A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution
Born in Berlin to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, Harry Benjamin (1885-1986) became a physician in 1912 at a time when German physiology and medicine had much to celebrate. He ended his days in New York City more than a century later, a much lauded, if controversial founder of the entirely new field of transgender medicine. The path was not easy as his own transitions were often painfully turbulent: bullied as a schoolboy for being neither Jew nor Christian, shunned in wartime America for being German, accused of quackery for being an advocate of glandular therapy. And he transited the Atlantic many times always both at home and alien on two continents. Nevertheless, he kept his faith in the miraculous effects of hormones and held fast to an undiminished will to help people live happier lives.
Using intimate diaries, letters, and interviews in both German and English, Alison Li has written a sensitive, insightful biography that not only traces this remarkable life, but also tracks the birth of endocrinology and the advent an unprecedented discursive consciousness that challenged social norms. Her earlier biography of J.B. Collip, biochemist of insulin fame, provided her with extensive knowledge of emerging hormones; she handles the technicalities with deft, accessible prose.
From witnessing the “resurrection” of a moribund patient with dried thyroid medication, Benjamin was captivated by the potential of hormones to bring even the sickest of people to perfect health. Initially intent on the rejuvenating possibilities, he thought of his work as “gerontotherapy” –treatment of the elderly – not so much to live longer but to live better. He became a devoté of Eugen Steinach and his procedure – which aimed to enhance hormone production of the gonads by suppression (through X-irradiation) of their competing elaboration of eggs or sperm. As the female and male hormones became commercially available as pills, they were added to the protocol. Inevitable slippage led to equating (or reducing) these goals to enhancing sexual prowess and attractiveness.
For some, peace came from simply living as one of the opposite sex, for others it was hormones, and eventually, for some, it was surgery.
Along the way, Benjamin encountered many prominent figures, and we read their impressions of each other. Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, Robert Masters, and Robert A. Wilson make appearances. The semi-autobiographical novel Black Oxen (1923) of his ever-loyal Californian patient, Gertrude Atherton, proclaimed the power of glandular therapy to a wide public and cemented Benjamin’s reputation for dealing with problems of sexuality. From listening carefully to each patient, he realized that the socially pervasive male/female binary failed to reflect individual identifications and orientations; gender was not a duality but a spectrum. Language had to evolve too and that is another theme of the book.
Married to a much younger woman, Benjamin consulted Sigmund Freud when his desire for her waned; however, thinking of himself as a courtly ladies’ man, he was offended by Freud’s suggestion that he could be a latent homosexual. The experience conditioned his mistrust of psychoanalysis. Choosing physiology over psychology, both men, we learn, underwent Steinach’s treatment.
With an office in New York City and later a satellite in San Francisco, Benjamin moved in a heady circle of artists, writers, politicians, and intellectuals—striving to find comfort in their own identities. He viewed the source of what became gender dysphoria as something biological. Instead of fixing the mind, he sought to repair bodies to match minds. For some, peace came from simply living as one of the opposite sex, for others it was hormones, and eventually, for some, it was surgery. Benjamin befriended Christine Jorgensen and collaborated with a few surgeons willing –even eager–to develop operative interventions that resulted in physical sex change. After their transition, he continued to follow his patients to understand if and how the procedures had helped their quality of life.
Always in private practice, never associated with academe except through research organizations of his own creation, Benjamin was dismayed by how his work was shunned by the medical establishment. From 1929 to 1935, he waged a lengthy lawsuit against Morris Fishbein the crusty leader of the American Medical Association for having disparaged him and his work. Benjamin wanted a retraction and an opportunity to explain in the pages of JAMA how his treatments were based in scientific research. He never got it.

Nevertheless, at the end of his long career Benjamin witnessed the establishment of gender identity clinics at universities beginning with John Hopkins University and extending to some twenty sites by the late 1970s. He also witnessed their numerous closures in the 1980s as a struggle was waged between those who saw gender dysphoria as a mental illness– not deserving of physical intervention, and those who followed Benjamin’s pragmatic, biological approach.
With curiosity and tolerance, Li probes the convoluted path of Benjamin’s career. She recreates the atmospheric ambience of exotic pre-war Berlin and the heady optimism of post-war America. She privileges the stories and perspectives of well-known trans people –Renée Richards, Reid Erickson, Jan Morris and many others. Without defensiveness, she presents the current criticisms of Benjamin and his so-called “standards” that had been generated to guide the medical approach to people with gender dysphoria. She treats the critics with the same attentive balance and consideration that Benjamin gave to his patients.
As a physician, Benjamin could scarcely formulate solutions to the distress of those who sought his help in any way other than through a disease model. His efforts brought their plight out of the shadows of deviance and crime to the attention of well-intentioned minds who applied pills and procedures to serve their complex needs, empowering them to live openly, and enabling them to eventually reject the disease model entirely. Trans is diversity—one of many to populate the postmodern world. This is a very good book.
Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution
Alison Li
Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2023
https://uncpress.org/book/9781469674858/wondrous-transformations
https://alisonli.com