Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf: A Life in Berlin and Transgender History PDF

The fascinating life of preservationist and museum founder Charlotte von Mahlsdorf has been the subject of an acclaimed autobiography, a ﬁlm in which she played herself, and a Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play. A controversial ﬁgure who may have willingly supplied information to the East German secret police during the period of the German Democratic Republic, Mahlsdorf was nevertheless honored by the German government after reuniﬁcation for her preservationist and museum work. She was admired by many for her bravery in the face of persecution and for her openness as a transgender public ﬁgure during perilous times. Mahlsdorf was born Lothar Berfelde on March 18, 1928 in Berlin. Biologically a male, even as a child she identiﬁed as a girl, displayed a fascination with girls' clothing and "old stuff," and preferred to play with "junk" rather than toys. These early interests presaged Lothar Berfelde's later emergence as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, famous transvestite and collector of everyday historical objects. Preferring the term "transvestite" to "transsexual" since she felt no aversion to her male genitals, Mahlsdorf declared that "In my soul, I feel like a woman" and described her childish self as "a girl in a boy's body." Mahlsdorf's father, Max Berfelde, was a violent man who rose in the ranks of the Nazi party to become party leader in the Mahlsdorf area of Berlin. Bitterly disappointed with his son's sissiﬁed manners and interest in girlish activities, he frequently subjected the child to harsh and inhumane treatment. In 1942 he forced Lothar to join the Hitler Youth even though the adolescent despised the Nazis and resented their treatment of Jewish friends and neighbors. Mahlsdorf's mother, Gretchen Gaupp Berfelde, was Lothar's "good fairy," a gentle and nurturing woman who comforted her child and accepted Lothar's feminine interests. Lothar also found acceptance from a lesbian aunt, who cross-dressed in male clothing and who introduced Lothar to Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's book, The Transvestites (1910), a work that Mahlsdorf particularly valued because it reassured her that she "was not alone in the world." After years of being beaten and humiliated by her husband, in 1944 Gretchen Berfelde announced that she was divorcing him. During this domestic crisis, Mahlsdorf's father threatened to kill his entire family. In response, Mahlsdorf struck her father dead with a rolling pin while he slept. She later defended her action as "a kind of preventive 'self-defense' to save other lives.... I felt neither hatred nor a need for revenge, but was forced to circumvent his designs on the lives of my mother, sister, and brother." After the slaying, Mahlsdorf spent several weeks in a psychiatric institution and then was sentenced to four years detention as an "anti-social juvenile delinquent." With the collapse of the Third Reich in April 1945, however, she was released. In the chaos attendant on the fall of Berlin, she barely escaped summary execution for seeking refuge in an air raid shelter reserved for women and children. Soon afterwards, Mahlsdorf assumed the name "Lottchen" and, then, "Charlotte von Mahlsdorf." As Mahlsdorf, she became a well-known ﬁgure in East Berlin, both as a transvestite and as a passionate collector of historical everyday items. Mahlsdorf's fascination with old furniture and other collectibles had begun as a child. She asked neighbors for old items that they were discarding and, as an adolescent, she worked for a second- hand goods dealer who cleared out apartments, often of ﬂeeing or deported Jews, and frequently kept some items for herself. After the war, Mahlsdorf built an impressive collection by rescuing objects from houses that had been bombed and also by buying items from people who ﬂed East Berlin for West Germany. Mahlsdorf, whose strongest desire was "to keep beautiful objects safe," specialized in everyday items-- chandeliers, furniture, gramophones, clocks, automated music players, glassware, etc.-- from the Gründerzeit, the period of the founding of the German Empire, the years between 1870 and 1900. Even before she understood the differences in period styles, she was instinctively attracted to this era's furniture, which in her childhood had gone out of fashion. "Columns, lathe-turned legs, and ball-shaped wooden decorations here and there gave me a thrill," she later recalled. In the difficult years after World War II, East German authorities seemed bent on destroying whole sections of Berlin, replacing distinctive old buildings with concrete high-rise towers and prefab housing. Such disregard for the past horriﬁed Mahlsdorf, who dedicated herself to preserving condemned buildings. The story of Christine Jorgensen serves as an episode in the history of sensational journalism, mass culture, and celebrity. It attracted readers, in part, because it offered an unconventional twist on a triedand- true American tale of adversity, human striving, and success. With dignity and poise, Jorgensen told a moving story of someone who had pursued her own dreams and overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But the Jorgensen story also captured public attention because it highlighted a number of key tensions of the mid-twentieth century. It pointed, for example, to the promise of science in the atomic age. It suggested that science could conquer nature and, in so doing, reinforced an optimistic vision of a future in which doctors, as saviors, offered miraculous cures. But, like the atomic bomb, it also hinted at a frightening Frankensteinian vision, in which overly conﬁdent scientists tampered with nature and unleashed destructive forces. The tension between the potential for progress and the possibility of disaster resonated with popular hopes and fears about the postwar surge in science and technology (8). The Jorgensen story also reﬂected concerns about gender. After World War II, some commentators worried about a "crisis in masculinity" (9). During the war, women had taken on traditionally male occupations, especially on the home front, and military psychiatrists had publicly expressed concern about the deﬁcient masculinity they claimed to have found in surprising numbers of male recruits. After the war, a number of authors castigated domineering "moms" and "matriarchs," who allegedly reared ineffectual or delinquent sons, and called for the reinforcement of traditional gender distinctions (10). In this context, the stories on Jorgensen, with their endless comments on her appearance, stood as a public restatement of what counted as feminine and what counted as masculine. But her story, in which "an ex-GI," the quintessential representation of postwar masculinity, became a "blonde beauty," ultimately undermined the attempt to restabilize gender. It could provoke anxieties about the failure of boundaries dividing female and male, and it could also invite fantasies about the possibility of traveling across the suddenly permeable border that separated women from men. Inevitably, Jorgensen's story also brought issues of sexuality into the news. It had a titillating edge, with a lurking subtext of homosexuality. Jorgensen had, after all, confessed her pre-operative (and post-operative) attraction to men. In the years after World War II, increasingly visible gay subcultures elicited increasingly homophobic reactions. In the postwar "lavender scare," hundreds of gay men and lesbians were dismissed from their jobs in the federal government. In various cities, police investigated "vice" and arrested gay men in bars, parks, and other public spaces (11). Although she dif. fered from gay men in her sustained desire to live as a woman, Jorgensen nonetheless reminded readers that people born with male bodies did not necessarily have sexual desires for women. Jorgensen underscored the stigma associated with homosexuality when she repeatedly claimed that she had not wanted to live as a gay man. But she also undermined the pathologization of homosexual love when she stated in American Weekly that her youthful love for a man was "ﬁne and deep and would have been restful had I been in a position to give and accept in the eyes of society" (12). She pushed her readers to consider whether (and why) the very same person was somehow more acceptable as a heterosexual woman than she had been when living as a feminine man attracted to other men. The notion of universally mixed bodily sex reached its American heyday with the Jorgensen story, but psychoanalysts and others immediately rejected it. Doctors and scientists gradually turned away from the biological determinism in which the particular mix of male and female determined the particular mix of masculine and feminine. They broke sex into constituent parts-gonads, hormones, chromosomes, genitals-some of which they could alter and some of which they could not. Increasingly they explained the desire to change sex with new concepts of "psychological sex," that is, one's sense of self as male or female. By the mid-195os they had developed a new language. In 1955, they began to replace "psychological sex" with the term "gender'' and a few years later "gender identity." Although the doctors disagreed (then and now) over what exactly determined it, they agreed that gender identity (the sex one felt oneself to be) was not necessarily determined by the gonads, genitals, or chromosomes generally used to deﬁne biological sex. As the doctors honed their new deﬁnitions of sex and gender, they also reclassiﬁed sexuality. At the time of Jorgensen's surgery, American doctors had barely contributed to the medical literature, mostly in German, on transsexuality. After the publicity concerning Jorgensen, American doctors began to distinguish transsexuality from transvestism and homosexuality. In their new schema, transsexuals had crossgender identiﬁcation, transvestites crossdressed, and homosexuals felt sexual attractions for members of their own sex. Some doctors (and some transsexuals) attempted to desexualize transsexuality by separating it from transvestic fetish and homosexual desire. In this way, they reﬁned the categories of sexual science in the post war era. With its combination of sensation, success, and celebrity and its commentary on science, gender, and sexuality, the Jorgensen story set off its own chain reaction. It rippled its way through popular culture into the medical literature. In the wake of the media blitz, doctors and scientists began to debate the deﬁnition of biological sex. Jorgensen and her doctors explicitly argued against the idea of two separate and opposite sexes. They argued instead that all humans have both male and female components. They promoted the notion, prevalent in Europe, of a continuum or spectrum of sex as opposed to polarized sex difference. Jorgensen herself publicized this new conception of biological sex repeatedly in the interviews she gave. In response to the question "Are you a woman?," she answered: "You seem to assume that every person is either a man or a woman.... Each person is actually both in varying degrees.... I'm more of a woman than I am a man" {13). Eventually the debates that took place in the popular press and in the medical literature made their way into the law. Transsexuals came to the courts to change the sex on their birth certiﬁcates, change their names, or ascertain the validity of a marriage. The doctors testiﬁed both for and against them, bringing new and competing deﬁnitions of sex and gender into the legal record. In the courts, the judges ultimately decided who counted as a woman or a man. In 1966, in the ﬁrst such prominent case, a judge in New York said he would not change the sex on a birth certiﬁcate. He deﬁned sex by the chromosomes, which could not be changed (14). But within a few years, a few judges, who saw themselves as liberals, came up with a new deﬁnition oﬂegal sex, which reﬂected the new conception of gender. In 1968, Judge Francis Pecora, of the Civil Court of the City of New York, accepted the application of a male-to-female transsexual, who asked to change her legal name from the "obviously 'male"' Robert to the "obviously 'female'" Risa. Pecora distanced himself from what he considered radical views of universally mixed sex, and he also distinguished himself from conservatives who would prefer to maintain the status quo. Instead, he came up with a new deﬁnition of sex. "A male transsexual who submits to a sex-reassignment," he wrote, "is anatomically and psychologically a female in fact" (15). The judge rejected the immutable chromosomes as deﬁning facts of legal sex and relied instead on genitals, which could be altered, and on gender identity. Sex could legally change. The case opened a longer debate, in which the courts, too, began to grapple with, question, and redeﬁne sex. * From the late 1960s on, transsexuals themselves began to organize for their civil rights. Drawing on the existing movements for racial justice, feminism, and gay liberation, they called for an end to police brutality, employment discrimination, and medical maltreatment. They looked to a future when varied expressions of gender no longer elicited harassment, ridicule, or assault. In the 1970s and 1980s, Christine Jorgensen joined them. She expressed her opposition to sexism and anti-gay initiatives, but mostly she spoke out in favor of transsexual rights. Her story, then, takes us from the reconsiderations of sex, gender, and sexuality of the postwar era to the movements for rights and liberation of the 1960s and after. In 1966, transgender activist Louise Ergestrasse strode into the office of Elliot Blackstone, the sympathetic liaison for San Francisco’s police department with the gay community. She dropped a book on his desk with a triumphant thud and demanded that he do something for “her people.” The book was The Transsexual Phenomenon by Harry Benjamin.1 The Transsexual Phenomenon was the ﬁrst major text to deﬁne transsexualism in clinical terms and to argue for compassionate treatment for transsexuals. It was a landmark work that inﬂuenced a generation of transsexuals and the health professionals who worked with them. Benjamin credited the courage of Christine Jorgensen, her willingness to be public with her story, and her brave Danish physicians for the signiﬁcant change in public awareness of transsexuality. Moreover, Jorgensen’s own hard work in trying to understand her experience and her readiness to serve as a conduit for others had created broad sympathy for transsexuals and early sparks of acceptance. At a dense 286 pages, the book ranged over the entire ﬁeld of study. A 16-page supplement of photographs was also available upon request but only to medical and psychological professionals. It began with a survey that disentangled transsexuality from homosexuality and transvestism. Benjamin described the “heart-breaking anguish” felt by transsexuals, observing that “there is hardly a person so constantly unhappy” as the transsexual before a sex change. These individuals, he said, were vulnerable to self-mutilation and suicide. Benjamin admitted that the causes of transsexuality were still unknown, though he favored endocrine and genetic explanations rather than psychological ones. He discussed surgical and nonsurgical treatments as well as legal issues. In the appendix, Benjamin presented the most recent of his data from 193 transsexual women and 27 transsexual men. Other appendices were contributed by colleagues. Journalist Gobind Behari Lal wrote on the broader religious and cultural context of ideas about the complementarity of the sexes. UCLA psychiatrist Richard Green wrote on the historical, mythological, and cross-cultural aspects. Robert Masters presented four autobiographical statements and three biographical sketches of transsexuals.2 In trying to make sense of the wide variation he saw in his case studies, Benjamin devised as a “working hypothesis” a six-point scale he called the Sexual Orientation Scale, which echoed the Kinsey Scale and before that Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexual intermediate types. At one end of the Sexual Orientation Scale was the person who only occasionally cross-dressed, and at the other end was the “true” transsexual who experienced a high-intensity desire to change sex and what Benjamin called “total ‘psycho-sexual’ inversion.” Since it was clear from his own practice that “the mind of the transsexual cannot be adjusted to the body,” he argued that, “it is logical and justiﬁable to attempt the opposite, to adjust the body to the mind.”3 To have believed otherwise would have meant being left with therapeutic nihilism—a conviction that treatment was not possible— a view that Benjamin had rejected all his life. While the book was primarily about transsexuals, he also addressed the nonsurgical management of transvestites. He noted that most transvestites wanted nothing from the medical profession, preferring to be left alone. Instead of desiring treatment for themselves, they wanted society to be “treated educationally” so that a more tolerant attitude would be fostered. The response to the book was sudden and tremendous, thanks to prominent articles in the New York Times that November. Benjamin wrote to a cousin, “We are drowning in letters and telephone calls. The publicity... actually was nationwide and quite unexpected.”4 The book caused what historian Susan Stryker calls a “sea change” in the popular and medical perception of transgenderism in the United States.5 For Benjamin and his associates, it would prove key to their being taken seriously by academic audiences. Even Robert Stoller, who had hesitated in joining Benjamin’s board, now acknowledged that Benjamin had not only “a good heart” but lots of very good clinical data. Stoller agreed to be the ﬁrst speaker when the Harry Benjamin Foundation organized its ﬁrst serious scientiﬁc meeting in 1967. The proceedings of the meeting were presented as a preliminary report to the New York Academy of Sciences and published in the academy’s Transactions.6 The impact of The Transsexual Phenomenon was also felt immediately and powerfully in clinical services. Again, Erickson Educational Foundation funding was key. Within a year, a gender identity clinic was opened at Johns Hopkins University, which was the ﬁrst university medical center to provide gender-reassignment surgery. In setting up the clinic, the Johns Hopkins team worked closely with the Harry Benjamin Foundation. John Money recalled that, without Benjamin’s evidence of successes with hormonal and surgical therapies, the Johns Hopkins program would not have been possible. The opening of the program was a source of great satisfaction for Benjamin as it was a vindication and an institutionalization of his many years of lonely advocacy for a group of patients who had until then been ridiculed or despised by the medical establishment.7 Within a short span, several other prestigious academic institutions followed suit, the earliest of them basing their protocols explicitly on the ﬁndings of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic and the Harry Benjamin Foundation. Organizers sent many visitors to observe Benjamin and his associates. The University of Minnesota Medical School opened its program in 1966, Northwestern University Medical School in 1967, and Stanford University and the University of Washington in 1968. By the end of the 1970s, there were some ﬁfteen to twenty major centers across the United States that conducted sex-reassignment surgery and more than a thousand individuals who were treated at these university- based clinics. One signiﬁcant outcome of the emergence of university-based gender-reassignment clinics was that academic physicians and psychologists became the gatekeepers to transsexual treatment. The rules by which they guarded the gates became standardized into medical protocols. The cautious clinical approach that Benjamin and his colleagues had developed patient by patient was codiﬁed, with minor local differences, into a Standard of Care that was shared among institutions. In general, individuals seeking transition were required to have a full medical and psychological assessment to screen for mental illness. They were then required to live for a year in their chosen gender before they were allowed to proceed to surgical treatment. Physicians were anxious not to provide treatment on demand to someone who might later come to regret the decision, especially when it involved potentially painful, dangerous, and life-altering surgery. But inevitably, the social and cultural prejudices of the gatekeepers fed into these decisions. Professionals noted that some transsexuals were quiet and calm and had lived with their sense of gender disjunction all their lives. Others were loud, demanding, and ﬂamboyant. Physicians tended to prefer working with the former group, favoring these whom they felt were likely to have a better outcome, by which they usually meant settling down to a quiet, “normal” life. These early experts believed they needed to deﬁne what a “true” transsexual was in order to determine whether an individual should be allowed to undergo medical transition. One norm they applied was heterosexuality. They assumed that, after transition, the individual should be sexually attracted to the other sex, and there was no room in their conception, for example, for someone who had lived and married as a man to still be attracted to her wife after transitioning to become a woman. Another part of their calculus was the likelihood that the person would be able to “pass,” that is, to be correctly viewed by observers. For male transsexuals, a growth of beard and lowered voice from hormone treatment typically meant they would be recognized as men by observers. For female transsexuals, those with smaller, delicate features were seen as more likely to succeed in their transition than taller, bulkier individuals. The emphasis was on how the individual would be perceived by others rather than on how they would feel inside.9 Benjamin’s thought about these issues evolved as he met more transsexuals and wrestled with a reality that was far more complex. When Renée Richards ﬁrst visited Benjamin, Benjamin performed a detailed physical examination and ordered a battery of biochemical and psychological tests. Psychologist Wardell Pomeroy, Benjamin’s colleague, was worried about Richards’s psychological proﬁle because Richards did not appear to be attracted to men. That meant that after transition, she would not be likely to succeed as a “normal” heterosexual woman. Benjamin decided he was not concerned about this, as he was beginning to realize that what would come to be called “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” were not always tied in ways that ﬁt heterosexual norms.10 These medical gatekeepers also soon learned that the networks of transgender people were agile and effective in distributing information. Those seeking reassignment soon arrived with practiced narratives, having learned how to tell physicians what they wanted to hear and omitting those facets of their story that did not comfortably ﬁt the model.11 To professionals, The Transsexual Phenomenon served to put transsexualism on the agenda of every sexology program. It became the textbook that taught many physicians and therapists their ﬁrst lessons about the subject. Although Benjamin described a spectrum of gender nonconformity, the clinical approach for the next decades would focus on those who were considered good candidates for “sex reassignment,” that is, to transition from man to woman or from woman to man as completely as possible. Elliot Blackstone, the community relations police officer in San Francisco, read Benjamin’s book and soon established social services for transsexuals in the Tenderloin neighborhood, which included legal and ﬁnancial assistance. Shortly after, a health services program was opened with Dr. Joel Fort as its head, providing hormones, counseling, and referrals. Fort invited Benjamin to train his staff, and in time, both Blackstone and Fort would become Benjamin’s friends. But The Transsexual Phenomenon did not inﬂuence medical professionals only. With its easy, accessible style and detailed clinical cases, its publication became a pivotal moment for many transgender people who ﬁnally saw themselves and their experiences presented in a compassionate manner. Benjamin’s book provided a way to frame their experiences and explain themselves to others. Activist groups grew up, some with new voices of protest against medical authority, something they shared with many other groups in the counterculture of the era. The interactions of transsexuals with transvestites, gay liberation groups, and feminist groups were varied. At some points, they found common cause; at others, there were painful and signiﬁcant differences. Some groups of radical lesbian feminists regarded transsexual women as dangerous interlopers in women-only spaces. Other feminists who were challenging traditional gender roles worried that transsexuals were too attached to traditional ways of being men and women; in a time of unisex dressing and hippie culture, the model of womanhood presented by an older generation of transsexuals like Christine Jorgensen seemed outmoded. A new wave emerged of trans people who embraced feminism and were inﬂuenced by Stonewall and gay liberation.13 But in transsexual research, who was inﬂuencing whom and how proved to be a complex question. More than a decade before, Alfred Kinsey had embarked of the sexuality of the human male. When Kinsey had studied wasps, he could classify them according to his own rules. But when he applied his careful systematic study to the sexuality of women and men, he found that his subjects talked back. This was undoubtedly true as well for Benjamin in his clinical interactions with his transgender patients.14 Philosopher Ian Hacking argues that when theorists in the human sciences create a new category of person, a “human kind,” something happens that doesn’t when researchers name a new mineral, a species of ﬁsh, or a star—a “natural kind”—and it is that human beings have the ability to decide whether or not they belong to this new “kind.” This recognition changes their experience of who they are. As people identify themselves as members of this new scientiﬁc category, they come to understand the experiences of their lives in light of the availability of this “human kind” and the language used to describe it. This means that in creating a new category, social scientists are actually changing the experience of the people who are classiﬁed by it, and the people who are changed, in turn, challenge and affect the way the category is deﬁned. This is a phenomenon Hacking calls a looping effect.15 Benjamin drew his idea of a new human kind—the transsexual—much like Magnus Hirschfeld had deﬁned the category “transvestite” half a century before, based on the testimony of people who came to him for treatment or whom he got to know through networks such as that of Louise Lawrence. What was excluded from his data, of course, were the experiences of people who didn’t come forward, who didn’t seek treatment, who didn’t see themselves represented in the examples given in the medical journals or popular books, who were not part of the same networks of like-minded people and perhaps had no connection with urban queer subcultures. The kind of stories that might be missing in Benjamin’s account is suggested by the work of historian Emily Skidmore, who has uncovered the lives of individuals who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were assigned female at birth but lived quiet, unremarkable lives as men, marrying women and being accepted as hardworking, contributing members of their small towns and rural communities. These trans men were neither cosmopolitan nor radical, and their stories became visible to historians only when their anatomical sex was accidentally revealed and reported in local newspapers and medical journals.16 Since most Americans would have learned about transsexualism through popular accounts, it is also important to consider the image of transsexualitycreated in the newspapers and magazines. The popular portrayal of transsexualism in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s was dominated by the white, middle-class, hyperfeminine example of Christine Jorgensen. It was a model that emphasized domesticity and respectability and rejected homosexuality and sexual deviance. As Emily Skidmore argues, Jorgensen’s claim to the role of a “good transsexual” depended on her distancing herself from other gender-variant individuals such as homosexuals or drag queens. Unlike Jorgensen, trans women who were African American, Latina, or Asian American were more likely to be presented in the press as objects of ridicule or exotic sexual enigmas rather than as individuals who had become “authentic” women. The present book is similarly circumscribed. In writing it, I have employed only the words of trans people who have openly written or spoken about their lives. That means that the narrative has been limited to those who have been willing to share publicly, who are often highly literate and almost all trans women. As well, it does not include the perspectives of those who did not orient their lives toward a medical diagnosis or treatment or those who perhaps did not relate to the image of transgender portrayed in the media or recognize their own experience in the deﬁnitions created by doctors. The stories here tell us how only a small number of trans people experienced their lives in this rapidly changing social environment. Moreover, it leaves out the rich complexity of trans lives beyond the clinical framework. It is far from a complete picture.17 In a broader view, it is important to reﬂect how thoroughly hormones had inﬁltrated the Western medicine cabinet by the 1960s. Perhaps the best-known example, and the one with the greatest social impact, was the contraceptive pill. “The Pill,” which had been dreamed of decades before by birth control reformers like Margaret Sanger, was introduced in 1960. For millions of women, a daily dose of estrogen and progesterone, soon cleverly packaged in a dialshaped dispenser, meant freedom from worry of pregnancy. Though previous generations had access to various methods of contraception, nothing before had provided the ease and effectiveness of the Pill. For the ﬁrst time, large numbers of healthy young women were taking hormone products on a daily and ongoing basis. For women on the other side of the childbearing years, hormones came in the form of hormone replacement therapy for the symptoms of menopause. When hormone products such as Premarin and Progynon emerged on the market, they were initially prescribed for the treatment of menstrual disorders and menopausal symptoms such as hot ﬂashes and heavy bleeding, and only for a short span of years. By the 1960s, however, women were encouraged to begin thinking of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as a means of remaining “feminine forever,” which was the title of a popular book by Dr. Robert A. Wilson. Wilson and his wife, Thelma, argued that HRT was not only a tool to combat menopause symptoms during the few years that a woman was undergoing menopause but a lifelong elixir to help retain youthfulness, femininity, and sexual attractiveness. In the 1980s and 1990s, these ideas would extend to promoting HRT in younger and younger women as a preventive of heart disease and osteoporosis. Marketing campaigns were aimed at women as young as thirty- ﬁve, with the suggestion that they should take HRT for the rest of their lives. By the end of the twentieth century, Premarin was the top-selling prescription drug in the world, accounting for billions in global sales.18 Chemists developed a large array of powerful synthetic hormones while at the same time endocrinologists gained knowledge of the multiplicity of functions played by the hormones in the body. The interactions among the hormones were dauntingly complex. Some hormones triggered cascades of other hormones; others were linked together in sensitive feedback loops. At the same time, American medicine was evolving along with consumer culture, and patients were becoming medical consumers. For many transgender people, hormones offered an accessible, relatively safe, and reversible means of exploring gender. In Louise Lawrence’s circle and elsewhere, many took hormones. For some, hormones were a step toward surgical transition; for others, they were sufficient in themselves. From the beginning, Benjamin and other endocrinologists were conscious of the dangers of hormone use, namely the possibility of cancer. Benjamin often warned his patients against self-medicating and advised them to take breaks between doses. The use of hormones by transgender people was just part of a larger social acceptance of hormone use for a broad range of purposes. In the 1940s, testosterone became widely used to treat what was called the “male climacteric,” or male menopause. In later decades it became clear that anabolic steroids were also being used to boost athletic performance, beginning with Russian weightlifters in the 1950s and bodybuilders in the 1960s. Hormones became a tool for self-fashioning and they were big business.19 During its prime years in the 1960s and 1970s, the EEF made a tremendous impact in turning transsexualism into an area of serious study. The EEF contributed to a wide range of educational and research projects as well as support for transsexual people. It promoted public lectures that introduced transsexualism to medical professionals, clergy, law enforcement officers, and students. The foundation made major contributions to research and practice, including $72,000 to the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. It funded numerous publications, from a newsletter and educational pamphlets to major reference works such as Money and Richard Green’s Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment in 1969 and Money and Anke Ehrhardt’s Man and Woman, Boy and Girl in 1972.20 Between 1964 and 1968, the EEF provided the Harry Benjamin Foundation with over $60,000 in support. The publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon and EEF funding of his research gave Benjamin a new prestige. The days of EEF ﬁnancing were not to last, however. Within a few years, Benjamin and Erickson would squabble over the spending of funds. Benjamin resented paying for items that he felt should have been covered by the EEF, and he disliked what he saw as Erickson’s attempts to control how money was used. In early 1967, the stipend from the EEF was reduced from $1,500 to $1,200 a month, and by the fall, when the term of the original grant was over, the EEF backing of the Harry Benjamin Foundation ended. After some additional negotiations, Erickson offered the foundation a small continuing sum of $250 to $300 a month, but Benjamin refused it angrily. With faint echoes of the ﬁnal days of the failed venture with Casimir Funk and Benjamin Harrow, Benjamin complained to others of Erickson’s pettiness and “childish craving” to be in charge. At length, Erickson demanded that Benjamin move out of the comfortable offices that had been paid for by the EEF.21 The EEF also laid the foundation for a professional organization for the study of transsexualism by sponsoring the ﬁrst several international symposia on gender identity. The First International Symposium on Gender Identity took place in London in 1969; the second such conference in Elsinore, Denmark, in 1971; and the third in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, in 1973. The fourth, held at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, California, in 1975, was named for Harry Benjamin in honor of his ninetieth birthday that year. At the ﬁfth meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1977, delegates received the surprising news that the Erickson Educational Foundation was closing. In response to this sudden withdrawal of the support that had been so critical to the development of the ﬁeld, the conference planning committee immediately scheduled a business meeting to brainstorm about how to deal with the fallout. A decision was taken to found a new professional association, and a committee was created to draw up the articles of incorporation. At the Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium in San Diego in 1979, the formation of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association was officially approved. It would become the major organization for professionals working with transgender populations. The new association brought together endocrinologists, surgeons, psychiatrists, lawyers, and experts affiliated with the large university-based programs in transgender health.22 Erickson lived for many years at his Love Joy Palace in Mazatlán, Mexico, and then in Southern California. Sadly, by the time he died in 1992 at the age of seventy-four, he had become addicted to illegal drugs and was a fugitive from US drug indictments in Mexico. His legacy in promoting the recognition of transsexualism, however, was a lasting one.23 In the years after his break with the EEF, Benjamin moved to a succession of smaller and smaller offices. He pondered whether to stay in New York, move to San Francisco, or retire completely and live in Europe, though he admitted, “Gretchen has something to say about it too.”24 At various junctures, he tried to pull together funding to reform his foundation under various guises, such as the “Harry Benjamin Gender Identity Research Foundation.” He attempted to continue his research in tracking the psychological well-being of pre- and postoperative transsexuals to determine how successful and stable they were in their new gender roles. He also hoped to computerize the data he and his associates had obtained from over a thousand patient case histories. One of the most difficult things to do was long-term follow-up. Post-transition, subjects were often only too glad to leave a painful history behind and to quietly move into a new life. Others felt pressured by their physicians to “woodwork”—as in “go back into the woodwork”—and to leave their families and communities behind to start their lives under new identities. At one point, Benjamin’s office was no more than a tiny space he dubbed “the closet.” Rather than squeezing into this space, Benjamin tried meeting with his patients in Virginia Allen’s living room, only to have his consultations interrupted by Allen’s young son and his friends as they arrived home from the Lycée or by the yappings of her poodle.25 In time, Allen became what a colleague called Benjamin’s “office wife,” who looked after all the details of his professional life. By the 1970s, Benjamin would say that she had become much more than a secretary and was actually his research associate who also took care of all his correspondence. Benjamin called her “the much admired Virginia” and spoke of his gratitude for her intelligent and efficient help. Allen spent long hours extracting data from the ﬁles and tabulating them so that they revealed their hidden patterns. When responding to letters, Allen added her own personal words of comfort, referring the writers to resources and assuring them they were not alone.26 In 1969, Benjamin hired a young internist, Charles Ihlenfeld, to look after his New York office while he was away in California. Ihlenfeld, who knew nothing about transsexualism, had been warned against working with Benjamin by a colleague. He became intrigued, however, and found himself staying on after Benjamin returned. In time, Benjamin came to think of Ihlenfeld as his successor and hoped that he would be the one to whom he could pass along his practice.27 Psychoanalyst Ethel Spector Person became interested in studying transsexualism and Benjamin. Arriving in his waiting room in the early 1970s, she made note of the wealthy women swathed in jewels, eminent politicians peeking in for their testosterone, and showgirls who upon closer inspection revealed Adam’s apples and man-sized feet. She relished the old-world charm with which Benjamin bought her a drink at a ﬁne hotel and lit her cigarette. She described him as “perhaps the last European gentleman.” Together, they spoke at length about his childhood, his love of opera, and his secret passions for unattainable women. He quoted Goethe in the original German and then graciously translated for her. Over the years, she recorded numerous interviews with him, and Benjamin eventually asked her to write his biography after his death. As a psychoanalyst, she spent much time speculating about his mentality. She was intrigued that an idea as radical as transsexualism had emerged from someone who appeared, at ﬁrst meeting, an old-fashioned elderly gentleman. She soon decided that this was not paradoxical at all and that he had always been a medical maverick.28 Benjamin also spoke to Person about his essential sense of hopelessness about the human condition. During these years, he suffered from bouts of depression, especially as his body failed him. He told Person that he was glad he and Gretchen had never had children and that it would be one’s greatest blessing never to have been born. After a life spent advocating for the marginalized, he now felt he could identify with the deviant condition, having, by reaching extreme old age, attained the status of a freak himself.29 In time, Benjamin inﬂuenced a new generation of professionals working with transsexuals. To many, a ﬁrst meeting with Benjamin was a memorable event. Christine Wheeler, a gracious and soft-spoken psychotherapist, was then a graduate student of Wardell Pomeroy. She was taken to meet Benjamin in a crowded Irish pub. There, she felt she had “tumbled down a rabbit hole” of history. Wheeler was enchanted to hear his stories of looking down Caruso’s throat and of meeting Freud, Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger, and other famous ﬁgures. Recalling the early days of Steinach therapy, he told her, “We were looking for the fountain of youth!” She found him elegant and old-world and discovered they had a shared love of opera. They would become close friends, sharing dinners and long conversations. In time she would herself develop a private practice with a specialty in gender disorders and would reﬂect on how much the direction of individuals’ lives can be inﬂuenced by the people they meet.30 Garrett Oppenheim, a seasoned journalist, wanted to move into transsexual counseling and went to interview Benjamin when Benjamin was eighty-nine. Oppenheim was nervous that he would make a fool of himself with such a revered pioneer in the ﬁeld, but within minutes, Benjamin put him completely at ease, speaking in a gentle, leisurely way about the subject. Even when asked the most far-out questions, Benjamin would answer patiently and without a hint of sarcasm. Oppenheim remembered, “A kind of magic ﬁlled the little office on New York’s East Side, and I could actually feel my human insight moving up several levels. When I ﬁnally emerged onto the sunny street outside, I just stood there awhile in a state of dazzlement— not from the sun, but from the man I had just touched minds with. And I heard myself saying to myself, ‘Boy, you’re going to be in this ﬁeld for a long, long time.’”31 John Money was about half Benjamin’s age when they ﬁrst met. For him, Benjamin seemed a living link to the early history of psycho-endocrinology, a reminder that the scholarship of his generation was founded upon the work of those in the early twentieth century.32 Charles Ihlenfeld knew that Benjamin was particularly sensitive if anyone should fail to give him sufficient credit and was always careful to properly acknowledge him in any paper. As Ihlenfeld put it, if Benjamin was in agreement with you, he could be magnanimous, but if he disagreed, he could be terrible. But on the whole, Ihlenfeld valued Benjamin as more than a teacher, mentor, or father ﬁgure; he was above all someone who taught him how to truly look at a patient as a person with feelings and to never lose sight of the need to take care of the patient rather than just the disease.33 Christine Jorgensen said to Christian Hamburger, “Well, Christian, we didn’t start the sexual revolution but I suspect we gave it a good kick in the pants!” By the mid-1970s, when the characters in the Rocky Horror Picture Show were singing about “a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania,”38 two of the most well-known transsexuals in the public imagination were Renée Richards and Jan Morris. Richards had returned to Benjamin’s office in 1974 after more than ten years of fruitless searching for a solution to her predicament. Benjamin had almost retired by then and Ihlenfeld had taken over the practice. Ihlenfeld said, “Renée, you’ve had enough of a runaround, it’s time for you to get the treatment that you need.”39 Richards underwent sex- reassignment surgery in New York in 1974. Two years later, she entered the world of professional sport, breaking into women’s tennis as the ﬁrst transsexual to be allowed to play. Backed by Billie Jean King and others, she took on the Tennis Association for the right to compete as a woman. Benjamin’s work had always involved a dialectic tension between the messy, imperfect reality of medical practice and the media representations of the results in the lives of his gerontology and transsexual patients. While he tried to be frank about the limitations of his treatments, the media images were what drove new patients to his door and shaped their expectations.45 The popular fascination with transsexual life stories was about the idea of transformation from one form to another, the seeming magic of changing completely and convincingly from man to woman or from woman to man. But perhaps, like those rejuvenated before them, part of the fascination was not so much about changing from one to another but the possibility of being both—that is, to be a woman who understands what it is to be a man, just as the rejuvenation stories tantalized with the idea of a new category of human being possessing the wisdom of age as well as the vigor of youth. In a 1967 Esquire article called “The Transsexual Operation,” one transsexual woman described her experience like this: “I’m not anything different since my, uh, operation. I think the same, do everything the same. Except now I can see through people. I can tell at a look or a glance what’s going on when I come into a room. I know what the men are thinking and I know what the women are thinking.”46 The author of the article, Tom Buckley, interviewed many of the key experts in the ﬁeld of transsexualism. He grappled with the play of image and substance in the lives of the transsexual women he met, whether secretary, bar girl, or pearl-draped matron, young or middle- aged, beautiful or plain. He called them “the great masqueraders of the world,” living in the shadowland where “illusion and reality, identity and anonymity, death and rebirth, mingle and diffuse.” Buckley interviewed Benjamin over several months, and his admiration never wavered. He presented a sympathetic portrait of the man he described as a “friend, defender, and medical consultant” for transsexuals. Buckley thought highly of Benjamin’s rare sophistication, continental charm, sharp wardrobe, and good taste in food and wines, not to mention his life in New York and San Francisco with his vivacious blond wife. Buckley reported that Benjamin even treated many transsexuals without charge. Still “hale” and “rosy-cheeked” at eighty-two, Benjamin spoke to the reporter one afternoon while gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge from the penthouse bar, the Top of the Mark. Benjamin told him, “To me it is just a matter of relieving human suffering the best way we can.”47

Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf: A Life in Berlin and Transgender History PDF

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