• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1914 0

was possible. “He always held out hope that the biological key would be found,” she says, “but he also believed that we didn’t have the tools to understand it” at the time he was working. Benjamin was “a product of his age,” Wheeler says, and some of his views have been revised by later researchers and clinicians. His attitude about surgery is one of them. According to Benjamin, “you weren’t a true transsexual if you didn’t desire surgery,” Wheeler says, whereas Wheeler, who has been in practice for thirty-three years, has many clients who “move in and out of transition … according to what feels safe at the time.” She also sees about a dozen people who have lived in their birth sex their entire lives but who decided “in their sixties and seventies that they couldn’t go to their graves” without talking with someone about their lifelong gender dysphoria. “They’ve never cross-dressed, they’ve never taken hormones,” she says. Are they transsexuals? Not in Benjamin’s view, but a new generation of clinicians and activists might argue differently.

Wheeler, along with her colleague Leah Schaefer, is the guardian of Benjamin’s archives, the voluminous patient records, correspondence, and other products of a lifetime of writing and research on two continents. This archive will provide a rich trove of data for future historians and other scholars. Someday, a biography of Harry Benjamin—far more than the brief sketch of his work in this chapter—will illuminate the significance of his research not only for transgendered people seeking a solution to their personal difficulties, but toward a broader and more comprehensive scientific understanding of sex and gender in the twentieth century.

“Treating the gender dysphoric person was ultimately the sum total of all of Benjamin’s previous interests and knowledge. One might say his work in the field was an accident for which he was totally prepared,” Schaefer and Wheeler wrote in 1995. “The course and events of Benjamin’s professional life were destined to crown a career that would unlock the door to an area of study that would have the most profound implications for our understanding of human nature and would change the lives of countless people forevermore.” Transsexual people themselves often express a less adulatory, though still generally positive, view of Benjamin and his accomplishments. Susan Stryker calls him “a genial old paternalist, a really nice guy who cared about his clients and saw himself as doing what he could to help. Really going above and beyond the call of duty in trying to arrange surgery for people, really compassionate.” Still, Benjamin could also be “very sexist and elitist and condescending to people,” Stryker says. “He called [transwomen] his ‘girls’ and he would only work with, take under his wing, the ones he thought were really attractive.”

Nonetheless, like his predecessor, Hirschfeld, “Benjamin did a lot of good progressive political work,” Stryker says. His office was in San Francisco’s Union Square, and many of his patients lived and worked in the Tenderloin, the city’s notorious red-light district. She adds (though I have not been able to confirm this) that Benjamin also served as “clap doctor for some of the best whorehouses in town” and that he performed abortions for the city’s elite Pacific Heights crowd. “If you look at some of these early sexologists, the people who are involved in doing transsexual/transgender work also tend to be involved in abortion rights and in prostitution rights,” Stryker says. Benjamin and sexologist colleagues such as Kinsey were sexual pragmatists, Stryker says, whose attitudes can best be summarized as “people fuck, and they fuck in lots of ways—get over it. Some people dress in different ways—get over it.”

Like Hirschfeld, Benjamin refrained from judging his patients/ clients. He was aware that many dabbled in prostitution, for example, admitting in The Transsexual Phenomenon that “the unfortunate fact that a number of patients went into prostitutional activities right after their operations has turned some doctors against