Dr. George Brown is the Associate Chair for Veterans Affairs and Professor of Psychiatry at ETSU’s Quillen College of Medicine.
I found out about Dr. Brown while doing a browse of the East Tennessean archives, with the key term “trans.” This article, written in October of 2018 by Katie Day, gives the introduction of Dr. Brown that he won an award “from a lifetime of work with transgender veterans and research.”
I’ve been interested in the research that has been afforded to trans people, like myself. I mostly assumed there had been no academic or clinical research conducted near or at ETSU. When I read this article, I knew I had to meet with Dr. Brown.
He is a busy man. We met in the waiting area of a Discount Tire.
He tells me, “I have a deposition next week.”
The deposition is in reference to a North Carolina decision by government to not cover state employee’s cross-sex hormones, including the children of these employees.
Dr. Brown’s work covers a vast array of rights for transsexuals. In addition to his veteran work and insurance advocacy, he has gone through court many times to advocate for cross-sex hormones and rehousing of trans women. “We had three straight wins in Illinois” for rehousing transsexual patients.
One of the patients, Strawberry, was someone who was finally able to rest more easily, knowing she is more safe in a women’s prison. Transgender people in prison are often the most vulnerable, especially if they were already on cross-sex hormones or if they begin cross-sex hormones.
I then began to wonder, what was the reasoning behind Dr. Brown’s dedication to trans people?
He said, “The first patient I ever saw, I got into medical school at the University of Rochester when I was 19, early acceptance program, and they do group encounters so that you can get introduced to live patients and the professor said ‘I have an interesting patient for you to interview,’” and the patient was an ex-army, post-surgical transsexual woman.
Dr. Brown’s career in transsexual health, from this point forward, has been a rocky path. He spoke about a paper he had published in 1988, before the Internet, in which he individually spoke with 188 transgender individuals. He said this became one “of my most widely referenced articles” because of the foundational purposes. It was the first large paper to de-pathologize trans people.
When he first began he told me, “I could put all of the literature on transsexuals in a quarter of a filing cabinet.”
More into his career, Dr. Brown established the first open clinic to transsexual veteran patients. This pioneering clinic housed and gave access to trans patients in the form of cross-sex hormones and psychotherapy.
Nowadays, since the Obama administration’s decision that the VA must treat trans patients, the VA has become the largest provider of cross-sex hormones in the nation. Many of the providers in the VA were not trained in the protocols of how to treat long term trans patients. Dr. Brown taught the doctors the long term regimen.
The fact I had not heard of Dr. Brown until now was appalling, someone so fundamental to trans history was right under my nose at East Tennessee State University. I feel less alone now, as if someone is around the corner to advocate for my right to hormones, or to my right to simply exist.
