The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [71]
Aaron Devor, professor of sociology at the University of Victoria and author of the book FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society, has been researching Reed Erickson’s life for several years. He became interested in Erickson as he worked on various books and research projects, and “the name of the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) came up from time to time,” he says. “I’d hear from different people that the founder of EEF might be transsexual—sometimes I’d hear MTF, sometimes FTM.” Characterizing these remarks as “gossip, rumor, enigmatic comments,” Devor says that he didn’t learn the truth until he was on sabbatical in California, in 1996, residing in a community for scholars doing LGBT research. “One of the fellows, who was also staying there at the time, Jim Kepner, lived down the hall, and Jim put out a little personal newsletter and in one of the newsletters he mentioned Reed Erickson of the EEF and he said that he was an FTM transsexual. At that time, I was aware that the EEF was important, though at that time I didn’t know how important.
“I don’t know all that much about Erickson’s childhood,” says Devor, aside from the fact that his mother was ethnically Jewish, but religiously a Christian Scientist, and that his father, Robert, owned a lead-smelting business. “In his early adulthood, Erickson lived as a lesbian, quite closeted as most were at that time. He was musical and played in his high school band. He—at that time she—had some secretarial training before studying engineering.” By the time Robert B. Erickson died, in 1962, willing the lead-smelting business to his daughters, Rita Alma had graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University (the first woman to do so), worked as an engineer in Philadelphia, and founded a successful stadium bleacher—manufacturing company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The death of Robert B. Erickson made his children wealthy, Devor says, even more so when the company was sold to Arrow Electronics for millions of dollars a few years later. Reed Erickson eventually amassed a personal fortune estimated at over $40 million, and donated enormous sums of money to various causes over the years, through the Erickson Educational Foundation, which he established in 1964.
In 1963, Erickson began seeing Harry Benjamin, taking hormones under Benjamin’s guidance, having already begun his life as a man. Benjamin was one of the first recipients of a grant from the EEF. This grant was to have far-reaching consequences, says Devor. “The EEF funded the Harry Benjamin Foundation from 1964 till 1968 for approximately $50,000 over those years. One of the activities that the money funded was bringing together a group of people working in the area to meet at Harry’s offices in New York once a month—people like Richard Green and John Money. During the mid-sixties, there weren’t a lot of people working on transsexuality; it was still a very hush-hush kind of subject. So bringing together this group of researchers produced a kind of synergy, and this synergy led to the founding of the Hopkins gender program. The thinking was, ‘if we can do this kind of surgery for intersexual people, why not for transsexuals?’”
Reed Erickson himself did not experience