GLR September-October 2024

ESSAY The Birth of Transgender Science V ERNON R OSARIO

“T O DEAR HARRY, Such a grand time we had in San Francisco. Fondly, Chris.” Christine Jorgensen’s auto graphed glossy photograph reveals her enduring friendship with Dr. Harry Benjamin. Jorgensen, of course, was the Danish-American former GI who had sought medical treatment in Denmark to achieve hormonal “sex trans formation” treatment. After her widely covered return to the U.S. in 1953, she sought out Benjamin for continued medical care in New York. Thanks to the global publicity Jorgensen drew to transsexualism and her association with Benjamin, they fostered the humane medical care of transgender people. The research foundation that Benjamin founded in 1964 sponsored international symposia on “gender dysphoria.” In 1979 the group was named in his honor as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. In 2007 it was re named the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (to reduce the association with mental illness). However, this development in his career was just the coda to a long and fascinating life (he lived to age 101!). Earlier, he had promoted various experimental, miraculous, and possibly quack treatments for everything from tuberculosis to aging. His involvement with transgender care has been documented within the history of en docrinology or transgender studies by schol ars such as Joanne Meyerowitz, Chandak Sengoopta, and Nelly Oudshoorn. However, historians of many disciplines have been ea gerly awaiting a more complete biography of this pioneering physician. Allison Li has finally produced this volume. Harry Benjamin (1885–1986) was born in Berlin. His fa ther’s family were Jews from a small agrarian town in Prussian Brandenburg (now on the border with Poland). His mother was from a middle-class Lutheran family, originally from West phalia. His father became a prosperous banker, affording Harry a humanistic, classical education in private schools. However, Harry had a rough time fitting in: he was viewed as Jewish by Christian peers and as a Gentile by wealthy Jewish families. Li suggests that this crisis of identity sensitized Benjamin to the distress of marginalized people. His cultured family instilled in him a lifelong appreciation for the arts, especially opera. His sis ter Edith was a soprano and went on to have a professional ca reer in the U.S. Harry studied medicine in Berlin, Rostock, and Tübingen, interrupted by six months of compulsory military service in1908. Germany was a leader in medicine at the time, and it was common for students to study at multiple universities Vernon Rosario is a historian of medicine and a UCLA child psychiatrist practicing in the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

to gain the best training. His first trip to America was in 1913 as an assistant to Friedrich Franz Friedmann, a flashy doctor who was ped dling his “turtle serum.” It was supposedly extracted from turtles and was touted as a miraculous cure for tu berculosis. (The antibiotic streptomycin was not dis covered as an effective cure until the 1940s.) Desperate and wealthy Americans pur sued the rare turtle treatment. Investors threw money at Friedmann. Benjamin was supposed to gather data to

Harry Benjamin, ca. 1966.

demonstrate the efficacy of the “turtle serum.” He only fully re alized it was a scam when Friedmann ran off to Germany with the money, leaving him stranded in the U.S. Nevertheless, Ben jamin became interested in the emerging field of endocrinology

as various glandular extracts began to be hy pothesized and then isolated as part of the complex system of hormonal regulation of the body. He struggled to make ends meet in the U.S. as a young physician with limited English skills. In November of 1913, his fa ther died back in Berlin. He was finally able

Harry Benjamin spear headed the medicaliza ti on and the legi ti miza ti onof transgender health care.

to afford an ocean liner ticket back to Europe in July of 1914— just as the Great War was breaking out. He became stranded in England but eventually managed to make his way back across the Atlantic to Philadelphia. In 1915, he earned his New York state medical license. Benjamin’s next endocrinological fascination was with the “Steinach operation.” On his return to Europe in 1921, Ben jamin met the venerable Viennese physician Eugen Steinach, who had invented and widely promoted this operation to pro mote “rejuvenation” in men. It consisted in tying off the ducts carrying sperm from the testes to the urethra. The rationale was that this created back pressure on the testes (the “puberty gland”) to produce their “internal secretion”—thus renewing male potency and lengthening life and vitality. It had a certain hydraulic logic, although it would eventually be proven inef fective. Nevertheless, Benjamin believed in it fervently enough that he underwent the procedure himself, as did Sigmund Freud. Other comparable treatments of the time included testicular ex tracts and testicular implants from monkeys. Similar approaches were also used in the treatment of “sex ual inversion” or homosexuality, based on the rationale that ef

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