Reed Erickson, a wealthy philanthropist and transgender man, established the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) that developed educational pamphlets that gave basic advice to transsexuals on matters like legal name changes or where to find competent surgeons.

He funded Harry Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) and leveraged educational institutions like John Hopkins, Stanford, and UCLA to establish clinical research programs to develop transsexual medicine- which they did.