60°10.070′, 024°54.822′ Under container, not wheelchair accessible
The Lapinlahti Hospital was in operation in 1841–2008. Many LGBTIQ people have had to use the services of the psychiatric hospital. One of them was XYZ, a patient assumed to be a woman, who was treated in the hospital during 1879–80. Assistant physician Johan Backman defined as the patient’s key characteristic a “contrary sexual feeling”, directly quoting the diagnosis die konträre Sexualempfindung of Berliner psychiatrist Karl Westphal. According to Backman, XYZ’s problems were however related to a mental illness and not the person’s LGBTIQ identity.
Up until the 1970s a transgender identity was regarded as a mental health disorder. Veronica Pimenoff started as a psychiatrist in the North Karelian psychiatric precinct in 1979, and worked as a doctor at Lapinlahti in 1989–90. “I knew more than my patients did, but in Helsinki it was the other way around. In Helsinki transgender cases were handled by doctors who had no training or interest in the area“, she recalls. Gender reassignment surgeries weren’t available in Finland until the 1990s. Before that people went to London, Casablanca and Tallinn for surgery.