User:Kbrackne/sandbox

History of Transmasculinity

Transsexuality was first coined in the 1960s in an article called The Transsexual Phenomenon by Harry Benjamin. A transsexual is defined as "a person who strongly identifies with the opposite sex and may seek to live as a member of this sex especially by undergoing surgery and hormone therapy to obtain the necessary physical appearance (as by changing the external sex organs)". “Surgical attempts at changing sex first made it into the public eye in the early 1910s when Eugen Steinbach, a psychologist at the University of Vienna, won international acclaim for his “transplantation” experiments on rats and guinea pigs”. By 1915, experimental transplants had started at Steinbach’s urging. Testicles of healthy men were removed and transplanted to men who’d lost theirs due to injury or disease. Further experimentation resulted in sexual organ transplants from sheep, rams, and apes to men. At this time, there had been no experimentation in mixing sexual organs between men and women. Most of critical sex-change experimentation took place in Berlin between 1920 and 1930. One account regarding a sex-change operation began in 1912, where a female-to-male “transvestite” had a breast removal and uterus removal and finally, in 1921, had both ovaries removed as well. Next, “a male-to-female underwent castration in 1920 and had an ovary implanted in 1921”. The definition of transexual and transsexuality sparked movement in changing the lives of transsexuals. In 1965, there was little to no institutional support for those who identified with another gender but by 1975, there were institutions widely performing experimental sex changes^[1].