Harry Benjamin Has a Bad Dream About Biological Sex

The Year is 1965...

Harry Benjamin, endocrinologist

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Dr. John Money
Psychohormonal Research Unit
The Johns Hopkins Hospital
1800 Orleans St
Baltimore, MD 21207

June 14, 1965

Dear John,

I received your letter dated June the 1st and read it to a growing pit in my stomach that I can only imagine pales in comparison to your own. I’m terribly sorry to learn that your adolescent transsexual has run away from the ward, it seems to have come as quite a shock. Do you know the child’s whereabouts or have they truly absconded? Such things are prone to happen with teenaged delinquents, but after the utter debacle of Stoller’s with that Agnes child out in Los Angeles, I had hoped we would finally have our guinea pig, so to speak: a specimen of the male transsexual in development, before the heavy weights of the world on their soul make them ever so much more difficult to study.  

Alas, my dear friend, I should hope that you do not place any of the blame for this prison break on your own shoulders. Perhaps this is a sign that you should go ahead with that plan to open the gender clinic after all. Goodness knows I alone could send you a never-ending supply of girls, who I am sure to vet until they know their place.

I have been preoccupied lately with preparing to travel back to San Francisco for the remainder of my summer clinic. Val and a new contact, Joanne, have offered to introduce me to an ever growing roster of girls who are most anxious to speak with me about their ostensible transsexualism. I gather that they have, lately, come to live together in a more formal manner in the city’s vice district. Strange that they should form what seem like families, isn’t it? In any case, should you find yourself on the California coast this summer I hope you will call on me (the usual hotel). I would be pleased to arrange with Val to take you to this transsexual neighborhood to see first-hand how the girls live. Perhaps that does not appeal so much to you, the psychologist, but I learned from my outings with our late friend Kinsey that it matters a great deal to see where our patients come from and what conditions we must convince them to escape.

I should hope not impose on you too much to relate something of a rather unusual topic for the substance of this letter—a dream of mine from last night that is plaguing me still in the afternoon. I know you don’t put much stock in such matters of interpretation, but you must once again indulge my German provenance here and remember that I used to visit with Freud in Vienna, albeit many years ago. In any case, it is not analysis that I seek, but something more intangible, akin to a professional comfort. 

In the dream I found myself in my office on the Upper West Side, though in the waiting room, which is queer in that I leave the fetching of patients to my secretary, or Dr. Wollman. In any case, thinking that was the source of my unease, I got up from my chair and went to the secretarial desk, only to find it unoccupied. Confused as to why the office was empty in the middle of the day, I wondered what I should do when I began to hear a rather seductive woman’s voice beckoning me from the consult room, much like a siren of a Homerian epic.

Although compelled to find the source of this feminine song, I noticed that I was walking with great trepidation, though I could not discern why. The door to the consult room was slightly ajar and as I lay my hand upon it to open, I noticed it trembling, soft, and small.

When I entered the room I finally saw whence the voice came: a beautiful woman of statuesque build, with cascading blond locks and the most delicate features. She smiled and resumed her serenade, half singing, half speaking: “Hello, Harry, I’m ready for you now. But are you ready?”

I opened my mouth to address her as a doctor and the owner of the clinic, but found no such voice able to speak. I cannot recall what it is I ended up replying, but if you should like to imagine, John, picture your friend Harry with the voice of a small church mouse. 

The woman smiled again, benevolently if also patronizingly, and reassured me “it is perfectly fine to be nervous, Harry. But there is nothing to worry about, I will help you find what you are seeking.” She then gestured at a mirror to beckon me before it, which I obeyed without a second thought. When I gazed upon myself, only my wife would know how much I must have shaken in bed, for I saw not myself, a doctor, but a patient—a transsexual, I should think! I was dressed head-to-toe in silky woman’s apparel, though I clearly had about as much sense for feminine garments in the dream as I do in real life, for I looked a mess, unkempt and untidy.

At this point I think I meant to protest to the whole scene, but the woman, who I increasingly regarded as something like my handler, came up behind me and lay her hand on my shoulder, which caused me to recoil in fear. She looked directly into the mirror so as to be sure that our eyes were locked, and calmly asked me to disrobe—forgive me for drawing such an image in your mind, John, I promise you I am not authoring a pornographic mis-en-scene. 

When I removed the silk dress and undergarments I was sporting, I gasped to find that I had no sex, that I was some sort of neuter, or sexless automaton, and I began to weep. Then I looked up from my tear-stained hands to see that the woman was smiling again, but this time knowingly and mockingly, as a handsome male colleague looking much like my old friend from Berlin, Dr Hirschfeld, walked in. This man came before me and thanked me for giving him what he needed. When I asked what he meant, he pointed to his groin, where I could sense, even before seeing a visual confirmation, that he was now the owner of my erstwhile member.

At this point I awoke in a cold sweat, relieved to know that it had been but a dream.

Well, John, I will get to my point. When I went to my study this morning as Gretchen made a pot of coffee, my eyes were for no reason drawn to a stack of manuscript papers that form the draft of that book I’m working on, about transsexualism. I reread my early chapter on the biology of sex difference. As I reviewed a paragraph I have authored in so many ways over the past thirty years that I would hardly consider it remarkable, I yet felt that same unease from the dream. The sentence that has lodged itself into my mind is as follows: “it is well known that sex is never one hundred per cent ‘male’ or ‘female.’ It is a blend of a complex variety of male-female components.”

In short, John, I feel my dream to have been the anxious vehicle of a question that, between you and me, I am worried that I cannot answer: if sex is, as we and so many others have observed scientifically, hardly a matter of strict separation between male and female, well, I cannot really be sure why transsexuals are measurably different from normal people anymore. What I mean is, we are presently developing diagnostics and treatments to induce a normal appearance of male or female in the transsexual, which you have explained to me as merely a matter of social adjustment, rather than correction of any biological pathology. But in the visceral dream scene of seeing myself de-sexed for the benefit of the male doctor, I cannot help but wonder if the strange malleability of sex will not, so to speak, come back to haunt us?

Perhaps that transsexual child of yours, the one who ran away, knows of what I speak better than I ever shall. Alas, I am tired and it has been a long couple of weeks. I send you this nighttime transcript as a confession, doctor to doctor, that ours is an unclear business. I think perhaps no one more than you knows the true power of sex to confound, resist, and exceed our intentions. I only hope we haven’t offended human sex too much, for its revenge might be more than you or I could fathom.

My warmest regards,

H.B.