By the early sixties, Money had met Benjamin and, as Money said at the latter’s memorial in 1987, “he became my living link with early twentieth-century psychoendocrinology. He was my exemplar of the continuity of scholarly history—and of the dependence of my own scholarship on that of my professional forebears.” Money shared yet another tie with Benjamin: like other pivotal figures in the mid-century study of gender variance, both were funded by a wealthy transsexual man named Reed Erickson. Like most early female-to-male transsexual persons, Erickson has remained largely invisible in popular accounts of transsexuality. Born Rita Alma Erickson in El Paso, Texas, in 1917, Erickson enjoyed a gregarious, colorful (some might say psychedelic) existence, marrying three times and fathering two children (by adoption). For the last twenty years of his life, he lived in Maza-tlän, Mexico, at a house he called the Love Joy Palace, where he kept a pet leopard. Despite his hedonistic lifestyle, Erickson did more than almost any person other than Harry Benjamin to help create the medical model of transsexuality and to advance understanding of gender variance among the research community and the public.
Aaron Devor, professor of sociology at the University of Victoria and author of the book FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society, has been researching Reed Erickson’s life for several years. He became interested in Erickson as he worked on various books and research projects, and “the name of the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) came up from time to time,” he says. “I’d hear from different people that the founder of EEF might be transsexual—sometimes I’d hear MTF, sometimes FTM.” Characterizing these remarks as “gossip, rumor, enigmatic comments,” Devor says that he didn’t learn the truth until he was on sabbatical in California, in 1996, residing in a community for scholars doing LGBT research. “One of the fellows, who was also staying there at the time, Jim Kepner, lived down the hall, and Jim put out a little personal newsletter and in one of the newsletters he mentioned Reed Erickson of the EEF and he said that he was an FTM transsexual. At that time, I was aware that the EEF was important, though at that time I didn’t know how important.
“I don’t know all that much about Erickson’s childhood,” says Devor, aside from the fact that his mother was ethnically Jewish, but religiously a Christian Scientist, and that his father, Robert, owned a lead-smelting business. “In his early adulthood, Erickson lived as a lesbian, quite closeted as most were at that time. He was musical and played in his high school band. He—at that time she—had some secretarial training before studying engineering.” By the time Robert B. Erickson died, in 1962, willing the lead-smelting business to his daughters, Rita Alma had graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University (the first woman to do so), worked as an engineer in Philadelphia, and founded a successful stadium bleacher—manufacturing company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The death of Robert B. Erickson made his children wealthy, Devor says, even more so when the company was sold to Arrow Electronics for millions of dollars a few years later. Reed Erickson eventually amassed a personal fortune estimated at over $40 million, and donated enormous sums of money to various causes over the years, through the Erickson Educational Foundation, which he established in 1964.
In 1963, Erickson began seeing Harry Benjamin, taking hormones under Benjamin’s guidance, having already begun his life as a man. Benjamin was one of the first recipients of a grant from the EEF. This grant was to have far-reaching consequences, says Devor. “The EEF funded the Harry Benjamin Foundation from 1964 till 1968 for approximately $50,000 over those years. One of the activities that the money funded was bringing together a group of people working in the area to meet at Harry’s offices in New York once a month—people like Richard Green and John Money. During the mid-sixties, there weren’t a lot of people working on transsexuality; it was still a very hush-hush kind of subject. So bringing together this group of researchers produced a kind of synergy, and this synergy led to the founding of the Hopkins gender program. The thinking was, ‘if we can do this kind of surgery for intersexual people, why not for transsexuals?’”
Reed Erickson himself did not experience tremendous difficulty transitioning, says Devor. Though he never underwent genital surgery, Erickson had a mastectomy in Mexico in the early sixties, and had some “touch-up work” on his chest in the United States, as well as a hysterectomy after becoming a patient of Harry Benjamin’s. “There were doctors who would do this if you had the money, and Erickson had the money,” Devor says. “Though it doesn’t seem that Erickson had much trouble himself, I think he was very aware of the troubles that others were having. One of the first projects of the EEF was drawing up a list of helpful and sympathetic doctors and surgeons by city and region. EEF was started in ’64 and this was one of their early projects. It was an ongoing project, and they were always adding new names to the list.”
Erickson enjoyed a warm relationship with Money, whom he was also funding by that time. “They were quite close for a long time, enjoying lots of social interaction,” says Devor. “They shared common interests. It was more than just a business relationship.… John Money was quite open and liberal and certainly not snobbish about socializing with transsexuals,” he says. “I know they were friends, and of course Erickson was putting money into what Money was doing.”
Erickson donated nearly $85,000 to the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic over ten years, says Devor. “It has become quite clear to me that the money from the EEF was essential to the start-up of the Johns Hopkins clinic. Media reports from the time said that the clinic was entirely funded by the EEF.” The importance of Erickson’s support, and Money’s gratitude toward his benefactor, can perhaps be judged by the fact that Erickson was invited to contribute the preface to Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, edited by Richard Green and
John Money and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1969. In the preface to that volume, Erickson testifies to the difficulty that transsexual people had in finding physicians who understood their condition and surgeons both competent and willing to carry out the surgery. “Although here and there an occasional doctor or clinic performed sex-change operations—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—it was only after The Johns Hopkins Hospital provided its facilities and publicized its work that sex-conversion operations began to be undertaken openly by hospitals of high reputation.”
By all accounts, the opening of the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1966, and the decision to begin performing sex-reassignment surgery there, was largely brought about by Money, who argued, cajoled, and arm-twisted reluctant colleagues into translating the expertise they had acquired treating intersexual people into treating transsexuals. In the introduction to Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, Harry Benjamin writes, “Dr. John Money, psychologist at Johns Hopkins, widely-known and respected for his extensive studies on hermaphroditism and related endocrinopathies and sexual disorders, was probably more responsible than any other individual for the decision that such an august institution as The Johns Hopkins Hospital would take up this controversial subject and actually endorse sex-altering surgery in suitable subjects. This decision testifies to the high esteem in which Dr. Money is held by his medical co-workers.”