Bylines

Dora Richter was the first known person to undergo gender confirmation surgery. Why was she lost to history for so long? Brandy Schillace is author of THE INTERMEDIARIES, which provides the full story...

I was late for lunch. At the time, I was juggling a teaching position with my work as public engagement fellow and running a journal; I’d made an appointment to meet a new graduate student assistant—but time got away from me. I was out of breath by the time I arrived, head still spinning with the effort of code-switching from one role to the next. It would take a few minutes to pull myself together, but the student was already there.

The weather had turned dark and cold; no snow, but a pelting of quick-freezing rain that made roads impassable. Schools everywhere cancelled and I—at fifteen—was tasked with keeping the woodfire burning as our only means of heating the underground house we called home. Living in the middle of abandoned coal lands, closer to the cemetery than to town, we had no cable and no internet. I, however, rejoiced. I’d just purchased the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Louis Pasteur’s breakthrough discoveries unlocked the world of microscopic organisms that live inside our bodies. On Nov. 4, 1856, Monsieur Bigo of Lille, France, awaited a visit from the local chemistry instructor. Bigo wasn’t used to hosting academics. He owned a factory in town that produced great vats of beet juice, which he fermented into alcohol for use in local industries. At least, that was the idea.

Karl, a PhD and lecturer at MIT, gave birth to both of his children—and despite being the one with the baby bump, he was routinely asked to wait outside while the nurses attended to his (not pregnant) wife. People were unable, he says, to see both a man and a pregnant body; as a result, Karl became a “fat man” rather than a pregnant person. Despite being assigned female at birth (AFAB) and possessing a uterus and glands for lactating, Karl was not—in the eyes of even the medical staff—the mother. Karl considered himself a PaPa; other transgender parents...

The “miracle” pig heart transplant plays with the expectations of desperate patients and makes clear how the system values certain lives over others. Dave Bennett agreed to have an experimental pig heart transplant surgery for two reasons. First, he hoped it meant he would be able to return home to his beloved dog again. And second, after being deemed a problem patient and consequently rejected from heart transplant programs, this was his only chance at life. In Bennett’s own words, he “wants a human heart.” By agreeing to the surgery, he’s hoping to convince the medical establishment that he’ll finally deserve one.

New technology promises to forecast the length of your life. But for disabled people, measuring mortality can prove fatal […] Using a dataset of 5,000 protein measurements from around 23,000 Icelanders, researchers working for deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland developed a predictor for the time of death—or, as their press release explains it, “how much is left of the life of a person.” It’s an unusual claim, and it comes with particular quhttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-medical-triage-a-vital-part-of-warfare-for-centuries-has-never-had/estions about method, ethics, and what we mean by life.

The first gender affirmation surgeries took place in 1920s, at a facility which employed transgender technicians and nurses, and which was headed by a gay Jewish man. The forgotten history of the institute, and its fall to Nazis bent on the euthanasia of homosexuals and transgender people, offers us both hope—and a cautionary tale—in the face of oppressive anti-trans legislation in the United States....