There is always too much to write. I keep meaning to finish other things, but life marches on and sometimes the relevance of a topic dies before it is fully explored.
Though a number of topics remain on my to-do list, life’s march was particularly notable today, as I received word through a New York Times obituary that Dr. Jeanne Hoff died at the end of October this year.
Most of the details of Hoff’s life were new to me, reading this essay. Her time in upstate New York, her advocacy for her institutionalized and imprisoned patients, and her retirement to California were all things I hadn’t heard. But Hoff herself was not new. Had you asked me the name yesterday, I would not have been able to recall, but when I was networking with other trans persons in the early 1990s about accessing care, two names kept coming up. One was Dr. Toby Meltzer, a surgeon then at OHSU in southwest Portland. A talented man and one of the best to handle one’s vaginoplasty, Meltzer was nonetheless involved in only a small slice of one’s transition. The other name was Hoff’s, which I still have written down in notes that I found today.
Dr. Jeanne Hoff was psychiatrist and veteran of the gender clinic era in trans history. In fact, she helped found the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (“HuhBIGDuh” to those in the know) and took over Benjamin’s practice at the end of his career at the most famous and influential of those clinics, that at John’s Hopkins University Hospital. What made her unique among the practitioners is that she was herself transsexual. Foreshadowing the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) which would later institutionalize a commitment to trans representation among its leaders, Hoff earned her place in HBIGDA with her professional accomplishments, but while serving used her own experience as trans to inform her work with the Associations and ultimately to affect its standards and recommendations.
It was for this work that her name was kept reverentially among trans persons of the day, passed from one to another. Should you have problems with an inexperienced or discriminatory health care provider, one trans person would tell the next, have them contact Hoff for advice. While I never sent my own therapist or doctor off to school themselves under Hoff, others did, and her advocacy was obviously effective. One person told me that the magic of Hoff is that she could speak the same words to a trans client, a friend at coffee, or a professional therapist and be understood by all of them. Not just understood, but they would all hear her as if she were speaking in their own native dialects. This more than anything characterized Hoff’s approach to activism: though she often spoke to cis people, she never lost her focus on trans lives. When she spoke, she seemed always to assume that trans people were in the room watching and listening. Her perspective was professional and clinical and curious and personal, always and all at once.
In the late 1970s she filmed a documentary about her surgical transition and her thoughts on her social experience and experiences with medical providers. This too, the Times tells us, was made with a trans audience in mind (even if it was filmed and edited by cis people who themselves intended its messages for cis audiences). I was too young to have seen it when it aired, but an east coast friend I knew had a tape of it. It happens that the original was recorded on betamax. Hers was a professional transfer to VHS to keep the documentary alive. This was the trans community of the 70s and 80s: both isolated and networked, widely scattered but devoted to preserving connections, resources, and history. I came out in the earliest 90s when trans visibility was decidedly increasing, and we had already begun to see a decrease in the sense of isolation and the desperation to cling to any thread that might connect a trans person to likeminded others. But my mentors came out into those traditions and remembered that isolation. They taught me the same care, the same respect for the individuals who came before.
Among the names we shared with each other were many local activists with huge hearts who will never be remembered. For us, they were no less important than a figure like Hoff who was so central to both the gender clinic service model and to its dismantling. (Hoff originated some significant criticisms of the sexism of the gender clinics of the era even while others, including viciously cissexist others like Janice Raymond would be given more credit for such feminist analysis.) But while we needed and appreciated and saw the generous work of the local activists and mentors who guided us through the often fatal anxieties scattered throughout the days of one’s coming out, Hoff laboured in the background. She dealt more often with our service providers than ourselves, but she spoke from our experience in their language and probably saved as many or more lives in that role than she did working directly with her psychiatric clients.
Though I didn’t know Hoff, and though my own experience belongs more to the new era ushered in with the optimism and growing openness characteristic of Bill Clinton’s presidential term, I had many indirect connections to her. Today I appreciate her as a functional transfeminist before the existence of organized transfeminism and as a disability activist in the “Nothing About Us Without Us” mold that did not reach the United States until her career was half over.
Hearing about her death now, during the darkest days of the year, feels appropriate. When she filmed her surgical treatment the days were dark. While I remember feeling lost without the word transfeminism, I at least had other feminists to point me to the work of feminist outsiders. Mitsue Yamada, Audre Lorde, mary hope lee, and Gloria Anzaldúa informed and inspired and led me. Hoff would have had whom? Angela Davis?
While the lesbian feminism of the mid-1970s was more trans friendly than the movement would be only a half dozen years later, it was hardly universally accepting of women like Hoff. I remember fighting a wider world for trans acceptance, but within the trans community for feminist awareness: my own consciousness couldn’t survive without a space that embraced both trans authenticity and women’s liberation. It wasn’t easy and literally took years, but I eventually collected friends who advocated both without question or hesitation. I struggle to imagine landscape into which Jeanne Hoff was born and the barriers she must have climbed to reach any places of peace.
But years do march on, and the movement Hoff witnessed over decades was immense. I hope that this did bring her to a peaceful place this past October, a place where she could rest knowing that others had come to carry her burden farther forward, and others still had taken up the burden after them. I doubt many trans people remember Hoff these days, but her ideas have shaped what the trans advocacy and transfeminist movements have become. Her hands will continue to support us for generations.
What a gift to the world Dr. Hoff was and always will be. Thank you for the education, always.
Thank you, CD.
I wonder if my own 1970s cis feminist life crossed paths with the work of Dr. Hoff. Her name seemed familiar when I read it in your first paragraph, and while I do not believe I saw the film she made, I think I talked with others who had seen it. That would have been in the late 70s or early 80s. It was hard to even find ways to talk about it then - particularly because my women's community was deep in the original "political correct language" discussions, which were all about trying to find more encompassing language so we weren't subconciously (or conciously) shutting people out.
Your article prompted a LOT of memories for me - not all about Hoff, but related to her work. I took a human sexuality class at Green River Community College (near Seattle), and the teacher had a whole week on trans life and trans surgery. The film we saw on trans surgeries was from one of the Scandinavian countries, with English voice over or subtitles or something. It was kind of patronizing and doctor-y. But the guest speakers were trans people from the Seattle area, and that was wonderful. The teacher allowed for awkward questions, but tolerated no dissing of our guests or the topic. I'm guessing that if I could take a peek at that class NOW, I'd spot some problems, but for its time, it was pretty awesome.
Reading your piece, I like to think that Dr. Hoff's work had a lot to do with the shape of the class, and my cis teacher's attitude, and (for that era at least) the welcoming attitude toward trans life. She no doubt had an impact on a wider world than the PNW, but what an amazing resource she must have been, for community and clients and medical professionals alike.
Thanks for writing, CD. I always seem to both learn a lot, and find new angles on my own experiences in life.