The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [103]
The first order of business for the new Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association was the development of a treatment protocol, or “Standards of Care,” for transsexual people, one that would both protect them from unscrupulous practitioners and also continue to exert some measure of medical control over the process of sex reassignment. “HBIGDA recognized the rise of private practitioners and tried to guide their professional behavior,” writes Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed. “Under its original Standards of Care, private endocrinologists and surgeons could not offer treatment on demand. Psychologists and psychiatrists … were to recommend medical treatment, and they were to have seen their clients for several months before making such recommendations. MTFs were to live as women and FTMs were to live as men for at least a year before they could undergo surgery. If they adhered to these guidelines, private practitioners could protect their professional standing and distinguish themselves from ‘chop shop’ doctors like John Brown.”
The Benjamin Standards of Care were put into place by researchers associated with the Erickson Foundation, and carried over many of the practices (for example, the “real-life” test and the role of psychotherapists as gatekeepers) that had first evolved in the university clinics. “The first version of the Standards of Care was very similar to the guidelines that came out of the EEF-based research of Benjamin and the Hopkins clinic,” says Aaron Devor, who is working on a biography of Erickson. “I have to infer that Erickson was comfortable with the model as it was developing,” says Devor. “In the context in which the model was created and the opposing view—that anyone contemplating taking these steps was out of their mind—this is understandable.” Nonetheless, the Standards of Care and the medical model of trans-sexuality that they represented stood in direct contrast to the activist approach born in the seventies. Many transsexual people did not want to be “medicalized” and they did not want to be “pathologized.” They wanted access to surgery and/or hormones on demand without having to jump through a series of Standards of Care hoops. Their most radical claim, and the one that was to create a nearly unbridgeable chasm between proponents of the Benjamin model and an increasingly vocal and active transgender movement in the early nineties, was that American society, not transgender or transsexual people, had a “gender problem.”
CONVERSATION WITH TOM KENNARD
Kennard and his partner, Marianne, have been together for four years. Kennard was fifty-one at the time of this interview and spent many years in the lesbian community prior to his transition. Marianne is forty-three; she identifies as bisexual and has had relationships with both men and women. Soon after Kennard completed transition, Marianne discovered that she was losing her sight. On the morning I visited them in their home in San Francisco, Marianne was out with her mentor in a local support group, learning how to navigate the city alone. After her return, we went out for breakfast. I was impressed by the great tenderness Kennard displayed toward Marianne and by the way that they were working together to ease Marianne’s transition into a challenging new world.
Q: Tom, could you speak about your experience crossing over from the lesbian-feminist community to living as a transman?
It was really hard. I was big feminist, a white lesbian feminist, and I was kind of a separatist. I didn’t like men, I didn’t like the patriarchy, and I never wanted to grow up to be a straight white guy. I fought it for a long time.
Growing up, I didn’t identify as anything, really. When you are little … I knew I was kind of different but I don’t really know how I knew that. I knew that there was a difference between boys and girls, because in school everything is segregated by gender, so I would have to get in the girls