Ira Pauly

Education and career

Pauly earned his undergraduate degree with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1954, where he was a standout football and rugby player. He won the Bruins' 1952 most improved player trophy and 1953 Spirit and Scholarship Award and was named a First Team Academic All-American in 1953. That season, UCLA won the Pacific Coast Conference and played in the Rose Bowl, during which he started both ways, as center and linebacker. He was selected as the 1953 Los Angeles Jewish Collegiate Athlete of the Year by B'nai B'rith. In 2004, Pauly was inducted into the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

He graduated from UCLA Medical School in 1958.

In the 1960s, while on the faculty at University of Oregon Medical School, Pauly began writing and speaking about treatment of transsexualism. He became supportive of sex reassignment surgery in 1961 "after soul-searching deliberation." Pauly noted that both transsexualism and abortion were "sex and tabooed topics" that elicited strong responses. Pauly is credited for undertaking the first global review of the published outcome data on transsexualism in 1965. Also in the mid-1960s, he began collaborating with endocronologist Harry Benjamin, who cited Pauly's work in The Transsexual Phenomenon. The two later worked to popularize their research in the lay press. In 1975, Pauly and University of Oregon medical student Thomas W. Lindgren introduced the Body Image Scale, with which subjects rate feelings about 30 body parts from 1 (very satisfied) to 5 (very dissatisfied). His 1981 follow-up report on outcome data was later published with independent reviews by Bengt Lundström and Jan Wålinder in 1984. Pauly served as president of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now known as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, from 1985 to 1987.

Pauly left Oregon for an appointment as professor and chairman, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Nevada School of Medicine in Reno, Nev. Under his leadership, the Department of Psychiatry developed a fully accredited residency. He retired from the medical school in 1994.

Pauly also served on the American Psychiatric Association's Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders.

He continued to practice clinically until 2010.

Family

He married Ann Flanagan in 1960. He has four sons, Brett, Quinn, Devin and Tye, and seven grandchildren.