50 Years of Sex Changes, Mental Disorders, and Too Many Suicides

Dateline Oct 4, 1966: The New York Daily News gossip column reported a girl was making the rounds in Manhattan clubs who admitted to being a man in 1965. She had undergone a sex-change operation in Baltimore at the Johns Hopkins gender clinic.

By 1979, thirteen years later, enough gender surgeries had been performed to evaluate the results. It was time for a report card based on actual patients.

1970s: How effective was the change surgery? What were the outcomes for transgender people?

The first report comes from Dr. Harry Benjamin, a strong advocate for cross-gender hormone therapy and gender-reassignment surgery, who operated a private clinic for transsexuals. According to an article in the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, “By 1972, Benjamin had diagnosed, treated, and befriended at least a thousand of the ten thousand Americans known to be transsexual.”

Dr. Benjamin’s trusted colleague, endocrinologist Charles Ihlenfeld administered hormone therapy to some 500 transgender people over a period of six years at Benjamin’s clinic—until he became concerned about the outcomes. “There is too much unhappiness among people who have the surgery,” he said. “Too many of them end as suicides. 80% who want to change their sex shouldn’t do it.” But even for the 20% he thought might be good candidates for it, sex change is by no means a solution to life’s problems. He thinks of it more as a kind of reprieve. “It buys maybe 10 or 15 years of a happier life,” he said, “and it’s worth it for that.”

But then, Ihlenfeld himself never had a sex change. I did, and I disagree with him on that last point: The reprieve is not worth it. After I had a reprieve of seven or eight years, then what? I was worse off than before. I looked like a woman—my legal documents identified me as a woman—yet I found that at the end of the “reprieve” I wanted to be a man every bit as passionately as I had once yearned to be a woman. Recovery was difficult.

Read here