It was almost noon on a Thursday in mid-May, and Chris Brown found himself putting work aside to mull over a letter he was writing to the legislators in his home state of Ohio. Brown wasn’t alone; some 237 other Ohio residents were also taking to their laptops to fire off written testimony expressing their opposition to — and outrage about — a proposed bill that would ban gender-related medical treatment for minors in the state. The legislation is among about 650 anti-trans, anti-gay bills that have been circulating in mostly Republican-controlled statehouses throughout the country.
“I am writing to you today as a native Ohioan, an Air Force veteran who served seven years of active duty at Wright-Patterson Medical Center, and an MD,” Brown’s letter to the state representatives began.
“HB68 does not ‘save adolescents,’” Brown wrote, referencing the legislation and its stated intent, “but rather it endangers their lives. The bill’s reasoning is based not on medical science — all mainstream physicians, including the AMA, AAP, and Endocrine Society, support the standard, safe, effective stepwise approach to gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary youth.” Such care can include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and — very rarely — surgery. Instead, Brown argued, the bill was “propagated . . . by a misguided subset of Christian fundamentalists.”
Brown’s letter went on to say that “being trans is not a delusion, nor is it a psychological malady” and that recent studies have shown that trans women’s brains are “statistically significantly different” from those of people who identify as male from birth, known as cisgender.
What the letter didn’t say is that 46-year-old Brown is a top-performing hedge fund manager whose firm, Aristides Capital, has had a 15 percent annualized return since its launch in 2008, earning it Barclayhedge’s classification in 2022 as the top long-biased equity hedge fund of its age (or older) based on risk-adjusted performance. The performance is all the more stunning because Aristides has maintained a value orientation during a time when the strategy has been largely out of favor.
More to the point, following three years of treatments, the twice-married father of four has come out as trans/nonbinary.
You can read my profile of Chris here:
Michelle Celarier 