When was the first gender reassignment

Paul Tessier, the father of craniofacial surgery, Dr. Ousterhout began his private practice in San Francisco in , making the practice one of the oldest continuing plastic surgery practices on the west coast. His specialty became facial feminization surgery for trans women, and he was widely considered the foremost facial feminization surgeon in the United States. In , Dr. Ed Falces, a plastic surgeon who performed body-focused gender confirmation surgeries, approached Dr.

Lucy wanted plastic surgery to make her face appear more feminine. Ousterhout agreed to the collaboration with Dr. Up until this point, Dr. After assisting Dr. Ousterhout conducted extensive research to identify which facial features were consituted feminine in shape and size. He derived measurements defining those features from a series of cephalograms taken in the s, and then worked with a set of several hundred skulls to determine if he could consistently differentiate females and males using those measurements only.

Ousterhout then began adapting surgical techniques and materials he already used to transform and feminize the male face. For over two decades, he added more procedures and developed more aggressive techniques, with the goal of producing better outcomes and more attractive faces for transgender patients.

Just some of the new techniques and procedures he performed in FFS included advancing the hairline; making the forehead smaller and rounder; reducing the brow ridge; shortening and narrowing the nose; shortening the upper lip; shortening the chin; narrowing the jaw; and reducing the laryngeal prominence.

In the course of more than 30 years, he has performed thousands of successful facial feminization surgeries—seeing each patient as an individual who deserved to have their desired physical appearance and enhanced self-esteem. Subsequent surgeries completed the process until she was ready to step into the spotlight. Jorgensen's sex change, which may have been leaked to the press by Jorgensen herself, hit the headlines Dec.

In fact, Jorgensen was not the first person to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. During the rollicking Weimar period, German doctors performed the surgery on at least two patients. The difference, in Jorgensen's case, was that she underwent hormone-replacement therapy in conjunction with the surgery. The earlier surgeries were strictly cut-and-paste. Although Jorgensen complained frequently about the jackals of the press, she did become something of a publicity hound and took most of the tasteless remarks with good grace, laughing off jokes such as, "Christine Jorgensen went abroad and came back a broad.

Pioneering influences in America began emerging in the s, including Dr. Kinsey was one of the first to use the term transsexual in his gender studies, and he helped introduce America to a concept that for some reason still seems foreign to many today despite its obvious place in history for years. The first American to undergo a sex change operation was Christine Jorgensen, who brought significant attention to the transgender revolution in America when her story hit New York Times headlines in Following Jorgensen's successful treatment in Denmark by Dr.

Christian Hamburger , many other transgender Americans wrote to Hamburger for similar treatment. Benjamin had been studying transgender issues since at least the s , but it was his book The Transsexual Phenomenon that left the most indelible impact on American transgender healthcare.

Over a decade later, a study out of Johns Hopkins called sex reassignment surgeries into question by suggesting that psychosocial outcomes in transgender patients who underwent reassignment surgery were not better than those who went without surgery. Despite criticism and a nod to flaws in its methodology, the study led to the closure of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic and an end to the sex reassignment surgeries offered there.

Now in its seventh iteration, the WPATH Standards of Care provide guidance on everything from hormone therapy to surgical interventions and everything in between. Destigmatization of this diagnosis was a major milestone for transgender individuals in America, and further strides were achieved when a government appeals board in ruled that Medicare must cover surgery for gender transitions, overturning a policy that had been in place since the s.

Given that the surgeries are no longer experimental in nature and that the updated WPATH standards of care reference many studies which have proven the beneficial effects of sex reassignment therapy for transgender individuals, this ruling was a long time coming. Gender dysphoria - a distress caused by the incongruence of a person's gender identity and their biological sex, drives the person to seek medical or surgical intervention to align some or all of their physical appearance with their gender identity.

Patients with gender dysphoria experience higher rates of psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety. Gender-affirming medical intervention tends to resolve the psychiatric disorders that are a direct consequence of gender dysphoria. Norman Haire was a medical practitioner and a Sexologist.

His patient, Dora Richter underwent 3 procedures reassigning from male to female between The procedures included a vaginoplasty surgical procedure where a vagina is created. Harold Gillies is most famous for the development of a new method of facial reconstructive surgery, in