Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution by Alison Li (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution by Alison Li
• Ketil Slagstad

Alison Li. Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. xvi + 250 pp. Ill. $30.00 (978-1-4696-7485-8).

In the introduction to her beautifully written biography of Harry Benjamin, Alison Li discusses the relevance of biographical approaches to history and the risk of contributing another hagiography of a grand white physician. The question is important, not least in fields such as trans medicine, where historians have noted the crucial role of trans people, children and adults, in shaping clinical and research practice.¹ Yet, Li argues, the biography has not outlived its role because it offers a format for tracing the complexities and contradictions of a single life: Lives are messy and do not unfold in a systematic way, Li reminds us, and it was only in the last phase of his clinical life, when Benjamin, often considered the “father” of trans medicine, turned to this practice.

Wondrous Transformations follows a chronological structure, tracing Benjamin’s life in twelve chapters, from his childhood in Berlin in the 1880s and 1890s to his medical studies in Tübingen and move across the Atlantic, where he practiced medicine in San Francisco and New York until he died in 1986. Benjamin originally came to the United States at the age of twenty-eight to become an assistant to Friedrich Franz Friedmann, who claimed to have developed a cure for tuberculosis based on a serum extracted from turtles in the Berlin Zoo. This quickly proved to be quackery. However, a trip back to Europe in 1921 was to shape the rest of Benjamin’s life. In Vienna he met the physiologist Eugen Steinach, who had developed a surgical technique for rejuvenation that involved cutting off the vas deferens. In Berlin, he met Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, opened two years earlier, became a laboratory for the combination of science and activism, and whose intricate theory of sexual variation as spectrally [End Page 330] distributed was directed against the pathologizing understandings of psychiatry. Benjamin became part of this network of physician-scientists who sought the explanation of human mysteries—disease, behavior, identity—in biology, particularly in glandular secretions. This was not just a theoretical insight; it was a program for clinical action: From organotherapy and extracts from the urine of horses or students, and later in the 1930s also from synthetic hormones, health could be optimized, diseases cured, and bodies modified. Back in the United States, Benjamin became a promoter of rejuvenation therapy.

Trans medicine did not emerge from an outspoken goal of affirming gender as it is understood today but developed out of an era of “wild” hormonal experimentation. In this climate, shown in the work of Chandak Sengoopta and Rainer Herrn (whose essential books are not referenced), physicians experimented with glandular treatment for a wide variety of ailments.² As scholars such as Kadji Amin and Julian Honkasalo have argued, trans medicine was enabled by rejuvenation and eugenics.³ Li adds nuance to a misleading genealogy of trans medicine as a liberatory project born in the early twentieth century, though one can understand why many promote this history as an emancipatory origin story in the current political climate given the wave of anti-trans legislation and attacks on gender-affirming treatment.

Harry Benjamin remained a clinician; he was first and foremost a practitioner, neither a particularly skilled researcher nor a brilliant theorist. Li paints a sympathetic portrait of the man of short stature: “Benjamin’s European charm may have enchanted his patients at first meeting, but what seems to have held them was a sense of his sincere concern and genuine warmth . . . they felt really seen as a human being, heard, cared for, and understood” (p. 108). Although Li references Beans Velocci’s work, which analyzes the correspondences between Benjamin and among others the surgeon Elmer Belt and which contributes a very different picture of a physician who finds the increasing number of trans people seeking his help primarily...