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January 14, 2020 60 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Podcast I am Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, and
that was another fail to attempt to introduct. Introduce, introduction,
start my podcast about bad people you shouldn't have acts
the standard. Man, I really liked it. Yeah, I feel
a need to change it. Do you get a haircut

(00:23):
or something? Man, I get a lot of haircuts. I
don't know. You know something different? You know what I mean?
Go get a mohawk and keep the greeting the same.
I think frosted mohawk. Technically, yeah, frost to tips. Get
some frost and tips and leave the lips. No. I
feel that like George Lucas, like, I'm not really an

(00:44):
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

(01:06):
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

(01:30):
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

(01:54):
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,

(02:17):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:59):
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

(03:23):
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,

(03:45):
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

(04:08):
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

(04:29):
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

(04:51):
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,

(05:15):
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

(05:37):
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

(05:58):
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

(06:19):
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,

(06:44):
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,

(07:06):
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

(07:27):
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

(07:51):
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,

(08:12):
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

(08:33):
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

(08:54):
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

(09:15):
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

(09:36):
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

(09:56):
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

(10:18):
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

(10:38):
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

(10:59):
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,

(11:21):
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

(11:44):
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

(12:06):
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

(12:27):
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

(12:49):
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,

(13:09):
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

(13:31):
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,

(13:51):
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

(14:13):
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

(14:36):
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.

(14:59):
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

(15:20):
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

(15:41):
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

(16:02):
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

(16:25):
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

(16:48):
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

(17:12):
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

(17:35):
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

(17:55):
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

(18:19):
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,

(18:42):
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,

(19:04):
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

(19:28):
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.

(19:50):
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

(20:11):
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,

(20:33):
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,

(20:56):
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

(21:19):
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.

(21:42):
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

(22:03):
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

(22:24):
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

(22:46):
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.

(23:06):
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

(23:28):
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

(23:50):
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

(24:11):
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.

(24:33):
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

(24:56):
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,

(25:19):
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,

(25:41):
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.

(26:03):
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

(26:26):
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.

(26:52):
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

(27:15):
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

(27:35):
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

(27:58):
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

(28:19):
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

(28:41):
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

(29:02):
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

(29:22):
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,

(29:45):
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,

(30:05):
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,

(30:27):
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

(30:50):
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

(31:13):
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

(31:35):
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

(32:03):
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.

(32:26):
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

(32:47):
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

(33:09):
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

(33:30):
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

(33:52):
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.

(34:14):
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

(34:34):
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

(34:56):
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,

(35:16):
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

(35:39):
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.

(35:59):
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

(36:20):
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

(36:43):
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,

(37:06):
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.

(37:28):
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

(37:51):
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

(38:13):
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

(38:34):
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

(38:56):
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

(39:17):
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,

(39:37):
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,

(40:04):
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

(40:27):
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,

(40:49):
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,

(41:12):
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

(41:34):
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

(41:57):
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.

(42:19):
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.

(42:40):
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

(43:03):
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

(43:26):
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

(43:48):
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

(44:10):
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

(44:32):
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,

(44:54):
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,

(45:17):
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

(45:37):
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

(45:57):
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,

(46:22):
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

(46:45):
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

(47:07):
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

(47:30):
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.

(47:52):
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

(48:14):
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

(48:38):
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

(49:00):
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

(49:21):
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,

(49:41):
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

(50:01):
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

(50:24):
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

(50:47):
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

(51:08):
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,

(51:31):
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

(51:52):
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

(52:14):
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.

(52:39):
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

(52:59):
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

(53:21):
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

(53:42):
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

(54:03):
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

(54:24):
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

(54:45):
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

(55:07):
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,

(55:29):
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

(55:52):
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.

(56:15):
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,

(56:37):
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.

(56:57):
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

(57:19):
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

(57:41):
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

(58:05):
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

(58:30):
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

(58:51):
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?

(59:11):
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

(59:31):
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.

(59:53):
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

(01:00:15):
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,

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