Harry Benjamin

Harry Benjamin (born January 12, 1885, Berlin, Germany—died August 24, 1986, New York City, New York, U.S.) was a German-born American endocrinologist and sexologist known for his pioneering role in recognizing transsexuality and developing medical interventions for transsexual and transgender individuals.

Benjamin earned a medical degree in 1912 from the University of Tübingen. The scientific study of sexuality, though not a part of his formal medical training, was one of Benjamin’s early interests, and his understanding was strengthened through his friendship with Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the founding fathers of sexology.

Benjamin relocated to New York in 1913 and started a private medical practice there. His work concerned the treatments to reverse the aging process and was especially concerned with sex hormones. He was a proponent of the so-called Steinach vasoligation, a partial vasectomy procedure devised by his mentor, the Austrian endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, and billed as a means of restoring a patient’s youthful energy and sexual potency. Benjamin’s politics brought him into the circle of sexual radicals active at the time, including Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey.

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In 1948 Kinsey recommended a patient to Benjamin. Born male, the patient expressed an acute desire to become a woman. At the time, the recommended treatment for individuals such as Benjamin’s patient was psychoanalytic therapy aimed at making the mind fit the body. Benjamin, however, was unconvinced of the effectiveness of that approach. Seeing gender identity on a continuum, he believed that some people could be born male but feel female and that the more-sensible treatment would be alter the body to better fit the patient’s perceived gender. He counseled the patient to travel to Europe, where surgeons performed one of the earliest gender-reassignment operations. Benjamin ultimately gained a reputation among people seeking to change their sex as a medical expert sympathetic to their plight.

In the 1950s Benjamin helped found the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. In 1966 he published The Transsexual Phenomenon, which drew on his work with clients who had a variety of “sexual disorders.” He argued that transsexuals were a group distinct from transvestites (heterosexual men who derived sexual pleasure from dressing in women’s clothing but who did not wish to become women) and homosexuals. While he acknowledged that overlap between groups was certainly possible, he argued against collapsing them into one category of “sexual pathology,” as each condition required a different treatment approach. In The Transsexual Phenomenon, Benjamin also challenged the dominant psychological treatment of transsexuality. He argued that psychoanalysis did not lessen the desire to change sex; it simply forced patients to go underground with their desires and lead miserable lives. Benjamin instead advocated that transsexuals be given hormones for the sex they wished to become in an attempt to fit the body with the mind. Benjamin also advocated surgery for patients deemed by medical experts to fit the diagnostic criteria for transsexuals. Benjamin’s views positioned him as a maverick in the medical community. However, his treatment approach to transsexuality eventually gained precedence over psychoanalysis.

In the 1970s Benjamin formed what later became the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), an association of therapists and psychologists. HBIGDA devised a set of “standards of care,” largely derived from Benjamin’s case studies, that sanctioned the criteria and diagnostic procedure for transsexuality. (In 2007 HBIGDA became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.) Although those care standards came under fire in the early 21st century by transgender activists who saw them as creating regulatory systems of gender, they continued to be seen as legitimate guidelines for the treatment of gender dysphoria—also known as gender identity disorder—the formal psychological diagnosis for transsexual and transgender individuals.