Dr. Benjamin’s Fantasy World

You're living in it

The prostitute who is able to create the illusion of an ideal sex partner, fleeting as it may be, has actually done something for this man’s mental health[.]

– Harry Benjamin (1964)

[I]f an extra highball or an extra cigar adds to your mental comfort and satisfaction, to your feeling of happiness, by all means have both, even at the risk of doing some harm physically. This harm is problematical anyhow and the authorities often disagree. But nobody can disagree as to the state of your own happiness.

– Harry Benjamin (1941)

Illustrations by Hieronymus Bosch

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. Its nightmarish vignettes, many of them perverse or obviously false, read like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But the concepts and arguments are familiar to the modern reader. That’s because if you’ve flipped through I Am Jazz, listened to The Protocol, or studied Bostock v. Clayton County, then you’ve encountered the Disney version of The Transsexual Phenomenon.

Benjamin, a dapper endocrinologist beloved for his bedside manner, is the architect of trans ideology. Born in 1885, he is still the movement’s driving intellectual force – despite its claims of cutting-edge science and supposed “queer women of color” roots.

In this post I’ll sketch Benjamin’s biography. Then I’ll break down his contributions to the trans movement, assessing how each idea and practice held up over the decades. Finally I’ll explore why no one on any side of 2025 gender discourse – trans activists, radical feminists, anti-feminists – acknowledges Benjamin’s hulking influence.

Sourcing

This post draws on Benjamin’s own words, contemporaneous journalism, and scholarship by Helen Joyce, Bob Ostertag, and Joanne Meyerowitz. For some biographical detail and historical context I rely on Alison Li’s 2023 biography of Benjamin, Wondrous Transformations.

Transformations has a slant. Li doesn’t say a word about the fetishistic men who seek estrogen and surgery, even though Benjamin discussed this crucial point forthrightly. Nor does she engage the concern that many of his patients were self-loathing, confused, lonely or embattled because of their homosexuality (she does curtly mention that some gays objected to his work). Worst of all, her book is blurbed by Susan Stryker, a propagandist “historian” whom she cites approvingly.

Biography and trans history are two genres prone to sanitizing their subjects. Transformations is probably guilty. But Li’s quotations from Benjamin’s archive seem to be genuine and she reveals plenty of unflattering detail. I’m using her work cautiously.

Life of Benjamin (1885-1986)

Benjamin with his mother, Bertha, in Berlin, 1909

In this section, all the material is from Li except where otherwise noted.

Harry Benjamin grew up saluting Kaiser Wilhelm II in bourgeois Berlin, the son of a Lutheran mom and ex-Jew dad. After writing his med school thesis on tuberculosis, he took a job in his late 20s assisting Friedrich Franz Friedmann – a grandiose young doctor who claimed he’d derived a cure to tuberculosis from turtles. The ruse got them invited to New York City in 1913, where they were mobbed by desperate patients, and DC, where Friedmann was feted by President Woodrow Wilson.

Benjamin soon realized he was part of a con. Plus Friedmann didn’t pay him. So he quit, ending up broke and stranded in America. After working odd jobs for a year he sailed back toward Germany, only to get diverted to England as World War I broke out.

Back in New York, Benjamin built a small practice and networked with intellectual physicians. 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.” He attracted media attention and glamorous patients, including the novelist-socialite Gertrude Atherton. In 1922, the 64-year old was in a funk so Benjamin X-rayed her ovaries. Weeks passed with no improvement to her energy levels. Benjamin continued to X-ray her ovaries and assured her the lack of improvement was normal. Then one day she “had the abrupt sensation of a black cloud lifting from my brain.” She began joyously pumping out novels. Benjamin wrote to Steinach, “I cannot rule out a psychological influence.”

It wasn’t the only time Benjamin chewed over the placebo effect. Once a patient called him frantic because her 5-year old son had swallowed “thyroid supplements” from Benjamin’s treasure chest. Examining the healthy boy over the next 24 hours, Benjamin realized he might as well have “eaten bread crumbs.” The pills were duds. He asked himself whether he simply cast a “spell” over patients with his confidence.

Nevertheless, Benjamin kept treating patients who wanted to be young again. They were banging down his door in the wake of Atherton’s endorsement. In 1925 he bought an opulent Upper West Side apartment with a marble staircase and servants.

That year Benjamin married Gretchen, a German 18 years his junior, rescuing her and her family from Weimar-era poverty. She soon complained to others about the couple’s lack of sex; he was rumored to cheat on her with actresses. But the marriage endured until his death. They never had children because, according to Benjamin, he was too selfish to be a father.

When Gretchen scored a patent for a “metallic face mask” to smooth wrinkles in 1929, Benjamin described it to Steinach as “a gimmick that might provide an additional income.”

Li emphasizes that Benjamin sold the Steinach operation as a way to improve life, not extend it. But he called his enterprise the “Life Extension Institute,” according to Ostertag.

One of Benjamin’s patients in the 1920s was Otto Spengler, a German-born NYC businessman Li describes as “a tall, lean man with long, thin red hair that he kept rolled up under his derby hat.” He was married with three kids.

Spengler wore women’s underwear under his business suit, Benjamin told an audience of “homophile” (gay) activists in 1966. His female employees somehow knew about his lingerie and “accepted” it. Spengler asked Benjamin for drugs to achieve “breast development” but the technology did not yet exist. So Benjamin X-rayed his testicles to feminize him, according to Meyerowitz. After Spengler was hit by a car, Benjamin felt dismayed to see the hospital records labeled him a “degenerate” for his choice of underwear.

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. As one of Atherton’s friends noted, “Just his approach is enough to make one feel better.”

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. Now, having read about sex changes, he was determined to obtain one himself. He’d recently been institutionalized for attacking his father, an outburst presumed to flow from his frustration at having a penis.

The Attorneys General of Wisconsin and California warned Barry’s doctors that castrating him would constitute criminal “mayhem;” a Chicago surgeon backed away after consulting counsel. According to Meyerowitz, Kinsey and Barry’s psychiatrist thought Barry should “undertake homosexual relations as a means of learning to value his genitals” (their words) rather than undergo castration.

Barry seems to appear in an appendix to Phenomenon under another pseudonym, H. His wild biography includes suspected incest with an older sister and:

H was sexually attracted to a brother six years his senior. He says that this brother would embrace him and reassure him that his condition [as a cross-dresser] did not affect their relationship. On such occasions, H would experience an erection.

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.

In 1964, the National Insider published a story on the “fourth sex” – neither male, female, nor homosexual – known as transsexual. It quotes Jorgensen, Benjamin, and Ira Pauly, a young psychiatrist whom Benjamin had mentored since residency:

The transsexuals are happy and content in their new roles [as wives].

They seem to have ironed out most of the obvious marital problems that would arise with their husbands.

THE ONLY THING THEY CANNOT DO AS WOMEN IS HAVE CHILDREN.

For those who remain single, the specialists say life is much more emotionally stable.

Two years later during the homophile lecture, Benjamin complained bitterly that the same tabloid had reported one of his patients regretted the surgery. He suggested the publication had paid off the transsexual. The following year, Esquire reported that Benjamin had never “heard of a change of heart.”

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:

[H]is libido hardly appeased [by getting drunk], he accosted a girl in the street, having been unable to find one anywhere else. The girl happened to be the wrong kind. She refused the sailor’s advances in no uncertain terms, whereupon he got mad and ‘pushed’ her. She fell so unfortunately that she fractured her skull on the sidewalk and the boy was arrested and charged with murder. Undoubtedly he paid for his (was it his alone?) crime with years in prison.

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).

Phenomenon presents cross-sex hormones as soothing and vaginoplasty as “possible salvation.” Fetishism, it argues, is a precursor to transsexuality. But in interviews, Benjamin drew a neat line between the two — the conditions were separate.

Throughout his life Benjamin was known for his European charm and fastidious, expensive style. Esquire praised his “sophistication,” noting he had “a wardrobe of custom-made suits and haberdashery from Sulka” and was “a connoisseur of wines, of the food of San Francisco…”

Benjamin explained his approach to transsexual medicine: “To me it is just a matter of relieving human suffering the best way we can.”

What’s Changed?

Benjamin’s theory of transsexualism reads like a dark relic – unless you’ve perused any currently-pending ACLU lawsuits.

1. The Holy Trinity Model of Sex

The central mystery of trans ideology is that sex has three conflicting definitions: the binary, the spectrum, and the hodgepodge. This model traces back to Harry Benjamin.

First, sex is binary and immutable. “No actual change of sex is ever possible,” Benjamin writes. “Sex and gender … are decided at the moment of conception, when either two X chromosomes …” In describing his patients’ sex, Benjamin tacitly adheres to the binary view. They’re all unambiguously male or female (though his pronoun usage is inconsistent).

Likewise, the ACLU has no problem identifying its clients sex as male or female and relies on that categorization in its briefs. But it uses the gibberish term “sex assigned at birth” for this designation rather than “sex” alone.

Second, sex is a spectrum. Benjamin: “Between ‘male’ and ‘female,’ ‘sex’ is a continuum with many ‘in betweens.’”

The ACLU’s lead trans attorney, Chase Strangio, puts her own sex on a spectrum. She believes she has “bodily formations that exist sort of in the liminal space between male and female.’”

Third, sex is a hodgepodge of indepedent characteristics. Benjamin lists the “kinds of sex” as “chromosomal, genetic, anatomical, legal, gonadal, germinal, endocrine (hormonal), psychological and - also - the social sex, usually based on the sex of rearing.” These may not be in “harmony.” Psychological sex is “highly important” and dictates the social sex in transsexuals and transvestites.

This year, the ACLU sued the federal government for the right to express one’s “gender identity” on one’s passport in the box designated for sex. It explained sex:

The concept of “sex” refers to multiple physiologic attributes, such as chromosomes, gonads (glands that produce hormones and gametes), and anatomy (internal and external reproductive parts), secondary sex characteristics that usually develop in puberty, and gender identity.

These attributes may not “align.” Gender identity – the sense of being male, female, or something else – “is the most important and accurate characteristic for determining what [a person’s] sex is” for purposes of passports. This is very similar to the hodgepodge described by Benjamin.

On top of those three understandings of sex, there is also a non-understanding to consider. Benjamin claimed “what we call ‘sex’ is of a very dubious nature and has no accurate scientific meaning.” The ACLU, citing the Endocrine Society, has said “the terms ‘biological sex’ and ‘biological male or female’ are imprecise and should be avoided.”

Benjamin was the first thought leader to bravely posit sex as a binary, a spectrum, a hodgepodge, and nothing, all at once. Today that idea is regularly on display in federal court.

2. Reliance on Myth

Phenomenon features an appendix by the psychiatrist Richard Green that roots transsexual identity in history, anthropological studies, and mythology. The human race has always included people who wanted to change sex, therefore we should help people pretend to change sex, seems to be the suggestion.

For example, Green describes a supposed practice by the Mohave tribe of North America:

An alyha [male who pretends to be female], after finding a husband, would begin to imitate menstruation. He would take a stick and scratch himself between the legs until blood was drawn. When they would decide to become pregnant they would cease “menstruations.” Before “delivery” they would drink a bean preparation, which would induce violent stomach pains that were dubbed “labor pains.” Following this would be a defecation designated as a “stillbirth,” which would be ceremoniously buried. There would then ensue a period of mourning by both the husband and “wife.”

This style of reasoning became a staple of trans advocacy. Today, trans NGOs celebrate North American “2 spirits.” But they don’t claim these men pretended their poop was a baby.

3. Fatalism

Benjamin was not a mental health professional. But he claimed that therapy could not help his patients overcome their desire to change sex because he hadn’t seen it work. “Since it is evident … that the mind of the transsexual cannot be adjusted to the body, it is logical and justifiable to attempt the opposite, to adjust the body to the mind.”

Benjamin saw a limited role for therapists. When discussing female transsexuals:

Psychotherapy with the purpose of having the patient accept herself as a woman is as useless in female transsexualism as it is in male. Psychotherapy can be helpful only as guidance and to relieve tension, provided there is a permissive attitude on the part of the doctor regarding masculinization.

The ACLU vehemently opposes any counseling that might lead a “transgender” patient to become content with their sex, labeling this “conversion therapy.” Its expert witnesses draw credibility from the decades-old conviction in gender medicine – passed down from Benjamin – that trans identity is intractable.

4. Kill All the Gatekeepers

The early days of gender medicine are known as a time of gatekeeping. Benjamin, however, rejected this practice.

As discussed above, he prescribed hormones to “everyone,” including young prostitutes – some of whom may have been underage. According to Li, he sent patients to a friendly psychiatrist “not to determine whether the patients were transsexual but whether they were mentally well enough to make their own decisions.”

Once Johns Hopkins opened its Gender Identity Clinic, the doctors struggled to decide which patients to operate on. In Ostertag’s words:

Benjamin suggested that the diagnosis required for the surgery could be the request for the surgery itself, arguing that anyone who was sick enough to ask for such painful, ferocious surgery was sick enough to receive it. Not surprisingly, this proposal convinced no one.

Modern gender medicine follows strictly in the Benjamin model as to adults, calling it “informed consent.” For kids, there is more controversy. Leading clinicians like Jason Rafferty and Johanna Olson-Kennedy openly argue that “kids know who they are” and failing to “affirm” them immediately is harmful. Even some clinics that advertise relying on “assessments” (which are not scientific) have been found to skimp on them.

5. Scientific Vindication Is Just Around the Corner

Many of Benjamin’s peers believed transsexuality was seeded in early childhood. But as a “monist” he believed everything had a physical cause, including psychological problems. He conjectured that the biological basis for transsexuality was exposure to certain hormones in the womb, but he never conducted any serious research into this. (Prenatal hormone exposure does seem to influence sexual orientation.)

Today, the ACLU – backed by prominent gender doctors – routinely argues in court that “there is a general medical consensus” that gender identity has a biological basis, but it has not been discovered yet. On the stand, its expert witnesses note that prenatal hormone exposure is a promising area of research.

6. Until the Vindication Comes, Just Trust Me

Phenomenon rests heavily on the author’s clinical experience, anecdotes, and ill-supported claims that no one regrets annihilating their genitals. Nevermind if the anecdotes are verifiable – some are facially absurd. From one transsexual’s family history:

The first child born to [the transsexual’s parents] was abnormal. Studied by scientists, she was declared at the age of two to “have the brain of an adult.”

The child died in her third year, a German specialist having predicted the death on the ground that “her brain was developing too fast for her body.” The brain was removed and preserved at a university. This child had given extraordinary answers to questions put to her by medical and other examiners.

An appendix by REL Masters discusses K, a transsexual who claims to be running his own study of 15 peers, none of whom have any regrets. Even Masters himself seems skeptical of K’s self-report:

Orgasm is presently experienced on the average of once in every three acts of intercourse. The vagina is “perfectly satisfactory.” Artificial lubrication is not required, since there is, according to K, sufficient internal secretion (perspiration?) for a penis to enter without difficulty and for the act to be completed without unpleasant friction. (This, if true, is unusual; the need for employing some lubricant is almost universally reported.)

Benjamin insists follow-up studies are impossible:

Before they have the operation, [transsexuals] are willing to promise anything, that they will be available for followups and so on. But afterwards, they tend to disappear. “I want to forget,” they say. “I was so miserable before and I am so happy now. Please don’t remind me.”

Today, child gender medicine is founded on “clinical experience,” low quality survey-based evidence with no control groups, and pseudoscientific Dutch research that asked girls if they felt uncomfortable with their erections. Gender doctors routinely testify in court based on their unsystematic personal observations. Civil rights lawyers present affidavits by parents that are absurd on their face.

7. Selective Iconoclasm

Benjamin casts his critics as prudes. “Breaking a taboo always stirs quick emotions.” In his homophile lecture he mocks “the great taboo that the sex organs must not be tampered with. Anything else can be done, a lobotomy may be done, the brain may be injured, but the sex organs must not be touched.”

In Phenomenon he complains that castration makes Americans emotional “because procreation is prevented.” He continues: “It is difficult to reconcile this argument with the only too well justified fear of overpopulation.”

Today, prominent journalists like Masha Gessen and Lydia Polgreen dismiss concerns that minors will later regret becoming sterile. Gessen bemoaned the influence of Kiera Bell, the British detransitioner, over the British High Court: “That one person’s testimony convinced the court to make a decision that will affect untold thousands tells us more about the pull that human reproduction has on the imagination than it does about gender transition.”

And of course, modern gendercrats insinuate that all of us who oppose injecting teen girls with steroids are social conservatives who can’t stand gender-nonconformity. Gessen refers to trans-skeptical liberals as “self-identified liberals.” One professional trans activist just told the Wall Street Journal, in an interview about gays condemning fraudulent “LGBTQ” propaganda, ”this is often about fear of the other.”

From Benjamin to Gessen, trans advocates smugly portray Americans as rubes imprisoned by puritan sexual morality. But they refuse to consider that one particular taboo could be driving young homosexuals to transition …

8. Don’t Say Gay

Benjamin rejects the idea that some people want to change sex because they are gay. He sneers at psychiatrists who have diagnosed his patients with “homosexuality” and

advised the patient to accept himself (or herself) as he or she was. The “gay” life … is no solution for the transsexual. He does not like it. He actually dislikes homosexuals and feels he has nothing in common with them.

In fact, Benjamin questions the entire concept of homosexuality. First, he thinks the word “homosexual” is over-applied to any man who’d had sexual contact with a man before. This might be a fair observation of his era. But then his logic falters:

[T]he great majority of all so-called homosexuals are in reality bisexually oriented although they may live exclusively homo- or heterosexual lives. These are fundamental facts that deserve to be recalled.

In Benjamin’s telling, the only true homosexuals are those who never have straight sex or relationships, but even these are somehow bisexual.

Benjamin kicks off his lecture to the homophiles:

I do not like the word homosexuality. It is to me something much too final and too much of a unit. I always like to talk of homosexual behavior and homosexual inclinations. I think that is much fairer and to the point.

It’s an imperious way to address a homosexual rights organization – telling the members they are not a unit.

For all his supposed open-mindedness, Benjamin doesn’t critique the idea that people should be straight. He writes of Jorgensen, “since the psychological status of a transsexual male is that of a female, it is natural that sex attraction centers on a male.”

The trans movement has attacked gays ever since. In 1974, psychiatrist Norman Fisk argued it was fine to castrate men “in full flight from … effeminate homosexuality.” In the 90s, trans activists excoriated gay activists for their supposed privilege. Modern gender doctors and trans activists falsely claim sexual orientation is not innate, rationalize transing gay kids, see childhood gender nonconformity as “evidence” of being “transgender,” slur lesbians for refusing to date men in dresses, denigrate gay rights victories …

Like Benjamin, today’s trans advocates problematize the term “homosexual” to death. GLAAD’s style guide, which other trans orgs and most of the corporate media seem to accept as authoritative, defines it:

Outdated clinical term considered derogatory and offensive. … Please avoid using “homosexual” except in direct quotes.

Like Benjamin, GLAAD advises against referring to gay people as a unit:

The term “gay community” should be avoided, as it does not accurately reflect the diversity of the community. Rather, LGBTQ community or LGBTQ+ community are recommended.

GLAAD uses the term “transgender community” uncritically.

Benjamin was trying to write a new class into existence: transsexual. But its members shared little in common. An overlapping group, homosexuals, was more cohesive – it made sense as a classification because it was rooted in biology. Benjamin needed to poison the public’s understanding of “gay” in order to shore up the reasoning behind “trans.” And so do trans advocates today.

9. Transition a la Carte

For gender doctors who worked in university clinics between 1966 and 1979, transing was a package deal. They only treated patients with hormones if they planned to receive surgery in the near future. It seems they worried that keeping one’s gonads while using cross-sex hormones caused cancer. Also, they thought the goal of gender medicine was to pass as the opposite sex.

Benjamin, however, prescribed hormones back when finding a surgeon in America was impossible. In Phenomenon, he endorses estrogen as a standalone treatment. For transvestites “it lowers libido, it calms the patient, and acts as a biological tranquilizer.” For “nonsurgical transsexuals,” estrogen is “needed for comfort and emotional balance.”

Today, gender doctors practice “nonbinary” gender medicine by offering hormones and hormone suppressants without surgery. Even though evidence now suggests this causes cancer.

10. Doctor as Lawyer

Benjamin advocated for gender medicine from the early 1950s onward, appealing to public sympathy for his patients. He also testified in family court that transsexuals should be treated as the opposite sex and provided his patients letters they could show police if they were caught violating cross-dressing laws. His partnerships with EEF in the mid-1960s brought him more opportunities to advocate for his practice by speaking with the media and influencing medical schools.

In Phenomenon, Benjamin suggests FTM surgery should “include the closing of the vagina” to “justify the statement later on [when the patient argues in court she is a man] that the patient could no longer function as a female[.]” The physician is encouraging pointless genital surgery based on a legal theory.

A passion for advocacy drives today’s most prominent pediatric gender doctors. They drafted their clinical guidelines with the aim of winning civil rights and insurance lawsuits.

11. Suicide Card

Benjamin argued that if people who wanted genital surgery weren’t granted their wish, they’d kill themselves. Phenomenon is chock full of morbid musing:

Some of them [in past eras] probably languished in mental institutions, some in prisons, and the majority as miserable, unhappy members of the community, unless they committed suicide.

How often a mysterious suicide is due to the utter misery of a transsexual is anybody’s guess.

Suicides with “motive unknown” have undoubtedly occurred because of the inability to procure surgical help for the sex change.

Benjamin doesn’t have data. In fact, he only presents one case of completed suicide:

He was … handicapped by extreme, almost paranoic sensitiveness to remarks referring to the feminine impression he made and to his assumed homosexual inclination.

Shouldn’t a transsexual man like being feminine? Maybe this man’s anguish owed to homosexuality rather than disharmonious gender.

Today, gender doctors floridly speculate about suicide. “I’m worried that we’re going to lose some kids” if they can’t access gender medicine, testified one in 2022. The Biden administration called the treatment “life-saving.”

Gender doctors have no data to support their hypothesis that gender medicine saves lives, even though they’ve brandished it with certitude for 60 years.

12. Nomenclature

If Benjamin’s writing seems foreign today, a big reason why is nomenclature.

Transsexual has since become transgender. The change developed out of 1970s fetish culture, when it referred to men who used hormones but did not seek surgery. Activists, including fetishists, adopted it – and expanded its definition – in the 1990s as part of a campaign to co-opt all gender-nonconforming people into trans activism.

Psychological sex became gender identity. The latter term originated in the early 1960s. Universities set up “Gender Identity Clinics” beginning in 1966. In 1993, fetishists fired their opening salvo in a revitalized fight for trans rights by declaring everyone has a right to define their own “gender identity.”

Smart move. In their first major lawsuit, brought by the ACLU, the judge saw gender identity as an analogue to sexual orientation. The association continues to today in many contexts as “SOGI.”

But the ACLU’s Strangio rolls her eyes at gender identity. She doesn’t think “sex” and “gender” should be two separate constructs — they’re the same, “just fucking pick one.” Her view tracks that of her non-lawyer activist peers. It echoes Benjamin, who wrote that gender is a word for “the nonsexual side of sex” and “sex and gender must, here and there, be used interchangeably.”

Modern trans activists and gender doctors are more rigorous than Benjamin about pronoun hygiene – always referring to patients by the sex they identify with and pretending they’ve always been that sex – and they only speak of the sex binary in the code of “assigned at birth.” This reflects the movement’s swerve in the 2000s toward “trans women are women” legal positions. It may also be an effort to defraud insurers, gaslight parents, deceive children, and dodge prosecution.

HBIGDA changed its name to WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) in 2006. The official reason was to shed the supposedly-pathologizing term “gender dysphoria.” I wonder if another concern was at play. The organization had just been taken over by activists in a transgender movement doggedly associating itself with civil rights – feminism, gay acceptance, and race equality. Benjamin was a straight white man.

13. Pervert Erasure

Benjamin acknowledges fetishistic cross-dressing. “[T]o take sex out of transvestism is like taking music out of opera. It simply cannot be done.” He quotes a transvestite: “When I dress, it feels as if I have a continuous orgasm.” This conduct leads to a desire for genital surgery: “The fetishistic can gradually develop into the (basically) transsexual variety, as case histories have repeatedly shown me.”

Benjamin believes these men “can resemble addicts, the need for ‘dressing’ increasing with increasing indulgences.” Yet he cites Hirshfeld’s view that “dressing” is “beneficial to their mental health.” He equivocates as to whether transsexuality is erotic.¹

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. But LGBTQ, Inc. shrieks “transphobia” at anyone who mentions a connection between cross-dressing and eroticism or BDSM. Only trans provocateurs like Andrea Long Chu, Torrey Peters, Anne Lawrence, and Julia Serano dare it.

Benjamin shares one peccadillo with modern activists: he theorizes a mysterious type of transsexual who is not spurred by fetishism or conflicted homosexuality. For these patients, “the cross-dressing is in all likelihood not of fetishistic but of basically transsexual origin[.]”

A parting word from Benjamin about fetishists:

Another one of my patients, a nearly sixty-year-old, largely heterosexual pharmacist, who looks little more than forty, combines his fetishistic “dressing” with a strong fetish for youthful apparel (civistism). He gets an even greater “sexual glow” (as he describes it) from dressing like a very young boy than as a woman. Once, he related, when he was almost fifty, he was alone at home and indulged in dressing in a young boy’s suit. The bell rang and he opened the door. A man was there and in the poorly lighted entrance hall, he mistook my patient for a child and asked: “Sonny, is your mother home?” That thrilled him to such an extent that he almost had an orgasm.

In sum, Phenomenon is a whirlwind of batshit that would traumatize the average Democratic voter reading it today. Yet its publication inspired med school deans to open cosmetic genital surgery clinics. Apparently 2025 is a more normal time than 1966.

Respect Benjamin’s Authority

Last week on X I posted a scholarly paragraph about men who rape turkeys and asked my followers to guess which gender doctor wrote it. Three ventured John Money, one Kinsey. Several denounced men in general. No one got it right — it was from Benjamin and REL Masters’ 1964 book on prostitution.

Most people who fight about trans ideology know Benjamin’s name but not his character. That’s because no sect has an interest in spotlighting him as a hero or villain. Trans activists don’t want to credit their gender insights to a Kaiser Wilhelm fanboy. Radical feminists train their disgust on more depraved sexologists, particularly Money. Social conservatives finger “queer theory” academics. Anti-feminists blame feminists.

I think these factions are all overlooking the obvious. John Money entered the trans game after Benjamin. His big idea – that parents can mold young children’s “gender identity” via clothing – is anathema to today’s trans ideologues. Queer theorists came along decades after Benjamin. They didn’t make up new ideas about “gender,” just repackaged and amplified his. No post-modern theorist can match the dynamism of a profit-motivated doctor who studied at a German sex dungeon.

Mainstream feminist and gay activists have also been major distributors, but not manufacturers, of trans ideology. Mission-driven paraphiliacs like Riki Wilchins and Julia Serano targeted them relentlessly, exploiting their bovine focus on “the marginalized” to convince them to Stand With sex mimics – nevermind that men who beat up their fathers because they can’t grow a vagina are marginalized for a good reason. Judith Butler, Sarah Schulman, and that gay guy who reported you to HR are just useful idiots. Whenever Matt Walsh seizes on some hazy parallel between women’s lib and trans ideology to argue transgenderism comes from the comp lit department (women can have it all, like pickup trucks … or penises!), he’s stumbling into the same fallacy that snared the 1990s women’s studies professors he disdains.²

Pugilists might find Harry Benjamin to be a dull villain because he didn’t stand for anything. He was just a Dr. Feelgood. No matter how hard you hit him, you’re not taking down communism, patriarchy, or feminism. He wasn’t even a true trans ideologue because he never believed he was changing his patients’ sex. He knew he was just placating them.

But he did indulge one fantasy of his own: he thought he was practicing medicine.

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1. Estrogen kills the libido, according to Benjamin, but even among post-surgical patients:

“Pleasurable sensation and satisfaction were repeatedly claimed even without an actual climax. However, definite orgasmic ability with a more or less distinct ejaculation from the urethra was described by more than half of these 51 patients, although the orgasm did not take place on every occasion (which is the case in normal relationships too). The explanation for the orgasm without a clitoris and a natural vagina is probably twofold. First, the psychological effect of, at last, being able to take the longed-for female role in the sex act. Second, the possible retention of sensory nerve ends in the scrotal (now labial) fold and also in the penal (now vaginal) tissue, provided this particular surgical technique was used.”

2. I’ve written about how trans activists used feminist professors as cover and beat down gay activists, particularly lesbians.