In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  Two months after her triumphant touchdown at Idlewild Airport, Jorgensen would find herself under attack, thanks to the absence of one “correction of medical science.” In April 1953, the New York Post published its first installment of a six-part exposé, “The Truth About ‘Christine’ Jorgensen.” She was “a woman in name only,” the newspaper held, because she had no female organs. The rest of the media, from Newsweek to True Romance, piled on. “Jorgensen was no girl at all,” Time decreed, “only an altered male.” If she wouldn’t submit to the knife, she couldn’t wear the glass slipper. Jorgensen was despondent. Whether in response to the attacks or not, she turned to Harry Benjamin and another physician for a surgical intervention: in a seven-hour operation in the spring of 1954, a plastic surgeon harvested skin grafts from Jorgensen’s thighs and fashioned a kind of vagina. The surgery was reportedly a failure by one measure—she told friends that the vaginal canal was too short for intercourse. Worse, the operation dragged on for so long that the anesthesia threatened to wear off, and when an ether mask was hastily applied to keep the patient knocked out, Jorgensen’s face was badly burned. “I remember clearly the feelings of dread and terror,” she wrote later, “and was far more concerned about facial burns than the complex surgery I’d been through.” Jorgensen understood that, whether the equipment worked or not, the most critical test for success as a girl was looking like one. “I had to become super-female,” she wrote later. “I couldn’t have one single masculine trait.”

  In 1930, Harry Benjamin hosted a prominent German sexologist on his visit to the United States, physician Magnus Hirschfeld. The two men were friends: they had toured the demimonde of Berlin together in the ’20s, and when Hirschfeld came to New York he stayed in Benjamin’s apartment and gave private lectures in his office. “Benjamin understood himself as a German sexologist in the Hirschfeld tradition,” Meyerowitz told me. “They both rejected psychoanalysis; they both advocated for the rights of sexual and gender minorities. They both responded sympathetically to desperate patients.” Yet Hirschfeld espoused an ethic directly at odds with the dualism that would come to prevail in the United States later in the century. “The number of actual and imaginable sexual varieties is almost unending,” Hirschfeld wrote in 1910. “In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics equally match in kind and number.”

  In 1919 in Berlin, Hirschfeld established the world’s first institute to study sexuality, which issued one of the earliest scientific reports on transsexual surgery. Hirschfeld himself conducted his field studies in the subterranean sexual haunts of Weimar Berlin. He spent years collecting eyewitness observations and distributing detailed questionnaires (ultimately filled out by more than ten thousand people). From this research, and flouting the iron-clad separate-spheres dictates of Wilhelmine Germany, he derived his prime finding: sexual identities were wildly varied and fluid, and defied classification. Categories of sex were “only abstractions, invented extremes.” While Hirschfeld constructed categories to aid his work and introduced some of the terminology that would, decades hence, find its way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, he maintained throughout his life that no one was a “true” sex type; human beings were all to some degree bisexual and bi-gendered, all “sexual intermediaries”—and, because of these endless variations, defined less by their difference than by their shared humanity. At one point, Hirschfeld tried to calculate all the varieties—he arrived at a grand total of 43,046,721—before deciding that number was a gross undercount.

  He took the same approach to transvestism, a term that he coined but saw as an “inclination,” not a genus. To label someone a transvestite, Hirschfeld argued, was to constrain their experience to too narrow and visual a category, one that could not do justice to the variegations of their internal emotional life. “One disadvantage of the term,” he wrote, “is that it describes only the external side, while the internal is limitless.” It was this limitlessness that he believed must be taken into account in any political struggle for sexual liberation: “Sexual human rights would have to begin with the acknowledgment that sexualities—in accordance with the doctrine of sexual intermediaries—are as diverse as the number of sexed individuals.”

  The rights of sexual minorities became Hirschfeld’s lifelong cause. For decades he fought to strike down Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175, which criminalized male homosexuality, and he convinced the Berlin police to recognize his “transvestite passes,” medical certificates he issued to protect cross-dressers from arrest. But he didn’t believe one’s essence sprang from membership in a sexual or gender category—or any category, racial, religious, or national. Hirschfeld’s own selfhood derived from multiple affiliations: he was a homosexual (a fact he neither announced nor denied), a feminist (he was an outspoken and dedicated supporter of women’s suffrage and birth control), a scientist, a physician, a socialist, a pacifist, a devotee of German culture, and a secular Jew. The one identity Hirschfeld would admit to was “panhumanist.”

  The question: where do you belong? What are you, really, gives me no peace. Were I to pose the question, Are you a German? A Jew? Or a world citizen? My answer would in any case be, “a world citizen.” Or all three.

  In a journal article in 1923, Hirschfeld remarked that some of his transvestite patients were expressing feelings that might be described as “seelischer Transsexualismus,” or spiritual transsexualism, but he wasn’t referring to the condition the word denotes today. He never separated out transsexuality as a category or regarded it as an identity. While doctors affiliated with Hirschfeld’s institute performed several (rudimentary) sex-change operations, they did so with some reluctance, at the behest of desperate clients threatening severe self-harm. (One male-to-female client later changed her mind and begged to return to manhood, lending support to Hirschfeld’s thesis that sexuality was a fluctuating entity.) Hirschfeld was more interested in freeing people to express their own idiosyncratic sexuality than in nailing down which patients belonged to which of two sexes. He was not looking to turn psychological ambiguity into certainty in the flesh.

  On May 6, 1933, a little more than three months after Hitler became chancellor, a hundred students from a National Socialist youth league called the Nazi Committee Against the Un-German Spirit pulled up in lorries in front of Hirschfeld’s institute. As a brass band blasted martial music, the young thugs stormed and then ransacked the building, smashing furniture and breaking windows, pouring red ink over thousands of manuscripts and confiscating the institute’s vast archive of books, photographs, and files. A few days later, a torchlight procession marched to Berlin’s Opera Square, bearing the defaced bust of Hirschfeld impaled on a stick, and tossed into a bonfire thousands of the institute’s “un-German” volumes. The party’s press praised the “Energetic Action against a Poison Shop”; they had “fumigated” the institute run by “the Jew Magnus Hirschfeld.”

  Hirschfeld, the “world citizen” who embraced all and no identities, was in France at the time, forced into exile. In the years leading up to his flight, fascist gangs had opened fire at his public speaking appearances and physically attacked him in Munich, once fracturing his skull so badly that he was declared dead (allowing him, he noted wryly, “an opportunity” to read his own obituary). Hirschfeld learned of the attack on the institute from a newsreel he watched in a Paris movie theater. He was subsequently stripped of his German citizenship. A year later, devastated by the destruction of his life’s work, he died of a heart attack on his sixty-seventh birthday.

  Five doctors who had been involved with sexology research at the institute fled the country; another likely died in a concentration camp. They, like a good number of the institute’s practitioners, were Jewish. At least one gentile on staff wasn’t spared either: the recipient of the first fully completed transsexual operation, R
udolf née Dorchen Richter, who became the institute’s longtime live-in maid, disappeared on the day of the attack, likely murdered. Other institute patients were placed on “pink lists,” arrested, deported, murdered.

  Was the Nazi raid on the institute motivated by hatred of a religious or a sexual identity? Or did the raiders also fear exposure of their own erotic proclivities? The institute’s assistant director, Dr. Ludwig Levy-Lenz, later speculated that “we knew too much”; their clientele included Third Reich officials. “Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and our other documentary material … was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.”

  Hirschfeld’s belief that identity divisions were not strictly binary and that desires were intermediary and limitless would find little resonance in Third Reich Germany—or, for that matter, in postwar America. In 1965, the U.S. Congress passed an amendment refining the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. The original act had banned immigrants with “psychopathic personalities.” The amendment explicitly applied that prohibition to “sexual deviation.” The law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 and remained on the books until 1990.

  Twenty-first-century transsexuals still live in a universe bound by Harry Benjamin’s protocols. His “Standards of Care” survive in the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) Standards of Care, the widely followed guidelines for sex reassignment surgery. Obtaining the surgery under WPATH requires a year’s worth of hormone therapy (approved by a therapist), a year of living full-time as the opposite sex, and, most crucially, two separate letters from two mental-health professionals who have independently determined that the patient is “eligible” for surgery. Without these all-important two referrals, WPATH’s standards advise surgeons not to operate. Unlike any other “transgressive” group, transsexuals can’t transgress without the consent of the authorities.

  Altering sex organs means getting an operation, and getting an operation means convincing clinicians to sign off on a diagnosis. That diagnosis is derived from the presumptions and prejudices of twentieth-century “experts” whose claims were often thinly researched and whose suppositions have been vastly amplified in the echo chamber of a clientele eager to say whatever is required to obtain the magic wand of surgery. Since transsexuality first entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980 (seven years after gay-rights advocates finally managed to get homosexuality out of it), “Transsexualism” has become “Gender Identity Disorder” has become “Gender Dysphoria.” In 2013, under pressure to “destigmatize” the transgender population, the authors of the DSM-V removed the diagnosis from the “Sexual Dysfunctions” and “Paraphilic Disorders” chapters, albeit not from the manual itself. The practitioners have made endless but largely superficial refinements to the taxonomy, adding and subtracting symptoms and demarcating predisposing and associated factors, primary and secondary types and subtypes. The diagnosis remains a baggy, ill-defined condition, based on theories with tenuous connection to empirical data or actual patient histories.*

  With no firm physiological markers to go on, the therapists who issue the all-important two letters must determine eligibility based not on what patients show but on what they tell, and how well they tell it. “Although transsexuality concerns the deliberate transformation of the material body more than any other category catalogued by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” Jay Prosser, a literature professor and female-to-male transsexual, observed in Second Skins, “transsexuality does not symptomize itself in the subject’s body, at least not visibly or reliably so. The diagnosis required for this transformation must instead derive from the patient’s narrative: narrativization as a transsexual necessarily precedes one’s diagnosis as a transsexual; autobiography is transsexuality’s proffered symptom.” To proceed to the operating room, the patient must tell the therapists the story they want to hear, a story that has barely changed since Harry Benjamin issued his guidelines in 1966.

  The tropes, code words, and set pieces this telling requires have long been traded in underground transsexual exchanges, and more recently on electronic forums and chat rooms. “To qualify for surgery,” a website for prospective male-to-female transsexuals that I read in 2010 instructed, be sure to emphasize that you suffer from a “persistent feeling of hatred for the male anatomical structures” and that you “absolutely dislike homosexual behavior.” In a 2014 online discussion about how to get approval from therapists for hormone treatment and surgery, a successful petitioner explains:

  I lied my ass off to my shrink, either direct lies or lies of omission. I sure as HELL didn’t tell him about my drinking problem, nor a word of my recovery issues. I never once told him of any doubts I had, never mentioned my boyfriend (now husband) nor that he is also trans, never mentioned breaking up with my ex. I made sure he saw a happy, well adjusted young girl no matter how stressed I was feeling. … I couldn’t be open with him, if I was I may still be waiting on that damn letter.

  In How to Change Your Sex, Lannie Rose, a male-to-female transsexual, counseled others to resist “the urge to game your therapist,” while noting how it was done: “The game is simple: just read the stories on a handful of transsexual people’s Web sites, and then concoct a story for your therapist that makes you seem similar to them.” This is a mode of literary composition that Prosser called replicating “the master narrative” of “transsexuality’s classic plot.” Sandy Stone described the method more plainly as “learning to lie effectively about one’s past.”

  Concocting such lies, Rose admonished, is “doing your self a big disservice and missing a great opportunity for personal growth.” She believed that the strict requirements enforced by unsympathetic therapists were artifacts of the recent past and that, “today, being honest with your therapist should not prevent you from obtaining the treatment you need for your gender dysphoria, regardless of the particulars of your story.” Rose’s book was first published in 2004, the same year my father had her operation. I wondered how my father had addressed her own particulars.

  “Sometimes I wish Harry Benjamin had never existed,” Mel Myers told me. “It might have been better if they just let us trans girls suffer in the darkness.” Some months after Mel and I met at Coffee People to talk about my father’s stay at Melanie’s Cocoon, we met for dinner at a Thai restaurant called Miso Happy. “I manipulated my therapist,” Mel said over our soup, and elaborated. “I knew all the answers. I’d come out of there like, ‘Ha! I nailed that!’ ” Maybe that wasn’t such a victory, he thought now. “The doctors could have guided me better. I wish there were therapists available to help some of us not go all the way. Maybe I could’ve just learned …”

  “Learned what?” I asked.

  “To live with myself.”

  “Do you think”—I hesitated—“do you think my father shouldn’t have had the operation?”

  “I can’t say why Stefánie was driven to do it,” Mel said, “and she was too closed down for me to know.” He picked at the remains of a spring roll on his plate. “Of the hundreds of transsexuals I’ve met, I’d say ten of them probably should have done it. Not that they shouldn’t transition, but it’s just too hard for them. They are always going to have to live as a ‘trans person.’ They are never going to pass.”

  In the three weeks that my father stayed at Melanie’s Cocoon, she did not impress Mel as someone for whom the transition would be easy. “Actually, I kind of hoped Stefánie wouldn’t stay with me,” Mel confessed. “I felt kind of threatened around him,” he said. “Her,” he amended. “Something about her was”—he considered—“overbearing. But I had just opened my guesthouse, and I had to recruit customers. So I went into her hospital room and gave her my pitch. At first she was pretty defensive and looking at me like, ‘What sort of a scam is this?’ But after a while, she started saying to the nurses, ‘Well, maybe I’ll stay at Me
lanie’s house.’ ”

  Mel called up some pictures of the Cocoon on his Palm Pilot. It was an airy wood-frame house with a wrap-around porch, ringed with palm trees and banana plants, high on a hill above the beach (high enough to make it through the December 2004 tsunami unscathed). Guests had their own rooms with a private bath. Melanie had decorated the common area with wicker furniture, eight clocks set to different time zones around the world, and inspirational art. The room’s signature piece was an oil painting of a naked woman with long blond hair, gazing out a brightly lit window. “She is looking out into a new day,” Mel said. “Everybody who’s stayed with me identifies with it.” Melanie prodded her guests into that new day with field trips to the beach, women’s clothing boutiques, nightclubs, and the Phuket FantaSea Show, “The Ultimate Nighttime Cultural Theme Park.” (My father would show me the video she bought in the FantaSea gift shop, featuring the park’s most popular attractions: a nightly “Cultural Illusion Show” where herds of elephants appear and disappear “at will,” a simulated thunder-and-lightning storm, and a photo studio that invited customers to get their pictures taken in “traditional” Thai costumes.)

  Melanie’s recruitment efforts at the plastic surgery wings of Phuket’s hospitals that May paid off. She signed up a half dozen guests, all male-to-female transsexuals. My father was, by far, the oldest. She was also the “most alone,” Melanie said. “Stefánie seemed isolated, even more than the others. Maybe it was because of her culture or history, but the others couldn’t relate to her. None of the other five wanted to visit with her. I had to push them. I talked her up as ‘The Great Hungarian!’ ”