Trigger warning: This piece contains references to the appalling practice of conversion therapy
In the sixties it was noticed that, 'almost all adult male transsexuals... gave histories of dressing up as girls and pretending to be women in their play as children'. Amazing to relate, this dressing up was construed as the cause of later gender identity issues, not as a symptom.
Having got this back to front, psychologists speculated that if this behaviour persisted into puberty, it was likely to become fixed. In their eyes, that was the worst of all possible outcomes and so a solution was needed because otherwise, the only option was surgery.
That's the theory of transsexualism in a nutshell, direct from the people who helped mould the hypothesis. I'm constantly amazed how many many trans people do not appreciate how intertwined the theory of transsexualism is was with what became known as conversion therapy, or that trans people were one of the first groups to be subjected to it.
The entanglement happened because the group of opinion-leading psychologists believed, as one paper succinctly put it, that, ''...sex reassignment for these males as adults is a palliative treatment in which the body is altered to fit the mind because the individual is no longer able on willing to change his mind to fit his body.'
Note the word, 'palliative'. In other words, sex reassignment, as it was then known, was seen as a last ditch treatment when all else was lost. Once you have seen the theory of transsexualism through this lens, it is hard to see it as anything other that what it is, because the need to avoid palliation was used to justify conversion therapy.
Most of the reports I've found in the literature from this time concern children assigned male at birth (AMAB) whose preference was for a feminine gender identity. It's important to know that fifty years ago, gender affirming care didn't exist as such and transgender wasn't even a concept, because of the emerging theory of transsexualism. At this time, attitudes to incongruent gender identity were so radically different most professionals classified it as deviance, which was in line with the advice of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, aka the DSM.
It was also very common for psychologists to associate feminine gender identity in AMAB with future homosexuality. Why? We can thank Freud for that, because he collapsed the distinctions between sex, sexuality and gender, making the latter derivative of little more than anatomical differences between sexes. The concept of transsexualism was predicated upon this, which is why it's so strongly binary - ultimately this was what made it it fall apart in the 1990s when it became accepted that gender identity wasn't an either/or situation.
I quickly discovered a dozen papers, including some by Money, the psychologist who 'treated' David Reimer. Money's name comes often amongst transsexual theorists and was joint editor with Green on one of the core textbooks on the subject, which I suspect members here do not know or they possibly wouldn't be so free with the use of the words transsexualism or transvestism, because Blanchard was a fully paid up member of this group.
Some of the papers are just plain wild, my favourite being a case report about 'John' who had HRT and progressed to a 36B cup size before having an exorcism and faith healing during which it is said their breasts vanished (needless to say this could not be confirmed independently). However, despite its many rivals the poster child for all of these papers was published in 1974 by two psychologists at Harvard, Rekers and Lovaas.
Their case report begins: 'Young boys with feminine sex-typed behaviors have recently become the object of increased psychological interest, perhaps because of growing evidence that childhood cross-gender manifestations are indicative of later adult sexual abnormalities; e.g., transvestism, transsexualism,
or some forms of homosexuality.'
The report is written about a boy named Kraig, who 'had a history of cross-dressing since he was 2 yr old; at that time, he also began to play with cosmetic items of his mother and grandmother. When the mother's clothing was unavailable, Kraig very frequently improvised in cross-dressing.'
Nowadays we would take that as a very strong indicator that Kraig was trans, but wait, because Rekers and Lovaas wrote, 'Kraig's feminine behavior was increasingly leading him to social isolation and ridicule. Boys like Kraig are typically scorned by their peers and live a miserable social life. While society probably could afford to become more tolerant with individuals with sex-role deviations, the facts remain that it is not tolerant, and, realistically speaking, it is potentially more difficult to modify society's behaviors than Kraig's, in order to relieve Kraig's suffering.'
Notice how the authors conflate feminine traits with homosexuality, which remained in the DSM as a mental disorder until 1987. Gay sex did not become legal throughout the US until 2003 as far as i know, courtesy of Lawrence vs. Texas.
Rekers and Lovaas justified their subsequent actions on the grounds that it was more compassionate to change Kraig than it was to support him in the gender he identified. This is how many of our parents will have rationalised their behaviour when they were making our lives hell for being gender incongruent. It was for our own good.
What the Rekers and Lovaas did next with Kraig is called 'operant conditioning,' the shaping of behaviour through punishment and reward, although in this case the punishment and reward were (mostly) emotional. Kraig was then aged about five.
The two set up various tables packed with toys judged suitable for masculine play (including a toy machine gun, plastic soldiers, and miniature airplanes) and feminine play (a doll with feminine clothes, a crib, and a set of toy dishes.) Then they manipulated his mother's reaction to Kraig playing with each type of toy to change his behaviour.
'During the session, the mother was helped to extinguish feminine behavior (verbal and play) by instructions over the earphones such as, "stop talking to him now", "pick up the book and read", "ignore him now", "look away from him". Immediately after the mother's correct response, the experimenter verbally reinforced that response; e.g., "good", "great, that's what we want", "that's right", "excellent". Similarly, if the subject picked up a masculine toy when the mother was not watching, the experimenter instructed her, "quick, look at him now", or "talk to him now".
These sessions were backed up by more of the same at home, along with a system of tokens, the award of red ones for feminine behaviour leading, amongst other things, to being spanked by his father. Three years later, when the authors followed up Kraig for the last time, he was no longer exhibiting any feminine behaviours and had developed some masculine ones that even the authors had to admit were sociopathic. At that stage, he was but eight years old.
This, Rekers and Lovaas called progress, though they added the caveat: 'Only follow-up evaluations on these children at 15 to 20 yr of age... will allow us to claim a preventative treatment for extreme adult sexual deviations of transvestism, transsexualism, or some forms of homosexuality.' It makes you want to put your head in your hands, though it probably didn't read as badly then as it does now.
Rekers and Lovaas' view was under fire by 1977, when Winkler questioned the many value judgements the two had made, adding that, 'Ability to behave in both "masculine" and "feminine" ways according to the demands of different situations would seem a more desirable goal than strengthening only one type of sex-role behavior'.
Winkler's final paragraph included the words, 'It appears that Rekers and Lovaas have not attended to research indicating that the popular mythology about sex roles may be misleading, and therefore fail to see a discrepancy between conforming to parental wishes and promoting social adjustment in the psychological sense'.
Kraig wasn't the only luckless child to go through 'treatment' of this sort and as far as I know, no systematic long term follow up was carried out on him or anyone else who had similar treatment by the authors who dished it out. Which is odd, because given the volume of research I can find, this type of conversion therapy must have been widespread between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Why the experiment was carried out at all baffles me, because the only difference between parents making a child's life hell for playing with the 'wrong' gender toys and a pair of psychologists doing the same is parents don't usually write it up in a scientific journal. More to the point, given the experiences I and so many people here have had, I'm inclined to wonder if the 'treatment' was the end of it for Kraig as Rekers and Lovaas supposed.
One reason I believe it may not have been the end of Kraig's story is that a 2024 study of 6601 people who had been subject to what we now call conversion therapy found strong correlations with post traumatic stress disorder and depression. Even the recall of their exposure to this kind of therapy was associated with a range of anxiety and depressive symptoms in people from sexual orientation and gender identity minorities.
Despite this and similar findings from many other papers, conversion therapy remains legal in many countries including the UK.
This is but one of the area where our Parliament has sat on its hands over transgender issues. A ban was on the cards a couple of years ago, but the present government has abandoned it for fear of upsetting religious groups. Given the churches' admitted failure to root out child abuse, including the recent scandal that led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, this does not seem wise.
The good news is conversion therapy is discredited amongst all but a tiny percentage of psychologists today, the bad is that parents everywhere are still permitted to go right ahead with their own version of what happened half a century ago. In most western countries, physical abuse of children is against the law, yet parents remain free to subject them to the most appalling psychological abuse if they aren't gender normative. Which the founding theorists of transsexualism fully supported, so why do we still use this word?
