The Birth of the "Sex-Change" Clinic in the Canadian Press


Toby Anne Finlay, York University

This paper explores the emergence of cultural understandings of trans phenomena in Canada through an analysis of early newspaper reporting about the development of trans medicine and what were then referred to as “sex-change” surgeries. Trans medicine was first formalized and made publicly available in North America through the Gender Identity Clinics (GICs) founded in the late-1960s, including at the Clarke Institute in Toronto. The treatment programs of these GICs helped to codify the definitions of “gender” and “transsexuality” in medicine and regulated access to medical gender transition for trans people (Meyerowitz 2002; Namaste 2000). This period of knowledge production was an object of immense fascination for news media beginning in the 1970s when medical understandings of transness were first being articulated in the press. Canadian newspapers were flooded with stories about the medical procedures that were becoming available, the protracted treatment program of the Clarke Institute GIC, and trans people’s unique pathways to healthcare access. This paper is drawn from a genealogical study of the development of trans medicine from the late-1960s to the present at the Clarke Institute, which would become the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). In accordance with Foucauldian approaches to genealogical inquiry (Foucault 2003), this research understands medical conceptions of gender as a contingent product of the relationships between medical practitioners, trans patients and activists, and the broader social conditions in which trans people lived. Drawing from this multi-method study which spans multiple archival sites and interview populations, this paper focuses on the archives of prominent Canadian newspapers which are often used to study cultural conceptions of gender in trans studies (Skidmore 2011). The present sample was limited to articles addressing trans healthcare that were published in the 1970s to best capture the initial reception of medical knowledges about transness following the establishment of the Clarke Institute GIC. In so doing, this paper asks how gender was constituted as a medical concept in this historical period and how this conception of gender was shaped by the interactions of medical practitioners, trans people, and news media? Analysis reveals that medical understandings of gender and related normative expectations for trans people were not simply confirmed by the press but rather were contested by the network of relationships organized around trans phenomena. Gender did not exist as a discrete category prior to the development of trans medicine in the mid-20th century. Previous research has illuminated the complicated negotiations that were undertaken by medical practitioners and trans people to differentiate transness from other categories of personhood, namely homosexuality and intersex conditions (Gill-Peterson 2018). These processes of categorical differentiation were far from settled in the archives of news media, as gender-nonconforming people continued to grapple with the terms with which they were hailed by medicine. These negotiations often resulted in the production of the “good transsexual” as a discursive ideal which ensured the conceptual separation of sex, gender, and sexuality and pathologized alternative expressions of transness (Aizura 2018; Velocci 2021). Analysis of the various “good” and “bad” transsexuals that appear in the archival record illustrates how the ideal subject of trans medicine taking shape in the Clarke Institute GIC was already being contested by trans people who could not or would not conform to these normative expectations.

This paper will be presented at the following session: