The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [102]
The EEF financed a steady stream of lectures at medical schools, at schools of social work and law, and to police officers in training.
“They sought out people in positions of power and influence over the lives of transsexuals and tried to educate them while they were being trained,” says Devor. “The EEF made movies and then sent them around to medical schools. In collaboration with John Money, they produced definitions of transsexuality and transvestism, which they sent out to 105 dictionaries and encyclopaedias, so that when you looked for a definition [of those terms] you found the ones they had created. It was almost as though they asked themselves what they could do to make people aware of this issue on every front.” The advice columnists Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers even referred people to the EEF in their columns. When the imminent closure of the EEF was announced at the Fifth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, held in Norfolk, Virginia, in February 1977, the assembled group of researchers, under the direction of Paul Walker, M.D., discussed the creation of a new organization to carry on its work. The proposed organization, named for Harry Benjamin, was formally approved at the Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, held in San Diego, California, in February 1979.
In March 2003, I spoke to Jude Patton, a transman who was the first “consumer advocate” on the new Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) Board of Trustees. Patton, a psychotherapist, was a graduate student when he became involved with HBIGDA through his doctor/patient relationship with Donald Laub, M.D., a surgeon at Stanford University’s Gender Clinic and one of the first members of the board. “When the first HBIGDA conference was going to be held, I asked Don Laub, who was my surgeon, if I could attend, and I came as his guest. At that time I had also met Zelda Suplee [of the EEF] and Paul Walker through some of the early support groups that I had started,” says Patton. At the meeting in San Diego in 1979, “there was a band of outspoken heterosexual TVs, consumer voices, who were very strident, saying, ‘Why don’t you include us?’ and other things of that nature,” says Patton. “So when they actually formed HBIGDA, Doctor Laub suggested that they include a consumer advocate, and he nominated me. The vote was fifteen to fifteen.” Patton says that the votes against were not against him personally—as “nobody really knew me”—but against the idea of having a consumer voice on the board at all. “I remember that someone stood up and said, I will not serve on any committee that has a consumer on it,’” he recalls.
Laub cast the deciding vote in favor of Patton’s membership, however, and Patton was elected. Patton served on the HBIGDA board from 1979 to 1981, and found the experience somewhat overwhelming. “I was very intimidated,” he says. “I was still a grad student, and these people were big names in the field.” Still, he says, “they were polite and they listened to me.” But after his two-year term expired, the board did not appoint another consumer advocate until 1997, when Patton was once again asked to serve, together with Sheila Kirk, M.D., an MTF surgeon. “It was my understanding that the position [of consumer advocate] would always be there,” he says. “But it didn’t happen again until 1997, when Sheila Kirk and I were contacted by the board. They knew our work and trusted us. I give Richard Green, who was president at the time, credit. He said, ‘It’s time.’” Patton believes that he was recruited to serve on the board again because of “the personal relationships I had