A review of Alison Li’s biography of Harry Benjamin

• Alison Li. Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 2023.
  
  
  

There are four biographies of Magnus Hirschfeld (by Charlotte Wolff, Ralf Dose, Elena Mancini and Heike Bauer), an autobiography and three biographies of Havelock Ellis (by Phyllis Grosskurth, Chris Nottingham, Arthur Calder-Marshall, John Stewart). Why has there been no book length biography of Harry Benjamin previously?

Li did a BSc in Biochemistry at McGill University and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at University of Toronto supervised by historian Michael Bliss, with the thesis J.B. Collip and the Making of Medical Research in Canada, which included Collip’s work 1921-2 contributing to the refinement of insulin and thereby saving the lives of many diabetics. Li taught at Toronto’s York University and more recently has been an independent historian and writer. She specialises in the history of hormones, their discovery and applications. She published a book based on her thesis, the biography, J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada, 2003. She was also a co-editor of Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945, 2003, to which she contributed an essay on the hormonal product Premarin. In 2008 she was a co-editor of Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss: Figuring the Social, in which she contributed the essay “Wondrous Transformations: Endocrinology after Insulin”. This essay covers Harry Benjamin and his rejuvenation treatment of the novelist Gertrude Atherton, her 1922 novel based on the experience and the subsequent film. This last is redone in the 2023 book.

Li did research in quite a lot of academic archives, including the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Haeberle-Hirschfeld Archives at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. She read Benjamin’s diary, his correspondence and his unpublished book The Winter of Our Discontent, 1941. Hence she is able to relate details not found in other accounts: what happened to his brother and sister; how his wife Greta became involved in his clinic as secretary and as nurse; how the mothers of both Harry and Greta came to stay. She also tells anecdotes about Benjamin’s sex life:

“He continued to be attracted to actresses and chorus girls. For a time, he saw patients in Los Angeles and mixed with the rich and famous. Jean Harlow’s initials appear in his address book, and colleagues would recall that he later reminisced about ‘dating’ her.” (p135)

However, a few matters must be discussed. 

On p112, Li repeats the most well-known accounts of Hirschfeld’s trans patients. One she names as Carla Van Crist. This is a name she found in Meyerowitz’ How Sex Changed, 2002. The problem is that most of us know, since Raimund Wolfert’s 2021 biography, that Crist was a pseudonym for Charlotte Charlaque. And Li apparently knows nothing of Charlotte as receptionist at Hirschfeld’s Institute, and acting as his translator in London, of her involvement with Toni Ebel, another of the well documented trans patients of Hirschfeld who had completion surgery, and their attempted escape from the Third Reich into Czechoslovakia. Li quickly mentions the two-patient surgery account (archive) by Felix Abraham, tells us that one of these was Dorchen Richter, but is mute about the fact that the other was Ebel. There is of course a detailed account of Ebel in Rainer Herrn’s Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, 2005. However neither Wolfert nor Herrn are in Li’s bibliography – she relies on Meyerowitz only. Meyerowitz’ book was groundbreaking 20 years ago, but trans history and biography have moved on.

Incidentally, Charlotte, back in the US in the 1950s, corresponded with Benjamin using the name Charlotte Von Curtius. Neither Meyerowitz nor Li, despite their reading of Benjamin’s correspondence at the Kinsey Institute realize that this is the same person, nor even mention a Von Curtius.

Li next gives a very ordinary account of “Lili Elbe”. Li made a decision to not include any accounts of Benjamin’s associates – such as Leo Wollman – and their trans patients – so why does she include Elbe, who was Kurt Warnekros’ patient? She does briefly mention Pamela Caughie in an endnote, but does not seem to have read the books and the extensive website by Caughie, Sabine Meyer and their team, not even to note that Lili’s post transition name was Lili Elvenes. 

In New York in the 1960s and 1970s, if you were trans and had money or contacts or were lucky, you went to Dr Benjamin. For less money you could go to Dr Leo Wollman located close to Coney Island. And if Wollman was too expensive, there were Drs David Wesser and Benito Rish at the Professional Hospital in Yonkers. Benjamin and Wollman sent patients to Wesser and Rish for surgery, but Wesser and Rish are mentioned not at all by Li. 

Wollman is mentioned only once – in a list of the members of the Harry Benjamin Foundation. Li three times mentions the Harry Benjamin Foundation, but fails to mention its major accomplishment, the 1969 anthology book Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment edited by Richard Green and John Money.

On p116, Li writes “A few years later Benjamin wrote Hirschfeld in alarm that an unauthorized, abridged translation of the first volume of Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie had been published by Julian Press in 1932 with ‘a most atrocious translation, utterly impossible”. Why not name the book? By the date and publisher, she is referring to Sexual Pathology: A Study of Derangements of the Sexual Instinct, translated by Jerome Gibbs, Julian Press, 1932. However, most readers will assume the much better-known Sexual anomalies and perversions, a compilation from Sexualpathologie by Arthur Koestler, revised for the English version by Norman Haire, an associate of both Hirschfeld and Benjamin, which came out a few years later. The Koestler-Haire book actually is not mentioned at all.

Benjamin and Virginia Prince were associated across several decades, he prescribed hormones to her, and whenever Prince was in New York they would have a meal together. In Transvestia # 12, December 1961, p14. Prince wrote: “I was chauffeured over to Dr. Benjamin's office for a nice but too brief visit and dinner with him. Those of you who have never met Dr. Benjamin have missed a real treat. People of our persuasion have no better professional friend.” It was from Prince that Benjamin adopted the expression: “Gender is located above, and sex below the belt”.

Prior to 1962 Prince’s magazine Transvestia frequently featured reprints and new articles by Benjamin, she is mentioned several times in The Transsexual Phenomenon (unlike Louise Lawrence who is surprisingly not mentioned at all) and most significantly Prince had a significant effect on Benjamin’s scale in that in accordance with her views it erases gay and female transvestites and gynephilic transsexuals. 

Li mentions Prince once only (p148): “Benjamin also began to work with Virginia Prince, a chemist, transvestite, researcher”. Her footnote chp9n49 shows that her one and only source is Meyerowitz (again) p181-2. She does not note the mentions in The Transsexual Phenomenon, and ignores the biographies by Richard Docter and myself.

The ongoing interaction between Benjamin and Prince is only partially documented. I was hoping that Li’s reading of Benjamin’s diary and correspondence would have provided more detail.

As Li says of The Transsexual Phenomenon: “At a dense 286 pages, the book ranged over the entire field of study”. My A critical rereading of Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon required 56 pages. Li devotes only two pages to it, only one page to its contents (p178-180). She gives only the 1966 Julian Press hardback in her bibliography, and in the text mentions that the 16 pages of photographs were withheld but could be requested by medical and psychological professionals. However most of us who have read the physical book, read the 1977 Warner Books paperback which did include the photographs. And of course most readers today use the PDF version which is available online. With such a short summary she is not able to discuss the Benjamin Scale, Benjamin’s inconsistencies, his ambivalences, his anticipations of future debates or of course the Virginia Prince impacts. Both Ray Blanchard with autogynephilia, and Charlotte Goiar with Harry Benjamin Syndrome later found a basis in The Transsexual Phenomenon but their applications deny his moral legacy. (See my A Critical Reading p10, 30-1)

She says that it was “the first major text” on the topic. “Major” is of course an equivocal term, but there had been three previous books specifically about transsexuality, the first two, as it happened, by persons themselves transsexual: Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, 1946, by Michael Dillon, and Over the Sex Border, 1963, by Georgina Turtle. The third was Eugene de Savitsch’s Homosexuality, Transvestism and Change of Sex, 1958 which discussed the transition of the Swiss trans woman Arlette Leber who had surgery in 1941-2 . None of these are mentioned by Benjamin, although the latter two are included without comment in Richard Green's bibliography at the end of the book. And none of them are mentioned or are found in Li’s bibliography.

Charles Ihlenfeld was Benjamin’s assistant from 1969 to 1976 and had been expected to take over the practice, but chose otherwise. Li tells this, but does not tell of Jeanne Hoff who did take over, and was herself in transition. 

Obviously the strength of the book is in the history of endocrinology, and the reading in various archives of Benjamin’s diary and his correspondence with patients and associates provide interesting anecdotes of them as people. It would be a better book if she had not mainly retold the stories that we know so well from Meyerowitz, and had told of some less-well-known patients instead. However it is a book that will be an essential reading for future biographers of Harry Benjamin.