Talking Back: Greer Lankton’s Medical Magic and Harry Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon

Greer Lankton’s works from the 1980s and 1990s intrepidly address her own experiences of gender transition and demonstrate visual art’s unique capacity to not only expand discourse on transgender histories in the United States but also reflect the absurdity of gender norms altogether. In Medical Magic, an artist’s book, Lankton restores subjective experience to sterile medical discourses by directly citing the visual language of 1970s-era medical approaches to transsexuality. Lankton made this book for a class assignment at the Pratt Institute in 1981, and it is now in the collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. The cover features a punk-inspired collage of two illustrated images of Lankton’s own figure—one in profile facing left and one from behind. Lankton presents herself clothed only in a pair of light-colored, high-waisted underpants and with her eyes concealed by the fading ink of a black marker. Striking out the eyes to conceal the identities of individuals was a technique used by many medical texts that described the treatment of “transsexual” patients. Most famous among them was Dr. Harry Benjamin’s book Transsexual Phenomenon, which documents anonymized patients as examples of the methods and results of sex and gender transformation that he helped develop. This paper looks closely at Medical Magic to describe how and to what end it renews discourses on surgeries that have been sidelined in transgender discourse in recent years.