Behind the Bastards - Part One: John Ronald Brown: The Worst Surgeon Ever

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

Robert is joined by Sofiya Alexandra to discuss John Ronald Brown, the world's worst surgeon.FOOTNOTES: Mediscams “Tabletop” John Brown Gets His (1999) John Ronald Brown | World’s Worst Sex Change Surgeon A Gender Variance Who's Who Out on a limb WHY DID HE CUT OFF THAT MAN'S LEG? digital transgender archive The Tijuana Experience (1992) Crossing Sexual Boundaries Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcast! I am Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, and that was another failed attempt to introduce introduction. Start my podcast about bad people. You shouldn't have asked the standard man, I really liked it. Yeah, I feel a need to change it. Just get a haircut or something, man.

I get a lot of haircuts, I don't know. No, like something different, you know what I mean? Go get a mohawk and keep the greeting the same. I have a mohawk, technically. Oh yeah, frost the tips. Get some frost the tips and leave the intro alone. No, I feel like George Lucas like I'm not really an artist unless I am tinkering with my work past the point where it works and to the point where no one enjoys it anymore.

But your real art is mansplaining and you still have that. Well, actually, Sophie, this episode I'm going to have you explain the bastard I wrote about who you have never heard of, so this will be a short episode of the show. Hi, I'm Sophie Alexander, you guys. I'm just out here giving him shit. Yeah, you didn't even enter your guest because I interrupted him. It's okay, it was a great insult. Just a train wreck from the out of the jump.

Good God. You're not even in the room to see our shady eye looks we keep giving each other about you. All deserved. I'm very hungover right now, so this is a shit show in so many ways. Sophia. Hi. Alexandra, Private Parts Unknown podcast. That's right.

And 420 Day Fiancé, bitch, we out here. And 420 Day Fiancé, that's right. Sophia. Yeah. Do you know about a guy named John Ronald Brown? Yeah, I fucked him last week. No, I don't know who that is. I hope not.

I really, really, you will not want to have fucked this guy after we finish this story. I'm sure since I'm here, he is a genocider of just babies and I'm sure that I will want to kill myself by the end of this like I usually do because that's what you do to invite me here. Now, you know, a genocider of babies, so babies aren't very tough, right? So if you're killing babies, it's probably pretty quick, right? They just can't handle a lot. Probably, he says. John Ronald Brown, this might be our darkest episode because like the crime is the darkest

because like obviously we've talked about people who've killed a lot more people. Georgia Tan killed a lot more people than John Ronald Brown. She sure did. But the things that he did to people are so gruesome and ghastly. We're going to be talking about a lot of botched surgery today. Oh my God, dude. I watch that show botched all the time. This is perfect for me.

This is like the most, the worst version of that. We're talking about a doctor who abused trans people for years. Oh, dude, really? Yeah, it's not a good one. So when I'm not here, does he talk about how he hates me the most out of like all of the guests? Is that what happens? Yeah, it's literally his hobby. You are a bastard among bastards, Robert Evans.

I'm the real bad guy of the series, except for in the case of this episode because John Ronald Brown is even worse than I could hope to be. All right, let's do this. So if you were like a trans woman in like the 1850s, your options would be pretty much limited to like the cosmetic, you know, shaving, wearing, you know, the clothing of your, of your choice makeup. There weren't like options for surgery, right? And so even many like pretty woke writers who had a deep understanding of the community in the 1800s and early 1900s would kind of lump transgender women in with transvestites and usually just use the word transvestite. And nowadays that's like definitely an insult, but kind of when you're reading stuff from like the late 1800s, a lot of times they actually are trying to be like understanding. It's just like the verbiage hadn't evolved very far at that point. The first person to transition medically was probably Lily Elb, who did so in 1930 with the help of pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

In addition to having an incredible name, Magnus was one of the bravest scientists in history. He was a homosexual himself and he had to hide being gay in order to practice medicine at the highest levels of German society. And in spite of this, he established a career as a tireless advocate for LGB and particularly T individuals in Berlin. In 1897, he founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which was dedicated to ending the stigma against homosexuality and to criminalizing it in Germany. So this is 1897. So Magnus is... That's amazing. ...ahead of the curve. Big Magnus energy over there.

Big Magnus energy. It's interesting to me that he's like such an advocate while also being a closeted gay man himself because I think there was this understanding that like, well, I won't be able to actually do this work very effectively if kind of everyone knows because it's Germany in 1897. That's an incredible sacrifice to make to stay closeted so you could help other people be themselves. Yeah, he was an amazing guy. Now, one of Magnus' achievements was the establishment of an LGBT self-help group and probably the first self-help group of like sort of in the modern sense of the word, where queer individuals in Berlin and again the 1890s and early 1900s could meet and discuss their issues. By creating a space where these people could gather, Magnus also gathered for himself the first large sample population of queer men and women ever studied in a systematic and scientific way.

He circulated a questionnaire among them and received answers from tens of thousands of people. So he was able to actually do like longitudinal sort of like survey work on the gay community prior to World War I. So this is obviously like groundbreaking shit. But obviously, given the time it was, it was not perfect and you would not consider like the wording that he used for everything ideal in the modern sense of the word. And I'm going to quote from The Guardian now. Elb, who was that one of the transgender women that he worked with, was reportedly disgusted by the questionnaire and the ambiguity of transsexuality as it was represented in the Institute. She described being requested to answer all these very rude and strict questions, says Rainier Hearn, a sexology researcher at Charité Hospital in Berlin. She refused the descriptions of sexual intermediates such as transvestites and hermaphrodites.

It was not acceptable for her. For her, there was no ambiguity. She was a woman, so she was very irritated by the whole process. So even like a guy like Hirschfeld doesn't really understand like transgender, like the nature of that doesn't understand what's going on with Elb. And I don't think anyone really has a vocabulary here. So like a lot of people, I think who were trans back then probably would have called themselves something different just because like the state of development of the vocabulary was so much more primitive. Sure. But Hirschfeld agreed to help Elb transition and with his assistance, she underwent surgery to have her testicles removed in Berlin, and then she underwent further surgeries in Dresden.

Now, these were mostly cosmetic surgeries. But as Hearn points out, just cosmetic surgery was not enough for Elb. Quote, Elb wanted to have implanted ovaries and a uterus because at that time to be a real woman, you had to be capable of having children. That was her ideal. She was obsessed by this and Elb's biography, which is based on her diary. She always fantasizes about being a complete woman. So obviously, then as now, technology did not make that possible. I don't think we can do that now in 1931.

It was not a thing medical science was up to the task of doing. And Elb's body rejected the new womb and she died of heart failure on September 13th, 1931. That's so sad. Yeah, it's a real bummer of a story. And there's a good book about her, the title of which I thought I included in here, but I did not. We'll be on BehindTheBastards.com in our source notes. So Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research was destroyed by the Nazis and his records were destroyed once Hitler came into power. If you Google Nazi book burning, the pictures that you get are the Hirschfeld library being burned by the Nazis.

And this was a major setback for humanity and particularly for LGBT individuals as much of what Magnus had been studying was like the biological roots of homosexuality. And in some ways science still has not recovered from this loss. It took up until like really the last like 10 or 15 years in a lot of cases where like we started to rebuild to the level that he was he was getting to be at in the 30s. Have you seen the show transparent? No. They do flashbacks to this. To the whole story, yeah. Oh, cool.

To all the queer people and then to the book burning. It's not really like told and like a chronological kind of like and then this happened scene. It's just a little flashes every episode for the season for this one season. Anyway. Yeah, it's a bummer of a tale. So yeah, the Nazis as Nazis do really jammed a finger in the eye of progress. But progress did not stand still and other developments in the early 20th century had a major impact on the development of gender transitioning. In 1929, estrone, a female hormone was isolated, followed by estriol.

Eventually, both hormones were classified together as estrogen. Progesterone was isolated and described for the first time in 1934. Testosterone in 1935. Now, it was not a short route from isolating these hormones and tooth figuring out how to produce them synthetically. But by the 1940s, the first injectable hormones had been developed, making what we now know as hormone replacement therapy possible. So that's like the genesis of HRT. Now, the first person to receive what we'd recognize as a modern gender transition was a woman named Christine Jorgensen. Yep.

And you might call her the first guinea pig for injectable hormones because like people really didn't know like how this was all going to work until they tried it on her. And I'm going to quote now from the book, Crossing Sexual Boundaries by J. R. E. Cain Dimeos. Quote, just how confusing the whole situation was at the time is indicated by the fact that the physician involved in the case called Jorgensen a transvestite in his official account of the case. His treatment of Jorgensen was in part surgical, castration, and epinectomy, but the important thing was the massive hormone treatment. Before going to Denmark, Jorgensen had been injecting herself with estrogen to bring about physiological changes. And after Hamburger and his associates examined her, they decided to treat her with massive injections of estrogen, much larger than what she had given herself. The large doses just changed the shape of Jorgensen's body to a more feminine contour, and her behavior, gait, and appearance also became more feminine. As her beard became sparser, electrolysis was used to remove the remaining hair.

The one thing they did not do for her was to give her a vagina, a failure that was only later partially resolved and not particularly satisfactory. Yet she looked and acted like a woman, something that took considerable practice before she was satisfied enough to tell her story. So, Christine Jorgensen went to the press in 1951 explicitly against her doctor's wishes, and her story was an instant, like, huge media sensation. And while the media at the time definitely did not treat it with overwhelming respect, the fact that she was coming out and talking about her experience was one of the most important moments in the history of trans visibility. Like, it was one of those things that, like, it had to happen, and it was always going to suck, kind of, for the first person to do it, because the media in 1951 was not going to be very tactful. But because she did it... Whenever you're the Jackie Robinson of anything, it sucks. Yeah. And it's a little like what you were talking about earlier.

Like, it is awkward. We're kind of in this awkward period now of discussing, like, non-binary gender and, like, trying to figure all this stuff and the terminology out, and it leads to a lot of arguments, but, like, you have to have these awkward periods before you kind of, like, get people used enough to certain ideas that it stops being weird and starts being something that, like, is just life. Yeah. Yeah. So, Jorgensen is important for a lot of reasons. And in the wake of her transition, huge numbers of people started writing to her doctor, who was, again, Danish, to request the surgery for themselves. And in fact, so many people flooded Denmark with requests for gender reassignment surgery that the government had to enact a law banning it for non-Danish people out of a fear that they would just be flooded by trans people from around the world looking for surgery and hormone replacement therapy. So this is like, like, there's all these people who have clearly always been there, and when Jorgensen comes out, they're like, oh, it wasn't just this thing that I alone was dealing with,

they kind of flood Denmark with requests for surgery because it's the only place doing it at the time. Now, the medical community in the 50s was obviously very much mixed on the subject of what precisely Christine Jorgensen was. Many psychiatrists considered her mentally ill and criticized Dr. Hamburger for using surgery and hormone replacement therapy instead of psychotherapy to correct what was seen as a sexual perversion. Well, it took a while for them to take it out of the DSM as being something that they consider to be abnormal sexuality. Decades. Yeah, decades and decades. And the whole battle over that is very complicated and, again, beyond kind of the scope of this episode. But one of the results of this whole thing was that Dr. Harry Benjamin popularized the term transsexualism to replace transvestism.

So in like, transsexual, again, we've moved beyond that term these days, and it's generally seen as rude, but there was a time in which that was like the kind of polite and medical term used to describe this thing. Yeah. Yeah, that was a gain. It was a step forward. So over the following years, the first gender identity clinic started to be established, starting with Johns Hopkins University and then Case Western Reserve University and then the University of Minnesota, the University of Oregon and Stanford University. Kind of surprising that Minnesota beat Stanford for gender identity clinics, but good for Minnesota. Yeah, Stanford should have been first. What the fuck, California?

You would think, right? I mean, California hasn't always been this libertine paradise it is today. Yeah. Now, these institutions began to slowly catch up to where Magnus Hirschfeld had been back in the 30s. And while their research focused mostly on trying to understand and classify what precisely trans people were, they also engaged in early sexual reassignment surgeries. Dallas Denny's, Dallas Denny, sorry, a trans rights activist and writer. I was like, whoa, they did the shit at Denny's? Yes, they did.

That's actually how Denny's got it stuck. That's fucking tight. It turns out they were terrible at surgery, but really good at cooking omelets. So they just sort of moved right into that field. Hey, man, can't make an omelet without removing a few eggs, am I right? There we go. Ladies. Ladies.

I'm so sorry. You may have actually a wrong idea about what an omelet is. We'll talk about that later. So now, Dallas Denny, who was a trans woman, a trans rights activist and a writer, was very critical about some of their, about like the efforts of these kind of early gender reassignment clinics. And she wrote this, quote, Jesus. So people who like were relatively emotionally stable and healthy would be denied the surgery because they would seem like, well, you're fine. You don't need this.

And like people who were like clearly for probably a lot of other reasons, you know, kind of on the edge of suicide emergency cases would be given surgery. So it meant that, and this has, this has like had an effect that went on to this day because it means that like some of the first, you know, transgender, like people, the first people to go through the surgery that were studied were people who had a whole lot of other issues, and again, led to like this, reinforce this belief that they were like fundamentally unhealthy because they wouldn't let healthy trans people have the surgery. So it's kind of messed up. It's like when people blame Jews for being into money and then the only jobs they could have is for his money lenders. It's like, yeah, you gotta. There's some lines there. They fucking love it.

Now, since medical schools were often unwilling to help trans patients, the private sector swooped in to offer assistance because sweet lady capitalism is nothing if not inclusive once money is on the line. A small number of surgeons, some motivated by altruism, others by a desire for cold hard cash, began to service the needs of the trans community. This was dicey legal ground to protect themselves from malpractice claims. Many of the surgeons required psychiatric clearances, the ones who did not inevitably tended to be sketchier individuals. And this finally brings us to the subject of today's episode, John Ronald Brown. It was a long introduction. Oh, and now it's time for ads. You know who won't perform sketchy unlicensed surgery, Sophia?

The following goods and services? Yes, only licensed surgery from the following goods and services. Oh boy. It's not going to be the last ad transition that's uncomfortable in this episode. That was not great, Robert. It was not great. It was not great. What do you want?

No, no, I expect not great. A good ad transition on a Sophia episode? That's not going to happen. Truth. But don't bring me into it. Yeah, don't loop her into your mess. Or sinking your own battleship, buddy. You know what didn't kill all those babies?

Dick pills. Here's some products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. All right. You notice I got you saying goods and services now? Fuck yeah. I do, I do. You accepted it in my mind.

I know, it's pretty great. I'll grow inside of you slowly like a fungus, Robert. I love funguses. That's where we get all of our best mushrooms. Yep. I'm just the mushroom of the heart. Soviet. Yes.

We've had a little history lesson, and now it's time to talk about a terrible person. Motherfucker, this whole thing is a history lesson. Okay. Yeah. John Ronald Brown, and I'm going to continually use his middle name because calling him John Brown will very much mix him up with the guy that we don't want mixed up in this story, the hero John Brown. So John Ronald Brown was born on July 14, 1922. I don't know where, and I haven't been able to find much if any meaningful tales about his childhood.

He claims in interviews to have been the son of a Mormon physician in Utah, which is probably where he comes from. John was apparently something of a child genius, and he found academics so easy that he graduated high school at age 16. He was drafted into the army at the start of World War II. I feel like he would lie about graduating at 16, but I do not feel like he would lie about being from Utah. No one has. What do you gain from that? No one has ever pretended to be from Utah. That's what I'm saying.

Anyway, go on. It's like lying about coming from Oklahoma City. Yeah, I trust you. Okay. So he gets drafted into the army at the start of World War II. And as a new soldier, he was required to take the general classification test, which is the precursor to the modern ASVAB test, which is like, what jobs are you smart enough to do in the army? Now, decades later, in interviews with journalists, John Ronald Brown would claim to have scored higher on this test

than any of the other 300,000 people who had taken it previously in Utah. Now, this guy's a liar, so he might be lying, but I also don't know that you would lie about being the smartest man in Utah. Again. I mean, if you're the kind of man who lied about being from Utah, you would probably lie about being the smartest man in Utah. I think he's probably- It's just a pile of lies. Yeah, maybe. It's like saying you got a 1600 on your SATs, but only when you're not in your hometown.

I wouldn't be surprised if 300,000 people was like 300,000 times the number of people who could read fluently in Utah in the 1940s. So a lot of Utah shade being thrown in this episode, which he deserves. Seriously, we're a million. Utah is beautiful. It is beautiful, but not humans. No. Nobody goes to Utah for the humans. No, it's not. It was Zion National Park to get away from them.

Exactly. So yeah, whatever the truth about how intelligent he was vis-a-vis the rest of Utah, Brown's score was high enough that the army sent him to medical school. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah in 1947 and his medical degree three months later because apparently that was a lot easier in the fours. Yeah, what the fuck? You just had a BA and put in an extra three months? That's like a summer. I don't think it was hard to be a doctor back then. Man.

They had just locked down that you shouldn't shoot people full of arsenic. Yo, I should have been born earlier. I get to medical people up. Oh man, you'd be a doctor. I'd be a colonel. We could have a podcast called The Doctor Colonel Hour. Yeah, and it will still be a lot of murder, but in real life. No.

Because there's also no contact lenses back then, and I'm very blind. So the doctoring would be wild as hell. The doctoring would be wild, the driving as well, because none of us are wearing seatbelts. Just a bunch of blind people crashing into each other in big steel cars. That sounds awesome. Yeah, it does. It would kind of rule. Now, the shitty John Brown, as I like to call him, moved to Los Angeles to do his internship at Harbor General.

He finished his internship at the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles. And at this point in his budding medical career, there seems to have been no sign that John was headed for anything but a productive career as a man of medicine. John finished his time in the military and went on to work as a general practitioner in California, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Marshall Islands. Now, it's possible that all this moving around was just John taking advantage of the fact that his skills as a doctor gave him the opportunity to see the world. Given what comes next, it's even more possible that he fucked up in a number of horrifying ways and had to repeatedly switch states. If that's the case. Any time you've got a doctor in the 40s and 50s who moves constantly. He's like the molesting priest of that time, you know. They're like, oh, gotta move him to another parish.

God, it would be so, like, I would absolutely have been surgerying people back then. I'm saying. Just any kind of surgery you want, I'll just leave. I don't want to stay in Mississippi. I'll cut off an arm in the next state. It'll be awesome. So, um, yeah, we don't know precisely what he did in his early career or if he was terrible from an early point. We only have one example of an early fuck up when he botched a thyroidectomy and almost lost a patient.

And we do know that John shouldn't have attempted to perform that surgery because he was not a surgeon and was not qualified to perform a surgery. So early on in his career, there is at least one case of him performing surgery without being trained to do so. I like a spunk. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. You know, surgery is really, it's like driving, you know. It's 90% spunk, I think. Yeah, you just gotta get in there and do it. Put your foot on the gas, close your eyes and start cutting it while you meet, you know. That's the way it works.

So, after botching a surgery, John decided that he should get training in the field if he was going to start cutting into people. And he spent two years in Newark City Hospital as a resident and also attended a plastic surgery program in Newark's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Unfortunately, he proved to be terrible at all of this. He failed repeatedly. So he goes to surgery school, but he fails constantly the exam that would actually certify him to perform plastic surgery. And then he later brags about this to journalists. I passed the written part of the exam without cracking a book, but he says that he failed his orals because his domineering father traumatized him. And so he couldn't handle confrontation with authority figures.

He would say that my brain turns into cottage cheese whenever he had to do the practical exam. Dude, also stop bragging about not practicing for being a doctor. Yeah, nobody's impressed by that. That does not make you feel good. I want you to practice. Yeah, I don't pick my doctor because who do I think has the best gut instinct? Yeah, I'm like, if you could wing it, you can be my doctor. I want the guy, yeah. That's not how we choose them.

Yeah, I want someone who looks exhausted from the sheer number of books that they've read. Yeah, I want to come in their office and be like, damn, I could never read all of these. That's how I want to feel. Yeah, yeah. So in total, John Ronald Brown failed the general surgery oral examination twice and the plastic surgery oral examination three times. He's not great. Now, this should have stopped him from ever performing surgery in a hospital, but it didn't largely because no one really checked up on him. Since he'd completed specialty residencies, he was still considered board eligible. And honestly, it seems like no one was really paying close attention.

So John got to work surgerying all sorts of people and outside of work, he had a somewhat tumultuous life. His first wife left him for one of his friends while he was in the army. The second wife died of breast cancer. John moved back from the East Coast to California where he started a medical surgery practice in San Francisco. Now, we don't know how John first learned about Christine Jorgensen's transition or how he felt about it, but it's plausible to assume his establishment in San Francisco, which was then one of the very few places in America where trans people had any visibility, would have keyed him in on the fact that there was suddenly a major demand in this segment of the population for surgeons and particularly surgeons who might not check to or surgeons who might not, you know,

wanting you to have a doctor's note saying that you were prepared for the surgery, surgeons who might just take the cash and do whatever you asked them. You go get butt implants and they put cement in your butt. Yes, exactly. Because they're like just in a hotel in Miami. Yeah. So the first vagina, that was very specific. I mean, that's a case.

I remember that vice documentary about people's like lip injections that would rot their faces off. So that sounded, I'm assuming it's the same kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Just putting shit into things that you shouldn't be because you're not a licensed person and people just trying to save money out there and do it under the table. It's amazing the desperation for something like thicker lips that would lead you to just like let somebody in a hotel room inject you with nonsense. Also so many of the stories are like, oh, and then I was like, is there no anesthesia?

And they're like, nah, I'm like, well, that's a really big sign for when you're going to get surgery. You're going to get surgery that you should be under anesthesia, not for lip injections. But you know what I'm saying? When people are like, yeah, I had to get butt injections. And they're just like, well, you're going to be weight during this. I'm like, what? That, yeah. So yeah, in the 1960s, the late 60s, doctors started performing the first vagina plastic.

And again, we don't exactly know when Brown got into this line of work. He probably started providing minor cosmetic surgery to transitioning individuals like facial surgery and stuff like that. But he quickly grew interested in doing more extensive work. And by February of 1973, John Ronald Brown was established enough in the trans community that he gave a presentation at the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome, sponsored by Stanford. Brown's presentation focused on what he called his miniaturization technique in which he would turn a patient's penis into a clitoris, thus guaranteeing them the ability to continue to experience sexual climax. So that's like the thing he starts like, he's probably for years working in the community,

but he has this idea to basically trim a penis down to a clitoris while doing a vagina plastic. It's a good selling point. I mean, it's a good selling point. Yeah, it makes sense, right? If someone was like, oh, and you can come, I would be like, I don't care what you said before that sold. So by the fall of that year, Brown had transitioned his own career almost entirely towards that sort of work. Very few other doctors willing to do it and most charged prices that were far out of the reach of many trans people. That's what I'm saying. Access is just not like, it's financial and whatever.

Yeah. Well, no, you're right. You're right on the money because John Brown basically establishes himself as the budget surgeon for gender transition, which is not, I mean, it's obviously it's a necessary thing to have because there's a lot of desperate people who need the surgery, but also people who are just trying to live their life like lives and ruining them physically and otherwise is just evil. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what we're getting to. So this period of time is when a guy named Paul Seade, a journalist for time, met John Ronald Brown. Now, Paul covered the LGBT community for time and he seems to be one of the very few mainstream journalists in that period who legitimately cared about queer people. If you read through his old articles, like the terminology he uses is not the terms we use today, but he's clearly like trying to be understanding and coming at this from a place of knowledge as opposed to sensationalism.

And he kept his ear to the ground and read the mimeographed zines that the LGBT community disseminated during this period of time to get out vital information. And as a result, he ran across a story about a doctor on Lombard Street who was in the words of one columnist, lopping people's penises off. So obviously, as a journalist, Paul's like, well, I want to know what's going on here. So he gives a call to Brown's clinic. Yeah, I would follow up on a lopping penises off lead. That sounds very promising. Let's see what's going on. So he calls Brown's clinic and he winds up talking to Brown's partner, a guy named Dr. James Spence. And I'm going to quote from Siadi's article in LA Weekly now.

Spence struck me as a bit of a hustler, far less polished than one would expect of someone with a medical degree if he had a medical degree. To some people, he gave business cards reading Dr. James Spence. But to me, he said he'd earned his medical degree in Africa and thus couldn't practice here. I later heard he was an ex-con who claimed to be a veterinarian, but that degree was phony too. The clinic wasn't much, just a few rooms on a busy street. It seemed more like a real estate office than anything else. Sensing my skepticism, perhaps, Spence invited me to an upcoming formal dinner at his hilltop home in Burlingham, where he and his partner, the renowned plastic surgeon Dr. John Ronald Brown,

would be explaining his new operation to a group of urologists, proctologists, and internists, some of whom Spence hoped would join him and Dr. Brown in setting up the finest sex change facility anywhere in the country. So there's a lot of information in those paragraphs. And probably the most interesting is the fact that this guy's business partner, Dr. James Spence, is in no way a doctor. He's even less of a doctor than his non-doctor partner. Yeah, he's a guy who pretended to be a vet. His only qualification is having lied about being a veterinarian. Yeah.

So yeah, Dr. Brown's practice was not exactly on the up and up. Now, despite his sketchiness, Brown needed Spence because the good doctor, the actual doctor, Brown, was terrible at meeting people and had no connections in the queer community and was kind of an awkward person, was not very good at building connections. And at this point, you're really talking about something very similar to being a drug dealer when you're talking about being the kind of medical professional like working with this community. And so Brown doesn't have the ability to kind of interface the way that a drug dealer needs to to build connections and trust in a community.

And Spence, who is a literal criminal and not at all the doctor, is good at doing that. And he's able to build connections with the gay community. And he helps broker deals between John Brown and queer figures like Angela Brown, who was the publisher of Mirage Magazine, which was like an LGBT-focused periodical at the time. John Brown helped to fund the magazine in exchange for promotion of his clinic. Now, Paul Ciotti attended the Soiree Brown and Spence through to publicize the opening of their new clinic. And here's how he described it. This is interesting to me. After the fruit and cheese, we adjourn to the kitchen where one of the waitresses lay on a butcher block table

and casually flipped up her skirt. A goose neck lamp was produced and all the doctors proceeded to examine the kind of work currently being done by Dr. Brown's competition. I'm no expert in female anatomy, but the waitresses' genitalia did not look like those of any woman I'd ever seen. There was no clitoris or anything resembling a vagina. It rather looked like someone had taken a pickaxe and neatly poked a small square hole, an inch on a side, directly into her groin. Either that or like an aerial photograph of a Manitoba iron ore mine taken from 20,000 feet. In contrast, Spence maintained, Brown had developed a revolutionary technique that would give transsexuals fully orgasmic clitorises and aesthetically pleasing vaginas. Later, Dr. Brown and I stood around the kitchen table while he displayed what to me were ghastly photographs of his surgical technique.

One picture showed a gauze noose holding up the head of a bloody penis while Brown sliced away at the tendrils of unwanted erectile tissue. So, and I want to emphasize here, Seade is not like a squeamish dude about all this. Like he's not the kind of dude who's just squeamish about the idea of trans surgeries. What he's seeing in Dr. Brown's work is like not good. Like it's not the way it should look. Well, Brown and Spence are like when serial killers work together and like Brown is the one that stays home and murders. And then like Spence is the one that goes and gets the victims because he's like personable. Yeah, except for the victims sort of survive and in some ways get brought into the clinic.

So like one of the ways that actually kind of made sense that they ran their clinic. So at this time, if you were going to like go the legit way to get gender confirmation surgery, you would work with a psychiatrist and would essentially spend some time taking hormones and living as your new gender. And then that psychiatrist would be like, OK, I think you're ready. You've committed like this is clearly not a passing thing. Let's get you the surgery. What Dr. Brown and his and Spence said should be done is instead other trans women should meet with the people who wanted surgeries and vet them, which on its face sounds like, OK, that might be one a reasonable way to do it is like these people know what's really involved in the surgery.

They might be able to do a better job of like judging like when someone's like emotionally like ready to undergo this thing. You know, when you're talking about the 70s, that seems like a pretty, pretty advanced way to look at it. But the reality is that those people are doctors or professionals. They're just people. They're not doctors or professionals and they're essentially working for Dr. Brown as a way to pay off their own surgeries. Oh, so they'll just say yes to anybody. Yeah. So it's not there's there's aspects of what he was saying he wanted to do that.

I'm like, yeah, that might make sense. And then like you really dig into it when it's like, oh, no, it was just a grift. It's a fucking MLM scheme, man. A little bit except for I don't like none of them are in it to make a profit. They're just trying to get this thing that they like literally is life and death for them this surgery. No, I just mean like once they're in, they're getting other people involved and then those people are going to get new people involved. And it's just like, yeah, it's not maybe not the best idea. Although you can see why when he explains it to other people, they might be like, oh, yeah, that seems like a reasonable way to do it.

Yeah. And who would know at that point it's not like exactly this is revolutionary. So it could be revolutionary like we know that this is great or revolutionary like it's just new. That's it. Yeah. So to layman at least what Dr. Brown claimed to be doing made sense. His patients had penises that they wanted transformative vaginas. So he would basically split the penis saving the nerves and blood supply and then reposition the head under a hood of flesh to create a clitoris.

The penile skin was used to create labia and the hair was removed from the scrotal skin to create the lining of a new vagina. In theory, this is a pretty reasonable way to do things. This is on paper what is supposed to be happening. There were two problems. Problem one was that John Ronald Brown had an almost pathological aversion to performing surgery in hospitals, medical clinics and anywhere else you might actually want to have major surgery performed. Dude, that's part of the job. Are you kidding me? That's like if I'm like, I want to be a comedian, but I do not want to be on a stage or in a bar or in a theater or in a club.

I want to be a comedian, but I would like to tell my jokes to the children of strangers who I abduct from their elementary school. Is that a job? I was like, no, that's not the job. That's just a crime. Yeah, so instead of working in like, you know, a clean operating room where it's safe to perform surgery. John Ronald Brown preferred to work out of his own home, which I prefer to work out of my home too. I'm working in my home drinking my coffee and wearing my pajamas right now. Yeah, but you can't be a stay at home surgeon.

That's not an odd patient. That's a fucked up dream. Like I like points for dreaming the big dream, but you cannot be a stay at home surgeon. Exactly. I perform surgery less than five times a year, I would say. And, you know, mainly to friends and enemies. So yeah, one early patient recalled going to Brown's home office, assuming that they would just receive a checkup on a surgery they'd gotten earlier. Instead, she woke up from the anesthetic to find that Brown had performed surgery on her in his garage.

Jesus fucking Christ. Not great. Unsettling as that is, Dr. Brown was very popular for a while, as has no froze practice made transitioning much more affordable than it had ever been before. John's home acquired the nickname The House of Dreams, which is fucking heartbreaking given what comes next. Yeah. One of John's early patients was a woman named Elizabeth. She was initially very happy with her new vagina, but a year after receiving the surgery, it began to tighten up and essentially heal itself closed. When she freaked out about this, John was nowhere to be found.

Elizabeth had to find another surgeon, Dr. Jack Fisher, to bat clean up. When interviewed later, Fisher, who had to clean up for a lot of Brown's patients, said this. It's hard to imagine anyone worse than John Ronald Brown. He didn't care much for evaluating his patients before surgery or for post-operative care. He was totally focused on the technical procedure itself, and he didn't do that very well. So this guy is all about the technical details of the surgery, and he's also bad at the technical details of the surgery. Oh god. Yeah.

Now, in spite of the sketchiness of Brown's practice and the bad experience of a lot of his patients, he was very popular among the trans community for a while. Wendy Davidson, who helped to organize peer clinics for the trans community, which is like clinics operated like buy-in for trans people to like provide each other with life-saving health care since the government and society did not give a fuck about them. So Wendy worked with Dr. Brown for a while until another activist, Donna Colvin, reported that she'd seen Brown shooting up Valium before performing surgery on patients, sometimes on literal kitchen tables. Oh my god. For which he acquired the nickname, Tabletop Brown. Jesus. Now, Sophia, you know who won't shoot up Valium and perform unlicensed surgery on a kitchen tabletop? The following goods and services?

That's right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

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What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We're talking about Tabletop Brown, a terrible surgeon.

So, Sophia, how are you feeling so far? Feeling pretty peppy. Good things are on the horizon. You are fiddling with things with your hand in such a way that I can almost taste the discomfort in the room. And that means it's a good episode. Question, how long till I can show her what this guy looks like? Let's wait until the end of episode one. Copy. Okay, so excited. Oh my god, now I'm trying to picture what I think he might look like.

Yeah, it's a thing. So, these stories of him shooting up Valium before performing table surgery took some time to percolate out into the wider community. For one thing, most of the women engaging Brown services specifically hired him because they couldn't afford to go to professional clinics where surgery, for example, was performed in an OR. Not in a kitchen. Not in a kitchen. The fact that he worked out of his house as well as hotel rooms and garages

was just something that these patients had to accept because they were trans women in the 70s and there just weren't a lot of fucking options. It was garbage. It's still garbage, but slightly less. Anyway, if you got your surgery done in a kitchen and then you found out your friend got, there's in a garage, you were big timing them, you're like, oh, I guess he didn't think you were good enough to operate on in the kitchen. Oh, you're a kitchener, huh? Oh, you're a garager. Yeah, I was in the kitchen. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Nice kitchen. He had a juice maker.

So Paul Siodi, who's like the very first journalist to dig into John and really like the source of 60% of the information for this podcast. I really, I have a lot of, I don't know much about the rest of his career, but just based on sort of his work in this community, in this period, I have a lot of admiration for him because he's writing for like Time fucking magazine and he's covering this group of people that like nobody else gives a shit about. So good on you, Paul. Props. Yeah, props. So he found John Ronald Brown impressive at their first meeting and I'm going to quote from him here. I must say he came across as genial, knowledgeable and obviously quite proud of his technique. There was a certain naivete and even passivity about him that struck me as surprising and a surgeon,

but compared to everything else I'd seen that night, it didn't warrant a second thought. So Paul wrote what he describes as a pretty boring article about sexual reassignment surgery for time since he didn't think that time would publish the wider details about what he'd seen. And before it went to print, Dr. Brown called him to beg that Paul not mention his name in the article. He informed Paul that he and Spence had had a falling out and canceled their plans to start a clinic. It is uncertain precisely what happened between Spence and Brown, but stories later came out that he allowed Spence to carry out his own surgeries and again Spence was a fake veterinarian, not even a fake doctor, so like something very, very sketchy happened between him and Spence and they stopped getting along. By 1977, Dr. Brown had botched enough surgeries that a bunch of other doctors, the ones who'd had to correct his work largely, had complained. The California Board of Medical Quality Assurance looked into Dr. Brown and was shocked to realize that he'd worked with a fake veterinarian, turned fake doctor and let this person perform surgery.

They revoked his medical license for, quote, gross negligence and competence and practicing unprofessional medicine in a matter which involved moral turpitude. Among other things, the board was furious with John for allowing his patients to work as clinical assistants in order to pay off their medical debts to him. So this is again what I'm talking about, like people can't pay all up front and he's like, why don't you be a nurse? Well, I don't, you don't need to know to be a nurse. My partner here is a fake vet. Exactly. My doctor partner is not a doctor. None of us are who we say we are here. You want to pretend to be a nurse? You want to pretend to be a nurse? I'll shave a couple grand off the cost. Now I'm going to quote from Paul Ciotti again. He failed to take medical histories or do physical exams before surgery and he did sex change surgery on virtually anyone who asked for it, regardless of whether they were physically or emotionally stable enough to cope with it.

And I think that's where her penis should be. I'm not really sure about how that patient identified. As a general rule, Paul's pretty careful about not misgendering people, but it was the 70s. And yeah, yeah, I think he's better than most people. So at that point in history, many credible surgeons required their patients to have lived as their chosen gender for at least a year prior to receiving surgery. There's a lot that makes sense about this practice, but it also meant that many of the people who most needed to transition never got the opportunity. If your life and job and friends and family couldn't accept you living as a woman before actually receiving the surgery, that would make it easy to pass, then you just couldn't transition. Some people, including some reputable physicians, defended Dr. Brown for serving the community when no one else would. The judge who revoked his medical license actually filed a memorandum opinion for Brown, calling him a pioneer who made innovative contributions to transsexual surgery despite difficulties like performing major surgery on a dinner table. The judge suggested that Brown should be limited to performing surgery in a medically recognized organization rather than being drummed out of the field entirely.

So that's actually a little bit surprising to me. Yeah, what a weird answer to the situation. We still want this guy on the team. I think it might just be a judge who realized that these people were desperate and that no one else was serving them and is like, again, the primitive nature of our understanding of gender and particularly trans people at this point means that this might not have seemed as brutal. Because you have to think about early treatments for cancer. They're literally pouring acid into people's wounds, like hydrochloric acid and shit like that, like trying to burn it off from the inside. So medicine tends to be brutal, especially medicine that's kind of on the cutting edge and especially in this period. And I think probably there were a lot of people who were like, well, of course he has a lot of patients with bad outcomes. This is new. Nobody knows how to do it well. We're still learning this thing. We should just try to make sure he works in a good, clean space because he's a pioneer. I think that's the angle, at least from the people who are reasonably compassionate. I think he kind of tricked some of them and they're like, well, yeah, what he did isn't great, but no one else is doing this work.

Well, no one else is harming this group of people. Yeah, you also have to admit there were hundreds of people by this point who had horrible, at least dozens who had horrible John Brown stories, but there were at least as many if not more people who had good John Brown surgeries. Because, you know, it's some people, it's the same thing that's like one of the difficulties today. Some people take really easily to this kind of surgery and their bodies heal well and it's very simple for them. And, you know, between like minor surgery and the hormones, they have a really easy transition and some people because of their age or because of just their genetics, it's much more complicated. And so there are some people who John does his thing on and it works out great for them and they get a good deal and they're grateful and they speak his praises and they send other people to him. And so it's not just people saying he did a horrible job on me. I guess I didn't realize how many happy customers he had. Sorry, Robert, it sounds like you're keeping for him.

I'm just trying to point out like for the judge. Is this how when I was here last time you were like pro a certain kind of dogfight? I am. I'm pro a lot of kinds of dogfights. I mean, look, we don't need to get into that today. No, sorry. Go ahead. Hashtag not all dogfights. Don't make that into a hashtag, Robert. It's a good hashtag, Sophie. It's a good hashtag.

So the judge is like this guy's a pioneer. We got to stop him from doing tabletop surgery. But, you know, maybe if we can get him to just work in an OR, he can do good work. But John Brown did not take this advice or this chance to actually improve his skills and serve a community in a responsible way. Instead, he moved to Hawaii. He almost immediately lost his permission to practice medicine in the state by doing something horrible. So he moved to Alaska and he lost his permission to practice medicine in Alaska shortly thereafter.

The hits kept on coming in 1979. One of his very first vaginoplasty patients sued. Julie had initially reached out to Dr. Brown about getting breast implants. He'd convinced her that he could make her, into his words, a perfect woman with his new techniques and convinced Julie to undergo a full operation. Dr. Brown was assisted in this by not a doctor's spence. The surgery did not go well and Julie sued in 1979 claiming Dr. Brown had left her neither male nor female. They settled out of court for enough money to provide psychiatric care help for the rest of Julie's life in a new operation.

By the time the court battle was done, Dr. Brown had basically rendered himself unemployable across the entirety of the continental United States, Hawaii and Alaska. So, next, he moved to the Caribbean. Oh, fuck. Why you gotta bring the Caribbean into this? Why you gotta do it? Yeah, St. Lucia to be specific. Oh, no. Now, when you read other doctors talking about John Brown,

they'll note that it was considered almost impossible to lose your medical license in the Caribbean at that point in time. But John did. Oh, my gosh. He is a pioneer. Like people talking about, like, I don't know how he lost his medical license in the fucking Caribbean, but it must have been horrible. So, St. Lucia was not entirely a loss for Dr. John Ronald Brown, though. In 1981, he fell in love there for the third and final time.

Love might be too strong a word for it. Yeah, love may not be the proper way to describe this. I should say at age 59, Dr. John Brown contracted an arranged marriage with the parents of a 17-year-old girl who did not speak English. Oh, God. Now, would you call that love? I'd call it buying a woman. Yeah, buying a woman seems accurate.

He seems to have basically paid her parents for her hand in marriage. She's a child now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He taught his new wife, Julie, to speak English and they had two sons. In an interview with Paul Ciotti, decades later, here's how Julie recalled their courtship. He asked me if I would like to get married. I said, I don't know. I was 17. He was 59. Still, I'd be remiss if I didn't state that Julie has, for years,

been consistent in expressing her gratitude to Dr. Brown. Even after they divorced in the 1990s, she insisted to reporters that she still loved him. He raised me. He taught me to read and write. He's a really good man. If I had to do it again, I'd marry him in a heartbeat. That's straight-up Stockholm syndrome. Yeah, it's fucked up. Like, he raised me and taught me how to read and write shouldn't go along with my husband. Yeah, that's some Woody Allen soon you shit. That is not okay.

It's not okay. You can't raise someone and fuck them at the same time. That's not okay. No. No, you cannot. No, you cannot. I don't have a joke for that. Nah, just pick a lane. You know what I mean? Yeah. Now, once John lost his license to practice in the Caribbean,

he was left with only one possible option for continuing his medical practice. Do I even need to say where he moved next? You know. Is it Africa? No. Where does a California doctor go when no other place will let him practice medicine? Yeah, that's right. Baja, baby. Oh.

No longer legally a Dr. Brown established a new plastic surgery clinic in Tijuana while he lived in Chula Vista, California. In order to address up the fact that he was illegally performing surgery in Mexico to avoid U.S. law enforcement, Brown described his business as an international practice in brochures. Now, he was far from the only doctor to use Tijuana as a base of operations for his underground gender reassignment surgery business. A number of physicians, some of whom were competent, worked out of the city as well.

The two most prominent were doctors Biber and Barbosa. In short order, Dr. Brown established himself as the dude you went to when you could not afford either of those other better guys. He was the doctor you went with if you wanted a surgery fast. He didn't even require hormone treatment, let alone a psychiatrist's referral beforehand. Over the course of the 1980s, he earned a reputation as tabletop Brown for his willingness to perform surgery basically anywhere. Dallas Denny, a trans activist, started hearing horrifying stories about Brown during this time.

Quote, patients were waking up in parked cars or abandoned hotel rooms. There was no screening and no aftercare. Anyone who walked in the room was a candidate. Some of these people, expecting vagina plasties, received simple panectomies, leaving them looking somewhat like a Barbie doll. Others ended up with something that looked like a penis which had been soon and split to their groin, which is essentially what had been done. Some ended up with vaginas which were lined with hair-bearing scrotal skin.

These vaginas quickly filled up with pubic hair becoming inflamed and infected. Some ended with periodontitis, some with permanent colostomies. Some ran out of money and were dumped in back alleys and parking lots to live or die. Wow. What a piece of shit. Not a great doctor. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah, it's a nightmare. Now, Jack Fisher, who's that plastic surgery professor at UC San Diego we talked about earlier, the guy who batted cleanup for John Brown a lot, concurred with Dallas's summary of Dr. Brown's competence.

And again, this is the guy who spent years like working on people that he had butchered. And after correcting what he called 12 to 15 pelvic disasters, he said this, he's a terrible appalling technical surgeon. There is just no other way to describe it. He doesn't know how to make a straight incision. He doesn't know how to hold a knife. He has no regard for limiting blood loss. And Dr. Fisher believes Dr. Brown's practice amounted to a crime against humanity. But, I should say, not everybody felt this way. Dr. Brown performed hundreds of gender transition surgeries

and either through his own semi-competence or the fact that some people really take easily to the surgery, a number of these worked out pretty well. Paul Ciotti tracked down several of these women, and I'm going to quote from his reportage again. One 33-year-old manager for a major airline tells me she had Brown do her gender reassignment surgery in 1985, when she was only 19. It was so successful, she says, that when she later got married, her husband never guessed that she'd been a male. To simulate a period, she used to prick her finger to leave blood stains on the sheets. I also hear from Anne, a Cambodian refugee whose father was killed by the Khmer Rouge,

that Brown had changed her entire suffering, painful life from that of an ugly worm to a beautiful butterfly. Furthermore, unlike that of some transsexuals who have difficulty passing as women, her surgery turned out so well, she says, that she got a job as a stripper in Las Vegas' Chinatown. Now, while these stories were not necessarily rare, they were not the norm either. Cherry, a North California businesswoman, traveled to Dr. Brown's clinic in 1984 to have dual sexual reassignment surgery with her brother. She explains, he ran specials, bring a girlfriend, two for the price of one. Cherry backed out at the last moment when she saw his actual office.

The sewers overflowed constantly and there was rarely running water. The OR was just a bedroom with an OB-GYN chair in it. Sometimes, Cherry claimed, Brown would sip coffee while doing the operation. And I'm going to quote now from LA Weekly. The thing that most bothered Cherry, she says, was Brown's brusque attitude. After surgery, he would grab the dried, blood-clotted bandages and rip them right off. He was always so disheveled, too. His hair went in different directions. His shoes were scuffed and worn down.

I remember him walking down the hall eating raw weenies right out of the package, a fucking package of weenies. Ew. So, in one case, says Cherry, who spent 11 days at Brown's clinic caring for her new sister. Brown operated on an HIV-positive patient who still had pins in her arm from an auto accident. She used the insurance settlement to pay for her surgery. In another, he used too much erectile tissue to construct the genital outer lips. As a result, whenever the girl got excited, her labia got hard.

So, not a great surgeon. Now, as the 1980s faded into the 1990s, Dr. John Brown was probably the most prominent low-budget gender reassignment surgeon, at least in Mexico. But the growing list of people crippled and deformed by his work were starting to gain notice and speak out against him. Unfortunately for everyone, Dr. Brown had evolved, and his miniaturization technique had given away to something vastly more horrifying. We're going to talk about that, and how it all came crashing down for John Ronald Brown in Part 2.

How you doing, Sophia? Just peachy! Everything's super fun and happy. Thanks for having me, Robert. You like this guy? Yeah, what a fan. Oh my god, that's what he looks like. Yeah, yeah, you looking at his picture? Yeah, he does not look like I would trust him. No, how would you describe him? Just like an evil old man, like, racism personified, I guess.

Yeah, he looks like he would be, like, shouting at a group of school kids, and particularly shouting at the school kids who weren't white in that group for being on his lawn. He's definitely your friend's, like, grandpa that would molest you. That's what he looks like. Yeah, he looks very molesty. Like, profoundly so. So, Sophia, are you in a good mood? Yeah, she's happy, you know? I love, love, love, love it when a group of people just gets terrorized by a fucking murderer,

and they already are the most marginalized group out there. So, yeah, you know, feeling pretty good. For some reason, the most horrifying part of all this, like, there's a lot of terrible surgery stories in here, and the most horrifying thought here is of, like, a doctor sipping coffee and eating cold weenies from a package and then immediately performing surgery without washing his hands. Like, that's the thing that, like... The entire thing is so creepy. A doctor that's okay with open sewage around?

How can you even eat a weenie when there's sewage around? Raw or cooked. John Brown. Goddamn. Well, you want to plug your pluggable, Sophia, before we write out? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at thesophia, T-H-E-S-O-F-I-Y-A. And I have a weekly podcast with Miles Gray from The Daily Zygast. It's called 420 Day Fiancé. It's half game show, half recap of our favorite trash show, 90 Day Fiancé.

And I have a podcast about love and sexuality called Private Parts Unknown. So check both of those out with Courtney Kosak, who did Bastards like two episodes ago. She did, she did. And I'm Robert Evans. I have a podcast. It's this one. You can listen to it by continuing to listen to it. You can find it online at BehindTheBastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and at BastardsPod. I have a political podcast you can listen to about this election called Worst Year Effort

with my friends Katie and Cody. It doesn't work. And I will perform surgery on you, but I will eat cold weenies the entire time I'm doing it. Any kind of surgery, I don't really care. I just love surgery. So come on down, find me in the woods. I'll just start cutting. Robert the Cutter.

Robert the Cutter. All right. That's the episode. Go listen to something happy to wash this out of your brain. Yeah. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.