Ralph Greenson (1911 – 1979) UCLA psychoanalyst

Romeo Greenschpoon was raised in Brooklyn, by parents who were immigrants from Russia. His physician father, a Shakespeare enthusiast, had named his twins Romeo and Juliet, which created some ribbing. The boy changed his first name to Ralph.

Ralph did pre-med at Columbia University. There being discrimination against Jews at US medical schools, he studied medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and graduated in 1934. Ralph also married a Swiss woman, Hildi, and they moved to Los Angeles for Ralph to do an internship at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. They anglicised their surname to Greenson in 1937.

Ralph Greenson returned to Europe to become a psychoanalyst and was analysed in Vienna by Wilhelm Stekel (a maverick in the psychoanalysis movement, who coined the term ‘paraphilia’ which was later popularized by John Money, and who distinguished transvestism from fetishism). However 12 March 1938 saw the Anschluß Österreichs, the Nazi takeover of Austria. Steckel and his wife immediately fled via Switzerland to England. Greenson returned to Los Angeles, and resumed analysis with Otto Fenichel (an orthodox Freudian, who had written about transvestites needing a fantasy of girls with penises).

Greenson enrolled in the US Army in 1942, and initially worked in a veterans' hospital in New York state, until he cracked his skull while working in a military ambulance. This exempted him from overseas service and he served as chief of the neuropsychiatric unit at the Army Air Force Convalescent Hospital in Fort Logan, Colorado, where he became known for his work with soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress. He also observed gambling among US officers, and wrote a paper on it for the psychoanalytical journal American Imago.

Back in Los Angeles as a civilian, in 1946 Greenson bought a house at 902 Franklin Street in Santa Monica from Eunice and John Murray who could no longer afford it. The Murrays divorced, and Eunice was hired by Greenson as his housekeeper, assistant and sometimes companion for his clients.
 
He was a founding member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and was appointed to the faculty of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) medical school. A gifted raconteur, he became one of the best-known psychoanalysts in Los Angeles, famous for his lectures and teaching. Greenson was also a violinist and he and some friends held a weekly salon where they played chamber music. He became friendly with screenwriter and novelist Leo Rosten (1911-1997), also Jewish and from New York who was the brother-in-law of Margaret Mead. Psychoanalysis was then in vogue and Rosten recommended Greenson as an analyst to his Hollywood friends – Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Vivien Leigh came to Greenson’s private practice. Greenson suffered a heart attack in 1955, and afterwards he worked from home in the afternoons: many of his better-known clients who didn’t want to be spotted entering a medical facility, preferred to see him there.

In February 1960, during the filming of the movie Let’s Make Love, co-starring Yves Montand and with a script revised by her husband Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe (born 1926) had a breakdown, and her New York psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, recommend that Greenson be brought in on a temporary basis. He had fifteen sessions with her 11 February to 12 March, and was appalled by the drugs that she was taking. Greenson was considered daring in accepting Monroe because of her suicide attempts. Other psychiatrists had had their careers damaged after a patient’s suicide, and Monroe was so famous. In addition Greenson was overworked. He had already had a heart attack, and had cut down on the number of his patients, but he still taught classes at UCLA, supervised psychiatrists in training, and served on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In late August Monroe returned to Los Angeles from Nevada where she was filming The Misfits, again from a script by Arthur Miller, and Greenson revised her drug prescription. After the film she returned to New York, and in between dates with the newly elected John F Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, she saw her psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, forty-seven times in two months.

In January 1961 Kris had Monroe committed to a mental asylum at the New York Presbyterian Hospital. Only the dramatic intervention of her previous husband, the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, got her out. She no longer wanted to continue therapy with Kris, and wrote a long letter to Ralph Greenson. By June Monroe was living in Los Angeles and seeing Greenson as often as five times a week. It was as if her needs were insatiable. He wrote to Marianne Kris how Monroe called him at all hours, threatened suicide, and then improved, only to break down again.

“I had become a prisoner now of a form of treatment which I thought was correct for her but almost impossible for me”.

Leo Rosten wrote a 1961 novel, Captain Newman M.D, based on Greenson’s wartime experiences in Fort Logan, Colorado.

In December 1961 Greenson placed his friend and housekeeper, Eunice Murray (1902 – 1994), to be nurse and companion to Monroe. Murray had never seen a Monroe movie. Monroe was delighted to find that Murray was an excellent seamstress, as several of her clothes needed to be taken in. Monroe – who was still exploring alternate spiritualities – was fascinated to discover that Murray was a Swedenborgian. In February 1962, Murray helped Monroe look for a house, and they found an ideal one at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood, only just over a mile from the Greenson residence. Greenson’s sister’s husband, Mickey Rudin, a well-known Hollywood lawyer became Monroe’s agent. Greenson held analysis sessions with Monroe at his own house at the end of each day, which led to his inviting her to stay for meals and musical evenings, and she met his wife Hildi, and his grown children Joan and Daniel.

A 5-minute drive from Monroe's House to Greenson's

Hildi suffered a mild stroke in February, and Greenson needed a rest from Monroe. They left on 10 May for six weeks in Europe and Israel. Monroe had been dumped by John F. Kennedy, and was having difficulties with director George Cukor on Something’s Got to Give, and, against precedent, the Fox Studio executives ignored her birthday on 1 June (they were in panic that the filming in Rome of Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor was going to bankrupt them). The next day she phoned Greenson’s house and his children went round. They called Milton Wexler, psychiatrist, Greenson’s designated locum. Monroe had Murray phone Greenson in Europe, and he returned 6 June. He met with the Fox Studio executives, but to no avail. They fired her on 9 June, but by the end of the month were negotiating to get her back. She was then interviewed by Life and Cosmopolitan, and did her first photo shoot for Vogue.

At UCLA there were discussions about a new clinic, discussions that used the newly formulated expression: 'gender identity'.

Eunice Murray sometimes stayed overnight, and was doing so on the night of 4/5 August 1962. Around 3 am she suspected something to be wrong and called Greenson, who came round and broke into Monroe’s locked bedroom via the window. He found her dead from a drug overdose – this was confirmed by her physician, and the police were summoned. She was the only patient who died in Greenson’s care.

Later that year Robert Stoller, Richard Green and several UCLA psychiatrists founded the Gender Identity Research Clinic. This was the first gender clinic so named, although those at Johns Hopkins and Charing Cross had been doing pioneering work in the field without such a name. The UCLA GIRC was explicitly oriented to research, not to providing support and surgery to trans persons. While Stoller was the Director, Greenson was Senior Psychoanalytic Consultant. His son Daniel was also on the team as a Research Associate. At this point Greenson’s experience with trans persons was minimal.

The film version of Captain Newman M.D., starring Gregory Peck as the Greenson character, was released in 1963. Greenson had had his name completely removed from the credits for fear that one of his patients would sue him for the portrayal.

In 1964 Greenson presented a paper “Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation,” which is generally taken to be a thinly disguised account of Marilyn Monroe being promiscuous. Also that year he interviewed a trans woman who is assumed to have been Tamara Rees (who had completed transition in 1954). Greenson diagnosed her as in flight from homosexuality. He claimed that some persons had such a dread of their own homosexuality that it undermined their sense of gender identity: if I love a man then I must be a woman. However, Tamara Rees was then on her second marriage. She and her husband adopted children and remained together until his death decades later. This same stance re flight from homosexuality was adopted by the anti-gay psychiatrist Charles Socarides in New York a few years later.

Later that year Greenson took over from Richard Green the analysis of a five-year-old boy, whose mother had brought him in after neighbors and his teacher commented on his frequent cross-dressing. Greenson and the UCLA referred to the child as ‘Lance’. He treated Lance mainly at the swimming pool at his own home, where he even taught Lance to swim. Most of the sessions were comprised of games in the water. This helped Lance to overcome his fears about being alone with a male adult. He bought Lance a Barbie doll, but restricted its use. Apparently Lance stopped cross-dressing. As Greenson saw it, he replaced Lance playing with the doll by playing with an adult male. According to Greenson, Lance had had difficulty differentiating loving an object from wanting to be the object. Initially he had referred to the doll as ‘me’.

Stoller and Greenson refined the concept of ‘gender’ that was being used at UCLA, by using the term ‘gender identity’ to refer to “one’s sense of being a member of a particular sex”.

In his 1965 public lecture, “Masculinity and Femininity Reconsidered”, Greenson had this to say: “It is not true that girls and boys are identical in behavior until the phallic or oedipal phase. For example, girls do much more playing with dolls than do boys, and boys are more prone to be ‘blanket lovers.’ This is an indication of a greater tendency to fetishism in boys. Boys who play with dolls are more apt to become transvestites." and “Deep analysis of fetishism and transvestitism in men, as well as deep analysis of neurotics, indicates that there exists in men a deep wish to be a woman. This is not just a wish for castration or a defense against castration anxiety; it is an indication of a special problem in individuation. In early development it becomes necessary to differentiate oneself from the mother. In individuals who fail or who do this only imperfectly there is apt to remain a need to become a woman. Both boys and girls go through a normal phase of envying mother. The girl has a special problem in changing her love object from mother to father. The boy has a special problem in changing the object of his identification from mother to father. This has important implications for the development of masculine or feminine traits.” (Nemiroff et al, p166)

In 1967 he was able to complete his The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis,which has become a classic in the field. He advocated an orthodox approach to the therapy, not such variances as he had done with Marilyn and Lance.

In 1968 Greenson proposed a developmental theory for homosexuality: “The male child, in order to attain a healthy sense of maleness, must replace the primary object of his identification, the mother, and must identify instead with the father. I believe it is the difficulties inherent in this additional step of development, from which girls are exempt, which are responsible for certain special problems in the man's gender identity, his sense of belonging to the male sex. ... The male child's ability to dis-identify will determine the success or failure of his later identification with his father.”

In 1972 Greenson gave a lecture for West German television, and surprised them by doing so in German. The English translation was entitled “A MCP Freudian Psychoanalyst Confronts Women’s Lib”. “I was first made aware of the possibility that man's envy of women was more widespread than I had anticipated by some clinical experiences that I had at the Gender Identity Research Clinic at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. In that Clinic we see patients who desire a surgical change of gender. People come there who believe they are ‘really’ a man in a woman's body or a woman in a man's body, or who simply insist they cannot live in their assigned gender and want an anatomical, surgical readjustment. Incidentally, these patients are clinically not psychotic. My theoretical training had led me to expect that, on the basis of penis envy, most of the patients would be women hoping to achieve a male habitus. To my surprise, two-thirds of the patients were men desiring to be transformed into women. The wish in men to be a woman is far more widespread than the conscious attitudes of men and women indicate, and more than the psychoanalytic literature would lead one to expect. Incidentally, transvestism, masquerading in the clothes of the opposite sex, only occurs in men, not in women.’ (Nemiroff et al, p260)

Greenson died age 68 in 1987.

The Greenson papers on Monroe and other celebrity and rich clients have been filed with the Special Collections at UCLA and will not will available to the public until 2039.

• Ralph R Greenson. “On Gambling”. American Imago, 4,2, April 1947: 61-77.
• Leo Rosten. Captain Newman, M.D. Fawcett Publications, 1961. A novel based on the wartime experiences of Rosten’s friend Ralph Greenson, and issues with empathy and post-traumatic stress.
• David Miller (dir). Captain Newman, M.D. Scr: Richard L Breen, Phoebe Ephron, Henry Ephron, based on the novel by Leo Rosten, with Gregory Peck as Josiah J Newman. US 126 mins 1963.
• Ralph Greenson, “Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation,” presented at a conference on “Psychotherapeutic Drugs: Indications and Complications,” January 12, 1964, USLC Center for the Health Sciences.
• Ralph R. Greenson, “On Homosexuality and Gender Identity,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45, 1964. Analysis of Tamara Rees.
• Ralph R. Greenson. “A transvestite boy and a hypothesis”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 47, 1966: 396–403.
• Ralph R Greenson. The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis. International Universities Press, 1967.
• Robert Stoller. Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, Science House,1968: 144, 152-3, 161, 254, 263, 266.
• Ralph R. Greenson, "Dis-Identifying From Mother: Its Special Importance for the Boy," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 1968: 370.
• Robert J Stoller. Sex and Gender Vol II: The Transsexual Experiment. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1975: 41, 53, 104-5, 124, 293.
• Ralph R Greenson. Explorations in Psychoanalysis. International Universities Press, 1978.
• Janet Malcolm. Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. Rowman & Littlefield, 1980: 45, 74-5.
• Kenneth Lewes. The psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality. Simon and Shuster, 1988: 192, 197-8, 204, 206.
• Robert A. Nemiroff, Alan Sugarman & Alvin Robbins (eds). On Loving, Hating and Living Well: The Public Psychoanalytic Lectures of Ralph R. Greenson. Karnac, 1992.
• Luciano Mecacci. Il caso Marilyn M. e altri disastri della psicoanalis. Giuseppi Laterza & Figli, 2000. English translation by Allan Cameron. Freudian Slips: The Casualties of Psychoanalysis from the Wolf Man to Marilyn Monroe. Vagabond Voices, 2009: Chp 1.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 115, 126, 173.
• Pierre-Henri Castel. La métamorphose impensable: essai sur le transsexualisme et l'identité personnelle. Gallimard, 2003: 88-9, 432n17.
• Daniel Greenson. “Greenson, Ralph (1911-1979)” in Alain de Mijolla. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Macmillan Reference, 2005.
• Douglas Kirsner. “‘Do as I say, not as I do’: Ralph Greenson, Anna Freud, and superrich patients”. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 24, 3, 2007: 475-486.
• J Randy Taraborrelli. The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. Rose Books, 2009: 158, 164, 166, 168, 180-190, 199, 201, 203, 205, 215, 217, 224-6, 228-9, 240-2.
• Riccardo Galiani. “Un cas, deux écritures, une catégorie”. Topique, 3, 108, 2009: 143-156. Online.
• Christopher Turner. “Marilyn Monroe on the couch”. The Telegraph, 23 June 2010. Online.
• Richard Green. “Robert Stoller’s Sex and Gender: 40 Years on”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 2010: 1461.
• Lois W Banner. Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox. Bloomsbury, 2012: 164, 166, 308, 329, 332-4, 341-2, 349-350, 352, 358-9, 363-372, 375-6, 380-8, 391-407, .
• Jat Margolis & Richard Buskin. The Murder of Marilyn Monroe: Case Closed. Skyhorse Publishing, 2014: Chps 3, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25. Also p1-3, 5, 32, 34, 41-4, 47, 51-2, 55, 57-9, 61, 67, 74, 76, 83, 92-3, 98, 121, 125, 153-5.
• “Dr Ralph Greenson”. Marilyn Forever, May 10, 2014. Online.

EN.Wikipedia(Ralph Greenson)      EN.Wikipedia(Death of Marilyn Monroe)      Find a Grave
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The books on Ralph Green that discuss his involvement with Marilyn Monroe don’t mention his involvement with the GIRC; those that discuss his involvement with the GIRC don’t mention his involvement with Monroe. Janet Malcolm mentions neither, nor does the article on Greenson in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis written by his son Daniel.

There are an amazing number of personal interconnections in the Marilyn Monroe case.  See the diagram on p33 of Mecacci's book.  For example Greenson's patient Frank Sinatra was also a lover of his patient Monroe.   Eunice Murray's former husband John Murray was the analyst of Anton Kris who was the son of Marrianne Kris, Monroe's New York psychoanalyst. 

If you google Greenson and Marilyn Monroe, you will find him accused of everything from having an affair with her, to controlling her life, to being complicit in her murder. Caveat lector.

Lance (1959 - ) UCLA GIRC’s first trans child

Lance had, almost since his first year, loved to parade in the shoes and clothes of his mother and sister. He also loved jewelry and makeup. The mother regarded this as just childhood play, but then a neighbor complained, and a teacher at school reported that he involved his friends in games of cross-dressing. At age five, Lance was taken by his mother to the University of California Los Angeles Gender Identity Research Clinic (UCLA GIRC).

Richard Green saw him twice weekly for six months, until called away, and then psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson continued the treatment. Robert Stoller, psychoanalyst and head of the GIRC analyzed the mother.

Greenson was a celebrity psychoanalyst in Los Angeles and had analyzed several film stars, such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis, and most famously had been Marilyn Monroe’s analyst at the time of her death in 1962. Lance was his first time treating a child.

He quickly noticed the child’s intelligence and athletic ability. He treated Lance mainly at the swimming pool at his own home, where he even taught Lance to swim. Most of the sessions were comprised of games in the water. This helped Lance to overcome his fears about being alone with a male adult. One day, while out for a walk, they encountered a group of girls playing with a Barbie doll, and Lance, becoming excited, asked to watch. At first he was mocked by the girls, but then became the center of their game. Later he begged Greenson to buy him a Barbie doll. Greenson did so, but on the condition that Lance could play with it only when with Greenson. After this point Lance largely stopped wearing female clothing. Lance did a drawing of the happiest day of his life, which was of himself in the pool, with a man outside watching. Lance avoided touching Greenson until the fifth month when they were playing together in the pool. Greenson was replacing Lance playing with the doll by playing with an adult male. According to Greenson, Lance had had difficulty differentiating loving an object from wanting to be the object. Initially he had referred to the doll as ‘me’.

Stoller analyzed the mother. She was in her forties, and had also an 11-year-old daughter. Her grandparents had been prize-winning lace-makers, and her father was noted for his needlework and weaving. She had been a creative dress designer before marriage, and still made all her own clothes. She permitted her children to see her nude and engaged in much body contact with them. Stoller describes her as looking ‘boyish’, and with shortish hair, although usually in a skirt. She took pride in her teenage photographs where she appeared to be a boy. She had passed as male whenever convenient; competed with boys in athletics and games; and played both male and female parts in theatricals. This was quite accepted by her family. She said:

"When you take off your own clothes and put on different clothes, you can be anyone".

Her own mother was emotionally distant, but her father comforted her, bought her clothes and took her, but not her brothers, to sports events. That is, until her younger sister was born. However at puberty she accepted her anatomical destiny, and developed her femininity. A brother 13 years younger was also a cross-dresser. She left home at 16. She married a man who was frequently away at work. They had a daughter and then Lance. Stoller describes both her mother and her husband as ‘empty’. He also diagnoses the mother as having ‘penis envy’. He summarizes:

“Let us review what has happened in this particular case. A strongly bisexual woman, with severe penis envy derived from her father and older brothers, in its turn the result of a sense of emptiness produced by her mother, married an empty man and had a son. On the one hand, the boy was (the phallus) of her flesh; on the other, he was clearly a male and no longer of her flesh. He was therefore both to be kept as a part of herself, by identification, and treated as an object whom she would feminize. He was his mother's feminized phallus.”

After many months of analysis, it came out that it was she, rather than her mother, who had brought up the brother, 13 years younger, who was also a cross-dresser. And he had the same name that she gave to her own son.

After Lance’s sessions with Greenson, he was deemed to be cured. Stoller, in a different essay (1968: 254) says:

“The first successfully treated case of childhood transsexualism is that of Greenson; a report written after the treatment was ended gives a vivid and warm account of this boy's rescue.”

A few years later when Agnes confessed to Stoller that she had taken external estrogens before first seeing him, she agreed for him to meet her mother, and he was able to analyze her. He found a pattern similar to that of Lance’s mother. He found a few more such, and proposed his intergenerational model of transsexual etiology, for which he became famous.

• Robert Stoller. “ Mother’s Contribution to Infantile Transvestic Behavior”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 47, 1966: 384-395.
• Ralph R. Greenson. “A transvestite boy and a hypothesis”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 47, 1966: 396–403.
• Robert Stoller. Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, Science House, 1968.
• Ralph R Greenson. Explorations in Psychoanalysis. International Universities Press, 1978.
• Pierre-Henri Castel. La métamorphose impensable: essai sur le transsexualisme et l'identité personnelle. Gallimard, 2003: 88-9, 432n17.
• Riccardo Galiani. “Un cas, deux écritures, une catégorie “. Topique, 3, 108, 2009 : 143-156. Online.
• Richard Green. “Robert Stoller’s Sex and Gender: 40 Years on”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 2010: 1460-1.

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When Stoller reprinted his article in his 1968 collection of papers, he renamed it “Mother’s Contribution to Transsexualism”; likewise when Greenson reprinted his in his 1978 collection, he renamed it “A transsexual boy and a hypothesis”.   Stoller (1968: 131) explains how he distinguishes the words: "I found myself, on calling the child an "infantile transvestite," continuously having to explain that although he cross-dressed, he did not have essential qualities of the adolescent or adult male transvestite (e.g., love of and anxious regard for his penis)." 

As is often the case with psychoanalytical studies, we have no follow-up. Lance became an adult at the end of the 1970s, and will now be turning 60. Did Lance later return to being a woman? Did he, like the presumed pre-transsexuals in the UCLA/Richard Green Feminine Boy Project of the 1970s,  become a gay man instead? Does the claim that he was ‘cured’ by Greenson mean that he was not really trans to begin with? We know of apparent trans kids who desist. A major example from the 1960s would be Kim Christy who grew up to be cis heterosexual, father and grandfather. No adult, cis man or trans woman has come forward to identify with Lance. Unlike Freud’s published case studies where the corresponding real-life persons have been identified.

If Stoller and Greenson were right about what they were doing, then it was wrong in that it was conversion therapy, which today would be illegal. However if the only result of Greenson’s therapy was to teach Lance to swim, and to make him comfortable in the presence of an adult male, then no real harm was done.  However to the extent that an attempt was made to induce an Oedipal complex through the transferential interventions of a male therapist, than that is something else.

Stoller is critical of Lance’s mother’s lifestyle: nudity in front of the kids, body touching, interest in clothes, freedom to wear whatever clothing. A few years later this kind of lifestyle was dubbed ‘hippie’. Surely there was much in it that is positive.   Stoller implies that the mother's passing as a teenage male was somehow perverse.   This would have been the early 1930s.   Her accepting her body changes at puberty, and switching to being a woman, could equally well imply a healthy attitude to reality.

Stoller regards it as important that she admitted that it was she, rather than her own mother, who had raised the brother who cross-dressed.  However he was 13 years younger, and she left home at 16.   So she raised him only for the first three years. Yet Stoller implies that she repeatedly turned boys into cross-dressers.

Stoller calls the mother 'bisexual'.   He is not using the term as we do today.  There is no suggestion of a female lover.   It would be better if he used 'bigender'.

Did the UCLA GIRC provide the therapy sessions pro bono (as it was research) or was the family sent a bill? As usual, we are not told.

Castel (p88) describes Lance as the archetype of a child transsexual. Really! This, of course was long before the recent expansion of numbers of trans kids, but there are serious candidates for the term from the 1950s/1960s: Sally Barry, Jill Monroe, Hedy Jo Star and of course Agnes.

Stoller writes of “a mother's unconscious wishes on the infant who is later to become perverse.*" and immediately adds a footnote: “After studying transexuals , I am much less certain what the word "perverse" means”.

To my mind the most perverse thing in the article is Stoller’s designation of the mother’s mother and of her husband as “empty”. However that is just a word. Stoller does not explain how he is using the word, and more importantly he does so on the word of a single analysand.

Stoller adds a footnote that after three years Lance’s father was persuaded to come in once a week and to see a different team member, but we are told nothing further.

Beverly-Barbara (1943 - ) restaurant worker

Beverly-Barbara*, from the Los Angeles area, was definitely a transkid expressing girls’ interest and dressing as a girl from an early age. Her parents hoped that she would grow out of it.

At age 15 she found work as a cocktail waitress, and saved up enough money to go and see Harry Benjamin. She claimed to be 18, although only 16, and Benjamin prescribed female hormones. Beverly-Barbara followed up with breast implants and electrolysis. Her voice had not changed much at puberty.

She found a boy-friend and in early 1967 they were married in Reno. She was able to do presenting her drivers license only. Beverly-Barbara was by then working as a receptionist at a prominent restaurant, but still not able to afford completion surgery. Benjamin suggested that she get in touch with Richard Green who, after two years with Benjamin in New York and a year in London with John Randell, had returned to the University of California Los Angeles Gender Identity Research Clinic (UCLA GIRC).

When Beverly-Barbara approached Green, he initially failed to understand why she was doing so.

“On the phone I did not suspect that she was transsexual. In person I saw no clue either.’ (Green, 2019: 144)

The GIRC had been active since 1962 but had not actually provided transgender surgery to any one, and Green thought that it was time to do so. Robert Stoller, the head of the GIRC was cautious about permitting such surgery, but was open to it being used as a research technique.

“Patient selection was crucial. It should be limited to those males who had been very feminine in childhood, had never lived acceptably in a masculine role, and who had not derived pleasure from their penis. He termed these ‘true transsexuals’.” (Green, 2010:1459).

Beverly-Barbara met these requirements. Green also endorsed John Money’s proposal that transsexual patients should undergo at least 12 months ‘real-life test’. Beverly-Barbara had in effect undergone 10 years real-life test.

Green enquired about the likelihood of being charged with mayhem. The University of California legal counsel in Berkeley quickly replied that such was a possibility, but that the University would pay the legal bill.

Green presented Beverly-Barbara to the GIRC at a Saturday morning conference in November 1968. Stoller gave a qualified approval. A second opinion was obtained from UCLA psychiatrist Larry Newman, and urologist Willard Goodwin (Elmer Belt's ++nephew who had argued against the continuation of transgender surgery by his uncle in 1954) agreed to do the operation.

All went well, and Beverly-Barbara co-operated in follow-up interviews. Then she disappeared into private life.

• Robert Stoller,. Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, Science House,1968: 251..
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 214.
• Richard Green. “Robert Stoller’s Sex and Gender: 40 Years on”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 2010: 1459.
• Richard Green. Gay Rights, Trans Rights: A psychiatrist/lawyer’s 50-year battle. 2018: chp 19.

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*Green 2010 calls her Barbara; Green 2018 calls her Beverly.  Meyerowitz does not give her a name.

Beverly-Barbara will now be 75 years old.

Other clinics refused to start the clock on the real-life test until after they had interviewed the patient – as Holly Woodlawn had found when she approached Johns Hopkins in 1966.


Of course Beverly-Barbara is very similar to Agnes, who had been approved for surgery with Elmer Belt by Stoller 10 years earlier. There has been a lot of commentary about Agnes, but very little about Beverly-Barbara.

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.