Harry Benjamin


Harry Benjamin was a German-American endocrinologist and sexologist, widely known for his clinical work with transgender people.

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 premed education in Berlin and Rostock, he joined a regiment of the Prussian Guard. 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 an interview conducted in 1985 he recalled:
Benjamin visited the United States in 1913, to work with a quack doctor who claimed to have found a cure for tuberculosis. The liner in which Benjamin was returning to Germany was caught mid-Atlantic both by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and the Royal Navy. Given the choice of a British 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, although 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. Later he practiced in San Francisco in the summer of every year, and otherwise at 44 East 67th Street in New York.

Work with transgender people

In 1948, in San Francisco, Benjamin was asked by Alfred Kinsey, a fellow sexologist, to see a child who "wanted to become a girl" despite being born male; the mother wished for help that would assist rather than thwart the child. Kinsey had encountered the child as a result of his interviews for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was published that year. Kinsey and Benjamin had seen nothing of the like previously. This child rapidly led Benjamin to understand that there was a different condition to that of transvestism, under which adults who had such needs had been classified to that time.
Despite the psychiatrists with whom Benjamin involved in the case not agreeing on a path of treatment, Benjamin eventually decided to treat the child with estrogen, which had a "calming effect", and helped arrange for the mother and child to go to Germany, where surgery to assist the child could be performed but, from there, they ceased to maintain contact, to Benjamin's regret. 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. Benjamin conducted treatment with the assistance of carefully selected colleagues of various disciplines.
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.
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 at best denied any affirmation of their gender identity, or involuntarily subjected to treatments such as drugged detention, electroconvulsive therapy, or lobotomy.
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. 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."
Similar cases in other countries fuelled this. But most of Benjamin's patients lived quiet lives.
Reed Erickson, a successful industrialist, sought treatment from Benjamin in 1963. Erickson was the founder and funder of the 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.

Other work and interests

Apart from endocrinology and sexology, he worked on life extension and would now also be described as a gerontologist. Benjamin himself lived to be 101.
Benjamin was married to Gretchen, to whom he dedicated his 1966 major work, for 60 years.
In 1979 the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association was formed, using Benjamin's name by permission. The group consists of therapists and psychologists who devised a set of Standards of Care for the treatment of gender dysphoria, largely based on Benjamin's cases, and studies. It later changed its name to The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, but still reveres its links to Harry Benjamin.