proponent of the method in the United States. He contributed the introduction and a number of case studies to Paul Kammerer’s 1923 study,
Benjamin’s interest in the rejuvenation of aging patients was closely connected to interest in sexology, as both disciplines were at that time based in endocrinology. Soon after he started his gerontology practice, Benjamin began meeting with “a handful of physicians in New York, all of whom were deeply interested in aging,” says Benjamin’s colleague, Christine Wheeler. “They called themselves the Wednesday Night Group,” and they discussed what was going on in the world of sexology. They called this interest “sex physiology.” This study group, which began meeting in 1916, “explored the possible function and meaning of the ductless [glands], or endocrine glands, a full ten years before the
According to Benjamin’s protegee, Leah Cahan Schaefer, “Harry believed that the urine of young men might contain testosterone and he persuaded a professor friend at City College to collect the urine of his students. Subsequently, Casimir Funk developed the first sex hormones from the urine of young men. With the androsterone that Funk collected and produced, Harry Benjamin, once again at the forefront of scientific investigation, gave himself the first hormone injection. Funk almost fainted, but the only reaction on Harry was a terribly sore and bruised area where the injection had been made, due to the impurity of the new substance.”
Like his mentors Hirschfeld and Steinach, Benjamin believed “that you couldn’t separate the body from the mind,” says Christine Wheeler. “He believed in the effects of hormones on behavior and motivation.”
The effects of hormones were also very much on the mind of another New Yorker at that time. In 1948—the year that Harry Benjamin met his first transsexual patient—George Jorgensen, Jr., enrolled at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistants School, in New York City. Frustrated by his inability to understand the French and German medical treatises on “hermaphrodism” and “pseudo-hermaphrodism” he found in the library at the New York Academy of Medicine, Jorgensen stubbornly sought another route to self-understanding. “Still determined to find some cure or satisfactory compromise for what I considered an emotional and sexual disorder, I enrolled at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistants School,” Christine Jorgensen wrote in 1967. At the school, Jorgensen learned to perform chemical analyses of blood and urine, and studied the principles of basal metabolism.
“However, it was the rare glandular disturbances which intrigued me more. Abnormal growth due to pituitary malfunction, steroids, enzymes, and sex hormones were all new areas of knowledge, but ones which I felt had some bearing on my own problem. Avidly, I discussed glands and glandular disturbances with the doctors who were my instructors,” Jorgensen writes. “These studies occupied my every waking moment, and probably many of my sleeping ones to become an all-consuming drive.”
Shortly after beginning studies at the school, Jorgensen received another in a series of propositions from gay men, in this case a Danish sailor, at a dance. Disturbed and confused by the desire he inspired in gay men, the student of medical technology turned for comfort to Paul de Kruif’s book,
Although estrogen hadn’t received quite the same star treatment as testosterone in the press, research on female hormones had been proceeding in tandem with testosterone research throughout the first decades of the century. In 1923 and 1924, the zoologist Edgar Allen and the biochemist Edward Doisy published papers describing the induction of sexual maturity in young female animals through injections of “the ovarian follicular hormone.” They called the newly purified hormone “Theelin,” a name that was dropped in favor of “oestrin” in 1926. In 1929, various researchers—including Allen and Doisy; Thayer and Veler in the United States; and Adolf Butenandt in Germany— succeeded in isolating oestrin in crystalline form. This pure crystalline oestrin was called “estrone.” One year later, a researcher named Zondek discovered that the urine of pregnant mares was a rich source of the hormone. In 1932, at the International Conference on the Standardization of Sex Hormones, in London, the names “oestrone,” “oestriol,” and “oestradiol” were adopted, and in 1938, chemists working for the German pharmaceutical company Schering developed ethynyl estradiol, the first orally active estrogen. In 1939, diethylstilbestrol, a highly potent synthetic estrogen, was developed and marketed in Germany, and after review by the Food and Drug Administration, in the United States. By 1941, a pill made from conjugated estrogens collected from pregnant mares (Premarin) was being marketed in Canada, and a year later in the United States.
In tandem with these advances, scientists learned that women’s urine contained the “male” hormone, testosterone, and the urine of men contained the “female” hormone, estrogen. Though the proportions were different, both sexes produced both male and female hormones. One researcher commented on the baffling discovery by noting that “the present wonder is not that intersexual conditions occur, but that the balance of endocrine factors usually comes down on one side or the other to produce a recognizable male or female—perhaps in these days, I should say, a more or less recognizable male or female.”
Within two weeks of beginning daily doses of ethynyl estradiol in 1949, Jorgensen noticed physical effects (“sensitivity in my breast area and a noticeable development”) and emotional ones. “The great feeling of listlessness and fatigue, which often seemed to be with me even after a full night’s sleep, had disappeared. I was refreshed and alive and no longer felt the need to take little cat naps during the day.” Encouraged by these results, Jorgensen speculated that “if the female hormones that I was taking without guidance could have such a pronounced effect on me, would it not be possible for an expert to administer them in proper proportions, so that my body’s chemistry would be in complete and correct balance?”
Jorgensen craftily confessed her secret to a fellow student, Gene-vieve Angelo, whose husband was an M.D. The friend arranged an appointment with her husband, Dr. Joseph Angelo, and after weeks of discussion and research in medical journals, Dr. Angelo agreed to supervise the estrogen administration. “It was his plan to retreat and use strong doses of testosterone, thereby returning me to my original maleness, if the estrogen injections had proven unsatisfactory,” Jorgensen writes. Around the same time, she received a letter from a Connecticut physician whom she had consulted a few years earlier, who pointed out “the course of treatment that you requested” (sex- change surgery) had been carried out in Sweden. Soon after finishing the course at the medical technician’s school, in December 1949, Jorgensen decided to visit family and friends in Denmark, and to proceed from there to Stockholm, “where I hoped to find doctors who would be willing to handle my case.”
Arriving in Denmark in May 1950, Jorgensen discovered that there was no need to go to Sweden. Instead, in July, she visited the Statens Seruminstitut, in Copenhagen, searching for Dr. Christian Hamburger, a prominent endocrinologist who had published a number of hormone studies. Learning that he was on vacation in the country, the impatient young American sought him out at home and, after pouring out “the whole story of my perplexing life,” asked him point-blank “if he thought I was a homosexual.” Hamburger replied negatively, and when pressed for an explanation, told Jorgensen that “the trouble is very deep-rooted in the cells of your body. Outwardly, you have many of the sex characteristics of a man. You were declared a boy at birth and you have grown up, so very unhappily, in the guise of a man. But inwardly, it is quite possible that you are a woman. Your body chemistry and all of your body cells, including your brain cells, may be female.”
