I was thrilled to read this. There remain far fewer transgender historical monographs in the field, compared to the number published in other sub-disciplines. This biography of Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist whose research and promotion of the effect of hormones on the human body, gender, and perceptions of health, fills a gap in our understanding of the formation of gender and transgender in the 20th century.
Li’s monograph is well-researched, pulling from a variety of sources to build a fleshy portrait of the man, but not only him; as with all good histories, Li produces a landscape of the era for the reader to understand the context of the individual. Benjamin, however, was a man beyond his time, thinking of gender in ways more similar to our own period than his — but that is the point: Benjamin is one of the forerunners of the way we think about gender today, as a spectrum. It is the contrast between him and his contemporaries which helps the reader visualize this landscape.
The chapters are chronological (rather than strictly thematic), offering the reader a clear trajectory of how concepts of gender and transgender — and here, especially — how the use of hormones became mainstream and effected changes in how medicine and healthcare as a whole.
I hesitate to write a full academic review as the digital review copy I had expired! Readers, this is a worthy book to read to grasp an often un-addressed aspect of transgender history!
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 