Jeanne Hoff, Pioneering Transgender Psychiatrist, Dies at 85
By Penelope Green, Dec. 18, 2023, NY Times
Dr. Hoff was born on Oct. 16, 1938, in St. Louis, the only child of James and Mary (Salih) Hoff. Her father was a laborer and, by the 1950s, was working as a bottler in a brewery. Dr. Hoff didn’t speak very much about her upbringing, though she hinted that it was marked by privation and disapproval, said Ms. Lucas, a friend since the 1980s. Her father, she told Ms. Lucas, was an alcoholic.

“I got the sense that she raised herself,” Ms. Lucas said. “She was so smart, they didn’t know what to do with her.”

Dr. Hoff earned a half scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis, from which she received a B.A. in 1960. She then earned a master’s in science from Yale, followed by an M.D. in surgery from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia in 1963. She returned to Washington University from 1971 through 1976, first as an instructor in pathology and then as a resident in psychiatry.

In the 80s, Dr. Hoff sold her practice and moved to Hudson, in upstate New York. She worked for an outpatient clinic for the state in nearby Kingston, treating severely disabled, long-term psychiatric patients, including schizophrenics. After half a decade or so, she moved to a group practice in Pittsburgh and ended up working in Oakland, Calif., treating the formerly incarcerated through a program with the California Department of Corrections. Her last job was at San Quentin, where she treated prisoners on death row. She retired in 1999, after a prisoner attacked her.

“She did not recover well from that trauma,” Ms. Lucas said.. “She said she couldn’t get mad, which would allow her to heal, because he was a patient. She would joke about it, ‘I thought it was going to happen today, but it only lasted a few seconds.’ She was enormously compassionate.”

No immediate family members survive.

At the conclusion of “Becoming Jeanne,” Mr. Field asked Dr. Hoff how she would like to be treated. “What can we do, to accept you?”

She did not hesitate in her answer: “It may not be necessary for you to go to a lot of trouble to learn about accepting transsexuals if you have a general principle and that is, ‘Mind your own business,’ I suppose. It boils down to that.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/us/jeanne-hoff-dead.html

I remember when his repackaging from Gene to Jeanne
was the subject of NY area TV news coverage.

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.