Richard Green (1936 – 2019) Part 2: academic, administrator

 Continued from Part 1.

Also in 1987 Green published The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality.  The gender variant children whom he had studied in the 1970s having by then grown up, and Green was able to locate two-thirds of both the 'sissy' group and the control group.  He showed that ‘sissy’ boys who may be taken as early transgender boys girls actually mainly grew up to be gay, without transgender inclinations.  Only one was considering a sex change but was being put off by the difficulties.  Only one of the control group grew up to be bisexual.  No members of either group grew up to be transvestites.

In 1992 he published Sexual Science and the Law, a review of various sexual fields and their legal situation, mainly in the US, but also in the UK. In the chapter on intergenerational sexuality he wrote that the experience for the younger person was not uniformly negative, based on a literature review.  He later commented:

"Bruce Rind et al reached a similar conclusion from a more sophisticated meta-analysis and all hell broke loose. Fortunately for me, no one read my book.(quoted in Newman, 2009)"

In 1993 he was co-counsel for Elke Sommer in her successful libel suite against Zsa Zsa Gabor who had called Elke a has-been.

Since 1994 he has been Professor of Psychological Medicine, Imperial College, London, and research director at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, where he saw trans persons two days a week. His life partner Melissa Hines is a professor of psychology and director of the Behavioural Neuroendocrinology Research Unit at the City University of London.  He is also a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he caused a stir by having his students read Thomas O'Carroll's book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case.

He was president of HBIGDA 1997-9. In 2002 he passed the editorship of the Archives of Sexual Behavior to Kenneth Zucker.

In 2002 Green questioned why pedophilia is classified as a mental disorder.

In 2004, Green was the sole defender of John Money in the BBC documentary, Dr Money and the boy with no penis, on the David Reimer case:

‘‘Based on what we knew at the time about how you become male or female or boy or girl, knowing the difficulties of creating a penis surgically, the decision that John Money made was the correct one. I would have made the same one’’ (Green, 2008).

He was one of the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic psychiatrists who brought a complaint to the General Medical Council that Russell Reid too easily accepted patients for hormone therapy and surgery.

In 2006 he was awarded the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for Sexual Research.

In 2006, when HBIGDA changed its name to WPATH, Green objected that the change had not been put to a full-membership vote and achieved such a vote, but the name change was then voted for.

In 2008, after Alice Dreger had defended Michael Bailey's The Man who would be Queen, Green commented:

"Dreger's meticulously detailed and documented essay is on remarkedly even terrain ....  And who knows whether [Christine Jorgensen]'s life story was entirely factual? In 1952, how else was an ‘‘Ex-GI’’ to become a ‘‘Blond Beauty’’. Homosexuality was both a mental disorder and a crime. Transsexualism was neither. Was Christine’s autobiography a ‘‘fairy tale’’? .... Is the Board [of HBIGDA] aware that there are medical and psychiatric professionals, including a transsexual, who side with Bailey in this situation? ....  Conway, James, and McCloskey generated a fortune in publicity for Bailey’s book, attracting a moderate sized city of readers who otherwise would have never heard of it. (Lighten Up, 2008)"

In 2010 he criticized Ray Blanchard's proposal to introduce hebephilia as a mental disorder in the DSM-5.

In 2011, the Irish annulment case, B (formerly known as M) v. L, cited a diagnosis by Green that the husband was autogynephilic.

Playwright Bruce Bierman was one of the "sissy boys" seen by Green for seven years in the 1970s, until his parents removed him from the program when he was 13. Later he read Green's 1987 book, and in 2004 turned his memories of the experience into a solo performance, "The Blue Dress", that he presented in San Francisco.

++ Richard Green died age 82.

*Not the artist, nor the actor nor the cricketeer nor the chemist nor the footballer.

• Richard Green & John Money. "Incongruous Gender Role: Nongenital Manifestation in Pre-Pubertal Boys". Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 131, 1960: 160-168.
• Richard Green & John Money. "Effeminacy in prepubertal boys; Summary of eleven cases and recommendations for case management." Pediatrics Vol. 27 No. 2 February 1961, pp. 286-291.
• Richard Green. "Transsexualism: Mythological, Historical, and Cross-Cultural Aspects" and Bibliography. In Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press, 1966.Online at: www.mut23.de/texte/Harry%20Benjamin%20-%20The%20Transsexual%20Phenomenon.pdf.
• Richard Green & John Money (ed). Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press,. 1969.
• Richard Green. Sexual Identity Conflict in Children and Adults. New York: Basic Books, 1974.
• Richard Green. "One-Hundred Ten Feminine and Masculine Boys: Behavioral Contrasts and Demographic Similiarities". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 5,5,1976.
• Richard Green. "Sexual identity of thirty-seven children raised by homosexual or transsexual parents". American Journal of Psychiatry 135, 1978: 692-697.
• Richard Green. Human Sexuality: A Health Practitioner's Text. Williams & Wilkins, 1979.
• Paul A. Walker, Ph.D., Jack C. Berger, MD., Richard Green, MD., Donald R. Laub, M.D., Charles L. Reynolds, Jr., M.D. & Leo Wollman, M.D. Standards of Care: The hormonal and surgical sex reassignment of gender dysphoric persons. The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, Inc. 1979.
• Richard Green. "The International Academy of Sex Research: In the beginning". Archives of Sexual Behavior 14, 1985: 293-302.
• Richard Green, K. Williams & M. Goodman. "Ninety-nine "tomboys" and "non-tomboys": Behavioral contrasts and demorgraphic similarities". Archives of Sexual behavior, 11, 1982: 247-266.
• Jane E. Brody. "Psychiatrists on Homosexuality: Vigorous Discord Voiced at Meeting". The New York Times, Jan 26, 1982. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9E05E0D81E38F935A15752C0A964948260.
• Richard Green. The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987.
• Richard Green. Sexual Science and the Law. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992. 
• Vern L. Bullough & Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. University of Pennsylvania Press 1993: 273-4, 327-8.
• Richard Green. "American Law Does/Does Not Respond to the Transsexual". Gendys Conference, 1994. www.gender.org.uk/conf/1994/green.htm.
• Phyllis Burke.  Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male & Female.  Anchor Books, 1997: 33, 34, 43-6, 52-4, 120-3.
• DJ West & Richard Green (eds). Sociolegal Control of Homosexuality : A Multi-Nation Comparison. Springer, 1997.
• Katrina Fox. "Vancouver – The Richard Green Interview". RFTS, 1997 Online at: http://web.archive.org/web/20030609051314/http://www.rfts.a.se/rich_greene.html.
• Richard Green. "Transsexual's Children". International Journal of Transgenderism, 2,4, 1998. www.wpath.org/journal/www.iiav.nl/ezines/web/IJT/97-03/numbers/symposion/ijtc0601.htm.
• Dan Pine. "Boy in a blue dress: One-man show relives gender-bending childhood". Jweekly.com, June 18, 2004. www.jweekly.com/article/full/22941/boy-in-a-blue-dress.
• Richard Green. "Lighten up, Ladies". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 37,3, 2008: 451-452.
• Cynthia BrianKate.  “Feminine Boy Project”.  Stony Brook Press, March 2010.  http://www.sbpress.com/2010/03/30/feminine-boy-project/
• Richard Green. "The Three Kings: Harry Benjamin, John Money, Robert Stoller". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38, 2008: 610-613.
• Melanie Newman.  "Paedophilia research riles and titillates the academy".  Times Higher Education Supplement, 20 Sept 2009. www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408084. 
• "Application for annulment granted to wife of transsexual", The Irish Times, April 4, 2011. www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0404/1224293732456.html.
• Andrea James. "Richard Green on gender variance". TSRoadmap. www.tsroadmap.com/info/richard-green.html.
• Peter Tatchell.  "Richard Green obituary".  The Guardian, 15 April 2019.  Online.  

EN.Wikipedia       http://richard-green-sexologist.co.tv. ____________________________________________________________

The good:  like John Money, Richard Green pushed to permit transsexual operations at a time when the vast majority of psychiatrists were against such surgery, and like Money arranged for his institution to become a GIC.  He assisted Harry Benjamin and wrote approval letters for the patients who wanted surgery.  If things had gone differently, this could have rebounded against him later in his career.  He is one of very few sexologists to have written about male spouses of trans women.  He spoke up more than once for the rights of trans parents to continue their relationships with their children.  He appeared several times in court on behalf of trans women seeking to retain their jobs, and on behalf of the gay scout master (his one-time colleague Rekers testified in a different case on behalf of the Boy Scouts of America instead).  He questioned the stereotypes about pedophiles.  He was a major participant in removing adult homosexuality from the DSM.

On the other hand: He pioneered the Feminine Boy Project which has survived in the religious reparation therapy of NARTH and in Kenneth Zucker’s clinic at CAMH, although Green's conclusion that feminine boys merely grow up to become ordinary cis-homosexuals should invalidate the existence of reparative therapy.  Green originated the Archives of Sexual Behavior which has become the organ for the Freund-Blanchard-Bailey heresy.  While Green has many times spoken up for transsexuals against those who would deny surgery, and for employment and  parental rights, when it came to a conflict between his colleagues and trans academics after Bailey’s book was published, he sided with his colleagues – this is not surprising.  However when Russell Reid was under attack, he did not support him.

George Rekers later was a major person in the homophobic Family Research Council and NARTH, but resigned in 2010 after the press caught him on holiday with a rent boy.

The message of The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality that the vast majority of ‘sissy boys’ are not pre-transsexuals seems obvious now, but it needed to be said to counter false assumptions.  It is good that autobiographies are now coming out by cis men who talk about their sissy childhood:  Olivier Theyskens, Bruce Bierman, Kevin Sessums (Mississippi Sissy).

The boys were turning 20 or so when Green found them again to write The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality.   However some do not come out as gay or trans until middle age.  Now that almost another 25 years have passed, is it time for another follow-up?

Would you have confidence in these psychiatrists to distinguish between a transkid and a ‘sissy boy’?  Do you feel that weak hand-eye co-ordination, playing with dolls, playing with girls identifies a transkid?   12 such boys had reparative therapy.  There is no mention that any of the boys in either group had therapy to counter tendencies to bullying or homophobia.   Why is being nice a failure of socialization, but bullying is not?

How come the Richard Green Wikipedia page makes no mention at all of the Feminine Boy Project?  There is no Wikipedia page at all for the Feminine Boy Project.  The New York Times obituary of Ivar Lovaas somehow forgot to mention the Project, and when Phyllis Burke interviewed Lovaas for her book (p46-51) he was apparently trying to disremember his involvement.  Stony Brook is keeping quiet about its involvement.

If you do read The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of Homosexuality, I suggest that you also read Phyllis Burke's Gender Shock.  In fact I recommend Burke's book by itself.


Given that Green compiled the Bibliography for Benjamin’s book, one now understands why the books and articles in the text are not in the bibliography, and the books and articles in the bibliography are not mentioned in the text.  And also that all Green's publications up to 1966 are in the bibliography.