Five Days in Baltimore

Back to the (Trans) (Jewish) Future

I’ve been thinking about travel writing lately, but this is not a travel piece. This is a train wreck.

I initially came to Baltimore to explore the medical archives at Johns Hopkins Hospital—the very place where John Money, father of ‘gender identity,’ put his ideas on gender into practice upon the minds and bodies of intersex children and transgender adults.

I came to look at the papers of Dr. Milton Edgerton, one of the lead characters in my book-in-progress on the history of transgender medicine in the United States. But I ended up spending most of my time looking through Money’s papers.

John Money was a meticulous (and egotistical) archivist of his professional life. He left behind documents that definitively prove that anti-trans doctors and administrators at Johns Hopkins purposefully created junk science for the purposes of legitimating the closure of their Gender Identity Clinic in 1979, an act that precipitated the closure of most mainstream transgender medical clinics in th…