A review of Goiar's The Original Harry Benjamin Syndrome Book

See also:

Charlotte Goiar (1972 - ) HBS activist.

A short history of (Harry) Benjamin Syndrome.

Rose White’s Harry Benjamin Syndrome Review – a review.

• Charlotte Goiar. The Original Harry Benjamin Syndrome Book. Self published, 2021.
  

Charlotte Goiar (1972 - ) was raised in Vigo in Galicia, Spain. She was diagnosed by the school psychologist as a trans child at age 7, and from age 16 was on hormonal therapy from the Vigo hospital - the first such patient to be so treated in Vigo. However she met much derision at school from both students and teachers and was unable to complete high school. Since 1991 she has been in psychiatric treatment, and living on welfare. In the early 2000s Goiar proposed the concept of Síndrome de Harry Benjamin (Harry Benjamin Syndrome). She set up www.shb-info.org in 2005. Various HBS websites - some run by other people - ran until 2011. Goiar was still pre-op at this stage. She underwent several years of litigation against Galacian Health Service, until finally in 2015 at age 42 she had completion surgery in Barcelona. She has of course set an important legal precedent for transsexuals in Spain.

Her new book opens with:

A Note to the Reader

The information contained herein has been silenced, obscured and censored by the LGBTQ lobby and allied political groups in power for three decades now. Those few who have tried to expose it have been ridiculed and threatened by these powerful lobbyists. For this reason, the reader is warned that the scientific & social evidence presented here can deeply overturn old beliefs held for a long period of time, which have been publicly promoted by that lobby which does not represent at all the group of patients. (p8)

On p12 Goiar lays out her position:

Today, the term 'transsexualism' is outmoded in its' ability to properly describe the condition.

Research now documents the fact that a neurogenetic basis (neurological, hormonal and genetic/DNA factors) undergird the existence of HBS. The old psychological construct known as “transsexualism” is now passé. Thus, those with HBS are the objective sex of their sex of stated identification.

Recent studies tell us that neurogenetic sex, rather than anatomical genital structures, determines more precisely the actual sex of an individual. Therefore, someone born with HBS is already a member of the "opposite" sex. This overturns the term “transsexualism” because there is no change of sex. Rather, one only does corrective surgery on reproductive structures.

Someone with HBS is already a member of their stated sex biologically, as their neurogenetic sex is of the identified sex by the brain, genetics, prenatal hormones and DNA structures, rather than the external genitalia. Simply put, their neurological sex is opposed to that of their genitals at birth, and they are in need of medical rehabilitation to fix this mismatch.

Therefore, we see that HBS is actually an intersex (Disorder of Sex Development) condition, and the old idea of “transsexualism” becomes outdated. The idea of a neutral and physiological neurological, genetic, hormonal and DNA basis for the conundrum replaces the obsolete idea that “transsexualism” was a psychological disorder.

 

Is HBS a synonym for transsexualism, a sub type thereof or a quite different condition?

Goiar equivocates.

As did her colleague Rose White in her 2010 book, Harry Benjamin Syndrome Review, Goiar is given to taking a quote from another writer about transsexualism and simply substituting “HBS” or “Harry Benjamin Syndrome” where the original said “transsexualism”. Convention says that if you do something like this you should put the substitution in [editorial brackets] to make it clear what you have done. Neither White nor Goiar does so. This of course is dishonest. However it does imply that “HBS” is simply a synonym for ‘transsexualism”.

The most outrageous instance is on p27 where we find:

“Over 70 years of medical research regarding Harry Benjamin Syndrome specify that there is NO evidence whatsoever that any psychological or environmental factors cause Harry Benjamin Syndrome. All of the medical research done to date indicates conclusively that physiological (neurological, genetic, DNA) factors are the sole cause of Harry Benjamin Syndrome.”

Goiar then attaches over 25 doctor and professor names including Richard Green, Zoe Playdon, Russell Reid etc as if they had actually signed such a statement. Whatever this document is or was originally, googling does not bring it up. The closest is an iPetition signed by a few people who are not famous doctors. Perhaps the original said - of course - ‘transsexualism’ not ‘Harry Benjamin Syndrome’ and 60 not 70 years. Laura Amato complained about this deception back in 2007.

In fact Goiar did put out a pamphlet in 2007 that contains the quote and supposed signatures and saying ‘60 years’. This was in many ways an early draft of the current book. In 2009 she wrote a Knol (a short-lived Google publishing feature) in which she specifically claimed that HBS was Benjamin’s Type VI. This of course created a problem in that Benjamin had specified that a Type VI would be exclusively Androphilic, but most trans women who did identify as HBS - far from being Androphilic - had gone through a period of being a husband and father.

In 2009 Goiar revised her estimate of the frequency of HBS and estimated that it is: “an extremely rare condition [1:100,000]”. I pointed out that therefore HBS are only a fraction of 1% of transsexuals. In a pamphlet put out in 2012 she made it clear that the 99%+ of trans persons are not HBS:

“Transsexualism (TS), Gender Identity Disorder (GID), or Gender Dysphoria is a mental condition that consists of the desire to live and to receive acceptance as a member of the opposite sex. Do not confuse this with HBS, as it is not medical. Feelings of malaise or discord with one’s anatomical sex and desires to obtain surgical or hormonal treatment to modify the body to agree with the desired sex usually accompany it (ICD-10 F64.0/ DSM-IV-TR).”

Thus HBS is supposedly something different from Transsexuality.

However in this new book, this is not clarified. When discussing Harry Benjamin, and when discussing medical treatment Goiar is certainly discussing transsexuality in general. The other 99%+ are invisible in this book (unless they/we are to be assumed under the term ‘transgender’).

Is HBS a DSD?

Goiar several times proclaims: “Harry Benjamin Syndrome is a disorder of sex development (DSD)”. She has from the start regarded HBS as an Intersex condition.

Intersex conditions are differentiated from transsexual in that:

1. intersex conditions can be detected at birth if the doctors look and do the tests.
2. most intersex activism -- as opposed to trans activists who campaign to make HRT and completion surgery available -- has been directed at getting doctors to not change children until they are old enough to consent, and to establish that many intersex conditions are not necessarily pathological,

There has been a push, mainly from the trans side, to establish Transsexuality and perhaps Transgender also as a type of Intersex. To some extent this is a matter of definition. However simple courtesy says that it is the Intersex activists, not the trans activists, who will continue to decide whether or not trans comes under the Intersex umbrella.

Goiar is sort of arguing that HBS is - or will be soon - detectable in the womb or at birth. See the discussion below.

DSD (disorder of sex development) is a term introduced in the so-called 2006 Consensus statement on management of intersex disorders. The Consensus was produced by medical professionals without input from Intersex activists except for Cheryl Chase/Bo Laurent. While there was a pretence that DSD is to replace the term ‘hermaphrodite’ rather than ‘intersex’, this has not been the case. The term DSD has been taken into use by medical professionals, but rejected by almost all the Intersex organizations. The major objection is the use of the word ‘disorders’ which implies and does lead to pathologization.

As Goiar is seeking for HBS to be considered a form of Intersex, embracing the DSD terminology may not be the best way to go about it.

Is HBS=HSTS?

The Freund-Blanchard-Bailey-Brown theoretical model uses the confusing term Homosexual Transsexual (HSTS) for heterosexual trans women. An HSTS is usually a trans kid telling her parents that she is really a girl from a young age, and who transitions as soon as possible. HSTS is contrasted to ‘autogynephiles’; much HBS commentary also used the term ‘autogynephiles’ for the other, non-HBS transssexuals - although Goiar dies not do so in this book.

So is HBS=HSTS? Many commentators see them as very similar. However HBS and HSTS are two solitudes both not communicating with the other.

Goiar still continues this non-communication.

David Reimer

There is chapter titled John Money, but actually mainly about his patient, the unfortunate David Reimer. Why are HBS persons concerned with Reimer? Reimer was a cis boy, reassigned to female after a bad circumcision that became a penectomy. The reassignment did not take and he grew up to be a heterosexual cis man.

What the Reimer story demonstrates is that it is very difficult to transsex a cis boy. It tells us nothing at all about transvestites, transgenders, transsexuals or HBSers. 

However see below where Goiar actually assumes that HBS was induced into an unfortunate boy who was transsexed in Auschwitz. As Goiar maintains that HBS is genetically determined, why would she think that was even possible? Has she properly thought through her own position?

Arnold Lowman, transgenderist

“Lowman also coined the term 'Transgenderist' and 'Transgenderism' and helped popularize the term 'Transgender' ". (p63)

What can I say? I have previously explained that this is completely wrong, as has Cristan Williams. The claim that Virginia Prince (dead name: Arnold Lowman) coined the term is a disinformation meme that has been definitely refuted but keeps being revived by writers who really want this non-fact to be true.

Virginia Prince was introduced to the term by Ariadne Kane around 1978, and used it in a few articles 1978-9. As she had done with 'transvestite' Prince took an existing word and attempted to restrict it to mean only her own type. It was mainly Leslie Feinberg who wrongly claimed that she had coined it.

Prince could not be transgender because she was transgender-phobic. Almost all types of transgender were prohibited from her groups. Even after Feinberg and IFGE falsely used her name in proclaiming the transgender umbrella, Prince continued to write mean-spirited articles complaining about the umbrellas.

Contemporary History of Harry Benjamin Syndrome

The book includes what Goiar calls a “Contemporary History of Harry Benjamin Syndrome”, but is really a very selective history of transsexualism. She starts as she did when her website was up with Lili Elbe. Surely Lili, a long-time transvestite who in middle-age progressed to surgery is of the 99% of transsexuals who are not HBS, and also - if we are to believe her unreliable autobiography - a person with Multiple Personality Disorder like Walt Heyer.   Surely Dorchen Richter or Toni Ebel would be much better candidates?

“1943 Germany Nazi doctors induce artificial Harry Benjamin Syndrome by hormonal treatment of prisoners. There are two cases very well documented, one in the concentration camp of Auschwitz and Marie-Andrée Schwidenhammer in the camp of Natzweiler-Struthof. Miss Schwidenhammer, now deceased, founded the Association of the Hormonal Patients (AHP) in order to to be able to help the victims of such practices.”(p64)

Really! HBS can be artificiality induced? Is she actually saying that if Schwidenhammer had not been experimented on in a Nazi concentration camp, she would not have become transsexual, and would not have organised to help others? Actually Schwidenhammer helped all trans persons, not just concentration camp victims.

What is most noticeable is the lack of any history of the HBS movement. Its founding in 2005; Goiar’s encounter with Diane Kearny, their split; the initial enthusiasm for the term as it was adopted by such as Laura Amato, Suzan Cooke and TS-Si, the leaving of those and many others within two years because of the disparagements, the homophobia, the transgender phobia; the closing down of the HBS web sites in 2010-11 - as a movement it lasted barely six years.

There is no word of Rose White’s 2010 book, Harry Benjamin Syndrome Review, the only previous book on HBS, which Goiar did endorse when it was published.

There is no word of the HBS pre-cursors, not even the most notable example of Margaret O’Hartigan, and there is no word about the “Classic TS” movement which flourished at about the same time.

Several HBS persons have achieved things well worth noting. Cathryn Platine founded the Maetreum of Cybele Magna Mater in Catskill in upstate New York, wrote a book on transsexual priestesses in the ancient world and organised relief efforts for LGBT victims of hurricane Katrina.  Yasmene Jabar set up the web sites Cafe Trans Arabi and the International Transsexual Sisterhood, the first to help trans women in the middle east, and then expanded to help trans women wherever they are. In 2005 she was involved in the Trans Eastern Conference (TEC) in Istanbul. Alejandra Portatadino worked with LGBT groups and sex workers and was recognized by the Buenos Aires Legislature as one of 20 Argentinian women who ‘broke traditional moulds’. Margaret O’Hartigan received a Spirit of Pride award for ““tireless advocacy for the trans community”. Joanne Proctor worked with OII. Rachel Hosham appealed to the European Court of Human Rights for the right to a corrected birth certificate and did valuable research on the Ewan Forbes case and its impact on Corbett v Corbett.

None of these are mentioned.

Is there a biological signifier?

Most of the world’s population live under authoritarian governments that would be delighted if the next generation of HBS/transsexual/transgender/queer persons could be identified in the womb and thereby eliminated by compulsory abortions. The number of persons with Down’s syndrome is already significantly down with voluntary abortions alone.

Every now and then there is a supposed breakthrough and a biological signifier is announced. HY-Antigen in 1979, BSTc in 1995. However they are not replicated by other scientists and/or they do not lead to any useful research, and they are forgotten.

While Goiar claims that HBS is congenital, she actually writes “Unlike other intersex conditions, the clinical manifestations of this syndrome are not evident at birth, it becomes evident later … Most diagnoses of HBS occur when the individual is between 15 to 35 years of age”. This despite it resulting from pre-natal events.

So what diagnostic methods does she propose:

--- the pheromone/chemical scent test to determine the true sex of an individual. This test consists of having the patient smell variations of chemical compounds and pheromones in which the neurological response of the brain elicits a sexually dimorphic response to each scent.

--- variations in the length of certain segments of DNA where the genetic code "stutters". That is, a few "letters" of the code repeat themselves in the same order many times. (However this approach suggests that such stutters may be the sites of most common genetic mutations and if one does lead to HBS, it has not been identified.)

Some other suggestions are also pursued, and the word ‘may’ is used a lot. Some of the ideas are certainly worthy of further research, but the total of ideas does not support the conclusion that HBS is different from transsexuality nor that it can be identified in the womb, at birth nor in teenage.

Given what Goiar has to offer, we don’t need to worry about the next generation being aborted.

Conclusion

Some of the more untenable positions of HBS have been left out of this book. Goiar has either accepted advice or has reconsidered.

However it does retain other quirks. Also much of what she writes here, she has published before.

It is a much better book that Rose White’s in 2010, even better written despite Goiar being Spanish.

If you want to read a book advocating HBS, this would be the one.

An interesting exercise would be to read this and Kay Brown’s On the Science of Changing Sex, 2020, at the same time and compare the two. Brown’s book advocates for the Blanchard HSTS theory.

Case of Sheffield and Horsham v. The United Kingdom, 1998

Rachel Horsham (1946 - )

Horsham was raised in a small village in Surrey, with a father who had been born in India, and a mother from Ireland. Horsham knew from an early age that she was not really male. As Rachel she emigrated to the Netherlands in 1974 because that country recognised trans women as women at a time when the UK did not.

She became a patient of Professor Dr Louis Gooren at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) of Amsterdam, wrote the first version of her autobiography in 1991, and completed transition in 1992.

She applied to the UK Consulate for a re-issued UK passport in her new name and gender:

“During an interview with the Consul, I was informed that it was not possible to be issued with a new passport reflecting my current status, at the time. Nor would they accept a letter of Deed Poll from a Solicitor for a change of forenames. Their reasoning: that the issuing of passports to transsexuals in the United Kingdom, showing their female status, on production of a letter of Deed Poll from a Solicitor, and a letter of acknowledgement from a qualified doctor, that the bearer was a transsexual, was not legal outside of the United Kingdom.” (Plaintiff’s Observations)

She was told that she needed an order from a Dutch Court. This was obtained and the passport re-issued. She became a Dutch citizen in 1993, and obtained a ruling in a Dutch court that her UK birth certificate should be amended. As this did not happen she initiated legal proceedings in the UK. This was appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 1994.

Kristina Sheffield (also born 1946)

Sheffield was a pilot with Brittania Airways, and had 34 years experience when she transitioned in 1986.

Kristina divorced from her wife as was almost always required in the 1990s (in retrospect she felt that she had been coerced into it underhandedly), and a judge also granted an injunction banning Kristina from seeing her daughter as “transsexuals are not suitable company for children”.

She applied to every UK airline, but was always obliged to show her birth certificate which said that she was born male, which resulted in her not getting employment.

While her passport was re-issued in her new name, she was still unable to obtain a US visa, and twice in court to stand surety for a friend, was obliged to reveal her previous name. A misunderstanding with the police with regards to a replica firearm indicated that they were aware of her gender change although the topic had not come up. A request under the Data Protection Act 1984 would have required her to state all previous names.

She also appealed through the UK court system and then to the ECHR.
 

And then

 
Both cases were initially accepted by the ECHR in 1994. Kristina met with Rachel in Amsterdam. Following advice from Rachel, Kristina revised the statement of her case. This made the two cases rather similar although the circumstances were different, in that Rachel wanted to marry and Kristina to find employment. The ECHR decided to couple both appeals.

Rachel, with Kristina’s assistance researched the Ewan Forbes-Sempill case and the Corbett divorce case. They obtained the birth certificates for April Ashley, Roberta Cowell, Michael Dillon and Georgina Turtle, and the marriage certificates for Georgina Turtle and April Ashley. Only April had not had her birth certificate amended re her name and sex. From this they were able to conclude that the Corbetts’ divorce trial could have been quickly concluded in that April was still legally male and thus the marriage was invalid according to the law at that time. There was no need for the detailed medical examinations that were done. Unless, of course, something other than an annulment of marriage was being enacted.

The original birth certificate for Ewan Forbes-Sempill proved impossible to obtain, however a copy specifying his male sex and name was available. The Sempill and Corbett cases had been more about establishing the boundaries of aristocratic privilege than of determining the best governance of transsexuals.

“It was also found, that there had been prior knowledge of these birth certificates by the plaintiffs of former cases that had gone to the ECHR. They were the cases of Rees and later Cossey. None of the fact that it was possible to amend a birth certificate, within existing statute law, was ever presented to the ECHR in those cases. They were based on a demand that the UK government must change the law. The court in those cases was not prepared to demand that a government must restructure its laws. Both cases lost and this created a case law in the ECHR upon which any further cases from the UK would be accepted and judged. The ECHR works on the basis of creating its own case law upon which to judge a case presented to them and where they have none they create it. If a case challenges existing case law, then the court can examine the situation.” (Rachel Horsham .4)

In May 1996, Rachel wrote an anonymous article that was published in The Independent, "Trapped in a man's body with a woman's mind". She detailed the then lack of human rights for transsexuals in the UK; explained how HRT and reconstructive surgery have a 97% success rate and attributed the condition to an incongruence of pre-natal hormones (a theory that was accepted in the late 1990s). She rightly points to the 1970 Corbett v Corbett divorce case as the point where things went wrong.

“All that is required is for government to accept a return to the pre-1970 status quo, a move that is supported by medicine, a large section of legal opinion and many parliamentarians. There is no need for new legislation or new administrative systems; the Birth Certificate still contains a column where errors at registration can be corrected as they were before 1970. Time has shown that there were no practical complications with those corrections, and thus there is no realistic argument for not reinstating the practice. Indeed, there is every reason for regarding it as an urgent necessity.”

The ECHR gave its judgement 30 July 1998. By 11 to 9 it voted that the Article 8 right to respect for a private life was not violated (although the court noted “no steps taken by respondent State to keep need for appropriate legal measures in this area under review despite Court’s view to that effect in Rees and Cossey judgments — Court reiterates that view”). By 18 votes to 2 it voted that the Article 12 right to contract lawful marriage was not violated. Unanimously it voted that Article 14, the right not to be subjected to difference in treatment was not violated. The judgment does not address Horsham’s argument that Corbett vs Corbett was a bad judgment and a simple reversal would solve the problems.

As Rachel summarises the result on her home page:

“The United Kingdom rejected [the plaintiffs’ plea] on the grounds that under British law a person’s sex is fixed at birth and cannot be amended or changed and argued that the Court of Human Rights had given two Judgments in their favour upholding this contention in two previous cases, Rees and Cossey. The plaintiff, in her submissions, proved that the government had lied to the court in those previous cases, and that English Statute law did have the required legislation to amend a person's birth certificate, in such cases. In 1998 the court decided to uphold its case law based on Rees and Cossey and the case of Rachel Horsham was never judged on the facts presented to them.”

Rachel expanded her autobiography to include the appeal to ECHR, and published it, also in 1998.
Kristina won an employment discrimination case in 1998 at an industrial tribunal in that she was unable to obtain even an interview with Easyjet to be a pilot despite her 34 years’ experience.

Context

In 1997, after 18 years of homophobic Conservative misrule, the Labour Party became the new government. Initially it continued the Conservatives’ homophobic policies, one of which was to oppose appeals such as that by Horsham & Sheffield. The GLBT censorship known as Section 28 was not repealed until 2003.

While government lawyers were in Strasburg arguing against the petitions of Horsham and Sheffield, Petra Henderson, British but resident in Germany, had completed surgical transition and wished to be recognised legally as female, which the government quietly permitted. She had threatened to go to the ECHR and the Government wished to keep her out of the newspapers. It was insisted that this was a one-off exemption and did not set a precedent. There were some other similar one-offs, such as the UK citizen in Paris who was able to obtain a similar result with Petra's assistance. Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of ‘joined-up government’, but this was one area where it was definitely not so.

Press for Change had been founded in 1992. It engaged with lawyers and Members of Parliament. Inevitably a slow process. A private member's bill was introduced in 1996, but as the then Conservative Government refused to endorse it, it was without success. In 2002, another appeal to the ECHR finally met with success, and two years after that the Labour Government passed the Gender Recognition Act – not perfect, but the best in the world at that time.

Comments

Rachel’s book is not listed in either Amazon or Abebooks. It is on the Dwarf Empire web page.












In recent years Rachel has self-identified as HBS, although independently of the two major strands thereof.   In 1998 the only Benjamin Syndrome movement was the Association du Syndrome de Benjamin in Paris run by Tom Reucher, Diane Potiron, Hugues Cariou, and which was inclusive unlike the HBS movement which developed after 2005.

• "Trapped in a man's body with a woman's mind", The Independent, 1 May 1996. Online.
• Rosa Prince. “Transsexuals in test case”. The Independent, 22 February 1998. Online.
• “British Pilot Wins Discrimination Case”. NewsPlanet, June 1, 1998. Online.
• Case of Sheffield and Horsham v. The United Kingdom. European Court of Human Rights, 30 July 1998. Online.
• “UK Transsexuals lose court case”. BBC News, July 30, 1998. Online.
• Christine Burns. “Court Judgement Criticises UK Government's Lack of Action”. PFC, 9^th August 1998. Online.
• Rachel Horsham. Release of the Dove. Dwarf Empire, 1991 and 1998.

Rachel Horsham’s Home Page

Yasmene Jabar (1956 - ) artist, activist, comedienne.

Diana was raised in Noxubee County, Mississippi and then on a farm near Salisbury, North Carolina. She found out about transsexuality by buying Harry Benjamin’s book and the Erickson Foundation pamphlets by mail order from Michael Salem who had an ad in Playboy.

"By the time I got my license to drive a car, I was going out dressed as a girl-- just going shopping, to the movies or out to eat. Sometimes I would talk a cousin into going with me so I would not be alone, at first it was scary but I got used to it quickly and to the fact that I passed as female better than I did as male."

She transitioned socially in 1974 taking hormones purchased at a black-market pharmacy. Diana worked at an impersonator club, Orleans, in Charlotte, N.C.

"The club was run by an older woman named Olean who always wore a long blonde wig, and false eyelashes and lots of makeup, who looked more like a drag queen than the real drag queen".

Diana also worked stealth in a massage parlor to save for her operation. She had surgery from Dr Stanley Biber, 1976, at the age of 20.

She married a Syrian man she met at college and became Diana Salameh. They were together seven years, and he gave her the name Yasmene which means ‘desert flower’. However she finally divorced him for philandering. By this time Yasmene had become a Muslimah.

She returned to Macon, Mississippi to take care of her handicapped mother. She was then an artist making dolls and Santas with a studio in Macon, where she was declared Business Person of the Year 1994.

Her second husband was a Jordanian living in Germany whom she met on the internet. They had a traditional Muslim wedding in Jordan and lived there for many years.

Yasmene set up the web sites Cafe Trans Arabi and the International Transsexual Sisterhood, the first to help trans women in the middle east, and then expanded to help trans women wherever they are. In 2005 she was involved in the Trans Eastern Conference (TEC) in Istanbul.

Personal problems resulted in Yasmene's web sites being discontinued at the end of 2006.

She has returned to living in the US, and has been working a a stand-up comedienne.

She was an early proponents of the concept of Harry Benjamin Syndrome (Yasmene's take) but did not stay with the HBS groups.

• Colin Crawford. Uproar at Dancing Rabbit Creek: Battling over Race, Class and the Environment in the New South. Perseus Books, 1996: 75-6
  
• “The Beautiful Sister: An interview with Yasmene Jabar”. Huriyah Freedom: A Magazine for Queer Muslims. Sep 7, 2004. Online at: transdada2.blogspot.com/2004/11/beautiful-sister-interview-with.html.
  
• http://butterfly-sisterhood.tripod.com.
  
• http://yasmenejabar.tripod.com.
  
• www.granny-maes-place.com.

 __________________________________________________________________________

For some reason Yamene has become part of a miscellaneous group of trans women who are reprinted with their before and after images in several dumb sites professing a false shock that transsexuality exists. 

The ebb and flow of social constructions

There is a misconception by some of those who prefer biologistic or even essentialist explanations that they therefore should reject social construction explanations.  For over 150 years now various writers have been proposing that homosexuality, transvestity and/or transsexuality are caused by some mixture of genetics and pre-natal experience, and for 150 years of effort very little has been established, especially in identifying which factors might make someone gay rather than trans or vice versa.  Every now and then some suggestive aspect of brain anatomy/chemistry such as H-Y Antigens or BTSc neurons is accepted uncritically as an explanation.  However these never seem to move on any next stage so that gender variance is as well explained as say autism or schizophrenia, or be developed to be used as a test,  and indeed attempts at replication of the original results by other scientists often fail.

Biologistic explanations have two serious weaknesses.  They cannot explain the dramatic increase in the percentage of us who are trans.  Add up all the known trans people in the entire nineteenth century and you have fewer than the transsexuals who are the newspapers in any one year in the 21st century.

Secondly biologistic factors do not at all explain the cultural changes of how trans persons are perceived and what options are available to trans persons at any time.  The biology was presumably similar for Lavinia Edwards in 1833, Charlotte Charlaque in 1930, Norma Jackson in 1931, Christine Jorgensen in 1953, Bibíana Fernández in 1977 and Jin Xing in 1995, but the social constructions in which they lived have changed enormously.

In the mid 19th century, a person whom we would now regard as transsexual was regarded as an invert, a category that also included what we now regard as homosexual.  In fact the first usage of the concept of a female trapped in a male body, anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, was to explain male homosexuality.
In the mid 20th century persons like Jorgenson were generally described as transvestists, before the term ‘transsexual’ came into use.

Let us take a small double wave in the sea of social construction.

The HSTS/Autogynephilia distinction was developed by Kurt Freund at what was then the Clarke Institute of Psychology Gender Identity Clinic, and appears in that institute’s Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management 1985, edited by Betty W. Steiner - although different terms are used.   Freund’s protégé and eventual replacement,  Ray Blanchard took the idea and renamed it with the terms that we now use.  Blanchard published papers in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (edited by Richard Green until 2001, and then by Kenneth Zucker) and similar journals that were not read by most trans persons.  However one who did and proclaimed herself to be an autogynephile, was Anne Lawrence who studied for a PhD at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality at San Francisco.  Michael Bailey was one of her thesis advisors.  Speculations continue as to which influenced the other more.  In 2003 Bailey published The Man Who Would Be Queen, and the concept became a public controversy.

Willow Arune, Lisanne Anderson and others set up the Autogynephilia Yahoo group, and a small but significant number of trans women self-identified as autogynephiles.   The group was apparently destroyed by Jennifer Usher manipulating the Yahoo complaints policy.

There were fewer trans women self-identifying as HSTS (homosexual transsexuals).   The most prominent was Kiira Triea, which was odd in that she had previously identified as a lesbian intersex.  She was the prime mover behind transkids.us.  Others involved included Jennifer Ross, Hontas Farmer and Heike Bödeker none of whom still speaks up for HSTS.

Very shortly afterwards, in 2005, Charlotte Goiar met Diane Kearny online, and then they split and founded two competing groups both using the term Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS).  The term had been proposed by Tom Reucher a decade before, but they turned its meaning upside down by applying it to emotions that had been previously expressed by Betty Cowell and Margaret O’Hartigan. The concern here is that most HBS advocates took up the term ‘autogynephile’  (Rose White, the author of the only book on HBS says rather ‘autogyne’ instead implying that she does not properly understand the concept).  It was stated in the short-lived HBS-written Wikipedia page on HBS that non-HBS MTF persons who have gender surgery were either autogynephiles or possibly gay men (no self-identified HSTS woman has ever claimed to be  or to have previously been a gay man).  Kearny claimed that non-HBS transsexuals were autogynephiles and fetishists.  The vast majority of trans women who do not fit these categories were defined out of existence, just as in the Freund-Blanchard-Bailey schema the same vast majority also disappears.

By syllogistic logic, HSTS = not autogynephile = HBS.  However this never worked psychologically.   A small number of HBS persons, could, if you force the HSTS/AGP dichotomy, be considered HSTS.  Diane Kearny who transitioned relatively early and later married a man, is the best candidate.   However most HBSers were first husbands and fathers, and transitioned only later. Thus if we force the dichotomy they would be AGP. Examples include Joanne Proctor, Tabatha Basco, Jennifer Usher, Cathryn Platine.  Rose White’s accounts of her life exclude what she did between the ages of 14 and 57, and it seems reasonable to assume that she fits here also.

The link between autogynephile and HBS was kept alive by the mutual antipathyof Willow Arune and Jennifer Usher across various Usenet fora.

In 2009 the Transkids site was revived by Kay Brown, the author of Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, writing as Cloudy. She also started a blog: On the Science of Changing Sex.  "I slept through the controversy surrounding the publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen. ... Prof. Bailey graciously gave me access to an online version of the book and I read it from front to back in nearly one sitting. Although I disagreed with several minor points, I felt I could have written the book myself. I agreed with each and every major point. Who wouldn't, if they knew what I know."

Of course the problem with HSTS is that it means ‘homosexual transsexual’, which is a confusing term for women who are mainly heterosexual (some are non-sexual).  It is also a very rude term in that it defines a trans women’s orientation by her birth gender.  There have been attempts to make Blanchard’s system less rude by proposing alternate terms, usually that HSTS should be called by the neutral term ‘androphilic’.  Alice Novic also proposed the terms Love-to-be-femme and Act-femme for AGP and HSTS respectively.  However these terms have not caught on.

The insistence on the term HSTS has kept away those HBSers who might have adopted it and also many others (myself included, even though unlike Triea and Brown, I am a graduate of gay lib).   The transkids.us site includes a page strongly insisting that HSTS and not androphilic is the right term.  Kay Brown/Cloudy continues the insistence in her FAQ:   “Transsexuals with this etiology are most often called, “homosexual transsexuals” (HSTS) or “early onset” in the scientific literature.  (This does not imply that they act like, nor identify, as “homosexual”.  It only means that they are sexually and affectionally attracted to the same natal sex.)” And goes on to refer to AGPs as non-homosexuals.   This is the same Kay Brown who in her Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History was critical of Harry Benjamin for using the term ‘male transsexual’ for a trans woman.

Anyway the tents are rolled up, and the circus has almost left town. 

• The Kearny web site and forum are derelict sites.
• The Goiar web site stands, but the forum has become inactive.
• The Rose White book caused such embarrassment that most HBS-ers declined to even mention it.  There has not been a second HBS book from anybody else.
• TS-Si which was initially proudly HBS, later removed the term and denied being HBS, and has now closed.
• Suzan Cooke, who initially labelled Women Born Transsexual an HBS site, later realized that she did not really identify with the HBSers and removed the label.
• In 2009 various HBSers wrote pages for the English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Simple Wikipedias, but were unable/refused to include critical opinions, give a history of HBS or support their claims.
• Alice Novic has removed almost all content from her web site.
• Cathryn Platine has announced that all “trans themed blog entries“ have been removed from radicalbitch.wordpress.com.
• Joanne Proctor and Tiira Triea are no longer with us.

Charlotte Goiar, who is the youngest person mentioned here, is now 40.  I don’t think that I have seen any enthusiasm for either HSTS/AGP or HBS among persons under 40. Their time is over

• Andrea James. “Denise Magner aka Kiira Triea: fabrications and hoaxes”.  Transsexual Road Map, 12 November 2012.  www.tsroadmap.com/info/transkids/denise-magner.html
• Kay Brown/Cloudy.  “FAQ on the Science”. On the Science of Changing Sex.  http://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/
• Zagria.  “A Blanchard-Binary Timeline”.   A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 20/10/2010.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/10/blanchard-binary-timeline-part-1-to.html  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2010/10/blanchard-binary-timeline-part-2-2001.html.
• Zagria.  “What is Autogynephilia?” A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 22/02/2009.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-is-autogynephilia.html
• Zagria. “A short history of (Harry) Benjamin Syndrome.”, A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 24 April 2012.  https://zagria.blogspot.com/2012/04/short-history-of-harry-benjamin.html.
• “Harry Benjamin Syndrome“.  Wikibin. http://wikibin.org/articles/harry-benjamin-syndrome.html.

A short history of (Harry) Benjamin Syndrome.

Summary: 

a) the sentiments of HBS were expressed long before the term was proposed

b) the first usage of the term was in Paris in 1994, where it was a radical and inclusive term

c) the Argentinean usage seems to be closer to the Parisian, than to the Goiar-Kearny usage

d) TS-Si and WBT identified with HBS in 2007, but later disassociated

e) no HBS person has published a history of the HBS movement

f) neither Reucher nor Goiar seem to have discussed the other.

1969

-- Georgina Somerset sued the doctors' weekly newspaper, Pulse International, for comparing her to Christine Jorgensen, "implying that I was homosexual, would have had breast implants, electrolysis and was probably not legally married, I had no choice but to instigate libel proceedings for, indeed, all these premises were totally false".   

1972

-- Betty Cowell interviewed in the Sunday Times: "I was a freak. I had an operation and I’m not a freak any more. I had female chromosome make-up, XX. The people who have followed me have often been those with male chromosomes, XY. So they’ve been normal people who’ve turned themselves into freaks by means of the operation.”

1990

-- Georgina Somerset wrote to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine,  "These true transsexuals are rare, often asexual and although popular, usually lonely sensitive souls, and its is these who primarily deserve our pity and time-consuming help. However, large numbers of homosexuals, antisocials, exhibitionists and perverts have for some time been jumping onto the transsexual bandwagon, bringing the subject and the medical profession into disrepute. These are more aptly trans-homo-sexuals, often having their partners at their side when having surgery, many afterwards becoming prostitutes."

1993      

-- Margaret O’Hartigan wrote:

"Every application of the term transgender to me is an attempt to mask what I've done and as such co-opts my life, denies my experience, violates my very soul.”('Changing sex is not changing gender', Sound Out, May 1993:20.). 

While she is the obvious pre-curser to the Goiar-Kearny flavour of HBS, she was never acknowledged by them.

-- O'Hartigan helped Dean Kotula, herself and others file complaints in Oregon on the basis that they were covered under disabilities anti-discrimination laws.  

1994

 -- Tom Reucher, Diane Potiron, Hugues Cariou and others found Association du Syndrome de Benjamin in Paris.  This was an inclusive group working with gays and with the trans spectrum.

-- Melanie Phillips, having completed transition with surgery from Dr Biber,  set up the first online transgender support site, and became one of the most cited advisors on developing a female voice.

1996

-- O'Hartigan received Pride NorthWest’s “Spirit of Pride Award” for her “tireless advocacy for the trans community and for trans consciousness raising with both the Les/bi/gay and general straight cultures”. She has opposed the removal of Gender Identity Disorder from the DSM in that the associated HBIGDA Standard of Care is non-abusive unlike what she was exposed to as a child, and attacked Phyllis Burke's Gender Shock which documents abusive attempts to 'cure' gender variant children as a 'transphobic' book.

1997 

-- Association du Syndrome de Benjamin start an annual march in Paris, Existrans, the first Saturday in October.

-- Cathryn Platine, who later identified as HBS, founded the Maetreum of Cybele Magna Mater in Catskill in upstate New York.  

1998

-- Rachel Horsham, who later identified as HBS, appealed to European Court of Human Rights about UK's continued refusal to re-issue birth certificates for trans persons.

2003

-- Georgina Somerset wrote to the Daily Telegraph to oppose the Gender Recognition Bill, then before Parliament, and re-iterated that "trans-sexuals do not change their sex but only become simulacra of the opposite sex".  This was quoted with approval by Norman Tebbit in the House of Lords.

2004 

-- Tom Reucher left the Association du Syndrome de Benjamin.

2005

-- Charlotte Goiar of Spain set up www.shb-info.org.  
-- She posted on the Australian WOMAN forum and encountered Diane Kearny in the US who already had a forum.  Goiar participated for a while and then they separated.  
-- September: Síndrome de Harry Benjamin Spanish Yahoo Forum founded.
-- October Existrans attracted over 1,000 marchers.

-- Yasmene Jabar had set up the web sites Cafe Trans Arabi and the International Transsexual Sisterhood, the first to help trans women in the middle east, and then expanded to help trans women wherever they are. In 2005 she was involved in the Trans Eastern Conference (TEC) in Istanbul.  

-- Cathryn Platine organised relief efforts for LGBT victims of hurricane Katrina,

 2006

-- May: The Original Benjamin Syndrome English Yahoo Forum founded.  Proposed HBS Standards of Care published.
-- Goiar and Kearny both then had a website, a forum and a Standards of Care. Goiar’s  was multi-lingual.  Kearny’s was in English only. Kearny’s required members to be post-op, a condition that Goiar could not meet. 
-- Laura Amato joined Goiar’s forum enthusiastically.
-- Alejandra Portatadino of Argentina completed transition:  an HBS woman, she worked with GLBTTI and sex workers. 

-- Yasmene Jabar's web sites were discontinued.   She became an advocate of HBS, put an explanation by Goiar on her web site, but did not stay with either of the two groups.

-- Melanie Phillips wrote on her website:  "I've presented myself as just another transsexual and documented my story in the hope it might smooth the way for others.  But now I wonder if it doesn't really foster false hope. … out of all those who have sex reassignment surgery, only a very few have female minds.  All the rest, no matter how feminine they have become, have male minds - they don't just think like men, then think as men. ... After all, those who speak in a female voice are as rare as those with female minds, in my experience.  Sure, anyone can learn to be more feminine in their speaking, but to actually alter the timber of the voice so it is rich and full but female in resonance, that may be beyond the ability of the rank and file transsexual."

2007

-- Karen Gurney “Harry Benjamin Syndrome is a neurobiological condition”. 
-- Laura Amato, turned off by disparagements  and anti TG and anti GLBT sentiments within the group, warns her readers. 
-- Diane Kearny, Jennifer Usher and 3 others attend a WPATH Symposium in Chicago to give an HBS presentation. 
-- A BBC news item on Argentinian trans woman Nati and her support from the gay community uses the expression “Harry Benjamin Syndrome” – while this one article is cited by HBS advocates for many years, the press doesn’t use the term again until 2012. 
-- Suzan Cooke:  “Good-Bye to Transgender and All That”  says that: “The transgender community is like a cult that pounds extremely negative messages into the heads of people treated for TS/HBS”.   
-- Lisa Jain Thompson: “Ruminations On HBS, Revolution, Society, And Real Life” – editor of TS-Si identifies with HBS.

2008

-- Association du Syndrome de Benjamin is dissolved and Objectif Respect Trans continues with many of the same members.
-- Alejandra Portatadino recognized by Buenos Aires Legislature as one of 20 Argentinean women who ‘broke traditional moulds’.

2009

-- Zagria’s Encyclopedia Gender Variance Who’s Who discusses the major HBS players. 
-- Goiar revises her estimate of the frequency of HBS and estimates that: “an extremely rare condition [1:100,000]”.  Zagria  points out that therefore HBS are only a fraction of 1% of transsexuals. 
-- Goiar removed her Myspace page.
-- Suzan Cooke’s blog Women Born Transsexual has HBS in its About, although her postings show that she is reconsidering her allegiance.
-- HBS International (Joanne Proctor) created pages on English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Simple Wikipedias. However they did not comply with Wikipedia standards in that they were mainly an advertisement with no historical references and made unsupported medical claims. The English version was also very rude about the other 99% of transsexuals. The pages lasted only several weeks.
-- Joanne Proctor writing as P.J. Schrödinger: Trans-Fried Fluff , in which she claims that: “Wikipedia should be treated as the publishing arm of CAMH”. 
-- Joanne became the HBS liaison to OII. 
-- Goiar created an HBS Knol . 

2010

-- Rose White writing as as Violet Grey: Harry Benjamin Syndrome Review.  CompletelyNovel,  www.completelynovel.com/books/102047/read-online  (Review).  A very idiosyncratic book obsessed with the dangers of oral sex.   Goiar endorsed it and linked to it; other HBS persons ignored it.  None have disassociated from it.

-- HBS International put a page on psychology.wikia.com  in January. It lasted less than a day.
-- Joanne Proctor HBS blog  was discontinued, as was the New Zealand HBS  site.
-- Cassandra Speaks  (HBS) blog was discontinued.
-- Diane Kearny’s HBS International  site was discontinued.
-- Ophelia Bradley. ’They Need Labels’: Contemporary Institutional And Popular Frameworks For Gender Variance. MA Thesis. Georgia State University. Discusses AGP, HSTS and HBS persons using their blog names rather than their person names.

-- the Maetreum of Cybele Magna Mater denied recognition as a religious institution and thus exemption from local property taxes.   The resulting win established legal precedence re minority religious property rights that range far beyond New York State.

2011

-- Goiar’s forum discontinued and closed.  Its active members moved to a Facebook group. 
-- Joanne Proctor closed Trans-Fried Fluff , and replaced it with trans-friedfluff . 
-- Joanne died from medical problems.

-- Cathryn Platine. The Cybeline Revival.  Home Brew Press.
-- TS-SI attempted to organise an annual Transsexual Independence Day whereon they urged their followers to write to politicians thus: “People of transsexual history, those born transsexual, have a correctable medical condition that should not be confused with the sociopolitical and lifestyle activism of transgender activists. This is important because the willful confusion imposed by transgenderism deflects effective medical treatment from those who desperately need it.”

2012

-- Goiar at age 39 wins a court ruling that the Galacian Health Service should pay for her to have genital surgery.  This results in many Spanish newspapers using the expression Síndrome de Harry Benjamin for the first time.

-- TS-SI closed down.   It had some time before denied that it was an HBS site.

2013

-- the Galician government appealed to the Spanish Supreme Court, which in turn also found in Goiar's favour in May 2013.  By September, as no steps were taken to conform with the ruling, Goiar went to the press. SERGAS then wasted almost two years sending Charlotte to public clinics in Málaga and Barcelona that did not do the required type of operation.

2015

-- at age 42, Goiar finally had surgery in the private Instituto de Cirurxía Plástica, Barcelona, with Dr Iván Mañero - the only clinic in Spain to offer colovaginoplasty. 

--  http://shb-info.org was taken down.

2017

-- Goiar allied herself with the ultra-Catholic Hazte Oír and its opposition to sex education and to ‘gender ideology’. She also claimed that the new ICD-11 term Gender Incongruence is the same thing as HBS.

2021

-- Charlotte Goiar.  The Original Harry Benjamin Syndrome Book.   Self published.

• Laura Amato. “Laura's Harry Benjamin Syndrome HBS: A Peer Review”  2007. http://harrybenjaminsyndrome-not-transsexual.com.
• Suzan Cooke.  “Good-Bye to Transgender and All That”.  TS-Si, 07 May 2007. http://ts-si.org/guest-columns/2347-good-bye-to-transgender-and-all-that.
• Lisa Jain Thompson.  “Ruminations On HBS, Revolution, Society, And Real Life”.  TS-Si, 25 November 2007. http://ts-si.org/component/content/article/2733.
• Diane Kearny.  “Letter to the American Psychological Association”.  09 July 2007. http://ts-si.org/files/LetterToTheAmericanPsychologicalAssociation.pdf.
• Karen Gurney “Harry Benjamin Syndrome is a neurobiological condition”. 2007-11. www.shb-info.org/hbsbio.html. 
• Daniel Schweimler.  “Argentine boy sex change approved”.  BBC News, 26 September 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7013579.stm.
•  http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/HarryBenjaminsSyndrome.  Closed in 2011.
•  www.shb-info.org.
• “Harry Benjamin Syndrome“.  Wikibin. http://wikibin.org/articles/harry-benjamin-syndrome.html.

TG, word and concepts: Part 5: The Backlash

Part 1: Introduction: the meanings of Transgender
Part 2: The early years: up to 1990.
Part 3: The full-blown usage after 1990
Part 4: The Myth that Transgender is a Princian Concept
Part 5: The Backlash    Part 6: Conclusions.

Antagonism between transvestites and transsexuals dates at least back to the 1960s. Harry Benjamin commented with regret: “Too many individuals are that way; what they do not like must be forbidden and punished. Then they are satisfied. I have even met transvestites who dislike (or pretend to dislike) transsexualism so much that they are against estrogen treatment and operation (for reasons of self protection?). There are also transsexuals who dislike transvestites as well as homosexuals. Intolerance can be found in strange quarters. (1966:114-5)”.

 

Whilst Virginia Prince and Kymberleigh Richards attempted to seize the word ‘transgender’ and narrow it down to match their own agenda, the other separatist camp, a small subset of transsexuals, has come to reject vehemently the term ‘transgender’.

Transsexual separatists who do not associate transgender with Prince:

The earliest such rejection that I have found is by Margaret O’Hartigan: 1993 “Every application of the term transgender to me is an attempt to mask what I’ve done and as such co-opts my life , denies my experience, violates my very soul. ('Changing sex is not changing gender', Sound Out, May 1993:20.)”. O’Hartigan is also the first writer that I have found who uses the term ‘transgender borg’. However in the quotations from her paper in both Califia and Namaste ( I have not been able to obtain the original) there is no mention of Prince.

Karen Gurney’s seminal “Harry Benjamin Syndrome is a neurobiological condition”, 2007, while being very emphatic that HBS is not transgender has no mention of Prince.

Joanne Proctor on her site http://trans-friedfluff.blogspot.com, 2011, argues that transgender and gender identity is a new way of being human and did not exist before John Money’s work. She has no mention of Prince.

The HBS Wikipedia page, 2009, has has been removed but one version has been archived here, has no mention of Prince

Charlotte Goiar’s Knol, 2009, on ‘Harry Benjamin Syndrome’ has no mention of Prince.

Those who do:

Diane Kearny “I have no idea why it is that the FTM transsexuals continually link themselves with transgender. Transgender is a term coined by and for a male transvestite, Charles “Virginia” Prince, who made it quite clear that he was not a transsexual and actually thought those of us who opted for surgery were delusional.” Here, 2006

Suzan Cooke. “Good-Bye to Transgender and All That”. TS-SI. 07 May 2007. http://ts-si.org/content/view/2347/995. “The coiner of the term transgender was Virginia Prince, a heterosexual crossdresser who held those of us who had sex reassignment surgery in contempt. Virginia was particularly vicious in her opinion regarding WBTs who were lesbian after sex reassignment surgery. She called us freaks and mistakes.” This was a seminal paper for separatists.  Suzan, like Margaret uses ‘transgender borg’ to group together an extremely disparate group of people.

Lisa Jain Thompson. TS-SI, 30 December 2007. http://ts-si.org/global-warning/2832-sex-gender-and-bathrooms-a-discussion-of-transgender-part-1 “Virginia Prince, a male crossdresser and a staunch promoter of heterosexual transvestism since the late 1950s, invented the term "transgender" in the 1990s to distinguish male crossdressers from men and women born with HBS.”

JustJennifer, July 22,2011. “the term "transgender," or more specifically, "transgenderist" originated with Arnold Lowman, better known as Charles "Virginia" Prince.  Yes, Prince came up with the term to describe those who crossdress full time.”

Purple Speaks, May 8, 2011. [Prince]”invented the term “transgender” out of elitism and hate.”

Tracie O'Keefe. “Transgender: Another Ghettoised Label and the Lost Sex and Gender Diverse Community”. World Association for Sexual Health, 2007. “The term 'transgender' was first made popular by Virginia Prince (1978), who used it to describe people whom she said were like her.” www.tracieokeefe.com/transgender%20ghettoised.htm. "Don't call me transgender".The Scavenger. 21 Nov 2010. www.thescavenger.net/glbsgdq/dont-call-me-transgender.html. O’Keefe gets her citation wrong: she claims that Prince used ‘transgenderist’ in ‘Transsexuals and Pseudotranssexuals’, 1978. O’Keefe’s preferred term is ‘sex and gender diverse people’ which would be fine with me if it were to catch on, except for its cumbersomeness (would it become SGD?), but I suspect that most separatists would not like it, because it regroups gays and trans together, undoing the separation that ‘transgender’ enabled. Of course O’Keefe is not a separatist. Her books are quite inclusive, but she talks at times like a separatist.

RadicalBitch. Riding the Second Wave, Aug 18, 2011. “Prince went on to organized Tri Ess, or the Society for the Second Self. These people became today’s transgenders. Women born transsexed mostly avoided these people although, sometimes early in dealing with their transsexuality, they crossed paths.”

Dana Lane Taylor. TS/IS Liberation. May 21, 2011. “First of all, the term transgender was coined by a transsexual-hating crossdressing male  named Charles Prince who wanted to separate himself from transsexuals. That fact alone sends shivers up our spines.”.

Things to note:

• With the exception of O’Keefe (who is pursuing a different goal) all the Prince-coined-tg rants are in the US. Prince is just not that important in other countries. Note than in the UK, prominent transvestites Charlotte Bach, Yvonne Sinclair, Vernon Coleman write as if she never existed.
• The earliest Prince-coined-tg claim that I found from a separatist is Kearny’s in 2006. I am actually surprised that the date is this late. If you do know of any earlier ones please tell us. 
• Kearny and Cooke seem to be the major promoters of the separatist Prince-coined-tg claim, the others following their example.
• Kearny and Cooke end up in de-facto collusion with Prince, Kimberleigh and Cook-Riley in giving Prince credit where she has no real claim.

The Parallelism of the Two Separatisms

I have previously posted Did Virginia Prince have Harry Benjamin Syndrome? Here I would like to simply iterate that both separatisms, Tri-Ess and HBS/CT/not-TG have the following in common:

1. They dislike the gender non-conforming, and especially those who are blatant about it, and thus they are reasonably described as transgenderphobic
2. Many, although not all, in both camps are uncomfortable with open homosexuality, and choose to ignore where gays, lesbians and trans have worked together, e.g for the Gender Recognition Acts.
3. Both camps have a standard solution, and are critical of those who make different decisions. ‘Do it may way or not at all!’.
4. Both camps credit Prince with coining ‘transgender’ when she did no such thing. 
5. Prince maintained that transvestite and transsexual are two separate conditions, and are not on a continuum.  Many not-TG persons strongly agree with her. 
6. Ekins, TG Prenomenon: 20 writes:  " too firmly rooted in an acceptance of the binary gender divide, and, in particular, often a very stereotypical and dated view of that divide".  He is writing of Prince, but could all too easily be writing of the not-TGs.

Certainly some of the not-TG people come across as continuing the work of Virginia Prince with only the very slight twist of being pro-surgery instead of anti-surgery.

What if the word ‘transgender’ is abolished?

Let us concentrate on meaning 1, which Benjamin called ‘non-surgical transsexual’. Plenty of trans persons do not mention whether they have in fact had surgery. Unless you see them naked, or are their doctor, you don’t know. What is the term for a trans person who may or may not have had surgery? If we are not to call them ‘transgender’ the word ‘transsexual’ will spread back to Benjamin’s usage, and surgery will be optional for transsexuals. Some people already use the word in this fashion.

The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe

On Charlotte Gioar’s HBS site, about a quarter of the way down, just above the plug for the never-happening Danish Girl movie (how typical of Goiar to be glad that a major trans role would be going to a cis actress),  you will find a plug for The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe.

What is The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe?

HBRCE promises a conference in Oslo in September 2012, and then:

The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe (HBRC-Europe) is a professional organization devoted to the understanding and treatment of the diagnosis transsexualism.

HBRC-Europe Mission Statement
As a European multidisciplinary professional Association the mission of The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe (HBRC-Europe) is to promote evidence based care, education, research, advocacy, and public policy regarding the diagnosis transsexualism

HBRC-Europe Vision Statement
The vision of The Harry Benjamin resource center-Europe (HBRS- Europe) is to expand its European authority by promoting, education, advocacy, training, research, quality health care and best practice standards for service providers and policy makers regarding the diagnosis transsexualism.

And that is it.  There is a list of board members, and a set of bylaws.  And a Links page with no links. But nothing that you might call content.  No essays, no discussion, no policy statement.  In particular, as it was Charlotte Goiar who recommended this site to us, there is no mention at all of HBS.

There is also Harry Benjamin Ressurssenter (see also Wikipedia page).  By their similar names, one would assume that the two groups are related, but neither web site mentions the other.

Who are The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe?

With only one exception, all the board are Norwegian.

• The president is Thore Langfeldt.   Here is his Wikipedia page.  His major works are: Sexologi ,1993, Barns seksualitet (Child Sexuality),2000, and Erotikk og fundamentalisme: Fra mesopotamia til kvinnefronten (Erotica and fundamentalism: from Mesopotamia to the women’s  movement),2005.  He was active in the paedophila study group, Pedofil Arbeidsgruppe, in the 1970s, and was a defence witness for Erik Andersen, Norway’s most prominent sex crime convict.
• The vice president is Ingvill Størksen, an advisor to the Norwegian Centre Party.  She has published on gay and lesbian youth and on living with AIDS.
• Board member Ira Haraldsen is a psycho-endocrinologist who studies Gonadotropin Releasing  Hormone Receptor Blockage and brain development.
• Board member Olav Bendiksby is writing a PhD on “young violent sex offenders in psychoanalytically oriented intensive psychotherapy”.
• Board member Tone Maria Hansen is a trans woman, a sociologist, a co-founder and chair of Landsforeningen for transseksuelle, now known as  the Harry Benjamin Ressurssenter in 2000.  She is in WPATH and gave a paper at IFGE in 2003.
• Board member Richard Green is research director at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic.

Conclusion

The Harry Benjamin Resource Centre Europe is a tentative organization of academics, who, with the exception of Hansen and Green, have little experience with trans people.  It is yet to be seen what will come out of it.

What is strange is that Charlotte Goiar endorses HBRCE.   There is not the slightest indication that HBRCE will endorse HBS.

Joanne Proctor (1947 – 2011) HBS activist.

Proctor was raised in Kaikoura on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, the second of four children. After a difficult adolescence he was drug dependent for seven years, culminating in a suicide attempt. Neither parent accepted his femininity, and both died before he transitioned.

In 1980s, Proctor worked as a crane driver at the port of Lyttelton outside Christchurch during a period of strikes.

He starting female hormones and became Joanne when she started a BA at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and then qualified as a lawyer in 1990 at the University of Waikato Law School.



An unsympathetic psychiatrist told her emphatically that her stature and looks eliminated her as a potential candidate. However she persevered. She was on an invalid's benefit when she was scheduled to have surgery at Waikato Hospital in May 1997, but the local health authority decided to stop funding sex changes less than a week before.

In 2000 the Chief Ombudsman, Brian Elwood, ruled that Joanne had been unfairly treated, but it still took two more years before the surgery was done by New Zealand's sole sex-change surgeon, Peter Walker. Without consulting her, Walker decided to do a colovaginoplasty rather than a penile inversion, and left Joanne with post-surgical complications, which ended up costing the New Zealand Health Service as much again as the vaginoplasty had done.

The Chief Ombudsman had to appeal to the Broadcasting Standards Authority in that TVNZ edited an interview with him about Joanne to imply that the decision was a landmark and unusual when Elwood had in fact emphasized that it was neither.

Joanne lived at an isolated country home with minimal human interaction: "six or seven 'contact hours' with people a month, including grocery shopping and GP visits" (Martin 1/6/02).

She became an HBS activist on the internet, and the HBS liaison to OII in February 2009. She was also active on TS-SI, and was one of the major authors of the short-lived HBS Wikipedia page.

In 2010 she closed down her personal blog, and the New Zealand HBS site, and wrote Trans-Fried-Fluff, then deleted its contents, and rewrote it as Trans-FriedFluff. She has claimed that Wikipedia should be treated as the publishing arm of CAMH, she was an admirer of Jan Wålinder, and of Thomas Szasz, and presented 'gender' as a creation of Robert Stoller and her co-patriate John Money, and transgenderism as a social construct similar to multiple-personality disorder and false memory syndrome. Sometimes she posted using the name P. J. Schrödinger.

"Professor Wålinder’s definition fell out of favour solely due to John Money’s duplicity over the outcome of the Reimer case. It was not the definition that was wrong. It was John Money. (Schrödinger,2010)"

Joanne died at age 63 of medical problems.

• Paul Yandall. "Roller-coaster week for sex swap candidate". NZHerald, Nov 27, 2000. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=162082.
• "TVNZ ordered to hand over tapes from news interview". NZ Herald, Aug 8, 2001. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=205498.
• Yvonne Martin. "$24,000 sex change surgery on the State". The Press, 06 April 2002. Online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transgendernews/message/125.
• Yvonne Martin. "Jo's vagina monologue". The Press, 01 June 2002. Online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transgendernews/message/382.
• Joanne Proctor. "Gender inquiry loses plot". The Press, 15 Aug 2007. Online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transgendernews/message/22135.
• "Use of Govt funds for sex-change surgery upheld ". Stuff. 19/01/2008. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/223145.
• "Joanne Proctor, Noted IS/TS Advocate, Passes Away". TS-SI, 10 March 2011. http://ts-si.org/the-dialogue/29251-joanne-proctor-noted-ists-advocate-passes-away.
• www.harrybenjaminsyndrome-nz.co.nz. Removed.
• http://joanneproctor-hbs.blogspot.com. Removed.
• http://trans-fried-fluff.blogspot.com. Empty.
• P.J. Schrödinger. Comment on Paul Burkhart.  "Open Mic: A Prolegomena of Transgenderism (pt.ii)". The Long Way Home.    http://paulburkhart.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/open-mic-a-prolegomena-of-transgenderism-pt-ii.
• http://trans-friedfluff.blogspot.com.
  
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The TS-Si obituary says that Joanne served "with distinction as a barrister".  However this is not confirmed by the numerous articles in the NZ press.

 "Wikipedia should be treated as the publishing arm of CAMH". Does this mean that she thought that, say, Andrea James, is a spokesperson for the CAMH?

Wålinder's definition of transsexualism was:

1. A sense of belonging to the opposite sex, of having been born into the wrong sex, of being one of nature’s extant errors.
2. A sense of estrangement with one's own body; all indications of sex differentiation are considered as afflictions and repugnant.
3. A strong desire to resemble physically the opposite sex via therapy including surgery.
4. A desire to be accepted in the community as belonging to the opposite sex.

I agree that Jan Wålinder should not be so forgotten.  Even the Swedish Wikipedia does not have an entry for him.  However to connect his lapse into obscurity and Money's behaviour in the Reimer case is going out on a limb. True, the ICD definition of transsexualism was originally that of Wålinder and later adopted a John Money type wording based on gender identity, but that was because Wålinder had slipped into obscurity.

She doesn't apologize for, explain or even mention Szasz's transphobia.

Joanne's account of 'gender' totally ignores its use before the 19th century when it was reduced in scope to grammar, and also ignores how feminists took the concept and turned it into something quite different from what Money had intended.