Part One: John Ronald Brown: The Worst Surgeon Ever

some frost and tips and leave the lips. No. I feel that like George Lucas, like, I'm not really an artist unless I am tinkering with my work past the point where it works and to the point where no one enjoys it anymore. But your real artist man splaining, and you still have that. Well, Actually, Sophie, this episode, I'm going to have you explained the asterday I wrote about who you have never heard of? So this will be a short episode of the show. M Hi, I'm

Sophia Alexander. You guys just out here giving him ship, didn't You didn't even enter your guests because I interrupted him? It was just a train wreck from the out of the jump. Um, good god, you're not even tor like shady like eye looks. We keep giving each other about all deserved. I'm very hungover right now. Um, so this is a ship show in so many ways, Sophia, Hi, Alexandra private parts unknown and for fiance, bitch we out, that's right, Sophia. Yeah. Do you know about a guy

named John Ronald Brown? Yeah? I sucked him last week. No, I don't know who. I hope not. I really really, you will not want to have fucked this guy after I'm here. He is, Uh, he is a genocider of just babies, And I'm sure that I will want to kill myself by the end of this, like I usually do, because that's what you do to invite me here. No,

you know, a genocider of babies. So babies aren't very tough, right, So if you're killing babies, it's probably pretty quick, right, Like they just can't handle a lot, probably, he said, John Ronald Brown. This might be our darkest episode because, um, because like the crime is the darkest because like obviously we've talked about people have killed a lot more people. Georgia Tan killed a lot more people, but the things that he did to people are so gruesome and ghastly.

We're gonna be talking about a lot of botched surgery today, So oh my god, dude, I watched that show Botched all the time. This is perfect for me. This is like the most the worst version of that. Um we're talking about a doctor who abused trans people for years. So ah, dude, really, yeah, it's not a good it's what I'm not here? Does he talk about he hates me the most? I don't like all of the guests. Is that what happened? Yeah, it's literally his hobby. You

are a bastard among bastards. I'm the real bad guy of the series, except for in the case of this episode, because John Ronald Brown is even worse than I could hope to be. All right, let's do this. So, if you were like a trans woman in like the eighteen fifties, your options would be pretty much limited to like the cosmetic you know, shaving, wearing, you know, the clothing of

your of your choice makeup. There weren't like options for surgery, right, and so even many like pretty woke writers who had a deep understanding of the community in the eighteen hundreds. In early nineteen hundreds would kind of lump transgender women in with transvestites and usually just use the word transvestite. And nowadays that's like definitely an insult, but kind of and you're reading stuff from like the late eighteen hundreds, a lot of times they actually are trying to be

like understanding. It's just like the verbage hadn't evolved very far at that point. The first person to transition medically was probably Lily Elbe, who did so in nineteen thirty with the help of pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. In addition to having an incredible name, Magnus was one of the bravest scientists in history. He was homosexual himself, and he had to hide being gay in order to practice medicine

at the highest levels of German society. Uh and in spite of this, he established a career as a tireless advocate for LGB in particularly t individuals. In Berlin. In eighteen ninety seven, he founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which was dedicated to ending the stigma against homosexuality and to criminalizing it in germanys this eighteen ninety seven, so Magnus ahead of the curve. Big Magnus energy over there, Big

Magnus energy. It's interesting to me that he's like such an advocate while also being a closeted gay man himself, because I think there was this understand that, like, well, I won't be able to actually do this work very effectively if kind of everyone knows. Um, because it's Germany and eight. Um, that's an incredible sacrifice to make to take closeted so you can help other people be themselves. Yeah,

he was an amazing guy. Um. Now. One of Magnus's achievements was the establishment of an LGBT self help group and probably the first self help group of like sort of in the modern sense of the word, where queer individuals in Berlin and again in the eighteen nineties and

early nine hundreds couldn't meet and discuss their issues. By creating a space where these people could gather, Magnus also gathered for himself the first large sample population of queer men and women ever studied in a systematic and scientific way. He circulated a questionnaire among them and received answers from tens of thousands of people. Um. Because he was able to actually do like like longitudinal sort of like survey

work on the gay community prior to World War One. Um, so there's obviously like groundbreaking ship, but obviously, given the time it was, it was not perfect and you would not consider like the wording that he used for everything ideal in the modern sense of the word. And I'm gonna quote from the Guardian now Elb, who was that uh, one of the transgender women that he worked with, was reportedly disgusted by the questionnaire and the ambiguity of trans

sexuality as it was represented in the institute. She described being requested to answer all these very rude and strict questions, says Rainy or Herne, a sexology researcher at Charite Hospital in Berlin, she refused the descriptions of sexual intermediates such as transvestites and hermaphrodites was not acceptable for her. For her, there was no ambiguity. She was a woman, so she

was very irritated by the whole process. So even like a guy like Herschfeld doesn't really understand like transgender, like that, like the like the nature that doesn't understand what's going on with Elb. And I don't think anyone really has a vocabulary here. So like a lot of people I think who were trans back then probably would have called themselves something different, just because, like the state of development

of the vocabulary area was so much more primitive. Um. But Hirchfield agreed to help Elb transition, and with his assistance, she underwent surgery to have her testicles removed in Berlin, and then she underwent further surgeries in Dresden. Now these were mostly cosmetic surgeries. Um. But as her points out, just cosmetic surgery was not enough for Alb. Quote. Elb wanted to have implanted ovaries and a uterus because at that time, to be a real woman you had to

be capable of having children. That was her ideal. She was obsessed by this, and Elb's biography, which is based on her diaries, she always fantasizes about being a complete woman. So obviously then is now technology did not make that possible. Um, I don't think we can do that now. In nineteen thirty one, it was not a thing medical science was up to the task of doing. Uh An Elb's body rejected the new womb and she died of heart failure on September nineteen thirty one. Yeah, it's a real bummer

of a story. Um. And there's a there's a good book about her, uh, the title of which I thought I included in here, but I did not. It'll be on Behind the Bastards dot Com in our in our Stars notes. So Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research was destroyed by the Nazis and his records were destroyed once Hitler came to power. If you google Nazi book burning, the pictures that you get are the Hirschfeld library being

burned by the Nazis. And this was a major setback for humanity and particularly for LGBT individuals, as much of what Magnus had been studying where that was like the biological roots of homosexuality. Uh. And in some ways science still has not recovered from this loss. It took up until like really the last like ten or fifteen years in a lot of cases, where like we started to rebuild to the level that he was he was getting

to be at in the thirties. Have you seen the show Transparent, No, they do flashbacks to to this, to the to the whole story, yeah, to all the clear people, and then to the book burning. It's not really like told and like a chronological kind of like and then this happened scene a just a little flashes every episode for the season, for this one season anyway. Yeah, it's a bummer of a tail um. So yeah, the Nazis, as Nazis do, really uh jammed a finger in the

eye of progress. But progress did not stand still in other developments in the early twentieth century had a major impact on the development of gender transitioning. In nine, estrone, a female hormone, was isolated, followed by estriol. Eventually both hormones were classified together as estrogen. Progesterone was isolated and described to the first time in nineteen thirty four, testosterone

in nineteen thirty five. Now, it was not a short route from isolating these hormones and tooth figuring out how to produce them synthetically, but by the nineteen forties, the first injectable hormones had been developed, making what we now know as hormone replacement therapy possible. So that's like the

genesis of of HRT. Now, the first person to receive what we'd recognize as a modern gender transition was a woman named Christine Jorgensen Um and you you might call the first guinea pig for injectable hormones, because like people really didn't know like how this was all going to

work until they tried it on her um. And I'm going to quote now from the book Crossing Sexual Boundaries by J. R. Kane Demos quote just how confusing the whole situation was at the time, as indicated by the fact that the physician involved in the case called Jorgenson a transvestite in his official account of the case. His treatment of Jorgenson was in part surgical castration and a penectomy,

but the important thing was the massive hormone treatment. Before going to Denmark, Jorgensen had been injecting herself with estrogen to bring about physiological changes, and after Hamburger and his associate examiner, they decided to treat her with massive injections of estrogen, much larger than she had given herself. The large dose has just changed the shape of Jourgensen's body to a more feminine contour, and her behavior, gait, and

appearance also became more feminine. As her beard became sparser, electrolysis was used to remove the remaining hair. The one thing they did not do for her was to give her a vagina, a failure that was only later partially resolved and not particularly satisfactory. Yet she looked and acted like a and something that took considerable practice before she

was satisfied enough to tell her story. So Christine Jorgensen went to the press in nineteen one um explicitly against her doctor's wishes UM, and her story was an instant, like huge media sensation UM. And while the media at the time definitely did not treat it with overwhelming respect UM, the fact that she was coming out and talking about her experience was one of the most important moments in

the history of transvisibility. Like it was one of those things that like it had to happen and it was always going to suck. Kind of the first person to do it because the media in nineteen fifty one was not going to be very tactful, um. But because whenever the Jackie Robinson of anything, it sucks. Yeah, And it's a little like what you were talking about earlier, Like

it is awkward. We're kind of in this awkward period now of discussing like non binary gender and like trying to figure all this stuff in the terminology out and it leads to a lot of arguments, but like you have to have these awkward periods before you kind of like get people used enough to certain ideas that it stops being weird and starts being something that like is just life. Um. Yeah, So Jourgensen is as important for

a lot of reasons UM. And in the wake of her transition UM, huge numbers of people started writing to her doctor, who was again Danish, UM to request the surgery for themselves, and in fact, so many people flooded Denmark with requests for gender reassignment surgery that the government had to enact a law banning it for non Danish people out of a fear that they would just be flooded by trans people from around the world looking for

surgery and hormone replacement therapy. So this is like like there's all these people who have clearly always been there, and when Jorgensen comes out there like, oh, it wasn't just this thing that I alone was dealing with, UM, And then they kind of flood Denmark with requests for surgery because it's the only place doing it at the time. Now, the medical community in the fifties was obviously very much mixed on the subject of what precisely Christine Jorgensen was.

Many chiatrists considered her mentally ill and criticized Dr Hamburger for using surgery and hormone replacement therapy instead of psychotherapy to correct what was seen as a sexual perversion. Well, it took a while for them to take it out of the d s M as being something that we can consider to be abnormal sexuality. So yeah, yeah, decades and decades um. And the whole battle over that is is very complicated and again beyond kind of the scope

of this episode, um. But one of the results of this whole thing it was that doctor Harry Benjamin popularized the term trans sexualism to replace transvestism. So in like trans sexual again, we've moved beyond that term these days and it's generally seen as rude, but there was a time in which that was like the kind of polite and medical term used. Yeah, yeah, that was a gain.

It was a step forward. So over the following years, the first gender identity clinics started to be established, starting with Johns Hopkins University and then case Western Reserve University and then the University of Minnesota to the University of Oregon, and Stanford University. Kind of surprising that Minnesota beat Stanford, uh for gender identity clinics, but good for Minnesota. Yeah,

Stanford should have been first. What the funk California you would think, right, I mean, California hasn't always been this libertine paradise is today. Yeah. Now, um, these institutions began to slowly catch up to where Magnus Hirschfeld had been back in the thirties. And while their research focused mostly on trying to understand and classify what precisely trans people were, uh,

they also engaged in early sexual reassignment surgeries. Um. Dallas Denny's Dallas Denny sorry, a trans rights activist and writer. They did the ship at Denny's. Yeah, that's actually right after That's fucking tight. It turns out they were terrible at surgery, but really good at cooking omelets, so they just sort of moved right into that. Man, kid can't make an omelet without breaking a few removing a few eggs. Am I right there we go. Sorry, who may have

actually a wrong idea about what an omelet is. We'll talk about that way. So um. Now, Dallas Denny, um, who was a trans woman who trans rights activist and a writer, was very critical about some of their about like the efforts of these kind of early gender reassignment clinics uh And she wrote this quote. The clinics viewed sexual reassignment as a last ditch effort to save those

with whom other therapies and interventions had failed. Those who were accepted for treatment were usually prostitutes, those with substance abuse problems, sociopaths, those who were schizophrenics, those who were profoundly depressed or suicidal, and others who were considered hopeless i e. Likely to die anyway. It was a classics application of the triage method, with those most likely to benefit from the intervention being turned away and the terminal

cases receiving treatment. So people who like were relatively emotionally stable and healthy would be denied the surgery um because they would seems like, well, you're fine, you don't need this, and like people who were like clearly for probably a lot of other reasons, you know, kind of on the

edge of suicide emergency cases would be given surgery. So it meant that and this has this is like had an effect that went onto this day because it means that like some of the first you know, transgender like people. The first people to go through this surgery that were studied were people who had a whole lot of other issues, which again lad to like. This reinforced this belief that they were like fundamentally unhealthy because they wouldn't let healthy

trans people have the surgery. Um, so it's kind of messed up. It's like when people blame Jews for being into money and then the only jobs they could have as whereas money lenders. It's like, yeah, now, um. Since medical schools were often unwilling to help trans patients, the private sectors swooped in to offer assistance, because sweet Lady capitalism is nothing if not inclusive. Once money is on

the line. A small number of surgeons, some motivated by altruism, others by a desire for cold, hard cash, began to service the needs of the trans community. This was i see, legal ground to protect themselves from malpractice claims. Many of these surgeons required psychiatric clearances. The ones who did not, inevitably tended to be sketchier individuals. And this finally brings us to the subject of today's episode, John Ronald Brown.

The long introduction, Oh and now it's time for ads you know who won't perform sketchy unlicensed surgery, Sophia, the following goods and services, Yes, only licensed surgery um from the following goods and services. Oh boy, it's gonna it's not gonna be the last ad transition that's uncomfortable in this episode. Was not great, Robert, it was not great. It was not great. What do you want? No, No, not great. A good add transition on a Sophia episode

that's not gonna have truth, But don't bring me into it. Yeah, don't loop her unto your us thinking, your battleship. You know what didn't kill all those babies, dick pills. Here's some products, and we're back, all right. You notice I got you saying goods and services? Now I do I do? You incepted it? In my mind? I know it's pretty great. I'll glow, I'll grow inside of you slowly like a fungus, Robert. I love funguses. That's where we get all of our

best mushrooms. I'm just the mushroom of the heart, Sylvia. Yes, we've had a little history lesson, and now it's time to talk about a terrible person motherfucker. This whole thing is a history lesson. Okay. Yeah, John Ronald Brown. Uh. And I'm gonna continually use his middle name because calling him John Brown will very much mix him up with the guy that we don't want mixed up in this story, the hero John Brown. So, John Ronald Brown was born

in July fourteenth, nineto. I don't know where, and I haven't been able to find much, if any, meaningful tales about his childhood. He claims in interviews to have been the son of a Mormon physician in Utah, which is probably where he comes from. John was apparently something of a child genius, and he found academic so easy that he graduated high school at age sixteen. He was drafted into the army at the start of World War Two. And I feel like he would lie about graduating at sixteen.

But I do not feel like you would lie about being from Utah. What do you gain from that? No one has ever pretended to be from saying anyway, It's like lying about coming from Oklahoma City. Yeah, I trust him. So he gets drafted into the army at the start of World War two, and as a new soldier, he was required to take the General Classification Test, which is the precursor to the modern as FAB test, which is like, are you are what jobs are you smart enough to do?

In the army? Um. Now, decades later, in interviews with journalists, John Ronald Brown would claim to have scored higher on this test than any of the other three hundred thousand people who had taken it previously in Utah. Now, this guy is a liar, so he might be lying, But I also don't know that you would lie about being the smartest man in Utah. Um. Again, I mean, if you're the kind of man who lied about being from Utah, you would probably lie about being the smartest man in Utah.

I think he's probably it's just a pile of lies. Yeah, maybe it's undred on your S A T S. But only when you're not in your hometown. I like, I wouldn't be surprised if three hundred thousand people was like three hundred thousand times the number of people who could read fluently in Utah in the nineteen forties. So a lot of Utah shade being thrown in this. It is beautiful, but not humans. Nobody goes to Utah for humans. It's

national park to get away from them. Yeah exactly, so, um yeah, whatever the truth about how intelligent he was visa v. The rest of Utah. Brown score was high enough that the Army sent him to medical school. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah and his medical degree three months later, because apparently that was a lot easier in the What the fuck you just had a b A and put in an extra three months. That's like a summer. I don't think it was hard

to be a doctor back then. Um, they had just locked down that you shouldn't shoot people for arsenic so actually have been born earlier. I get some medical people up. Oh man, you'd be a doctor. I'd be a colonel. We could. We could have a podcast called The Doctor Colonel Our Yeah, and it's still it will still be a lot of murder, but in real life because there's also no contact lenses back then, and I'm very blind,

so the doctor would be wild as hell. The doctor would be wild the driving as well, because none of us are wearing seatbelts. Um, just a bunch of blind people crashing into each other at big steel cars. It sounds awesome, Yeah, it does. It dool kind of rule Now, um, the shitty John Brown, as I like to call him, moved to Los Angeles to do his internship at Harvard General.

He finished his internship at the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles, and at this point in his budding medical career, there seems to have been no sign that John was headed for anything but a productive career as a man of medicine. John finished his time in the military and went on to work as a general practitioner in California, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Marshall Islands. Now it's possible that all this moving around was just John taking advantage of the fact that his skills as a doctor

gave him the opportunity to see the world. Given what comes next, it's even more possible that he fucked up in a number of horrifying ways and had to repeatedly switch states. That's the case anytime you've got a doctor in the forties that you know, got to move him to another parish. God, it would be so like I would absolutely have been surgerying people back any kind of surgery. You want to just leave. I don't want to stay in Mississippi. Like cut off an arm. In the next day,

it'll be awesome. So, um yeah, we don't know precisely what he did in his early career or if he was terrible from an early point. We only have one example of an early funk up, when he botched a thyroid actomy and almost lost a patient. Um, and we do know that John shouldn't have attempted to perform that surgery because he was not a surgeon and was not qualified to perform a surgery so early on in his career. There is at least one case of him performing surgery

without being trained to do so. Sunk you know what I mean? Oh yeah, you know surgeries Really it's like driving, I think, Yeah, you just gotta get in there and do it. Put your foot on the gas, close your eyes, and start cutting it white meat. You know, that's the

way it works. So uh. After botching a surgery, John decided that he should get training in the field if he was going to start cutting into people, and he spent two years in Newark City Hospital as a resident, and also attended a plastic surgery program in New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Unfortunately, he proved to be terrible at

all of this. He failed repeatedly. The So he goes to surgery school, but he fails constantly the exam that would actually certify him to perform plastic surgery um and then he later brags about this to journalists. Quote, I passed the written part of the exam without cracking a book. But he says that he failed his orals because his domineering father traumatized him and so he couldn't handle confrontation

with authority figures. He would say that my brain turns into cottage cheese whenever he had to do the practical exam, which did also stop bragging about not practicing. For being a doctor, he had nobody not make you feel good. I want you to practice, Yeah, I don't. I don't pick my doctors, Like, who do I think has the best gut instinct? I'm like, you could wing it. You can be my doctor that I want the guy, Yeah,

that's not how we choose him. Yeah. I want someone who's like, looks exhausted from the sheer number of books that they've read. Yeah. I want to come in their office and be like, damn, I could never read all of these. That's how I want to feel. Yeah. Yeah, So in total, John Ronald Brown failed the general surgery oral examination twice and the plastic surgery oral examination three times.

He's not great. Now, this should have stopped him from ever performing surgery in a hospital, but it didn't, largely because no one really checked up on him. Since he completed specialty residencies, he was still considered bored eligible, and honestly, it seems like no one was really paying close attention. UM. So John got to work surgery all sorts of people, and outside of work, he had a somewhat tumultuous life. His first wife left him for one of his friends

while he was in the army. Second life died of breast cancer. John moved back from the East Coast to California, where he started a medical surgery practice in San Francisco.

Now we don't know how John first learned about Christine Jorgensen's transition or how he felt about it, but it's plausible to assume his establishment in San Francisco, which was then one of the very few places in America where trans people had any visibility um would have keyed him in on the fact that there was suddenly a major

demand in this segment of the population for surgeons. And particularly surgeons who might not checked or surgeons who might not um you know, wanted you to have a doctor's note saying that you, uh, you were prepared for the surgery surgeons who might just take the cash and do whatever you ask them, Like when you go get button plants and they put cement in your butt, Yes, exactly, just in a hotel in Miami. Yeah, so the first vaginta that's that was very specific. I mean, that's a case.

Remember that Vice documentary about people's like lip injections that would rock their faces off, So that sounded I'm assuming it's the same kind of thing. Yeah, exactly, just putting ship into things that you shouldn't be because you're not all licensed person and people just trying to save money out there and do it under the table. It's amazing the desperation for uh something like thicker lips that would allow lead you to just like let somebody in a

hotel room inject you with nonsense. Like so many of the stories are like oh and then I was like, is there is there no uh anesthesia? And they're like nah. I'm like, well that's a really big sign for when you're going to get surgery. That you should be an under anesthesia, not for lip injections. But you know what I'm saying when people are like, yeah, I had to get butt injections, and they're just like, well, you're gonna

be wait during this, and like what that? Yeah? So uh yeah, in the nineteen sixties, the late sixties, uh, doctor started performing the first vagina plastics UM. And again we don't exactly know when Brown got into this line

of work. He probably started providing minor cosmetic surgery to transitioning individuals, like facial surgery and stuff like that, UM, but he quickly grew interested in doing more extensive work UM and by February of nineteen seventy three, John Ronald Brown was established enough in the trans community that he gave a presentation at the second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender

Dysphoria Syndrome sponsored by Stanford. Brown's presentation focused on what he called his miniaturization technique, in which he would turn a patient's penis into a clitterists, thus guaranteeing them the ability to continue to experience sexual climax. UM. So that's like the thing he starts like, he's probably for years working in the community, but he has this idea to basically trim a penis down to a clitterist while doing a vagina plastic selling point. I mean, it's a good

selling point. Yeah, it makes sense. Right If someone was like, oh, and you can come, I would be like, I don't care what you said before that. So yeah, So by the fall of that year, Brown had transitioned his own career almost entirely towards that sort of work, very few other doctors willing to do it, and most charged prices that were far out of the reach of many trans people. That's what I'm saying. Access is just not like, yep, it's financial and whatever and yeah, yeah, well no, you're right,

you're you're you're right on the money. Because John Brown basically establishes himself as the budget surgeon for gender transition um, which is not uh, I mean, it's obviously it's a necessary thing to have because there's a lot of desperate people who need the surgery, But praying on people who are just trying to live their lives like lives and

ruining them physically and otherwise is just evil. Yeah. Yeah, well that's what we're getting to this period of time is when a guy named Paul Ciotti, a journalist for Time, met John Ronald Brown. Now Paul covered the LGBT community for Time, and he seems to be one of the very few mainstream journalists in that period who legitimately cared about queer people. Um, if you read through his old articles, like, the terminology he uses is not the terms we use today.

But he's clearly like trying to be understanding and coming at this from a place of knowledge as opposed to sensationalism. And he kept his ear to the ground and read the mimiographed zines that the LGBT community disseminated during this period of time to get out vital information. And as a result, he ran across a story about a doctor on Lombard Street who was, in the words of one columnist, lopping people's penises off. So obviously, as a journalist, uh,

Paul's like, I want to know what's going on here. Uh, So he gives a call to Brown's clinic follow up on a lobbing penis's off. Lead. That's very promising. Let's let's see what's going on. Um. So he calls Brown's clinic and he winds up talking to Brown's partner, a guy named Dr James Spence, and I'm gonna quote from Siati's article in l a Weekly. Now, Spence struck me as a bit of a hustler, far less polished than one would expected someone with a medical degree if he

had a medical degree. To some people, he gave business cards reading Dr James Spence, but to me he said he'd earned his medical degree in Africa and thus couldn't practice here. I later heard he was an ex con who claimed to be a veterinarian, but that degree was phony too. The clinic wasn't much, just a few rooms on a busy street. It seemed more like a real

estate office than anything else. Sinsing my skepticism, perhaps Spence invited me to an upcoming formal dinner at his hilltop home in Burlingham, where he and his partner, the renowned plastic surgeon doctor John Ronald Brown, would be explaining his new operation to a group of urologists, proctologists and internists, some of whom Spence hoped would join him and Dr Brown and setting up the finest sex change facility anywhere

in the country. So there's a lot of information in those paragraphs, and probably the most interesting is the fact that this guy's business partner, Dr James Spence, is in no way a doctor. He's even less of a doctor than his non doctor partner. Yeah, he's having lied about being a veterinarian. So um. Yeah. Dr Brown's practice was

not exactly on the up and up. Um. Now, despite his sketchiness, Brown needed Spence because the good doctor, the actual doctor Brown was terrible at meeting people and had no connections in the queer community and it was kind of an awkward person, was not very good at building connections. And at this point, you're really talking about something very similar to being a drug dealer, when you're talking about being the kind of medical professional like working with this community.

And so Brown doesn't have the ability to like kind of interface the way that a drug dealer needs to to build connections and trust in the community. And Spence, who is a literal criminal and not at all the doctor, is good at doing that and he's able to build

connections with the gay community. Um. And he helps broker deals between John Brown and queer figures like Angela Brown, who was the publisher of Mirage magazine, which was like an LGBT focused periodical at the time, John Brown helped to fund the magazine in exchange for promotion of his clinic. Now Pulsati attended the soire Brown and Spence through to publicize the opening their new clinic, and here's how he

described it. This is interesting to me. After the fruit and cheese, we adjourned to the kitchen, where one of the waitresses lay on a butcher blocked table and casually flipped up her skirt. A goose neck lamp was produced, and all the doctors proceeded to examine the kind of work currently being done by Dr Brown's competition. I'm no expert in female anatomy, but the waitresses genitalia did not look like those of any woman I'd ever seen. There

was no clitterest or anything resembling a vagina. It rather looked like someone had taken a pickaxe and neatly poked a small square hole and inch on aside directly into her growing Either that or like an aerial photograph of a Manitoba iron ore mine taken from twenty feet. In contrast, Spence maintained Brown had developed a revolutionary technique that would

give transsexuals fully orgasmic clitteresses and esthetically pleasing vaginas. Later, Dr Brown and I stood around the kitchen table while he displayed what to me were ghastly photographs of his surgical technique. One picture showed a gauze noose holding up the head of a bloody penis while Brown sliced away at the tendrils of unwanted directile tissue. So, and I want to emphasize here, Si is not like a squeamish dude about all this, Like he's not the kind of dude.

He's just squeamish about the idea of trans surgeries. What he's seeing in Dr Brown's work is like not good. It's not the way it should look. Brown and Spence are like when serial killers work together, and like Brown is the one that stays home and murders, and then like Spence is the one and that goes and gets the victims because he's like personal, yeah, yeah, except for the victims sort of survive and in some ways get

brought into the clinic. So like one of the ways, one of the ways that actually kind of made sense that they ran their clinic. So at this time, if you were going to like go the legit way to get gender confirmation surgery. UM, you would work with a psychiatrist and would essentially spend some time taking hormones and living as your new gender UM, and then that psychiatrist would be like, Okay, I think you're you're ready, You're you've committed, Like this is clearly not a passing thing.

Let's get you the surge. What Dr Brown and his uh and Spence said should be done is instead other trans women should meet with the people who wanted surgeries and vet them, which, on its face it sounds like, okay, that might be one a reasonable way to do it. Is like these people know what's really involved in the surgery, they might be able to do a better job of like judging like when someone's like emotionally like ready to undergo this thing, you know, when you're talking about the seventies.

That seems like a pretty pretty advanced way to look at it. But the reality is that, um, those people are doctors or professionals. They're just they're not doctors or professionals, and they're essentially working for Dr Brown as a way to pay off their own surgeries. Yeah, so it's not there's there's aspects of what he was saying. He wanted to do that. I'm like, yeah, that might make sense, and then like you really dig into it and it's like,

oh no, it was just a grift. Okay, the fucking MLM scheme man a little bit, except for I don't like, none of them are in it to make a profit. They're just trying to get this thing that they like literally is life and death for them, this surgery. No. I just mean like, once they're in, they're getting other people involved, and then those people are going to get

new people involved, and it's just like witness. Yeah, yeah, it's not maybe not the best idea, although you can see why when he explains it to other people they might be like, oh, yeah, that seems like a reasonable way to do it. Yeah, and who would know at that point. It's not like exactly, this is revolutionary, so could be revolutionary, like we know that this is great or revolutionary, Like it's just new, that's it. Yeah. So to Layman, at least, what Dr Brown claimed to be

doing made sense. His patients had penises that they wanted to transform into vaginas, so he would basically split the penis, saving the nerves and blood supply, and then reposition the head under a hood of flesh to create a glutorus. The penile skin was used to create labia, and the hair was removed from the scrutle skin to create the lining of a new vagina. In theory, this is a pretty reasonable way to do things. This is on paper what is supposed to be happening. There were two problems

probably him. One was that John Ronald Brown had an almost pathological aversion to performing surgery in hospitals, medical clinics, and anywhere else you might actually want to have major surgery. Dude, that's part of the job. Are you kidding me? That's like if I'm like, I want to be a comedian, but I do not want to be on a stage or in a bar, or in a theater or in a club. I want to be a comedian, but I would like to tell my jokes to the children of

strangers who I abduct from their elementary school. Is that a job? I It's like, No, that's not the job. That's just a crime. Um. Yeah. So instead of working in like, you know, a clean operating room where it's safe to perform surgery, John Ronald Brown preferred to work out of his own home UM, which I prefer to work out of my home too. I'm working in my home, drinking my coffee and wearing my pajamas right now. Yeah, but you can't be a stay at home surgeon. That's

that's a fucked up dream. Like points for dreaming the big dream, But you cannot be a stay at home surgeon exactly. I performed surgery less than five times a year, I would say, um, and you know, mainly to friends and enemies. Um so yeah. One early patient recalled going to Brown's home office, assuming that they would just receive a checkup on a surgery they'd gotten earlier. Instead, she woke up from the anesthetic to find that Brown had

performed surgery on her in his garage. Jesus not great. Um, unsettling as that is. Dr Brown was very popular for a while as hiss no frills practice made transitioning much more affordable than it had ever been before. John's home acquired the nickname the House of Dreams, which is fucking heartbreak and given what he takes. Yeah. One of John's

early patients was a woman named Elizabeth. She was initially very happy with her new vagina, but a year after receiving the surgery, it began to tighten up and essentially heal itself closed. When she freaked out about this, John was nowhere to be found. Elizabeth had to find another surgeon, Dr Jack Fish, sure to bat clean up. When interviewed later, Fisher, who had to clean up for a lot of Brown's patients, said this, It's hard to imagine anyone worse than John

Ronald Brown. He didn't care much for evaluating his patients before surgery or for post operative care. He was totally focused on the technical procedure itself, and he didn't do that very well. So this guy is all about the technical details of the surgery, and he's also bad at the technical details of the surgery. Uh yeah. Now, In spite of the sketchiness of Brown's practice and the bad experience of a lot of his patients, he was very

popular among the trans community for a while. Wendy Davidson, who helped to organize peer clinics for the trans community, which is like clinics, operated like buy in for trans people to like provide each other with life saving healthcare. Since the government and society did not give a funk about them, so Wendy worked with Dr Brown for a while until another activist, Donna Colvin, reported that she'd seen Brown shooting up valium before performing surgery on patients, sometimes

on literal kitchen tables. Required the nickname table to browns Now, Sophia, you know who won't shoot up valium and perform unlicensed surgery and a kitchen tabletop the following goods and services. That's right, we're back. Uh we're talking about tabletop Brown. Um a terrible surgeon. So, Sophia, how are you feeling so far? Feeling pretty peppy? Good things are on the horizon?

You are You are fiddling with things with your hand in such a way that I can almost like taste the discomfort in the room, and that means it's a good episode. Question until I can show her what this guy looks like. Let's wait until the end of episode one. Okay, so excited. Oh my god, Now I'm trying to picture. I think you might look like, Yeah, it's it's a it's a thing. So uh. These stories, stories of like him shooting up valium before performing table surgery, took some

time to percolate out into the wider community. For one thing, most of the women engaging Brown services specifically hired him because they couldn't afford to go to professional clinics where surgery, for example, was performed in a not in a kitchen. The fact that he worked out of his house as well as hotel rooms and garages was just something that these patients had to accept because they were transmarted in the seventies and they just weren't a lot of fucking options.

You know, it was garbage. It's still garbage, but slightly less. Anyway, do you think if you got your surgery done in the in the kitchen and then you found out your friend got there's in a garage, you were like kind of big timing them. You're like, oh, yeah, I guess you didn't think you were good enough to operate for to operate on in the kitchen. Oh you're a kitchen or huh, yeah you're a garage. Yeah I was in the kitchen. Sorry about that. Sorry about that nice kitchen.

He had a juice maker. Um So Paul Ciotti, who was like the very first journalist to dig into John and really like the source of sixty percent of the information for this podcast. I really I have a lot of I don't know much about the rest of his career, but just based on sort of his work in this community in this period. I have a lot of admiration for him because he's writing for like, Time fucking magazine, and he's covering this group of people that like nobody

else gives a shit about. So good on you, Paul, Um, Yeah, props. So Uh. He found John Ronald Brown impressive at their first meeting. Uh, And I'm gonna quote from him here. I must say he came across as genial, knowledgeable, and obviously quite proud of his technique. There was a certain naivete and even passivity about him that struck me as surprising and a surgeon. But compared to everything else I had seen that night, it didn't warrant a second thought.

So Paul wrote what he describes as a pretty boring article about sexual reassignment surgery for Time, since he didn't think that Time would publish the wider details about what he'd seen. Um And before it went to print, Dr Brown called him to beg that Paul not mentioned his name in the article. He informed Paul that he and Spence had had a falling out and canceled their plans

to start a clinic. It is uncertain precisely what happened between Spence and Brown, but stories later came out that he allowed Spence to carry out his own surgeries, and again Spence was a fake veterinarian, uh, not even a fake doctor. So like something very very sketchy happened between him and Spence and they stopped getting along. By nineteen seventy seven, Dr Brown had botched enough surgeries that a bunch of other doctors, the ones who had to correct

his work largely had complained. The California Board of Medical Quality Assurance looked into Dr Brown and was shocked to realize that he'd worked with a fake veterinarian turned fake doctor and let this person perform surgery. They revoked his medical license for quote gross negligence and competence and practicing unprofessional medicine in a matter which involved moral turpitude, among

other things. The board was furious with John for allowing his patients to work as clinical assistance in order to pay off their medical debts to him. So this is again what I'm talking about, Like people can't pay all up front, and he's like, why don't you be a nurse? Well, I don't you don't need to know to be a nurse. My my, my partner here is a fake vets exactly. My doctor partner is not a doctor. No amous like

who we say we are here. You want to pretend to be a nurse, You want to pretend to be a nurse. I'll shave a couple grand off the cost. Now I'm going to quote from Palsiati again. Among other things, the board charged Brown allowed Spence to hold himself out as an m D. He allowed unlicensed people, including other transsexual patients, to write prescriptions under his signature, diagnosed patients,

and provide medical care. He misrepresented sex change surgery and insurance forms is corrective surgery for the congenital absence of a vagina. He exhibited gross negligence by failing to perform sex change operations in an acute care facility. Brown did them in his office on an outpatient basis. He unaccountably failed to hospitalize a patient who had a life endangering and puss infected wound the size of a softball where

his penis used to be. He failed to take medical histories or do physical exams before surgery, and he did sex change surgery on virtually anyone who asked for it, regardless of whether they were physically or emotionally stable enough to cope with it. Um And I think that's uh where her penis should be. I'm not really sure about how that patient identified. As a general rule, Paul's pretty careful about not miss gendering people. But it was the seventies.

Um And yeah, yeah, I think I think he's better than most people. UM. So at that point in history, many credible surgeons required their patients to have lived as their chosen gender for at least a year prior to receiving surgery. There's a lot that makes sense about this practice, but it also meant that many of the people who

most needed to transition never got the opportunity. If your life and job and friends and family couldn't accept you living as a woman before actually receiving the surgery that would that would make it easy to pass, than you just couldn't transition. Um. Some people, including some reputable physicians, defended Dr Brown for serving the community when no one

else would. Uh. The judge who revoked his medical license actually filed a memorandum opinion for Brown, calling him a pioneer who made innovative contributions to trans sexual surgery despite difficulties like performing major surgery on a dinner table. The judge suggested that Brown should be limited to perform arming surgery and a medically recognized organization rather than being drummed

out of the field entirely. So that's actually a little bit surprising to me that, like, yeah, what a weird answer to the situation, Like we still want this guy

on the team, you know. I think it might just be a judge who realized that these people were desperate and that no one else was serving them, and is like, again, the primitive nature of like our understanding of like um gender and particularly trains people at this point means that like this might not have seemed as brutal because like you have to think they think about early treatments for cancer, like they're literally like pouring acid into people's wounds, like

like hydrochloric acid and ship like that, like trying to burn it off from the inside. Um, So medicine tends to be brutal, and especially medicine that's kind of on the cutting edge, and especially in this period, and I think probably there were a lot of people who are like well, of course he has a lot of patients with bad outcomes. This is new, nobody knows how to do it. Well, we're still learning this thing. You know. We should just try to make sure he works in

a good, clean space because he's a pioneer. Like I think that's the that's the angle at least from the people who are like reasonably um, like compassionate, Like I I think he kind of tricked some of them and they're like, well, yeah, what he did isn't great, but like no one else's is doing this work, and it's

it's no one else is harming this group of people. Yeah, well, you also have to admit there were hundreds of people by this point who had horrible at least dozens who had horrible John Brown stories, but there were at least as many, if not more, people who had good John Brown surgeries. Um, because you know, it's it's some people. It's the same thing. That's like one of the difficulties today.

Some people take really easily to this kind of surgery and their bodies heal well and it's very simple for them. And you know, between like minor surgery and the hormones, they have a really easy transition. And some people because of their age, because of just their genetics. It's much more complicated. And so there are some people who John does his thing on and it works out great for them, and they get a good deal and they're grateful and

they speak his praises and they send other people to him. Um. And so it's not just people saying he did a horrible job on me. I guess I didn't realize how many happy customers he ut. Sounds like you're for him. I'm just trying to point out, like when I was here last time, you were like pro a certain kind of dog fight. I am, I'm trow a lot of kinds of dog fights. I mean, look, we don't need to get into that today. No, sorry, go ahead. Hashtag

not all dog fights. Um. Hashtag Robert, it's a good hashtag. Sophie, it's a good hashtag. So Um. The judges like, this guy's a pioneer. We got to stop him from doing tabletop surgery. But you know, maybe if we can get him to just work in an o R, he can do good work. Um. But John Brown did not ache this advice or this chance to actually improve his skills and serve a community in a responsible way. Instead, he

moved to Hawaii. UH. He almost immediately lost his permission to practice medicine in the state by doing something horrible, So he moved to Alaska, and he lost his permission to practice medicine in Alaska shortly thereafter. The hits kept on coming. In nineteen seventy nine, one of his very first vaginal plastic patients sued. Julie had initially reached out

to Dr Brown about getting breast implants. He had convinced her that he could make her, into his words, a perfect woman with his new techniques UH, and convinced Julie to undergo a full operation UH. Dr Brown was assisted in this by not a doctor Spence. The surgery did not go well, and Julie sued in nineteen seventy nine, claiming Dr Brown had left her neither male nor female. They settled out of court for enough money to provide psychiatric care, help for the rest of Julie's life, and

a new operation. By the time the court battle was done, Dr Brown had basically rendered himself unemployable across the entirety of the continentally United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. So next he moved to the Caribbean. Fuck, Why you got to bring the Caribbean into this? Why you gotta do it? Yeah? St Lucia to be specifical. Now, when you read other doctors talking about John Brown, they'll note that it was considered almost impossible to lose your medical license in the

Caribbean at that point in time. But John did um and he is a pen like people talking about like, I don't know how he lost his medical license and the fucking Caribbean, but he It must have been horrible. So uh, St Lucia was not entirely a loss for Dr John Ronald Brown, though in ninety one he fell in love there for the third and final time. Love might be too strong a word for it. Yeah, love, love may not be the proper way to describe this,

I should say. At age fifty nine, doctor John Brown contracted and arranged marriage with the parents of a seventeen year old girl who did not English. Oh God, would I'd call it buying a woman? Oh yeah, buying a woman seems accurate. He seems to have basically paid her parents for her hand in marriage. She's a child, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. He taught his new wife, Julie to speak English. And they had two sons. Uh. In an interview with Paul

Ciotti decades later, here's how Julie recalled their courtship. He asked me if I would like to get married. I said, I don't know. I was seventeen, he was fifty nine. Still, I'd be remiss if I didn't state that. Julie has for years been consistent in expressing her gratitude to Dr. Brown. Even after they divorced in the nineteen nineties, she insisted to reporters that she still loved him. He raised me. He taught me to read and write. He's a really good man. If I had to do it again, I'd

marry him in a heartbeat. That's straight up Stockholm syndrome. Yeah, it's fucked up. Like he raised me and taught me how to read and write. Yeah, that's it's not okay. You can't raise someone and at the same time, that's not okay. No, No, you cannot, um no, you cannot. I don't have a joke for that. Just pickle an, you know what I mean. Now. Once John lost his license to practice in the Caribbean, he was left with only one possible option for continuing his medical practice. Do

I even need to say where he moved next? You know, no where to where do where does a California doctor go with no other place? P? Yeah, that's right, baba baby. Uh no longer legally a doctor, Brown established a new plastic surgery clinic in Tijuana while he lived in Chula Vista, California. In order to dress up the fact that he was illegally performing surgery in Mexico. To avoid US law enforcement,

Brown described his business as an international practice in brochures. Now, he was far from the only doctor to use Tijuana as a bay of operations for his underground gender reassignment surgery business. A number of physicians, some of whom were competent, worked out of the city as well. The two most prominent were doctors Biber and Barbosa. In short order, Dr Brown established himself as the dude you went to when

you could not afford either of those other better guys. Uh. He was the doctor you went with if you wanted a surgery fast. He didn't even require hormone treatment, let alone a psychiatrist referral beforehand. Over the course of the nineteen eighties, he earned a reputation as tabletop Brown for

his willingness to perform surgery basically anywhere. Dallas STINNY. A transactivist started hearing horrifying stories about Brown During this time, quote, patients were waking up in parked cars or abandoned in hotel rooms. There was no screening and no aftercare. Anyone who walked in the room was a candidate. Some of these people, expecting vagina plastics, received simple penectomies, leaving them

looking somewhat like a Barbie doll. Others ended up with something that looked like a penis which has been soon and split to their groin, which is essentially what had been done. Some ended up with vaginas which were lined with hair bearing scrotal skin. These vaginas quickly filled up with pubic hair, becoming inflamed and infected. Some ended with paradon titus, some with permanent colostomies. Some ran out of money, and we're dumped in back alleys and parking lots to

live or die. Wow? What a yeah, Yeah, it's a nightmare. Um Now, Jack Fisher, who's that plastic surgery professor at UC San Diego we talked about earlier, the guy who batted clean up for John Brown. A lot concurs with Dallas's summary of Dr Brown's competence. And again, this is the guy who spent years like working on people that he had butchered. Um And after correcting what he called twelve to fifteen pelvic disasters, he said this, he's a terrible,

appalling technical surgeon. There is just no other way to describe it. He doesn't know how to make a straight incision, he doesn't know how to hold a knife, he has no regard for limiting blood loss. Uh. And Dr Fisher believes Dr Brown's practice amounted to a crime against humanity,

but I should say not everybody felt this way. Dr Brown performed hundreds of gender transition surgeries, and either through his own own semi competence or the fact that some people really take easily to the surgery, a number of these worked out pretty well. Uh. Pulciotti tracked down several of these women. And I'm gonna quote from his reportage again. One thirty three year old manager for a major airline tells me she had Brown do her gender reassignment surgery

in nineteen eighty five when she was only nineteen. It was so successful. She says that when she later got married. Her husband never guessed that she'd been a male. To simulate a period, she used to prick her finger to leave bloodstains on the sheets. I also hear from Anne, a Cambodian refugee whose father was killed by the Khmer Rouge, that Brown had changed her entire, suffering, painful life from

that of an ugly worm to a beautiful butterfly. Furthermore, unlike that of some trans sexuals who have difficulty passing as women, her surgery turned out so well she says that she got a job as a stripper in Las Vegas, Chinatown. Now, while these stories were not necessarily rare, they were not the norm either. Cherry, a North California businesswoman, traveled to Dr Brown's clinic in nine four to have dual sexual

reassignment surgery with her brother. She explains he ran specials bring a girl for a two for the price of one. Cherry backed out at the last moment when she saw his actual office. The sewers overflowed constantly and there was rarely running water. The O R was just a bedroom with an O B G Y N chair in it. Sometimes, Cherry claimed, Brown would sip coffee while doing the operation. And I'm gonna quote now from l A Weekly. The thing that most bothered Cherry, she says, was Brown's brusque

attitude after surgery. Would grab the dried, blood clotted bandages and ripped them right off. He was always so disheveled to his hair went in different directions, his shoes were scuffed and worn down. I remember him walking down the hall eating raw weenies right out of the package. A

fucking package of weenies. So. In one case, says Sherry, who spent eleven days at Browne's clinic caring for her new sister, Brown operated on an HIV positive patient who still had pins in her arm from an auto accident. She used the insurance settlement to pay for her surgery. In another, he used too much erectile tissue to construct the genital outer lips. As a result, whenever the girl got excited, her labia got hard. So not a great surgeon. Now.

As the nineteen eighties faded into the night eighteen nineties, Dr John Brown was probably the most prominent low budget gender reassignment surgeon, at least in Mexico, but the growing list of people crippled and deformed by his work. We're starting to gain notice and speak out against him. Unfortunately for everyone, Dr Brown had evolved and his miniaturization technique had given away to something vastly more horrifying. We're going to talk about that and how it all came crashing

down for John Ronald Brown in part two. How you doing, Sophia, Just peachy, everything's super fun and happy. Thanks for having me, Robert. You like this guy? Yeah? What ifan? Oh my god, that's what he looks like. Yeah? Yeah, you looking at his picture? Yeah, he does not look like I would trust him. No, how would you describe him? Just like

an evil old man, like racism personified? I guess. Yeah, he looks like he would be like shouting at a group of school kids in particularly shouting at the school definitely for being on his lawn. Yeah, he's your definitely your friends, like grandpa that would molest you. That's what he looks. Yeah, he looks very molesty, like profoundly so. So, Sophia, are you uh in a good mood? Yeah? Sup? S happy?

You know, I love love, love love it when a group of people just gets terrorized by a fucking murderer and they already are the most marginalized group out there, So yeah, you know, if you can pretty good. For some reason, the most horrifying part of all this, like there's a lot of terrible surgery stories in here, but the most horrifying thought here is of like a doctor sipping coffee and eating cold wienies from a package and

then immediately performing surgery without washing his hands. Like that's the thing that likes. The entire thing is so creepy. A doctor's with open sewage around. How can you even eat a weenie when they're sewage around? Raw? Or cooks? John Brown? God, damn well, you want to plug your plugable Sofia before we write out. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at the Sophia t h E. S so f I y A and I have a weekly podcast with Miles Gray from The Daily's Eyegeist. It's

called Fiance. It's half game show, half recap of our favorite trash show ninety Fiance and I have a podcast about love and sexuality called Private Parts and now. So check both of those out with Courtney Kossak, who did Bastards like two episodes ago. She did, she didn't, And I'm Robert Evans. I have a podcast. It's this one. You can listen to it by continuing to listen to it. You can find it online behind the Bastards dot com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and Bastard's pot.

I have a political podcast you can listen to about this election called Worst Year Epper with my friends Katie and Cody. It's on the same network. Um, and I will perform surgery on you. Um, but I will eat cold Weenies the entire time I'm doing it. Um, any kind of surgery, I don't really care. I just love surgery. So, UM, come on down, find me in the woods. Um, I'll just start cutting. Robert the Cutter, Robert the Cutter, all right, that's the episode. Go, um, go listen to something happy

to wash this out of your brain. Yeah,