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No book has shaped trans ideology more than Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon. Published in 1966, it’s built on personal testimony, emotional blackmail, contradictory theories, and literal mythology.
Benjamin, a dapper endocrinologist beloved for his bedside manner, is the architect of trans ideology.
The 1920s were an exciting time for medicine (insulin, antibiotics) but Benjamin’s arc bent toward blunders. He became a disciple of Eugan Steinach, an Austrian who transplanted opposite-sex gonads into rats with intriguing results but then staked his career on “rejuvenation” – one-testicle vasectomies intended to make men over 40 feel young.
Benjamin brought “Steinach operations” to NYC, offering ovary X-rays to women for the same purpose of “reactivation.”
Scientists were racing to synthesize sex hormones. Benjamin formed a team to manufacture androgens in the late 1920s but the venture was unsuccessful. He continued to offer “reactivation” and various potions. His bedside manner made him popular.
Before the Nazis took over, Benjamin frequently traveled to Germany. In Berlin he’d visit his friend Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, where a museum displayed BDSM gear and frilly underpants worn by Prussian officers. Hirschfeld and the resident scholars puzzled over the distinctions between transvestites and homosexuals.
In 1949, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey introduced Benjamin to Val Barry (pseudonym), a man in his early 20s whose parents had raised him as a girl from a young age because his personality was so feminine.
Benjamin informed Barry that he was “a woman [who] accidentally possesses the body of a man,” prescribed estrogen, X-rayed his testicles, and referred him to Sweden for genital surgery.
In 1952 the media alighted on Christine Jorgensen, a young homosexual man who’d just arrived home to New York in women’s clothing after castration in Denmark. Benjamin, now in his 60s, wrote Jorgensen a letter offering his services. By that point his practice was struggling, according to Ostertag, as the Steinach operation had become known as quackery.
As homosexuals and transvestites bombarded Jorgensen with requests for advice, he referred them to Benjamin. Soon the doctor had shifted his practice from reactivation to transsexualism.
Benjamin advocated for legalized prostitution. In 1964 he condemned the recent cleanup of San Francisco (where he lived during the summers), suggesting the dearth of accessible “whores” caused a sailor to murder a woman.
By the mid-1960s Benjamin was transitioning young male indigents in San Francisco. It appears some of these youths were underage; some may have been prostitutes. ”Harry Benjamin, he gave hormones to everyone,” one reminisced decades later.
The Transsexual Phenomenon was released in 1966 by Julian Press, which published works on sexology and exotic religion. The New York Times covered it twice. Aloof academics like Robert Stoller started taking Benjamin seriously. The San Francisco Police Department had a copy. The Erickson Educational Fund granted Benjamin $50,000 (around $500,000 in 2025). Johns Hopkins opened the country’s first “Gender Identity Clinic” – with full surgical services – that year. One of its founders, John Money, said Phenomenon made it possible.
Transsexual clinics soon cropped up all over the country. New practitioners honored Benjamin by naming guidelines, a conference, and finally their guild after him, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA).
Benjamin acknowledges fetishistic cross-dressing. “[T]o take sex out of transvestism is like taking music out of opera. It simply cannot be done.”
Benjamin describes “accompanying perversions or deviations that often complicate transvestism” like “bondage,” “flagellation,” and wanting to be “humiliated.”
He illuminates the condition’s sophisticated pedigree:
Havelock Ellis proposed the term “eonism” for the same condition, named after the Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont, a well-known transvestite at the court of Louis XV. In this way, Ellis wanted to bring the term into accord with sadism and masochism, also named after the most famous exponents of the respective deviations, the French Marquis (later Count) Donatien de Sade, and the Austrian writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
Recently feminists like Roisin Michaux and Genevieve Gluck have made similar observations to Benjamin – that these men are addicted to feeling sexually humiliated – by reviewing their social media activity.
Source: Dr. Benjamin’s Fantasy World – by Glenna Goldis – Bad Facts
