Part Two: John Ronald Brown: The Worst Surgeon Ever

I think you will keep having a disaster until you commit to going back to the old ways what I have my wise, I have committed to getting fired and then becoming a corrupt small time cop. I think that's the path I want to go with. Did you if you watch Jaws recently, there's a scene in the second Jaws movie where Sheriff Brody gets at oh man, it's great.

There's a scene in the second Jaws movie where Sheriff Brody gets out of his police car and is preceded by forty or fifty beer cans tumbling out onto the ground around him, and like, that's exactly what I want to do for a living, just rolling around in a police car, drunk as ship with a gun. No accountability

on some beach town in the middle of nowhere. I'm glad that you're going to be a corrupt small town cop because, as as we discussed in the previous episode, I will be performing unauthorized surgeries and at that point I'm gonna need a friend in the police department. Friend, Yeah, this is the plan. Hey, would you like to be the non doctor con man veterinarians doctor Spence to my doctor Ronald und Yeah, no not, you're the cop. You already have a role to play. Would you so feel

with you on anything? My friend? Perfect? We got a clinic going, Robert, keep us out of the papers, all right, Well that's good, you know, Sophie, it's complicated. I feel like I want to know more about Spence because this is not just a simple man pretending to be a doctor. This is a man pretending to be a veterinarian who pretends to be a doctor. And that's like a whole different layer of scamminess. And oh, it's hilarious that he needed to first fool himself to step one. He's like, no,

pretending to be a doctor. He's like, I can't do that, that's too much lying. First, I'm gonna pretend to be a vet and out of there pretending to be a doctor. That's not that far. I can do that. Yeah, it's amazing, It's really amazing. Can we put up a picture of him too, because I'd like to, But the faces of that firm were not for doctors clinic. He died in a ditch like that is my assumption that he died

in a ditch overdosing on something horrible. If the world it isn't any way, just in which it's not, he would have died in a dish. So let's start part two. Um. Now, As I mentioned in the first episode, John Ronald Brown didn't only have sad stories in terms of his patients. He had some happy customers. One of them was Patrese Baxter. She was a longtime client and she calls him one of the best surgeons in the United States, even though by the time she met him, he was no longer

legally allowed to practice surgery in the United States. Still, Dr Brown illegally gave Patrise a tummy tuck, a facelift, and breast implants. She was so happy with the results that she had him cut into her granddaughter's ears. Quote they stuck out. The kids on her track team called her dumbo, why don't you just fly? He did her nose too. Patrese claims the surgery went well enough that her granddaughter went on to work as a model, So she clearly admired the man, But even Dr Brown's number

one fan acknowledged that he had some faults. She's also not a good person if she's getting years of fucking granddaughter. Cut. We haven't even gotten into what a bad person she is right away. So she said he was brilliant, but he had no common sense. He would walk through plate glass doors. He couldn't balance his checkbook through a screen door before. That is embarrassing and shameful. Um, now, just t whis bring me to and it's very cute. Tut tusk, tut tut tusk tusk who says that no one she

acknowledged that his bedside manner was not exactly great. Uh. Sometimes he would grab a magazine mid conversation and start reading. He mumbled frequently, and he never held his patient's hands. Still, Patrese insists he was more of a hero than a villain. He only charged for a sex change, and half the time they didn't even pay. Now, before you take Pat Baxter's commentary too seriously, you should know that she wasn't

just satisfied customer. She was also a surgical entrepreneur, which is one of the most terrified phrases I've ever heard. I lived in San Diego and ran a shady as clinic in Mexico. She and John Brown became business partners and worked together for years. She urged John to expand his repertoire beyond basic plastic surgery and gender reassignment. There was, she told him, a vast untapped market in men who wanted bigger dicks. Oh man, I'm kind of excited about

where this is going. Oh yeah, yeah, I know this is going in a fun direction. And it's one of those things we've just been talking about the most vulnerable people in the world been getting screwed over by this guy. Yeah about this, Yeah, I mean, I'm societal of this. Yeah, okay, yeah. So Dr Brown got into the penix extension business in Penthouse Forum sent a writer to to Wanta to investigate

Brown's practice. Now, the good not a doctor had started claiming an advertise spence that he could add one to two inches to a dick by cutting the suspenser ligament that held the penis root to the pubic bone, which I wrote as public bone, which is not a thing, but I found funny. Um. The article, titled The Incredible Dick Doctor, portrayed Dr Brown actively as a horrible driver who frequently backed into other cars. It pointed out that his pants fell down once in the o R at one.

Oh my god, that's like a cartoon. That's imagine, right before doctor starts cutting into you, his pants fall down. You're like, Okay, I have to cancel the surgery if you know aeal. Next, I am fucking telling everyone an anvil just falls on his head. That's ridiculous, dude. At one point in the article, he accidentally cut a patient's penile shaft, sending blood spurting all over the room. His quoted response to this funk up was I made a boo boo. I was gonna guess it was oops. But

this is worse. Yeah, that's definitely worse than oops. So someone from Inside Edition must have been reading Penthouse for the articles, because three years later they sent a team to investigate Dr Brown. The resulting documentary, The Worst Doctor in America, was filmed with Brown's oblivious consent. At one point, it showed him performing scalp surgery on a transwoman who was supposed to be sedated, but the sedation didn't take and the patient screamed and cried while the team recorded.

Brown called this nothing unusual. There's a special segment of one interview that I think is worth me reading in full inside edition. This is them narrating. But to Brown, failure is no reason to proceed with caution, and he continues to experiment on humans whenever he develops a new procedure. And this is Brown talking back in the developmental stage. I remember several times asking myself, is it really right for me to be doing what amounts to experiments on

some of these people? After thinking it all through, these people knew what I was doing, They knew I wasn't It wasn't a proven experiment. They were all willing. So He's like, I thought about whether I have any morrible responsibility, and I decided no, No am I a SOULI school? Yeah. Um so, Cherry, the young woman who's uh sister got a sex change with Dr Brown, definitely considered him to be a dangerous kook, but acknowledged he gives you a

vagina at a fair price. Competent doctor's charged twelve thousand to twenty tho dollars for a vagina. At the time, Brown's fees were reasonable enough that hundreds of women chose to gamble on him, in spite of the fact that his new nickname, Butcher Brown was by far the worst yet not as good as tabletop Brown. Not as good as tabletop Brown. Now, during my research, I came across

a tremendous resource called the Digital Transgender Archive. This wonderful site includes pictures, articles, and scans of entire issues of various znes and newsletters distributed by the trans community, going you know, back like decades, and I came across one from nine called twenty Minutes and a few pages in it featured a cartoon drawn by someone named Radia. Uh and Sophie. You want to show her the political cartoon of Dr Brown. It's a little small, so creep on it.

Yeah that chucks out. Yeah, it's just it's it's pretty much just a portrait. Yeah, he's dressed as like Jason from the Friday the Thirteenth movies, with a hockey mask covered in blood and a chainsaw of a patient on

its back. Yeah. Um now. That cartoon was followed by a furious article about Dr Brown titled Mac the Knife and I'm going to quote from it now a patient no more like a victim of the nefarious Dr Brown presented herself with the aid of a companion at the emergency room of San Francisco General Hospital today November four, for life saving medical assistance. Just a week earlier, in Mexico, she had the misfortune to fall into the not so

tender clutches of Dr Brown. By the time she arrived at s F General, she'd lost more than four pints of blood and was well down the road to being another and not so fortunate statistic of the infamous meat cutter. From information available, she's but one of ten recent victims of Brown's. For those of you contemplating surgery, don't go to Mexico for it, and above all, don't let Dr

Brown do it. Admittedly, his price of three thousand dollars is attractive, but the pain, anguish, and post surgical complications are not worth the trivial amount of money saved. So twenty Minutes had written warnings about Dr Brown before, and he'd actually had someone from his office respond to them.

Since his potential clients read this magazine, and since he knew no one from the a m A. Or law enforcement was reading trans community newsletters, he felt secure in just lying shamefully to these people to try to convince more of them to let him commit surgery on their groins. And here's his representatives response. Many of you have heard about doctor John Ronald Brown, m D, some of it positive, some negative. This letter is intended to set the record

straight and to inform those interested in his work. It goes on to account Dr Brown's educational history all the different hospitals he worked at, notably leaving out his repeated failures to actually pass his surgical exams. Then it gives this justification for the fact that his clinic had to be in Mexico rather than the United States. Due to the temporary rivocation of his license to practice in California.

His clinic has been moved to Plus, Mexico. He's currently preparing for reinstatement of his California license, but states that even when he is eventually vindicated, his practice will probably remain in Mexico for various reasons, especially the reduced problems of doing transsexual surgery, the reduced problems, meaning like the reduced laws governing what you can do to people you're

performing surgery on now. In that letter, Dr Brown's representative also brags about a revolutionary new technique he developed, taking bowel tissue to make the new vaginal canal for his patients. That's ensuring them a self lubricating vagina. Twenty Minutes notes that as a result of his failure to actually do this competently, more than seventy of his patients had received permanent colostomies, and I found a quote from writer Dallas

and Aenny on all this. In the nineteen nineties, Brown came to favor invasive surgery, in which you would aft the neo vagina to a section of resected colon. His results had never been good. The growing area of a Brown patient typically looked as if the penis had been split lengthwise and sutured to the growing with a simple hole between the split halves. Patients often wound up with colostomies. Several of Brown's girls dance topless, using scarves to conceal

the bags attached to their sides. When he started going into the peritoneum. Things got really scary. Patients would return home smelling of rotting flesh. Often they would return to Brown, going again and again for revision, each time paying large sums of money. Many eventually wound up in emergency rooms, and I dare say some ended up dead. Now it's hard to imagine just how fucking horrifying receiving surgery under

these conditions would have been. And there are very few first person accounts from Dr Brown's victims, and none that go into a tremendous amount of detail. I did find the experiences of one transwoman, Canary Cohn, who received her gender assignment surgery in Tijuana, and she went with a better doctor than Dr Brown, one of the better doctors in the area. So as I read this story, I want you to remember that what Brown patients would have

woken up with was actually worse than this um. So this is like a better case scenario than Dr Brown, and it's still pretty fucking horrifying. Somebody, please please come here. I cried and reached for the button, keeping it in my hand. A peculiar wet feeling was gathering around my legs. At first, I was too frightened to peer under the sheets, but as the chill increased, I reached for the chain over my head. With the light on, I lifted the sheets.

Then I panicked. The sheet under me was a pool of blood, and more was flowing from between my legs. I pressed the button again and again and began to scream for help, thinking about detaching myself from the bed, I propped myself on one arm, but then fainted and fell back. When I woke up some ten or fifteen minutes later, the blood had made its way down one side of the bed to the floor. I was weaker now and the pain didn't matter. I was bleeding to death. Sobbing,

I began to pray aloud. Then I screamed again and again until my voice faded into hoarseness. Grabbing a book from the table, I tried to throw it through the window, but it fell from my fingers into the pool of blood. The chills had changed to small convulsions as I tried to calm myself. Bending my head, I looked once more at the side of the bed, half covered with my

life's liquid. It looked pretty, somehow, red on white. I couldn't help thinking how ironic it was that I had we con saved all this time to pay for my own death. I would be my own executioner. And again, this is someone waking up in a clinic. So this is someone getting surgery from one of these doctors who

actually does provide doctor aftercare. Dr Brown's patients typically woke up in hotels or cars undergoing the same thing, not attached to a bed, not in like obviously Canary eventually did get medical help, but just took a while for I think the clinic to realize what was going on. But what a nightmare. You're bleeding to death and you know it, and you paid for your surgery and it's just like sober, yeah, yeah. And in the case of Dr Brown's patients, this is happening like the back of

a Ford Fiesta. Um, it's it's hard to imagine. So despite the fact that he had moved his practice to Mexico, presumably because he couldn't legally perform surgery in the US, Dr Brown still repeatedly performed surgeries in the United States throughout the nineteen eighties. In nineteen four, he was arrested for giving a presentation where he offered penile lengthening surgery to a group of men in San Diego. He only received a slap on the wrist for this and continued

traveling around California to perform minor surgery. Cherry recalled He'd shoot silicone anywhere you wanted it for two hundred dollars. He do breast surgery for five d He'd do cheeks, breasts, and hips. After injections, you had to lie flat on your back for three days so the silicone wouldn't go anywhere. He plugged the holes with crazy glue. He's a big fan of crazy glue. Yeah, I was saying, these are like the people that have been busted for doing this stuff.

In Los Angeles County, one patient filed to complaint against Dr Brown for a breast enlargement procedure he had performed on her. It turns out that rather than performing any kind of surgery, he just shoved a needle into her breasts and injected them with raw silicone. He then closed the holes with crazy glue. Another patient, a genetic female named Mona, complained that after Dr Brown gave her a facelift, face peel, eye job, and breast implants, he did not

do a good job. During the facelift, he severed a nerve in her face, leaving her with a permanent crooked smile her implants face, which caused the breasts to rot and leak a fluid her boyfriend described as smelling like cat piss. Then they fell off. To his credit, Dr Brown performed some aftercare for Mona. She recalled that at some one point he showed up to inject her with

painkillers wearing only one shoe. Oh my god, Wow, what a good sign to not let someone doctor on you when they're wearing just one shoe, Like you're going to inject someone with medicine and you couldn't get your shoe game on point for the day. Let's just go ahead and extend it to the whole outfit. If you're missing anything from the outfit, you're you're you're on a time out for doctoring for the moment. It's like a guy trying to shoot you up with insulin while wearing board shorts.

Like no, no, I'm gonna go ahead and pass. Yeah. Now. Despite all this horror, it was the Inside Edition episode that finally drew some serious legal attention to John Ronald Brown. The FBI went after him, confiscated his money, shut down his clinic and charged him with practicing medicine without a license. He had previously been convicted for prescribing narcotics with revoked license and practicing under a false name. With all of that on his record, you might expect him to serve

some serious time. That seems like a significant crime, right, m hm. He was sentenced to three years in prison and served nineteen months. Oh my god, yeah, nineteen months. Um. So, for a brief period of time, about a year, he worked as a cab driver on Coronado Island, which is possibly the only job he ever did that he might have been qualified for. He remember, they said that he got a constantly rearended people and got into car accidents. He actually went into the only other profession he could

kill people. Like, that's not okay, that's not okay. You're absolutely right, Like he picked the one other job that he was dangerously bad at. I mean, we really could he We have gotten him to be like a Walmart Greater, just something where you're just harmless, you know. I feel like as a Walmart Greater, he would have gotten people killed just directing them to the wrong aisles, just throwing

peanuts at kids with allergies. So Paulciati interviewed John about this period in his life, and Dr Brown insisted that the time in jail didn't deter him from his chosen calling. In the least. He said that he decided long ago to rebel against what he saw as the unjust medical establishment. I didn't like some of the things that organized doctors were doing, so I rebelled. Later, I didn't like what the government was doing in support of the medical organizations,

so I rebelled. I chose to ignore the laws. He's a hero. He's a hero, Sophia. After a year, John was able to put together enough money to reopen his surgical practice in Tijuana. For a couple of years, he continued chopping into whoever would pay, primarily servicing the trans community, if you can call what he did a service. By night, he had carried out an estimated six hundred gender reassignment surgeries. That is the year he met Greg Firth. Now Greg

was a psychlo No Greg with two gs three. Actually this is even worse than the regular Greg. There are five letters in Greg's first name, and three of them are G. It's a it's a disaster, It's gonna not end. Well, it does not now. Greg was a psychoanalyst from New York City. In addition to being a well respected mental health expert, Firth also suffered from a rare condition known

as a potemnophilia. Have you ever heard of epotemnophilia? The person who coined that term in ninety seven, John Money, described it as an extreme sexual fetish wherein victims desire to sever their own limbs so they can have better orgasms. What yeah, wait, why DoD, Why do the limbs get in the way of a good orgasm? That's a great question. And we're gonna talk about appet nephelia a little bit more in a minute. But you know what won't sever

your limbs to give you better orgasm? Sofia the following goods and services. That's exactly right. That is the guarantee we make is that none of these products will sever your limbs in the pursuit of an orgasm. We're back and we're talking about how there should be a legal limit on the number of g's allowed in a name. And I'm going to put it. I'm gonna say zero. All rights are just ad That's what I'm saying. They're just raised now yeah exactly name yeah, just reth deal

with it. So um Apa tem nephelia is usually described as an extreme sexual fetish about, you know, wanting to sever your own limb for a better orgasm. That is not how many sufferers of describe it. What are they say? Yeah? Firth and a lot of other people with it argue that the sexual angle is either minor or non existent in a lot of cases. Um Greg doesn't even like

the term appotem nephelia. He prefers body identity transfer. Um One sufferer I found interviewed in Salon described the way her condition made her feel in this way quote, For me, sexuality is being comfortable with my body inside. I feel my legs don't belong to me and they shouldn't be there. There's just an overwhelming sense of despair. Sometimes I don't want to die, but there are times I don't want to keep living in a body that doesn't feel like mine.

Now First seems to agree with this more or less, insisting in interviews it's not about sex, it's not about getting off with someone. This is about becoming able bodied. So these the people suffering this will claim that like it's not I don't want to get it removed because I think it's hot to have to lose a limb. I feel like, this isn't my body part and I can't be comfortable in my own body while I have

this armor leg because they're not an alien limb. But they're not capable of realizing that that's like good disorder, or are they. I think they are, But I think a lot of them would say that the treatment for the disorders to have the fucking leg removed or whatever. Um, I'm not going to come down on this one way or the other. This is just what they will say. Yeah, I mean I think before, but I'm like, yeah, And there are some people who definitely like there are amputation

fetishists and stuff too. It's complicated, I think the I think some people will argue that folks like Greg just have an amputation fetish, and I think some sufferers of apotemnophelia will say it's not a fetish, it's like a body Dysmorpheus sort of thing. This is not my limb and I need it removed. And there are people who will be like, you're just saying that so you can try to get surgery because you think gets hot, Like, I really don't know. I'm not a fucking expert on anything.

I mean, it doesn't really matter though, but it makes me think of like anorexi or something. It's like, you know, you're looking in the mirror and you see something that, yeah, it's not it's not right. So you're like, no, I have to keep getting thinner. I'm not thin. It doesn't look right, like I can't. I'm not going to feel happy until them this then, But it's ultimately something that you know you recover from if you work on it. But I guess not. I don't know if it does

it work like that for this, I have no idea. Um, well, well well I'll tell a little bit more and we'll see how we feel. Definitely, Greg actually does seem to have a bit of a recovery um. But yeah, we're building to that. So for years, Greg Firth has sought to have his legs surgically amputated um and there are some reputable surgeons who will do this for people with

appa tim nephelia. Unfortunately, the one first tried to contract had to back out of doing the surgery after the public hospital he worked at rescinded his privileges due to bad publicity. They were actually protests in Scotland against voluntary amputation being legal at all. Um. And when this all blew up in the news, first doctor, the guy who tried to go with, complained that banning safe voluntary amputations and hospitals would only make the problem worse for his patients. Quote,

they may take the law into their own hands. They may lie in a railway line and get run over by a train. They may use shotguns and their limbs off. They really are quite a desperate bunch, um. And the doctor's kind of proven right in some of this that, like you know, um, when someone has this kind of and it's tough because like a lot of doctors will say it's immoral fundamentally to do this because your job

isn't to remove healthy tissue. I think other doctors might claim that, like, these people clearly aren't healthy, so you are helping them by doing this. It's a very complicated realm of medical ethics, um, or at least it seems complicated to me. Let us know, if you're a doctor, if you would remove someone's leg voluntarily, um, hit us up now. Once his plans to remove his leg legitimately with a real doctor in a real hospital fell through.

Greg Firth started searching around for other places where he might have his alien leg removed. He read a story about an underground surgeon based out of San Diego. Despite the man's nickname Butcher Brown, that sounds good to me. That sounds good to me. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah. Greg decided this guy was a good person to reach out to, and Dr Brown was of course only too happy to help. Stacy running the d A who prosecuted Brown for what later happened, said he saw it is

all the same. You cut off a boob, you cut off a penis, you cut off a leg. Sounds like a quality doctor. No difference between any of those things. Now. First negotiated with Dr Brown, and eventually they managed to settle on a price. He flew down to Mexico to finally lose his alien leg, but when he showed up at Brown's makeshift o R, the Mexican doctor Brown had hired to assist him realize that he was about to help sever a healthy leg. First recalled. He kept saying,

this isn't right, you don't want this. Eventually, the Mexican doctor left the building, and Brown was forced to cancel the surgery, since it turns out amputating is a little bit of a two man job, so Brown agrees. Firsth flies down there and like, Brown gets an actual doctor in Mexico to help, and that guy is like he tricks him basically, and once he realizes what's happening, he's like, I'm not going to do this. This is fucked up. Um,

so good on that doctor. Um. A year later, in John Brown called Firth with what he's called good news and bad news. The good news was he had yeah. The good news was he'd found another doctor. The bad news was it would now cost ten thous dollars. By this point, Firth was less convinced that he even wanted to commit to the surgery, but he decided to give

it a shot. His good friend and fellow alien leg sufferer, Philip Bondy, scolded him for considering bailing on the opportunity, telling him, you'll regret this the rest of your life. How ironic, because you can't undo imputating your leg, but you can always undo having your leg. These people are not super rationally thinking about this problem. Um, I don't

feel uh not to appa, timnophelia shame them. But I don't think you should do this, um, And I think given what happens next time, right, So first travel to San Diego and took a taxi to the clinic in Tijuana. By the time he arrived, conclude that his compulsion to have his leg removed was gone. He told Brown absolutely not um, and this would kind of tend to suggest that, like, actually, yeah, you shouldn't have your legs removed. If this is the kind of thing that's seeing, how horrible the o R

can like remove you of your compulsion. Um. Anyway, here's how l A Weekly sums up what happened next. Thinking perhaps that Firth was merely nervous, Brown offered him a sedative, but Firth testified he didn't want to be sedated. He wanted out of there. Before leaving, however, he suggested that what he thought would be a win win solution for everyone, even though he no longer wanted the operation himself, he knew someone else who did. Maybe we could switch it around,

said Firth, Philip could take my place. And it turned out that Philip Bundy's apotem nephelia was much stronger than the Firth's. He flew right to Mexico and on May ninth, or John Brown severed his leg. Normally, surgery like this would be an impatient procedure. You would, you would not want to. But if you know John Ronald Brown, you

know he doesn't do inpatient procedures. Instead, he drove the freshly amputated Philip Bondi fifteen miles into the desert, where Dr Brown tossed his leg out of the car to be eaten by coyotes. Oh my god, why was that his first idea? How is the coyotes the first idea you have for getting rid of a leg? Because he has John Ronald fucking Brown. That is crazy. Nurse coyotes will be assisting in the procedure. Oh my god. That crazy. Their medical coyotes, Oh my god. Those are probably the

only people that worked in this clinic that actually were there. Yes, the most competent medical professionals. And you know what, the coyotes did their job properly. They were the most ones. Yeah, competent people. Yeah. Now, after throwing his patient's leg out of a car window, John Brown drove his patient into California to a holiday inn, gave him a ten minute lesson in walking with crutches and drove off into the sunset to count his money. Oh my god, oh god,

it's a nightmare. Two days later, Greg Firth went to check up on his friend in the Holiday Inn and found him dead. An autopsy revealed that gas Gang Green from an improperly sterilized leg stump, had been the culprit. Philip's death would have been an agonizing, almost unimaginably painful affair. This was the case that finally made the law treat Dr John Brown as the minister society that he so clearly was. It's telling that he had to finally kill

a straight man before this happened. And I'm not just saying that to score woke points. Um. After the police started, Yeah, after the police started digging into Dr Brown, the detective in charge of the case made a point of looking into some of Brown's other patients. And I'm gonna quote

Pulciotti with The l A Weekly again. When d A investigator Basinski, a tall, outgoing former cop with a shaved head and a big gray mustache, began calling on the people on Brown's patient lists, a lot of them just hung up on him. Some more hookers, he said. Some thought they were in trouble, some just didn't like the police. I called one woman, and an older woman answered, why do you want my son? She said. He committed suicide

two weeks ago. As Basinski later learned, Christina, formerly known as Eddie, had mortgaged her house to pay for a total of tin surgeries by Brown, but, according to legal documents followed by running, the skin graphs that Brown used to line Christina's vaginal walls were so thin that they tore during intercourse. When Brown removed Christina's lower ribs to give her a narrower and more feminine waiste, she subsequently

developed an abscess as big as a basketball. Christina's nose job turned out so poorly that she ended up with different sized nostrils, one of which turned up like that of a pig. Christina complained to Brown that he'd made her vaginal entrance too small, but when Brown enlarged it,

Christina felt he'd ruined her. Today, Brown says he feels badly that he didn't better explain the procedure to Christina, but when he called to tell her he was refunding five hundred dollars her mother told him that her son had just hanged himself in the garage. According to Running, Brown took the news quite calmly, noting merely that transsexuals had a high suicide rate. And I should note I'm reading a quote from an article there Sciatti consistently correctly

genders Christina Christina's mother. Yeah, those are her quotes on the matter though. Um, yeah, so the up it's also super fucked up, also removing the ribs, like, yeah, that's not okay, I mean, and it's kind of buried a little bit. But the most fucked up thing there is that when Dr Brown learns that one of his patients has killed herself, doesn't care. He's just like a lot of my patients killed themselves. Actually it happens constantly. Um,

it's amazingly terrible. Uh. And it it's it goes to show that like John is usually shown as like having killed one person Bundy, but he killed a lot of people. They just the law didn't care about them. Um, and oftentimes is that story shows their pair didn't either. And also just like the fear of whoever, the fear of whoever it is calling and checking on you means like

you're not really getting the full information anyway. Yeah yeah, because like a lot of these patients were sex workers and they're not going to talk to a fucking copy even if the cop legitimately cares about what's being done to them, Like it doesn't matter. Um So, Dr Brown

was arrested and police searched a Sandy Cedro apartment. They found bloody shoes and pillows, used needles, vials of silicone, dozens of empty tubes of crazy glue, bloody towel soaking in bleach, and dozens of returned advertising brochures for his horrible clinic. One of the brochures read as follows, Oh boys, is going to be unpleasant to read. The prettiest pussies are John Brown pussies. The happiest patients are John Brown patients because number one each has a sensitive clit. Number

two all get orgasms. Number three careful skin draping gives a natural appearance. Number four men love the pretty pussies and the sexy response Yeah obviously not true. Yes, horrible horrible eyes now also found in Dr Brown's apartment where videotapes of the Bad Doctor's operations. These videos were given names that reflect the level of professionalism I think we've all come to expect from John Brown. I'm trying not to laugh, but it's It's like one was titled Jack

has a new piss hole behind his balls. Um again, this is how the doctor labeled his surgery tapes. Um yeah. While bizarre, that video was not what hit prosecutors the hardest in brown stash. That came across a recorded sex change surgery which showed Brown using a scalpel so dull he had to use it like a saw, jerking it back and forth into the patient's flesh. Uh yeah. As the media's chief expert on table top Brown, pal Ciolo spent a lot of time talking to the detectives and

prosecutors trying to put Brown away. They showed him some of these videos, and here's how he describes one. In the video's opening shot, which is reminiscent of that famous scene from The Crying Game, an attractive Asian girl and the soon to be Las Vegas stripper is shown standing naked from the waist up, quietly chatting with Brown, who is off camera. She has nicely formed breasts and abundant

black hair that cascades down her shoulders. Then slowly, the camera moves down her body and suddenly you realize she has a penis. When the actual surgery starts, I find it so unsettling that I have to turn off the tape. All the men had the same reactions as running. The judge asked, do I have to watch this video? I said, well, yes, you do. You're the judge. Yeah, so yeah, I you know, part of me is like I I kind of like running here because he's like, yeah, you have to watch this.

You have to know what this guy did to properly sentence him, and like just because it's gross, Uh, you don't get to not look at it. You would look at photos of a murder, and that's what this guy did. So we're gonna watch the smoking videos. Like. I respect that a lot. Um, you know what. I also respect Sophia Goods and Services, the products and services that support this show. We're back so um. Apparently Brown had intended that tape and a lot of the other tapes to

be like advertising and training videos. Uh. The second scene in that tape we just described shows the doctor sitting in a chair wearing a white coat and explaining the upcoming operation to the camera. Uh, he has a microphone and his hand is kind of shaking, says running. You see him reach up and grab his hand and this is his dominant hand, the one he operates with. He holds up crew drawings ripped out of a spiral notebook. He says, this is the corporate of the corporate. He

stumped on the word. He finally says it the copora cavanosa, the spongey tissue on the other side of the penis. He goes off in this vein. You can see him waving the cameraman off when he loses a thought. The tape was so crude you could hear dogs barking during the surgery and music playing. The scrotal skin was lying on a board. It had pushpins in it. It was so dirty and dried out it looked like it had been run over by a tire. Yeah. The prosecution's chief

witness was a young trans woman named Camille. She was one of the only victims of Dr Brown who was willing to testify in court. Prior to her surgery, Camille had been an insurance underwriter. She claims Dr Brown botched her surgery so badly that she was basically unemployable now her surgery went down in November n Quote, he gave me an epidural. I woke up ten minutes prior to the end of the operation. We started talking. Brown said, we're almost done. I wasn't scared. I was happy as hell.

I was finally getting what I wanted. When you are climbing Mount Everest, you don't worry about a little frostbite on the top. But after the surgery was complete, Camille started having difficulty with her recovery. She developed a recto of vaginal fistula, which caused her feces to flow into her new vagina. This was the result of Dr Brown experimenting with his technique of using bowel tissue to create vaginal walls. She said, quote, my bladder was block, my

limph glands swelled up, and my skin turned yellow. Black stuff was pouring out of my lungs. All my systems were shutting down. All he would have to do is take one breath and let go. The fact that Camille survived is almost miraculous, and her testimony helped to finally put but Your Brown away for good. He was convicted by unanimous decision and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

He expressed no remorse or even real understanding that he had committed horrific acts that had permanently disfigured and in many cases, ruined, the lives of human beings. Pal Ciolo talked to Brown several times in prison via collect call. In their last conversations, Brown expressed that his entire career

was part of God's plan. He had called upon John Ronald Brown to help the transgender community, and next, Brown believed God had called upon him to invent a hyper thermia chamber that would cure cancer, AIDS and genital herpes. Brown described this as I'm sorry, like the other h that seems telling, that seems like he had herpies. He's like, the other two are for humanity, last ones for Papa. This one's for Dr Brown. That's what it sounds like, is you don't go cancer AIDS, harpies in the same

three equally serious. Seriously, that's amazing. Yeah. Now. Brown described this as using a chamber with an ivy drip that would spray a patient with hot water to cause a healing fever. Uh. And in addition to this, Dr Brown claimed to have developed a prototype asphalt removal machine, an attachment for trailers that would make them more aerodynamic, in a book that would provide a full explanation for the

movement of tectonic plates. He had a lot of book ideas, including an autobiography about his medical career and a book that would prove the existence of God. Tragically, John Ronald Brown, Yeah, was taken away from us too soon to finish any of these projects. In two thousand ten, just shot It was eighty eight birthday. He died painfully of pneumonia in prison. Oh well that's a silver lining painfully. Yeah, it's a story. Yeah, painfully. It was a horrible death. Uh, he did not get

what he deserved. No, he absolutely did not. And on that note, yeah, well, Sophia, what would you do if you had a leg that you hated and desperately wanted removed because you felt like it was an alien limb? Like, what do you do? I think you go to therapy and I don't know, try to work on it. I don't really know. See, I was going to go with shotgun, but yeah, therapy is probably better. I mean, I guess I feel like depression in no way is the same

as this, but it's like depression makes sense. You know, makes you want to kill yourself. And if someone was just like, okay, here's a gun, I'd be like, oh, that's not helping me. You know, probably just talked me out of wanting to die. Yeah, that's yeah. I don't know much about APATM nephelia, but it does sound like a thing. I don't know, Like if that one guy changed, then it's possible, right it is, but maybe he wasn't

as serious about it. I don't know, Like the doctor, it's all the spectrum, right, you can probably be really wanting your leg off and just a little bit wanting

it off. I don't know the doctor who, like the legit doctor who had performed some of those surgeries and then lost his operating privileges, Like there's a like he he didn't make a bad point where he was like, look, some people are going to do this, and as long as you make sure you're only performing surgery on the ones who are like otherwise going to go blow their own legs off or lay down on a train track, like,

you're reducing harm. And I that's that There is an argument to make, not that it's a bad argument, it's just that, uh, you can try to guess who the people are that are going to try it anyways, and you can be wrong, and you know, there's really no good answer. If you were wrong one way, people are going to kill themselves or maim themselves on their own. But if they come to you and you do it every time, then there's no chance of them ever psychologically recovering.

So I don't know what the answer is there. Yeah, I don't either, because it's one of those things where clearly I think if Firth had been allowed to perform or to to undergo the surgery, he clearly didn't really want to lose his leg, and he probably would have wound up regretting it. Um. I think. But the other guy, the guy who died, Um, if he'd been able to go to a real doctor in a safe o R with a proper yeah, he'd still there's a good chance he would have lived. Um. So it is it is.

There's not like an easy answer to this. I also don't know anything about the disease, like does it spread, Like after you get your one leg taken care of, is it possible that you'll be like, oh, well, now this leg is the alien and I need to get this off and then you just keep going, how does it work? Because you can get addicted to plastic surgery, you can probably get addicted to this too, can't you? Who know? You know, I assume, I assume you can.

I do think it's a bit different than that, just because, like I think it's very focused. It tends to be with these people like they're they're obsessed with this one limb um. But you know, I'm not. Uh, I'm not an expert on it. Um. It's certainly a pain a complicated tail. Yes, as is the tale of John Brown. What are you distracted by? What are you doing? The bad John Brown? I'm trying to like, there's this screeching noise coming over repeatedly the line, and I'm trying not

to be taken aback by it because it's horrible. Oh that's my parent. I'm so sorry. I don't think so. It sounds like somebody is like fucking an old television. Um. Yeah, okay, okay, um, which are yeah? So it just sounds like you're there is doctor John Ronald Brown. Um. It was a fun. One of the interesting things about researching this was just

because I read. I had to read a lot of old articles and documents dealing with the trans community is like kind of experiencing the use of terminology and what's okay evolve over the course of a couple of decades.

That was really interesting. UM, and I do recommend the Digital Transgender Archive UM, which is like a really precious source of You could kind of see it as an attempt to make sure that like, no matter what happens, what happens with the Magnus Hirschfeld's library doesn't happen again, that these um, these historical documents of this community taking care of itself and defending itself through the decades when no one else gave a shit about them. UM, that

that doesn't get lost. It's a really um precious source and uh, I found it fascinating, So I recommend given that a ready read cool. Great yep, Well, Sophia, you got any plug bubles you wanna you wanna drop down in the old P zone? What's the P zone? That's the plug zone, that's what it sounds like. All right, my club, my plug holes are. You can find me at this ifia on Twitter and Instagram. That's th h E s O f I y A and you can catch me with miles Gray on our podcast for twenty

Day Fiance Weekly. It's super fun. It's a game show recap show of ninety d fiance and it's ridiculous and we have sound effects. And you can catch me on my other podcast Private Parts and known about love and sex around the world. Well you can, you can. You can do that. You can catch me on my other podcast Worst Year Ever. You can catch me on this podcast every Tuesday and Thursday, except for the Tuesdays and Thursdays that I don't do this podcast. Um, and you

can find love in your heart, I hope. If not, sorry, that's rough. That's the episode. M h m hm