Jeanne Hoff, pioneering transgender psychiatrist, dies at the age of 85

In December 1977, Dr. Jeanne Hoff, a 39-year-old psychiatrist, takes a television crew out of her Manhattan home. The next day they would accompany her to the operating room for her gender confirmation surgery.

‘Becoming Jeanne: a search for sexual identity’ the resulting documentary about Dr.’s experience. Hoff was shown on NBC the following spring, with Lynn Redgrave and Frank Field as hosts.

“It is indeed a very lonely moment,” said Dr. Hoff, a slight figure with shoulder-length brown hair, that evening. She added, “The things we do to our bodies and our lives are very disturbing to the people around us, and I see that fear and confusion written on their faces, even if they have known me for a long time.”

Her choice to undergo surgery was years of preparation. However, her choice to go public, which could have had a major impact on her livelihood and well-being, was an easier one.

She wanted to express her own difficulties in finding care, her interactions with doctors who were not knowledgeable enough about transgender people. She hoped her experience would inform the medical profession.

In those years, there were few transgender figures in the public eye, but they were notable. In the early 1950s, the glamorous Christian Jorgensen’s transition was buzzing tabloid news, although a few years later she was denied a marriage license because her birth certificate identified her as male. In 1974, travel writer Jan Morris published ‘Conundrum’, a memoir of her own transition, to some acclaim. And in 1977, Renée Richards, the ophthalmologist and tennis player, had obtained a court order to play in the women’s division at the US Open.

But the television debut of Dr. Hoff was mainly created as an example for her patients. Because many were transgender or homosexual themselves, it did not seem possible, as she put it, for her to encourage them to live openly, confidently and free from shame without doing so herself.

Dr. Hoff, perhaps the first openly transgender psychiatrist, died on October 26 at her home in San Francisco. She was 85.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Carol Lucas, a friend. Her death, which was not reported at the time, was announced this month by Gay City News.

Dr. Hoff had a private practice in Manhattan and at the time of her transition had also taken over the practice of Dr. Harry Benjamin, the German-born endocrinologist often described as the father of transgender care in the United States. Yet Dr. Hoff is not well known in the history of that care, if it is known at all.

Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies sexuality, and transgender history in particular, recalled being surprised when she discovered Dr. Hoff encountered: which she had donated to the Kinsey Institutewhen she was working on her 2018 book, “Histories of the Transgender Child.”

“The idea that a trans woman would openly practice as a psychiatrist in the 1970s is revolutionary in itself, when the profession was still struggling to depathologize homosexuality,” said Dr. Gill-Peterson on the phone. “But knowing that your psychiatrist understood what it was like to be in your shoes was a tidal wave.”

In her research, Dr. Gill-Peterson that Dr. Hoff had successfully advocated for the release of a black transgender woman who was institutionalized between the ages of 15 and 30 because doctors diagnosed her claim about her gender identity as “mental retardation.” ‘delusions’ and ‘sexual perversion’.

“For all the flowery language of the reports, there is an unmistakable moralistic disapproval of her effeminacy and homosexuality,” wrote Dr. Hoff in her analysis of the woman’s care, “but not the slightest indication that the diagnosis of transsexuality was suspected, even though it was very clear from the details provided.”

In ‘Becoming Jeanne’ Dr. Hoff on the reflexive, if less destructive, sexism of her own doctors, such as the surgeon who thought her breast implants should be larger; he was surprised, she said, that she didn’t want to look like a showgirl.

At one point in the documentary, Ms. Redgrave asked Dr. Hoff about her thoughts about marriage. Dr. Hoff said she was in a relationship with a man, but she didn’t think the relationship would survive the transition. (It didn’t happen, though.)

“The marriage market for middle-aged spinsters is not a bull market,” she said. “I won’t die of sadness if it doesn’t happen to me. I have an interesting profession. I have a full life with friends who are affectionate and caring. And that, she added, was “a whole lot better than life was before.”

Dr. Hoff was born on October 16, 1938 in St. Louis, the only child of James and Mary (Salih) Hoff. Her father was a laborer and worked as a bottler in a brewery in the 1950s. Dr. Hoff did not talk much about her upbringing, although she hinted that it was grim, marked by hardship and disapproval, said Ms. Lucas, a friend since the 1980s. Her father, she told Ms. Lucas, was an alcoholic.

“I got the sense that she was raising herself,” Ms. Lucas said. “She was so smart they didn’t know what to do with her.”

Dr. Hoff earned a half scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned a BA in 1960. She went on to earn a master’s degree in science from Yale, followed by an MD in surgery from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Columbia in 1963. From 1971 to 1976, she returned to Washington University, first as an instructor in pathology and then as a resident physician. assistant in psychiatry.

In the 1980s, Dr. sold Hoff closed her practice and moved to Hudson, New York. She worked for a state outpatient clinic in nearby Kingston, where she treated severely disabled, long-term psychiatric patients, including schizophrenics. After about half a decade, she moved to a group practice in Pittsburgh, eventually working in Oakland, California, where she previously treated inmates through a program with the California Department of Corrections. Her last job was at San Quentin, where she treated death row inmates. She retired in 1999 after an inmate attacked her.

“She didn’t recover well from that trauma,” Ms Lucas said. “She said she couldn’t get angry, which would help her heal, because he was a patient. She joked, “I thought it would happen today, but it only lasted a few seconds.” She was very sympathetic.”

No immediate family members survive.

At the end of “Becoming Jeanne,” Mr. Field asked Dr. Hoff how she would like to be treated. “What can we do to accept you?”

She didn’t hesitate in her answer. “You may not need to put much effort into learning about accepting transsexuals if you have a general principle and that is, ‘Mind your own business,’ I suppose. That’s what it comes down to.”