Welcome back to Prism's This Day In History. We'll be discussing The Transsexual Phenomenon and the author behind this book: Harry Benjamin. Though there's a lot of controversy surrounding this work, it's the start of medical care for transgender people, often known as a "transsexuals' Bible" in scholarship. It's a medical textbook that was published on the 1st of January in 1966, and includes 4 parts:
-A set of concluding remarks by Benjamin himself. This piece includes neurology and psychology as search points for answers. A prediction is made that sex reassignment surgery will be made legal in the future, but patients in the US will have to be born lucky to be able to afford and get such treatment.
-Arguments for the human sexes to be in harmony with each other, rather than working against each other. It also argues for human beings with dual sexes of different amounts. This piece was written by Gobind Behari Lal.
-Transsexualism within a classical and indigenous setting in terms of history and mythology, created by one of Benjamin's colleagues, Richard Green.
-4 autobiographies & 3 biographical profiles of transsexual patients with photographs before and after their operations. This was compiled by R.E.L. Masters.
Harry Benjamin studied at the German Institute of Sex Research/Sexology in Berlin before studying in Austria and later moving to the United States. When he arrived in San Francisco in 1948, he was asked by a fellow sexologist to see a young AMAB patient who insisted on being female. This sparked the interest of Benjamin, with him realising this wasn't the known condition of transvestism, which many transgender people were classified under at the time. He started hormonal treatment on the patient, despite his fellow coworker (a psychiatrist) not agreeing, in preparation for surgery in Germany, but sadly lost contact with the child and their family after this happened.
He got many more patients referred to him by others after this instance, including many from Denmark, most of whom he kept in contact with. A lot of the letters exchanged between him and these patients have been archived at the Humboldt University in Berlin. One of these patients was Christine Jorgensen, who helped bring the issue of transsexualism into the view of the general public - even internationally. He gives her a lot of credit for being able to move forward with his studies.
Benjamin used 7 different categories to differentiate sex: chromosomal, morphological, genital, germinal, hormonal, psychological, and social. To Benjamin, a transsexual was someone whose psychological sex is different from the other 6, and treatment is necessary to create a symphony between them. He states that "no-one is so constantly unhappy [before sex change] as the transsexual".
In 1979, permission was given to use Benjamin's name for the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which consists of therapists and psychologists who created an SOC (Standard of Care) based on Benjamin's works. They sought to treat gender dysphoria and have since changed their name to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
The biggest pieces of criticism on the work nowadays are the endorsement of heteronormativity and cisnormativity, relying too much on "passing", the construction of gender success, and the criteria he set for "male transsexuals to make suitable women".
The Transsexual Phenomenon helped open gender clinics at multiple universities, as well as other major medical centers throughout the USA. It helped at least one, but realistically more, influential person become a spokesperson against police harassment of transgender individuals and helped us gather the knowledge we have today.
