When transgenderism seemed to be a phenomenon confined only to the tiniest handful of adults, it occasioned very little serious debate. It was tied up in the public mind with drag performance, or transvestitism. Like belonging to a tiny religious sect, it was accepted as the sort of thing a poor soul at the margins might find helpful to cope with life. And there the phenomenon’s strange metaphysics about being “born in the wrong body” would remain as ignored as the prophecies of doomsday issued by the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ magazine The Watchtower.
Sex-change surgery was the subject of an obscure 1970s-era medical debate. Johns Hopkins Hospital had first offered a “change of sex operation” in 1966. Thirteen years later, after concurring with a study by Jon Meyer that the surgery conveyed “no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation,” the procedures were halted by chief of psychiatry Paul McHugh. Thirty-eight years later, Hopkins reversed its reversal and resumed what it now called “gender affirming” care.
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