Trapped

By Daniel C Merrill

The authors work of historical fiction describes the pioneering transsexual program at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center. Dr. Colin Markland and his team of Urologic Surgeons performed the first sex-change operation on the famous Cuban dancer Shalimar in 1966. Twenty-three additional procedures were carried out over at the University over the next 9 years. This book tells the true stories of Shalimar, Linda and Jackiethree transsexuals who believed they were females trapped in a males body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479701919

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel C. Merrill MD.

Library of Congress Control Number:  2012914993

ISBN:

Hardcover  978-1-4797-0190-2

Softcover    978-1-4797-0189-6

Ebook          978-1-4797-0191-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

119347

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

About the Author

Additional Books by the Author

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my mother, Molly Eisenach Merrill, one of the hardest working women who ever set foot on this planet—a loving wife and mother who led by example every single day of her life. Whatever I have achieved in this life, I owe to you, Mother. May you rest in peace, knowing that your efforts on behalf of your son and daughter were not entirely in vain. If there were more mothers like you, this world would be a much better place.

I also dedicate this book to Dr. Colin Markland, who gave me a chance to succeed as an academic urologist. I will forever be indebted to this gifted teacher who would have moved heaven and earth to see his residents succeed at their chosen field of endeavor. He and his wife, Clair, made us part of their family during the seven years we were in Minnesota, and Tina and I will never forget their kindness. I was lucky indeed to have been associated with this gifted man during my formative years in academic medicine.

Acknowledgments

This is a work of historical fiction based on my experience with the male transsexuals I cared for at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The medical histories of the three main characters in the book are real; their names and personal histories are fictitious, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Introduction

Dr. Donald W. Hastings was professor and chairman of the psychiatric department at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center when the transsexual program began in 1966. This world-renowned psychiatrist had spent much of his professional life studying gender identification problems and had become convinced that, irrespective of its cause, which remains unknown to this day, people with transsexualism could not be treated successfully with medication or any form of psychological or psychiatric therapy.

He ultimately came to the conclusion that the best, and indeed the only, option for people afflicted with this kind of gender disorder was to grant their wishes and, by surgery, transform them into members of the opposite sex. At the time, these sex-reassignment surgical procedures were called sex-change operations by the lay press.

The majority of transsexuals were men who believed they were females who somehow became trapped in a male’s body. A few, about one in seven, were females who considered themselves males. I do not recall having been involved in any female-to-male sex-change operations during my tenure at the university from 1966 to 1973. However, my mentor, Professor Colin Markland, who led the surgical team that performed the sex-change operations, informed me that he carried out four or five female-to-male procedures before the program was discontinued in the mid-1970s.

Although it doesn’t seem so today, the sex-change operations Dr. Hastings proposed were considered to be extremely radical in the 1960s. A handful had been performed in Europe over the previous twenty or thirty years, but the operation had been outlawed in most of the civilized world. I doubt that he would have been able to get his research program approved in the culturally conservative state of Minnesota if it were not for the fact that Dr. Hastings was held in such high esteem by the medical community.

In those days, there was a significant fear that transsexualism might be some type of temporary mental aberration, and many of those who were skeptical of sex-reassignment surgery worried that a transsexual might change his mind after surgery, which was irreversible, and regret having undergone the procedure.

Dr. Hastings was not one of them since his extensive experience in treating patients with gender disorders led him to the opposite conclusion. His experience, to the contrary, suggested that once a child or adult thought they were a male or a female, they never changed their minds. Furthermore, there was nothing he, or anyone else, could do to alter the way they viewed themselves with respect to their sexual identity.

Nonetheless, possibly in part to placate his critics as well as to assure that he didn’t make a mistake, Dr. Hastings set up a comprehensive program to evaluate prospective candidates for sex-change surgery. Patients who were candidates for sex-reassignment surgery had to be referred to him by someone in the psychiatric community before they were accepted into his research program at the university.

Thus, prospective candidates for sex-reassignment surgery had been studied extensively before they walked through the front doors of the university hospital. Once considered a candidate for surgery, the transsexuals were admitted to the psychiatric ward, where they underwent an extensive one-month period of observation by a special team of doctors and nurses whose sole purpose was to determine if the candidate was a true transsexual.

One could only imagine the chicanery these males were subjected to by the sexy and cunning nurses that Dr. Hastings had recruited to help him unearth unworthy candidates for his transsexual program. Apparently, one glance at the long legs of one of his attractive nurses was enough to send you packing. As we will see as this novel unfolds, a person could be rejected as a candidate for surgery simply because an evaluator felt that something just didn’t feel right about the situation.

Dr. Hastings was taking no chances; his reputation and, indeed, the reputation of the university depended on him making the right choices every time—no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Dr. Donald Creevy, a world-renowned figure in urology and a man in his late sixties, was professor and chairman of the division of urology at the university in 1966 when his staff performed the second sex-change operation in the United States. Dr. Hastings, a man of the same age, was one of his best friends and closest confidants. I knew Dr. Creevy to be an extremely conservative individual, and one could only speculate as to his reaction to Dr. Hastings’s request that the urologists on his staff perform the mutilating procedures inherent in the sex-change operations.

In the end, however, he agreed to allow the members of his staff to perform the procedures. Dr. Creevy was at the end of his long and distinguished surgical career at the time and no longer performed open surgical procedures, confining himself primarily to transurethral resections of the prostate, a procedure he had pioneered years before. He delegated the performance of the sex-change operations to his junior partner, Colin Markland, an Englishman who had immigrated to the United States several years before. Dr. Markland, who is now in his early eighties, told me that Dr. Creevy had no interest in transsexuals or, more to the point, sex-change operations.

In 1966, Dr. Markland was rapidly establishing himself as a leading American urologic surgeon. As I recall, he had more innovative ideas each day than most stray dogs have flees. I can safely say, now some forty-six years later, that Dr. Markland could hardly wait to sink his teeth into the challenges inherent in the surgical transformation of a man into a woman.

I came to the university as a first-year resident in urology in 1966. I was the third assistant in Shalimar’s surgery in the fall of that year. It was one of the most exciting days of my young life. Six years later, as a junior member of the university’s urology staff, I was performing the procedures myself with