GLR September-October 2024

feminate males were deficient in vital tes ticular secretions, or else their testes were producing defective ones. What we now term the “sex hormones” or sex steroids were first being extracted and identified in the 1920s and ’30s. But calling them “sex hormones” remains an enduring misnomer. Almost as soon as they were discovered, physiologists found that both “male” and “female” hormones are produced across the sexes and are broadly important to health, not just sexual traits. Li tracks how Benjamin, upon returning to the U.S. in the fall of 1921, began promoting the Steinach operation as well as the use of these glandular extracts for “rejuvenation” in men and women. Evincing an entrepreneurial spirit, he and two col leagues formed the Hormone Research Corporation to isolate a male hormone that could be exploited for clinical use. But their lab was beaten to the punch by researchers at the University of Chicago in 1929. Benjamin’s venture into hormone production had collapsed by 1931. It wasn’t until 1935 that three European drug companies (Organon, Ciba, and Schering) simultaneously isolated and synthesized crystalline “testosterone.” The discov ery led to a Nobel Prize in 1939. Benjamin adapted the Steinach procedure to women by di recting X-ray radiation to the ovaries, which would presumably lead to sterility. One patient who underwent this procedure, au thor Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton, believed it boosted her vitality and cured her of her “mental sterility.” Li notes that Ben jamin was surprised that the women flocking to his office were not housewives seeking a magical fountain of youth, but instead business owners and professional women. I have to wonder whether many of these women were lesbians, willing to trade fertility and family for the promise of professional achievement. Atherton remained a lifelong friend and promoter of Ben jamin’s hormonal treatments (which would have functioned like postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy today). Li mines Benjamin’s correspondence with Atherton and others for fasci nating details on his scientific theories, clinical practice, and political views. He established a second practice in San Fran cisco in 1933, where he also cared for sex workers at two broth els. His medical practice declined during World War II, but he was soon able to recover, running offices in both New York City and San Francisco. He also managed to attend medical confer ences in Europe, meeting leaders in sexology with whom he maintained lively correspondences. In this way, through the ca reer of Benjamin, Li provides us with a wonderful survey of

20th-century sexology. Benjamin visited Magnus Hirschfeld at his Institute for Sex ual Science in Berlin. He treated patients who’d been referred to him by Alfred Kin sey. His meeting with Freud in 1928 did not go so well. Li notes that after Benjamin confessed to his impotence with his wife, Freud suggested that Benjamin was a “la tent homosexual.” Li ruefully admits that

WONDROUS TRANSFORMATIONS A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolu ti on by Alison Li University of North Carolina Press 258 pages, $30.

we don’t have any firm proof that he was, only scant evidence that “he had a fetish for very thin girls with very long hair.” Li points out how Benjamin was very liberal-minded, which was in keeping with other researchers in the controversial field of sexology. His promotion of new and largely untested medical interventions was not without its critics. He engaged in a war of words and an unsuccessful lawsuit against Morris Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association . Fish bein’s Medical Follies (1925) had criticized Benjamin’s meth ods along with other dubious medical practices and devices of the time. Other physicians in the AMA tended to lump Benjamin in with “quacks, near-quacks, and faddists.” Yet, by all the epis tolary evidence, he was a warm, beloved physician who cared for his patients with Old World charm and thoroughness. He had already had a long, successful career as a gerontol ogist and endocrinologist by the time Christine Jorgensen brought him into transgender care in the 1950s. Her global fame drew hundreds of letters of inquiring about transsexual medical treatment; she was able to redirect these to Benjamin. He was the perfect person at the right time. He had certainly been in troduced to homosexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals in Berlin through his friendship with Magnus Hirschfeld. Li doc uments how Benjamin had made his first recommendation for cross-sex hormone therapy in 1949—to a patient referred by Kinsey. Benjamin was uniquely predisposed to understand the plight of transgender people as grounded in biology rather than psychopathology, which was the dominant psychoanalytic model of the time. Thanks to Jorgensen’s referrals and his growing reputation, Benjamin was able to become a leader in the clinical care of transgender people in the 1950s and ’60s. Jorgensen became the medical model for the standard, healthy “transsexual,” and Ben jamin became the nexus for other sympathetic clinicians and sex ologists. This experience was distilled into his best-known publication, The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966). He simulta neously spearheaded the medicalization and the legitimization of transgender health care. Other medical historians, notably Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed: A History of Trans sexuality in the United States (2002), have documented Ben jamin’s pioneering work in the incredibly productive last third of his life. However, Li provides the much anticipated full appraisal of his many contributions to gerontology, sexology, and en docrinology. Her access to German archival source documents was indispensable to this project. Her meticulous scholarship does not hamper her lively storytelling. While I can have imag ined a more politically or theoretically censorious take on Ben jamin, it was a relief not to hear any of that shrillness. Ultimately, Alison Li’s biography is as affectionate as Christine Jorgensen’s dedication, representing many years of being engrossed in the life of Harry Benjamin.

TheG & LR

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