The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [70]
Star doggedly pursued her goal for the next four years, as her dancing career flourished and her romantic relationships continued to be sabotaged by the discrepancy between her gender and her anatomy. Eventually, she found her way to Harry Benjamin, who referred her to a “California surgeon” (most likely Elmer Belt) who could perform the surgery for about four thousand dollars. Estimating the costs of the surgery, hospital fees, travel expenses, and associated expenses at approximately six thousand dollars, Star began saving. Then, early in 1962, a friend referred her to a doctor in Chicago, who “examined me and told me immediately that he knew the man who could do the operation. Within a few minutes he had placed a call to a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and the appointment was made.”
After this doctor and four of his colleagues examined her, the unnamed Memphis surgeon informed her that “the operation is extremely complex and, for that reason, dangerous…. If the operation is a success, it is possible that you might never dance again. It is also possible that you might never walk. Also, it is extremely doubtful that you will ever be able to have a sex life.” As if that weren’t enough, the surgeon added that Star might not survive the operation. Star’s reply was simple. “Anything is better than living the misery I have lived my whole life. I realize it is a gamble, but the pot’s too big not to take a crack at it.”
The surgery was performed the next day. The initial operation took five hours. Nine days later, one of Star’s doctors accidentally punctured her urinary tract during an examination, necessitating another two-hour operation to repair the damage. Forty-five days later she left the hospital, and entered her future as a woman. “Since the change and my adjustment to it, my life has flowered,” she writes on the final pages of her autobiography. “Each day I discover something about my new self. Each day I gain even more confidence in myself, more interest in myself, and above all, more self-resect. Life has taken on a new look. It has become something to be enjoyed and lived, rather than a burden to make the best of.”
Although Star was eventually able to locate a surgeon in the United States willing to perform sex-reassignment surgery despite the fear of mayhem laws, it is clear from her account of their meeting that her doctor was performing the surgery for the first time, and was far from confident about his ability to provide her with a functional vagina. Meanwhile, back in Baltimore, urologists and plastic surgeons at Johns Hopkins were perfecting their reconstructive techniques as they attempted to fulfill the evolving mandate to provide intersexual children and adults with “normal” genitals. John Money began to use his growing scientific reputation and the institutional power that it conferred to persuade his colleagues at Johns Hopkins that they ought to challenge the mayhem laws that prevented surgeons from “matching the body to the mind,” as Harry Benjamin once wrote, and begin performing sex-reassignment surgery on adults.
By the early sixties, Money had met Benjamin and, as Money said at the latter’s memorial in 1987, “he became my living link with early twentieth-century psychoendocrinology. He was my exemplar of the continuity of scholarly history—and of the dependence of my own scholarship on that of my professional forebears.” Money shared yet another tie with Benjamin: like other pivotal