A Pioneer in Gender-Affirming Care Caves to Anti-Transgender Panic

A love letter to UVA

In 1977, a young person in her early twenties, then living in a commune with fifteen other “homosexuals” in an overflowing house in Richmond, Virginia’s Fan District, was admitted for an operation at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville. She received an innovative surgical treatment, the Richmond News Leader later reported, the effect of which was that she “became a woman.”

Around the same time, a nineteen-year-old from rural Farmville, Virginia, sixty miles south of Charlottesville, arrived at the university to pursue a similar treatment, yet in this case the goal was to become a man.

The treatment of young transgender people at UVA began, quietly, in 1970 under the leadership of Dr. Milton Edgerton, a pioneering plastic surgeon and co-founder, four years earlier, of the nation’s first center for transsexual medicine at Johns Hopkins University. After transferring to UVA, Edgerton and his team built Charlottesville into a major worldwide hub for the clinical pra…