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Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution
Harry Benjamin (1885–1986), a German-born endocrinologist, was a pivotal figure in the development of transgender medicine. He was physician to transgender pioneers such as Christine Jorgensen, the 1950s "Ex-GI" turned "Blonde Beauty" media sensation, and in turn, she and other collaborators helped to shape Benjamin's influential 1966 book, The Transsexual Phenomenon. Alison Li's much-needed biography of Benjamin chronicles his passion for hormones and his lifelong interest in sexology.
Drawing from extensive research in archival documents, secondary sources, and interviews, Li tells the story of Benjamin's early ventures in gerontology and his later work with over a thousand transgender patients. Benjamin's contributions to treatment, education, research, and networking helped to create the institutional foundations of transgender medicine. Moreover, they set the stage for a radical reconsideration of gender identity, challenging us to reflect upon what it is to be male or female and to envision moving beyond these long-held categories.
Drawing from extensive research in archival documents, secondary sources, and interviews, Li tells the story of Benjamin's early ventures in gerontology and his later work with over a thousand transgender patients. Benjamin's contributions to treatment, education, research, and networking helped to create the institutional foundations of transgender medicine. Moreover, they set the stage for a radical reconsideration of gender identity, challenging us to reflect upon what it is to be male or female and to envision moving beyond these long-held categories.
272 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 14, 2023
About the author
Alison Li
5 books1 followerAlison Li is an historian of science and medicine who writes about medical research, hormones, and the culture in which they were shaped. She takes great pleasure in bringing the wonder of science to a non-specialist audience, especially those who feel that science is not for them. She lives in Toronto.
Instagram: @alisonli341
[Photo: Diana Renelli]
Instagram: @alisonli341
[Photo: Diana Renelli]
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 15, 2023
Isn't this a great cover? This little history is a biography of Harry Benjamin, one of the first doctors to prescribe hormonal replacement therapy to transgender people. It charts the life of Dr. Benjamin, from his youth in Berlin (what a wonderful soul he was!) to his early years in New York attempting to cure tuberculosis, to his middle-aged celebrity involved with the "rejuvenation cure", to finally his later life, where he helped some of the first transgender people access hormonal treatments.
I found myself really connecting to Mr. Benjamin through the pages and I grew to also wish to have known the man myself. Several sections were an absolute treat: I loved his early years and the passages around the first world war, as well as his celebrity connection to Gertrude Atherton and the his first interactions with gender-diverse patients. The book lagged a bit in the middle; I believe this probably from a lack of interesting source material, and at times it felt a bit like a who's who of Harry Benjamin's circle.
In a related way, the book only begins to talk about transgender topics in depth around 2/3 into it. I'm worried the advertising for this book will leave some people frustrated—This is not a book on transgender history but a biography of a man associated with its history. I loved it because I love history and biographies, but I don't know if everyone will.
The minutiae of transgender topics also inspire a lot of passion (both good and bad) and I found the author's tone wonderfully balanced for the subject matter. I have a very fraught relationship with more modern conceptions of gender identity (in an appropriate metaphor, I lived a few years as a Benjamin Scale 4, I'm now at a 2) and nowadays I find a lot of solace in historical concepts of gender and sexuality. The world is not always kind to me about it, but this book felt like a comfortable little blanket to wrap around myself in the meantime. Rather than try to make excuses for ideas or terminology, the book relates the history as it was while reminding the reader to be sympathetic through anecdotes of the literal life-saving care he could give his patients. I love that. The love from his transgender clients is palpable in their stories, and I am so so so glad we have this biography of this man now.
Anyways, I love Harry Benjamin and I loved this book. Pick it up (or better yet, go bug your library to get it)!
Thank you NetGalley for this ARC!
I found myself really connecting to Mr. Benjamin through the pages and I grew to also wish to have known the man myself. Several sections were an absolute treat: I loved his early years and the passages around the first world war, as well as his celebrity connection to Gertrude Atherton and the his first interactions with gender-diverse patients. The book lagged a bit in the middle; I believe this probably from a lack of interesting source material, and at times it felt a bit like a who's who of Harry Benjamin's circle.
In a related way, the book only begins to talk about transgender topics in depth around 2/3 into it. I'm worried the advertising for this book will leave some people frustrated—This is not a book on transgender history but a biography of a man associated with its history. I loved it because I love history and biographies, but I don't know if everyone will.
The minutiae of transgender topics also inspire a lot of passion (both good and bad) and I found the author's tone wonderfully balanced for the subject matter. I have a very fraught relationship with more modern conceptions of gender identity (in an appropriate metaphor, I lived a few years as a Benjamin Scale 4, I'm now at a 2) and nowadays I find a lot of solace in historical concepts of gender and sexuality. The world is not always kind to me about it, but this book felt like a comfortable little blanket to wrap around myself in the meantime. Rather than try to make excuses for ideas or terminology, the book relates the history as it was while reminding the reader to be sympathetic through anecdotes of the literal life-saving care he could give his patients. I love that. The love from his transgender clients is palpable in their stories, and I am so so so glad we have this biography of this man now.
Anyways, I love Harry Benjamin and I loved this book. Pick it up (or better yet, go bug your library to get it)!
Thank you NetGalley for this ARC!
September 2, 2023
I’ve read quite a lot of books on trans history, but I’ve never really read anything about the cis doctors who pioneered trans healthcare (other than Dr. Hirschfeld), which made this an interesting new perspective for me. The topic is fascinating & the book is definitely well researched and well written. My only minor complaint is that for me, even as someone who reads a lot of academic work and non-fiction, the book took me ages to get through (which is why I’m posting this review only 3 days before the deadline for my ARC, oops) as focus of the book is on Dr. Benjamin as a man, rather than on his work in trans healthcare. Still a great biography that I would recommend, but I did find myself skimming parts.
March 16, 2024
Li looks at the history of the German born physician, Harry Benjamin who helped revolutionize medicine related to hormones & the medical care for transsexuals in America in the 1950s & 1960s. It traces his relationship with the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld & the relationships he developed with his transgender clients placing everything in a larger historical context.
Beginning with the activism of the lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1867, the movement for homosexual rights took root in Germany, thanks to progressive forces that were fostered by German idealism and romanticism. It was in this context the first homosexual magazine, Der Eigen (The Self-owning), was founded in 1896. The following year, Hirschfeld cofounded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the worlds first homosexual rights organization which was guided by the motto “Justice through science.” 67-68
A turning point in the formation of Benjamin's views came with the 1906 publication the sexual question by the Swiss neurologist and psychiatrist August Forel. The book treated questions such as premarital sex, homosexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease in an unusually forthright manner, and Benjamin found it professionally objective common sense. Forel emphasize that sexuality was beautiful, and not shameful. 69-70
Berlin was then the home to a great flourishing of gay and gender diverse culture, so much so that homosexuality was known elsewhere as “the German disease.” There was, however, still a great deal of secrecy and hypocrisy surrounding the issue of homosexuality. Homosexual activity was well known and secretly tolerated among the Prussian officer class, but in 1906 this code of silence was breach when a radical newspaper broke Astoria accusing a close friend of the Kaiser, Prince of Eulenberg, of a homosexual liaison with another favoured courtier, Count von Moltke, leading to a series of scandalous and highly publicized civil trials and courts-martial in which Hirchfeld played a prominent role as an expert witness.
Hirschfeld testified in the hope of promoting his theory that homosexuality was a natural variation rather than a disease or a sin. Unfortunately, the trial led to an ugly backlash against homosexuals and against Hirchfeld. 70
Individuals who cross-dressed had been categorized as homosexuals. But in Hirshfield's tours of the Berlin bars and clubs he had come to know many people who challenged these conceptions and forced him to rethink this way of classifying people. His growing perspective that cross-dressers were not necessarily homosexual as a result of years of sometimes angry exchanges with cross-dressers. In 1910, Hirschfeld disrupted the traditional categorization by introducing the term “transvestite” to describe men who dressed as women or women who dressed as men, arguing that how a person experienced or expressed themselves as men or women was a phenomenon that was distinct from whether they were sexually attracted to the same or other sex. These ideas were set out in his book Die Transvestiten (The transvestites). 75
After the war, in the newly liberal atmosphere of Weimar Germany, Hirschfeld gained support for his efforts from the social Democratic government. In 1919, he achieved a long time dream of establishing the Institute for Sexual Science, which was the first of its kind in the world. 77
The library in archive came to hold in an unprecedented trove on information comprising thousands of questionnaires…
The social atmosphere of the Institute was joyful, transgressive, and at times startling, even to those who consider themselves avant-garde…
But more than this, the Institute brought together the scientific study of sex with advocacy for the rights of sexual minorities…78
Just before he left for home, Benjamin took part in a stimulating and significant conference. Hirschfeld believe that there were two requirements for homosexual emancipation: the first was the recognition of homosexuality as a biological variation, and the second was the integration of the homosexual movement with other sex reform movements, such as those for birth control, abortion rights, and marriage reform. For this reason, he organized the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the Basis of Sexual Science, which was held 15-20 September 1921 in the heart of Berlin at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus, the newly opened home of the Berlin medical Association and German surgical Society. 79-80
At the time, monism was a rapidly growing movement in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Although the work of German biologist Ernst Haeckel would have been the chief influence on German monism, it is likely that Benjamin's understanding of honest ideas derived at least and apart from the writings of Auguste Forel. The underlying principle of scientific monism was the unity of the human and natural world. In contrast with, for example, Descartes’s dualistic view of mind and body, or with religious world views, monism health that everything could ultimately be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. As a neurologist, Forel was committed to explaining consciousness and the workings of the human mind in terms of physiochemical reactions. This was a view that Benjamin would remain committed to throughout his life.
Monism was also associated with broader ethical and social views, including a commitment to world peace, International cooperation, and the formation of a healthy society through eugenics. Well some members of the movement would later promote race hygiene and views that would lead to fascism, other monist such as Magnus Hirschfeld preach sexual reform and tolerance. 129
By November, Isherwood moved there, taking up residence next-door to the Institute for sexual science, in a room rented from Magnus Hirschfeld’s sister.150
Schering would launch the first orally active estrogen product Progynon in 1928. Progynon was initially made from ovarian extracts, then placentas, and later the urine of women late and pregnancy. 152
Adolf Butenandt would successfully isolate a crystalline androsterone from 25,000 litres of male urine in 1931, and Ernst Laqueur and his team would isolate a crystalline hormone from the testicle in 1935 giving it the name testosterone. 153
There is evidence that, by the late 1920s, individuals-including a number of Americans-were receiving medical interventions to change sex at very centres in Europe. These interventions included both hormone therapy and surgery. Florence Winter (pseudonym) visited Berlin and consulted with Hirschfeld about the possibility of female-to-male surgery. When Hirschfeld agreed to arrange for the procedure, he warned her that afterward, she would not be either man or woman. [13. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed. Meyerowitz suggests he probably meant that it would be impossible for surgeons to give her a functioning penis or make it possible for her to reproduce, 29] She ultimately decided against surgery opting as a man for many years, and then return to Chicago to live as a lesbian. Another American, Carla Van Crist (pseudonym), grew up in Berlin and San Francisco as a boy and then worked as a female impersonator. She recalled visiting Harry Benjamin in New York, who advised that she consult Hirschfeld. (Benjamin himself did not remember this meeting). At the Institute, she had surgery in 1929 or 1930 and worked as a receptionist until 1933 [14. Meyerowtiz, How Sex Changed, 30]
Hirschfeld’s housekeeper Dora Richter (known as Dorchen) would become the first person known to undergo complete genital transformation. Richter, assigned male at birth, had cross dressed in childhood and had been repeatedly arrested for dressing as a woman until a judge wrote to Hirschfeld for advice. Hirschfeld invited Richter to the Institute and offered surgical treatment, which Richter welcomed. In 1922, Richter underwent castration. For many years after, she would work as a domestic and a demonstration patient at the Institute. In 1931, she had additional procedures to remove her penis and have a vagina surgically constructed under the care of Hirschfeld’s associates, gynaecologist Ludwig Levy-Lenz and surgeon Erwin Gohrbrandt. 154
In March 1930, Hirschfeld referred Ernest F. Elmhurst, a homosexual activist, to Benjamin. Elmhurst was eager to set up a homosexual for organization in New York, a “movement of inverts, as he described it. Years before, in Germany, Elmhurst (then known as Ernst Klopfleisch) had made an unsuccessful attempt to turn the Kurhotel in Altenau in the Harz mountains into a summer gathering place for “inverts,” and now having spent seven years in New York, he felt he had sufficiently studied the psychology of Americans to believe that there might be an opportunity to do the same in the New World. He suggested they might set up a large club building similar to a YMCA or an athletic club, on the water or in the mountains, where inverts could claim a place in the world. Elmhurst noted that the only opportunity to reach inverts then was that the very successful costume balls. 156
Benjamin may have been unable to appreciate, or was perhaps unaware of, was that they already existed a lively demimonde that included semi public organizations such as Paresis Hall, a gay bar and centre of homosexual life in New York, and the Cercle Hermaphroditos, housed in the hall, which since 1895 had served as the first known informal organization the United States concerned with social justice for transgender people. This group, however, did not seem to have any lasting influence or inspire any successors. [20. Stryker, Transgender History, 57] 157
Endocrinology had emerged as the quintessential modernist enterprise, marked by a faith and science to engineer everything from the physical shape of the human body to the moral fabric of an entire society. Along with psychoanalysis, endocrinology offered the possibility of unearthing the urges and motivations that lay beneath conscious understanding and of charting the pieces of an increasingly fragment self. 159
In Shanghai, he met twenty-four-year-old Li Shiu Tong, a medical student who became his disciple and companion. 162
On 6 May 1933, a mob of students back by the Nazi party broke into the Institute for sexual science and plundered its library. Four days later, portions of the library holdings were thrown into a bonfire, along with a bust of Hirschfeld. In Paris, Hirschfeld watch the book burning in a news reel at the cinema. Months later, the remaining books, furniture, and materials were sold at auction, and all the staff and even Hirschfeld’s sisters turned out of the house. The government stripped away Hirschfeld’s German citizenship as well as the royalties for Titus Pearls, leaving him with a few resources. Hirchfeld dreamed of continuing his research elsewhere but was never able to find the support. He continued to correspond with Benjamin about a return to the United States, but despite Benjamin's considerable efforts and reports of Hirschfeld’s improving ability to lecture in English, plans for a lecture tour fell through.
Hirschfeld died in exile Nice in 1935 at the age of sixty-seven. His papers and personal effects and the burden of continuing his life's work were left to his too close disciples and companions, Karl Giese and Li Shiu Tong. Giese fled to Czechoslovakia and lived in difficult circumstances, unable to access Hirschfeld’s estate. He died by suicide in 1938. Li continued his studies in Zürich and at Harvard and then return to Hong Kong in 1960. In 1974, he immigrated to Canada and died in Vancouver in 1993. From the notes he left behind, it seems he hoped to write about Hirschfeld;s teachings but never did so. [38. Marhoefer, Racism and the Making of Gay Rights.] 163
Through the early decades of the twentieth-century, eugenic ideas were popular among both conservative and progressive reformers. Negative eugenics sought to improve society through birth control and sterilization to prevent reproduction of people considered to possess undesirable traits. Positive eugenics sought to encourage reproduction among individuals with desirable characteristics. 174-175
During the 1930s and 1940s, the mass media presented many sensationalized stories of sex change that brought the possibility of medical intervention to the attention of individuals who had a sense of cross-gender identity and were looking for solutions to their predicament. 175-176
In 1941, newspapers reported that Barbara Richards had spontaneously begun to transform from a man to a woman, but reading beyond the headlines, one could learn that she had been receiving female hormone injections to ‘stabilize here condition.’ 176
Kinsey, as zoologist had begun his career studying the biology of gall wasps, had turned his systematic eye to the study of human sexuality and in 1947 established the Institute for sexual research at Indiana University. He had gained celebrity status (and in conservative quarters, infamy) for his groundbreaking study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, in 1948, which would be followed in 1953 Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. 190
One individual he met left Kinsey puzzled. Twenty-three-year-old Val Berry (pseudonym) was unlike anyone he had encountered before. Kenzie was familiar with transvestite she wish to cross-dress, but he had never encountered individuals who actually considered themselves to be the so-called other sex. Kenzie asked Benjamin-with whom he had developed our friendship after meeting him several years before through the introduction of the New York obstetrician and gynaecology researcher Robert L Dickinson-to see the patient and give his opinion. 191
In turn, Barry wrote to Benjamin in May 1949. Reading her case, he replied to her letters saying that he suspected she was a woman who "accidentally possesses the body of a man.” 192
Most psychiatrists of the day would have assumed that the best approach in a case like this to use psychiatric measures to change the mind to match the body. Benjamin tentatively proposed something few had considered before American medicine: that the body be changed to match the mind. 192-193
Benjamin objected strongly, but Brown, like Wisconsin's attorney general, issued the legal opinion that genital modification would constitute “mayhem.” The mayhem statute stand from a prohibition left from English common law, which I've been intended to prevent the maiming of men who might serve as soldiers. 193
Over the next decades, only a small number of operations were done in the United States, most by Benjamin colleague Elmer Belt, Los Angeles surgeon, and all of those done in strictest secrecy. Val Berry ultimately travelled to Sweden to receive surgery in 1953. [40] 194
By 1942, a synthetic version of estrogen became available in the form of diethylstilbestrol (DES). Several versions of androgens were also available since the isolation of testosterone in 1935. 195
Benjamin also began to connect with a number of transgender individuals through Karl Bowman and Louise Lawrence, a pioneering transgender community organizer. Lawrence had been assigned male at birth but had been living full-time as a woman for many years. Over time, she developed a large correspondence with others across the United States identified as “transvestite.” She found others by placing personal ad advertisements and magazines and reaching out to individuals who have been arrested for crotch stressing in public… [44.] 196
He helped them connect with Elmer Belt, one of the few surgeons in the United States then doing genital-reassignment surgery, who operated on Carol in 1956. 197
Louise Lawrence, elegant and dignified, became an important collaborator an influence on Benjamin’s thinking. Historian Joanne Meyerowitz describes her as a “one-woman social hub.” Through the course of many years, she taught Benjamin much about her experience and served as a valued sounding board for his ideas. They introduce each other to their contacts, and Lawrence introduced Benjamin to several of his earliest patients. Lawrence, and artist, had live the first half of her life as a man, marrying twice and having a daughter while secretly cross-dressing. When her second marriage ended divorce, she decided to attempt to live full-time as a woman as she had always dreamed. She moved to another city and successfully sold her paintings while managing a small apartment house and offering services in remodelling and decorating. While she considered herself a champion of transvestites, she moved freely amongst several different communities, attending gay drag parties, working with the homophile movement, and associating with the gay female impersonators who performed at the nightclub Finocchio’s. She had experimented with homosexuality while living as a man and continue to socialize with lesbians and gay men. In the 1950s, her efforts to bridge the social groups was unusual. [47. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 185-86] 198
In 1954, when vaginoplasty (the surgical construction of a vagina) became legal in the United States, he along with Dr. Joseph Angelo oversaw Jorgensen’s next surgery. 209
One key development was the emergence of the notion of “gender” and “gender identity” in the mid-1950s and early 1960s in the work of John Money and his associates Joan Hampson and John Hampson Johns Hopkins University, as well as psychiatrists Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson at the University of California at Los Angeles. Gender, the live experience of masculinity or femininity, was distinct from biological sex, which was constituted by chromosomes, hormones and anatomy. Gender referred to an individual subjective sense of being masculine or feminine, what previous theorist had tried to describe as a “psychological sex” or what Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had tried to suggest when he talked about a feminine soul in a male body. Gender identity, or one's internal sense of being a man or a woman, was differentiated from sexual orientation-whether one had an erotic attraction to members of the same sex or other sex. Gender identity-a subjective experience of gender-was also distinguished from “gender role,” the social behaviours associated with men or women. 210
With the help of Jorgensen’s creative and focused attention and the input of his other patients, Benjamin began to formulate the transsexual idea. Articulating the concept of transsexuality involved a complex and often uneasy collaboration between transgender people and the medical professionals who worked with them. 211-212
Although Herschel had used the term “seelischer Transsexualismus” (psychological transsexualism) as early as 1923 to refer to what he called a “true transvestite,” English readers generally date the
Beginning with the activism of the lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1867, the movement for homosexual rights took root in Germany, thanks to progressive forces that were fostered by German idealism and romanticism. It was in this context the first homosexual magazine, Der Eigen (The Self-owning), was founded in 1896. The following year, Hirschfeld cofounded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the worlds first homosexual rights organization which was guided by the motto “Justice through science.” 67-68
A turning point in the formation of Benjamin's views came with the 1906 publication the sexual question by the Swiss neurologist and psychiatrist August Forel. The book treated questions such as premarital sex, homosexuality, prostitution, and venereal disease in an unusually forthright manner, and Benjamin found it professionally objective common sense. Forel emphasize that sexuality was beautiful, and not shameful. 69-70
Berlin was then the home to a great flourishing of gay and gender diverse culture, so much so that homosexuality was known elsewhere as “the German disease.” There was, however, still a great deal of secrecy and hypocrisy surrounding the issue of homosexuality. Homosexual activity was well known and secretly tolerated among the Prussian officer class, but in 1906 this code of silence was breach when a radical newspaper broke Astoria accusing a close friend of the Kaiser, Prince of Eulenberg, of a homosexual liaison with another favoured courtier, Count von Moltke, leading to a series of scandalous and highly publicized civil trials and courts-martial in which Hirchfeld played a prominent role as an expert witness.
Hirschfeld testified in the hope of promoting his theory that homosexuality was a natural variation rather than a disease or a sin. Unfortunately, the trial led to an ugly backlash against homosexuals and against Hirchfeld. 70
Individuals who cross-dressed had been categorized as homosexuals. But in Hirshfield's tours of the Berlin bars and clubs he had come to know many people who challenged these conceptions and forced him to rethink this way of classifying people. His growing perspective that cross-dressers were not necessarily homosexual as a result of years of sometimes angry exchanges with cross-dressers. In 1910, Hirschfeld disrupted the traditional categorization by introducing the term “transvestite” to describe men who dressed as women or women who dressed as men, arguing that how a person experienced or expressed themselves as men or women was a phenomenon that was distinct from whether they were sexually attracted to the same or other sex. These ideas were set out in his book Die Transvestiten (The transvestites). 75
After the war, in the newly liberal atmosphere of Weimar Germany, Hirschfeld gained support for his efforts from the social Democratic government. In 1919, he achieved a long time dream of establishing the Institute for Sexual Science, which was the first of its kind in the world. 77
The library in archive came to hold in an unprecedented trove on information comprising thousands of questionnaires…
The social atmosphere of the Institute was joyful, transgressive, and at times startling, even to those who consider themselves avant-garde…
But more than this, the Institute brought together the scientific study of sex with advocacy for the rights of sexual minorities…78
Just before he left for home, Benjamin took part in a stimulating and significant conference. Hirschfeld believe that there were two requirements for homosexual emancipation: the first was the recognition of homosexuality as a biological variation, and the second was the integration of the homosexual movement with other sex reform movements, such as those for birth control, abortion rights, and marriage reform. For this reason, he organized the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the Basis of Sexual Science, which was held 15-20 September 1921 in the heart of Berlin at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus, the newly opened home of the Berlin medical Association and German surgical Society. 79-80
At the time, monism was a rapidly growing movement in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Although the work of German biologist Ernst Haeckel would have been the chief influence on German monism, it is likely that Benjamin's understanding of honest ideas derived at least and apart from the writings of Auguste Forel. The underlying principle of scientific monism was the unity of the human and natural world. In contrast with, for example, Descartes’s dualistic view of mind and body, or with religious world views, monism health that everything could ultimately be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. As a neurologist, Forel was committed to explaining consciousness and the workings of the human mind in terms of physiochemical reactions. This was a view that Benjamin would remain committed to throughout his life.
Monism was also associated with broader ethical and social views, including a commitment to world peace, International cooperation, and the formation of a healthy society through eugenics. Well some members of the movement would later promote race hygiene and views that would lead to fascism, other monist such as Magnus Hirschfeld preach sexual reform and tolerance. 129
By November, Isherwood moved there, taking up residence next-door to the Institute for sexual science, in a room rented from Magnus Hirschfeld’s sister.150
Schering would launch the first orally active estrogen product Progynon in 1928. Progynon was initially made from ovarian extracts, then placentas, and later the urine of women late and pregnancy. 152
Adolf Butenandt would successfully isolate a crystalline androsterone from 25,000 litres of male urine in 1931, and Ernst Laqueur and his team would isolate a crystalline hormone from the testicle in 1935 giving it the name testosterone. 153
There is evidence that, by the late 1920s, individuals-including a number of Americans-were receiving medical interventions to change sex at very centres in Europe. These interventions included both hormone therapy and surgery. Florence Winter (pseudonym) visited Berlin and consulted with Hirschfeld about the possibility of female-to-male surgery. When Hirschfeld agreed to arrange for the procedure, he warned her that afterward, she would not be either man or woman. [13. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed. Meyerowitz suggests he probably meant that it would be impossible for surgeons to give her a functioning penis or make it possible for her to reproduce, 29] She ultimately decided against surgery opting as a man for many years, and then return to Chicago to live as a lesbian. Another American, Carla Van Crist (pseudonym), grew up in Berlin and San Francisco as a boy and then worked as a female impersonator. She recalled visiting Harry Benjamin in New York, who advised that she consult Hirschfeld. (Benjamin himself did not remember this meeting). At the Institute, she had surgery in 1929 or 1930 and worked as a receptionist until 1933 [14. Meyerowtiz, How Sex Changed, 30]
Hirschfeld’s housekeeper Dora Richter (known as Dorchen) would become the first person known to undergo complete genital transformation. Richter, assigned male at birth, had cross dressed in childhood and had been repeatedly arrested for dressing as a woman until a judge wrote to Hirschfeld for advice. Hirschfeld invited Richter to the Institute and offered surgical treatment, which Richter welcomed. In 1922, Richter underwent castration. For many years after, she would work as a domestic and a demonstration patient at the Institute. In 1931, she had additional procedures to remove her penis and have a vagina surgically constructed under the care of Hirschfeld’s associates, gynaecologist Ludwig Levy-Lenz and surgeon Erwin Gohrbrandt. 154
In March 1930, Hirschfeld referred Ernest F. Elmhurst, a homosexual activist, to Benjamin. Elmhurst was eager to set up a homosexual for organization in New York, a “movement of inverts, as he described it. Years before, in Germany, Elmhurst (then known as Ernst Klopfleisch) had made an unsuccessful attempt to turn the Kurhotel in Altenau in the Harz mountains into a summer gathering place for “inverts,” and now having spent seven years in New York, he felt he had sufficiently studied the psychology of Americans to believe that there might be an opportunity to do the same in the New World. He suggested they might set up a large club building similar to a YMCA or an athletic club, on the water or in the mountains, where inverts could claim a place in the world. Elmhurst noted that the only opportunity to reach inverts then was that the very successful costume balls. 156
Benjamin may have been unable to appreciate, or was perhaps unaware of, was that they already existed a lively demimonde that included semi public organizations such as Paresis Hall, a gay bar and centre of homosexual life in New York, and the Cercle Hermaphroditos, housed in the hall, which since 1895 had served as the first known informal organization the United States concerned with social justice for transgender people. This group, however, did not seem to have any lasting influence or inspire any successors. [20. Stryker, Transgender History, 57] 157
Endocrinology had emerged as the quintessential modernist enterprise, marked by a faith and science to engineer everything from the physical shape of the human body to the moral fabric of an entire society. Along with psychoanalysis, endocrinology offered the possibility of unearthing the urges and motivations that lay beneath conscious understanding and of charting the pieces of an increasingly fragment self. 159
In Shanghai, he met twenty-four-year-old Li Shiu Tong, a medical student who became his disciple and companion. 162
On 6 May 1933, a mob of students back by the Nazi party broke into the Institute for sexual science and plundered its library. Four days later, portions of the library holdings were thrown into a bonfire, along with a bust of Hirschfeld. In Paris, Hirschfeld watch the book burning in a news reel at the cinema. Months later, the remaining books, furniture, and materials were sold at auction, and all the staff and even Hirschfeld’s sisters turned out of the house. The government stripped away Hirschfeld’s German citizenship as well as the royalties for Titus Pearls, leaving him with a few resources. Hirchfeld dreamed of continuing his research elsewhere but was never able to find the support. He continued to correspond with Benjamin about a return to the United States, but despite Benjamin's considerable efforts and reports of Hirschfeld’s improving ability to lecture in English, plans for a lecture tour fell through.
Hirschfeld died in exile Nice in 1935 at the age of sixty-seven. His papers and personal effects and the burden of continuing his life's work were left to his too close disciples and companions, Karl Giese and Li Shiu Tong. Giese fled to Czechoslovakia and lived in difficult circumstances, unable to access Hirschfeld’s estate. He died by suicide in 1938. Li continued his studies in Zürich and at Harvard and then return to Hong Kong in 1960. In 1974, he immigrated to Canada and died in Vancouver in 1993. From the notes he left behind, it seems he hoped to write about Hirschfeld;s teachings but never did so. [38. Marhoefer, Racism and the Making of Gay Rights.] 163
Through the early decades of the twentieth-century, eugenic ideas were popular among both conservative and progressive reformers. Negative eugenics sought to improve society through birth control and sterilization to prevent reproduction of people considered to possess undesirable traits. Positive eugenics sought to encourage reproduction among individuals with desirable characteristics. 174-175
During the 1930s and 1940s, the mass media presented many sensationalized stories of sex change that brought the possibility of medical intervention to the attention of individuals who had a sense of cross-gender identity and were looking for solutions to their predicament. 175-176
In 1941, newspapers reported that Barbara Richards had spontaneously begun to transform from a man to a woman, but reading beyond the headlines, one could learn that she had been receiving female hormone injections to ‘stabilize here condition.’ 176
Kinsey, as zoologist had begun his career studying the biology of gall wasps, had turned his systematic eye to the study of human sexuality and in 1947 established the Institute for sexual research at Indiana University. He had gained celebrity status (and in conservative quarters, infamy) for his groundbreaking study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, in 1948, which would be followed in 1953 Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. 190
One individual he met left Kinsey puzzled. Twenty-three-year-old Val Berry (pseudonym) was unlike anyone he had encountered before. Kenzie was familiar with transvestite she wish to cross-dress, but he had never encountered individuals who actually considered themselves to be the so-called other sex. Kenzie asked Benjamin-with whom he had developed our friendship after meeting him several years before through the introduction of the New York obstetrician and gynaecology researcher Robert L Dickinson-to see the patient and give his opinion. 191
In turn, Barry wrote to Benjamin in May 1949. Reading her case, he replied to her letters saying that he suspected she was a woman who "accidentally possesses the body of a man.” 192
Most psychiatrists of the day would have assumed that the best approach in a case like this to use psychiatric measures to change the mind to match the body. Benjamin tentatively proposed something few had considered before American medicine: that the body be changed to match the mind. 192-193
Benjamin objected strongly, but Brown, like Wisconsin's attorney general, issued the legal opinion that genital modification would constitute “mayhem.” The mayhem statute stand from a prohibition left from English common law, which I've been intended to prevent the maiming of men who might serve as soldiers. 193
Over the next decades, only a small number of operations were done in the United States, most by Benjamin colleague Elmer Belt, Los Angeles surgeon, and all of those done in strictest secrecy. Val Berry ultimately travelled to Sweden to receive surgery in 1953. [40] 194
By 1942, a synthetic version of estrogen became available in the form of diethylstilbestrol (DES). Several versions of androgens were also available since the isolation of testosterone in 1935. 195
Benjamin also began to connect with a number of transgender individuals through Karl Bowman and Louise Lawrence, a pioneering transgender community organizer. Lawrence had been assigned male at birth but had been living full-time as a woman for many years. Over time, she developed a large correspondence with others across the United States identified as “transvestite.” She found others by placing personal ad advertisements and magazines and reaching out to individuals who have been arrested for crotch stressing in public… [44.] 196
He helped them connect with Elmer Belt, one of the few surgeons in the United States then doing genital-reassignment surgery, who operated on Carol in 1956. 197
Louise Lawrence, elegant and dignified, became an important collaborator an influence on Benjamin’s thinking. Historian Joanne Meyerowitz describes her as a “one-woman social hub.” Through the course of many years, she taught Benjamin much about her experience and served as a valued sounding board for his ideas. They introduce each other to their contacts, and Lawrence introduced Benjamin to several of his earliest patients. Lawrence, and artist, had live the first half of her life as a man, marrying twice and having a daughter while secretly cross-dressing. When her second marriage ended divorce, she decided to attempt to live full-time as a woman as she had always dreamed. She moved to another city and successfully sold her paintings while managing a small apartment house and offering services in remodelling and decorating. While she considered herself a champion of transvestites, she moved freely amongst several different communities, attending gay drag parties, working with the homophile movement, and associating with the gay female impersonators who performed at the nightclub Finocchio’s. She had experimented with homosexuality while living as a man and continue to socialize with lesbians and gay men. In the 1950s, her efforts to bridge the social groups was unusual. [47. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 185-86] 198
In 1954, when vaginoplasty (the surgical construction of a vagina) became legal in the United States, he along with Dr. Joseph Angelo oversaw Jorgensen’s next surgery. 209
One key development was the emergence of the notion of “gender” and “gender identity” in the mid-1950s and early 1960s in the work of John Money and his associates Joan Hampson and John Hampson Johns Hopkins University, as well as psychiatrists Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson at the University of California at Los Angeles. Gender, the live experience of masculinity or femininity, was distinct from biological sex, which was constituted by chromosomes, hormones and anatomy. Gender referred to an individual subjective sense of being masculine or feminine, what previous theorist had tried to describe as a “psychological sex” or what Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had tried to suggest when he talked about a feminine soul in a male body. Gender identity, or one's internal sense of being a man or a woman, was differentiated from sexual orientation-whether one had an erotic attraction to members of the same sex or other sex. Gender identity-a subjective experience of gender-was also distinguished from “gender role,” the social behaviours associated with men or women. 210
With the help of Jorgensen’s creative and focused attention and the input of his other patients, Benjamin began to formulate the transsexual idea. Articulating the concept of transsexuality involved a complex and often uneasy collaboration between transgender people and the medical professionals who worked with them. 211-212
Although Herschel had used the term “seelischer Transsexualismus” (psychological transsexualism) as early as 1923 to refer to what he called a “true transvestite,” English readers generally date the
September 1, 2023
*4.25
As someone unfamiliar with Harry Benjamin, this book was an informative one. Wondrous Transformations follows his life, role in hormonal research, and contributions to what became the foundation of transgender medicine. I found the section where Li discusses Benjamin's work with Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science very interesting! I consider this a must read for anyone interested in learning more about LGBTQ+ history.
As someone unfamiliar with Harry Benjamin, this book was an informative one. Wondrous Transformations follows his life, role in hormonal research, and contributions to what became the foundation of transgender medicine. I found the section where Li discusses Benjamin's work with Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science very interesting! I consider this a must read for anyone interested in learning more about LGBTQ+ history.
November 6, 2023
I was thrilled to read this. There remain far fewer transgender historical monographs in the field, compared to the number published in other sub-disciplines. This biography of Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist whose research and promotion of the effect of hormones on the human body, gender, and perceptions of health, fills a gap in our understanding of the formation of gender and transgender in the 20th century.
Li’s monograph is well-researched, pulling from a variety of sources to build a fleshy portrait of the man, but not only him; as with all good histories, Li produces a landscape of the era for the reader to understand the context of the individual. Benjamin, however, was a man beyond his time, thinking of gender in ways more similar to our own period than his — but that is the point: Benjamin is one of the forerunners of the way we think about gender today, as a spectrum. It is the contrast between him and his contemporaries which helps the reader visualize this landscape.
The chapters are chronological (rather than strictly thematic), offering the reader a clear trajectory of how concepts of gender and transgender — and here, especially — how the use of hormones became mainstream and effected changes in how medicine and healthcare as a whole.
I hesitate to write a full academic review as the digital review copy I had expired! Readers, this is a worthy book to read to grasp an often un-addressed aspect of transgender history!
Li’s monograph is well-researched, pulling from a variety of sources to build a fleshy portrait of the man, but not only him; as with all good histories, Li produces a landscape of the era for the reader to understand the context of the individual. Benjamin, however, was a man beyond his time, thinking of gender in ways more similar to our own period than his — but that is the point: Benjamin is one of the forerunners of the way we think about gender today, as a spectrum. It is the contrast between him and his contemporaries which helps the reader visualize this landscape.
The chapters are chronological (rather than strictly thematic), offering the reader a clear trajectory of how concepts of gender and transgender — and here, especially — how the use of hormones became mainstream and effected changes in how medicine and healthcare as a whole.
I hesitate to write a full academic review as the digital review copy I had expired! Readers, this is a worthy book to read to grasp an often un-addressed aspect of transgender history!
April 18, 2024
A solid biography that tells the story of a doctor who helped a lot of transgender patients at a time that few other physicians were willing to, and when psychotherapists were largely pushing to try to "fix" these patients to make them accept the gender they were assigned at birth, rather than to help them transition.
Overall, it was well written, and I learned some interesting things about the history of trans medicine. One thing that stood out to me was how much this was driven by transgender people seeking help wherever they could find it. So even though this is a biography of Walter Benjamin, the "transgender revolution" was led not by him, but by transgender people pressuring the medical system to help them.
Also, it was interesting to find out that the main transgender health association, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), was formerly called the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and was founded back in 1979. I've been reading WPATH's Standards of Care to understand more about what they recommend for hormone treatment—but I hadn't realized how old the organization was, or what its origin was.
There were two main issues with the book in my opinion:
First, the book spent more time on Benjamin's early work on hormones than I thought made sense, given that it's billed as a book about his work on transgender medicine. This material definitely needs to be there to make it a complete biography, but I didn't feel I needed to know so many details about it. In the Epilogue, the author explains that the project began with her focused only on Benjamin's early work on hormones—in line with the author's general background on the history of hormones. But when digging into his story, she realized that the most interesting thing about his career was his work with transgender patients. It felt to me like either she wasn't able to entirely let go of that earlier focus for the book, or her interest in the history of hormones shaped how she approached it. Either way, it was frustrating and I wish the balance of the book were more heavily on Benjamin's transgender work, and less on the early history of hormone research and treatment.
Second, the book didn't delve much directly into what Benjamin wrote in his most famous book, The Transsexual Phenomenon . I haven't read that book, and may never will, because I'm assuming it's fairly dated at this point. But I would be curious to read a synopsis of what held up over time or was even prescient, and what did not hold up. The author did talk about this in general, explaining that Benjamin was prescient in his steadfast belief that being transgender was rooted in biology (as opposed to psychological trauma, or some other such theory), and that he was compassionate both in finding how to treat these patients at all, but also in the way he interacted with them. At the same time, the author points out, he could be paternalistic and act as a gatekeeper to services, dissuading some people from undergoing treatments if he didn't think they would be "successful" at transitioning. I wanted to have more critical analysis of Benjamin's ideas, in light of the current situation.
Overall, it was well written, and I learned some interesting things about the history of trans medicine. One thing that stood out to me was how much this was driven by transgender people seeking help wherever they could find it. So even though this is a biography of Walter Benjamin, the "transgender revolution" was led not by him, but by transgender people pressuring the medical system to help them.
Also, it was interesting to find out that the main transgender health association, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), was formerly called the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and was founded back in 1979. I've been reading WPATH's Standards of Care to understand more about what they recommend for hormone treatment—but I hadn't realized how old the organization was, or what its origin was.
There were two main issues with the book in my opinion:
First, the book spent more time on Benjamin's early work on hormones than I thought made sense, given that it's billed as a book about his work on transgender medicine. This material definitely needs to be there to make it a complete biography, but I didn't feel I needed to know so many details about it. In the Epilogue, the author explains that the project began with her focused only on Benjamin's early work on hormones—in line with the author's general background on the history of hormones. But when digging into his story, she realized that the most interesting thing about his career was his work with transgender patients. It felt to me like either she wasn't able to entirely let go of that earlier focus for the book, or her interest in the history of hormones shaped how she approached it. Either way, it was frustrating and I wish the balance of the book were more heavily on Benjamin's transgender work, and less on the early history of hormone research and treatment.
Second, the book didn't delve much directly into what Benjamin wrote in his most famous book, The Transsexual Phenomenon . I haven't read that book, and may never will, because I'm assuming it's fairly dated at this point. But I would be curious to read a synopsis of what held up over time or was even prescient, and what did not hold up. The author did talk about this in general, explaining that Benjamin was prescient in his steadfast belief that being transgender was rooted in biology (as opposed to psychological trauma, or some other such theory), and that he was compassionate both in finding how to treat these patients at all, but also in the way he interacted with them. At the same time, the author points out, he could be paternalistic and act as a gatekeeper to services, dissuading some people from undergoing treatments if he didn't think they would be "successful" at transitioning. I wanted to have more critical analysis of Benjamin's ideas, in light of the current situation.
August 8, 2023
Alison Li writes a compassionate and immensely readable book about the incredible Dr. Harry Benjamin and his patients. She traces his life from Germany to his role in hormonal research and his work with transgender patients. In focusing on Benjamin's life and research for a good chunk of the book, Li connects the changing European landscape with the new medical beliefs ("rejuvenation" and the Hirschfield Institute for ex.).
By grounding the reader in the medical history of Dr. Benjamin and his colleagues, she gives us enough background so we're able to understand the difficulties that face Dr. Benjamin's patients. One of the maddening parts of the book is how Li shows that progress was constantly halted/detoured by "medical gatekeepers." This book would be excellent for medical students as well as anyone interested in the overlooked work of Dr. Benjamin.
As an aside, Li mentions Gertrude Atherton (famous patient of Dr. Benjamin) through the book and I hope she writes a biography of this woman she sounds like such a fascinating woman.
By grounding the reader in the medical history of Dr. Benjamin and his colleagues, she gives us enough background so we're able to understand the difficulties that face Dr. Benjamin's patients. One of the maddening parts of the book is how Li shows that progress was constantly halted/detoured by "medical gatekeepers." This book would be excellent for medical students as well as anyone interested in the overlooked work of Dr. Benjamin.
As an aside, Li mentions Gertrude Atherton (famous patient of Dr. Benjamin) through the book and I hope she writes a biography of this woman she sounds like such a fascinating woman.
September 10, 2024
Li's research in this creates a more complete picture of Benjamin than I've ever seen - as a PhD student entering the space of research on trans health (and soon attending the annual conference of the organization originating from Benjamin's work), I felt a deep sense of connection to and understanding of the complex intellectual tradition(s) that have led us here. I think that one of this piece's greatest strengths is how it shares the experiences of trans* folks who worked with and were supported by Benjamin as crucial primary sources.
May 4, 2024
Fantastic book! It dragged a couple of times but that was entirely due to the fact that it was a very informative biography. It could also be that there would be spurts of putting the book down for a while and then coming back to it and trying to remember exactly where I am in the story of it all. And also so many names too. I mean that is just the reality with a biography of Harry Benjamin and his interactions with so many people over his 100 years of life.
November 12, 2023
A remarkable biography, highly readable and thoughtfully researched. Alison Li's writing is intelligent, measured, compassionate - a pleasure to read.
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