Mick Hartley

More on WPATH, and its dodgy history, from Malcolm Clark at The Critic:

Its founder Harry Benjamin began his career in the late 1930s in New York promoting quack hormone cures based on the work of the now discredited German medic Eugen Steinach who, among other things, claimed he could cure homosexuality by implanting tiny grafts of a heterosexual men’s testicles into gay men’s bodies. Ironically, this attempt to turn confused, self-loathing gays straight may be the only consistent thread in WPATH’s shameful history.

Harry Benjamin became obsessed with transsexuality in the late 1950s and in 1963 treated a fabulously wealthy lesbian heiress called (Rita/) Reed Erickson who believed she was a man. She was so pleased with the results of her mastectomy and testosterone injections she helped Benjamin set up the predecessor of WPATH, the US-based Harry Benjamin Foundation and its later global equivalent the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. She then poured vast sums of money into both. Without her largesse it is inconceivable that today’s gender affirmation colossus would have taken root. She funded support groups, international conferences, films and lectures. She also worked with Benjamin on his first Standards of Care. It was through Benjamin and his good friend the distinctly creepy scientist John Money that Erickson paid for the first gender identity clinic in the States at John Hopkins University.

If this sounds like an uplifting story of private wealth enabling medical innovation it requires important context. Erickson saw her gender identity funding as just a small part of her commitment to all sorts of New Age ideas that she hoped would “expand our understanding of human consciousness”.

Among the recipients of barrow-loads of her moolah were all sorts of cranks from the parapsychologist Stanley Krippner, who claimed to be able to communicate telepathically, to the marine laboratory of neuroscientist John Lilly who claimed he was on the brink of being able to communicate with dolphins. His research programme was shut down after local papers revealed a female scientist had been regularly masturbating a male dolphin. As you do. Lilly was also by then a ketamine addict as was Erickson herself. Did I mention she poured yet more of her money into ketamine research? If only she’d realised it’s never a good idea to get high on your own supply.

The point is that none of these projects was considered less important to Erickson than that of Harry Benjamin’s. The bank transfers continued for all of them even as Erickson had to take refuge from drug charges in a huge estancia in Mexico. It was there in 1976 that the “writer” Helen Schuman was flown by private jet to meet Erickson and her pet leopard. Schuman convinced her to pay for the publication of A Course in Miracles, a book Schuman insisted had been dictated to her by Jesus himself. You may scoff at Schuman, and I do, but on the upside she hasn’t been responsible for the castration of thousands of boys or the mutilation of thousands of girls.

A Course in Miracles still sells. Krippner, who is in his dotage now, is still researching. Lilly, long dead, still has his fans. But only the gender pseudoscience that Erickson helped establish and funded for three decades has managed to sink its tentacles into public life and medicine. The reason it alone was able to do this was because it tapped into the language of social justice and identity politics. There was no community of angry dolphin-communicators to cancel those who denied their delusion. No bands of telepathic activists who claimed they would commit suicide if we didn’t use their newly invented pronouns. We would never accept Ketamine devotees picketing medical meetings to try to enforce prescribing the drug to children.

The leaks from WPATH should mark the start of a long overdue re-assessment of this dodgy lobby group by medical regulators. But that’s not enough. It’s time they explained why they fell for the rebranding of an organisation set up by a pill-pushing fraudster and funded by a drug-addled crank. The harm caused by serious institutions embracing its pseudo-science and magical thinking has been incalculable.

Yep, it's cranks all the way down in the golden age of American crankery, from Scientology to Carlos Castaneda to orgone boxes to multiple personalities. Scientology, cleverly, formalised itself as a religion. Gender ideology, of course, has many of the same cult-like characteristics. The astonishing thing though is how successful it's been, managing to position itself as the progressive follow-on to gay liberation. Countless confused children have paid the price….