The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [55]
Benjamin concludes that the responsibility of the physician is to heal, not to judge the morals or behavior of his patients. “A doctor could hardly be held responsible, and should not hold himself responsible, for what a patient will do with his regained health. That is none of his business. Such an attitude could lead to endless absurdities as the above examples show.” This attitude was quite rare among physicians encountering transsexual and transgendered patients throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, and remains rare today. Nearly every transgendered person I spoke with had experienced some painful interaction with a health care provider, most often a doctor, whose distaste for gender-variant people was hardly disguised. In Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, the author and activist Leslie Feinberg describes a series of such encounters, one of which culminated in a physician shoving his hands down her pants and shouting, “You’re a freak!” Whatever Harry Benjamin’s flaws, he was at least cognizant of the fact that his Hippocratic oath applied to all his patients, not just the normatively gendered ones.
Benjamin died in August 1986, at the age of 101. His friend Christine Jorgensen, for whom he felt immense respect and gratitude, outlived him by only three years, dying of bladder cancer at the age of sixty-two. In the introduction to The Transsexual Phenomenon, Benjamin pays tribute to Jorgensen in words that echo the praise of his own friends and colleagues at his memorial service.
Without her courage and determination, undoubtedly springing from a force deep inside her, transsexualism might still be largely unknown—certainly unknown by this term—and might still be considered to be something barely on the fringe of medical science. To the detriment if not to the desperation of the respective patients, the medical profession would most likely still be ignorant of the subject and still be ignoring its manifestations. Even at present, any attempts to treat these patients with some permissiveness in the direction of their wishes—that is to say, “change of sex”—is often met with raised medical eyebrows, and sometimes even with arrogant rejection and/or condemnation. And so, without Christine Jorgensen and the unsought publicity of her “conversion,” this book could hardly have been conceived.
In a 1953 letter to Benjamin, written soon after they met, Jorgensen explained why she had overcome her initial resistance and was beginning to speak to the media and accept offers to perform in nightclubs— in other words, to embrace her notoriety, rather than running from it. “As you know, I’ve been avoiding publicity, but this seems the wrong approach. Now I shall seek it so that ‘Christine’ will become such an average thing in the public mind that when the next ‘Christine’ comes along the sensationalism will be decreased. You know what I’m trying to do is not as great as the big medical discoverers in the past, but it will be a contribution. With God’s help and those who believe as you do, I know this will be a step into the future understanding of the human race. I wonder where there are more who join us in this struggle.”
CONVERSATION WITH ALESHIA BREVARD
Aleshia Brevard is an actress and writer. A graceful woman in her sixties, in 2001, Brevard published a memoir, The Woman I Was Not Born to Be, in which she describes her childhood in Tennessee, her pre-transition years in