Harry Benjamin
Harry Benjamin was a sexologist who believed that a person’s gender was engrained into a person’s brain before birth and could not be changed with psychotherapy. He developed the term “transsexual” in 1954 to refer to people whose gender identity did not match their physical body and who desired surgery to rectify the situation.
In 1948 Alfred Kinsey referred a gender dysphoric, male patient who desired a sex change operation, to Benjamin. He initially intended to turf the patient to psychologists, but after hearing conflicting views from various doctors about the proper course of treatment, he determined to take on the case himself. This young man was Benjamin’s first transsexual patient. He treated the transsexual with a regiment of hormones and eventually sent his patient to Europe for a penectomy. Between 1948 and 1978, he treated over 1,500 other transsexuals with hormones and/or guidance through their sex change operations. In 1966 he wrote The Transsexual Phenomenon, to counteract wide spread ignorance about gender variance.
After treating hundreds of patients, he developed the Sex Orientation Scale which compartmentalized gender dysphoric people into different levels of transvestites and transsexuals; and claimed that only the people who wanted to undergo sex change operations were true transsexuals. This, in part, led to the hierarchy and valorization of post-op. transsexuals within the transsexual community.
