May 19, 2025 • 42 mins
As a trans woman, Eilís Ní Fhlannagáin didn’t have much faith in mainstream health care. So when she wanted gender affirming surgery to remove her testicles, she turned to her best friend and trainee doctor Willow, and asked her to perform the operation in her living room…
From this humble beginning, Eilís and Willow built a whole clinic dedicated to trans women - in a tractor barn in the rural Pacific North West.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, girlfriends, I just wanted to give you a heads
up that this episode includes conversations about transphobia and descriptions
of state violence against trans people. There's also some pretty
graphic explanations of some surgical procedures if you're feeling squeamish
about that kind of thing, and as per usual, we'll
be swearing. If you do listen, you'll hear the incredible
(00:22):
story of how two trans women formed a clinic in
a tractor shed to help others and pay their rent.
If you don't, though, no worries. There's plenty more episodes
for you to listen to. It's morning in Philadelphia, USA,
sometime in the early noughties. Ailesh and Willow are getting
ready for something big.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Well, it was like, all right, where we doing this?
I'm like my Bedroom's like, we are not doing this
in your bedroom?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
And I'm like why not.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
She's like, because I need to position myself between your legs.
There's no place for me to do that in your bedroom.
We're doing in the requining chair.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Ailesh and Willow are sister. They weren't born as sisters,
but they've chosen each other. Alice lives with another member
of her queer family. Jenny, who she calls her adoptive
trans mum, and Jenny has a favorite chair.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
She loves this reclining chair. She sits in this reclining
chair all the time.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
That's the reclining chair in question. It's situated in their
mother's living room, which is notably not sterile. And this
matters because what the sisters are about to do is
an orchaeectomy, a surgery to remove Ailicia's testicles. Yes, girlfriends,
we're going there, so strap in. It's about to get
(01:39):
intense and graphic.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
So we create a sterile feel. We run the pressure
cooker for the artocleave.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
An autoclave is basically a steam cleaner on steroids. And
the pressure cooker, well, that's the thing you Nan uses
to cook her beef stew. But what is that's actually
important to know is that Willow is a recent medical
graduate and she's got ileash juiced up on anesthetics. Thank god,
legs akimbo in this treasured reclining chair.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I'm like lying there in pain because it's a weird feeling.
She's about halfway through and then they hear, oh shit,
Manny did of like what she's like? Hold on a second,
the Electrocaudrey pen's dead.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
That's a medical device that's used to stop bleeding, and
so it's really the last thing that should stop working.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Oh no, this gets so much worse, so much worse.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Spoiler alert. Ailesh is right. This surgery does not go
well at all, but it would be the first of many.
Eilitia and Willow would go on to help other trans
women get the medical care they desperately needed, and they'd
do it not from their mother's living room in Philadelphia,
but from a remote tractor shed in the Pacific Northwest.
(03:04):
This shed would become the headquarters of the Trans Health
Initiative and the stuff of legend. I'm Annisonfield and from
the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts. This is the
Girlfriend's Spotlight, where we tell stories of women women today.
(03:42):
Aileish runs the ball Barn. Before we get into what
happened during Aleish's surgery about to go very wrong, let's
wind back to the early nineties. Aleish Neel Lonigan was
a punk running with a right girl, and when she
came out as trans, the reaction was mixed.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Early nineties transition was difficult. Some of them were assholes,
some of them weren't. Some of the people in my
family did not necessarily approve, and I was kicked out
of the house, but nowhere to go.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
She needed to find a new crew and a new home.
But this was before social media existed in instead were
mailing lists on ancient text messaging systems, and when she
was around twenty, I least got on one for trans
kids run by a woman named Jenny.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
You know, we used to joke that Jenny knew all
the trans kits on the internet. We were all on
her mailing list. And the reason why she did it
was because, you know, when she was coming up, there
were just no one there for her. She had transitioned
in like the early eighties, so she wanted to make
sure that kids didn't have to go through the same
pain that she went through.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
How does that end up evolving into a real in
person relationship.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Went and called Jenny up and like, Jenny kicked out
of the house, and she's like, fine, you can sleep
on my sofa, but only for like a.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Couple of weeks.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Thanks Jenny, I slept on her sofa and I actually
started paying bills because I got a job on this
immediately and she's like, fine, you can stay.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Oh so it kind of became like a mutual aid.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Oh yeah, it was absolutely mutual aid. She was older,
she had health problems, so you know, I would cook
and clean and stuff for her, and she kind of
became my adopted trans bom.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
When I started down what was a very long road
to get official gender affirming healthcare, Jenny knew what shortcuts
to take.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
I called up Jenny and she's like, there's a doctor
in South Philadelphia just go to and every month I
would go pay I think it was forty dollars to
go get an injection. Like people would go on what's
called Meximone trips where a friend of theirs would go
to Mexico for a holiday, come back with it entire
(06:00):
suitcase file estrogen because you could get it over the
counter there. Yay, So how was the process? You know,
schneaky enter Willow.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
We're not using her real name, by the way, for
safety reasons, but she was that DIY living room surgeon.
She was also one of Jenny's trans kids.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
So she had just graduated from medical school and was
in her internship. She was going to come visit Jenny
and I was walking home and there's this piece of
shit camaro out front. God, she was notorious for buying
shit cards. I'm like, how the hell's that thing even
on the road? Walk into the house and there's Willow
(06:40):
and then we just became friends.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Alicia just got laid off as a software developer. This
was way before big tech and the dot com bubble
had just burst.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
I had a whole lot of time, and I had
fuck all the day. I'd been on eight years of
spirital aptom, which is it reduces the amount of testosterone
that's up ticked into your body. I hated being on
that drug.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Was it uncomfortable to be on the drug?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
You have to peek constantly, and I just wanted off
of it right And I'm like, hey, Willo, got a
question for you. So orchaectomies how hard are orchaectomies? And
orchaectomies are removal of the testicles. Now, there's two ways
that they do this. One is through the belly and
(07:26):
that is not something that's normally done, and the other,
much more common, is through the scirtle sack. And Willow's like,
it's not that hard. I'm just like, have you ever
done one?
Speaker 3 (07:37):
No?
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Would y'all like to look, I'll buy all the supplies.
Everything will be grand. And she's like, let me think
about it. She gets back to me like a week later.
She shows up and comes out with like a two
or three page photocopy, Like what's that? And she's like,
how to do the damn thing. I'm like, okay, So
(08:04):
we go in the next morning, we wake up early.
Now I'm living in Jenny's house. Jenny knows that we're
going to do this. She's like, you're gonna screw yourself up. God,
we granted now hold my beer.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
You know what they say, Mum is always right because
we know exactly how this goes down. Alice in Jenny's
recliner chair and Willow with the Electrocautrey pen in hand
that's just stopped working.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
She's like, okay, so we have a few choices here.
I can stitch you up, bring you to the hospital,
and you know they'll do whatever. I can stitch you up,
and we'll come back at this another day, or I
can just keep going.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
And I'm like, hey, I'm not going through this again.
No no, no, no, no, no no no no.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
It's like, okay, if we do, you have to be
real careful, and I'm like, we'll do so she continues
the surgery. Now, the best part of the story was
after the surgery, we had all cleaned up and Jenny
she comes downstairs and she's hungry. Now, one of the
things about these surgeries is there's leftovers. Oh what do
(09:16):
you do with the leftovers?
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Probably leaves them on her recliner chair.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
No, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
I stuck them in a zip black bag because I'm
gonna I'm gonna make a looseight block out of fit
a paperweight that's gonna be hysterical. So I stuck them
in the freezer. Jenny walks down, She's like, are you okay,
And I'm like, I'm ground. Jenny walks over to the
freezer and she's like, there's any of the taketos left?
And she pulls out the zip wok bag and she's
(09:43):
looking at her. She's like, what is this some of
your hippie food? And I'm like, Jenny, put those back
and she looks at him and she screams and drops
him on the floor, storms over to a reclining chair,
flops herself in it, and she's like, you better have.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Cleaned up your room.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
After this, Will is like out the door and she
just kind of snorts and it just glare at her.
Jennie's like, what, I just looked at her reclining chair,
and She's like, for fuck's sake, I will never be
able to eat anything out of the freezer. And I
don't even want to be sitting in.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
This chair now. And I'm like, I.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Love you, Please don't murder me.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Oh my god, you really were her child?
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Oh god? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Now, most orchiectomies are done for cis men who have
testicular cancer. Right, So the way they teach you how
to do the bandage is you wrap the scrotle sack
around the penis. Problem, if you were a trans woman
who's been on estrogen for a certain amount of time,
(10:56):
that is not going to work. So did the wrapping
the way that the book said, and like the next day,
the wrapping just falls apart.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Next thing, a leash knows she's got the mother of
all infections, so she books it to the emergency room
in desperate need of some official medical assistance.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
There's this thing that emergency departments will sometimes do, which
is called gomer get out of my emergency room.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
The staff basically tell Eileish to get lost.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
The triage nurse was like, yeah, this is obviously drug
seeking behavior. And I'm like penicillin. I don't even care
if you give me painkillers all I want or antibiotics.
I obviously have an infection. And like security guard pushed
me out of there.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
They didn't even kind of look.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
No, no, no, no, my god. About four days later,
I couldn't sit up. So Jenny was like, you were
going to the hospital. Put on some clothes. I couldn't
get jeans on. She had brought me this, like, you know,
the nineties flowing hippie skirts, So I put one of
those on. She gets me in her car, drives me
(12:11):
in an emergency room. Like the nurse is asking me,
when was the last time you had your period?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
And I'm like I've never had one.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
She's like why, and I just went lip the skirt
up and she just looks and she's like, okay, percocet
or morphine and I'm like morphine please. And they had
to go and they had to debreed the wound and
clean everything out and it was not pleasant.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
But I was in there for seventies. Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, like the doctor was like, yeah, I had you
come in later, you would have died.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
It's wild. And then on like a personal level, you
weren't coming out of that emergency room in deep, deep pain,
Oh yeah, And you weren't getting the care, like the
basic love and humanity that should be awarded to anybody
who goes into one of these institutions.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I didn't want to love our humanity. I wanted fucking antibiotics.
I didn't want to die. And the reality is is
at that hospital, because of how they treated me in
the emergency ram, I was very reluctant to go the
second time. I almost died because of that. And this
is not abnormal. It's this thing that trans folks have
(13:23):
been dealing with for years. There has been, for as
long as I've been alive, a reluctance for trans people
to trust the medical profession, because the fact is a
medical profession abuses us. They abuse us through their standards
of care, by treating us like children, by assuming that
(13:45):
we need their psychosexual history bullshit in order to get
the medical stuff we need in order to delve our lives.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
It was common in the nineties and still today for
trans people to face invasive questions around things like their
sexual experiences to even get evaluated for healthcare.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
And then even after that, they're still treating you like crap.
And this is not unusual for any person who's either
a sexual minority a racial minority, because doctors are not
immune from society.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Luckily, I least did manage to access the treatment she
needed before it was too.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Late, and that was that I had to have the
wound packed for two months. It was not pleasant, and
you know, we went well with and learn I survived osbrand.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
But that experience is yet another confirmation that as a
trans woman, there are no guarantees that medical institutions will
keep you safe.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
I have literally had Willow give me stitches before I
would go to a doctor again.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Willow herself is actually about to start a residency to
become a abortion doctor, and she hears some stories about
a group of women in late sixties early seventies Chicago
they called the Jaine Collective.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
And what they did was they provided abortions for people
who needed it. They did this knowing full well that
abortion was illegal and they had to be real sneaky
about it. And Willow's like, I got an idea, these
people are cool as shit.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
We should do something like that for transfers.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
After the break, Willow and aile do do something like
that for trans folks.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
Got got you?
Speaker 1 (15:56):
After that faithful archaectomy, Willow and Eileish both moved to
the Civic Northwest. Willow's new abortion residency is based out there,
and Aileash is following a then girlfriend who's craving the
quiet life. It's a beautiful place. Imagine rugged coastlines, lush,
tall forests, and towering mountains. If you've ever watched the
(16:18):
Twilight movies, you kind of know the landscape more timber
than tech.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Yeah, there's not a lot of programmer jobs out here.
If I wanted to go be a logger, I could
do that, But I really don't want to go be
a locker. So what am I going to do here?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
I'm like outside talking to Willow one day and I'm
just like, you know, we're running out of money, and
Willa was like, well, do you think you can do electrolysis?
Electrolysis is the all way that we used to remove hair.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Electrolysis uses a small electric current to permanently destroy hair follicles.
It can take anywhere between fifty to five hundred hours
of treatment to get the job done. That's base a
full time job for i Leash.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
I'm like, oh, I'm sure I could figure it out,
and she's like, all right, here's what I'll do. I'm
going to buy you in electrial'sis machine practice on yourself.
What we can do is a constarative clinical will offer
orchaectomies for a low cost, and when folks come for
an archaeactomy, they can stay here and you can do
(17:23):
legal electro on them.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
All power to them. They're diving headfirst into permanent hair
removal and archaectomies, which are surgeries to remove testicles. That's
two major healthcare options that they can offer their community.
But trans people are one of the communities in the
US who are most likely to experience discrimination in housing
and employment. Many simply can't afford the health care that
(17:48):
they need, and especially back then, when an archaectomy at
a regular clinic was about two five hundred dollars for
a forty five minute procedure. What Ileish and Willow want
to do is provide these operations on the cheap, charging
on a sliding scale from zero to five hundred dollars,
which is a big deal.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
I'm like, that actually doesn't sound like a bad idea,
and she was like, well, you know, I figured out
the problems with my or character. Mean kind of what
we did wrong first is, you know, instead of doing
that really screwed up wrapping situation, we do a compression
bandage against the body, and second we put in dreams. Third,
(18:33):
we give people prophylactic antibiotics, which.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Is like the smart thing to do.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
And you know, they got checkups twice during their stay,
so they had to stay for seven days just in
the area and Willa will go and check up on
them and change bandages and stuff.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
I'm like, that sounds fine.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Can you walk us through the process of setting up
the clinic and building it?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
So we had no idea where we were going to
build a damn thing. We had no idea. So we
are living in a rented farmhouse in the middle of
the Olympics in Washington State, on a two and fifty
six acre farm that the owner still lives on the farm,
His son still lives on the farm. So we're kind
(19:18):
of doing things right underneath our landlord's nose. And we're like, okay,
where are we going to build this? And will It
was like, well, there's this tractor shed that you have now.
Our tractor shed, for those who don't know, is a
three sided building with a roof, and it's where you
park tractors and farm implements. So the week before our
(19:41):
first searchery, we're just banging this out. I learned how
to tile.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
That week.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Willow had been to go on eBay and find old
medical equipment, so like this electric cautery from the eighties
that's like insanely huge but still works. We had an
auto cliff, an entire procedure table. It was swang, you know.
It was not like you know, shady shady done in
(20:10):
a hotel room. This was pretty swang.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, because when you say a tractor shed, I'm picturing
something really kind of farmyard animals around you.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
No.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
I know the guy who moved in after me, and
he used it as his office, and I guess now
it's used as an FDA chicken slaughtering room. Oh god,
a DA certified chicken slaughtering room, which I find his sterical.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
I feel like there's a joke in there somewhere, but
I just can't here.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Is it absolutely a joke in there, and I'll not
make it, but I will allow so many other people
to make it.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
After only a week of tractor shared renovations, the trans
Health Initiative is ready for its first surgery.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Our first patient was a friend of mine. You know,
everything went perfectly fine.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
The word spreads fast, and they opened their doors to
more patients.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
But cautiously, I was probably a little bit more paranoid
than I really needed to be. But you know, we
were doing this without medical insurance because it wasn't a requirement,
and honestly, we couldn't afford it without business license, which
we didn't need because we made less than fourteen thousand
a year. So we were doing this like real under
the radar, real quiet, right under everyone's.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Says, yes, the clinics under the radar, And it started
off as a bit of a DIY mission. But the
whole thing is actually totally above board.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Oh yeah, absolutely perfectly legal. You know, I am following
all the guidelines set upon me by the Border Health
and the laws of that.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
See. So if I were a patient and I've just arrived,
can you kind of take me through what's happening to me?
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
So we're actually going to start earlier. You would email
me and I would kind of email you back, and
I kind of do a sniff test because there were
some people who were not trans women asking for this.
I had one guy he was like, I have cheated
with my brother's wife and he will not trust me
again unless I am castrated.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
If you do not do this, I will do this
to myself.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
And like, look, you know, I'm all for body autonomy,
but that's not what I'm set up for. Man, I
can't help you. And then I would ask you for
a letter from a therapist. Then I would call up
Willow and say, okay, I got a patient in when
are you free, And she'd look at her calendar give
me a free date, and I'm like, okay, you were
to show up at this date here, wear comfortable shoes
(22:39):
because it's the gravel driveway and it's in the middle
of the Oregon Coast range.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
It rains a lot.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
I had someone show up in stilettos and I was like, oh, honey,
wrong footwear.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
I kind of love it.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, what would happen is you show up will It
would give you a quick medical examination. She would talk
to you and go you know, with the surgery entails,
you know, the risks of it, blah blah blah blah blah.
You know, it was kind of amazing because you see
trans women at their most vulnerable and they're most scared
(23:12):
and they're most empowered. At the same time. We would say, okay,
here's script for vicoin.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
That's a drug used to treat moderate to severe pain.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
And then here's script for marx oficillin.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
That's a penicillin antibotic for the aftermath.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
You're going to go into town and you're going to
bring that all back and you're going to take the
viking in front of us. They'd get back, they'd take
it in front of us, and we'd say okay, trying
to get undressed, and we'd start the procedure. And my
job during the procedure was to hold your hand and
tell you very long stories in a very very radio
(23:51):
announcer voice, and sometimes I would tell jokes. They would
be very long, very boring jokes. My repertoire jokes is
amazing because I had to talk like this and make
sure that you were nice and calm and not paying
attention to the fact that both your testicles were being
removed through a small hole in your scrotum.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Okay, give me an example. I'm a patient.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Okay, already, So mushroom walks into a bar and says, hey, bartender,
I'd like to drink. The bartender looks at the mushroom
and says, no, get out of here. We don't serve
your kind. The mushroom goes, hey, why not, I'm a
fun guy. Like These were not good jokes. They were
(24:36):
not designed to be good. They were designed to keep
your attention.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah, yeah, it would, and your voice is very soothing.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Oh I had to learn the soothing waste because again,
things being pulled through parts of your body that aren't
generally supposed to be pulled through.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you need to be soothed.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, you're feeling it. And then when we hit the electrocuttery,
you're smelling it too. Oh no, yeah no, and that
is not necessarily good smell. Something's cooking bodily, yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Alicia and Willow had certainly come a long way from
their disastrous first archaectomy. They're doing good, clean medical work.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Zero infections, zero infections.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
There you go. Were they the authorities interested in what
you guys were doing with the clinic.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
They weren't at first. Now what had happened was said
woman who showed up in the stilettos.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Went back to.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Her doctor, and her doctor was examining her and says, oh,
you've gotten richiect to me. She's like yes, And he said,
where'd you get that? It's very nice work, and she said,
up a logging road in a barn with two trans
women out wall.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Technically correct.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
When a physician hears this, what he's going to do
is he's going to call the board of health. And
i'd geese and the gee start right cracking away. I'm like,
what the hell's going on? Because that sounds like someone's
coming up to drive. And I look out and there's
(26:25):
a blue Ford Taurus. Now, for your listeners in the
eight nineties early two thousands, if you see up blue
or black or ground Ford taurusts, that's a cop car.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
That is a government car. So I went, what the fuck?
Speaker 2 (26:45):
And then I see this kind of gouty older woman
get out of the car in this tall, skinny bean
pole of a man and they're in they're kind of
frumpled government clothes, and I'm like that is not FBI.
Those are not cops. They are not dressed detectives, that
is dressed like bureaucrat. And I come out to the
(27:06):
porch and I go, can I help you? And they go,
we're looking for Willow. I'm like, why are you looking
for Willow? She's like, we're here to examine the clinic.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
After the break, the fate of the clinic hangs in
the balance between the Board of Health and a potentially
incriminating plastic cup filled with balls.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Got you, you got you?
Speaker 1 (27:47):
The Board of Health has just arrived on Ailsha's doorstep.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Go back into the house and a page Willow nine
one one. She's like, what you just got me out
of something at work that I need to be in.
And I'm like, well, the Board of Health here and
they would like to examine the clinic. She's like really,
And I'm like yeah, really, and Willi says, all right,
just show them the place.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
The night before it had rained something fierce. It was
muddy and slippery, so Alicia and Willow had to carry
their patient into the house to recover. She was a
bit of a lightweight and was passed out on vicodin.
Some of the cleanup could surely wait until the next
morning when the Board of Health had come knocking.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
So I go out and I'm like, follow me, wipe
your feet on the mat. Do not track mud into
my clinic. So I wipe my feet. I go into
the clinic. They walk in muddy feet. Okay, this is
bureaucrass trying to show in my place.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
I get it. I get it. So I walk in.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
They're like, where do you keep the narcotics? And I'm like,
what narcotics? You use narcotics for this and I'm like, yeah,
we do. And what happens is they get a script
and they go into town and then they take in furnaces. Well,
where you keep the script? We don't. The doctor brings
script bad with her takes it away. Autoclave logs are here.
(29:06):
These are my autoclave batch test strip numbers. Here you
go and they're like business license and I'm like, we
don't make more than fourteen thousand a year, but I
also do electrolysis. There's a business license.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Everything they challenge her on a leash has the perfect
answer to.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
They have me kind of backed up into the room
and like all the way in the back was the
cattery machine. And I looked to my right and I
looked down and there's a specimen cup. Oh remember when
I said this surgery has remains well whiteweight from the
night before one to keep her remains And I'm like great, and.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Then she's like, but I need help into that.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
So I helped her and I forgot the damn remains
and they're behind the electro cottery and I'm like fuck.
So government bureaucrats generally don't like dealing with us, and
if you're trying to get them to go away, the
easiest way to do is to raise your voice and
say the word trans very loudly. I just started saying, hey,
(30:10):
you guys, I wouldn't be doing this if the Board
of Health actually treated trans folks fairly. And they're like, oh,
they start shuttering, that's the wrong department, and I'm like,
I don't care if it's the wrong department. You guys
are in my surgery for no apparent reason whatsoever. You've
tracked mudd In on the floor. You're giving me a
bunch of grief, and like, you know, what, are you
guys going to start doing trans stuff fairly? In the
(30:31):
trans trans trans transtrands, and they got really uncomfortable looking,
and I'm like, go away, go away, go away. You
were not going to look behind the autoclaves. You were
not going to see the specimen cup with testicles in it.
So they didn't say it, Thank Christ, and they went away.
And I grabbed the testicles and then go and I
(30:53):
hand it to lightweight and I'm like, here, you forgot something.
So months later they ding us on one thing. They said, yes,
the clinic was all perfectly legal, except there was mud
on the floor of the surgery the cheek.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Even when the authorities were actively looking for mistakes, they
couldn't find anything apart from the mud they dragged in themselves.
The clinic was that professional and safe, and so Alisha
and Willow are able to carry on in that converted
tract to Bonn, providing healthcare to trans women from all
over the country. What did you enjoy most about this
(31:37):
whole clinic adventure.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I enjoyed the look in the eyes of other trans
women when they realized that there were no CIS folks involved,
no trans masks involved, no one but other trans women involved,
and that they could go and do this or something
like this look I'm an Irish American kid from Jersey.
(32:04):
Willows trashy and pickup driving, and if we can do
this shit, Jesus kids, you know, go get yourself a
little bit of education and trust me, you're going to
be grand. Just don't be afraid, right, And that's the thing,
like I think a lot of times trans women, especially
(32:24):
we're afraid to kind of do things because if we
get in trouble, we're fucked.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
How many of these surgeries did you guys?
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Do?
Speaker 3 (32:35):
I think it was around fourteen?
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Wow, that's amazing. The clinic closed its doors after eighteen months.
Willow and I leash were burnt out, juggling multiple jobs
and just needed a change.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Doing trans health courage wonderful, but it's also kind of
a drag. Especially as transperson. You can't emotionally distance yourself
from that. After the clinic, we told no one for
twenty years.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Why you know.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I'd love to say that we've started the clinic cup
for noble reasons, but the reality is that I was
poor and Willow wanted to help, and I was like, Oh,
here's a way to actually be able to pay my
rent and afford my box of Vannies. Mac and cheese
that eat once a day, and you know, be able
(33:31):
to actually do something for folks.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, I mean affording your box of Annie's mac and cheese.
Obviously it's super important. But also I mean you were
helping people, weren't you. It's what you did was make
care accessible.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I can never like focusing on that because I don't know.
I have complex feels about that, because, like you know,
I don't think that there was some freaking saintly goal
to it. I come from this entire punk ethos of
not having heroes, and hero worship.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Makes me really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
I am a dumb shlub from Jersey with a high
school diploma that just figured this out and just was
not afraid to get in trouble. The important things that
people do were done in silence, and they are done
behind the scenes. And I never wanted kudos for this,
like Willow still doesn't want kudos for this. Who doesn't
want to be known period And the reason why is
(34:28):
because you know, you help people because you're morally offended,
because you cannot sit there and stand by and watch
what is happening. I think what people are doing is
way more important and should be celebrated more than the
people themselves.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah, celebrate the work. Yes, and those of us who
like to celebrate people on the side can whisper your
name quietly.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
It's going to make me feel weird, but whatever, fair enough.
Me and Willow have a phrase we like to say,
be the cockroach. Cockroaches are very hard to kill. They
don't need a lot. They need a nice kind of
warm place to sleep that's a little dark. They do
a lot of things under the noses of like you know,
(35:14):
those humans that are living in that nice little apartment
in Williamsburg. You know, if you can learn what you
need to survive and learn what you need to do
to do the work you need to do, and keep
that as minimal as possible, there's a lot you can do.
(35:36):
So instead of trying to do more and more and more,
solve a problem that's in front of you. Right, there
was a problem in front of me. We could solve
it easily. We built in a fucking burn for Christ's sake.
It wasn't that difficult to do. You know, read the
instruction book and there you go.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
But if you.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Look at things as like, oh my god, that problem
is too big. No, no, no, it's not too big.
You're just trying to bite off too big of a chunk.
Bite off little chunks, right, And that's how you shouldify
the world.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
And you best believe the world still needs some serious deshittifying.
It's around twenty years since Ileish and Willow launched the
Trans Health Initiative, and trans people navigating medical institutions are
still met with prejudice and hostility. The medical care that
is available can still be invasive, hard to access, and
(36:41):
involve traumatic psychological testing. Alisha actually says that in the
US it's worse now than she's ever seen it. Trans
people's basic human rights are consistently trampled on, and the
mainstream media is just amplifying those hateful voices. People are dying,
(37:03):
so trans people do it like they've always done. Figure
out a way to do it themselves and help each
other do it. But you can help too if you're
a transperson in the States looking for resources or assist
person interested in solidarity and mutual aid. We'll leave some
(37:24):
links in the show notes. Girlfriends were stronger together. If
you've enjoyed this conversation, you can find loads more incredible
women on our feed. Do check them out, and please
(37:44):
do spread the word and tell your friends about us.
We want as many people as possible to be part
of the Girlfriend's Gang. Next time on the Girlfriend's Spotlight,
Nadia punks the President.
Speaker 4 (38:00):
We were told that we are paid by Hillary Clinton
to destroy Russian They said that we cursed the entire
country and thus we need to be burnt at the stake.
Some people said it we need to be whipped publicly
on the Red Square.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Hey, you've reached the Girlfriend's hotline. You can leave your
mini story after the turn.
Speaker 5 (38:25):
Hi, Anna and the Girlfriend's Team. When our daughter was young,
one of my acting students became her nanny and became
part of our family. Really it was as if our
daughter grew up with three parents, not two. Anyway, time
passed and we had moved to a new city, and
at that time, my partner was starting his very first
(38:47):
day of his brand new job at the university, and
I got booked for a film and television gig and
I had to decide whether to take it or not.
And I was talking to super Nanny on the other
side of the country, and I mentioned this dilemma of
whether I should turn down the gig or not and
she said, oh, I'll come and.
Speaker 6 (39:08):
Take Cleo to her first day of grade one, no worries.
And she got on a plane and she flew all
the way from Toronto to the west coast of Canada,
and she took Cleo to her first day of grade
one in her new school, in her new city, in
full hair and makeup, with cupcakes and treats. And Cleo
(39:29):
was as loved and safe on her first day of
school as if I and my partner had taken her.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Now that's a girlfriend. If you have your own story
like the one you just heard, and you'd like the
whole girlfriend's gang to hear it, then please send it
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under ninety seconds. Please and email it straight to the
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(40:00):
we're keeping things a little anon. We want stories like
that one time your bestie kindly told you your outfit
was giving serious two thousand and nine energy and lent
you a new one, Or when she offered a babysit
when you hadn't slept in days because your baby was
up all night doing the Terrible twos. Thank you, girlfriend.
(40:20):
I want stories that are meaningful or silly. I want big,
I want small. I'm desperate to hear them, so send
them over right, I'll catch you later. Bye. This season,
The Girlfriend's Spotlight is supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide. They
do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and movements
(40:42):
to strengthen and grow. If you'd like to find out
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Womankind dot org dot UK. The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced
(41:04):
by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit
novel dot Audio. The show is hosted by me Anna Sinfield.
This episode was written and produced by a Malia Sortland.
Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr. Our researcher is Zaiana Yusuf.
Sensitivity checking and editorial support by Jesse lou Nawson. The
(41:28):
editor is Hannah Marshall. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are
our executive producers. Production management from Joe Savage, Srie Houston
and Charlotte Wolf. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas
Alexander and Daniel Kempsen music supervision by Jacob Tivich, Nicholas Alexander,
and Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein and
(41:52):
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Willard Foxton is creative director of Development and Special thanks
to Katrina Norvelle, Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcasts,
as well as Carl Frankel and the whole team at
w MP.
Hey, girlfriends, I just wanted to give you a heads
up that this episode includes conversations about transphobia and descriptions
of state violence against trans people. There's also some pretty
graphic explanations of some surgical procedures if you're feeling squeamish
about that kind of thing, and as per usual, we'll
be swearing. If you do listen, you'll hear the incredible
(00:22):
story of how two trans women formed a clinic in
a tractor shed to help others and pay their rent.
If you don't, though, no worries. There's plenty more episodes
for you to listen to. It's morning in Philadelphia, USA,
sometime in the early noughties. Ailesh and Willow are getting
ready for something big.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Well, it was like, all right, where we doing this?
I'm like my Bedroom's like, we are not doing this
in your bedroom?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
And I'm like why not.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
She's like, because I need to position myself between your legs.
There's no place for me to do that in your bedroom.
We're doing in the requining chair.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Ailesh and Willow are sister. They weren't born as sisters,
but they've chosen each other. Alice lives with another member
of her queer family. Jenny, who she calls her adoptive
trans mum, and Jenny has a favorite chair.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
She loves this reclining chair. She sits in this reclining
chair all the time.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
That's the reclining chair in question. It's situated in their
mother's living room, which is notably not sterile. And this
matters because what the sisters are about to do is
an orchaeectomy, a surgery to remove Ailicia's testicles. Yes, girlfriends,
we're going there, so strap in. It's about to get
(01:39):
intense and graphic.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
So we create a sterile feel. We run the pressure
cooker for the artocleave.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
An autoclave is basically a steam cleaner on steroids. And
the pressure cooker, well, that's the thing you Nan uses
to cook her beef stew. But what is that's actually
important to know is that Willow is a recent medical
graduate and she's got ileash juiced up on anesthetics. Thank god,
legs akimbo in this treasured reclining chair.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I'm like lying there in pain because it's a weird feeling.
She's about halfway through and then they hear, oh shit,
Manny did of like what she's like? Hold on a second,
the Electrocaudrey pen's dead.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
That's a medical device that's used to stop bleeding, and
so it's really the last thing that should stop working.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Oh no, this gets so much worse, so much worse.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Spoiler alert. Ailesh is right. This surgery does not go
well at all, but it would be the first of many.
Eilitia and Willow would go on to help other trans
women get the medical care they desperately needed, and they'd
do it not from their mother's living room in Philadelphia,
but from a remote tractor shed in the Pacific Northwest.
(03:04):
This shed would become the headquarters of the Trans Health
Initiative and the stuff of legend. I'm Annisonfield and from
the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts. This is the
Girlfriend's Spotlight, where we tell stories of women women today.
(03:42):
Aileish runs the ball Barn. Before we get into what
happened during Aleish's surgery about to go very wrong, let's
wind back to the early nineties. Aleish Neel Lonigan was
a punk running with a right girl, and when she
came out as trans, the reaction was mixed.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Early nineties transition was difficult. Some of them were assholes,
some of them weren't. Some of the people in my
family did not necessarily approve, and I was kicked out
of the house, but nowhere to go.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
She needed to find a new crew and a new home.
But this was before social media existed in instead were
mailing lists on ancient text messaging systems, and when she
was around twenty, I least got on one for trans
kids run by a woman named Jenny.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
You know, we used to joke that Jenny knew all
the trans kits on the internet. We were all on
her mailing list. And the reason why she did it
was because, you know, when she was coming up, there
were just no one there for her. She had transitioned
in like the early eighties, so she wanted to make
sure that kids didn't have to go through the same
pain that she went through.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
How does that end up evolving into a real in
person relationship.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Went and called Jenny up and like, Jenny kicked out
of the house, and she's like, fine, you can sleep
on my sofa, but only for like a.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Couple of weeks.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Thanks Jenny, I slept on her sofa and I actually
started paying bills because I got a job on this
immediately and she's like, fine, you can stay.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Oh so it kind of became like a mutual aid.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Oh yeah, it was absolutely mutual aid. She was older,
she had health problems, so you know, I would cook
and clean and stuff for her, and she kind of
became my adopted trans bom.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
When I started down what was a very long road
to get official gender affirming healthcare, Jenny knew what shortcuts
to take.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
I called up Jenny and she's like, there's a doctor
in South Philadelphia just go to and every month I
would go pay I think it was forty dollars to
go get an injection. Like people would go on what's
called Meximone trips where a friend of theirs would go
to Mexico for a holiday, come back with it entire
(06:00):
suitcase file estrogen because you could get it over the
counter there. Yay, So how was the process? You know,
schneaky enter Willow.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
We're not using her real name, by the way, for
safety reasons, but she was that DIY living room surgeon.
She was also one of Jenny's trans kids.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
So she had just graduated from medical school and was
in her internship. She was going to come visit Jenny
and I was walking home and there's this piece of
shit camaro out front. God, she was notorious for buying
shit cards. I'm like, how the hell's that thing even
on the road? Walk into the house and there's Willow
(06:40):
and then we just became friends.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Alicia just got laid off as a software developer. This
was way before big tech and the dot com bubble
had just burst.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
I had a whole lot of time, and I had
fuck all the day. I'd been on eight years of
spirital aptom, which is it reduces the amount of testosterone
that's up ticked into your body. I hated being on
that drug.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Was it uncomfortable to be on the drug?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
You have to peek constantly, and I just wanted off
of it right And I'm like, hey, Willo, got a
question for you. So orchaectomies how hard are orchaectomies? And
orchaectomies are removal of the testicles. Now, there's two ways
that they do this. One is through the belly and
(07:26):
that is not something that's normally done, and the other,
much more common, is through the scirtle sack. And Willow's like,
it's not that hard. I'm just like, have you ever
done one?
Speaker 3 (07:37):
No?
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Would y'all like to look, I'll buy all the supplies.
Everything will be grand. And she's like, let me think
about it. She gets back to me like a week later.
She shows up and comes out with like a two
or three page photocopy, Like what's that? And she's like,
how to do the damn thing. I'm like, okay, So
(08:04):
we go in the next morning, we wake up early.
Now I'm living in Jenny's house. Jenny knows that we're
going to do this. She's like, you're gonna screw yourself up. God,
we granted now hold my beer.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
You know what they say, Mum is always right because
we know exactly how this goes down. Alice in Jenny's
recliner chair and Willow with the Electrocautrey pen in hand
that's just stopped working.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
She's like, okay, so we have a few choices here.
I can stitch you up, bring you to the hospital,
and you know they'll do whatever. I can stitch you up,
and we'll come back at this another day, or I
can just keep going.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
And I'm like, hey, I'm not going through this again.
No no, no, no, no, no no no no.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
It's like, okay, if we do, you have to be
real careful, and I'm like, we'll do so she continues
the surgery. Now, the best part of the story was
after the surgery, we had all cleaned up and Jenny
she comes downstairs and she's hungry. Now, one of the
things about these surgeries is there's leftovers. Oh what do
(09:16):
you do with the leftovers?
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Probably leaves them on her recliner chair.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
No, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
I stuck them in a zip black bag because I'm
gonna I'm gonna make a looseight block out of fit
a paperweight that's gonna be hysterical. So I stuck them
in the freezer. Jenny walks down, She's like, are you okay,
And I'm like, I'm ground. Jenny walks over to the
freezer and she's like, there's any of the taketos left?
And she pulls out the zip wok bag and she's
(09:43):
looking at her. She's like, what is this some of
your hippie food? And I'm like, Jenny, put those back
and she looks at him and she screams and drops
him on the floor, storms over to a reclining chair,
flops herself in it, and she's like, you better have.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Cleaned up your room.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
After this, Will is like out the door and she
just kind of snorts and it just glare at her.
Jennie's like, what, I just looked at her reclining chair,
and She's like, for fuck's sake, I will never be
able to eat anything out of the freezer. And I
don't even want to be sitting in.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
This chair now. And I'm like, I.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Love you, Please don't murder me.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Oh my god, you really were her child?
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Oh god? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Now, most orchiectomies are done for cis men who have
testicular cancer. Right, So the way they teach you how
to do the bandage is you wrap the scrotle sack
around the penis. Problem, if you were a trans woman
who's been on estrogen for a certain amount of time,
(10:56):
that is not going to work. So did the wrapping
the way that the book said, and like the next day,
the wrapping just falls apart.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Next thing, a leash knows she's got the mother of
all infections, so she books it to the emergency room
in desperate need of some official medical assistance.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
There's this thing that emergency departments will sometimes do, which
is called gomer get out of my emergency room.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
The staff basically tell Eileish to get lost.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
The triage nurse was like, yeah, this is obviously drug
seeking behavior. And I'm like penicillin. I don't even care
if you give me painkillers all I want or antibiotics.
I obviously have an infection. And like security guard pushed
me out of there.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
They didn't even kind of look.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
No, no, no, no, my god. About four days later,
I couldn't sit up. So Jenny was like, you were
going to the hospital. Put on some clothes. I couldn't
get jeans on. She had brought me this, like, you know,
the nineties flowing hippie skirts, So I put one of
those on. She gets me in her car, drives me
(12:11):
in an emergency room. Like the nurse is asking me,
when was the last time you had your period?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
And I'm like I've never had one.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
She's like why, and I just went lip the skirt
up and she just looks and she's like, okay, percocet
or morphine and I'm like morphine please. And they had
to go and they had to debreed the wound and
clean everything out and it was not pleasant.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
But I was in there for seventies. Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, like the doctor was like, yeah, I had you
come in later, you would have died.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
It's wild. And then on like a personal level, you
weren't coming out of that emergency room in deep, deep pain,
Oh yeah, And you weren't getting the care, like the
basic love and humanity that should be awarded to anybody
who goes into one of these institutions.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I didn't want to love our humanity. I wanted fucking antibiotics.
I didn't want to die. And the reality is is
at that hospital, because of how they treated me in
the emergency ram, I was very reluctant to go the
second time. I almost died because of that. And this
is not abnormal. It's this thing that trans folks have
(13:23):
been dealing with for years. There has been, for as
long as I've been alive, a reluctance for trans people
to trust the medical profession, because the fact is a
medical profession abuses us. They abuse us through their standards
of care, by treating us like children, by assuming that
(13:45):
we need their psychosexual history bullshit in order to get
the medical stuff we need in order to delve our lives.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
It was common in the nineties and still today for
trans people to face invasive questions around things like their
sexual experiences to even get evaluated for healthcare.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
And then even after that, they're still treating you like crap.
And this is not unusual for any person who's either
a sexual minority a racial minority, because doctors are not
immune from society.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Luckily, I least did manage to access the treatment she
needed before it was too.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Late, and that was that I had to have the
wound packed for two months. It was not pleasant, and
you know, we went well with and learn I survived osbrand.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
But that experience is yet another confirmation that as a
trans woman, there are no guarantees that medical institutions will
keep you safe.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
I have literally had Willow give me stitches before I
would go to a doctor again.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Willow herself is actually about to start a residency to
become a abortion doctor, and she hears some stories about
a group of women in late sixties early seventies Chicago
they called the Jaine Collective.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
And what they did was they provided abortions for people
who needed it. They did this knowing full well that
abortion was illegal and they had to be real sneaky
about it. And Willow's like, I got an idea, these
people are cool as shit.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
We should do something like that for transfers.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
After the break, Willow and aile do do something like
that for trans folks.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
Got got you?
Speaker 1 (15:56):
After that faithful archaectomy, Willow and Eileish both moved to
the Civic Northwest. Willow's new abortion residency is based out there,
and Aileash is following a then girlfriend who's craving the
quiet life. It's a beautiful place. Imagine rugged coastlines, lush,
tall forests, and towering mountains. If you've ever watched the
(16:18):
Twilight movies, you kind of know the landscape more timber
than tech.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Yeah, there's not a lot of programmer jobs out here.
If I wanted to go be a logger, I could
do that, But I really don't want to go be
a locker. So what am I going to do here?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
I'm like outside talking to Willow one day and I'm
just like, you know, we're running out of money, and
Willa was like, well, do you think you can do electrolysis?
Electrolysis is the all way that we used to remove hair.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Electrolysis uses a small electric current to permanently destroy hair follicles.
It can take anywhere between fifty to five hundred hours
of treatment to get the job done. That's base a
full time job for i Leash.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
I'm like, oh, I'm sure I could figure it out,
and she's like, all right, here's what I'll do. I'm
going to buy you in electrial'sis machine practice on yourself.
What we can do is a constarative clinical will offer
orchaectomies for a low cost, and when folks come for
an archaeactomy, they can stay here and you can do
(17:23):
legal electro on them.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
All power to them. They're diving headfirst into permanent hair
removal and archaectomies, which are surgeries to remove testicles. That's
two major healthcare options that they can offer their community.
But trans people are one of the communities in the
US who are most likely to experience discrimination in housing
and employment. Many simply can't afford the health care that
(17:48):
they need, and especially back then, when an archaectomy at
a regular clinic was about two five hundred dollars for
a forty five minute procedure. What Ileish and Willow want
to do is provide these operations on the cheap, charging
on a sliding scale from zero to five hundred dollars,
which is a big deal.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
I'm like, that actually doesn't sound like a bad idea,
and she was like, well, you know, I figured out
the problems with my or character. Mean kind of what
we did wrong first is, you know, instead of doing
that really screwed up wrapping situation, we do a compression
bandage against the body, and second we put in dreams. Third,
(18:33):
we give people prophylactic antibiotics, which.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Is like the smart thing to do.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
And you know, they got checkups twice during their stay,
so they had to stay for seven days just in
the area and Willa will go and check up on
them and change bandages and stuff.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
I'm like, that sounds fine.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Can you walk us through the process of setting up
the clinic and building it?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
So we had no idea where we were going to
build a damn thing. We had no idea. So we
are living in a rented farmhouse in the middle of
the Olympics in Washington State, on a two and fifty
six acre farm that the owner still lives on the farm,
His son still lives on the farm. So we're kind
(19:18):
of doing things right underneath our landlord's nose. And we're like, okay,
where are we going to build this? And will It
was like, well, there's this tractor shed that you have now.
Our tractor shed, for those who don't know, is a
three sided building with a roof, and it's where you
park tractors and farm implements. So the week before our
(19:41):
first searchery, we're just banging this out. I learned how
to tile.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
That week.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
Willow had been to go on eBay and find old
medical equipment, so like this electric cautery from the eighties
that's like insanely huge but still works. We had an
auto cliff, an entire procedure table. It was swang, you know.
It was not like you know, shady shady done in
(20:10):
a hotel room. This was pretty swang.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah, because when you say a tractor shed, I'm picturing
something really kind of farmyard animals around you.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
No.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
I know the guy who moved in after me, and
he used it as his office, and I guess now
it's used as an FDA chicken slaughtering room. Oh god,
a DA certified chicken slaughtering room, which I find his sterical.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
I feel like there's a joke in there somewhere, but
I just can't here.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Is it absolutely a joke in there, and I'll not
make it, but I will allow so many other people
to make it.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
After only a week of tractor shared renovations, the trans
Health Initiative is ready for its first surgery.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Our first patient was a friend of mine. You know,
everything went perfectly fine.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
The word spreads fast, and they opened their doors to
more patients.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
But cautiously, I was probably a little bit more paranoid
than I really needed to be. But you know, we
were doing this without medical insurance because it wasn't a requirement,
and honestly, we couldn't afford it without business license, which
we didn't need because we made less than fourteen thousand
a year. So we were doing this like real under
the radar, real quiet, right under everyone's.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Says, yes, the clinics under the radar, And it started
off as a bit of a DIY mission. But the
whole thing is actually totally above board.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Oh yeah, absolutely perfectly legal. You know, I am following
all the guidelines set upon me by the Border Health
and the laws of that.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
See. So if I were a patient and I've just arrived,
can you kind of take me through what's happening to me?
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
So we're actually going to start earlier. You would email
me and I would kind of email you back, and
I kind of do a sniff test because there were
some people who were not trans women asking for this.
I had one guy he was like, I have cheated
with my brother's wife and he will not trust me
again unless I am castrated.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
If you do not do this, I will do this
to myself.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
And like, look, you know, I'm all for body autonomy,
but that's not what I'm set up for. Man, I
can't help you. And then I would ask you for
a letter from a therapist. Then I would call up
Willow and say, okay, I got a patient in when
are you free, And she'd look at her calendar give
me a free date, and I'm like, okay, you were
to show up at this date here, wear comfortable shoes
(22:39):
because it's the gravel driveway and it's in the middle
of the Oregon Coast range.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
It rains a lot.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
I had someone show up in stilettos and I was like, oh, honey,
wrong footwear.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
I kind of love it.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, what would happen is you show up will It
would give you a quick medical examination. She would talk
to you and go you know, with the surgery entails,
you know, the risks of it, blah blah blah blah blah.
You know, it was kind of amazing because you see
trans women at their most vulnerable and they're most scared
(23:12):
and they're most empowered. At the same time. We would say, okay,
here's script for vicoin.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
That's a drug used to treat moderate to severe pain.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
And then here's script for marx oficillin.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
That's a penicillin antibotic for the aftermath.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
You're going to go into town and you're going to
bring that all back and you're going to take the
viking in front of us. They'd get back, they'd take
it in front of us, and we'd say okay, trying
to get undressed, and we'd start the procedure. And my
job during the procedure was to hold your hand and
tell you very long stories in a very very radio
(23:51):
announcer voice, and sometimes I would tell jokes. They would
be very long, very boring jokes. My repertoire jokes is
amazing because I had to talk like this and make
sure that you were nice and calm and not paying
attention to the fact that both your testicles were being
removed through a small hole in your scrotum.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Okay, give me an example. I'm a patient.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Okay, already, So mushroom walks into a bar and says, hey, bartender,
I'd like to drink. The bartender looks at the mushroom
and says, no, get out of here. We don't serve
your kind. The mushroom goes, hey, why not, I'm a
fun guy. Like These were not good jokes. They were
(24:36):
not designed to be good. They were designed to keep
your attention.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah, yeah, it would, and your voice is very soothing.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Oh I had to learn the soothing waste because again,
things being pulled through parts of your body that aren't
generally supposed to be pulled through.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you need to be soothed.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, you're feeling it. And then when we hit the electrocuttery,
you're smelling it too. Oh no, yeah no, and that
is not necessarily good smell. Something's cooking bodily, yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Alicia and Willow had certainly come a long way from
their disastrous first archaectomy. They're doing good, clean medical work.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Zero infections, zero infections.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
There you go. Were they the authorities interested in what
you guys were doing with the clinic.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
They weren't at first. Now what had happened was said
woman who showed up in the stilettos.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Went back to.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Her doctor, and her doctor was examining her and says, oh,
you've gotten richiect to me. She's like yes, And he said,
where'd you get that? It's very nice work, and she said,
up a logging road in a barn with two trans
women out wall.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Technically correct.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
When a physician hears this, what he's going to do
is he's going to call the board of health. And
i'd geese and the gee start right cracking away. I'm like,
what the hell's going on? Because that sounds like someone's
coming up to drive. And I look out and there's
(26:25):
a blue Ford Taurus. Now, for your listeners in the
eight nineties early two thousands, if you see up blue
or black or ground Ford taurusts, that's a cop car.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
That is a government car. So I went, what the fuck?
Speaker 2 (26:45):
And then I see this kind of gouty older woman
get out of the car in this tall, skinny bean
pole of a man and they're in they're kind of
frumpled government clothes, and I'm like that is not FBI.
Those are not cops. They are not dressed detectives, that
is dressed like bureaucrat. And I come out to the
(27:06):
porch and I go, can I help you? And they go,
we're looking for Willow. I'm like, why are you looking
for Willow? She's like, we're here to examine the clinic.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
After the break, the fate of the clinic hangs in
the balance between the Board of Health and a potentially
incriminating plastic cup filled with balls.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Got you, you got you?
Speaker 1 (27:47):
The Board of Health has just arrived on Ailsha's doorstep.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Go back into the house and a page Willow nine
one one. She's like, what you just got me out
of something at work that I need to be in.
And I'm like, well, the Board of Health here and
they would like to examine the clinic. She's like really,
And I'm like yeah, really, and Willi says, all right,
just show them the place.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
The night before it had rained something fierce. It was
muddy and slippery, so Alicia and Willow had to carry
their patient into the house to recover. She was a
bit of a lightweight and was passed out on vicodin.
Some of the cleanup could surely wait until the next
morning when the Board of Health had come knocking.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
So I go out and I'm like, follow me, wipe
your feet on the mat. Do not track mud into
my clinic. So I wipe my feet. I go into
the clinic. They walk in muddy feet. Okay, this is
bureaucrass trying to show in my place.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
I get it. I get it. So I walk in.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
They're like, where do you keep the narcotics? And I'm like,
what narcotics? You use narcotics for this and I'm like, yeah,
we do. And what happens is they get a script
and they go into town and then they take in furnaces. Well,
where you keep the script? We don't. The doctor brings
script bad with her takes it away. Autoclave logs are here.
(29:06):
These are my autoclave batch test strip numbers. Here you
go and they're like business license and I'm like, we
don't make more than fourteen thousand a year, but I
also do electrolysis. There's a business license.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Everything they challenge her on a leash has the perfect
answer to.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
They have me kind of backed up into the room
and like all the way in the back was the
cattery machine. And I looked to my right and I
looked down and there's a specimen cup. Oh remember when
I said this surgery has remains well whiteweight from the
night before one to keep her remains And I'm like great, and.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Then she's like, but I need help into that.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
So I helped her and I forgot the damn remains
and they're behind the electro cottery and I'm like fuck.
So government bureaucrats generally don't like dealing with us, and
if you're trying to get them to go away, the
easiest way to do is to raise your voice and
say the word trans very loudly. I just started saying, hey,
(30:10):
you guys, I wouldn't be doing this if the Board
of Health actually treated trans folks fairly. And they're like, oh,
they start shuttering, that's the wrong department, and I'm like,
I don't care if it's the wrong department. You guys
are in my surgery for no apparent reason whatsoever. You've
tracked mudd In on the floor. You're giving me a
bunch of grief, and like, you know, what, are you
guys going to start doing trans stuff fairly? In the
(30:31):
trans trans trans transtrands, and they got really uncomfortable looking,
and I'm like, go away, go away, go away. You
were not going to look behind the autoclaves. You were
not going to see the specimen cup with testicles in it.
So they didn't say it, Thank Christ, and they went away.
And I grabbed the testicles and then go and I
(30:53):
hand it to lightweight and I'm like, here, you forgot something.
So months later they ding us on one thing. They said, yes,
the clinic was all perfectly legal, except there was mud
on the floor of the surgery the cheek.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Even when the authorities were actively looking for mistakes, they
couldn't find anything apart from the mud they dragged in themselves.
The clinic was that professional and safe, and so Alisha
and Willow are able to carry on in that converted
tract to Bonn, providing healthcare to trans women from all
over the country. What did you enjoy most about this
(31:37):
whole clinic adventure.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I enjoyed the look in the eyes of other trans
women when they realized that there were no CIS folks involved,
no trans masks involved, no one but other trans women involved,
and that they could go and do this or something
like this look I'm an Irish American kid from Jersey.
(32:04):
Willows trashy and pickup driving, and if we can do
this shit, Jesus kids, you know, go get yourself a
little bit of education and trust me, you're going to
be grand. Just don't be afraid, right, And that's the thing,
like I think a lot of times trans women, especially
(32:24):
we're afraid to kind of do things because if we
get in trouble, we're fucked.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
How many of these surgeries did you guys?
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Do?
Speaker 3 (32:35):
I think it was around fourteen?
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Wow, that's amazing. The clinic closed its doors after eighteen months.
Willow and I leash were burnt out, juggling multiple jobs
and just needed a change.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Doing trans health courage wonderful, but it's also kind of
a drag. Especially as transperson. You can't emotionally distance yourself
from that. After the clinic, we told no one for
twenty years.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Why you know.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I'd love to say that we've started the clinic cup
for noble reasons, but the reality is that I was
poor and Willow wanted to help, and I was like, Oh,
here's a way to actually be able to pay my
rent and afford my box of Vannies. Mac and cheese
that eat once a day, and you know, be able
(33:31):
to actually do something for folks.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, I mean affording your box of Annie's mac and cheese.
Obviously it's super important. But also I mean you were
helping people, weren't you. It's what you did was make
care accessible.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I can never like focusing on that because I don't know.
I have complex feels about that, because, like you know,
I don't think that there was some freaking saintly goal
to it. I come from this entire punk ethos of
not having heroes, and hero worship.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Makes me really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
I am a dumb shlub from Jersey with a high
school diploma that just figured this out and just was
not afraid to get in trouble. The important things that
people do were done in silence, and they are done
behind the scenes. And I never wanted kudos for this,
like Willow still doesn't want kudos for this. Who doesn't
want to be known period And the reason why is
(34:28):
because you know, you help people because you're morally offended,
because you cannot sit there and stand by and watch
what is happening. I think what people are doing is
way more important and should be celebrated more than the
people themselves.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah, celebrate the work. Yes, and those of us who
like to celebrate people on the side can whisper your
name quietly.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
It's going to make me feel weird, but whatever, fair enough.
Me and Willow have a phrase we like to say,
be the cockroach. Cockroaches are very hard to kill. They
don't need a lot. They need a nice kind of
warm place to sleep that's a little dark. They do
a lot of things under the noses of like you know,
(35:14):
those humans that are living in that nice little apartment
in Williamsburg. You know, if you can learn what you
need to survive and learn what you need to do
to do the work you need to do, and keep
that as minimal as possible, there's a lot you can do.
(35:36):
So instead of trying to do more and more and more,
solve a problem that's in front of you. Right, there
was a problem in front of me. We could solve
it easily. We built in a fucking burn for Christ's sake.
It wasn't that difficult to do. You know, read the
instruction book and there you go.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
But if you.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Look at things as like, oh my god, that problem
is too big. No, no, no, it's not too big.
You're just trying to bite off too big of a chunk.
Bite off little chunks, right, And that's how you shouldify
the world.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
And you best believe the world still needs some serious deshittifying.
It's around twenty years since Ileish and Willow launched the
Trans Health Initiative, and trans people navigating medical institutions are
still met with prejudice and hostility. The medical care that
is available can still be invasive, hard to access, and
(36:41):
involve traumatic psychological testing. Alisha actually says that in the
US it's worse now than she's ever seen it. Trans
people's basic human rights are consistently trampled on, and the
mainstream media is just amplifying those hateful voices. People are dying,
(37:03):
so trans people do it like they've always done. Figure
out a way to do it themselves and help each
other do it. But you can help too if you're
a transperson in the States looking for resources or assist
person interested in solidarity and mutual aid. We'll leave some
(37:24):
links in the show notes. Girlfriends were stronger together. If
you've enjoyed this conversation, you can find loads more incredible
women on our feed. Do check them out, and please
(37:44):
do spread the word and tell your friends about us.
We want as many people as possible to be part
of the Girlfriend's Gang. Next time on the Girlfriend's Spotlight,
Nadia punks the President.
Speaker 4 (38:00):
We were told that we are paid by Hillary Clinton
to destroy Russian They said that we cursed the entire
country and thus we need to be burnt at the stake.
Some people said it we need to be whipped publicly
on the Red Square.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Hey, you've reached the Girlfriend's hotline. You can leave your
mini story after the turn.
Speaker 5 (38:25):
Hi, Anna and the Girlfriend's Team. When our daughter was young,
one of my acting students became her nanny and became
part of our family. Really it was as if our
daughter grew up with three parents, not two. Anyway, time
passed and we had moved to a new city, and
at that time, my partner was starting his very first
(38:47):
day of his brand new job at the university, and
I got booked for a film and television gig and
I had to decide whether to take it or not.
And I was talking to super Nanny on the other
side of the country, and I mentioned this dilemma of
whether I should turn down the gig or not and
she said, oh, I'll come and.
Speaker 6 (39:08):
Take Cleo to her first day of grade one, no worries.
And she got on a plane and she flew all
the way from Toronto to the west coast of Canada,
and she took Cleo to her first day of grade
one in her new school, in her new city, in
full hair and makeup, with cupcakes and treats. And Cleo
(39:29):
was as loved and safe on her first day of
school as if I and my partner had taken her.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Now that's a girlfriend. If you have your own story
like the one you just heard, and you'd like the
whole girlfriend's gang to hear it, then please send it
to us. You can record it as a voice memo
under ninety seconds. Please and email it straight to the
girlfriends at novel dot Audio. Please don't include your name,
(40:00):
we're keeping things a little anon. We want stories like
that one time your bestie kindly told you your outfit
was giving serious two thousand and nine energy and lent
you a new one, Or when she offered a babysit
when you hadn't slept in days because your baby was
up all night doing the Terrible twos. Thank you, girlfriend.
(40:20):
I want stories that are meaningful or silly. I want big,
I want small. I'm desperate to hear them, so send
them over right, I'll catch you later. Bye. This season,
The Girlfriend's Spotlight is supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide. They
do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and movements
(40:42):
to strengthen and grow. If you'd like to find out
more or donate to help them secure equal rights for
women and girls across the globe, you can go to
Womankind dot org dot UK. The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced
(41:04):
by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit
novel dot Audio. The show is hosted by me Anna Sinfield.
This episode was written and produced by a Malia Sortland.
Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr. Our researcher is Zaiana Yusuf.
Sensitivity checking and editorial support by Jesse lou Nawson. The
(41:28):
editor is Hannah Marshall. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are
our executive producers. Production management from Joe Savage, Srie Houston
and Charlotte Wolf. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas
Alexander and Daniel Kempsen music supervision by Jacob Tivich, Nicholas Alexander,
and Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein and
(41:52):
Jemma Freeman. The series artwork was designed by Christina lemcol
Willard Foxton is creative director of Development and Special thanks
to Katrina Norvelle, Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcasts,
as well as Carl Frankel and the whole team at
w MP.
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