physique was completely female. How could they refuse me?”
Star’s efforts to convince the Hopkins researchers that she was intersexual, and thus a suitable candidate for corrective surgery, failed. After five days of examinations at the hospital, she was sent home to await a letter. The letter arrived, dated February 24, 1959. Its author (possibly Money, though the name is obscured in Star’s autobiography) says that after he discussed Star’s case with “Dr. Eugene Mayer, Dr. William Scott, Dr. Hampson, and Dr. Shaffer,” the group’s unanimous decision was to advise her “not to go ahead with the conversion type of surgery that you seek.” The decision of the committee was based on both medical and legal considerations. “The studies that we have made would all indicate that your basic structure is anatomically male and that we would not be likely to find any evidence internally of ovaries or any female structures.” The physicians feared that the narrowness of Star’s pelvis would make the creation of a vagina difficult, and the possibility of postsurgical urinary difficulties might handicap her ability to make a living as a dancer.
“We do realize that you are psychologically more comfortable in your role as a female and perhaps it would be wise for you to continue as you have in the past,” the letter continues sympathetically. “You deserve considerable credit for having been able to adjust as well as you have to some of the difficult situations that you have encountered in the past.” Nonetheless the committee had decided that “there are numerous reasons from both your standpoint and from the standpoint of the surgeons involved that would suggest that the performance of this type of surgery might in actuality constitute mayhem and you must consider that possibility quite seriously before embarking on such a program.”
Sympathetic or not, the letter was a heavy blow to Star, who objected to the physicians’ paternalistic approach and their assumption that they knew better than she where her best interests lay. “I didn’t feel any malice towards the doctors. After all, they were only doing what they considered best for me. But I was sure they were wrong. Not wrong as far as the possible medical consequences of the operation … rightly or wrongly, I felt their decision had been based more on ‘moral,’ psychological and legal reasons than medical reasons. Certainly there was a risk involved, but I felt that I should be the one to decide whether I wanted to take it or not. They were wrong to deny me this decision. But in denying it to me, they only increased my determination to do—somehow, somewhere—what I knew had to be done.”
Star doggedly pursued her goal for the next four years, as her dancing career flourished and her romantic relationships continued to be sabotaged by the discrepancy between her gender and her anatomy. Eventually, she found her way to Harry Benjamin, who referred her to a “California surgeon” (most likely Elmer Belt) who could perform the surgery for about four thousand dollars. Estimating the costs of the surgery, hospital fees, travel expenses, and associated expenses at approximately six thousand dollars, Star began saving. Then, early in 1962, a friend referred her to a doctor in Chicago, who “examined me and told me immediately that he knew the man who could do the operation. Within a few minutes he had placed a call to a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and the appointment was made.”
After this doctor and four of his colleagues examined her, the unnamed Memphis surgeon informed her that “the operation is extremely complex and, for that reason, dangerous…. If the operation is a success, it is possible that you might never dance again. It is also possible that you might never walk. Also, it is extremely doubtful that you will ever be able to have a sex life.” As if that weren’t enough, the surgeon added that Star might not survive the operation. Star’s reply was simple. “Anything is better than living the misery I have lived my whole life. I realize it is a gamble, but the pot’s too big not to take a crack at it.”
The surgery was performed the next day. The initial operation took five hours. Nine days later, one of Star’s doctors accidentally punctured her urinary tract during an examination, necessitating another two-hour operation to repair the damage. Forty-five days later she left the hospital, and entered her future as a woman. “Since the change and my adjustment to it, my life has flowered,” she writes on the final pages of her autobiography. “Each day I discover something about my new self. Each day I gain even more confidence in myself, more interest in myself, and above all, more self-resect. Life has taken on a new look. It has become something to be enjoyed and lived, rather than a burden to make the best of.”
Although Star was eventually able to locate a surgeon in the United States willing to perform sex- reassignment surgery despite the fear of mayhem laws, it is clear from her account of their meeting that her doctor was performing the surgery for the first time, and was far from confident about his ability to provide her with a functional vagina. Meanwhile, back in Baltimore, urologists and plastic surgeons at Johns Hopkins were perfecting their reconstructive techniques as they attempted to fulfill the evolving mandate to provide intersexual children and adults with “normal” genitals. John Money began to use his growing scientific reputation and the institutional power that it conferred to persuade his colleagues at Johns Hopkins that they ought to challenge the mayhem laws that prevented surgeons from “matching the body to the mind,” as Harry Benjamin once wrote, and begin performing sex-reassignment surgery on adults.
By the early sixties, Money had met Benjamin and, as Money said at the latter’s memorial in 1987, “he became my living link with early twentieth-century psychoendocrinology. He was my exemplar of the continuity of scholarly history—and of the dependence of my own scholarship on that of my professional forebears.” Money shared yet another tie with Benjamin: like other pivotal figures in the mid-century study of gender variance, both were funded by a wealthy transsexual man named Reed Erickson. Like most early female-to-male transsexual persons, Erickson has remained largely invisible in popular accounts of transsexuality. Born Rita Alma Erickson in El Paso, Texas, in 1917, Erickson enjoyed a gregarious, colorful (some might say psychedelic) existence, marrying three times and fathering two children (by adoption). For the last twenty years of his life, he lived in Maza-tlan, Mexico, at a house he called the Love Joy Palace, where he kept a pet leopard. Despite his hedonistic lifestyle, Erickson did more than almost any person other than Harry Benjamin to help create the medical model of transsexuality and to advance understanding of gender variance among the research community and the public.
Aaron Devor, professor of sociology at the University of Victoria and author of the book
“I don’t know all that much about Erickson’s childhood,” says Devor, aside from the fact that his mother was ethnically Jewish, but religiously a Christian Scientist, and that his father, Robert, owned a lead-smelting business. “In his early adulthood, Erickson lived as a lesbian, quite closeted as most were at that time. He was musical and played in his high school band. He—at that time she—had some secretarial training before studying engineering.” By the time Robert B. Erickson died, in 1962, willing the lead-smelting business to his daughters, Rita Alma had graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University (the first woman to do so), worked as an engineer in Philadelphia, and founded a successful stadium bleacher—manufacturing company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The death of Robert B. Erickson made his children wealthy, Devor says, even more so when the company was sold to Arrow Electronics for millions of dollars a few years later. Reed Erickson eventually amassed a personal fortune estimated at over $40 million, and donated enormous sums of money to various causes over the years, through the Erickson Educational Foundation, which he established in 1964.
In 1963, Erickson began seeing Harry Benjamin, taking hormones under Benjamin’s guidance, having already begun his life as a man. Benjamin was one of the first recipients of a grant from the EEF. This grant was to have far-reaching consequences, says Devor. “The EEF funded the Harry Benjamin Foundation from 1964 till 1968 for approximately $50,000 over those years. One of the activities that the money funded was bringing together a group of people working in the area to meet at Harry’s offices in New York once a month—people like Richard Green and John Money. During the mid-sixties, there weren’t a lot of people working on transsexuality; it was still a very hush-hush kind of subject. So bringing together this group of researchers produced a kind of synergy, and this synergy led to the founding of the Hopkins gender program. The thinking was, ‘if we can do this kind of surgery for intersexual people, why not for transsexuals?’”
Reed Erickson himself did not experience tremendous difficulty transitioning, says Devor. Though he never
