The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [52]
Describing Benjamin as a “godsend,” Jorgensen recalled that “I could recommend Harry to all these thousands of people who contacted me … because I didn’t know where to recommend people to go, there were no gender identity clinics, there was no place for them to go. So suddenly the deluge fell onto poor Harry’s shoulders.” And a deluge it was. When he met Christine Jorgensen, and began monitoring her hormones and later sending her to see Los Angeles urologist Elmer Belt for the final stage of her surgery, Benjamin had treated fewer than a dozen transsexual patients. By the time he finally closed his practice, twenty-five years later, in 1978, he had seen more than 1,500 patients. It sometimes seems that every transsexual person in America in the sixties and seventies somehow found their way to Benjamin’s office, even before the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, in 1966.
In The Transsexual Phenomenon, Benjamin seeks to dissipate some of the scientific and public ignorance shrouding the subject of gender variance. Early in the book he refers to Hirschfeld’s research on transvestism at the Institute for Sexual Science, but he quickly distinguishes transvestism and transsexuality as clinical entities.
The transsexual (TS) male or female is deeply unhappy as a member of the sex (or gender) to which he or she was assigned by the anatomical structure of the body, particularly the genitals. To avoid misunderstanding: this has nothing to do with hermaphroditism. The transsexual is physically normal (though occasionally underdeveloped). These persons can somewhat appease their unhappiness by dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex, that is to say, by cross-dressing, and they are, therefore, transvestites too. But while “dressing” would satisfy the true transvestite (who is content with his morphological sex), it is only incidental and not more than a partial or a temporary help to the transsexual. True transsexuals feel that they belong to the other sex, not only to appear as such. For them, their sex organs, the primary (testes) as well as the secondary (penis and others), are disgusting deformities that must be changed by the surgeon’s knife. This attitude appears to be the chief differential diagnostic point between the two syndromes (sets of symptoms)—that is, those of transvestism and transsexualism.
Benjamin created a chart, the Sex Orientation Scale, based on the Kinsey rating scale for homosexuality. In the Kinsey Scale, a completely heterosexual person is ranked zero, and a fully homosexual person six. A person who is equally attracted by either sex would be a three. In the Benjamin scale of transvestism/transsexuality, there are six “types,” which together make up three “groups” of progressively gender-variant individuals. Group one includes the three types of transvestite (“pseudo,” “fetishistic,” and “true”), who cross-dress to varying degrees and for varying reasons. Only the final type, the “true” transvestite, expresses an interest in estrogen therapy or surgery, and this interest tends to be of an experimental nature.
Group two includes only one “type,” the “nonsurgical transsexual,” a person who “wavers between TV and TS,” cross-dressing “as often as possible with insufficient relief of his gender discomfort.” This non-surgical transsexual will be likely to request hormones for “comfort and emotional balance,” Benjamin writes, but while he finds the idea of sex-reassignment surgery attractive, he will not pursue it with the intensity of the latter two types (group three), “true transsexuals” of moderate or high intensity. These individuals tend to feel “trapped in the wrong body,” according to Benjamin, and will hope for and work for sex reassignment surgery. The major difference between these final two types is that the “true transsexual, high intensity” doesn’t just dislike his genitals; he despises them and may attempt to mutilate his sex organs or commit suicide if unable