (more often called gender-affirmation or -confirmation surgery in the 2020s).

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Amanda. Interview by Andrea Jenkins, March 31, 2017, Minneapolis. Transgender Oral History Project, Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota.
https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll97:75

Benjamin, Harry, MD. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press, 1966.

Ewing, Dona. Interview by Andrea Jenkins, April 4, 2016, Minneapolis. Transgender Oral History Project, Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota.
https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll97:35

——— . Interview by Andrea Jenkins, March 27, 2017, Minneapolis. Transgender Oral History Project, Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota.
https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll97:136

“Dr. D. W. Hastings, Organized Program for Changes of Sex. New York Times, September 7, 1977.

“Dr. Hastings, Sex-Change Pioneer at ‘U,’ Dies.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 6, 1977.

Hastings, Donald W., MD. “Inauguration of a Research Project on Transsexualism in a University Medical Center.” In Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, edited by Richard Green, MD., and John Money, 243–251. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.

——— . “Postsurgical [sic] Adjustment of Male Transsexual Patients.” Clinics in Plastic Surgery 1, no. 2 (April 1974): 335–344.

Hastings, Donald W., MD, and Colin Markland, MD. “Post-Surgical Adjustment of Twenty-Five Transsexuals (Male-to-Female) in the University of Minnesota Study.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 7, no. 4 (1978): 327–336.

Hastings, Donald W., MD, and John A. Blum, MD. “A Transsexual Research Project at the University of Minnesota Medical School.” Journal-Lancet 87, no. 7 (July 1967): 262–264.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

O’Hartigan, Margaret Deirdre. Interview by Myra Billund-Phibbs, April 6, 2022. Conducted remotely. Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota.
https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll97:255

“‘She Did The Talking:’ An Interview with a Transexual.” Gay Vue 1, no. 8 (December 1971): 13–16.

Southgate, David. “Transsexuals Allege Discrimination at U of M Clinics.” Equal Time, December 18, 1992.

Spavin, Don. “Brothers Now Sisters and Living In ‘Torment’ Ends.” Aberdeen Daily News (Aberdeen, SD), August 16, 1970.
https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/qj72p737c

⸻ . “‘We are Free, Happy, and Female.’” St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 16, 1970.

“Trans-Sex Surgery at Minnesota.” Waterloo Daily Courier (Waterloo, IA), January 8, 1967.

Tretter 357
Transgender Informational Files, 1941–22014
Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies
Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries
Description: The Transgender Research Guide, 1923–2014, is composed of magazines, newsletters, newspapers, zines, pamphlets, correspondence, organizational records, clippings, photocopies, educational material, and ephemera. Coverage is given to subjects specific to national and international transgender individuals and communities.
https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/13/archival_objects/424095

Related Images

Lenette and Lauraine Lee
Lenette and Lauraine Lee
Dr. Donald W. Hastings
Dr. Donald W. Hastings
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Transsexual Research Project news articles
Transsexual Research Project news articles
Lenette and Lauraine Lee shopping
Lenette and Lauraine Lee shopping
Scale of patient progress
Scale of patient progress
“Social” scale of patient progress
“Social” scale of patient progress

Turning Point

In 1964, a trans woman in the psychiatric ward of a University of Minnesota hospital in Minneapolis expresses her urgent need for sex-reassignment surgery to Dr. Donald W. Hastings. Her case motivates Hastings and his colleagues to design a long-term study of trans patients.

Chronology

1952

American trans woman Christine Jorgensen receives sex-reassignment surgery in Denmark. She returns to the US to media attention, and the sensationalized moment is the first major breakthrough of transness into American media and public consciousness.

1964

In December, a thirty-eight-year-old trans woman reports to the U of M Hospitals in distress, pleading for treatment and surgery. Hospital staff, including the psychologist Donald Hastings, initiate the Transsexual Research Project in response.

1966

Sexologist Harry Benjamin publishes The Transsexual Phenomenon, an early text devoted to trans medicine. Its faults aside, the work is groundbreaking in its argument that surgery can alleviate trans patients’ distress.

1966

After much planning and assurances from university administration, the Transsexual Research Project is initiated. Dr. Hastings, two surgeons, and the rest of the Gender Committee begin to intensively interview and screen potential patients.

1966

Johns Hopkins University announces the opening of its gender identity clinic and surgical practice in November. This is met with much press attention, and the program does not survive the political and social pressures it faces as a result.

1966

The trans woman who initially reported to Dr. Hastings in 1964 receives sex-reassignment surgery on December 20, becoming the project’s first patient. Hers is almost certainly the first sex-reassignment surgery performed in the Upper Midwest.

1968

Urologist Dr. Colin Markland performs twenty-one sex-reassignment surgeries as part of the project. Twenty-five were performed in total.

1972

A trans man receives hormones and a double mastectomy, or top surgery, through the project. As a result, Dr. Hastings receives many letters from other trans men and transmasculine people in the Twin Cities seeking care; none is admitted.

mid-1970s

The project begins charging thousands of dollars under the guise of no longer billing taxpayers for gender-affirming procedures. This effectively ends it entirely; local trans women report staff being unreachable and uninterested.

1977

Dr. Hastings dies of a sudden heart attack on September 4, at the age of sixty-one.

1992

A group of trans patients alleges misconduct and discrimination at the U of M’s Program in Human Sexuality (PHS).

2000s

Trans community organizing begins to improve relations between the trans community and the U of M.