Harry Benjamin

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For the actor, comedian, writer, and producer, see H. Jon Benjamin.
Harry Benjamin
BornJanuary 12, 1885
Berlin, Brandenburg, German Empire[1]
DiedAugust 24, 1986(1986-08-24) (aged 101)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Scientific career
FieldsEndocrinology, sexology

Harry Benjamin (January 12, 1885 – August 24, 1986) was a German-American

sexologist, widely known for his clinical work with transgender people.[2]

Early life and career

Benjamin was born in Berlin, and raised in a German Lutheran home. His mother was German and his father at least part-Jewish in ancestry. After premedical education in Berlin and Rostock, he joined a regiment of the Prussian Guard.[3] He received his doctorate in medicine in 1912 in Tübingen for a dissertation on tuberculosis. Sexual medicine interested him, but was not part of his medical studies. In a 1985 interview he recalled:

I do remember going, as a young person, to a lecture by Auguste Forel, whose book The Sexual Question was a sensation at the time and which impressed me greatly. I also met Magnus Hirschfeld very early on through a girl friend, who knew the police official Kopp, who was in charge investigating of sexual offenses. He, in turn, was a friend of Hirschfeld's, and so I met both men. That was around 1907. They repeatedly took me along on their rounds through the homosexual bars in Berlin. I especially remember the 'Eldorado' with its drag shows, where also many of the customers appeared in the clothing of the other sex. The word "transvestite" had not yet been invented. Hirschfeld coined it only in 1910 in his well-known study.[4]

Benjamin visited the United States in 1913, to work with a

internment camp, as an "enemy alien", or returning to New York, he used his last dollars to travel back to America, where he made his home for the rest of his life.[6]
However, he maintained and built many international professional connections and visited Europe frequently when wars allowed.

After several failed attempts to start a medical career in New York, in 1915 Benjamin rented a consulting room, in which he also slept, and started his own general medical practice.[7][8] In 1937 he moved his practice to a ground floor office suite at 728 Park Avenue in Manhattan, then briefly to 125 East 72nd Street in 1957, and sometime between 1959 and 1962 he moved his practice again to 44 East 67th Street before finally relocating to 1045 Park Avenue in 1963 where he continued to practice until his retirement in 1968.[9] Sometime before 1948, he also began maintaining an office in San Francisco where he practiced during the summer of every year (at 450 Sutter Street, Suite 2232),[10] with many of his patients coming from the nearby Tenderloin neighborhood[11]).

Work with transgender people

Prior to arriving in the United States, Benjamin studied at the

transsexualism,[15] realizing that there was a different condition to that of transvestism, under which adults who had such needs had been classified to that time.[citation needed
]

Despite the psychiatrists Benjamin involved in the case not agreeing on a path of treatment, Benjamin eventually decided to treat the child with estrogen (

Premarin, introduced in 1941), which had a "calming effect", and helped arrange for the mother and child to go to Germany, where surgery[specify] to assist the child could be performed but, from there, they ceased to maintain contact, to Benjamin's regret.[citation needed
] However, Benjamin continued to refine his understanding and went on to treat several hundred patients with similar needs in a similar manner, often without accepting any payment.

Many of his patients were referred by

David Cauldwell, Robert Stoller
, and doctors in Denmark. These doctors received hundreds of requests from individuals who had read about their work connected with changing sex, as it was then largely described.

However, due to the personal political opinions of the American doctors and a Danish law prohibiting sex reassignment surgery on noncitizens, these doctors referred the letter-writers to the one doctor of the era who would aid transsexual individuals, Harry Benjamin.[16] Benjamin conducted treatment with the assistance of carefully selected colleagues of various disciplines (such as psychiatrists C. L. Ihlenfeld and John Alden, electrologist Martha Foss, and surgeons Jose Jesus Barbosa,[17] Roberto C. Granato, and Georges Burou).

Benjamin's patients regarded him as a man of immense caring, respect and kindness, and many kept in touch with him until his death. He was a prolific and assiduous correspondent, in both English and German, and many letters are archived at the Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology, Humboldt University, Berlin.[18]

The legal, social and medical background to this in the United States, as in many other countries, was often a stark contrast, since wearing items of clothing associated with the opposite sex in public was often illegal, castration of a male was often illegal, anything seen as homosexuality was often persecuted or illegal, and many doctors considered all such people (including children) at best denied any affirmation of their gender identity, or involuntarily subjected to treatments such as drugged detention, electroconvulsive therapy, or lobotomy.[citation needed].

Though he had already published papers and lectured to professional audiences extensively, Benjamin's 1966 book, The Transsexual Phenomenon, was immensely important as the first large work describing and explaining the affirmative treatment path he pioneered.[19] Publicity surrounding his patient Christine Jorgensen brought the issue into the mainstream in 1952 and led to a great many people presenting for assistance, internationally. In the preface of Christine Jorgensen's autobiography, Dr. Benjamin also gives Jorgensen credit for the advancement of his studies. He wrote, "Indeed Christine, without you, probably none of this would have happened; the grant, my publications, lectures, etc."[20]

Similar cases in other countries (such as that of

Coccinelle[21] who received much publicity in France in 1958, and April Ashley, whose exposure in 1961 by the British tabloid press was reported worldwide) fuelled this. But most of Benjamin's patients lived (and many still live) quiet lives.[citation needed
]

Erickson Educational Foundation, which published educational booklets, funded medical conferences, counselling services, and the establishment of gender clinics. The EEF funded the Harry Benjamin Foundation.[22][12]

Other work and interests

Apart from endocrinology and sexology, he worked on

gerontologist
. Benjamin himself lived to be 101.

Benjamin was married to Gretchen, to whom he dedicated his 1966 major work, for 60 years.[23] They were married December 23rd, 1925.[23] Gretchen revealed to Charles L. Ihlenfeld "about six months after they were married Harry brought his mother from Germany to live with them" and that "from then on their bedroom door remained open".[23]

In 1979 the

Standards of Care (SOC) for the treatment of gender dysphoria, largely based on Benjamin's cases, and studies.[24] It later changed its name to The World Professional Association for Transgender Health
(WPATH).

Bibliography

See also

Notes

  1. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2024-06-10.
  2. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2024-02-21.
  3. ^ Person, Ethel Spector, The Sexual Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1999.
  4. ^ Hu-Berlnin.de Archived 2004-12-27 at the Wayback Machine.
  5. ISBN 0-684-31427-4
    , 978-0-684-31427-3
  6. ISBN 978-0-323-48089-5
    . Following a professional visit to the United States in 1913, Dr Benjamin's return to Germany was disrupted when the ship on which he was traveling was caught mid-Atlantic by the Royal Navy during the outbreak of World War I. Preferring to return to the United States rather than be treated as an enemy alien in a British internment camp, Dr Benjamin began practicing general medicine in New York in 1915.
  7. ^ Alison Li. "That Which Sets in Motion". Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. p. 2. Retrieved 2023-06-06.
  8. ^ Zagria (2022-01-14). "The Offices of Harry Benjamin. Part I: to 1968". A Gender Variance Who's Who. Archived from the original on 2023-11-21. Retrieved 2023-12-24.
  9. ^ "728 Park Avenue Manhattan - Trans Medical Care at the Office of Dr. Harry Benjamin". NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Archived from the original on 2023-09-26. Retrieved 2023-12-24.
  10. ^ Kane, Peter Lawrence (2015-07-22). "The Tenderloin Museum Has Ceiling Lights in the Shape of the Tenderloin". SF Weekly. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  11. ^ Conway, Lynn. "Lynn Conway's Career Retrospective, Part II". University of Michigan. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  12. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4833-7129-0
    .
  13. ISBN 978-3-030-29093-1
    .
  14. ^ a b "Trans Medical Care at the Office of Dr. Harry Benjamin – NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project". www.nyclgbtsites.org. Retrieved 2024-06-10.
  15. ^ a b The Sisterhood: Dr. Harry Benjamin "Dr. Harry Benjamin". Archived from the original on 2005-04-07. Retrieved 2021-07-05..
  16. ISBN 0-674-00925-8
    .
  17. ^ University of Michigan.
  18. ^ "Archive for Sexology". hu-berlin.de. Archived from the original on 2007-12-04.
  19. ISBN 978-1-57958-091-9
  20. ^ Jorgensen, Christine, and Susan Stryker. "Preface." Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography. 1st ed. Cleis, 2000.
  21. ^ Coccinelle Show.
  22. ^ Devor, Aaron H. (September 18, 2013). "Reed Erickson and The Erickson Educational Foundation". web.uvic.ca. University of Victoria. Retrieved 5 June 2017.
  23. ^
    S2CID 142619491
    .
  24. ISBN 978-1-4129-0916-7

References

External links

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