A rereading of Benjamin: Part 2: transvestites

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. Warner Books Edition 1977, with a bibliography and appendix by Richard Green.  PDF (with different pagination).  Page references eg p32/13 mean p32 in the 1977 Warner edition and p13 in the PDF. 

Part I:  intro and the Scale
Betty (?1938 - ?) female impersonator, salesgirl, model. --- 2nd entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part II:  transvestites
Clara Miller (1899 - ?) fur merchant, office worker ---  3rd entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part III: trans women
Joe (1920 - ?) cattle breader, art dealer ---  4th entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part IV: photos, legal, trans men, conclusions
Comments

Chapter 2: Transvestism, Transsexualism, and Homosexuality.

Virginia Prince, writing as C.V. Prince, with a preamble by Harry Benjamin, had published. “Homosexuality, Transvestism and Transsexuality: Reflections on Their Etiology and Differentiations” in The American Journal of Psychotherapy, 11, 1957.   Prince proposes that there are three kinds of ‘males’ who dress as women. Benjamin seems to have taken this as a starting point.

The first sentence is more carefully phrased than many later writers' claims: "Transvestism (TVism) as a medical diagnosis was probably used for the first time by the German sexologist, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, about forty years ago when he published his book, Die Transvestiten". p24/10  

Actually Die Transvestiten was published in 1910, which was 56 years, not forty, before 1966. 

Benjamin continues to use TV and TS as abbreviations throughout the book. In Transvestia 12 (December 1961) Prince credited herself as having coined the term TV, although as usual she did not say where. As it is the obvious abbreviation, it is more than likely that other people had used it without waiting for her to coin it. Furthermore, she said, she therefore had a right to "pronounce a death sentence", and urged that all would use FP (=femme personator) instead. (Robert S. Hill. ‘As a man I exist; as a woman I live’: Heterosexual Transvestism and the Contours of Gender and Sexuality in Postwar America. PhD Dissertation. University of Michigan. 2007:62)    Five years later, Benjamin's usage of TVism implicitly denied her claim to coinage, and her admonition that it not be used.

Benjamin writes: “Most writers on the subject refer to transvestism as a sexual deviation, sometimes as a perversion. It is not necessarily either one. It also can be a result of ‘gender discomfort’ and provide a purely emotional relief and enjoyment without conscious sexual stimulation, this usually occurring only in later life.” p24/10

But shortly afterwards he writes: “Because of the much more permissive fashions among women, and for other reasons, the problem of transvestism almost exclusively concerns men in whom the desire to cross-dress is often combined with other deviations, particularly with fetishism, narcissism, and the desire to be tied up (bondage) or somehow humiliated (masochism).” p25/10 , and then “The majority of transvestites are overtly heterosexual, but many may be latent bisexuals. They 'feel' as men and know that they are men, marry, and often raise families. A few of them, however, especially when they are 'dressed,' can as part of their female role react homosexually to the attentions of an unsuspecting normal man. The transvestite’s marriage is frequently endangered as only relatively few wives can tolerate seeing their husbands in female attire. The average heterosexual woman wants a man for a husband, not someone who looks like a woman; but mutual concessions have often enough preserved such marriages, mostly for the sake of children.” p26/11

Virginia Prince writing in Transvestia, and speaking in public played down the erotic and/or fetishistic aspects of cross-dressing. On the other hand, in her meetings with psychiatrist Robert Stoller, she affirmed at least the erotic aspects. While she denied finding men attractive, she did enjoy being attractive to and flirting with men. She had a cross-dresser friend who was willing to play the male role and took her for lunch and drinks. Afterward they did mutual masturbation. She found kissing, hugging and affection from a man to be sexually rewarding. (Richard F Docter. From Man to Woman: The Transgender Journey of Virginia Prince. Docter Press, 2004: 66-7). One wonders, in the paragraph by Benjamin, if Prince had discussed the same eroticism with Benjamin. In either case Benjamin had certainly encountered it in discussions with other patients.

Benjamin contrasts TVs and TSs: “The transsexual (TS) male or female is deeply unhappy as a member of the sex (or gender) to which he or she was assigned by the anatomical structure of the body, particularly the genitals. To avoid misunderstanding: this has nothing to do with hermaphroditism. The transsexual is physically normal (although occasionally underdeveloped). These persons can somewhat appease their unhappiness by dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex, that is to say, by cross-dressing, and they are, therefore, transvestites too. But while ‘dressing’ would satisfy the true transvestite (who is content with his morphological sex), it is only incidental and not more than a partial or temporary help to the transsexual. True transsexuals feel that they belong to the other sex, they want to be and function as members of the opposite sex, not only to appear as such. For them, their sex organs, the primary (testes) as well as the secondary (penis and others) are disgusting deformities that must be changed by the surgeon’s knife. This attitude appears to be the chief differential diagnostic point between the two syndromes (sets of symptoms) - that is, those of transvestism and transsexualism.” p27/11

Benjamin gives a brief account of Christine Jorgensen, and in a footnote: “A few daring surgeons performed 'conversion operations' thirty or forty years ago but with very doubtful if not unfavorable results. In most cases, they castrated or removed the penis only, without attempting to create a vagina (see case of Lilly Elbe).” footnote, p28/18. He seems to be unaware of Hirschfeld’s patients Toni Ebel, Dörchen Richter and (suppposedly) his own patient whom he sent on to Berlin, Charlotte Charlaque. One also wants to ask if Kurt Wenekros’ patient Lili Elvenes (Elbe) underwent only a penectomy, why is she said to have died after a uterus transplant.

Bemjamin then asks whether “transvestites with their more or less pronounced sex and gender indecision may actually all be transsexuals, but in varying degrees of intensity”. p35/14 “A low degree of largely unconscious transsexualism can be appeased through cross-dressing and demands no other therapy for emotional comfort. These are transvestites…It must be left to further observations and investigations in greater depth to decide whether or not transvestitic desires may really be transsexual in nature and origin. Many probably are, but the frequent fetishistic transvestites may have to be excluded.” So much for HBS and other transsexuals who claim to cite Benjamin that transvestites are a different something (but see otherwise in Part III).

He continues: “If these attempts to define and classify the transvestite and the transsexual appear vague and unsatisfactory, it is because a sharp and scientific separation of the two syndromes is not possible. We have as yet no objective diagnostic methods at our disposal to differentiate between the two. We - often - have to take the statement of an emotionally disturbed individual, whose attitude may change like a mood or who is inclined to tell the doctor what he believes the doctor wants to hear. Furthermore, nature does not abide by rigid systems. The vicissitudes of life and love cause ebbs and flows in the emotions so that fixed boundaries cannot be drawn. It is true that the request for a conversion operation is typical only for the transsexual and can actually serve as definition. It is also true that the transvestite looks at his sex organ as an organ of pleasure, while the transsexual turns from it in disgust. Yet, even this is not clearly defined in every instance and no two cases are ever alike. An overlapping and blurring of types or groups is certainly frequent.” p35/15

Chapter 3: The Transvestite in Older and Newer Aspects

Nonaffective dressing: a cis person who cross-dresses to cross a border, rob a bank, get into an all-male or all-female place, even to attend one's own funeral. Those female impersonators who are not transvestites or transsexuals. Gay men in drag for a competition, to seduce straight men. This is covered in two short paragraphs, and certainly does not consider such gays as then progress on the road the womanhood. This is Type 0 (what today we might call Cis Cross-dressing). There are of course thousands of books and films that use these events as plot devices – a phenomenon of both high culture (Benjamin the opera buff would have been very aware of Marriage of Figaro and Der Rosenkavalier) and the cinema (Some Like it Hot and Thunderball are prominent examples from the early to mid 1960s).

“Their actions usually have nothing to do with transvestism either, the female attire being incidental, nonaffective, and without eroticism. ... In transvestism proper, the emotions are always involved, tinged more or less with eroticism, sexual stimulation, - and often masturbatory satisfaction.” p46/20. In Chapter 2, Benjamin had argued that transvestism was not a sexual deviation. Now he seems to be backtracking.

Type I Pseudo Transvestite. Again a very short section. His main example, p46/21, is a man, 60, previously a Kinsey 3 and married to a woman, who when younger had often cross-dressed. Now, since his wife’s death, he is a Kinsey 5 and never cross-dresses. I have a Label Youthful Phase in my encyclopedia. Are persons who cross-dress when young, but then desist not to be regarded as transvestites? This would result in us losing Kim Christy, John Herbert, Herbert Beeson, Boy George from our history. But more importantly I have never regarded ‘lifelong’ as an essential word in the definition of ‘tranvestism’, nor have I seen other definitions include it.

Then there is a throwaway paragraph at the end of the section. “Another, probably very small group of men may belong to the same category. They do not ever 'dress' overtly, out of fear or shame, but greatly enjoy transvestitic fantasies and literature. It is probably immaterial whether to classify them as pseudo or not at all.” p47/21 It would not be until over 45 years later that the concept of Cross Dreamer would be articulated.

Pseudo-Transvestite is marked Kinsey 0-6 in Benjamin’s Scale. This is all sexual orientations. The next two Transvestite types are marked 0-2 only. And thus gay transvestites are erased, unlike in Benjamin’s previous book Prostitution and Morality. Let us mention Patricia Morgan who was a patient of Benjamin in the late 1950s. She started as a male prostitute, became a transvestite prostitute, had surgery from ElmerBelt in 1961, and continued as a female prostitute. Perhaps Benjamin should have listened more attentively to what Morgan had to say. In her very being she refutes the distinction between the homosexual, presumed to be a pseudo transvestite who will discontinue, and the transsexual.

Type III True Transvestite.

“A large group of male transvestites (TVs) can be called "true" because cross-dressing is the principal if not the only symptom of their deviation. They dress out of a strong, sometimes overwhelming, emotional urge that – to say the least - contains unmistakable sexual overtones. Some of them can resemble addicts, the need for ‘dressing’ increasing with increasing indulgences.“ p47/21 and continues: “Sexual reasons for male transvestism are especially evident in the early stages of a transvestitic career. No experienced clinician can doubt the sexual roots in the large majority of transvestites. In most of the medical literature it is, therefore, perhaps not too fortunately, referred to as a sexual deviation or perversion. The often admitted masturbatory activities during or after a transvestite spree confirm this view. The frequently reported guilt feelings and disgust that are followed, with purges, that is to say, getting rid of all female attire, likewise point to the, - basically - sexual nature of transvestism (‘Post coitum omne animal triste?’).” p48/22 Then Benjamin talks about the ‘transvestite with a latent transsexual trend’: “The sexual element in transvestism seemed to me always more manifest in the fetishistic than in the latent transsexual type where (as in true TSism) a low sex drive and gender dissatisfaction frequently predominated.“ p53/24

What about female transvestites? “The facts may apply to the female as well as to the male, but this chapter will be devoted to the male only. Female transvestism seems to be rare and of somewhat doubtful reality. Women's fashions are such as to allow a female transvestite to indulge her wish to wear male attire without being too conspicuous. Her deviation has been considered merely arrogant while male transvestism is to many objectionable because, in their opinion, it humiliates.” p47/21 This again is a repetition of what Virginia Prince said. And the claim is offensive in that many female cross-dressers were in fact arrested – especially if they were anywhere near a lesbian bar. The Los Angeles police actually had a special section, the Daddy Tank, to imprison female cross-dressers. Louis Sullivan and Patrick Califia would later mock this attempted erasure of female cross-dressers, but that was still in the future. Here is a quote from Califia. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism  Cleis Press, 1997: 201.  “A whole book could probably be written about the misogyny and homophobia that has led sexologists and other 'experts' to frequently state, as Prince does, that women can wear men's clothes without being punished, so they have no need to become transvestites. This is patently false. … As any stone butch or passing woman can tell you, the general public continues to be deeply disturbed by a biological female who appears in public in men's clothing. There is no difference between the discrimination, condemnation, and violence that is routinely inflected upon male and female cross-dressers, if they are exposed as such."

On p49/22 we are formally introduced to “Charles Prince, Ph.D., who himself is a transvestite” and “Emphatic among present-day writers as to a supposedly nonsexual nature of transvestism”. Note the ‘supposedly’. Charles is of course Virginia. The PhD was earned by Virginia’s male persona Arnold Lowman in pharmacology, which led to his two successful books Chemistry in Your Beauty Shop, 1955 and Survey of Chemistry for Cosmetologists, 1959 – none of this mentioned. There has obviously been some sort of dialectic between Prince and Benjamin, who had known each other at least ten years by this time. Prince seems to have pushed Benjamin further in erasing gay transvestites and female transvestites, but Benjamin has resisted Prince’s position that transvestism is non-sexual. It is a shame that this was not documented.

Benjamin does not introduce us to Taylor Buckner, a future sociologist at Sir George Williams University, Montréal (and in fact mispells his name as Buchner), but does cite his master’s thesis on subscribers to Prince’s Transvestia magazine several times.

Type II Fetishistic Transsexual. Benjamin gives two examples p51/23.
 a) “a man in his late sixties, was accustomed to this form of transvestism when he went out. Only at home did he "dress" completely. Once he was in a street accident and was taken unconscious to a hospital. When the female undergarments were discovered, the examining physician, completely unacquainted with transvestism, wrote the fact into the hospital record (where I saw it), together with the diagnosis of ‘concussion’ and ‘patient evidently a degenerate’." p51/29 Footnote 7 tells us that his case was fully described by Dr Talmey, and thus we identify OttoSpengler.
b) “a nearly sixty-year-old, largely heterosexual pharmacist, who looks little more than forty, combines his fetishistic ‘dressing’ with a strong fetish for youthful apparel (civistism). He gets an even greater ‘sexual glow’ (as he describes it) from dressing like a very young boy than as a woman”.

There is also a short section at the end of the chapter, Concomitant deviations, where Benjamin mentions bondage, flagellation, and auto-asphyxiation with its risk of suicide. However he goes on: “Fetishism (S.O.S. II) complicates other TVs' sex lives. At the same time, it puts an additional strain on married life. There are those who like furs or leather. They buy jackets, coats, and entire outfits at considerable expense so that the wife has a just grievance, if she cannot afford anything like it for her own wardrobe.”p63/28

Now this was 1966, seven years before Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show; four years before Jayne County incorporated fetish themes into her act; 10 years before Punk, and well before the fetish club scene. Psycho-analysts had been ignorantly writing for decades that transvestism was a type of fetish. On the other hand there was a publisher in New York, Leonard Burtman  who had been putting out real fetish titles since the late 1950s, and around this time became a mentor of Kim Christy. It is very difficult from our 21^st century perspective to give any credence to what either the psychoanalysts or Benjamin wrote about fetishism. They just don’t know what they are talking about.  A small number of transvestites were and are fetishists, but the examples cited by Benjamin hardly count.  ‘Fetish’, much like the word ‘autogynephile’ in later years became a general insult term to throw at a trans person whom you dislike. The HBS people put down Prince’s femmiphilics as fetishists, while FPE was actually obsessed with not being fetishistic. Two years after Benjamin’s book, Transvestia columnist Sheila Niles popularized the concept ‘whole girl fetishist (WGF)’ for FPE members who did not pass well enough, particularly if it were for lack of trying. Over the next few years it came to be that those who failed or didn’t bother to fashion themselves as truly feminine were "fetishistic". Susanna Valenti even estimated that the majority of members were WGFs.

What about real fetishistic transvestites? One was certainly known to Benjamin. Two years earlier in 1964, Leonard Wheeler had published Sex Life of a Transvestite. He revealed Connie, his female self as an erotic transvestite who was also into bondage, with cruel sadistic fantasies about women. His book contained an introduction by Benjamin’s colleague Albert Ellis, and was featured in Taylor Buckner’s 1969 paper “The Transvestic Career Path” - in fact it was the only autobiography that Buckner referred to. However there is no mention of Leonard Wheeler in Benjamin’s book.

Transvestite Publications.  Again Virginia Prince is mentioned, and her magazine Transvestia and her denial of a sexual component. And then: “The de-sexing attempt is merely one example of the frequent lack of realism among transvestites and their ever-present capacity for illusion and self-deception. The inability of many of them to look at themselves objectively is their great handicap. It explains that all too often they do not look like women at all when ‘dressed,’ but like men dressed up as women. They do not see it and that is why some of them are arrested. One only has to look at some of the photos published in Transvestia and Turnabout to recognize the truth of this observation. While unfortunate, the self-deception is understandable if we think of the wish being the ever-present motivating force.” p54/24

Benjamin is more positive about Turnabout: “A seemingly more objective approach to the problem can be found in the pages of Turnabout, another more recent magazine of transvestism. Its competent editor, Fred Shaw [Siobhan Fredericks], writing under different pseudonyms, with several qualified collaborators, likewise provides self-expression for their readers through letters and photographs, but they provide, at the same time, education and information through scientific debates, giving expression to diversified views. They disagree with ‘Virginia Prince’ and her principal theory that ‘the girl within’ prompts transvestites to be what they are and to act as they do. Yet - as we have seen - such theory does contain a grain of truth, namely, the biological fact that in every male there is an element of the female, and vice versa. Our culture and upbringing, however, lead to the practical demands (for males and females), for masculinity and femininity as such, and allow no ‘girls within’ men. It does exist only under just such abnormal conditions as transvestism, transsexualism and certain cases of homosexuality with effeminacy. All this, however, permits no generalization.” p55/25

Benjamin says nothing about Female Mimics, which had been available since 1963. While it was more oriented to female impersonation, many of the same people read both Turnabout and Female Mimics.

Transvestites’ wives. Prince had published The Transvestite and His Wife in 1962, which Benjamin does not mention. He does say: “The wives of transvestites constitute a psychological problem by themselves. I have spoken to at least a dozen. Most of them put up a brave front, claiming to be unaffected in their love for their husbands, but admitting they are certainly not happy about the TVism, even suffering acutely at times. Few, but very few, say they enjoy helping their husbands to "dress" and "make up" and actually like him in his female as much as his male role.” p61/27

Betty (?1938 - ?) female impersonator, salesgirl, model

Betty was raised in the US Northwest, one of five children. He was initially permitted to dress as a girl, but his parents divorced when he was five, and the step-father objected to the cross-dressing.

At 15, Betty was raped. At 16 she read about Christine Jorgensen and knew what she wanted. She had seen the Jewel Box Review when it came to town, and a close friend had obtained a position there as a chorus boy. After winning first prize at a local Halloween ball she sent photographs to the friend at Jewel Box Review, and got back a wire from the manager offering a job.

She grew her hair to shoulder length, which led to complications when out in male guise – this being over a decade before men began growing their hair long. After a two-month club residency, the troupe played Betty’s home town, and then she was laid off.

She asked her parents to permit that she have a sex change – she being a minor – but they refused, and at their request she visited a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist discovered what Betty already knew: she was androphilic and desperately wanted to become a woman. She continued to find find work as a female impersonator.

At age 20, after a period of despondency at not having a female body, he decided to return to being a man, cut his hair short and then volunteered to join the US Navy. He was almost rejected when the medical inspection discovered the old rape, but he asserted that he had been a victim, and was accepted. He was assigned to record keeping, and deployed to Japan, where he quickly discovered the gay bars, and then a male geisha house. Citing his female impersonator experience, he was taken on as a male geisha. She had a thrill when several of her shipmates came into the bar, but they did not recognize her. Back in the US he had an affair with a man in Oklahoma City.

One day after being honorably discharged she was back on the stage as a female impersonator. During a nine-month engagement at a “well-known club” in New York, she met two performers who had transitioned, and knew instantly that she wanted to do the same. She grew her hair again, and started going out as a woman, quite successfully even before starting female hormones. When her show went on tour, she stayed in New York to continue hormone treatment. She found another job as an impersonator-dancer at a “major nightspot”.

Late in 1961 she was invited to the table of a man, an ambassador of a Latin American country, who invited her first to have a drink, and then offered to pay for her transformation. He “took me to an internationally famous endocrinologist, whose prices I could never have afforded”. She also underwent electrolysis to eliminate her facial hair.

A year later, July 1962, she was ready for surgery, and the ambassador arranged a trip to Casablanca. In Paris she was joined by another impersonator making the same journey. The cost at the Casablanca clinic was US$1250. The operation apparently went well. However a week later when she was back in Paris, she suffered continual vaginal bleeding, and went to a US hospital. A week of douching fixed the problem. On return to the US, Betty felt obliged to explain to immigration why she had only female clothes in her suitcase: that she was a professional female impersonator.

For a few months she worked as a prostitute, “to prove to myself that I was really a woman”, but then found such work distasteful. She worked as a salesgirl, and as a fashion model. She finally won acceptance from her mother and step-father. She started writing, with the aid of professional writer, her autobiography. During the mid-1960s she acted as a confessor and adviser to other transsexuals in the city.

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. Warner Books Edition 1977: 239-255, 308-313.

________________________________

The Transsexual Lives Appendix to Harry Benjamin’s book by REL Masters says that “Betty” is a pseudonym, although she uses it for herself in her autobiographical segment. Other than that we do not have a name for her.

It is a problem for the historian that Betty does not give the name of the clubs where she works, or the doctors that she went to, although the “internationally famous endocrinologist, whose prices I could never have afforded” is obviously Benjamin and the surgeon in Casablanca is obviously Dr Burou. If there is any information about her after 1966, it is not found in that we do not have her name. Is the “well-known club” in New York the 82 Club?

Jan Morris also had need of further medical attention after returning from Dr Burou’s clinic.

One wonders if the unnamed ambassador asked for anything, sexual of otherwise in return. However we have come across another rich man, Rex/Gloria who paid for younger trans women to go to Dr Burou without such requests.

The information about Betty is in two parts. An excerpt from her unpublished autobiography, and a clinical overview by Masters. Despite having her account to consult, Masters is sloppy with facts. He puts her first attempt at surgery, which was vetoed by the parents, before the first period of working as an impersonator; he says that Betty joined the Army rather than the Navy. Also he continues to refer to Betty as ‘he’ even after surgery.

We have no information about Betty after Benjamin's book in 1966.

A rereading of Benjamin: Part 1: intro and the Scale

Harry Benjamin's book is now 50 years old.    This is the only close reading of the book available.

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. Warner Books Edition 1977, with a bibliography and appendix by Richard Green.  PDF (with different pagination).  Page references eg p32/13 mean p32 in the 1977 Warner edition and p13 in the PDF. 

Part I:  intro and the Scale
Betty (?1938 - ?) female impersonator, salesgirl, model. --- 2nd entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part II:  transvestites
Clara Miller (1899 - ?) fur merchant, office worker ---  3rd entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part III: trans women
Joe (1920 - ?) cattle breader, art dealer ---  4th entry, Appendix D, autobiographies
Part IV: photos, legal, trans men, conclusions
Comments

See also my biography of Harry Benjamin:

Part1 - beginings
Part 2 - rejuvenation.
Part 3 - transsexualism to 1966.
Part 4 - transsexualism since 1966

Harry Benjamin's other books
The other Harry Benjamin 
Benjamin's first 10 patients: a disambiguation

Dedication

The book is dedicated to Mrs Benjamin, Gretchen, and appreciations are given to G.R. Lal and R.E.L. Masters who each wrote an appendix, Richard Green who wrote an appendix and the bibliography, Arthur Ceppos president of Julian Press (who also published Ron L Hubbard and John Lilly), associates Leo Wollman and Wardell Pomeroy for advice and assistance, Richard Levidow, attorney (who would later be the attorney for the Queens liberation Front), for advice on the legal chapter, Robert Laidlaw and Johannes Burchard, psychiatrists for encouragement, Brooking Tatum for editing the book, and to Reed Erickson for financial and moral support. John Money and Virginia Prince who are mentioned in the book are not mentioned in the appreciations.

Context

While there had been several previous books about transvestism, there had been only two previous books specifically about transsexuality, both, as it happened, by persons themselves transsexual: Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, 1946, by Michael Dillon, and Over the Sex Border, 1963, by Georgina Turtle. Neither of these are mentioned by Benjamin, although Turtle's book is included without comment in Green's bibliography.

The word 'transsexual' first appeared in English in Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy & Clyde Martin.  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1948, as a kind of homosexual considered as an intermediate sex.   The next year, 1949, David Cauldwell wrote a paper for Sexology about a girl who wanted to be a boy. He entitled the paper ‘Psychopathia transexualis’ (note the one S). This paper was not much noticed. Harry Benjamin later commented: "Whether I had ever read that article and the expression remained in my subconscious, frankly, I do not know". It was Louise Lawrence who introduced Benjamin to Cauldwell’s writings.  The word also turned up in Edward D Wood's 1953 film, Glen or Glenda, just before Benjamin used the word in public.  

Ira Pauly had been sitting in on Benjamin's Wednesday afternoon clinic with his transsexual patients, and in 1963 had read a paper before the American Psychiatric Association in St Louis: "Female Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism", and in 1965 had published "Male Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. A Review of 100 Cases" in the Archives of General Psychology (13:172-181). In Sweden Jan Wålinder was working on his Transsexualism. A Study of Forty-Three Cases which would be published in 1967. 1965 had seen the publication of Abby Sinclair's I Was Male and Hedy Jo Star's My Unique Change. Neither of these are mentioned by Benjamin, but they are in Green's bibliography. In 1965 John F Oliven published Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, wherein he used the word ‘transgenderism’; he was omitted from Green’s bibliography.

In 1966, around the time of publication of his book, Benjamin referred Phyllis Avon Wilson to the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. She is taken to be the Clinic's first patient to be operated on, and later that year she had become a dancer in New York, where she was outed in a gossip column and the press realized that there was a major story at Johns Hopkins.  Shortly afterwards, the Universities of Minnesota, Stanford, Northwestern and Washington at Seattle also opened Gender Identity Clinics.

Earlier in 1966, the British Medical Journal had published a leading article on transsexuality that summarized the field from the medical point of view. Christine Jorgensen's A Personal Autobiography would be published in 1967, and be filmed three years later.

By 1966, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn had met each other, and Holly approached the Johns Hopkins clinic about TG surgery.   Others who first went to the clinics that year were the one-year-old Bruce Reimer and Barbara Dayton.   The National Academy drag pageant final 1967 would be won by Rachael Harlow, and the film version would become a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival.  Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge would be published in 1968; the Stonewall riots would be a year after that.

Spelling

Benjamin is considered, in contradistinction to Cauldwell, as the major proponant of the 2-S spelling of 'transsexual'. He even writes ‘psychopathia transsexualis’ when referring to Cauldwell’s term.

Readers of the PDF version may assume that there is a switch, in Appendix D, to the 1-S spelling: 'transexual'. However this is a copying error. It remains 2-s in the printed version.

Chapter 1: The Symphony of the Sexes.

An earlier draft of this chapter was originally published as "Seven Kinds of Sex" in Hugo Gernsback's Sexology Magazine in 1961.

On the first page, Benjamin writes: " 'Gender' is the nonsexual side of sex. As someone expressed it: Gender is located above, and sex below the belt." p15/6 In the footnote on p65/42, he repeats this and attributes it to Virginia Prince.

Georgina Somerset, in her 1963 book, had contentiously insisted that chromosomes = sex. Benjamin is probably not replying to her in naming this chapter. While admitting that chromosomal sex is fundamental, he explains that 'sex' also has genetic, anatomical, legal, gonadal, germinal, endrocrinal, psychological and social aspects. Chromosomes are the one aspect that cannot be changed.

It has of course become a cliché of anti-trans writers to claim that one cannot change one’s chromosomes and therefore one cannot one’s sex. I was disappointed to find that Anne Vitale, who is otherwise trans positive, also makes the same claim.

The Benjamin Scale - Typology

The author of the British Medical Journal article in early 1966 had enumerated 3 kinds of transvestism: 1) as a masturbatory ritual associated with erotic excitement 2) a symptom associated with other anomalies such as homosexuality 3) a means of gratification without genital excitation or interest in homosexual behaviour. He followed Kinsey in that a transvestite may or may not be homosexual, and had rejected the common attitude in psychoanalysis that (1) was the main form.

Benjamin reminds us, p32/13, that in previous publications, he had divided all transvestites into three groups: 1) those who merely want to ‘dress’ and be accepted as women. 2) those who waver, who want breast development but shy away from surgery. 3) ‘fully developed’ transsexuals. Benjamin had arrived at this typology after observing over 200 patients, of whom more than half he diagnosed as transsexuals. He proceeds to discuss other doctors, p34/14, who divide by ‘sex feel’: heterosexual transvestites, versus transsexuals who “considers his sexual desire for a man to be heterosexual, that is, normal”. Benjamin does not mention, as many have since, that this approach erases all gay and lesbian sensibility. He does continue by commenting how trans patients are often bi, do change sexuality over time, or are apparently heterosexual because they do not wish to be seen as homosexual as well as tranvestic.  However what he does do is assign Kinsey Scale vales to each of his six types.

Benjamin proposes what he calls his Sex Orientation Scale. It contains “six different types of the transvestism-transsexualism syndrome as clinical observations seem to reveal them. While there are six types, there are seven categories listed on the scale, the first one describing the average, normal person.”

While he had criticized other doctors who divide by ‘sex feel’, he applies a Kinsey Scale number to each of his types. As Kinsey wrote it:

0 Exclusively heterosexual
1 Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2 Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 Equally heterosexual and homosexual
4 Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6 Exclusively homosexual.

However as we are dealing with trans persons, we should rewrite it, as Benjamin did not:

0 Exclusively gynephilic
1 Predominantly gynephilic, only incidentally androphilic
2 Predominantly gynephilic, but more than incidentally androphilic
3 Equally gynephilic and androphilic
4 Predominantly androphilic, but more than incidentally gynephilic
5 Predominantly androphilic, only incidentally gynephilic
6 Exclusively androphilic

1-5 are of course gradations of bisexuality.

Persons of any Kinsey type may be Type I Pseudo Transvestite. However a Type III True Transvestite is marked as Kinsey 0-2 (gynephilic) and thus gay transvestites have been erased. Gays also cannot be Type II Fetishistic Transvestite either (Kinsey 0-2), an assumption that was later built into the DSM-III-R 1987. By then homosexuality was removed from the DSM, but transvestism was now added: it was renamed 'Transvestic Fetishism'. As Prince had advocated, and Benjamin implied in his scale, Transvestism was defined as done by heterosexual males. Cross-dressing was not regarded as a transvestism when done by women or gay men. However, presumably to Prince’s chagrin, the psycho-analytic tradition that heterosexual transvestism was a fetish was accepted.

At the other end of the scale, Type V True Transsexual Moderate Intensity is Kinsey 4-6 and Type VI True Transsexual High Intensity is Kinsey 6 only. Thereby Charlotte Goiar, Lili Elvenes (Elbe), Betty Cowell, Jan Morris, Renée Richards cannot be True Transsexuals on this scale, only those who are gay/androphilic. This is the basis of the claim by Ray Blanchard to have recognized a second transsexual type, the ‘autogynephile’, although most who are Kinsey 1-3 pre-op reject the term.

What about Type IV Nonsurgical Transsexual? The older Virginia Prince would presumably fit in here, but never agreed with the label. Louise Lawrence and Susanne Valenti also fit. It is marked Kinsey 1-4. Prince and her followers attempted to appropriate the term ‘transgenderist’ for this category, but never made the term their own. However should it not also contain non-surgical persons such as Holly Woodlawn, International Chrysis, Jayne County, Minette or Carla Antonelli who were presumably Kinsey 5-6? Does Benjamin assume that all such androphilic trans women would eventually opt for surgery.

Benjamin does not build early or late transition into his schema. Type V or Type VI may transition at 16 or 61. Early transition is not a requirement. Of course a Type VI High Intensity person would logically want to transition early, but in 1966 there were lots of trans women who had been desperately wanting transition for 30 or 40 years but the doctors, the clinics had not been available.

Note that Benjamin uses ‘Trapped in a male body’ to describe Type V Moderate Intensity. For Type VI High Intensity he uses ‘Total Psycho-Sexual Inversion’. This is not a distinction that later writers paid any attention to.

A footnote, p40/18, presents two alternate typologies. “After having devised the first S.O.S. chart, it was shown to two of the most earnest students of the transvestitic problem, both transvestites themselves, and they formulated charts of their own. In one, seven types were likewise recognized and recorded as follows”.

1 Fetishist
2 Low intensity TV
3 True femiphile TV
4 Asexual type
5 Gender type TS
6 Intensive sexual type TS
7 Operated TS

Type and percentage
1 Fetishist 25
2 Narcissist 50
3 Exhibitionist 10
4 Pseudo-transsexual 10
5 Transsexual 5

As the first contains the word ‘femiphile’, we can be fairly sure that its author is Virginia Prince.

Michel Seghers (1932 – 2014) sex-change surgeon

Michel Seghers qualified as a doctor at the Catholic University of Luvain in 1957. As an alternative to Belgian military service he did a three-year medical internship in the then Belgian Congo, first on a sugar cane plantation, and then at the University of Lovanian in Léopoldville (renamed Kinshasha in 1966), which was affiliated with the his alma mater. His wife was with him, and as it happened each of their three children would be born on different continents.

From 1962 he worked for a year in Cincinnati, USA, where he gained experience in plastic surgery at the Christ and Children’s Hospital. He accepted a position at the University of Léopoldville in 1963 where he did plastic and reconstructive surgery, but returned to Brussels in 1966 during the instability with the change of government that resulted in Mobutu Sese Seko coming to power.

In October 1967 Peggy Wijnen died of a blood clot shortly after transgender surgery. Her surgeon, Andre Fardeau, was charged with inflicting fatal blows and wounds with premeditation and willingly but without intent to kill, but died during the trial. This attracted Segher’s attention, and shortly afterwards a French psychiatrist introduced him to a patient who lived and passed as female and had attempted suicide several times in despair. Seghers studied the literature, and realized that he was the only hope for the patient. The operation at St Joseph’s Hospital was successful, and afterwards Seghers communicated the facts to the Belgian Society for Plastic Surgery.

There was another Belgian surgeon who was known for attempting to build extra-large vaginas and ended up with vagina-rectal fistulae. Against this background, two of Seghers’ early patients requested penectomy and orchiectomy only, that is without a vagina.

At his clinic first at St Joseph’s Hospital and then from March 1991 at Avenue de Broqueville 60, Brussels (map) he performed over 1,600 mtf genital operations, and some ftm top surgery. He generally insisted that a patient be 21 or older, but did the operation on a younger US girl who was accompanied by her mother.

In 1988 a registered nurse from the US, Michelle Hunt, herself trans, stayed on in Brussels after her operation. She met Dr Seghers’ US patients at the airport, and took them to his office. She also toured trans groups in the US, and made appointments for surgery where appropriate. However she held back the name of the surgeon to protect him from enquiry letters which generated criticism. In Fall 1993 there was conflict between Michelle Hunt and the Ingersoll Gender Center in that their respective booklets on Dr Seghers' services were similar.

Dr Seghers retired in 2001. He died at age 82.


Patients include:

patient of French psychiatrist, early 1970s
Maud Marin, 1974
Yeda Brown, 1975
Veronica Jean Brown, 1985 – doesn’t give Seghers’ name.
Michelle Duff, 1987
Michelle Hunt, 1988
April, 1991, arrived with a bout of the flu. Had to come back at a later date.
Dallas Denny, 1991
Lechane Bezuidenhout, 1992
Rachael Booth, 1992/3
Christine White, 1993
Rusty Mae Moore, Chelsea Goodwin, 1995
Karine Espineira, 1998
Catrina Day, 1999

• Veronica Jean Brown. “On the Road to Brussels”. The TV-TS Tapestry, 48,1986: 50-4. Online.
  
• The Brussels Experience. Seattle: Ingersoll Gender Center 16 pp 1989.
  
• Dr Seghers Patient Information. 3 September 1991. http://lvtgw.jadephoenix.org/Info_htm/Surgical/Segher01.htm.
  
• Michel Seghers at the Southern Comfort Conference, 4 October 1992. Transcript    Dallas Denny Interview.
  
• Chrysalis Quarterly, 1, 6, 1993. Online Contains letters between Michelle Hunt and Ingersoll, and the interview with Dr Seghers.

Vidensbanken om kønsidentitet

_____________________________________________________

Veronica Jean Brown assured her readers that Dr Seghers is "American trained'.   Well he did one year in Cincinatti.   He did six years in Zaire.   So 'Zaire trained' would be more descriptive.   This is actually very relevant.   He got a lot of experience reconstructing bodies that had been seriously damaged by war and violence.   That kind of training makes a good surgeon.   Other sex-change surgeons who learned their skill in war zones include: David Wesser (Vietnam War),  Stanley Biber (Korean War), Howard Jones (WWII), Georges Burou (WWII), Harold Gillies (WWI & WWII).

Frederik Vilhelm Schmidt (1845 – 1936) orphanage head, inmate

Frederikke Vilhelmine Møller, the daughter of a metal worker was raised in Copenhagen. Her father died in 1856, and she was raised by her grandparents. At age 20, working as a maid, Vilhelmine was jailed for stealing food for her impoverished mother and four small siblings.

From there she joined the congregation of Pastor Rudolph Frimodts, and was later employed at the new Godthaab orphanage in Frederiksberg.

In 1881 Vilhelmine Møller was appointed head of the Kana boys’ home. She was respected for her modern opinions on child rearing, and she was published in many magazines. In 1889 at the first public meeting of Kvindevalgretsforeningen – KVF (the Female Suffrage Association) 1500 women voted Møller onto the board.

On 28 February 1893 16-year-old Volmer Sjøgren (born 1878), one of Møller’s wards, died in bed after a birthday party. He was about to leave the home and take up an apprenticeship as a metal worker in Copenhagen. The doctor listed the cause of death as a blood clot and Volmer was buried.

However his roommate, Louis, told his mother that Matron Møller often called Volmer to share her bed. The mother contacted the chairman of the Kana board. The chairman dismissed the insinuation as ludicrous, but when he told Møller of the claim, she lost composure, collapsed and was admitted to hospital. After discharge she was interviewed by the police, who found her explanations inconsistent. She confessed to a five-year affair with Volmer, but denied killing him. The police exhumed his body but found no evidence of foul play.

At Easter Vilhelm attended religious services in prison, and then confessed that she had killed Volmer by adding a sedative to his fruit juice and then suffocated him in his bed, fearing that after leaving the home, he would disclose their relationship. The district judge wondered about Møller’s large and stocky figure and her deep voice, and finally asked her directly if she were a man. This she adamantly denied.

She was then examined by professor Stadfeldt who decided that Møller was not a woman, not a hermaphrodite, but a man. Møller was put into men’s clothing and transferred to the men’s prison at Christianshavn. Here he wrote an autobiography, in which he describes himself as Dobbeltmennesket (a double person). Further examination established genital ‘abnomalities’. It came out that Møller had also had sexual relations with an assistant, a young widow called Mackwitz. Such was Møller’s reputation as devout and respectable that Mackwitz was suspected of corrupting her boss. She was arrested, but released after two months.

Møller’s defense was based on the personal suffering and social circumstances of living in a false gender role. Møller’s mother testified that as her baby’s penis was so small, she thought that she had a daughter. However on 4 March 1894, under the male name of Vilhelmi Møller, he was condemned to death. The Supreme Court upheld this verdict 22 June. On 21 July Møller’s sentence was commuted by King Christian IX to hard labour for life. The next year, a Dr Stilhoff analysed the documents and published an account in a medical journal.

After eleven years, Vilhelmi Møller was released from Vridsløselille prison. In December 1905, Møller married Agnes Larsen (1858 - 1925) who had been a warder in the women’s prison where Møller had first been held, and had kept in touch by correspondence. He found work in the office of the lawyer who had defended him.

In 1907 Vilhelmi Møller changed his legal name to Frederik Vilhelm Schmidt.

He died aged 91 in Vangede, a suburb of Copenhagen.

In 2005 Karen Søndergaard Jensens published a novel Dobbeltmennesket about the life of Frederik Schmid.

• H. Stilhoff. “Et Tilfaelda afmandlig Hermafroditisme (Kanasagen)”. Bibliotekfor Laeger, 6, 1896:210-234.
  
• Karin Lützen. “La Mise en discours and Silences on the History of Sexuality” in Richard G. Parker & John H Gagnon. Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World. Routledge, 1994:38-9.
  
• Karen Søndergaard Jensen. Dobbeltmennesket: Frederikke Vilhelmine Møller. Allerød: Kallisto, 2005. Webpage.
  
• Else Cederborg. A World of Weird Truths and Truthful Weirdnesses. Authorhouse, 2011:96-7.
  
• Sabine Meyer. 'Wie Lili zu einem richtigen Mädchen wurde': Lili Elbe: Zur Konstruktion von Geschlecht und Identität zwischen Medialisierung, Regulierung und Subjektivierung. "Wie Lili Zu Einem Richtigen Mädchen Wurde". [s.l.]: transcript, 2015: 16-7.

DA.Wikipedia   Vidensbanken om kønsidentitet     Dengang

Adolf Butenandt (1903 – 1995) hormone chemist

Adolf Butenandt was raised in Lehe, near Bremerhaven, the son of a businessman. The first from his family to go to university, he studied chemistry at Marburg and Göttingen, and graduated PhD from the latter in 1927. He was politically active from 1925 in the Jungdeutscher Orden, a party then opposed to the rising Nazi Party. His thesis was supervised by Adolf Windaus who was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for work on sterols.

From 1927 until 1930 he was Scientific Assistant at the Institute of Chemistry, Göttingen. He and his assistant Erika von Ziegner worked with the pharmaceutical company Schering AG, which collected human pregnancy urine, and then mare’s urine. They isolated the estrogen hormone oestrone in pure, crystalline form, almost at the same time that E.A. Doisy did this in the US. Erika and Adolf married in 1931, Erika giving up her career, but raising five daughters and two sons.

From 1931 until 1933 Adolf was Privatdozent in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of Göttingen and acting Head of the laboratories for organic and inorganic chemistry. Schering AG had an arrangement with the Berlin police to make daily deliveries of men’s urine totalling over 17,000 litres. Butenandt and Kurt Tscherning distilled this and obtained 50 mg of androsterone, in pure, crystalline form.which they found to have a chemical formula very similar to oestrone.

From 1933 Butenandt was Professor of Chemistry at Danzig Institute of Technology, where he succeeded in isolating Progesterone in the female ovary in 1934. This was partly financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, as was his two-month trip in 1935 to Canada and the US, where he met all of the major North American scientists in his field. Shortly after his return to Germany he was offered a chair at Harvard University, which he declined.

In 1936 it was requested that Butenandt join the Nazi party, and the same day that he did so, he also became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry in Berlin. His predecessor, Carl Neuberg, who was Jewish, was dismissed for that reason alone. From androsterone Butenandt obtained testosterone in 1939, a compound which had been first obtained from the testes in 1935 by Ernst Laqueur. By 1938, based on Butenandt’s pioneering work, scientists at Schering AG, Hans Herloff Inhoffen and Walter Hohlweg, synthesized ethinyl estradiol – this was approved by the FDA in the US in June 1943, and became the basis of the vast majority of birth control pills and hormone therapy into the 21^st century.

In January 1938 word reached England that Schering had applied for a patent on ethinyl estradiol. A team under Charles Dodds at the Courtald Institute of Biochemistry at the Middlesex Hospital (where Hans Inhoffen had worked a few years earlier) combined with a team under Robert Robinson at Oxford. A crash program led to the synthesis of Diethylstilbestrol (DES). A chemist on Dodd’s staff, Wilfred Lawson, developed a formulation, and Leon Golberg, an Oxford student performed the actual synthesis. Dodds published the formula in Nature. It was not patented but given away, and quickly produced by over 300 pharmaceutical companies, thus depriving Schering AG of royalties.

Butenandt was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with the Croatian-Swiss Leopold Ružička for work on sex hormones. Richard Kuhn from Heidelberg had been awarded the 1938 prize for his work on vitamins. Otto Hahn was awarded the 1944 prize for his work on nuclear disintegration. All three Germans were obliged to decline the prize by the Nazi government which objected that Carl von Ossietsky, a German Jew, convicted of treason and held in a concentration camp, had been awarded the 1935 Peace Prize.

Butenandt was a staff physician of the Luftwaffe from 1942, and helped develop a hormonal solution to counter sudden drops in pressure at high altitudes. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology. He believed that blood could be analysed to determine race. He was the supervisor of Josef Mengele who supplied non-consensual blood samples from over 200 inmates of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The blood was analysed by a member of the Biochemistry Institute. Historians have discussed to what extent Butenandt knew that the blood was taken from concentration camp inmates. In addition, selected inmates at Auschwitz were fed liquid estrogen. It was simply poured into the daily soup. The women stopped menstruating, and the men lost their sex drive.

Butenandt was awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz (War Merit Cross) Second Class in 1942, and First Class in 1943. To escape the allied air raids, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry was transferred to Tübingen in 1944. Butenandt became Professor of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Tübingen, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was lodged with the Institute of Physiological Chemistry there.

From the end of the war until June 1947, Butenandt was listed as wanted in the US occupation zone, but he was treated as a Nobel Laureate in the French zone which included Tübingen. As early as November 1945 he was in Basel for financial discussions with the La Roche pharmaceutical company. In 1946 he visited Paris and met with the Académie de Médecine. In September 1948 he was offered a chair at the University of Basel, but turned it down. Butenandt was able to claim his Nobel Prize in 1949.

He was able to pull strings so that von Verschur was not prosecuted as a war criminal, and while von Verschur was never again an Institure director, in 1951 he was appointed a professor of genetics at the University of Münster.

In 1960 Butenandt became President of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, now renamed the Max Planck Institute. He retired in 1972, but continued as Honorary President.

In 1984 Benno Müller-Hill published Tödliche Wissenschaft: die Aussonderung von Juden, Zigeunern und Geisteskranken, 1933-1945 which accused Butenandt of knowingly collaborating with von Verschuer and Mengele. Butenandt refused any serious discussion of the issue, and that was that.


Adolf and Erika both died in 1995, aged 91 and 88.

• Adolf Butenandt. Das Werk eines Lebens, 4 vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1981
  
• Benno Müller-Hill. Tödliche Wissenschaft: die Aussonderung von Juden, Zigeunern und Geisteskranken, 1933-1945. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984. Tranlated by George R Fraser as Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945. Oxford Univ. Press, 1988: 5, 33, 36, 39, 60, 72-3, 83, 119, 188, 190.
  
• Peter Karlson. "Obituary: Professor Adolf Butenandt". The Independent, 31 January 1995. www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-adolf-butenandt-1570960.html.
  
• "Butenandt, Adolf Friedrich Johann". Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 2000. Online at: www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2830905541.html.
  
• Barbara Seaman,. The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009: 13, 22-7, 30-6, 42, 44, 61.
  
• Wolgang Schieder. “Adolf Butenandt between Science and Politics: From the Weomer Republic to the Federal Republic of Germany”. In Susanne Heim, Carola Sachse & Mark Walker (eds). The Kaiser Wilhelm Society Under National Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009: 74-98.
  
• Achim Trunk. “Two Hundred Blood Samples from Auschwitz: A Nobel Laureate and the Link to Aischwitz”. In Susanne Heim, Carola Sachse & Mark Walker (eds). The Kaiser Wilhelm Society Under National Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009: 5,6,14,15,16,19,20, 46, 74-98, 120-144, 374-387, 400-418.
  
• Michael Schuring. “The Predecessor: The Uneasy Rapprochement between Carl Neuberg and Adolf Butenandt after 1945”. In Susanne Heim, Carola Sachse & Mark Walker (eds). The Kaiser Wilhelm Society Under National Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009: 400-418.
  
• "Adolf Butenandt - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 15 Oct 2012 www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1939/butenandt-bio.html.

EN.Wikipedia

Anne Vitale (1938 - ) gender therapist

Vitale first qualified as an artist, doing a 1972 BA at the University of California at San Diego followed by a Master of Fine Arts.

After some years of therapy for gender identity issues, she did a psychology PhD at the Professional School for Humanistic Studies, also in San Diego, and transitioned at the same time. Her dissertation was on gender identity issues, and she joined HBIGDA (now WPATH) in 1979. She had surgery in January 1980, moved to San Rafael, California and completed her PhD in 1982. She then studied Existential Psychotherapy with James F. Bugental, 1983-91.

A licensed psychologist in California, Anne Vitale has been at the same clinic in San Rafeal since 1984. Initially she thought that trans persons were too few for her to specialize in gender identity issues, and that she might be unsuitable in that “Countertransferance issues can be very destructive to a vulnerable population”. However there were few other gender therapists, and a San Francisco clinic started making referrals. She made contact with other gender therapists in the San Francisco area and they formed the Bay Area Gender Associates.

Glassgold and Drescher regard Vitale as a follower of Victor Frankl who entwined meaning and authenticity. They write, with regard to Vitale's 1997 paper:

“General authenticity is the clinical focus of Anne Vitale, a trans-identified, American psychologist specializing in existential-humanist psychotherapy. Vitale provides therapeutic support for cross-dressing and gender-divergent clients in such a way as to skillfully combine therapist advocacy and self-empowerment of the client. Specifically, she employs a client-centred, open-minded approach to helping her trans and questioning clients to take responsibility for discovering and actuallizing their own particular form of life meaning and personal power. This supported quest for identity and validation typically involves a dovetailing of genderal integrity, community connection, and existential authenticity.”

Rather than use the DSM diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder, Vitale proposes instead that, where there is a pathology, it is better labelled Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD): that it is this deprivation, not a person’s gender identity, that she seeks to treat. She divides gender variant individuals into three categories:

“for discussion purposes only and with no regard to importance or severity of diagnosis”. (p19)

G1. “natal males who have a high degree of cross-sexed gender identity … we can hypothesize that the prenatal androgenization/ defeminization process – if there was any at all – was minimal, leaving the default identity largely intact. Furthermore the female expression of identity of these individuals appears very difficult or impossible for them to conceal.” (p19)

G2. “natal females who almost universally report a lifelong history of rejecting female dress conventions along with conventional girl’s toys and activities. … these individuals typically take full advantage of the social permissiveness allowed women in many Western societies to wear their hair short and dress in loose, gender-neutral clothing.” (p20)

G3. “individuals who look and act unambiguously as society expects them to but privately identity as the opposite gender. We can hypothesize that the pre-natal androgenization/ defeminization process was sufficient enough to establish a workable gender identity that approximated their biological sex but insufficient enough to provide comfort in that gender role. For these female-identified males and male-identified female [see note below] the result is a more complicated and insidious sex/gender discontinuity. From earliest childhood these individuals typically suffer increasingly painful and chronic gender dysphoria. They tend to live secretive lives, often making incrementally stronger attempts to convince themselves and others that they are the gender they were assigned at birth.”(p20)

G1 and G2 are clinically similar. They both “report relatively low levels of anxiety”. If they decide to transition physically, they “accomplish it with relatively little difficulty”.

However

“The cloistered, [G3] natal males, on the other hand, typically only start to realize the seriousness of their dilemma at this age. It is common to hear reports of these individuals increasing the intensity with which they try to rid themselves of the ever-increasing gender-related anxiety. Many individuals paradoxically adopt homophobic, transphobic, and overtly sexist attitudes in the hope that they will override their desires to be female.” (p28)

She regards being trans as a congenital condition and cites Zhou et al, 1995, and Kruijver et al, 2000. As in the quotes above, she assumes that these studies justify an assumption that the prenatal androgenization/ defeminization process is different in G1 and G3 persons.

She regards sex as purely chromosomal and actually says

“The idea that one can ‘change’ from one sex to the other [is] absurd”. (p52)

However with a few cautions she does use hormones as a diagnostic tool.

“It is well documented that cross-sex hormones have a mitigating effect on patients suffering from severe gender dysphoria. The effect is so marked, in fact, that the treatment is used to confirm or reject the GID diagnosis. Fortunately, psychological outcomes precede permanent physiological secondary sex characteristic changes, making it an ideal tool for diagnostic confirmation or contraindication.”(p72)

 All page references are to Vitale’s 2010 book..

• Anne Vitale. “History and resolution of sex/gender integration needs in four male-to-female transsexuals”. PhD thesis, Professional School for Humanistic Studies, 1982.
  
• Anne Vitale. “The Therapist Versus the Client: How the Conflict Started and Some Thoughts on How to Resolve It” in Gianna E. Israel & Donald E. Tarver. Transgender Care: Recommended Guidelines, Practical Information, and Personal Accounts. Temple University Press, 1997.
  
• Anne Vitale. “Sexism in the Male-to-Female Transsexual”. 1997. www.avitale.com/MTFSexism.htm.
  
• Anne Vitale. “The Gender Variant Phenomenon--A Developmental Review”. January 27, 2003. http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm.
  
• Rachel Ann Heath. The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality: Changing Gender to Match Mindset. Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2006: 90.
  
• Judith M. Glassgold & Jack Drescher. Activism and LGBT Psychology. Binghamton, Haworth Medical Press, 2007: 78, 79, 83.
  
• Lin Fraser. “An Interview with Anne Vitale”. The Update: The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, 20,3, Fall 2010. PDF.
  
• Anne M. Vitale. Gendered Self: Further Commentary on the Transsexual Phenomenon. Flyfisher Press/Lulu, 2010.
  
• Kay Brown. “A Clinical View”. On the Science of Changing Sex, February 2014. https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/a-clinical-view.
  
• Jack Molay.  “Anne Vitale on Crossdreaming in Middle Age”. CrossDreamers, May 19, 2014. www.crossdreamers.com/2014/05/anne-vitale-on-crossdreaming-in-middle.html.
  
• Jack Molay. “On Anne Vitale's theory on testosterone-poisoning in MTF crossdreamers”. Crossdreamer Sidebars, April 2, 2015. http://crossdreamers.blogspot.ca/2015/04/on-anne-vitales-theory-on-testosterone.html.
  
• Kay Brown. “A Passing Privilege ...”. On the Science of Changing Sex, January 1, 2016. https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/a-passing-privilege.

www.avitale.com      The Gendered Self      CV
_________________________________


A note on the Professional School for Humanistic Studies. It has neither a webpage nor a Wikipedia page. Googling it brings up other PhD theses by other students, but apparently all in the early 1980s, which gives an indication of when it discontinued. Apparently the founder was Harold Greenwald, (1910-1999) obituary, the author of a best-selling 1958 book on female prostitution, a student of Theodor Reik and Albert Ellis, and the developer of Direct Decision Therapy. Vitale says nothing about any of this or whether Direct Decision Therapy has influenced her therapy.

I like the expression Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD).  Pity that it is not more widely used.

In Vitale’s 2003 paper, G3 persons are all ‘natal males”, but in her 2010 book, ftm persons are also included.

Obviously there is an approximation of Vitale’s G1/G2 to Blanchard’s HSTS, and of G3 to autogynephilia. The citation notes to her book include both Blanchard and Zucker, and the reading list on her website includes the Clarke Institute’s 1990 book, Clinical Management of Gender Identity Disorder in Children and Adults. However there is no mention of Blanchard in the text, and thus neither acceptance nor rejection of the inevitable notion that her 3 categories are a rewrite of Blanchard’s. An obvious improvement over Blanchard is that Vitale does not align her 3 categories with sexual orientation, nor does she write her G3 as a sexual obsession.

Vitale starts by saying that her three types are “for discussion purposes only and with no regard to importance or severity of diagnosis”, but then claims a differential hormonal underpinning for each type. Some would say that this is equivocation or even reification.

Zhou at al. “A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality” 1995, is a much-criticized small sample(N=6) that claims to find a female-sized BSTc in the brains of dead trans women. Anne Lawrence argues that it is a marker of autogynephilia; Rose White that it is marker of HBS. However the paper argues only for a difference between trans and cis, and does not attempt to differentiate between different types of transsexuals, G1 vs G3, HSTS vs AGP etc. Thus Vitale’s use of it to claim hormonal differences between G1 and G3 is unsupported.

While Heath discusses Vitale’s typology in her 2006 book, there is no entry in the index for it.

I would like to refer to my previous article A rejoinder to Kay Brown’s “What is a Transsexual?”   There I commented:

a) "It is always easier to believe in a theory that matches your own life experience."   Kay Brown feels that she is classic Blanchard HSTS and endorses his typology.   I feel that neither of Blanchard's types match me and I reject it.   Maxine Petersen, as a loyal disciple of Blanchard, must regard herself as an autogynephile, but has never confirmed this.    Anne Vitale, who transitioned at age 42 after years of receiving gender therapy, is presumably a G3, but likewise does not confirm this.

b) I criticized Blanchard and Brown for using the label 'homosexual transsexual' not only for its denial of their current womanhood, but even more so for using it re early transitioners who never spent time as gay men.   "On the other hand there are gay transsexuals, many of whom are not early transitioners.   This is a common pattern among trans men, many of whom spend some years as lesbians, often gaining a female lover who stays with them when they become men.  Similarly many trans women spend some time as gay men on their way to womanhood:  Jennifer North, Poppy Cooper, myself, Roz Kaveney,  Dawn Langley Simmons."  I should also have mentioned Susan Cannon, science historian, who went to Dr Biber at age 55 after decades of sex with men.

Vitale initially regarded G3 as 'natal males' only but after further thought made it gender neutral.   If I am to fit into Vitale's typology I would best fit into G2 which is described as ftm only.  The quote above from p20 does not make this clear, but elsewhere Vitale mentions that many of her G2 persons spent time in the lesbian community.   I would see the concept of G2 being improved by making it gender neutral, and for all alumni of gay and lesbian experience.   Likewise G1 would be for all early transitioners who never join gay or lesbian communities.