The Forgotten Roots of the Transgender Phenomenon
Twentieth-century sexologists haunt contemporary studies of sexuality and gender. They have left us with much confusion and little clarity, the opposite of what Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, prescribed over a century ago. The epigraph above is a quotation from an address Blackwell delivered in 1890 titled “The Influence of Women in the Profession of Medicine” at the London School of Medicine for Women. Perhaps we should not be surprised that the most prominent sexologists of the twentieth century were all male.
The “science of sex” began from the premise that sexuality can be understood scientifically and objectively, without regard to political or moral implications. Yet, from a twenty-first-century vantage point, many of the early sexologists’ most influential views seem dubious, at best, and deeply misogynistic, at worst. Indeed, many of the most troubling contemporary phenomena that haunt our sexual landscape can be traced back to their work, which legitimized and popularized countless formerly taboo practices. In other words, their “objective science” had moral and political implications aplenty.
In recent years, feminism has become the scapegoat for many of these developments, from the widespread acceptance of violent pornography to the sudden explosion in transgender identification. A typical view of the situation holds that the third-wave feminism of the 1990s, with its emphasis on sex positivity and queer theory, is thesinglecauseof the transgender phenomenon. This narrative emphasizes women’s role while neglecting men’s contributions. But to understand how we got here, we must understand that sexology provided the ideological foundations for the widespread acceptance of postmodern gender ideology—and the pornography that fuels it. The influence of sexology also helps to explain how the paradigm “gender-affirming care” was extended so quickly from adults to children. Indeed, the more deeply one looks at the history of sexology, the more clearly one recognizes that today’s views of sexuality and gender far predate the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the incoherent academic theories that followed.
Transgenderism’s rise is not purely a postmodern phenomenon, much less a feminist one. Rather, it is the result of more than a century of social and sexual conditioning, based on the theories of sexology’s fathers. Though you may not know their names, you are living in a sexual culture built on the foundation laid by these men.
This essay will provide a brief overview of five of the most influential sexologists of the twentieth century: Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, Alfred Kinsey, and John Money.
Havelock Ellis: “Scientific” Misogyny
In the early twentieth century, Havelock Ellis introduced a series of ideas about female sexuality that have been echoed in countless texts since then. Contemporary examples include Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (2007) and Andrea Long Chu’s Females (2019), both written by men who identify as trans women. Their views of womanhood and sex sound eerily similar to those Ellis promoted, as do—in the most revealing of horseshoe effects—those of “manosphere” influencers.
In his seven-volume work, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, published between 1897 and 1928, Ellis theorized female sexuality in terms of passivity and masochism. In the second volume, for example, Ellis discusses how force, aggression, and cruelty toward women are “biologically correct” in sexual intercourse. “We must regard the whip as a natural symbol for the penis,” writes Ellis. “One of the most frequent ways in which the idea of coitus first faintly glimmers before an infantile mind—and it is a glimmer which, from an evolutionary standpoint, is biologically correct—is as a display of force, of aggression, of something resembling cruelty.”
Ellis’s conception of the penis as a whip may initially seem metaphorical. Yet in the third volume of his Studies, published in 1903, he explicitly clarifies that he views violence as essential to proper heterosexual activity.
Force is the foundation of virility, and its psychic manifestation is courage. In the struggle for life violence is the first virtue. The modesty of women—in its primordial form consisting in physical resistance, active or passive, to the assaults of the male—aided selection by putting to the test man’s most important quality, force. . . . Courtship resembles very closely, indeed, a drama or game; and the aggressiveness of the male, the coyness of the female, are alike unconsciously assumed in order to bring about in the most effectual manner the ultimate union of the sexes. The seeming reluctance of the female is not intended to inhibit sexual activity either in the male or in herself, but to increase it in both. The passivity of the female, therefore, is not a real, but only an apparent, passivity . . . [emphasis added].
Women’s reluctance toward sexual intercourse, in Ellis’s view, is an invitation for men to overcome feminine resistance. Men must establish sexual “unity” through force, with male aggression triumphing over female “coyness.”
Ellis’s theories significantly influenced mid-century marital sex manuals and modern “sex education,” disseminating male-supremacist ideology in “scientific” and “objective” language. Words and phrases like “natural,” “evolutionary,” and “biologically correct” throughout Ellis’s work serve to effectively cross-dress a social theory of sexual relations in scientific garb. Later in the twentieth century, Alfred Kinsey and John Money would repeat this trick to great effect.
In a posthumously collected book of Ellis’s writings, published as a marital sex manual titled Sex and Marriage, Ellis writes that “only the girl with whom one has not grown up from childhood, and become accustomed to, can ever be to us in the truly sexual sense, a real girl.” “Girl” was the term Ellis used for the object of a man’s sexual desire. Transgender exhibitionists Serano and Chu desire to be exactly this type of “girl.” “When I hit puberty, my newly found attraction to women spilled into my dreams of becoming a girl,” Serano tells us. For him, “forced feminization” turns “the humiliation you feel into pleasure, transforming the loss of male privilege into the best f**k ever.” Chu writes, in a notorious line from his pamphlet-length essay: “Getting f**ked makes you female because f**ked is what a female is.”
Superficially opposed to Serano and Chu in “the culture war” but sexually and politically brothers in woman-hating arms, right-wing provocateur Nick Fuentes puts it more bluntly still: “Women are made to be f**ked, literally. . . . Women exist for sex.”
Magnus Hirschfeld: Founder of “The World’s First Trans Clinic”
Another founding father of sexology, Magnus Hirschfeld, coined the term “transvestite” (Transvestiten) in 1910. In 1919, Hirschfeld founded what Scientific American has described as “the world’s first trans clinic.”
One of the earliest operations performed by Hirschfeld’s Institute was “testicle transplantations,” which were performed on gay men in an effort to “cure” their homosexuality. Physicians at the Institute took testes from recently deceased heterosexual males and surgically transplanted them into homosexual males they had castrated. After this procedure, some patients initially believed they had overcome their homosexuality and felt heterosexual urges, but the relief was short-lived. Soon, they discovered that they had not been healed; they had merely been mutilated.
In his biography of Hirschfeld, Ralf Dose summarizes the aftermath: “The end result was a lateral or complete castration, with all the well-known consequences for the patient’s physical and mental condition.” In most cases, the patients’ bodies rejected the foreign, transplanted gland tissue, which became necrotic and had to be surgically removed. In all cases, the transplants did not work as intended. The procedure did not cure the male patients’ homosexuality. Yet the official webpage for Hirschfeld’s Institute notes: “No criticism of the testicle transplantations by Institute staff members has been recorded.” In other words, neither Hirschfeld nor his colleagues at the Institute ever held themselves accountable. In short, despite being a homosexual male himself, Hirschfeld facilitated a violently medicalized “cure” for homosexuality at the very same Institute now celebrated as a pioneer in “gender-affirming care.”
Following this attempt in the early 1920s, Hirschfeld’s Institute performed the earliest modern “sex change” in the form of vaginoplasty. A 1931 article titled “Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites” discusses the cases of Rudolf Richter and Arno Ebel. Weeks after the “vaginoplasty” on Richter, another of Hirschfeld’s colleagues performed a fifth surgery on Einar Wegener on June 17, 1931, involving a vaginoplasty and uterus transplant. These led to organ rejection, infection, and death from cardiac arrest on September 13, 1931. Perhaps that tragic end is the reason Wegener was omitted from their article. His life would later be memorialized in books and films, such as 2015’s The Danish Girl.
After performing these pioneering “transsexual” operations on patients in the 1920s and early 1930s with Hirschfeld’s Institute, surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt became a high-ranking medical authority under the Nazi regime by the late 1930s. He was involved with subjecting prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp to freezing experiments, with findings published in 1945. The widely accepted narrative has been that the Nazis destroyed Hirschfeld’s Institute because they hated lesbians, gay men, and “trans people.” However, Harry Benjamin himself provided another reason in his Transsexual Phenomenon: prominent Nazis had been patients. According to Benjamin, “The Institute’s confidential files were said to have contained too many data on prominent Nazis, former patients of Hirschfeld, to allow the constant threat of discovery to persist.”
Both Ellis and Hirschfeld enabled male transvestic fetishism, theorizing that it must have some unidentified biological cause they needed to hunt out. Although relatively less radical than the mid-century sexologists who followed them, Ellis and Hirschfeld directly influenced Harry Benjamin, Alfred Kinsey, and John Money in significant ways, laying the foundations for both the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the transgender ideology of today.
Harry Benjamin: Marketing “Sex Change”
Harry Benjamin first met Hirschfeld circa 1906 in Berlin. Later, Benjamin regularly visited Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science during the 1920s and early 1930s.
In 1948, Benjamin began seeing patients in New York City who desired “sex conversion.” The term “conversion operation” is used throughout his work, marketably euphemized into “sex change,” “sex reassignment,” “gender transition,” and, most recently, “gender-affirming care.” His landmark study, Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), was based on his clinical observations of 152 male cases and 20 female cases, in a ratio of about eight men for every one woman.
Benjamin’s focus was gratifying his male patients’ desire to become sexually attractive females. His book even includes photos of male patients “living as women” in sexualized poses. Through surgery, he sought to enable his male patients to have sex as females. “Operative techniques,” he wrote, “will have to be perfected so that the often all-important sex life as a female will be realized in a satisfactory manner.”
Radical feminist Janice G. Raymond critiques Benjamin’s role as “the father of transsexualism” in The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979). She quotes Benjamin’s rationale for judging “successful” candidates: “Most important for my own satisfaction and consent to the operation was the belief that a reasonably successful ‘woman’ could result.” “Success” depended on the extent to which the man would be sexually desirable to heterosexual men. The ultimate affirmation of femininity was bound up in men’s sexual use of an object considered “female.” Peer-reviewed research in the 1970s, quoted in The Transsexual Empire, underscored male patients’ desires to become wives and prostitutes: “There is no greater confirmation of femininity than that of having normal heterosexual men again and again accept her [sic] as a woman and even pay her [sic] for sex services.”
Raymond also notes that Benjamin’s interest in “sex conversion” began when Alfred Kinsey referred him to a case involving “a young boy whose great ambition was to become a girl.”
Alfred Kinsey: Dismissing Child Sexual Abuse
During the same time period when Benjamin began seeing his patients, Alfred Kinsey published two widely influential works “revolutionizing” modern sex education: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Notably, in the latter, Kinsey dismissed the severity of child sexual abuse: “If a child were not culturally conditioned, it is doubtful if it would be disturbed by sexual approaches of the sort which had usually been involved in these histories.”
Kinsey viewed the child in terms of a subject for conversion. He compared children’s distress over sexual abuse, particularly involving girls, to what “children will show when they see insects, spiders, or other objects which they have been adversely conditioned.” At the April 1971 New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) Conference, radical feminist Florence Rush delivered a paper titled “The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View” critiquing Kinsey’s theorizing of child sexual abuse: “With the usual male arrogance, the author [Kinsey] cannot imagine that a sexual assault on a child constitutes a gross and devastating shock and insult, so he blames everyone but the offender.”
In Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), radical feminist Andrea Dworkin criticized Kinsey’s objectivity in his research: “Kinsey’s sources were, in fact, much more unreliable than anyone could deduce from reading either of his volumes on human sexuality.” She references Wardell B. Pomeroy, a Kinsey co-researcher and co-author of the Kinsey Reports, who wrote about their work in the biography Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (1972). For a source, the Kinsey team used a man who claimed he “had homosexual relations with 600 preadolescent males, heterosexual relations with 200 preadolescent females, intercourse with countless adults of both sexes, with animals of many species.” Preadolescence generally refers to the period between ages nine and twelve, so the man interviewed was a sexual abuser of not only hundreds of children but also many animals, whose narrative became “data” for Kinsey’s team. According to Pomeroy, this man’s story “was the basis for a fair part of Chapter Five in the Male volume concerning child sexuality” and used as “data on the behavior of many children.”
This pattern is typical of Kinsey’s work, which studied highly non-representative volunteers who exhibited high levels of sexually deviant behaviors, then extrapolated from them to make normative claims about healthy human sexuality.
John Money: Transsexualism and Childhood “Sexual Rehearsal Play”
Successor to Benjamin and Kinsey, John Money co-founded the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1965-1966, the first clinic in the United States to offer a specific program for the “conversion operation” mapped in Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon. While Benjamin’s medical offices in Manhattan had provided consultation, evaluation, and “treatment” in terms of prescribing hormones, he referred patients elsewhere for surgeries. The Johns Hopkins program was distinct in that it established a formal multidisciplinary program involving surgeons, psychiatrists, psychologists, endocrinologists, and other specialists.
Notably, Money has defended pornography as an important part of children’s “sex education” and pedophilia as a “sexual orientation.” In his work on incest, he described a man committing incest as “like being a religious deviant in a one-religion society,” arguing that shame around incest, “not the partnership [sic] itself, may be the source of trauma.” In The Transsexual Empire, Raymond notes that, by the 1970s, Money became “the foremost publicist of the transsexual phenomenon,” an ideological successor to Benjamin. Others, like former Johns Hopkins psychiatrist-in-chief Paul R. McHugh, have also sharply rebuked Money’s work over the last few decades.
Compared to his academic sexology books, Money’s interviews make his wordy theories more comprehensible. For this reason, Money’s defenders avoid his less verbose explanations, which are (mostly) free of dense terminology. When John Stoltenberg interviewed him for Omni magazine in 1980, for instance, Money explained that
The whole purpose of paying attention to transsexualism is to force society to change its entire attitude toward, for instance, the sex education of its children, and its attitude toward normal primate sexual rehearsal play in infancy.
In Money’s view, our reluctant society must be forcibly converted into what he termed a “sexual democracy.”
“Sexual rehearsal play in infancy” was of peculiar interest to him, as demonstrated in the “treatment” of David and Brian Reimer. The tragic story of the Reimer twins, which Money initially claimed as a rousing success, has now become infamous after both committed suicide as adults. After one brother was injured in a botched circumcision, Money convinced his parents to let him perform a vaginoplasty on the boy and to raise him as a girl, in order to prove the theory that gender was a social construct. The Reimers later reported that, in their therapy sessions, Money made the boys play-act graphic sexual acts, in an attempt to teach “Brenda” to assume the proper passive female sexual role.
Money’s own sexual theories corroborate the Reimers’ narratives of “therapeutic” sexual abuse in the form of “sexual rehearsal play.” Based on his observations of “young monkeys playing at coital sex” to develop “psychosexual normalcy,” Money’s view was that little boys need to mount little girls in “sexual rehearsal play.” “I think that we produce all the psychosexual disorders, all of the sex-offender disorders that get people thrown in jail,” Money lectured to his class, “because, instead of encouraging children to develop normal heterosexual play patterns, we encourage them to develop no sexual play patterns at all.” As recorded in Stoltenberg’s article, Money projected on screen for his Johns Hopkins class “slides taken secretly by telescopic lens of a boy, about five, with his pants down, mounting a girl slightly younger.” In other words, he created and distributed child pornography in the guise of educational material.
By 1986, Money became radically more insistent that, if surgeons do not remove the otherwise healthy genitals of adults who desire to be the opposite sex, then the patients will do it themselves. “You’d have lots of patients willing to get a gun and blow off their own genitals if you don’t do it,” he said in the 1980 Omni interview. “I’ve had several who got knives and cut themselves trying to get rid of their sex organs. That’s their obsession!” While Kinsey opined that “it would be very hopeless to attempt to amputate your male organs and implant a vagina,” Money insisted that patients would self-mutilate anyway, so the medical establishment may as well do it for them.
Building upon the foundations laid by his sexological predecessors, Money’s sexual theories illustrate better than anything else why “sex conversion” soon extended from adults to children. Money has played a seminal role in the defense of transsexualism, the precursor of today’s paradigm of “gender-affirming care.”
In short, throughout the twentieth century, the male-dominated field of sexology has been the pseudoscientific force behind the medicalization of sexuality and gender and the sexualization of children.
In a 1987 presentation titled “Sexology and Antifeminism,” radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys noted: “Throughout the twentieth century, women have been the problem for sexology and sex reform… because they have never shown the right enthusiasm.” Jeffreys connects this problematization of female sexuality with the rise of “sex positivity” and “queer theory.” Far from being authentic developments of feminist theory and practice, Jeffreys argues that the field has been part of an organized backlash against feminist critiques of transgenderism, prostitution, pornography, and other sexual practices that disproportionately harm women and children.
This is not a fringe theory or an unsubstantiated claim. Prominent queer theorists openly acknowledge their indebtedness to the theories of twentieth-century sexologists. One prominent example is Gayle Rubin’s 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” which is widely seen as a seminal text of queer theory. There, Rubin specifically names Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Alfred Kinsey as influences. I would add Benjamin and Money to that list.
Language and history remain the vital tools for us to understand what happened to human sexuality by the twenty-first century. It can also help us understand what role feminism has played in the past and ought to play in the future. “The language changes from writer to writer,” Andrea Dworkin observes, “but what remains constant is that this intense sense of estrangement from the female provides the necessary basis for sexual excitement.”
Were more of society familiar with the feminist critiques of sexology, our sexual ethics would be radically different. A necessary first step is looking backward so that we can move forward—beyond sexology’s fathers.
