The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [136]
Unbeknownst to anybody, I remembered the article about Hopkins, and I wrote to them and set up an appointment. I have a love/hate relationship with Hopkins. The love is that I do recognize that they did this. They were at the forefront in America. Harry Benjamin started it, and they picked it up academically. That’s how things work in medical culture. And they performed a service. Now, granted, it was completely twisted the way they went about it at the time. But they performed a service. Before you had to go where? To Casablanca? Thailand today is a mecca, compared to what Casablanca was like. So I appreciate that. John Money was part of it. He did the work when being a sexologist was not an easy thing to do. I can appreciate too how difficult it was for the surgeons to want to do this. The book on the history of trans-sexuality [How Sex Changed] makes that point. The terms didn’t really exist. There’s this one little group of Jewish doctors in Weimar Germany that were beginning to do this, for the first time ever in the history of civilization. And it’s not easy to go from that, through Nazism and the Holocaust, and then come to America and keep going with it. There’s so much shame in this country; we’re so puritanical. So the people who did it were pioneers, and I’m grateful to them.
But anyway I went down there [to Baltimore]. I left school early and I went down there and I thought, “Let’s do this.” I got an intake form and stuff like that and I filled it out, but I got cold feet. I didn’t feel comfortable. I didn’t feel welcome. I felt dirty. I felt like they were making me feel like a pervert.
Q: How old were you?
I was twenty. I called ahead and made an appointment. I suppose my records are still there somewhere. But I just freaked out. I couldn’t do it. I did not feel welcome. It’s amazing how today, when I go to my electrolysis, my hair stylist, my surgeon, these people bend over backward to make you feel like a human being. And in those days, they did not. No matter how much they felt they were trying, it was so damn paternalistic. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, but they made you feel like a real freak. I couldn’t do it. So I went back to searching the stacks at school libraries, but all I could find were textbooks with the relevant pages ripped out or aversion therapy, putting electrodes on your penis. And I was thinking, “No way!”
But there was no place else to go. I wasn’t going to a shrink. Nobody was out there saying, “We welcome gender-variant patients.”
Q: You never heard of Harry Benjamin?’
No, there was only Creedmore. To me, psychiatry was Creedmore. I didn’t know any different. I wasn’t in medical school at the time. Even when I went to medical school, I found nothing. Nobody talked about sex at all. I took a one-week externship in urology. DES was never mentioned. Of course, I didn’t know about the DES at that point. I didn’t know that till the end of my medical career. I first came across the book To Do No Harm in the eighties. It was only when I saw that, that I thought, “Oh, could this be?” And I asked my mother, and she just came right out and said, “Yes.” I was born in New York in 1952, there were certainly thousands of other Jewish kids exposed. I’m not the only one.
Q: You and your mother must have a very complex relationship as a result of the DES exposure.
She still blames herself. I told her that I’ve gotten over that. I don’t blame her anymore. She’s responsible for it, yes, but I can understand how it happened in the social context of the time. I don’t blame her.
Seven
FEAR OF A PINK PLANET
Developments in the last decade have highlighted