Harry Benjamin
Harry Benjamin · Science & Medicine
Endocrinologist who founded the medical care of transgender people, author of The Transsexual Phenomenon, son of a Jewish-born father from Schwedt
12 janvier 1885, Berlin, Allemagne — 24 août 1986, New York, États-Unis
Berlin, New York
Harry Benjamin is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Endocrinologist who founded the medical care of transgender people, author of The Transsexual Phenomenon, son of a Jewish-born father from Schwedt
Origins and early life
Harry Benjamin was born in Berlin on 12 January 1885, the son of Julius Benjamin, born in 1847 into a Jewish merchant family of Schwedt on the Oder, who converted to Christianity before marrying Bertha Hoffmann, a Lutheran; Harry and his siblings were raised Lutherans, and the Jewish origin of his father, which this fiche states as its basis, followed him nonetheless through the prejudices of his Berlin youth, as his biographer Alison Li has shown.
He took his medical degree at Tübingen in 1912, sailed to New York the next year to work on a tuberculosis cure that proved a fraud, and was stranded in America by the outbreak of war; he stayed, and practiced in New York for seventy years.
Work and career
An endocrinologist and gerontologist, a friend of Magnus Hirschfeld and of Eugen Steinach, whose rejuvenation treatments he championed, he was sixty-three when, in 1948, Alfred Kinsey sent him a patient — a child who wanted to be a girl — and he found his life's work: he became the first physician in America to treat transgender people with hormones and to refer them for surgery, to listen to them rather than to try to cure them of what they knew themselves to be, and his book The Transsexual Phenomenon, of 1966, gave the condition its clinical description and its name, and gave his patients the standing of patients.
The association founded in his honor in 1979, now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, wrote the standards of care that medicine follows. He died in New York on 24 August 1986, at one hundred and one.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10718274/
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Endocrinologist who founded the medical care of transgender people, author of The Transsexual Phenomenon, son of a Jewish-born father from Schwedt
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10718274/
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