The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  In July of 2001, I posted a message on an Internet genealogy list, seeking family members of Jorgensen to confirm the information in the autobiography. I didn’t hear from any Jorgensens but I was contacted by a few people who had known or encountered George or Christine Jorgensen at some point. One of the most poignant notes I received was from a woman named Peggy Stockton McClelland, whose parents, she said, had shared a house with Jorgensen in Connecticut.Christine Jorgensen lived with my mother and father in Milford, Conn. My father, Richard Stockton, was attending Yale Photography School at the time and they shared the rent. Christine was known as George at that time. My mother loved him, as a friend, and he confided in her many feelings at that time in his life. My mother said he would babysit me for them and was the closest friend she had at that time. He loved to do more female type things, loved to be in the kitchen and take care of me. They lived in a beautiful stone home on the water in Woodmont, Conn., which is still there. Perhaps Christine was also attending school with my father? I never knew. I really do not know how my parents knew George, but eventually my parents returned to Muncie, Indiana, and they lost contact. My mother said they knew he was different, and she was not surprised by his decision.

  While living with the Stocktons and other friends in the suburbs of New Haven, George Jorgensen continued to puzzle over his “difference” and to seek possible solutions. “The recurring questions of what to do about my effeminate appearance continued to plague me. Even if it were possible to adjust my mind and attitudes to a more male outlook, I wondered what could be done about a ‘masculine’ mind in a feminine body.” In December 1948, while still living in New Haven, Jorgensen encountered a book that was to provide him with the answers he sought. The book, Paul de Kruif’s The Male Hormone, a popular account of the science of endocrinology, was the catalyst that was to begin the process that transformed the anonymous George into the world-renowned Christine. “ ‘Manhood is chemical, manhood is testosterone. Over and beyond testosterone, manhood seems to be partly a state of mind’ … As I read on, my mind raced with this new knowledge, for throughout the narrative, there was woven a tiny thread of recognition pulled from my own private theories.”

  Reading Paul de Kruif’s ode to the power of the male hormone, testosterone, today it is easy to understand the comfort that the tormented George Jorgensen, Jr., found within its pages—but more difficult to trace the intuitive leap that enabled him to conceive a novel solution to his problem. The book describes the “rescue of broken men,” genital males who, like Jorgensen, seemed to lack key physical and psychological attributes of masculinity, or older men experiencing “the slow chemical castration” of aging. Early in the book, de Kruif describes a twenty-seven-year-old medical student, physically underdeveloped when he was first examined by physicians at Albany Medical College in 1937. “His hips were wide like a woman’s; he had protruding breasts like a girl’s; he had almost no Adam’s apple; and his voice was high-pitched like a woman’s. He had only a hint of hair under his arms and none on his chest or belly, and pitifully to kid himself that he was a man, he shaved about once in ten weeks,” de Kruif writes. “There were large circles under his eyes, and his private parts were somewhat smaller in size than those of a four-year old boy. His penis, which the doctors measured, was one inch long and less than half an inch in diameter.” The young man had also suffered throughout his life from severe migraines and the kinds of hot flashes that trouble menopausal women. As a result of these difficulties, he was socially withdrawn and often depressed. Curiously, he was engaged to be married—though he admitted to his doctors that he was unable to maintain an erection and had very limited sexual feelings. In medical terms, the young man was suffering from “hypogonadism,” or testosterone deficiency.

  James B. Hamilton, an anatomy professor at the college, was able to persuade the pharmaceutical company Ciba to send him “for purely scientific purposes—a supply of testosterone that was still worth more than its weight in gold,” writes de Kruif. “For the first time into any American man, as far as published records go, anatomist Hamilton and the doctors sent shots of testosterone into the flabby muscles of this twenty-seven-year-old boy’s arm and into those of his buttocks three times a week.” The results impressed the scientists. Previously, the young man had “experienced only the feeblest and most fleeting sexual sensations,” but within sixty hours of the first injection, he began to have erections. After a mere six days of injections, his erections “became more frequent and stronger; the size of his penis at rest became greater; and before the month of testosterone injections was completed, this man, impotent for life, was able to carry on sexual intercourse.”

  But the effects of the hormone did not end there. The doctors witnessed what appeared to be a complete physical and psychological transformation. “The boy’s thyroid gland began to grow; his larynx became congested, and the doctors thought they could detect a lower pitch to his voice. The hot flashes that had bothered him for years disappeared completely. During that month he had only one attack of the migraine headache that had tortured him so long and so often. A curious new sap of self-confidence flowed through him, and energy, and he looked people in the face and was happy. Hair began to grow on his upper lip and his chest; and when he looked toward tomorrow, he no longer despaired.”

  Concerned that these effects might be caused by autosuggestion, the doctors replaced the testosterone in the syringe with inert oil, without telling their patient. “In five days he had four hot flashes and then an attack of migraine. The erections of his penis, signals of his new miraculous manhood, began to weaken…. With his new manhood ebbing, at the same time away went his new pride and confidence, and now he was tired all the time again, after doing nothing.” When the doctors resumed the shots of testosterone (again, without informing the patient) “within a few days there was a startling upsurge in his total vitality and his march toward belated manhood.”

  The case of this young man—the first American to be treated with the newly synthesized hormone testosterone—proved what experiments with castrated rats, guinea pigs, and other animals had suggested decades earlier. Manhood was hormonal. Young men who had never been men could be virilized, and old men whose manhood was waning could be “rejuvenated” or restored to their previous virility, through injections of the male hormone. Paul de Kruif, the science writer whose book introduced this novel concept to George Jorgensen and thousands of other Americans, had begun to look into the testosterone cure as he felt his own “manhood” begin to slip away in his fifties. Not only were his sexual powers beginning to wane, but he felt his overall strength and enthusiasm for life and work—his vitality— begin to diminish. He looked to science for an explanation, and discovered the work of the “hormone hunters,” as he termed the early endocrinologists whose experiments with animals and human beings had pointed to a link between virility and vitality.

  Enthusiastically, de Kruif shared with his readers his quest for rejuvenation and the history of the science that had made rejuvenation possible. He narrated the tale of Arnold Adolf Berthold, professor of physiology at the University of Gottingen, who in 1849 removed the testicles from four roosters and watched two of them become “fat pacifists” while two others, in whom he had grafted new testicles, looked and acted like roosters once again. “They crowed. They battled. They chased hens enthusiastically. Their bright red combs and wattles kept growing.” He soberly recounted the cautionary tale of Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard, the founder of the science of endocrinology, who at seventy-two made himself an object of public ridicule by injecting himself with a solution made from the testicles of dogs and guinea pigs and announcing that this “testicle soup” had restored his youthful sexual vigor, mental acuity, and intestinal functioning. The sensation created by Brown-Sequard’s discovery quickly degenerated into ridicule as the elderly Frenchman’s “rejuvenation” failed within a month.

  However, other scientists investigating the structure and function of the “ductl
ess glands” of the endocrine system established scientifically a fact that farmers had known for centuries: the sex of an animal was entirely dependent on the presence and proper functioning of its gonads—testicles in the male and ovaries in the female—and its overall strength and vigor seemed mysteriously bound up with the health of those organs. Moreover, animals could be “masculinized” or “feminized” by gonadal manipulation. No matter their sex at birth, animals surgically deprived of their gonads and later implanted with either testicles or ovaries exhibited the behaviors characteristic of animals born with those organs.

  The Viennese endocrinologist Eugen Steinach had shown that young rats and guinea pigs castrated at around four weeks old remained sexually immature, but that as soon as a replacement set of gonads was implanted in their abdomens, “symptoms of underdevel-opment or even retrogression passed away both in the male and in the female, even if they had been absent for some time.” Steinach also found that the sex expressed by the surgically altered animals was entirely dependent on the type of gonad he implanted in their abdomens: “the female implanted with the male gland will always be a male with all of his characteristics; and the male implanted with a female generative gland will develop into a full-fledged female. By implanting a male and a female generative gland simultaneously … Steinach produced hybrids (hermaphrodites).”

  Steinach’s research had been followed closely by Magnus Hirschfeld and his colleagues at the Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, as mentioned in the previous chapter. But it was Steinach’s American disciple Harry Benjamin who was to build a clinical practice based on the professor’s theories and to serve as the most fervent advocate of hormonal treatment for aging men and, later, transsexuals in the United States. By the time the future Christine Jorgensen read Paul de Kruif’s popular account of the power of hormones on gender and sexual behavior in 1948, Benjamin had been working to promote Steinach’s research in America for nearly twenty years. Steinach and, to a lesser extent, Magnus Hirschfeld were Benjamin’s mentors, and through him a European-style sexology was imported to America.

  Born in Berlin in 1885, Harry Benjamin left Germany in 1913, the year after receiving his medical degree, to carry out research on tuberculosis in the United States. His return to Germany was prevented by the outbreak of World War I, and for a time he was interned as an enemy alien. “He came to America quite by happenstance, when a German doctor brought him to America to do TB research because he spoke a little English,” Benjamin’s friend and colleague Christine Wheeler told me in a 2002 interview. “He was on his way back to Germany when a British vessel seized the freighter and diverted it to London. He had very little money left, and he was essentially a POW because the war had broken out. But he was able to buy a one-way ticket back to the United States, and he hocked his watch to get back to New York because he had friends there.”

  Benjamin was released on the condition that he stay in the United States, and he began a medical practice in New York. “He started a small practice when he came to New York, living in the same room where he saw patients,” says Wheeler, who recalls Benjamin saying that “he paid six dollars a week for the room.” After the war, beginning in 1921, he returned to Germany each year to pursue his research interests and to renew his contacts with old friends and colleagues, including Magnus Hirschfeld (whom he had met in 1907). Because his major interest at the time was geriatrics, Benjamin was eager to meet Steinach, and the two men were introduced in 1921 in Vienna. “I was greatly impressed with his sex changes operations in rats and guinea pigs by means of castration and transplantation of endocrine glands,” Benjamin said in an interview a few years before his death in 1986. “From then on, I visited him as his disciple almost regularly every summer well into the thirties. Thus, I became, as it were, a transatlantic commuter, who tried to mediate between America and Europe.”

  Benjamin was quick to acknowledge his indebtedness to both Hirschfeld and Steinach in later years. “Every year during the 1920s, I went to Berlin and spent many hours at Hirschfeld’s lectures at his institute, and more than once did I take part in the guided tours through the institute and its unique museums,” he said in an address given at the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, in November 1969. But significant as Hirschfeld and his institute were for Benjamin’s development as a humanitarian and sexologist, it was Steinach who claimed his allegiance as mentor. “Benjamin felt that Steinach was a genius,” says Christine Wheeler, and the two men carried on a forty-four-year correspondence, which is archived at the New York Academy of Medicine. Steinach could be difficult to deal with—Wheeler calls him “irascible”—but Benjamin remained loyal to his mentor. Harry Benjamin “was a humanitarian, fiercely loyal, very elegant, very old world,” says Christine Wheeler. “They used to call it breeding. So he protected Steinach.”

  Benjamin soon became the leading proponent of the “Steinach operation” in America. Steinach’s researches with animals had convinced him that vasoligation, or the severing of the vas deferens (spermatic duct) in men—an operation that is today called vasectomy—resulted in an almost miraculous “rejuvenation” of aging mammals. Steinach’s senile animal subjects grew glossy new coats of hair, gained weight and muscle, and regained the strength and endurance characteristic of much younger animals. Encouraged by these findings, other physicians began to perform vasoligation in humans, and the surgery was soon being touted as a treatment not only for the lassitude of old age, but also for age-related diseases such as cancer and atherosclerosis. It appeared that the gonads were the seat not only of sexual identity and virility, but also of overall health and vigor. “They were trying to find sex hormones,” says Christine Wheeler, “but they were also looking for the fountain of youth.”

  Many men of the era, celebrated and unknown, underwent the Steinach operation, hoping to stave off the physical and psychological effects of old age. Indeed, when Harry Benjamin met Sigmund Freud (through a referral from Steinach), Freud admitted that he, too, had undergone the Steinach operation, and felt that “his general health and vitality had improved,” and that “the malignant growth of his jaw had been favorably influenced. ‘Don’t talk about it as long as I am alive,’ he said to me on parting. I told him I would not and I kept my promise,” Benjamin said in 1969. Freud’s unwillingness to publicize his surgery points to its somewhat unsavory reputation even in the days of his greatest success. Nonetheless, throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, Steinach’s disciples and colleagues performed the procedure on their aging male patients and gathered data that appeared to confirm its efficacy.

  Harry Benjamin, whose New York medical practice focused mainly on geriatrics, was the most enthusiastic proponent of the method in the United States. He contributed the introduction and a number of case studies to Paul Kammerer’s 1923 study, Rejuvenation and the Prolongation of Human Efficiency, and arranged for a showing of the “Steinach Film,” a silent documentary on Steinach’s hormonal research, at the New York Academy of Medicine in 1923. “Broadly speaking, the Steinach Operation strengthens the endocrine system,” Benjamin writes in the introduction to Kammerer’s book. “On account of the inter-relationship of the different glands with an internal secretion and the influence these glands have over the nervous system, the strengthening of the glandular system will result in a re-energizing of the physical and mental capacities. Naturally such a strengthening should be resorted to if a glandular weakness or inferiority exists.”

  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.” Thi
s 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 Journal of the American Medical Association published its first article on the use of thyroid hormone,” Benjamin’s colleague Charles Ihlenfeld pointed out at a symposium on gender identity in 1975. A decade later, Benjamin, who worked as a consulting endocrinologist at the City College of New York in the thirties, “helped arrange financial support for Funk and Harrow who succeeded in the first isolation from human urine of a biologically active androgen,” Ihlenfeld said.

  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.”