Tracing Trans Surgery Through the Archives in Portland, Shir Bach | March 11, 2021

Good morning everyone! My name is Shir Bach, and I’m a graduating student of medical history at Reed College in Portland. In 2019 I had the privilege of being the first George T Nicola LGBT+ History fellow, a year-long fellowship with the Gay and Lesbian Archives of the , or GLAPN. Over the course of the fellowship, I conducted original research on the history of transgender surgery in Portland. Writing (Local) Trans History

● Types of sources: ○ Archival material ○ Oral history ○ Self-narratives / Webpages ● Crafting narrative vs flattening history

When I first proposed this project, I was struck by a lack of historical writing on trans surgery in local contexts. I knew there was a history of trans surgery in Portland, but seemed like no one had bothered to write it down. As I began my research, I realized that wasn’t quite right. People leave traces of themselves whether they’re published or not, and trans people are no different. In newsletters, hospital records, memoirs, court documents, and every other way imaginable, trans people make themselves known to any historian who’s willing to do the work.

To this end, my research has relied on three major types of sources: institutional archival records, oral history interviews, and trans self narratives. With the time I have today, I’d like to share with you all an example of each type of source and explore how I attempted to synthesize them into a cohesive narrative. This methodology is the backbone of historical research, but it poses some major questions for the project of trans history in particular. Sandy Stone’s “Post transsexual manifesto” has been at the front of my mind over the course of this project, reminding me of the benefits and drawbacks of attempting to create a cohesive linear narrative out of a century of scattered stories and lived experiences. I have consciously written against a narrative of progress that charts a straight line from oppression to liberation. The century covered in my work spans stories of institutional change, self-actualization, medical abuse, love and heartbreak, activist organizing, and the mundane lives of Portlanders across the decades. If the project of history is to flatten those stories into a single narrative, then it’s not a project worth undertaking. With that in mind, lets turn to the sources...... The Archives

I’ve included some screenshots on the right to show you what these three different sources looked like materially, but the goal isn’t for you to read all of that text, so don’t worry about that.

The first place I looked for my research was the historical collections and archives at OHSU. The team there has been hard at work over the past few years trying to unearth trans-related materials, but they’re limited by the priorities and agendas of those doctors and researchers who decided what to write down, and what to give to the University after their deaths. The subject file ‘transsexual’ consists of some articles on Alan Hart, a radiologist and trans man who transitioned after graduating from the University of Oregon Medical School in 1917, and a few scattered news-clippings from the 1970s.

The most valuable thing I was able to draw from those articles was the cryptic references to a “transsexual clinic” in Portland, but the articles never mentioned any doctors by name. It wasn’t until I turned to oral history, which I’ll talk about next, that I was able to get a couple names: psychiatrist Ira Pauly, gynecologist Raphael Durfee. With those names, I was able to look back at subject files at OHSU and articles at . None of the doctors I identified in my research ever published anything about this clinic in Portland, although Dr. Pauly published various articles on transsexuality more broadly. As a result, press coverage was the only archival source I could find. There were a handful of articles in the Oregonian, and one in the Dallas Morning News.

Frustratingly, these articles had more contradictions in them than continuities. One article states that surgeries took place at OHSU’s main hospital; another that they were performed at private hospitals to avoid affiliation with the university. In one article, Dr. Pauly tells the Oregonian that 15 patients have received surgery through the clinic. Three years later, Dr. Durfee tells the Dallas Morning News that the clinic has treated 12 total patients. I couldn’t understand why the numbers didn’t add up, and I was quickly becoming more and more discouraged.

My history courses at Reed had taught me how to do archival research, and not much else. But as I started to realize how little of this history had been preserved in OHSU’s archives, I knew that I had to start thinking outside my comfort zone. This is where my partnership with GLAPN became invaluable...... Oral History

● Oral history as “testimony” ● Intergenerational care ● Issues of privacy ●

As a local LGBT historical society, GLAPN is involved in recording testimony from the elders in our community. One of the wonderful people I met through GLAPN, a long-time member of the Portland lesbian community named Patti, introduced me to a friend of hers who had been a patient of Dr. Pauly in the 1970s. For the sake of privacy, I have referred to this woman in my research as Lois. Patti told me that Lois had received surgery under Dr. Pauly’s care and lived as a man for a few years in rural Oregon. She never spoke about this time in her life, as it understandably brought back trauma. I really was being thrown into the deep end in terms of oral history here. I agonized for weeks about how I would balance being an empathetic listener to a story that was so familiar but divergent from my own, and being a researcher interested in buried histories. When I met with Lois at her home in East Portland, she was ready to talk.

I could spend the next hour just talking about Lois’ story, but I’ll highlight one piece in particular that shaped my research. The articles from the Oregonian I had read at OHSU spoke of a transsexual clinic in 1970s Portland. In my mind, I had been imagining something that looked like OHSU’s current Trans Health Program, except everyone was wearing bell-bottomed jeans. But when I asked Lois if she had ever met any of Dr. Pauly’s other patients, maybe in waiting rooms, she just laughed. Medical transition in the 1970s, I learned, was an inherently solitary affair. The doctors saw no need to connect patients to one another. In fact, I later learned that doctors assessing post-operative success sometimes considered having mostly gay or trans friends as an indication of failure.

Talking to Lois about her experience suddenly recontextualized my previous frustration with the contradictory reports about the Portland clinic. I began to understand the clinic less as a fully integrated medical team, and more as a loose association of practitioners who gained a reputation for their willingness to care for trans patients. Of course the numbers in the articles didn’t match up—the doctors involved simply weren’t invested in pooling their records. They probably didn’t even see themselves as a clinic until reporters came knocking...... Wide (Trans) Web

My conversations with Lois really turned my entire perspective on this research, and I became a lot more focused on finding self-narratives—any place where a trans person was telling their own story. And while I was reading an article from a trans newsletter in Portland from 1997, I found this article talking about the brand-new world of the Internet, of AOL message boards and geo-cities websites where cross-dressers and trans women were gathering to talk about their lives and transitions. Most of the links from that article were long dead, but I started thinking seriously about the internet as an archival source.

Google-fu brought me to Christine Beatty’s website glamazon dot net. The website is still active, and actually looks a lot different today than it did in 2019 when I was doing my research. But Beatty has preserved a sort of digital time-capsule in the older sections of her website, under a section called “The Beatty Archives”. These pages offer a view into the internet before social media, where people collected information and personal writings on their own websites. Pages upon pages of Beatty’s ‘transition diary’ offer reflections and photos from every step along the way in her social and medical transition, and a ‘links’ page directs readers to similar websites curated by other trans women. Much of the content on her website was reformatted into a memoir that Beatty self-published in 2011, entitled Not Your Average American Girl. I drew primarily on that memoir for the final project, but I’m still enthralled by the website itself, and the multiple purposes it served. It was a personal diary, an educational tool, and a community hub, all in one.

Its hard to overstate the importance that the internet had on the history of trans surgery. In fact, there’s going to be a panel tomorrow morning about digital trans histories, which I can’t wait for. Websites like Beatty’s represented a concerted effort on the part of trans people to distribute information about medical transition as widely and freely as possible to other trans and questioning people. At first, I thought this was just a methodological convenience, something that allowed me greater access to the story. But as I trawled through the remnants of these websites, I realized that it was actually the story in and of itself. This was a story about independent social networks, about DIY, about the kind of community that rushes in to fill the gaps left by institutional neglect...... In the end, I had only nine months to turn all of this research into a final paper for GLAPN’s website. Writing academic history is hard, but I think writing public history is even harder. I was caught between an impulse to craft an engaging and accessible story, and my commitment to the messiness of history. After a lot of deliberation and drafting, I chose to divide my research into four major time periods, with an individual self-narrative about transition at the heart of each section. The history of trans surgery in Portland has a lot to tell us about doctor/patient dynamics, hospital politics, underground organizing, and trans resilience. Engaging with that history means sorting through and sitting with messy, incomplete, and contradictory sources. That’s exactly what makes it so important. Thanks so much...... References

Bach, Shir. “Tracing Trans Surgery Through the Archives in Portland, Oregon.” Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest, 2020. http://glapn.org/6068SurgeryInTransition.html. Beatty, Christine. “The Beatty Archives.” Glamazon, 2016 2003. http://beatty.glamazon.net/. Little, Linda. “Good Results Claimed with Changes in Sex.” Dallas Morning News. March 27, 1975. Lynch, Douglas. Flag of Portland, Oregon. December 2, 2005. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Portland,_Oregon.svg. “Portlander Asks Sex Change Surgery.” . September 25, 1972.