Robert Eads

Robert Eads (1945 –1999) was an American trans man, whose life and death was the subject of the award-winning documentary Southern Comfort (2001). Eads transitioned later in life and as such it was deemed inadvisable to seek surgical sex assignment to male genitalia. Eads was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1996, but as an example of the social stigma faced by gender variant individuals, more than a dozen doctors refused to medically treat him on the grounds that taking him on as a patient might harm their practice. When he was finally accepted for treatment in 1997 the cancer had "already metastasized to other parts of the body, rendering any further treatments futile."