This doctor was an early champion of transgender people, and even helped the SFPD understand them
Harry Benjamin wrote the first book on sexual reassignment
In the early 1970s, the celebrated travel writer and historian, Jan Morris, walked into a Park Avenue doctor’s office. Morris found Dr. Harry Benjamin at his desk. Benjamin had a warm bedside manner and urged her to “sit down — tell me all about yourself.” He looked to Morris “like a white gnome — white haired, white-jacketed, white-faced” and had a German accent recalling a caricature of a Hollywood psychiatrist. What Dr. Benjamin was about to say to Morris was revolutionary.
“You believe yourself to be a woman?” Benjamin asked. “Of course, I perfectly understand.” Jan Morris was born James Morris and was at the time of her appointment with Benjamin living as a man. She had come to the endocrinologist and sexologist because she had heard that Dr. Benjamin might have a controversial new way to help her.
At the time, treatments for trans people included psychotherapy, shock therapy, religious training, hypnosis, lobotomy and commitment to an asylum. Obviously, these methods offered no relief from the acute pain of living in the wrong body, and some resorted to suicide or self-castration. Sex reassignment surgery was illegal in the United States. The Journal of the American Medical Association read in 1978, “most gender clinics report that many applicants for surgery are actually sociopaths seeking notoriety, masochistic homosexuals, or borderline psychotics.” Americans believed that trans and gay people and drag queens were one in the same. Benjamin would be the first to explain the difference.
Benjamin had broken with the medical community and proposed a radical alternative to their treatments: what if rather than trying to change the minds of trans people, he helped them change their bodies?
Morris was stunned at what the doctor was suggesting. “Alter the body! Of course this is what I had hoped, prayed, and thrown three-penny bits into wishing wells for all my life; yet to hear it actually suggested by a man in a white coat in a medical office, seemed to me like a miracle … To match my sex to my gender at last, and make a whole of me!” Benjamin arranged for Morris to travel to Casablanca for sex reassignment surgery. By 1972, she was living fully as a woman.
With his trailblazing 1966 book, The Transexual Phenomenon, which was the first devoted to the subject, Benjamin became the “primary point of dissemination” of information on trans people. He was largely unconcerned with the anticipated backlash, writing, “Intersexes exist, in body as well as in mind. I have seen too many transsexual patients to let their picture and their suffering be obscured by uninformed albeit honest opposition. Furthermore, I felt that after fifty years in the practice of medicine, and in the evening of life, I need not be too concerned with a disapproval that touches much more on morals than on science.”
Word spread of “the Benjamin method” and the doctor was flooded with calls and letters. One prospective patient wrote, “Please forgive my extreme feelings of urgency, for I can truly not stand this feeling of being an imposter any longer.” Another stated, “I find it increasingly difficult to go on living with myself. I am ready now to go to whatever extremes … I am tired and I am not willing to fight against my real desire any longer.”
Benjamin did not begin his career in sexual research. But in 1948, he received a patient referral from the famous sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey. “Van,” designated male at birth, was 23 and had been living as a girl since the age of 3. She asked to be treated in every way as a girl, and her family complied. In high school, when administrators refused to allow Van to use the girl’s bathroom, she dropped out. Not long before meeting with Benjamin, Van had been forced into an institution by the courts. She and her mother were desperate for a solution: they did not want her to be “fixed,” but to be able to live her life freely as a woman.
Benjamin had read German medical literature on sex reassignment surgery, which had been coming out since the 1930s. He arranged for Van to travel there to meet with sex reassignment doctors. After the surgery, she changed her name to Susan, moved to Canada, and was never heard from again.
Benjamin meanwhile, likely encouraged by Van’s successful transition, began seeing more trans patients. His seventh was the former American G.I., Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen’s 1952 sex reassignment surgery in Denmark was the first to be widely reported in the press. Rather than shrinking from the publicity, Jorgensen used it to launch an advocacy campaign. Jorgensen and Benjamin were arguably the most influential original advocates for the trans community, and they wrote effusively about each other’s work.
The same year as his book was published, Benjamin and other doctors secretly opened the first sex reassignment clinic in the United States at Johns Hopkins University. “The program was meant to be cautiously and rigorously experimental,” as Timeline has described. The “Benjamin model” was then used in clinics across the country at the University of Minnesota, Stanford, and UCLA. Many came under scrutiny because of their experimental nature, with some patients claiming to feel like guinea pigs. Others readily took part, eager to aid in public and scientific understanding. By and large, Benjamin’s reputation emerged unbesmirched with many former patients clamoring that he was the only doctor who understood them.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Benjamin was a fixture in the in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, which had become the center of advocacy for marginalized groups. Urban renewal projects in other parts of the city had exiled gay and transgendered people there. During this time, San Francisco police officer Elliot Blackstone was approached by Louise Ergestrasse, a trans prostitute. She wanted him to stop officers from harassing her and other trans people. Blackstone would later describe the encounter in an interview: “One day, this tall, football player–type female came in to see me. I said, ‘Oh, you’re a transvestite.’ She said, ‘No, I’m a transsexual.’ And I said, ‘Well, pardon my ignorance, but what in the hell is a transsexual?’ She gave him a copy of Dr. Benjamin’s book and surprisingly, he appears to have read it and reached out to Benjamin. Benjamin became a sort of unofficial advisor to Blackstone for the next several years as he acted as a liaison between the trans community and the SFPD.
Dr. Benjamin lived until he was 101. What is perhaps most striking about his life and work is not just his own humane progressivism, but the torpor of society’s evolution since then. A respected medical professional offered a comprehensive understanding of trans life over half a century ago and still society finds itself locked in battles over who can go to the bathroom where, who can work where, and even who deserves to live.
