Hi Katherine,
The following on-line references may be of some use to you. All are on
IJT site: http://www.symposion.com/ijt/
There are two critical reviews of Meyer and Retter, and a more general
review of all the follow-up studies done up to 1991.
Firstly in Pfellin and Junge:
"Sex Reassignment. Thirty Years of International Follow-up Studies
After Sex Reassignment Surgery: A Comprehensive Review, 1961-1991"
there is a critical review of Meyer & Retter at
http://209.143.139.183/ijtbooks/pfaefflin/3043.asp
The review, inter alia, says about the John Hopkins closure issue:
> This follow-up study, started in the year 1971 -- whose results were
> presented for the first time at the Annual Meeting of the American
> Psychiatric Association, May, 1977, in Toronto, Canada and was then
> hardly noticed -- has found in the Western professional world and also
> in the lay press, a great resonance after its being published in the
> Archives of General Psychiatry in August 1979. One can call it the most
> noted and disputed follow-up study, where the dispute was less by its
> many times falsely-cited results than the accompanying statements of
> the first author who saw a connection between this publication and the
> stopping of sex reassignment surgery at the renowned Johns Hopkins
> University Clinic.
> In this clinic a sex reassignment surgery was done for the first time
> in a North American university clinic in 1960. More specifically, a
> double-sided sub-cutaneous mastectomy was performed on an FMT.
> Previously it had only been available abroad and maybe in private
> clinics for US-American patients - so it was, through this act,
> converted into a serious treatment, even though it was not undisputed.
> Like the first surgical procedure, the establishment of the Gender
> Identity Committee at the Johns Hopkins University Clinic some years
> later (1965) was a signal for other US (American) university clinics.
> Correspondingly noticed were press releases that sex reassignment
> surgery was not done any more at the Johns Hopkins University
> Clinic; it was connected to the publication of the follow-up study
> by Meyer & Reter. (TIME took the study to demonstrate that there are
> "no differences in long-term adjustment between transsexuals who go
> under the scalpel and those who do not". The New York Times cited
> Meyer, "My personal feeling is that surgery is not a proper treatment
> for a psychiatric disorder and it's clear to me that these patients
> have severe psychological problems that don't go away following
> surgery" [both cited fromFleming et al., 1980, p. 451, but there
> without giving dates or pages]). In reality, the stopping of surgery
> had other reasons than the results of the follow-up study: namely,
> first, the resignation of the surgeon, second, that the Johns
> Hopkins University Clinic wanted to make pioneer work and did not
> follow up with once-established treatment methods to keep more
> research capacity free and, finally, the personal rivalry within
> the Gender Identity Committee had an important role
> (comp. Lothstein, 1980; personal writing from John Money to F.P.).
> Disregarding these circumstances, patients with transsexual symptoms
> were still diagnosed and given psychiatric care, and in as far as
> indicated, were transferred somewhere else for surgery.The idea of
> the follow-up study was to stop for a moment after the gender
> reassignment surgery became, in a certain way, routine, and see the
> long-term results ("To step back from 'normalization'," p. 1010).
> The description of the research group forces the conclusion that the
> samples described by Money & Ehrhardt (1970), Money (1971) and Jones
> (1972) are contained in the sample of Meyer & Reter without being so
> noted.
>
Also in Pfellin and Junge their general review of all the follow-up
study results (which are also all critically evaluated) which is at
http://209.143.139.183/ijtbooks/pfaefflin/6002-6.asp#Treatment
starts:
> "The follow-up studies and reviews conclude that gender reassigning
> treatments are effective. Positive, resp., desired results overweigh
> continuously and pregnantly the negative or non-desired effects. The
> results with males are, on average somewhat more favorable , than
> those with females".
>
and then goes on to give details.
You can also find an earlier, and equally critical review of Meyer &
Retter by Fleming M., Steinman C., Bocknek G. (1998)
"Methodological Problems in Assessing Sex-Reassignment Surgery:
A Reply to Meyer and Reter." republished in IJT 2,2, at
http://www.symposion.com/ijt/ijtc0401.htm
Hope this information is of some help.
regards,
--
Toni Roome
Senior Lecturer in Statistics/OR,
Dept. of Maths. and Stats.
University of Huddersfield
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