Against the “Tyranny of the Calendar:” Sexology, Gerontotherapy, and Harry Benjamin’s Biological Age Estimation

• In Event: Sexing Sciences, Sciencing Sex

English Abstract

This paper explores one of the earliest articulations of biological age estimation through its measuring methods and biopolitical aspirations. In 1947, German-American physician and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, better known for his work on transsexuality, published his method for biological age estimation in the Journal of Gerontology, the first of its kind. Drawing from published and archival material, I argue that Benjamin developed a practice of biological age estimation to demonstrate the efficacy of “gerontotherapy”, a term he coined in the 1940s as a scientific refashioning of glandular rejuvenation after it increasingly fell under critique by medical authorities as quackery. Further, I argue that Benjamin framed biological age as a biopolitical tool through which to organize social institutions and address social problems, ranging from retirement policy to the legalization of prostitution to the outcomes of diplomacy and war. This, I suggest, constituted a type of gerontotherapeutic vision of the future: a world in which the medical treatment of aging and widespread usage of biological age estimation both revitalized individual health and maintained a vigorous and prosperous nation. In conversation with the scholarly literature in trans history about Benjamin as a key figure in trans medicine, my examination of Benjamin’s gerontotherapeutic practice reveals the historical interactions between the disciplines of gerontology and sexology through the nexus point of biological age estimation.

Author

• Ben Maldonado, Harvard University