Transgender

Forum














The Art of Politics

Gender Shock

by Judy Osborne

When I was five I wanted to be one of the girls, though at Christmas that year I knew I’d better pretend I liked my baseball mitt better than my sister’s pink taffeta party dress.

Something predating my earliest memory had convinced me that boyhood was a far safer place than girlhood for a person with a boy body. I’m not sure what I feared. Had my strict Christian parents discovered some hint of femininity and tried to beat it out of me? Had I already found out the hard way that being a sissy involved dire consequences in the neighborhood? I’ll never know, but a gift helped me discover how smart I was back then to shut up about the notion that I didn’t like the guy stuff all that well.

Two friends from work helped me celebrate my birthday a while ago with a long and raucous lunch at a Capitol Hill cafe in Seattle and the gift of a book called Gender Shock. Subtitled "Exploding the Myths of Male and Female" much of the book describes what might have happened to me if I had insisted on trading in the mitt for a party dress of my own.

The book grew our of author Phyllis Burke’s "problem" raising her son without a male role-model. Burke had lectured widely following the publication of her first book, Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son. Audiences universally asked the question: "Who is going to teach him how to be a man?"

Burke equivocated with her answers and struggled for a solution to the perceived "problem" until one day an elderly woman in the audience slammed down her fist and shouted that she had raised her sons after her husband’s death by using "all the parts of me to do it" and that "there’s nothing wrong with them."

Burke began to use all her parts to raise her own son, including "the trapped half of our identity, where we have hidden those parts of ourselves that are considered gender inappropriate." She realized that her son needed many people who bring "joy and compassion" into his life, but "the fact that they are male or female is the least important fact of all."

Burke pursued her growing interest in the way our society imposes strict rules of gender. In the process, she encountered and unmasked three of society’s myths: "that gender (or behavior) is a result of sex (the body itself)", "that gender and sexuality are linked within the body and are the same thing", and "that there are only two kinds of bodies: the male and the female". She began to see "clearly that gender, sex and sexuality are three distinct domains, and the variance within each domain is extraordinary."

The author researched case histories of kids who failed to conform to the gender expectations of parents and "mental health" professionals. That’s where the horror begins. As Burke describes in graphic detail, concerned parents and homophobic psychiatrists applied a whole panoply of behavioral, drug and reinforcement techniques, eventually convincing unknown numbers of young children to take their gender incongruity underground.

There’s the case of Becky, 7, who refused to wear dresses and stomped around with her pants stuffed into her cowboy boots. She liked basketball and climbing and took big, sure-footed strides. She scored in the high-average range of intelligence, and her behavior at school was not reported as a problem.

Then there was Jerry, a well-adjusted nine year old who wasn’t good at sports and preferred girls as friends.

Becky’s mother turned Becky over to a Harvard and UCLA-trained clinical psychologist doing experimental behavioral treatment under a government grant. The psychologist diagnosed Becky with "gender identity disorder" and found her at risk for "transsexualism, adult homosexuality, neuroticism, personality disorder, drug and alcohol abuse, an unstable work record, depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, schizophrenia and psychiatric hospitalization." Becky’s "treatment" lasted for about two hundred sessions using sex-typed toys and a system of rewards and punishments, with three people checking her every move and a fourth timing her, Becky eventually was pronounced "cured". The cure meant that she played exclusively with "girls" toys while the researchers were watching her.

Jerry was forced to engage in sports and was paired up for school work with Mike, the star athlete and most popular boy in his class. Jerry had a terrible time trying to play football and was ridiculed and rejected repeatedly by Mike. He was judged to have made significant progress when he joined Mike in teasing the girls, his former friends. While retrospectively analyzing the case during the 90’s, the same researcher told Burke that, without treatment, the girls would have rejected Jerry because "Girls don’t want sensitive and caring. They want the jerks. It’s the only fatal flaw of women. They’re drawn to these kinds of men."

Both children were tested and found to be sufficiently gender-rigid at the end of their treatments. Reports from their case histories indicate that both Jerry and Becky suffered a considerable loss in self-esteem. Nothing is known about their issues later in life.

It gets worse. Kraig, 4, was entered in UCLA’s "Feminine Boy" project. After researchers subjected Kraig to a series of positive/negative reinforcement techniques, including spankings, Kraig’s mother was required to withdraw all attention whenever Kraig played with toys considered feminine. The four-year-old became so hysterical he had to be dragged, screaming, from the room. Available for follow-up research years later, Kraig had become a man terrified about his sexuality, worried about anything that might make him appear feminine, and experiencing "shame" as the dominant theme of his life. At eighteen he attempted suicide.

For the ultimate horror, Burke goes on to relate the histories of Kit, Jamie and Daphne, kids no more gender deviant than Becky, Jerry and Kraig, who were locked in "hospitals" for much of their adolescence, subjected to electroshock and a variety of drugs, and taught to hate their natural feelings of gender. The "Daphne" is Daphne Scholinski, who offers a chilling record of her own incarceration and "therapy" in the autobiography of her youth, The Last Time I Wore a Dress."

Gender Shock is rich in its analysis of many issues of concern to the transgender community. The author uncovers glaring misuses of the American Psychiatric Association’s "Gender Identity Disorder" diagnosis. She delves into the works of such "gender gurus" as Marianne Williamson and Robert Bly who perpetuate stereotypes of masculine and feminine behavior. She exposes the vast cruelty and arrogance of the mental health establishment in treating those who stray from gender norms. Throughout, Burke documents her contention that such treatments continue today "in clinics and private practice all over the world."

I like best Burke’s persuasive argument that natural gender behavior is a continuum from masculine to feminine, not two poles apart. As she concludes, "By releasing ourselves from the bipolar trap and claiming gender independence, we have the opportunity to affirm those parts of ourselves we have denied but need."

TGF's Home Page