The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [51]
Like Jorgensen, this patient (referred to as “Barry” in Benjamin’s case studies) had from his earliest childhood felt that he was in fact a girl, and after reading about “operative procedures which feminized men” had “pressed his parents to find a surgeon who performed such operations.” Unlike Jorgensen, however, Barry became emotionally disturbed when he was unable to fulfill this desire and had been institutionalized by the courts when his frustration erupted into violence.
Barry was taken by his parents to see Alfred Kinsey in 1948, when the famous sex researcher was taking case histories at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Kinsey, whose previous research had not prepared him for Barry, sent the boy to Benjamin, then seeing patients in the same hotel.
“Benjamin’s first inclination was to send the boy to a psychiatrist, but he soon discovered that this was not a good idea,” says Christine Wheeler. When asked whether or not castration and peotomy were indicated for the “very effeminate” boy, “the psychiatrists disagreed among themselves,” Benjamin says. “Some were for it, others were against it.” He started the boy on a course of hormones, which “had a calming effect,” but was unable to find a urologist in the United States willing to perform surgery. He advised the boy (and his mother) to travel to Germany for the operation.
When the Jorgensen story broke, in 1953, Harry Benjamin was sixty-seven years old and looking forward to retirement. He had enjoyed a long and a productive career, and as his geriatric patients died, he stopped acquiring new ones. He recruited Virginia Allen, a doctor’s wife whom he had met at a meeting a few years earlier, to help him slowly phase out his practice. “He invited me for drinks at the Sulgrave Hotel and told me he felt he had only a few years left and wanted to spend them quietly in a retirement practice,” Allen recalled at the memorial that was held following Benjamin’s death, in 1986. However, things didn’t work out quite the way that Benjamin had planned.
At the memorial, Virginia Allen recalled the day that she stumbled upon a cache of patient folders that she found particularly puzzling. “While arranging files one day, I asked, ‘What are these few records off by themselves? They seem so strange—the patients have male and female names.’ H.B. sighed, ‘They’re transsexuals and transvestites, some referred by Kinsey. Not much is known about them.’ ‘Why don’t we do something with them, since we have so much time,’ I asked. He nodded and said, ‘Yes, that may be very good. They are sad people and deserve help but they make everyone, even other doctors, so nervous and uncomfortable. Bring the records in here and we’ll go over them.’ And so it began.”
Benjamin began seeing patients referred by Kinsey and others, including a husband and wife who had been married to each other twice—the second time, in reversed-gender roles. His remaining geriatric patients were not happy about the new crop of patients, and his long-awaited retirement had nearly materialized when Christine Jor-gensen suddenly burst onto the scene, thoroughly upsetting his plans. In December 1952, Benjamin wrote to one of his transsexual patients, an artist named Doris, with whom he had carried on a long and animated correspondence: “The papers here are full of the Jorgensen case, the boy who went to Denmark to be operated on and is now coming back as a girl. I’ll probably see the party when she returns home.”
At the Benjamin memorial, in 1986, Christine Jorgensen described the circumstances under which the two pioneers had met. Returning home from Europe in 1953, she said, she “encountered a mountain of mail and I do mean a mountain—thousands and thousands of letters, many of which were from people who had problems that were similar to mine—in that mountain of mail was a letter from Harry Benjamin, whom I had never heard of before and he asked me—told me