In the Darkroom (19 page)

By the mid-'70s, more than forty gender identity clinics from Johns Hopkins to the University of Minnesota to Stanford had sprung up to teach “acceptable” gender roles to young children and to diagnose transsexuals and determine whether they should be recommended for surgery. “Some of the doctors,” Meyerowitz observed, “actually required their [transsexual] patients to undergo training in conventional gender stereotypes.” At the Stanford clinic, “the screening process included a ‘rehabilitation' period with workshops on appropriate grooming.”

The era's new regimen also gave impetus to the view, which prevails today, that transsexuality has little to do with erotic impulse. The distinction between gender and sex—“Gender is located above, and sex below the belt,” Benjamin postulated—became dictum under the new generation of sexologists, who coined the term “gender identity.” UCLA psychiatrist Stoller drew a firm line between “gender identity”—what gender one believed oneself to be—and “sexual identity,” which was limited to what one did or fantasized doing in bed. By the early '70s, transsexualism was being described in the clinical literature as “a disorder of gender identity,” separate from and even antithetical to sexuality. “A single episode of cross-dressing in association with sexual arousal is regarded as sufficient to exclude the diagnosis of transsexualism,” Howard J. Baker, a psychiatrist at the UCLA Gender Identity Research Clinic, asserted in 1969 in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
. “Transsexuals,” he stated flatly, “never become sexually excited as a result of cross-dressing.” Many transsexual advocates guard that border even today. When a 2003 book by a research psychologist suggested that some male-to-female transsexuals were aroused by the idea of themselves as women—a concept known as autogynephilia—the author and his supporters were met with fury.
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As the years passed, Benjamin became increasingly insistent about the need for transsexuals to pass as “normal,” meaning that his male-to-female patients (and he mainly treated male-to-female) who qualified for surgery were expected to embody all the clichés of postwar femininity. He, along with the newer cohort of sexologists, was disinclined to accept clients whose exterior appearance and presentation failed to fit an image of the ideal woman or who balked at traditional sex roles. “This includes not only passing as members of the desired sex,” Benjamin instructed, “but also accepting the social, economic, and familial consequences of the change.” His favored patients were the ones who fulfilled his vision of true womanhood; “my girls,” he called them. Benjamin and a Los Angeles sex-change surgeon he worked with liked to go to lunch surrounded by their particularly beautiful patients. In Benjamin's case, particularly beautiful meant “Aryan good looks, blond-haired and blue-eyed,” recalled Stryker, who conducted oral histories of Benjamin's patients when she was director of the GLBT Historical Society. “He liked to show off his trans arm candy. He took a proprietary, look-what-we-made pride in it all. It was very much a Pygmalion kind of thing.”

In Benjamin's own case histories, he cast his clientele in sugar-plum terms: “Ruth” is a “tall, slender woman,” he wrote, who “crosses her legs and automatically adjusts her fashionable short skirt as any woman would.” “Harriet” is “an attractive young lady” who has “met her Prince Charming” (“a responsible and understanding older man”) and, having relinquished her job for “household duties” and made plans to adopt a child, has achieved “a happy ending.” Benjamin's descriptions sometimes sounded like they belonged in a '50s B-movie.

There was, in fact, such a movie: Ed Wood Jr.'s 1953 cult film,
Glen or Glenda
, in which a Benjamin-like psychiatrist supervising the sex change of a Jorgensen-like former GI (played by Wood, himself a lifelong cross-dresser) instructs his patient on “the duty of a woman,” “the correct styling for her facial contours,” and “the proper walk.” Due to the good doctor's tutelage—“A lady is a lady whatever the case may be”—and thanks “to the corrections of medical science,” Glenda's case “has a happy ending.”

Benjamin's most famous client was only too glad to play the fairy-tale princess. “It is possible that my attachment to the world of make believe was influenced even before I was born,” Jorgensen wrote on the first page of her memoir,
Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography
, “for my paternal grandfather, Charles Gustav Jorgensen, came to this country from Odense, Denmark, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen.” Jorgensen's allegiance to Andersen startled me, all the more because it wasn't the only parallel with my father. As a young man, Jorgensen relates, he adored marionettes (“I never seemed to tire of manipulating the tiny figures in their fanciful world”), aspired to photography and set up a darkroom at home, and soon set his sights on a career in film. Those ambitions dead-ended in the 1940s in the “cutting library” of RKO-Pathé News in New York, where George Jr. worked in the newsreel's back office, splicing bits of film together to create stock footage. I couldn't help but think of my father's lifelong propensity to cut and splice, in darkrooms on continent after continent.

Two months after her triumphant touchdown at Idlewild Airport, Jorgensen would find herself under attack, thanks to the absence of one “correction of medical science.” In April 1953, the
New York Post
published its first installment of a six-part exposé, “The Truth About ‘Christine' Jorgensen.” She was “a woman in name only,” the newspaper held, because she had no female organs. The rest of the media, from
Newsweek
to
True Romance
, piled on. “Jorgensen was no girl at all,”
Time
decreed, “only an altered male.” If she wouldn't submit to the knife, she couldn't wear the glass slipper. Jorgensen was despondent. Whether in response to the attacks or not, she turned to Harry Benjamin and another physician for a surgical intervention: in a seven-hour operation in the spring of 1954, a plastic surgeon harvested skin grafts from Jorgensen's thighs and fashioned a kind of vagina. The surgery was reportedly a failure by one measure—she told friends that the vaginal canal was too short for intercourse. Worse, the operation dragged on for so long that the anesthesia threatened to wear off, and when an ether mask was hastily applied to keep the patient knocked out, Jorgensen's face was badly burned. “I remember clearly the feelings of dread and terror,” she wrote later, “and was far more concerned about facial burns than the complex surgery I'd been through.” Jorgensen understood that, whether the equipment worked or not, the most critical test for success as a girl was
looking
like one. “I had to become super-female,” she wrote later. “I couldn't have one single masculine trait.”

In 1930, Harry Benjamin hosted a prominent German sexologist on his visit to the United States, physician Magnus Hirschfeld. The two men were friends: they had toured the demimonde of Berlin together in the '20s, and when Hirschfeld came to New York he stayed in Benjamin's apartment and gave private lectures in his office. “Benjamin understood himself as a German sexologist in the Hirschfeld tradition,” Meyerowitz told me. “They both rejected psychoanalysis; they both advocated for the rights of sexual and gender minorities. They both responded sympathetically to desperate patients.” Yet Hirschfeld espoused an ethic directly at odds with the dualism that would come to prevail in the United States later in the century. “The number of actual and imaginable sexual varieties is almost unending,” Hirschfeld wrote in 1910. “In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics equally match in kind and number.”

In 1919 in Berlin, Hirschfeld established the world's first institute to study sexuality, which issued one of the earliest scientific reports on transsexual surgery. Hirschfeld himself conducted his field studies in the subterranean sexual haunts of Weimar Berlin. He spent years collecting eyewitness observations and distributing detailed questionnaires (ultimately filled out by more than ten thousand people). From this research, and flouting the iron-clad separate-spheres dictates of Wilhelmine Germany, he derived his prime finding: sexual identities were wildly varied and fluid, and defied classification. Categories of sex were “only abstractions, invented extremes.” While Hirschfeld constructed categories to aid his work and introduced some of the terminology that would, decades hence, find its way into the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, he maintained throughout his life that no one was a “true” sex type; human beings were all to some degree bisexual and bi-gendered, all “sexual intermediaries”—and, because of these endless variations, defined less by their difference than by their shared humanity. At one point, Hirschfeld tried to calculate all the varieties—he arrived at a grand total of 43,046,721—before deciding that number was a gross undercount.

He took the same approach to transvestism, a term that he coined but saw as an “inclination,” not a genus. To label someone a transvestite, Hirschfeld argued, was to constrain their experience to too narrow and visual a category, one that could not do justice to the variegations of their internal emotional life. “One disadvantage of the term,” he wrote, “is that it describes only the external side, while the internal is limitless.” It was this limitlessness that he believed must be taken into account in any political struggle for sexual liberation: “Sexual human rights would have to begin with the acknowledgment that sexualities—in accordance with the doctrine of sexual intermediaries—are as diverse as the number of sexed individuals.”

The rights of sexual minorities became Hirschfeld's lifelong cause. For decades he fought to strike down Germany's notorious Paragraph 175, which criminalized male homosexuality, and he convinced the Berlin police to recognize his “transvestite passes,” medical certificates he issued to protect cross-dressers from arrest. But he didn't believe one's essence sprang from membership in a sexual or gender category—or any category, racial, religious, or national. Hirschfeld's own selfhood derived from multiple affiliations: he was a homosexual (a fact he neither announced nor denied), a feminist (he was an outspoken and dedicated supporter of women's suffrage and birth control), a scientist, a physician, a socialist, a pacifist, a devotee of German culture, and a secular Jew. The one identity Hirschfeld would admit to was “panhumanist.”

In a journal article in 1923, Hirschfeld remarked that some of his transvestite patients were expressing feelings that might be described as “
seelischer Transsexualismus
,” or spiritual transsexualism, but he wasn't referring to the condition the word denotes today. He never separated out transsexuality as a category or regarded it as an identity. While doctors affiliated with Hirschfeld's institute performed several (rudimentary) sex-change operations, they did so with some reluctance, at the behest of desperate clients threatening severe self-harm. (One male-to-female client later changed her mind and begged to return to manhood, lending support to Hirschfeld's thesis that sexuality was a fluctuating entity.) Hirschfeld was more interested in freeing people to express their own idiosyncratic sexuality than in nailing down which patients belonged to which of two sexes. He was not looking to turn psychological ambiguity into certainty in the flesh.

On May 6, 1933, a little more than three months after Hitler became chancellor, a hundred students from a National Socialist youth league called the Nazi Committee Against the Un-German Spirit pulled up in lorries in front of Hirschfeld's institute. As a brass band blasted martial music, the young thugs stormed and then ransacked the building, smashing furniture and breaking windows, pouring red ink over thousands of manuscripts and confiscating the institute's vast archive of books, photographs, and files. A few days later, a torchlight procession marched to Berlin's Opera Square, bearing the defaced bust of Hirschfeld impaled on a stick, and tossed into a bonfire thousands of the institute's “un-German” volumes. The party's press praised the “Energetic Action against a Poison Shop”; they had “fumigated” the institute run by “the Jew Magnus Hirschfeld.”

Hirschfeld, the “world citizen” who embraced all and no identities, was in France at the time, forced into exile. In the years leading up to his flight, fascist gangs had opened fire at his public speaking appearances and physically attacked him in Munich, once fracturing his skull so badly that he was declared dead (allowing him, he noted wryly, “an opportunity” to read his own obituary). Hirschfeld learned of the attack on the institute from a newsreel he watched in a Paris movie theater. He was subsequently stripped of his German citizenship. A year later, devastated by the destruction of his life's work, he died of a heart attack on his sixty-seventh birthday.

Five doctors who had been involved with sexology research at the institute fled the country; another likely died in a concentration camp. They, like a good number of the institute's practitioners, were Jewish. At least one gentile on staff wasn't spared either: the recipient of the first fully completed transsexual operation, Rudolf née Dorchen Richter, who became the institute's longtime live-in maid, disappeared on the day of the attack, likely murdered. Other institute patients were placed on “pink lists,” arrested, deported, murdered.

Was the Nazi raid on the institute motivated by hatred of a religious or a sexual identity? Or did the raiders also fear exposure of their own erotic proclivities? The institute's assistant director, Dr. Ludwig Levy-Lenz, later speculated that “we knew too much”; their clientele included Third Reich officials. “Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and our other documentary material … was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.”