In 1976, a woman from Roanoke, Virginia, named Rhoda received a prescription for two drugs: estrogen and progestin. Twelve months later, a local reporter noted Rhoda’s surprisingly soft skin and visible breasts. He wrote that the drugs had made her “so completely female.”
Indeed, that was the point. The University of Virginia Medical Center in nearby Charlottesville had a clinic specifically for women like Rhoda. In fact, doctors there had been prescribing hormones and performing surgeries—what today we would call gender-affirming care—for years.
The founder of that clinic, Dr. Milton Edgerton, had cut his teeth caring for transgender people at Johns Hopkins University in the 1960s. There, he was part of a team that established the nation’s first university-based Gender Identity Clinic in 1966.
When politicians today refer to gender-affirming care as new, “untested” or “experimental,” they ignore the long history of transgender medicine in the United States.
It’s been nearly 60 years since the first transgender medical clinic opened in the U.S., and 47 years since Rhoda started her hormone therapy. Understanding the history of these treatments in the U.S. can be a helpful guide for citizens and legislators in a year when a record number of bills in statehouses target the rights of transgender people.
Christine Jorgensen, who received gender-affirming treatments in the 1950s, was one of the first trans celebrities in the U.S. Bettmann/Getty Images Treating Gender in Every Population
As a trans woman and a scholar of transgender history, I have spent much of the past decade studying these issues. I also take several pills each morning to maintain the proper hormonal balance in my body: spironolactone to suppress testosterone and estradiol to increase estrogen.
When I began HRT, or hormone replacement therapy, like many Americans I wasn’t aware that this treatment had been around for generations. What I was even more surprised to learn was that HRT is often prescribed to cisgender women—women who were assigned female at birth and raised their whole lives as women. In fact, many providers in my region already had a long record of prescribing hormones to cis women, primarily