The Harry Benjamin Foundation in the mid 1960s

In 1963 Benjamin was invited by Dr Robert Hotchkiss, the urologist, to read a paper at New York's Bellevue Hospital. He also read a paper at the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex (of which he was a charter member). That year Reed Erickson became a Benjamin patient and almost completed transition. He then founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), financed entirely by himself.

Through his foundation Erickson agreed to finance the newly created Harry Benjamin Foundation (HBF) for three years at a minimum of $1,500 a month. The money from Erickson enabled a move to a larger office at 86th St and Park Avenue. The foundation sought to enhance Benjamin’s professional status. Robert Stoller at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) had disparaged Benjamin in that he was not psychiatrically trained, and did not publish in the most reputable journals. Stoller politely declined to serve on the Foundation’s advisory board. Nevertheless Benjamin was able to use the Foundation to enhance his working relationship with other doctors and researchers in the field.

Meetings of the foundation were held in the office, mainly on Saturday evenings. The members conducted psychological, endocrinological and neurological tests on transsexual patients, and interviewed them before and after surgery, looking to prove or disprove any genetic, hormonal or neurological basis for the condition.

Those in regular attendance

Harry Benjamin

Of course. GVWW

John Money

Money had become head of the Psychohormonal Research Unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1962, and was keen on opening a Gender Identity Clinic.

Richard Green

In addition to attending meetings of the Foundation, Green also spent time in Benjamin’s office writing approval letters for his clients, and writing what became two appendices to Benjamin’s 1966 book. GVWW

Leo Wollman

Gynecologist and hypnotist, Wollman claimed to have seen more transsexual patients than Benjamin had. At this time they shared the practice, and worked from the same office. Wollman also ran a group session, the first Sunday of every month, near his other office at Coney Island. GVWW.

Henry Guze

Guze was a professor at the American Academy of Psychotherapies which he co-founded. He was also a co-founder of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, where he was president 1964-6. He specialized in psychosomatic illness, schizophrenia and disorders of sexual behaviour, and was a hypnotist. He proposed a 4-part typology of transsexuals: 1) effeminate in structural appearance 2) trained early to adopt a cross-gender role, as among some Native American tribes 3) problems of self-identification, perhaps as a result of a psychotic process 4) latent or expressed homosexuals. He found fantasies of sex change and cross-dressing common among ‘so-called normal’ people but regarded the expression of such desires as markedly fetishistic. Guze died in 1970, age 51, of cardiac arrest. Obituary.

Ruth Rae Doorbar

Doorbar had published on sex offenders and sex within marriage in the 1950s. Her major work with the HBF was “Psychological Testing of Transsexuals” (Online), which found more trans woman than expected with high IQs. At a time when inter-racial couples were still illegal in some US states, her boyfriend was Jamaican, and she moved to Jamaica with him and became a pioneer in Jamaican psychotherapy.

Robert Veit Sherwin

Sherwin was a lawyer and co-founder of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex. He was the author of Sex and the Statutory Law, 1949. He advised Benjamin and others on mayhem and other legal aspects of what they were doing. He published “The Legal Problem in Transvestism” in 1954, and a revised version “Legal Aspects of Male Transsexualism” was included in Green and Money, 1969. He died in 1979.

Herbert Kupperman

Kupperman authored Human Endocrinology, 3 volumes, 1963, and was known for his work on hormones in women. He was a pioneer in identifying the chromosomal sex of intersex infants.

Wardell Pomeroy

Trained as clinical psychologist, Pomeroy had been a major colleague of Alfred Kinsey, and they and Clyde Martin were co-authors of the landmark books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). He moved to New York in 1963 and went into private practice as a sex therapist. He was known for his prodigious sexual appetite; while primarily gynephilic, he also went with men for balance. Later he wrote popular books on adolescent sexuality, that those who would ban books kept putting on their lists. He died in 2001 at age 87. EN.Wikipedia. Obituary.

And when they were in New York

Christian Hamburger

The Danish endocrinologist who had overseen Christine Jorgensen’s transition. EN.Wikipedia.

Walter Alverez

Alverez (1884-1978) was a prominent physician at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. After retiring in 1951 he began writing a medical column which soon became syndicated across North America. He was noted for his enlightened attitude to homosexuality. EN.Wikipedia.

-------

Benjamin met monthly with John Money and Richard Green and the idea was raised of applying the kind of surgery being done on intersex patients to transsexuals as well. Money took three post-operative patients of Harry Benjamin to meet his colleagues at Johns Hopkins. As the Gender Identity Clinic there began to coalesce, it was integrated into the work of the Foundation, which provided them with patient referrals. Reed Erickson’s EEF donated $85,000 to the Gender Identity Clinic over a few years, and Reed became quite friendly with John Money. He went to Johns Hopkins for a double mastectomy repair in 1965.

The Harry Benjamin Foundation similarly endorsed the gender clinic at Stanford University. The Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis was considering opening a Gender Identity Clinic led by Donald Hastings. Two members went to New York, met with the HBF and were able to examine patients of Benjamin and Wollman who had had surgery abroad. Their surgeon, John Blum, went to Johns Hopkins to observe transgender surgery.

Harry Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon came out in 1966. Guze gave it a very positive review in The Journal of Sex Research. Also in 1966, Benjamin referred Phyllis Wilson who was the subject of the first sex-change operation by Howard Jones at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He also witnessed an operation performed by Jones. By now Stoller had come round, and after meeting with Benjamin described him to Green as “not only a good heart but plenty of good clinical data’.

The Harry Benjamin Foundation presented eight separate papers at a meeting at the prestigious New York Academy of Sciences on January 16, 1967, mainly considering etiology based on pre and post examinations of Benjamin's patients. Stoller flew in from Los Angeles and presented the first paper. Green returned from London. Stoller and Green presented papers based on research at UCLA. Kupperman, Pomeroy, Money, Doorbar, Wollman and Guze also presented papers, based on their work with the HBF.

Benjamin and Erickson had been having disputes, sometimes quite petty, about how the money was spent. In the spring of 1967 the EEF grant was reduced to $1,200, and in the fall – after the promised three years expired-- stopped entirely. Shortly afterwards, the Erickson Educational Foundation asked Benjamin to vacate the office that it was subsidizing.

There had been discussion that a book should emerge to embody the findings of the Foundation, but this was felt to be too narrow. In particular that would exclude the important work being done in Europe. The book, financed again by the EEF, eventually came out in 1969 as Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment edited by Richard Green and John Money.

Publications by members of the Foundation

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. With a bibliography and appendix by Richard Green.  A close reading.
• Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 29,4II, January 16, 1967.

Robert Stoller. “Etiological Factors in Male Transsexualism”. p431-3.
Herbert S Kupperman, “The Endocrine Status of the Transsexual Patient”. p434-9.
Richard Green. “Physician Emotionalism in the Treatment of the Transsexual”. p440-3.
Wardell B Pomeroy. “A report on the Sexual Histories of Twenty-Five Transsexuals”.p444-7..
John Money & Ralph Epstein. “Verbal Aptitude in Eonism and Prepubertal Effeminacy – A Feminine Trait”. p448-54.
Ruth Rae Doorbar. “Psychological Testing of Transsexuals: A Brief Report of Results from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Thematic Apperception Test and the House-Tree-Person Test”. p455-62.
Leo Wollman. “Transsexualism: Gynecological Aspects. p463.
Henry Guze. “The Transsexual Patient: A problem in Self Perception”. p464-7.

• Henry Guze. “Review of The Transsexual Phenomenon by Harry Benjamin”. The Journal of Sex Research, 3,2, May 1967: 183-5.
• Richard Green & John Money. Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment. The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969. With contribution by Benjamin, Erickson, Money, Green, Stoller, Guze, Pomeroy, Doorbar, Hamburger, Wollman, Sherwin.

Other

• Anon.  "Review of Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Ser II, vol 29, No 4, pp428-467".  Transvestia, 51, June 1968: 54-7.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 214-5, 219, 222, 223.
• Richard Green. Gay Rights, Trans Rights: A psychiatrist/lawyer’s 50-year battle. 2018: chp 16.
• Julian Gill-Peterson. Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018: 139-140.

Transgender lexicons: John Money 2: other words

Transgender lexicons:

Virginia Prince
Rose White
Raven Usher
Chris Bartlett
Jack Molay
Raphael Carter
John Money – part 1: gender and transexual

Other Words in Money’s Glossaries:

Man & Woman, Boy & Girl

Gynandromorphy: woman-man-shape. Thus, literally, the term means having some of the body morphology and measurements of an average woman, and some of an average man, or being at neither extreme.

Paraphilia/paraphiliac: a psychological condition of being obsessively responsive to, and dependent on an unusual or unacceptable stimulus in order to have a state of sexual arousal initiated or maintained.

The Man Who Invented Gender: “Although the Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of paraphilia in 1925, it was largely Money who popularized the term among psychologists. Eventually, the word replaced perversions in psychiatric literature.“

Love and Love Sickness:

Allosex-avoidancy: a socially dictated constraint on personal disclosure to members of the other, but not one’s own, sex. It affects both behaviour (as in locker-room nudity, for example) and communication, as in sexual joking.

Androgynophilia: erotosexual pairing with a man and a woman serially or simultaneously by a member of either sex.

Andromimetic: a girl or woman being a person manifesting the features or qualities of a male in bodily appearance, dress and behaviour. There is no fixed vernacular synonym except, maybe, a bull dyke, that is a female homosexual who lives in the role of a man. She may request breast removal, but not genital surgery, and usually not hormones to masculinize the voice, beard and body hair.

Apotemnophilia: the condition of being dependent on being an amputee, or fantasying oneself as an amputee, in order to obtain erotic arousal.

(Comment: later, several other sexologists have either discussed or facilitated apotemnophilia. Russell Reid referred two such patients to a surgeon; Ray Blanchard and Anne Lawrence gave papers at the Third International Body Integrity Disorder Meeting in 2003 comparing apotemnophilia to Gender Identity Disorder; in 1999 Dr John Brown removed a leg from an apotemnophiliac who subsequently died: Brown was then imprisoned.)

Gynandromorphy: woman-man-shape. Thus, literally, the term means having some of the body morphology and measurements of an average woman, and some of an average man, or being at neither extreme.

Gynecomimetic: a boy or man being a person manifesting the features or qualities of a female in bodily appearance, dress and behaviour. Specifically, a drag queen, which is the vernacular term for a male homosexual who lives in the role of a woman. He retains his male genitals, even though he may take hormones to grow breasts.

Gynophila – Money’s spelling for gynephilia.

Sexosophy: the body of knowledge that comprises the philosophy, principles, and knowledge that people have about their own personally experienced erotic sexuality and that of other people, singly and collectively.

(Comment: as opposed to Sexology, the science of sex).

Other words used by John Money :

Abidance: continuing to remain, be sustained, or survive in the same condition or circumstances.

Ambisexual -- an alternate term for ‘bisexual’, first cited in the OED for 1938. Money claimed to have been one of the first to use the term, but later dismissed it as meaning nothing different from ‘bisexual’.

Autoagonistophilia: pleasure from being viewed while having sex.

(Other writers spell it Autagonistophilia. Presumably the term, or simply autagonist, could also be used for a kind of exhibitionist drag queen who is not able to simply transvest, but is insistent on being read; likewise the kind of transsexual who cannot simply be a woman, but demands that everyone be aware of her transition. Money does not get into a discussion of this.)

Biologically devout -- explaining sexuality and gender identity purely in terms of DNA, hormones etc.

(Comment: there should be a matching term for explaining sexuality and gender identity purely in terms of family, society, social construction, self fashioning etc – but what would that be?)

Biophilia – forms of sexual desire that lead to procreation. See also Normaphilia.

(Comment: the word is also used by Erich Fromm and then Edward O Wilson for the proposed human tendency to seek connections with other life forms. EN.Wikipedia)

Extraspective – the outward observation of things, the default way to observe, the opposite to Introspective. Normally this would not need a name, in that all life forms do it without knowing about introspection. However in Money’s “gender indentity/role (G_I/R” the two complement each other.

Fuckology – a synonym for sexology. Sometimes spelt with a ‘ph’. In 1996 Money presented a paper to the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and therapists which he titled: “Fuckology: The Science We Lack”. There is a 2015 anthology of papers: Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts.

Homosexology/Heterosexology – a division of sexology by its two major orientations.

Indicatrons “In recognition of the fact that psychology’s units of raw data all serve to indicate something or other to the psychologist or scientist, they can all be categorized as indicatrons.

Katharma. A word to be preferred over ‘freak’. “A person whose social stigmata need to be cleansed by society so that he may become a rightful member of the human race.

Normaphilia – any form of sexual desire that is socially accepted.

Paleodigm: an ancient example or model of a concept, explanation, instruction idea or notion, preserved in the folk wisdom of mottos, maxims, proverbs, superstitions, incantations, rhymes, songs, fables, myths, parables, revered writings, sacred books, dramas, and visual emblems. Paleodigmatics is the organized body of knowledge of paleodigms.

Pedeiktophilia: penile exhibition.

(Comment: because this word starts with ‘ped’, many will take it as having something to do with pedophilia.)

Quim and swive: In neither the standard English vocabulary of literature and science, nor the vernacular vocabulary of uncensored speech, are there terms by which to distinguish what the woman does to the man, in the procreative act, from what the man does to the woman.

The two words, from olden English, best fit the need. Either can be noun or verb.

(Comment: Most online sites that define swive use it for either the male or the female action. Most sites give quim only as a noun, not as a verb.)

Sexual orientation -- Money pushed for this term rather than ‘sexual preference’ in that it is less judgemental and that attraction is not necessarily a matter of free will.

Spookological: “That which is not biological is occult, mystical or, to coin a term, spookological.”

Transvesticism – sometimes used instead of transvestism.

Ycleptance: namimg and being named.

Transgender lexicons: John Money 1: gender and transexual

Transgender lexicons:

Virginia Prince
Rose White
Raven Usher
Chris Bartlett
Jack Molay
Raphael Carter
John Money

John Money coined a lot of words, and took other existing words and made them his own. Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity, 1972 (co-authored by Anke A. Ehrhardt) and Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Difference, and Pair Bonding, 1980 both contain extensive glossaries – 16 pages in the former, 17 in the latter, but actually do not contain most of his neologisms. More than that, the glossaries contain both words in general usage and Money’s coinings. Unfortunately, unlike Jack Molay, Money does not indicate his own coinings e.g with an *.

On the other hand Terry Goldie’s The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money, 2014, had Index entries for most of Money’s neologisms, and chapter 6 is “The Edge of the Alphabet: Neologisms”.

Goldie writes: “Money loved jargon and creating jargon. He seemed to have no idea in sexology for which he did not want to find a Latin or Greek word. “ (p148-9)

Money is, of course, most associated with the term gender, so let us start there.

Gender

Man & Woman, Boy & Girl:

gender identity: the sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s individuality as male or female (or ambivalent), in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behaviour. Gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity.

gender role: everything that a person says and does, to indicate to others or to the self the degree in which one is male or female or ambivalent. It includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response. Gender role is the public expression of gender identity, and gender identity is the private experience of gender role.

Love and Love Sickness: (8 years later)

gender: one’s personal, social and legal status as male or female or mixed, on the basis of somatic and behavioural criteria more inclusive than the genital criterion alone.

gender indentity/role (G_I/R): gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is public manifestation of gender identity. Gender identity is the sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s individuality as male, female, or ambivalent, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behaviour. Gender role is everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male or female, or ambivalent; it includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response.

And 4 years after that:

In 1984, Money presented a paper “The Conceptual Neutering of Gender and the Criminalization of Sex”.* In it he surveys the changes in the use of the word during the 30 years since he had introduced it in 1955. ``As originally defined, gender role consists of both introspective and the extraspective manifestations of the concept. In general usage, the introspective manifestations soon became separately known as gender identity. The acronym, G-I/R, being singular, restores the unity of the concept. Without this unity, gender role has become a socially transmitted acquisition, divorced from the biology of sex and the brain.”

He notes that “people adopted the term and gave it their own definition”. The first change was to separate gender identity and gender role; the second was the separation of sex from gender as “heralded in the title of Stoller’s book, Sex and Gender (1968)”. He continues: “Many textbooks … now introduce the definition of gender by defining sex as a biological entity -- and as what one is born with. Gender is a social entity, which one acquires after birth, and gender role is the social casting or ordainment of gender. This is the strategy by which gender role has been neutered. It has become devoid of any connection with biology and reproduction. It is defined instead as the product of social history, with male and female roles having been more or less arbitrarily assigned on the basis of male superiority and female inferiority.”

Money also includes the rather odd observation:

“The discordancy that exists in the case of transsexualism is so complete that, in technical jargon, gender identity is sometimes used as an attribute of only the discordant cases. One effect of this usage has been that some theoreticians of homosexuality have been entrapped into attributing a male gender identity to all homosexuals, provided they do not repudiate their self-declared status as male. The qualifier is then added that the homosexual, despite a male identity, has a male object choice or sexual preference. This nomenclature is totally illogical in cases of gynemimetic homosexuals, or drag queens, who impersonate women in variable degrees on a full-time basis. It is more straightforward to attribute to homosexuals a gender identity that is homoerotic, and in its nonerotic components may or may not conform to the masculine stereotype.”

(Comment: Money’s concept of “gender indentity/role (G_I/R)” makes sense in terms of the work that he was doing in the mid-1950s with intersex persons with the same DNA/hormonal conditions who stayed with the gender of rearing, whichever it was. However once the concept of ‘gender’ was released to the wider world, other uses were found for the term. This was inevitable, as it would be for any word that is as useful as ‘gender’. Money is particularly insensitive to feminist usages of ‘gender’ as a social construction and as a system of oppression.

With all respect for Money’s role in enabling transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins, “gender indentity/role (G_I/R” ) renders null the dynamic behind transsexuality. As it consists of “both introspective and the extraspective manifestations” of gender such that they reinforce each other, he is talking of cis gender. In a trans person there is a discrepancy between gender (role) and gender identity, and the act of transition is to change one’s gender (role) to align it with one’s gender identity.)

A note on the word ‘transexual”.

‘transexual’ (one S) was coined by David Cauldwell. Harry Benjamin went with the two-S spelling, but Money retained Cauldwell’s one-S spelling. Article.

Riki Anne Wilchins and others proclaimed that they spelt the word with one S to avoid medical implications. I never understood that claim. One-S, two-S -- it was a choice between Cauldwell-Money on one side and Benjamin on the other. Both have medical implications. To avoid such one needs to say ‘transsexuality’ rather than ‘transsexualism’.
____________

* “The Conceptual Neutering of Gender and the Criminalization of Sex” was first given 20 September 1984 as a lecture at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research, Cambridge. It was published in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, 14, 1985: 279-290. It was reprinted as the penultimate chapter in John Money. Venuses Penuses: Sexology, Sexosophy and Exigency Theory, 1986.

Continued in part II

Charing Cross GIC – addendum

Part I: 1818-1982
Part II: 1983-now
Addendum
Stuart Lorimer

There has been an article “Fifty years on: The Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic and the funding of a category without parallel” published at Youth Trans Critical Professionals and again at Gender Trender.

The author is given as “Susan Matthews, UK Academic”, but does not list any academic qualifications.

The article gets off to a very bad start with one error after another.

“It [CXGIC] was founded in 1966”

I have already discussed this. Treating intersex patients, the clinic dates from the 1930s, treating transvestites and transsexuals, from the 1950s.

“at Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, the world’s first GIC  founded the previous year” [1965]

Actually the UCLA GIC was founded by Stoller in 1964.

“The founding clinician at Charing Cross, Richard Green, came with an impressive academic pedigree, having worked with Money, collaborating on research on boys who demonstrated cross-gender behaviour.”

Richard Green was reported to be in London in 1966 and 1969. He very likely visited the existing Charing Cross clinic, but he certainly had no position there. He is not even mentioned in John Randell’s book. Also the Feminine Boy Project was still in the future: it was done in the 1970s.

“Up until the second half of the twentieth century, the word ‘gender’ referred to grammatical gender, a feature of language not human identity.”

Not this canard again! Obviously Matthews does not read 17-19^th century novels. Some examples:

Henry Fitzgeffrey 1620: “Now Mars defend us! seest thou who comes yonder? Monstrous! a Woman of the Masculine Gender.”
Susanna Centlivre, early 18^th century playwright reported that theatre managers 'treated her ... in the Masculine Gender'. 

George Byron, Don Juan, 1824, having got his protagonist into female dress justifies using female pronouns: 'I say her because,/The gender still was epicene'.

Matthews then writes about John Money, lobotomy, John Money again, Bruce Reimer of course. She does not at all mention the Charing Cross doctors who worked with trans patients in the 1960s, ie. John Randell, Lennox Broster, Peter Philip. Come to that, there is also no mention of a certain Harry Benjamin. For Matthews, it seems, Money alone invented transsexualism!

Matthews writes: “For the Reimer case is open to many different readings. Zoe Playdon attributes the failings of UK gender identity clinics to this history”. This is a remarkable statement in that the details of the Reimer case would not be known for another 20 or 30 years. Certainly there is no mention of it in Randell’s 1973 book.

Matthews seems to think that Money was such an overwhelming influence that Charing Cross followed his lead: “The science of gender emerged from a tiny group centred on John Money and its findings were ethically compromised”. If this were so why cannot it be demonstrated from Randell’s writings?

Here is the bibliography from Randell’s book.

 The only mention of Green or Money is the 1969 anthology, which would be included as Randell contributed a paper to it. However none of Money’s or Green’s writings are listed, nor are they in the index, nor are they mentioned in the text.

In the 1960s the UK was less dependent on US fashions. To take two contemporary examples, that is 1965-7, compare the anti-psychiatry of RD Laing to the Scientology fellow-traveller Thomas Szasz, or the radical difference between the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd and Soft Machine from that which came from San Francisco. John Randell, whatever else we may think of his attitude, was his own man, and no-one has argued that he was a disciple of Money.

Having ignored the history of the CXGIC, Matthews jumps quickly to the 21^st century, and as proof of Money’s influence she writes: “Echoes of the founding beliefs are still apparent in a 2011 paper by James Barrett, currently lead clinician at Charing Cross GIC. ‘Disorders of gender identity have probably always existed, inside and outside Europe’, Barrett writes, citing a 1975 study (Heiman).”

Heiman is not in her bibliography. Comments about trans people being everywhere are found in every popular survey. May I suggest Oscar Gilbert’s Men in Women's Guise: Some Historical Instances of Female Impersonation, 1926 or many News of the World articles over the decades. To claim this as part of Money’s influence is to show that Matthews does not begin to understand what he had to say.

She spends most of the paper attacking Barrett and the fact that he has said different things at different times. He is wrong when he and other clinicians decide what to do ignoring the patients’ wishes, and he is wrong when he listens to the trans persons who come to the clinic and he accepts their self-diagnosis. “This claim is important, for if trans were a disorder (as in 1966), the work of the clinic would belong in a worrying tradition, one that harks back at the worst to lobotomy and calls up disturbing memories of the treatment of David Reimer. If trans has any links to body dysmorphia, to anorexia, or to self-harm, then it could not be appropriate to medicate or to offer surgery, however acceptable to the patient, however fiercely demanded.”

Having attacked Money for not listening to David Reimer’s self-diagnosis that he was not a woman, Matthews is still not willing to accept the equivalent self-diagnosis of trans persons. She connects trans and trauma: “Perhaps the most important voices are those of transitioners and detransitioners who are now beginning to explore what they see as a relationship between trans and trauma, challenging the constricting logic which demands that the complexity of human experience must fit the constructs of the gender narrative.”

Let us suppose that there is merit in Matthew’s linking of trans and trauma. She undermines her own case by distorting the history of the CXGIC and especially her (how shall we put if) Money-fication of its history and by paying no attention at all to the clinic’s pioneers.

Diane Baransky (193? - ?) hairdresser

Diane Baransky apparently had surgery at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1963.  Her brief moment of fame was in February 1967 when she and John Money were interviewed by Alvin Davis on the CBC program This Hour Has Seven Days.  Her purpose was to demonstrate how convincing as a woman a transsexual could be.  It was not stated whether she were Canadian, or whether she had come from the US with John Money.

As John Colapinto summarizes her appearance:

‘At this point the camera cut from Dr, Money and his questioner to a a blond women who walked out onto the set.  Dressed in a narrow skirt, high heels, and a matching close-fitting jacket, she took a seat in the chair across from the two men.  A close-up shot revealed that her round, pretty face was expertly made up, in the style of the mid-1960s, with heavy eyeliner, mascara, and foundation, her mouth thickly painted with lipstick.

“This is Mrs. Diane Baransky,” the show’s announcer said.  “Until four years ago, her name was Richard.” …

Now she was accepted as a woman and had recently married her husband, a fellow hairdresser. ‘

The show was watched by Mr and Mrs Reimer in Winnipeg, who wrote the next day to John Money for advice about their son who had been left without a penis after a botched circumcision by cauterization.

• John Colapinto. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl.  HarperCollins, 2000: 21-6.

__________________________________________________

There are a couple of problems with this account.  The standard account is the first transsexual to have surgery at Johns Hopkins was Phyllis Wilson in 1966, and in February 1967, Johns Hopkins was claiming to have done only two such surgeries.  From the ‘four years ago’ it is implicit that she transitioned in 1963.  However transition may take some years.  It is possible that Diane was the second patient after Phyllis in late 1966, or that she had gone to Europe or Morocco like so many transsexuals at that time.  The account in Colapinto’s book does not clarify the issue.

The second problem is that according to Colapinto the CBC program was This Hour Has Seven Days.  According to CBC Archives page This Hour Has Seven Days was a satirical news program, and most importantly, it ran from October 1964 to May 1966.  That it, it was no longer being broadcast in February 1967. Nor is there an Alvin Davis listed as one of its interviewers.  Very likely Mr and Mrs Reimer mis-remembered the name of the program – that is very easy to do. Again Colapinto’s account does not clarify the issue.   However the BBC documentaries were able to find the relevant clip, but do not give the broadcast details.

“Diane Baransky” was probably, according to the customs of the time, a pseudonym.  Certainly the one woman of that name who is found in a Google search is too young to be the same person.  Like Agnes, who was in the news a few years earlier, she successfully managed to stay out of the news for the rest of her life.

Harry Benjamin. Part 3: transsexualism to 1966

Part 1: beginings
Part 2: rejuvenation
Part 3: transsexualism to 1966
Part 4: transsexualism since 1966
Part 5: rereading of The Transsexual Phenomenon.

Virginia Allen and her doctor husband first met Harry Benjamin at a lecture that he gave in Atlantic City in 1950. When she moved to New York two years later, she phoned him, and although he could not remember who she was, he went to lunch with her. Shortly afterwards she became his assistant, at first part time. He was in the process of moving to a smaller 'retirement' office on East 67^th Street. She typed the many drafts of Prostitution and Morality. One day while rearranging his files, she asked about a small group by itself where each patient had both a male and a female name. He decided to pay more attention to them.

Benjamin, like everybody else, read about Christine Jorgensen in December 1952. He wrote to Louise Lawrence:

"The papers here are full of the Jorgensen case, the boy who went to Denmark to be operated on and is now coming back as a girl. I'll probably see the party when she gets home".

He wrote to Christine:

Dear Miss Jorgensen:

These lines are written to you in the interest of some of my patients and naturally also of those whose emotional problem nobody understands better than you do.

Frankly, I am worried over the effect your story and publicity may have in some instances. I had a few rather frantic phone calls and letters recently. Therefore, I would be grateful to you if you would tell me how you are handling the innumerable communications that undoubtedly came to you. Don't they all indicate hopefulness yet utter frustration ?

In my many years of practice of sexology and endocrinology, problems similar to yours have been brought to me frequently. I need not tell you how profoundly disturbed some of these people are. Naturally, they identify themselves with you. Can I tell them that you will answer their pleas with a personal note, a friendly non-committal form-letter perhaps, but—for psychological reasons—bearing your signature? That would help enormously. Or have you formulated another plan? Can I be of assistance? If so please feel free to call on me.

Most sincerely and earnestly yours,

Harry Benjamin, M.D. (Jorgensen: 190-1)

A meeting was set up at the home of Tiffany Thayer, the Fortean author. Benjamin became her endocrinologist and worked with her on the avalanche of mail that she had received from other transsexuals. Both she and Dr Christian Hamburger in Copenhagen referred patients to Benjamin. When in New York Christine would have dinner with Harry and Gretchen, and meet his other patients. In her honor he referred to transsexuals as cris-crosses (Person: 348).

Benjamin later summarized this period:

“While there was no way for me to help with any surgery or even a referral to a surgeon, some earnest professional attention to their complaints, psychological guidance, and cautious hormonal feminization went a long way toward making life a bit easier for them. In some cases, my efforts undoubtedly prevented attempts at suicide or self-mutilation - yet, by no means in all cases. These few instances of attempted self-castration by definitely non-psychotic individuals impressed me greatly. Their desperation as well as the entire clinical history with their vain search for help, often from childhood on, made me realize that the medical profession truly treated these patients as ‘stepchildren’. Educational and medical lectures and scientific publications were urgently needed. That became clear to me as I saw more and more the suffering of these tormented people. (Benjamin's Introduction to Green & Money: 3)”

In 1953 Benjamin, at the suggestion of Emil Gutheil, psychoanalyst and editor of the American Journal of Psychotherapy (AJP), arranged a symposium on transvestism and transsexualism. It was held at the New York Academy of Medicine: Benjamin read his paper, "Transsexualism and transvestism as psychosomatic and somatopsychic syndromes", and Gutheil and the others responded from their respective experiences and standpoints. This was the first time that Benjamin used the term ‘transsexual’. David Cauldwell had used the term, with one ‘s’, in a 1949 paper, and Louise Lawrence had introduced Benjamin to Cauldwell’s writings. “Whether I had ever read that article and the expression remained in my subconscious, frankly, I do not know”. The term had also been used earlier that same year in Ed Wood’s film, Glen or Glenda. In his paper, Benjamin argued that psychotherapy aimed at dissuading a transsexual is unproductive, and that the etiology is probably a combination of constitutional, psychological and hormonal influences. He identifies three types of transvestite: 1) the psychogenic transvestite 2) the intermediate type 3) the somatopsychic transsexualist. Gutheil reported that reprints of the paper were in unusually large demand, particularly by army doctors. By now Benjamin was getting as many new referrals through physicians as through other patients.

Tamara Rees like Jorgensen had surgery in Europe, arrived back in the US to media acclaim, and also became a Benjamin patient, and also received much mail which she answered by referring correspondents to Dr Benjamin.

In 1955 Frederic Worden & James Marsh published "Psychological Factors in Men Seeking Sex Transformation" in the Journal of the American Medical Association, wherein they described their five research subjects as having "an extremely shallow, immature and grossly distorted concept of what a woman is like socially, sexually, anatomically and emotionally", and dismissed their co-operation with the project as a "need for recognition", and concluded that the desire for surgery served as "an escape from ... sexual impulses". They also distorted what Benjamin had written. He replied both publicly and privately. In a letter to Kinsey he wrote: "Worden's sole interest is psychoanalytic research. He is not interested in helping any patients." Four of the five wrote to Benjamin expressing outrage at how they had been treated by Worden and Marsh.

By then Benjamin had met Virginia Prince, and helped her with “parental and marital problems”, put her on female hormones, and arranged for her to meet Christine Jorgensen. Prince came to consider him a personal friend. In 1957 C.V. Prince wrote a paper for The American Journal of Psychotherapy where she was introduced by Benjamin:  

"Dr Prince is known to me personally. I have met him in his male as well as his female role. I have had lengthy and stimulating discussions with him. He is highly educated with a fine cultural background."   

Prince presented three types of ‘males’ who may share ‘the desire to wear feminine attire’ (p82), that is homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals. Much of that paper was recycled into Benjamin's 1966 book.

In 1960 Benjamin went to Chicago to give a legal deposition on behalf of a trans man, Tommie, who was attempting to change his birth certificate. Benjamin gave his usual explanation of the different sexes: genetic, anatomical, endocrine, psychological, social and assigned for rearing. The judge deferred to Benjamin's expertise. Benjamin wrote to Elmer Belt: "Isn't it encouraging, that occasionally we encounter an intelligent judge".

Hedy Jo Star, Patricia Morgan and Aleshia Brevard saw Benjamin in 1961, and were referred to Elmer Belt in Los Angeles for surgery, although Hedy then made other arrangements. In Aleshia's case, Benjamin even phoned her parents to explain. Ira Pauly was then at the New York Hospital, and having just seen his first transsexual patient, checked the scant literature that was then available and found Benjamin's name and address, and phoned to introduce himself. For much of that year, he attended Benjamin's Wednesday afternoon clinic.

"I never met anybody who seemed to care about his patients that way. It was almost as though they were all his family. How totally comfortable they were with him and thus with me, simply because I was somehow connected with Harry. During my previous 4 years with patients, I had always thought that it was important to achieve some professional distance from patients. Not to get too close was somehow the appropriate stance to seek vis-a-vis patients. Well, Harry showed me that was certainly not the case. He epitomized what I consider to be the ideal doctor-patient relationship. From that moment forward he was my model and I strived to achieve that level of comfort, intimacy, and caring that he so admirably demonstrated for me. (Memorial: 17)"

In 1963 Benjamin was invited by Dr Robert Hotchkiss, the urologist, to read a paper at New York's Bellevue Hospital. He also read a paper at the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex (of which he was a charter member). That year Reed Erickson became a Benjamin patient and started transition. The next year he donated money to the newly created Harry Benjamin Foundation. The money from Erickson enabled a move to a larger office at 86^th and Park. Benjamin began to share his practice with gynecologist and hypnotist Leo Wollman. Benjamin also worked with sexologist Robert Masters, endocrinologist Herbert Kuppermann and psychologist Wardell Pomeroy, previously of the Kinsey Institute.

Benjamin met monthly with John Money and Richard Green in New York under the auspices of Reed Erickson’s EEF, where the idea was raised of applying the kind of surgery being done on intersex patients to transsexuals as well. Green described his first meeting:

"I was introduced to Harry Benjamin by John Money. ... From 1964 to 1966, I would see Harry’s patients in his New York office on Saturdays. For some, I wrote letters endorsing sex-change surgery in Europe. It was unavailable in the U.S. In retrospect, this may not have been a safe step at the beginning of my psychiatric career. Harry seduced me deeper into transsexualism. At our first clinical day, he introduced me to a beautiful post-operative patient. She had been operated on by George Burou in Casablanca. She allowed me to conduct a pelvic examination. I was astounded at the excellence of the surgery. The three of us went to an elegant Manhattan restaurant. I have never had a companion who caught the eye of so many admiring, lustful men. This was not because she appeared as a sex-change. She was a genuine woman stunner. I still receive her Christmas greetings. She is still beautiful. (Three Kings: 610)"

In 1964-5 meetings with the New York Health Department failed to clear the way for re-issued birth certificates, however John Money, who was agitating to open the first Gender Identity Clinic in the US at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, brought three postoperative patients of Benjamin to meet with his colleagues, Howard Jones and Milton Edgerton. Also in 1964  both Jan Morris and Renée Richards came for their first visits.

Morris, who would hesitate for 8 years before finally finding her own way to Dr Borou in Casblanca, describes the encounter with Benjamin in her autobiography, Conundrum, 1974:

"The first person I met who really seemed to understand something of the predicament was Dr Harry Benjamin of New York, to whose clinic in Park Avenue, wearied by the struggle, I eventually found my way. Dr Benjamin was then in his sixties, I suppose, and looked like a white gnome – white-haired, white-jacketed, white-faced. He seemed too small for his desk, and he talked with a scholarly Viennese accent, like a psychiatrist in a film. "Sit down, sit down – tell me all about yourself. You believe yourself to be a woman? Of course, I perfectly understand. Tell me something about it – take it easy, take it easy – now, tell me, tell me ..(p49-50)".

Richards, who was still in the US Navy, and also avoided surgery until 1974, later described the meeting:

"When I met Dr. Benjamin, I think that all of my nervousness and anxiety disappeared. ... I was confronted by a short man who was balding at that time, who wore very thick glasses and who wore a tong white coat and shook my hand warmly and escorted me to a chair opposite him at the same level, seeing eye to eye, to speak to me in consultation. And he was, to my view, a physician that I was looking at and he treated me with respect, as an equal, as a patient, as someone in need. And for the rest of my relationship with him, that's the way he treated me. He asked me the age-old question, "How long have you had this problem?" And I gave him the answer that all transsexual patients give, "As long as I can remember." And he folded his hands in front of him and he said, "Yes, that's right, that's what transsexual patients say. He was making his diagnosis of true transsexualism. (Memorial: 22)"

++Benjamin finally published his book Prostitution and Morality, co-written with REL Masters.  The book has a few passing references to trans prostitutes, and unlike his 1966 book, does acknowledge 'homosexual transvestites'.

++Also in 1964 Benjamin published Nature and Management of Transsexualism: With a Report on Thirty-One Operated Cases.  

By then Benjamin felt that he had enough clinical material to write a definitive book on transsexuals.
_____________________________________________

Other sexologists who started new activities in their sixties: Harold Gillies was 60 when he first operated on Michael Dillon, and 69 when he operated on Roberta Cowell; Howard Jones was 68 when he left Johns Hopkins and started a new career in in vitro fertilization at Eastern Virginia Medical School; Herbert Bower was 60 when he, with Trudy Kennedy, initiated the clinic that grew into the Monash Gender Identity Clinic. 

Both Benjamin and Prince refer to each other in their writings. It is therefore odd that Docter's biography of Prince mentions Benjamin not even once.

Richard Green (1936 – 2019) Part 2: academic, administrator

 Continued from Part 1.

Also in 1987 Green published The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality.  The gender variant children whom he had studied in the 1970s having by then grown up, and Green was able to locate two-thirds of both the 'sissy' group and the control group.  He showed that ‘sissy’ boys who may be taken as early transgender boys girls actually mainly grew up to be gay, without transgender inclinations.  Only one was considering a sex change but was being put off by the difficulties.  Only one of the control group grew up to be bisexual.  No members of either group grew up to be transvestites.

In 1992 he published Sexual Science and the Law, a review of various sexual fields and their legal situation, mainly in the US, but also in the UK. In the chapter on intergenerational sexuality he wrote that the experience for the younger person was not uniformly negative, based on a literature review.  He later commented:

"Bruce Rind et al reached a similar conclusion from a more sophisticated meta-analysis and all hell broke loose. Fortunately for me, no one read my book.(quoted in Newman, 2009)"

In 1993 he was co-counsel for Elke Sommer in her successful libel suite against Zsa Zsa Gabor who had called Elke a has-been.

Since 1994 he has been Professor of Psychological Medicine, Imperial College, London, and research director at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, where he saw trans persons two days a week. His life partner Melissa Hines is a professor of psychology and director of the Behavioural Neuroendocrinology Research Unit at the City University of London.  He is also a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he caused a stir by having his students read Thomas O'Carroll's book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case.

He was president of HBIGDA 1997-9. In 2002 he passed the editorship of the Archives of Sexual Behavior to Kenneth Zucker.

In 2002 Green questioned why pedophilia is classified as a mental disorder.

In 2004, Green was the sole defender of John Money in the BBC documentary, Dr Money and the boy with no penis, on the David Reimer case:

‘‘Based on what we knew at the time about how you become male or female or boy or girl, knowing the difficulties of creating a penis surgically, the decision that John Money made was the correct one. I would have made the same one’’ (Green, 2008).

He was one of the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic psychiatrists who brought a complaint to the General Medical Council that Russell Reid too easily accepted patients for hormone therapy and surgery.

In 2006 he was awarded the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for Sexual Research.

In 2006, when HBIGDA changed its name to WPATH, Green objected that the change had not been put to a full-membership vote and achieved such a vote, but the name change was then voted for.

In 2008, after Alice Dreger had defended Michael Bailey's The Man who would be Queen, Green commented:

"Dreger's meticulously detailed and documented essay is on remarkedly even terrain ....  And who knows whether [Christine Jorgensen]'s life story was entirely factual? In 1952, how else was an ‘‘Ex-GI’’ to become a ‘‘Blond Beauty’’. Homosexuality was both a mental disorder and a crime. Transsexualism was neither. Was Christine’s autobiography a ‘‘fairy tale’’? .... Is the Board [of HBIGDA] aware that there are medical and psychiatric professionals, including a transsexual, who side with Bailey in this situation? ....  Conway, James, and McCloskey generated a fortune in publicity for Bailey’s book, attracting a moderate sized city of readers who otherwise would have never heard of it. (Lighten Up, 2008)"

In 2010 he criticized Ray Blanchard's proposal to introduce hebephilia as a mental disorder in the DSM-5.

In 2011, the Irish annulment case, B (formerly known as M) v. L, cited a diagnosis by Green that the husband was autogynephilic.

Playwright Bruce Bierman was one of the "sissy boys" seen by Green for seven years in the 1970s, until his parents removed him from the program when he was 13. Later he read Green's 1987 book, and in 2004 turned his memories of the experience into a solo performance, "The Blue Dress", that he presented in San Francisco.

++ Richard Green died age 82.

*Not the artist, nor the actor nor the cricketeer nor the chemist nor the footballer.

• Richard Green & John Money. "Incongruous Gender Role: Nongenital Manifestation in Pre-Pubertal Boys". Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 131, 1960: 160-168.
• Richard Green & John Money. "Effeminacy in prepubertal boys; Summary of eleven cases and recommendations for case management." Pediatrics Vol. 27 No. 2 February 1961, pp. 286-291.
• Richard Green. "Transsexualism: Mythological, Historical, and Cross-Cultural Aspects" and Bibliography. In Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press, 1966.Online at: www.mut23.de/texte/Harry%20Benjamin%20-%20The%20Transsexual%20Phenomenon.pdf.
• Richard Green & John Money (ed). Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press,. 1969.
• Richard Green. Sexual Identity Conflict in Children and Adults. New York: Basic Books, 1974.
• Richard Green. "One-Hundred Ten Feminine and Masculine Boys: Behavioral Contrasts and Demographic Similiarities". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 5,5,1976.
• Richard Green. "Sexual identity of thirty-seven children raised by homosexual or transsexual parents". American Journal of Psychiatry 135, 1978: 692-697.
• Richard Green. Human Sexuality: A Health Practitioner's Text. Williams & Wilkins, 1979.
• Paul A. Walker, Ph.D., Jack C. Berger, MD., Richard Green, MD., Donald R. Laub, M.D., Charles L. Reynolds, Jr., M.D. & Leo Wollman, M.D. Standards of Care: The hormonal and surgical sex reassignment of gender dysphoric persons. The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, Inc. 1979.
• Richard Green. "The International Academy of Sex Research: In the beginning". Archives of Sexual Behavior 14, 1985: 293-302.
• Richard Green, K. Williams & M. Goodman. "Ninety-nine "tomboys" and "non-tomboys": Behavioral contrasts and demorgraphic similarities". Archives of Sexual behavior, 11, 1982: 247-266.
• Jane E. Brody. "Psychiatrists on Homosexuality: Vigorous Discord Voiced at Meeting". The New York Times, Jan 26, 1982. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9E05E0D81E38F935A15752C0A964948260.
• Richard Green. The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987.
• Richard Green. Sexual Science and the Law. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992. 
• Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. University of Pennsylvania Press 1993: 273-4, 327-8.
• Richard Green. "American Law Does/Does Not Respond to the Transsexual". Gendys Conference, 1994. www.gender.org.uk/conf/1994/green.htm.
• Phyllis Burke.  Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male & Female.  Anchor Books, 1997: 33, 34, 43-6, 52-4, 120-3.
• DJ West & Richard Green (eds). Sociolegal Control of Homosexuality : A Multi-Nation Comparison. Springer, 1997.
• Katrina Fox. "Vancouver – The Richard Green Interview". RFTS, 1997 Online at: http://web.archive.org/web/20030609051314/http://www.rfts.a.se/rich_greene.html.
• Richard Green. "Transsexual's Children". International Journal of Transgenderism, 2,4, 1998. www.wpath.org/journal/www.iiav.nl/ezines/web/IJT/97-03/numbers/symposion/ijtc0601.htm.
• Dan Pine. "Boy in a blue dress: One-man show relives gender-bending childhood". Jweekly.com, June 18, 2004. www.jweekly.com/article/full/22941/boy-in-a-blue-dress.
• Richard Green. "Lighten up, Ladies". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 37,3, 2008: 451-452.
• Cynthia BrianKate.  “Feminine Boy Project”.  Stony Brook Press, March 2010.  http://www.sbpress.com/2010/03/30/feminine-boy-project/
• Richard Green. "The Three Kings: Harry Benjamin, John Money, Robert Stoller". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38, 2008: 610-613.
• Melanie Newman.  "Paedophilia research riles and titillates the academy".  Times Higher Education Supplement, 20 Sept 2009. www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408084. 
• "Application for annulment granted to wife of transsexual", The Irish Times, April 4, 2011. www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0404/1224293732456.html.
• Andrea James. "Richard Green on gender variance". TSRoadmap. www.tsroadmap.com/info/richard-green.html.
• Peter Tatchell.  "Richard Green obituary".  The Guardian, 15 April 2019.  Online.  

EN.Wikipedia       http://richard-green-sexologist.co.tv. ____________________________________________________________

The good:  like John Money, Richard Green pushed to permit transsexual operations at a time when the vast majority of psychiatrists were against such surgery, and like Money arranged for his institution to become a GIC.  He assisted Harry Benjamin and wrote approval letters for the patients who wanted surgery.  If things had gone differently, this could have rebounded against him later in his career.  He is one of very few sexologists to have written about male spouses of trans women.  He spoke up more than once for the rights of trans parents to continue their relationships with their children.  He appeared several times in court on behalf of trans women seeking to retain their jobs, and on behalf of the gay scout master (his one-time colleague Rekers testified in a different case on behalf of the Boy Scouts of America instead).  He questioned the stereotypes about pedophiles.  He was a major participant in removing adult homosexuality from the DSM.

On the other hand: He pioneered the Feminine Boy Project which has survived in the religious reparation therapy of NARTH and in Kenneth Zucker’s clinic at CAMH, although Green's conclusion that feminine boys merely grow up to become ordinary cis-homosexuals should invalidate the existence of reparative therapy.  Green originated the Archives of Sexual Behavior which has become the organ for the Freund-Blanchard-Bailey heresy.  While Green has many times spoken up for transsexuals against those who would deny surgery, and for employment and  parental rights, when it came to a conflict between his colleagues and trans academics after Bailey’s book was published, he sided with his colleagues – this is not surprising.  However when Russell Reid was under attack, he did not support him.

George Rekers later was a major person in the homophobic Family Research Council and NARTH, but resigned in 2010 after the press caught him on holiday with a rent boy.

The message of The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality that the vast majority of ‘sissy boys’ are not pre-transsexuals seems obvious now, but it needed to be said to counter false assumptions.  It is good that autobiographies are now coming out by cis men who talk about their sissy childhood:  Olivier Theyskens, Bruce Bierman, Kevin Sessums (Mississippi Sissy).

The boys were turning 20 or so when Green found them again to write The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality.   However some do not come out as gay or trans until middle age.  Now that almost another 25 years have passed, is it time for another follow-up?

Would you have confidence in these psychiatrists to distinguish between a transkid and a ‘sissy boy’?  Do you feel that weak hand-eye co-ordination, playing with dolls, playing with girls identifies a transkid?   12 such boys had reparative therapy.  There is no mention that any of the boys in either group had therapy to counter tendencies to bullying or homophobia.   Why is being nice a failure of socialization, but bullying is not?

How come the Richard Green Wikipedia page makes no mention at all of the Feminine Boy Project?  There is no Wikipedia page at all for the Feminine Boy Project.  The New York Times obituary of Ivar Lovaas somehow forgot to mention the Project, and when Phyllis Burke interviewed Lovaas for her book (p46-51) he was apparently trying to disremember his involvement.  Stony Brook is keeping quiet about its involvement.

If you do read The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality, I suggest that you also read Phyllis Burke's Gender Shock.  In fact I recommend Burke's book by itself.


Given that Green compiled the Bibliography for Benjamin’s book, one now understands why the books and articles in the text are not in the bibliography, and the books and articles in the bibliography are not mentioned in the text.  And also that all Green's publications up to 1966 are in the bibliography.

Richard Green (1936 - 2019) Part 1: psychiatrist, lawyer.

Richard Green was raised in Brooklyn, NY. He earned an AB from Syracuse University in 1957, and an MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1961, where he was a student of John Money, who introduced him to gender variant children. Green had the idea of comparing the children to the recollections that adult transsexuals had of their own childhood. He published papers with John Money on such children.

Green did a psychiatric residency at the University of California at Los Angeles, Medical School 1962-4 with Robert Stoller. Money introduced Green to Harry Benjamin in 1964, and for two years he saw patients in Benjamin's New York office and wrote letters for them so that they could obtain surgery in Europe. He wrote the appendix on historical and cross-cultural aspects and the bibliography for Benjamin's book.

He did a further residency at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) 1965-6. Green spent 1966 in London and became friends with Yoko Ono, and part of his anatomy appears in her film, Bottoms.

He then returned to UCLA as a Professor of Psychiatry. In 1969 he co-edited the ground-breaking Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment anthology with Money, with an Introduction by Harry Benjamin. The same year, with encouragement from Stoller, Green arranged the first transsexual operation at UCLA, only a year after Stoller had retracted his conclusions in the Agnes case.

In 1971 he became the founding editor of Archives of Sexual Behavior, after Stoller nominated him to the publisher, and stayed as editor for 30 years. He was significantly involved in the removal in 1973 of ‘homosexuality’ as a diagnosis in the DSM. In 1974 he published Sexual Identity Conflict in Children and Adults, with a forward by Robert Stoller, which draws anecdotally on the children and adults whom he had seen as a psychiatrist. This book is still one of the very few to discuss the male spouses of trans women.

From the dust Jacket of Sexual Science and the Law

During the 1970s Green, Ivar Lovaas and George Rekers (more) headed the "Feminine Boy Project" funded by NIMH to at least $1.5 million.  The basic study was a 15-year follow-up of 50 'feminine' boys matched with 50 other boys of comparable age. ethnicity and parental education.  Both groups were studied using parental questionnaires, interviews with the boys, psychological testing and observations of playroom activity.  There were follow-ups, usually at one-year intervals.The project was mainly located at UCLA and secondarily at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and also at the Roosevelt Institute in New York City, the Fuller Theological Seminary and the Logos Research Institute.  The last two institutions are Christian, and their principal researcher was Rekers, who was the major advocate that the boys should be not merely observed, but treated, that is persuaded or cajoled back to gender conformity.  Twelve pairs of parents consented that their son should enter such a course of treatment.
 
Green was the founding president of the International Academy of Sex Research in 1973 and a founding committee member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) in 1979, and was a co-author of the first edition of the Standards of Care.

In 1978 he published a paper, which is still rather unique, to the effect that a parent changing sex has only a small effect on the children, and that there is no reason why the trans parent should not continue to see the children.

He testified as an expert witness for transsexuals who lost their jobs in transition: Smith v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co, 1978; Ashlie, aka Komarnicki v. Chester-Upland School District, 1979; Terry v. EEOC, 1980; Kirkpatrick v. Seligman and Latz, Inc, 1981; and most famously for Karen Ulane in Ulane v. Eastern Airlines, Inc, 1983. He was also co-counsel for Curran v. Mount Diablo Council of the Boy Scouts of America, 1981, where an assistant scoutmaster had been rejected for being gay. Green completed his JD from Yale University Law School in 1987.

Testifying for Ulane, Green defined a transsexual as:

"Transsexualism is a pervasive, severe and long-standing discontent, discomfort, belonging to the sex to which one was born.  It is accompanied by a long-standing wish for a variety of hormonal, surgical and civil procedures which would allow one to live in the sex role opposite to that to which one was born.  This long-term discontent, dysphoria, if you will, with being male or female, is not a product of some significant type of mental disorder" (Sexual Science and the Law p106).

He defined a transvestite less satisfactorily:

"A transvestite is an individual who is content being the sex to which he was born, does not wish to undergo sex-change surgery.  It is an individual whose primary gratification from cross-dressing or dressing in women's clothes is one of sexual arousal rather than a feeling of social comfort. (Ditto)"

Continued in Part 2.

Johns Hopkins – Part 2: 1966-1979.

Continued from Part 1.



++Psychiatrist Ira Pauly had published the first aggregation study of transsexual cases in 1965,  "Male Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. A Review of 100 Cases".  This resulted in a job offer from Johns Hopkins, but, after a pay rise, Pauly decided to stay at the University of Oregon Medical School.

It was to Johns Hopkins that underground film star Holly Woodlawn went for the operation in 1966, but she was denied it in that she had not been in the program for at least a year. She went on a shopping spree instead with the money that her boyfriend had provided for the operation.

One-year-old Bruce Reimer was brought to see Dr Money and surgically reassigned to female as Brenda in 1967, and continued annual visits for almost 10 years, until Brenda began to refuse, and started to change back to male as David.

++The same year Barbara Dayton moved to Baltimore with wife and children, and started living as female.  The Clinic declined her application based on age, appearance and numerous tattoos. Also Barbara could not afford the fee.

The most prominent patient in the Gender Identity Clinic was writer Dawn Langley Hall who had surgery in 1968, married an African-American the next year, and publically announced the birth of a daughter in 1971 (a claim that the Gender Identity Clinic said was “definitely impossible”).   ++This was also the year that Roberta White was admitted for surgery.

In 1968 the Gender Identity Clinic provided surgeon Stanley Biber with diagrams on how to do sex change surgery. Renée Richards met with John Money, but at the end was told that Johns Hopkins was not accepting any more transsexual patients at that time.

In 1969, transsexual pioneer Christine Jorgensen came to Johns Hopkins for corrective surgery.  Future showgirl Michelle Brinkle ran away to Baltimore intending to register at the Clinic, but never did, and ended up at Dr Burou’s Clinic in Casablanca instead. Psychiatrist Jon Meyer became chairman of the Gender Identity Clinic, and his predecessor, John Hoopes wrote: “The surgery, often considered outrageously excessive and meddlesome by the uninformed, must be undertaken regardless of the censure and taboos of present society”. Also in 1969, Richard Green and John Money co-edited Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, with a preface by Reed Erickson, an introduction by Harry Benjamin, and published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

John Money conducted a follow-up study of ‘17 male and seven female patients’, and found that after surgery nine patients had improved their occupational status and none declined. “Seven male and three female patients married for the first time” and “All of the 17 are unequivocally sure they have done for themselves the right thing”.

In 1970, Dr Edgerton left for the University of Virginia, where he established a Gender Identity Clinic, and Dr Hoopes returned to Johns Hopkins to replace him as Chief of Plastic Surgery. Dr Meyer started his own study of the benefits of surgery.

In 1972 future doctor Dana Beyer, then a student, came to the Clinic but found the intake application so off-putting that she fled before seeing a doctor.

In 1974, 23-year-old future intersex-cum-HSTS activist Denise Tree (Kiira Triea) had surgery with Dr Howard Jones after years of therapy from Dr Money.

In a paper with John Hoopes, Meyer wrote: “Most of the patients continue to be emotionally and socially much the same as they were in the pre-operative phase”.

In 1975, Catholic psychiatrist Dr Paul McHugh became head of the Psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins. He later wrote that he intended from the start to put an end to sex change surgeries which he described as “the most radical therapy ever encouraged by 20th-century psychiatrists— with perhaps the exception of lobotomies”.

In 1976 Charles Annicello from the clinic testified in a New Jersey court on behalf of M.T., a trans woman who was suing for alimony. Louis Gooren, who would develop the Gender Clinic at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, studied at Johns Hopkins in 1976, as did Russell Reid who later became a consultant at Charing Cross Hospital.

The clinic was also featured as the location of a rather unusual at-knife-point FTM operation in John Walters’ film Desperate Living, 1977.

The Joneses retired from Johns Hopkins in 1978, and became professors of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia Medical School, where they established the first in vitro fertilization program in the United States.

In 1979, (the same year that Janice Raymond published the transphobic The Transsexual Empire) psychiatrist Jon Meyers and co-author Donna Reter reporting to Paul McHugh, finished their evaluation of fifty post and pre-op patients they saw as still deeply disturbed. “To say that this type of surgery cures psychiatric disturbance is incorrect. We now have objective evidence that there is no real difference in the transsexual’s adjustment to life in terms of jobs, educational attainment, marital adjustment and social stability,” he said. He later told The New York Times, “My personal feeling is that surgery is not a proper treatment for a psychiatric disorder, and it’s clear to me that these patients have severe psychological problems that don’t go away following surgery.” He even referred directly to “one case”, probably Reed Erickson, “In which a woman required hospitalization for drug dependency and suicidal intentions after being changed to a man”.

John Hoopes also changed his mind: “Prior to the surgery, these patients were at least male or female, but after the surgery the males converted to females weren’t really females and the females converted to males weren’t really males. . . You’ve created a new breed. You’ve created something you don’t know what to do with. … I never saw a successful patient. For the most part they remained misfits”.

The Meyer study has not been supported by later studies. Its methodology has been strongly criticized, especially the vagueness of some of its scoring, and that it does not include any measure of personal satisfaction. None of the post-operatives regretted the operation (as Meyers and Reter acknowledged). However, citing the study, the hospital administration closed the program.

The Johns Hopkins program was never important in terms of numbers, in fourteen years they provided surgery to only thirty people (compare to Dr Biber who would do many more than that every year), but in that it was the first clinic it was felt as a loss when it closed.

Even so, Johns Hopkins' reputation was such that transsexuals continued to apply to the Hospital. They were seen in the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit at $150 a time, but no referrals for surgery were made after 1979.

John Money stayed at the PRU, even after 1986 when it was moved to smaller premises outside the Hospital.

As late as 2005, a group of Christian ministers went to Trinidad, Colorado and tried to use the Meyer study to force Marci Bowers to stop performing gender surgery.

• • Thomas Buckley “A Changing of Sex by Surgery Begun at Johns Hopkins”. New York Times. Nov 21, 1966.
  • “Surgery Now Used to Alter the Sex of ‘Transsexuals’ “. Herald-Journal. Nov 22, 1966. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=K4EsAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Yc0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=2435,3668040&hl=en
  • “A Change of Gender” Newsweek. Dec 5, 1966, :73.
  • “Sex-Change Operations at a U.S. Hospital”. US News & World Report. Dec 5, 1966: 13.
  • Charles W. Slack.  "Life's Such a Drag, They'd Rather Switch".   The Village Voice.  Nov 6, 1969, vol XIV, 56.  Archive.  
  • John Colapinto. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. London: Quartet xvii, 279 pp. Toronto & New York: HarperCollins, 2001: especially chp2.
  • Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 7, 80, 114, 142, 211, 218-223, 251, 266-270
  • Edward Ball,. Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004: 84, 157-160, 244-9.
  • Deborah Rudacille. The Riddle of Gender. New York: Pantheon Books. 2005: 104-110, 111-113, 116-8, 119, 121-8, 131-3, 143, 169, 238.
  • Laura Wexler. “Identity Crisis”. Baltimore Style Magazine. Jan/Feb 2007. www.baltimorestyle.com/index.php/style/features_article/fe_sexchange_jf07. Also at: http://www.alteryourview.com/index.php/style/features_article/fe_sexchange_jf07/. 
  • Elizabeth Reis. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, Paperback 2012.

 EN.Wikipedia(History_of_intersex_surgery).

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The Wikipedia article, "History of Intersex Surgery", should be called "Intersex Surgery at Johns Hopkins"; as it completely ignores work done elsewhere. The work  of Lennox Broster in particular is scandalously missing.

For those who like to perceive patterns in history, it is remarkable how the Johns Hopkins GIC falls between the publications of The Transsexual Phenomenon and The Transsexual Empire.