Walter Benjamin Syndrome

There's no automatic, linear progress in trans science. It has to be fought for. Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed documents this struggle; it's filled with fascinating stories of trans individuals and doctors who pushed against orthodoxy to make physical sex transition a reality. The emergence of fascism and the Second World War led Walter Benjamin to write his critique of comfortable left-wing visions of progress in 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' in 1940. One of the most famous photographs of book-burning from the period of Nazi rule shows the papers of the Institute of Sexual Science being consumed, in 1933. A bust of Magnus Hirschfeld's head can be seen. Jewish, homosexual and a member of the German Social Democratic Party, Hirschfeld, who led the Institute, was called by Hitler 'the most dangerous man in Germany'. At the ISS in Berlin Hirschfeld researched and helped to arrange some of the world's first sex reassignment operations for transsexual women. When people talk about trans politics and research as something newfangled, it's important to remember the historical acts of suppression that enables this judgement.

The notion of reviving the past in Benjamin's theses is relevant from a trans-political perspective - an attentive look at anthropology and history reveals an intriguing diversity in gender identities and behaviours; trans is no new thing. Leslie Feinberg's popular manifesto Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come tells the story of the crushing of these gender variant forms of life in the early modern period. Trans liberation not only engages the forefront of modern science; it unleashes again human desires repressed in Europe by Christianisation and elsewhere by colonisation.

Without modernity, the medical discoveries that made physical transition possible could not have occurred. But this was no automatic outcome. Transition had to be fought for - will continue to require this. In just the same way, as John D'Emilio argued in 'Capitalism and Gay Identity', the growth of urban life in the United States made the living of a homosexual life and the development of gay communities possible. Yet without the active struggle by gay people for liberation - the seizure of the possibilities for freedom immanent in capitalist modernity - then nothing could have changed. The conflictual play between capitalist development and purposive human action - ideal-political projects - drives what we call social progress.

Historian Susan Stryker uncovered a Stonewall-like historical event from 1966, the Compton's Cafeteria riot, in which a group of drag queens in San Francisco (many today would be called trans women) struck against police harassment. I give way to Stryker, despite my loathing of long quotations. She makes the point that they would have been aware of the recent developments in the medical profession surrounding transsexuality, and these galvanised their struggle:

'One thing that made the incident at Compton's different from similar incidents...was a new attitude toward transgender healthcare in the United States. Doctors in Europe had been using hormones and surgery for more than fifty years to improve the quality of life for transgender people who desired those procedures; doctors in the United States had always been reluctant to do so, however, fearing that to operate or administer hormones would only be colluding with a deranged person's fantasy... And after 1949, California Attorney General Pat Brown's legal opinion against genital modification created legal exposure for doctors who performed genital surgery. This situation began to change in July of 1966, just before the Compton's Cafeteria riot, when Dr. Harry Benjamin published a pathbreaking book, The Transsexual Phenomenon. In it, he used the research he had conducted with transgender patients during the past seventeen years to advocate for the same style of treatment that Magnus Hirschfeld had promoted in Germany before the Nazi takeover. Benjamin essentially argued that a person's gender identity could not be changed, and that the doctor's responsibility was thus to help transgender people live fuller and happier lives in the gender they identified as their own. Benjamin's book helped bring about a sea change in medical and legal attitudes. Within a few months of its publication, the first "sex change" program in the United States was established at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School.

The sudden availability of a new medical paradigm for addressing transgender needs undoubtedly played a role in creating a flash point at Compton's, where long-standing grievances finally erupted into violence. When people struggling against an injustice have no hope that anything will ever change, they use their strength to survive; when they think that their actions matter, that same strength becomes a focus for positive change. Because Benjamin worked in San Francisco for part of every year, some of his patients were the very Tenderloin street queens who would soon start fighting back to improve their lives. They were intimately familiar with his work. Of course, not every male-bodied person who lived and worked in women's clothes in the Tenderloin wanted surgery or hormones, and not all of them thought of themselves as women or as transsexuals. But many of them did. And for thsoe who did, the changes in medical-service provision that Benjamin recommended must have been an electrifying call to action. The next time the police raided their favorite neighborhood hangout, they had something to stand up for.'