The Erickson Educational Foundation also produced numerous publications for transsexual people and their families, brochures and pamphlets that explained in everyday language what transsexualism was and offered effective strategies for treatment. “In their day, these were the only educational material that transsexual people and their families could get their hands on. They were quality publications, and have been subsequently republished and are still in circulation,” says Devor. “The EEF really created public awareness, public sympathy, even empathy for transsexuals. I give Erickson a tremendous amount of credit for bringing this issue to the attention of researchers and the public.”
The EEF financed a steady stream of lectures at medical schools, at schools of social work and law, and to police officers in training.
“They sought out people in positions of power and influence over the lives of transsexuals and tried to educate them while they were being trained,” says Devor. “The EEF made movies and then sent them around to medical schools. In collaboration with John Money, they produced definitions of transsexuality and transvestism, which they sent out to 105 dictionaries and encyclopaedias, so that when you looked for a definition [of those terms] you found the ones they had created. It was almost as though they asked themselves what they could do to make people aware of this issue on every front.” The advice columnists Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers even referred people to the EEF in their columns. When the imminent closure of the EEF was announced at the Fifth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, held in Norfolk, Virginia, in February 1977, the assembled group of researchers, under the direction of Paul Walker, M.D., discussed the creation of a new organization to carry on its work. The proposed organization, named for Harry Benjamin, was formally approved at the Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, held in San Diego, California, in February 1979.
In March 2003, I spoke to Jude Patton, a transman who was the first “consumer advocate” on the new Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) Board of Trustees. Patton, a psychotherapist, was a graduate student when he became involved with HBIGDA through his doctor/patient relationship with Donald Laub, M.D., a surgeon at Stanford University’s Gender Clinic and one of the first members of the board. “When the first HBIGDA conference was going to be held, I asked Don Laub, who was my surgeon, if I could attend, and I came as his guest. At that time I had also met Zelda Suplee [of the EEF] and Paul Walker through some of the early support groups that I had started,” says Patton. At the meeting in San Diego in 1979, “there was a band of outspoken heterosexual TVs, consumer voices, who were very strident, saying, ‘Why don’t you include us?’ and other things of that nature,” says Patton. “So when they actually formed HBIGDA, Doctor Laub suggested that they include a consumer advocate, and he nominated me. The vote was fifteen to fifteen.” Patton says that the votes against were not against him personally—as “nobody really knew me”—but against the idea of having a consumer voice on the board at all. “I remember that someone stood up and said, I will not serve on any committee that has a consumer on it,’” he recalls.
Laub cast the deciding vote in favor of Patton’s membership, however, and Patton was elected. Patton served on the HBIGDA board from 1979 to 1981, and found the experience somewhat overwhelming. “I was very intimidated,” he says. “I was still a grad student, and these people were big names in the field.” Still, he says, “they were polite and they listened to me.” But after his two-year term expired, the board did not appoint another consumer advocate until 1997, when Patton was once again asked to serve, together with Sheila Kirk, M.D., an MTF surgeon. “It was my understanding that the position [of consumer advocate] would always be there,” he says. “But it didn’t happen again until 1997, when Sheila Kirk and I were contacted by the board. They knew our work and trusted us. I give Richard Green, who was president at the time, credit. He said, ‘It’s time.’” Patton believes that he was recruited to serve on the board again because of “the personal relationships I had developed over the years” with board members, and also because he is “an educator. I’m not a rabble-rouser,” he says.
The first order of business for the new Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association was the development of a treatment protocol, or “Standards of Care,” for transsexual people, one that would both protect them from unscrupulous practitioners and also continue to exert some measure of medical control over the process of sex reassignment. “HBIGDA recognized the rise of private practitioners and tried to guide their professional behavior,” writes Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed. “Under its original Standards of Care, private endocrinologists and surgeons could not offer treatment on demand. Psychologists and psychiatrists … were to recommend medical treatment, and they were to have seen their clients for several months before making such recommendations. MTFs were to live as women and FTMs were to live as men for at least a year before they could undergo surgery. If they adhered to these guidelines, private practitioners could protect their professional standing and distinguish themselves from ‘chop shop’ doctors like John Brown.”
The Benjamin Standards of Care were put into place by researchers associated with the Erickson Foundation, and carried over many of the practices (for example, the “real-life” test and the role of psychotherapists as gatekeepers) that had first evolved in the university clinics. “The first version of the Standards of Care was very similar to the guidelines that came out of the EEF-based research of Benjamin and the Hopkins clinic,” says Aaron Devor, who is working on a biography of Erickson. “I have to infer that Erickson was comfortable with the model as it was developing,” says Devor. “In the context in which the model was created and the opposing view—that anyone contemplating taking these steps was out of their mind—this is understandable.” Nonetheless, the Standards of Care and the medical model of trans-sexuality that they represented stood in direct contrast to the activist approach born in the seventies. Many transsexual people did not want to be “medicalized” and they did not want to be “pathologized.” They wanted access to surgery and/or hormones on demand without having to jump through a series of Standards of Care hoops. Their most radical claim, and the one that was to create a nearly unbridgeable chasm between proponents of the Benjamin model and an increasingly vocal and active transgender movement in the early nineties, was that American society, not transgender or transsexual people, had a “gender problem.”
CONVERSATION WITH TOM KENNARD
Kennard and his partner, Marianne, have been together for four years. Kennard was fifty-one at the time of this interview and spent many years in the lesbian community prior to his transition. Marianne is forty-three; she identifies as bisexual and has had relationships with both men and women. Soon after Kennard completed transition, Marianne discovered that she was losing her sight. On the morning I visited them in their home in San Francisco, Marianne was out with her mentor in a local support group, learning how to navigate the city alone. After her return, we went out for breakfast. I was impressed by the great tenderness Kennard displayed toward Marianne and by the way that they were working together to ease Marianne’s transition into a challenging new world.