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A Brief Look at the History of Medicalising Sex & Gender — Part One

The first F-M sex-change operation in a transsexual patient, i.e. the construction of a penis (so-called phalloplasty), allegedly took place in the Netherlands in Arnhem in 1959–1960. The first university-based gender clinics operated in the United States from the early 1960s to approximately 1980. During this two-decade period, doctors and researchers would attempt to find a cause and a psychiatric treatment (i.e., a cure) for transsexuality. They would ultimately fail in this search for an aetiology/etiologic cause and would move toward surgical and hormonal treatments….