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Showing posts with label 1980s gender theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1980s gender theory. Show all posts

26 July 2013

Walter L. Williams (1948–) anthropologist.

Walter Lee Williams completed a PhD in History and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He became Professor of Anthropology, History and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California in 1979.

Williams read and was impressed by Jonathan Katz' 1976 Gay American History which contains a section on 'berdaches'. He began research on the subject at the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, but quickly found better resources at the the Gay and Lesbian archives at ONE, Inc. He gave his first paper on the subject at a history conference and was scolded for even discussing it by a leading historian who had previously written letters of recommendation for him.

One, Inc put Williams in touch with gay pioneer Harry Hay who had lived for years on native reservations. In 1982 Williams set out to find a living 'berdache', and did so among the Omaha, and then another among the Lakota. He followed this with a field trip to the Yucatán where he met Mayan 'berdaches'. He also did ethnographic fieldwork living on Eastern Cherokee, Seminole, Pine Ridge Sioux, Aleut and Navajo Nation reservations.

In 1986 Williams published The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture.
Williams' book was a ground-breaking summary of the literature supplemented by his fieldwork. He outed himself in the book as a gay researcher, and discussed the alliance of living 'berdaches' with the then gay movement. He dismissed the idea that a 'berdache' was transsexual:
"It is worth noting that many transsexuals may pass for women because there is no respected alternative to masculinity in this society. Bodily mutilation is a heavy price to pay for the ideology of biological determination. American Indian cultures, through the berdache tradition, do provide alternative gender roles. Indians have options not in terms of either/or, opposite categories, but in terms of various degrees along a continuum between masculine and feminine."
He also included sections on gay pirates and cowboys that are not of obvious relevance to the topic of the book.

The Spirit and the Flesh won the Gay Book of the Year Award from the American Library Association, the Ruth Benedict Award from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists, and the Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the World Congress for Sexology.

Harry Hay reviewed the book and criticized it for conflating winkte or nádleehé or other 'berdache' with gay and for de-emphasizing the ceremonial and spiritual aspect of the role. However he concluded:
"All that being said, the book is also a vast compendium of gaily related information, chock-a-block full of new anthropological notions to explore, old academic confusions to clean up, and all of it very readable. ... The Spirit and the Flesh is, for all its faults, clearly a giant step in the direction of enabling, perhaps even empowering, Heteros to see Gay People as we wish to be heard. It is without a doubt a book no serious library can in future be without. (p282)"
Four years later the third annual intertribal First Nations/Native American gay and lesbian conference in Winnipeg voted strongly for the term 'two-spirit' and that the term 'berdache" not be used.

Williams was co-founder, with an ex-boyfriend, of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History for the American Historical Association, and was an officer of the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists.

In 1992 a second revised edition of The Spirit and the Flesh was published, but still used the terms 'berdache' and 'Indian'.

In 1994 Williams got the University of Southern California to provide space for the ONE Gay and Lesbian Archives.

In 1997 Jean-Guy A. Goulet re-analyzed the original 1947 and 1954 accounts of the Northern Athapaskans and demonstrated that Williams' paraphrase added an unwarranted conclusion.



The same year Pat Califia in Sex changes: the politics of transgenderism made the obvious, but not previously well articulated, point that both Katz and Williams talk of 'berdaches' as gay, but surely they are a type of transgender. Califia comments:
"Williams' position on the gender of the berdache is ambiguous. On the one hand he is forced to admit at the very least that the berdache was differently-gendered, combining male and female qualities, occupying a social role that was 'half-man, half-woman' and 'not-man, not-woman'. Yet he insists, in an amazing series of arguments, that the berdache were not women, transvestites, hermaphrodites, or transsexuals.(p132)"
"Why is Williams so reluctant to simply own the fact that one of the most important defining qualities of a berdache was her donning of female apparel? His line of reasoning here seems based almost entirely on distaste about transvestism, which he dismisses as an embarrassing sexual kink. ... I assume that Williams would come down hard on a straight researcher who insisted on interpreting homosexuality solely through the lens of medical or psychiatric pathology and protest if it was discussed only as a recently-discovered type of sexual abnormality. Why doesn't he reject a similar definition of and treatment of transvestism and transsexuality? (p133)"
Williams lived for extended periods in Thailand, Indonesia (as a Fulbright scholar), Cambodia, Philippines, and other parts of Asia and the south Pacific.

In 2006 Williams added an author's note in Amazon:
"Unless continued sales of this book will justify the publication of a third revised edition in the future, it is not possible to rewrite what is already printed. Therefore, I urge readers of this book, as well as activists who are working to gain more respect for gender variance, mentally to substitute the term "Two-Spirit" in the place of "berdache" when reading this text."
In February 2011 Williams suddenly quit his position at the University of Southern California, and relocated to Cancún, Yucatán, after being questioned by Los Angeles police after returning from a trip to the Philippines. In June 2013 the FBI put Williams on its Ten Most Wanted list, the 500th person to gain that distinction.

He was arrested by the Yucatán local police the next day, reportedly having been shopped by a local resident for the $100,000 award. He was extradited to Los Angeles and arraigned. He was charged with sexual assault and predation on two 14-year-old boys from the Philippines with whom he engaged in webcam sex and then flew to the Philippines to have sex with in December 2010. He was said to be facing 100 years in prison, but in September 2014, he pled guilty to one count on the understanding of serving no more than five years. 
EN.WIKIPEDIA   LinkedIn   WorldCat   Amazon.US
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There are some issues to be raised against The Spirit and the Flesh, but it was the first book-length discussion of North American aboriginal gender variation.  There are now almost a shelf-full of such books, but it was Williams who opened the door.   There is no such shelf of books on South American or Australian aboriginal gender variation.

The fact that Katz and Williams regarded two spirit persons as homosexual rather than transgender, and were not really called out about it until Pat Califia’s 1997 book, is a demonstration of the changing social construction of sex and gender.

Apparently Wikipedia did not have a page on Williams until his arrest.   The current page says nothing at all about his academic career.  In addition the page is called “Walter Lee Williams” in the style of US policing, and the several mentions of “Walter L Williams” (as he is always listed on his books) on other Wikipedia pages do not click through.

Williams has been arrested in Mexico for a crime said to have been committed in the Philippines, based on an anonymous denunciation.   There is no mention of a Filipino request for his extradition.   Given that Gary Glitter, the most famous westerner to be convicted for child sexual abuse in East Asia was sentenced in Vietnam to three years and released after two, the US probably does not want to risk that the Philippines might be as liberal as its Communist neighbour.

There has been a rush by universities and gay organizations to dis-associate from Williams although he is merely accused.   He has not yet been tried.  The concept of ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is merely a memory from the past.

The Victoria Brownworth, who wrote the article above for the Advocate, is the same person who has been having a contretemps with Cristan Williams (no relation to Walter)
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16 April 2013

A review of Kris Kirk & Ed Heath - Men in Frocks, 1984

There are three books on trans people in the UK in the 1980s: this book, Richard Ekins' Male Femaling and Liz Hodgkinson's Body Shock.  I have all three side by side on my shelf.  Each book focuses on a different group:  Hodgkinson on SHAFT, Ekins on the Beaumont Society and Kirk and Heath on the TV/TS group.  Somehow this results in no one person appearing in more than one book, although in reality there was migration among the three groups - for example we have seen that Janette Scott moved from the executive of the TV/TS group to the executive of the Beaumont Society.

Christopher Pious Mary Kirk (1950 – 1993) was a journalist for Gay News in the early 1980s. Later he was an openly gay music journalist writing for Melody Maker, The Guardian and other publications. In 1984 he published Men In Frocks, with photographs by his lover Ed Heath. In 1986, Channel 4 television broadcast a documentary-drama about Kris Kirk entitled A Boy Called Mary. In 1988 Kris and Ed moved to rural Wales to open a bookshop, but three years later Kris found that he had Aids. He went blind in 1992, and died in 1993. Other works: A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk's Greatest Hits, 1990 - a collection of his music journalism.

  • Kris Kirk with photographs by Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press 1984.


Note: this book was written in the early 1980s and thus, inevitably, it does not conform to the expectations of the 2010s.   The title was perhaps ill-chosen even then.   Kris, several times in the book has to apologize that a person (Poppy Cooper, Roz Kaveney, Letitia Winter) is not a man in a frock, they having become a woman.  However the book is of major historical interest, and many of its observations are still valid.



Introduction

Kris asks where you would have looked if you wanted to wear drag in the 1940s?
"Well, if you were lucky enough to be on one of the few gay grapevines - and the right gay grapevine at that - you might hear of a secret party in somebody's private home where you could slip on a frock on arrival and slip it off again when you left.  There was little else. ... So what happened between then and now? What triggered off the rise of drag in Britain?"  
His answer is that
"The evolution of modern drag goes hand in glove with the increased visibility of those gay men who not only enjoy debunking the traditional male image, but also enjoy doing it in public."
Vivian Namaste has claimed that the pioneering for trans people was mainly done by sex workers, but has declined to provide a supporting narrative for her claim.  Kris' claim for the pioneering by gays is found in this book.

The Chorus Queens

Following the Second World War a venue of sorts did open up for the isolated few who wanted something other than the stereotyped male role.  In California Louise Lawrence was introducing trans women to each other, as was Marie André Schwidenhammer in Paris.  However in Britain the only option was the soldiers-in skirts revues, and of course to get into those you had to have some inclination, if not actual talent, towards singing and dancing, although you did not have to have actually served in the forces. The first such show was actually a US import, Irving Berlins' This is the Army, which played the London Palladium for four nights in 1944.  The going wage in the British versions was £6 or £7 a week and half of that went on draughty digs where they sometimes had to share four-to-a-bed.  We have already noted Poppy Cooper whose path to womanhood was via these revues. Other performers included Terry Gardener and Canadian Loren Lorenz.  Shelley Summers did drag while with HM forces in Burma until 1947 (for which he got sergeant's stripes) but did not join any soldiers-in-skirts revue because of family, but did become a drag performer in the 1960s.  While most books on either theatre or on cross-dressing barely pay any attention to these shows, Kris points out that while Lena Horne could not fill the Theatre Royal in Leeds, Men in Frocks played to capacity houses; Sophie Tucker's box-office record at the Golders Green Empire held for years until it was broken by Forces Showboat.  There was a significant difference from the drag acts of the 1930s such as Bartlett & Ross or Ford & Sheen and the pantomime dames all of whom had been doing cod drag, that is being funny.  Terry Gardener, who was in the first We Were in the Forces in 1944, explained:
"The general idea of the first show was to put men into dresses to make them look dreadful, but that soon started to change because the audience liked the prettiest ones best" - which much suited the performers. 
Most were gay:
 "Heterosexuals? In the choruses?  I can't say I ever met any.  I guess it was possible" - Loren Lorenz. 
 Men who were not queens were 'hommes' ('omnies' in Polari).  A surprising number of omnies wanted to bed the queens, but
"If you ever suggested to an homme in those days that he was homosexual, even bisexual, he would have killed you" - Poppy Cooper.

Did somebody say: what about Gillies, Dillon, Cowell?  They don't fall within the pervue of this book.  Not only were none of them gay, and to be a trans patient of Gillies you had to be the child of either one of England's top doctors or of a Baron.  Anyway he stopped after two patients.  Hoi polloi need not apply.  

Gay Paree and the Sea Queens

By the mid-1950s the forces drag shows had run their course, and the audiences were no longer coming - many of them had acquired televisions.  There were other things happening that were a bit of a surprise to the queens: those who took being female more seriously.  There were stories in the press: Christine Jorgensen, Bobbie Kimber, Roberta Cowell.  

Basically the show queens had nowhere to turn to.  The few exceptions were Terry Gardener who partnered with Barri Chat and found work in regular variety shows, as did Phil Starr and Terry Dennis.  Danny Carrol changed his name to La Rue and in 1955 started a residency at Winston's Club in Mayfair that lasted for six years.  Mrs Shufflewick pursued an idiosyncratic career on the wireless and also did eight seasons at the Windmill Theatre - many of her audience took her to be a woman. However Roy Alvis, not finding any drag work, became a meat porter at Smithfield Market until the pub drag boom in the late 1960s.  Some like Poppy Cooper went to Paris where Le Carrousel and Chez Madam Arthur were hiring.  Tommy Osborne remembers: 
"I liked Paris, but I wasn't too happy in the show.  I was a singer and I used to go out there and belt out the numbers big and loud and forget about being in drag, but most of the audience was there purely for the sensation of seeing boys with tits.  The boys were all incredibly beautiful.   But they just couldn't do anything, bless them."   
1953-4 was a particularly good time to not be in England.  In addition to the Coronation, David Maxwell-Fyfe, Home secretary 1951-4, and John Nott-Bower, Commission of Scotland Yard(1953-8), under US pressure and in the shadow of the Guy Burgess defection to Moscow, started a purge of homosexuals.  In 1953, the actor John Gielgud, the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke and the MP William Field were all convicted.  In 1954 Edward Montagu, Lord of Beaulieu, the writer Peter Wildeblood and Michael Pitt-Rivers were convicted and imprisoned.  On release Rupert Croft-Cooke moved to Morocco, and drag entertainer Ron Storme worked in Tunisia.  

The other destination for show queens was the merchant navy.  Lorri Lee recalls:
"The sea was an ideal life for queens in those days.  There were hundreds of us, literally.  Competition was very stiff if you wanted an homme.  ... The Sea Queens were all drag queens and had a frock tucked away, just in case.  We did shows on a little stage on the ship: the crews got the dirty version, while the passengers got the cleaned up version."  
On layovers in London, a popular place to stay was Stella Minge's.  Other sea queens were Loren Lenz and Yvonne Sinclair.

However there were drag gatherings in Britain that were not bothered by the police, such as Blackpool at Easter, and the Vic-Wells Costume Balls (Old Vic and Sadler's Wells) although it had signs posted saying "No Drag Allowed", and later the Chelsea Arts Ball, which had a similar sign.

The Pub Queens

There was very little pub drag before 1960 except for a few tolerant, mainly straight, pubs in the East End, such as the Bridge House (which later became a heavy metal/punk/goth pub) in Canning Town.  Through the 1960s the number of pubs doing drag increased.  Roy Alvis returned to doing drag, although he was arrested by the police for doing so more than once.   Gay men started going to drag shows in straight pubs in that that was a good way to meet gay men.

The drag scene was helped by the various youth homeovestic fashions - the Teddy Boys, The Mods, the Rockers - which opened up clothing options so that short-back-and-sides, jacket and tie were no longer so overwhelmingly demanded.  The iconography was upended in the mid 1960s, following the Beatles and the Stones when long hair on men became acceptable.  Swinging London came and went, as did the Permissive Society.   Drag was never central to either but it benefited from the further loosenings of required dress.  The first edition of Roger Baker's  book Drag: a history of female impersonation on the stage came out in 1968.

In London, the Union Tavern, the Vauxhall Tavern and Black Cap became established as drag venues.  A similar situation happened in Manchester, where the Union Tavern was the place.   Danny La Rue opened his own club in 1964, performed for royalty and for a while was Britain's highest paid performer.  Gays who were not queens were arguing in public for changes in the law, and the law really was changed in 1967 as part of a liberal package from the Labour Party which included abortion and divorce law reform.  While a significant number of the drag performers did continue their journey and become women, the majority did not.

On p48 Kris notes that

"Whatever their reason for donning drag in the first place, dragging up soon became 'just a job' for most of the regular Pub Queens.  One of the many ironies of professional drag is that, for many performers, what began as a giggle or as a pleasure soon became a chore.  And then drag queens come to realise what women have always known: that the fun of dressing up quickly evaporates when you feel obliged to do it." 
Another change in the 1960s was the innovation of miming to records.  The act Alvis and O'Dell are credited with being the first when they mimed to Susan Maughan singing Bobby's Girl, a 1962 single that went to number 3 in the UK and number six in Norway.  Alvis and O'Dell were then one of the hottest acts in town -- until every body else got a tape recorder.

Kris. a gay man who loves drag, but was unhappy about what the pub scene had become,  finishes the pub chapter with a regretful survey:

"I have spoken to drag performers who have been genuinely hurt at the suggestion that they are satirising women because they feel  - however mistakenly - that they are paying homage to their female idols; and while there are Diana Rosses and Shirley Basses in this world I cannot see how they will ever be dissuaded of this.  ... There are also drag acts like Dave Dale who consider themselves to be character actors who do caricatures of both men and women.  There are acts who are still doing the pregnant bride routine which they were doing twenty years ago.  And there are acts which prey on the basest instincts of their audience, perpetuating the notion that women smell like fish and that black men swing from trees.  What the latter acts do is unforgivable and I prefer to reserve my venom for them and those unthinking audiences of gay men who appear to share their brute misogyny and racism."
The Ball Queens

The problem with the Chelsea Arts Ball was that officially drag was not permitted, and if you did not pass well, or drew attention, there was a risk of being ejected.  By the mid-1960s there were balls that were really drag balls.  After trying different locations the Porchester Hall was selected as the place.  Prominent among the organizers were Jean Fredericks and Ron Storme.  At first most of those who went thought of themselves as drag queens,   A fair number of them didn't bother at first with female underwear, and in fact would rush home afterwards to change and then go out to pick up a bloke. But then they realized that there are lots of men who went to went to the balls to pick them up, and that these men expected them to be wearing stockings and frilly knickers. (1)

As the balls continued, those better described as transvestites or transsexuals starting coming.

"The drag queens thought the TVs were peculiar for wanting to dress like an ordinary woman does, and the TVs thought it peculiar that the queens like to go over the top.   In those days you could always tell them apart by the clothes.  -- Ron Storme

TV and TS (2)


In this chapter Kris discusses the differences between DQ, TV and TS.  The stereotypes, and that many do not fit the stereotypes.  He concludes:

"If there is any one lesson to be learned from studying this field it is that the individual is individual.  People define themselves and the self-definition must always takes priority over the received wisdom.   I have met self-defined draq queens whom others would describe as TV either because they enjoy 'passing'; or because they 'dress' so often that it could be seen as a compulsion; or because they wear lingerie, either to turn men on or to make themselves feel sensuous.  I have met drag performers who have grown to dislike drag, and men who insist on being called 'cross-dressers' because they dislike what the word 'drag' stands for, and men who wear part-drag in order to create confusion and doubt amongst others, but who would never wear full drag because that would defeat their object.  I know self-defined TVs who are gay or bisexual or oscillating, some of them having learned to cross this sexuality barrier through their cross-dressing.  I have met TVs  who dress like drag queens and drag queens who dress like TVs, and TVs whose cross-dressing has encouraged them to question their 'male role', which in turn has made them examine their idea of 'femininity'.  And perhaps most important of all, I have learned how marshy a terrain is the middle ground between our earlier clear-cut distinction between transvestites and transexuals."

Theatrics

Until 1968 theatres had to obtain a license for each production from the Lord Chamberlain.  This was of course inimical to innovation.  John Osborne's A Patriot For Me at the Royal Court Theatre in 1965 was banned because of the drag ball scene – it became a private theatre club to continue the performance.  The previous year, Douglas Druce, whose imitation of Elizabeth Windsor was regarded as stunning, was invited to close the first half at a show called Sh... at the New Century Theatre in Notting Hill Gate.  This was met by great applause, in that Druce had got HRH absolutely right.  The next night the Lord Chamberlain in person appeared and would close the theatre if the scene were not cut.  (3)

The Lord Chamberlain also did not approve of any drag shows.  Chris Shaw managed to get some staged by disguising them as Old Tyme Music Hall.

The 1970s, however, were very different. Tim Curry got the role of his life in The Rocky Horror Show which opened in 1972.  Lindsay Kemp opened Flowers, based on Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974.  The Cocteau inspired Grande Eugene appeared at the Roundhouse.

The US histories tell us how San Francisco's Cockettes were such a flop in New York.   The same thing happened to the Ballet Trocadero and the Cycle Sluts from the US and the Australian Simon and Monique's Playgirls Revue when they came to London.  However Hot Peaches were successful and an inspiration to the Brixton Faeries and Bloolips.   Divine played the warden in Women Behind Bars, 1976. Hinge and Bracket started their career.


The Rad Drag Queens

London Gay Liberation Front was established in 1970.   At first there was no drag.

"It started with jellabas and kaftans and long hair and flowers ... then we discovered glitter ... and the nail varnish.  Later some of us - a quarter of the men, I'd say, at some time or other - would get a nice new frock for the next Gay Lib dance.  Then a few people began wearing it to meetings.  It just evolved." -- Michael James.
It then became street theatre, notably the Miss Trial demo outside the Old Bailey in support of the women who were on trial for disrupting the Miss World contest, and then the disruption of the 1971 Christian Festival of Light. Some GLF queens wore drag because it felt right, some for fun and some for political reasons.   

Generally the queens were living in communal squats and in poverty in Brixton and in Notting Hill, and wore drag all day every day. They aligned themselves with lesbians against the masculine gay men who were dominating the GLF meetings. When the women finally split from GLF in February 1972, the Rad Fems began to dominate at the All-London meetings at All Saints Hall in Powis Square, which was a bit intimidating for newcomers.

However the RadFems also demonstrated against the launch of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, which allowed The Sunday Times to run an article on the irony of feminist men telling women how they should behave. The fledging Gay News used this to disassociate from what they referred to as 'fascists in frocks'. The initial issues of Gay News were hostile to GLF in general and even more so to the queens.


There was also a Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen group which met separately.
And Now?

 The 1970s and 1980s had a lot of drag on record and stage: David Bowie and Boy George.  The punks initially went to gay bars because they weren't accepted anywhere else, and some of the gay bars evolved into punk bars.   The New Romantics and the Blitz crowd came and went.

 Kris provides a profile of many who were active in the 1980s.

 Endpiece
"In general, people do not like complexity.  That is why when they come across something like transvesting they look to science to provide them with cut and dried answers.  But science, for all its valuable contributions to understanding, has little to tell us about the human spirit.  To learn about that you have to talk to and observe human beings.  If the people in this book are saying anything at all with one voice, it is that there is no overall psychological compulsion for cross-dressing. There is nothing that the men we have spoken to have in common except that they dress in the clothes associated with the opposite sex.  They are the most extraordinarily  wide range of people, they see all sorts of different reasons for why they dress, and they dress in all sorts of ways.  We are left, as we always knew that we would be, with more questions than answers.  This might appear confusing, but of course confusion is what drag is all about.  And confusion can be a very valuable tool, because when people are confused, they are sometimes obliged to think.  And perhaps the more they think about it, the more they will find an understanding of why men sometimes discover a wish or a need to play sometimes at being 'not-men'."

 _________________________________________________________________________________

 (1) Indifference to underwear can be argued either way 1) that it is a marker of a lack of a female gender identity; 2) that it is marker of a non-erotic gender identity. Either way it is not confined to self-identified drag queens -- see Felicity Chandelle.  Also some cis women insist on sexy underwear, while other choose what is practical.

 (2) We have already seen Virginia Prince's unlikely claim to have coined the abbreviations TV and TS.   I think that their use here demonstrates  that they are the obvious abbreviations and were arrived at independently by different people.

 (3) This of course is long before Helen Mirren essayed the part.

 April Ashley, while androphilic, is not featured here because she did not go to any of the places discussed.

 None of the people in this book appear in any book by Vern Bullough.  It was realizing that that led me to perceive the systematic exclusion of gay/androphilic trans persons from Bullough's work.

 Probably Ray Blanchard would regard these persons as "homosexual transsexuals" as he uses the term, although many of them defy his stereotyping.  However he never does discuss work by other writers outside a small circle of psychologists.   The one person in the world who does self-identity as a "homosexual transsexual" in the Blanchardian sense, ie Kay Brown, is not such that she would would be featured in this book even if she were British.  In the autobiographical accounts that she has published there is no mention of participating in gay events, nor does she express similar sentiments to the ones found in this book.

 Like - well actually very unlike - Darryl Hill's Trans Toronto, this book is an oral history.  Hill seems to think that all his interviewees must be confidential.  In some cases there is such a need, but some of Hill's interviewees are well known to trans readers.  He should have given them the option to be identified by their full name.  Also they are encouraged to talk using their own term rather than just to affirm or dissent from theory points.
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22 April 2011

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. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia 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.
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20 April 2010

Janice Raymond (1943 - ) feminist professor.

++ Name of Raymond's 1980 paper corrected.

Raymond did a BA in English Literature at Salve Regina College, 1965, and an MA in Religious Studies at Andover Newton Theological School, 1971. She was then for a short time a member of the Sisters of Mercy, but left and did a PhD in Ethics and Society at Boston College, 1977. Raymond’s PhD thesis supervisor was Mary Daly of Boston College. Daly was writing Gyn/Ecology at the same time. Raymond’s dissertation became The Transsexual Empire, 1979, and it and Gyn/Ecology cite each other, and both were published by Beacon Press which is associated with the Unitarian Church. In 1978, Raymond became Professor of Women’s Studies and Medical Ethics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Raymond’s position is that transsexual women are not women, and she uses male pronouns for trans women throughout. The Transsexual Empire enthusiastically draws on Thomas Kando’s Sex Change; The Achievement of Gender Identity Among Feminized Transsexuals, 1972, and on Jan Morris’ Conundrum, 1974. Kando restricted his sample to recently-transitioned transsexuals, and Morris wrote within two years of surgery, and so Raymond was easily able to find examples of the gender enthusiasm of new women which she insisted was typical of transsexual women of whatever duration. Raymond says that she supplemented these with 13 direct interviews and found highly stereotypical notions of gender roles, and without the “role strain of normal women”. However Angela Douglas claimed that all the quotes from these 13 are in fact from a letter that Douglas wrote to Raymond. Raymond retells several of the transsexual tales that were in the US press in the 1970s: Angela Douglas’ notorious polemical letter that was a reaction to lesbian separatism; the fuss that some lesbians made about Sandy Stone being the sound engineer at the feminist Olivia Records; Paula Grossman being fired.

She takes the position that sex is determined by the chromosomes and that if XY one is always male, and if XX always female, and secondly that the historical experience of being raised as a girl and menstruating determines a woman. A constructed-woman has only a history of wishing to be a woman. The primary cause of transsexualism is the sex stereotyping of patriarchal society (no biological, psychological or existential causation is considered), and the secondary cause is the professionals, the surgeons, psychiatrists, counselors, electrologists etc who provide services and persuade foolish persons to change (the opposition of the vast majority of male doctors to the first transsexuals is not considered). She never considers that transsexuals themselves regarded the gender-stereotyped requirements of the gender clinics as a problem. Transsexual men are “the tokens that save face for the transsexual empire”, and are barely considered. The patriarchy has introduced sex changes as a means of controlling gender stereotypes, which act in the interests of men. Once extra-natal conception is introduced, biological women will become redundant.
“All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, and appropriating this body for themselves. [...] Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive”.
In various places she compares gender surgery to foot-binding, clitoridectomy and infibulation, corset mutilation, unnecessary hysterectomies and radical mastectomies. Several times she suggests but just stops short of saying that transsexuality was associated with the Nazis, and the death camps.

Whilst Raymond maintains that male-to-constructed-females are more gender stereotyped than biological woman, worse still are those who attempt to be lesbian-feminists:
"Transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists show yet another face of patriarchy. As the male-to-constructed-female transsexual exhibits the attempt to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have molded women, the male-to-constructed-female who claims to be a lesbian-feminist attempts to possess women at a deeper level, this time under the guise of challenging rather than conforming to the role and behavior of stereotyped femininity”.
Raymond’s call to action:
“I contend that the problem with transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence” .
The book was endorsed in a review by Thomas Szasz which is quoted on both its front and back covers (“Raymond’s development and documentation is flawless”).

Raymond also wrote a paper, Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery, for the US Government. This paper, which is less contentious and inflammatory in its language and thus more superficially plausible, resulted in the removal of US federal and some state aid for indigent and imprisoned transsexuals, and provided an example for insurance companies who were pleased to have a feminist telling them that transsexuality should not be covered. This non-coverage included breast or genital cancer where it could be deemed to be a consequence of transsexual activity.

Carol Riddell wrote the first detailed and critical review of Raymond’s book, and it has been frequently reprinted, which I have drawn upon above.

Through the 1980s gay academics endorsed Raymond’s book. It was admired by Wayne Dynes (“Impassioned radical-feminist critique”) and Jonathan Katz (“The most profound, extended critique of the medical concept of ‘transsexualism’ ”).   Liz Hodgkinson’s Bodyshock: The Truth About Changing Sex, 1987, while being pro-transsexuals, repeatedly returns to Raymond’s book for explanation.

Along with Peter Ackroyd’s Dressing Up, also 1979, Raymond’s book became a de rigueur entry in the bibliography of any 1980s book on trans topics, even though many authors did not actually seem to understand what she was saying.

In 1988, Sandy Stone wrote a manifesto defiantly responding to Raymond.

Unlike the concept of autogynephilia, very few actual transsexuals identified with Raymond’s position, the one exception being Rachael Webb, a lorry driver cum London Councillor who regarded herself as a radical feminist and as a constructed woman.

Raymond’s books in the early 1990s attacked sexual liberalism, contraception in the form of RU486, and the new reproductive technologies.

In 1996, The Transsexual Empire was reissued by Teacher College Press, without any changes although by that time the excessive gender conformity required by gender clinics that she had initially criticized was largely a thing of the past. She expands her criticism in the new Introduction using the new word, ‘transgenderism’, she dismisses gender transgression as a new type of gender conformity, and has specific criticisms of RuPaul, Leslie Feinberg and k.d. lang. So non-surgical gender solutions are not acceptable either as some might have assumed from her book.

In the late 1990s and 2000s there have been a number of trans writers who have used Raymond’s book as if it referred to other transsexuals whom they don’t seem to like, often referred to as ‘autogynephiles’ or ‘transgender’ or ‘men’, although there is no basis for this in Raymond’s writings: she is as critical of the lesbian-feminist constructed female as she is of the gender-stereotyped constructed female. Notable examples are by Margaret O’Hartigan and Cathryn Platine.

From 1994-2007 Raymond was the Co-Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and is still on the Board. She retired as a professor in 2002, and is Professor Emerita. In CATW she is strongly against decriminalization of prostitution which has led several sex worker activists to take issue with her. She talks about prostitution as if trans women and men are never sex workers.

*Not Janice Raymond, Playmate of the Month for December 1974.
______________________________________________________________________

Raymond has kept her personal life quiet.   Her Wikipedia page has a ‘personal life’ section which says that she is a former Catholic and an open lesbian.  There is no mention of her having a wife.  There are two rumours relating to her private life.  I did not include them above because I could not confirm them, but they are very germane to her writings:  that she had a passion for a trans woman but was rebuffed (Denny, 2002);  and that she and Daly were lovers.  Both suggestions partially explain the intensity of her transphobia.

My husband was raised a Catholic and is a graduate of the Jesuit Boston College.  On reading this, his major comment was to explain that many ex-Catholics and lapsed Catholics emphasize the one issue that affects them personally – with Raymond it is the non-ordination of women ( Johnson, 1973) – but continue to agree with the Church on other issues.  Raymond’s position is remarkably congruent with the Church of Rome:  trans woman are not women; abortion is wrong; the new reproductive technologies are wrong.

For all her concern with the “role strain of normal women”, Raymond is indifferent to the role strain of those born male.  Other than feminist  consciousness raising, she rules out – this is made clear in the introduction to the 1994 reprint - any solution that such male-born persons may wish to try: in addition to her proscription of surgical gender change, she also condemns androgynous gender mixing for both men and women.  She denies that women wearing trousers is transvestity  and at the same time denies men any clothing freedom at all.    Like Virginia Prince and some of the HBS people she is insistent that other persons should follow her prescription only and is not interested in what they might think, or in allowing them to be themselves.

I am a woman, therefore I am a feminist.  This is so obvious to  me.  The great expansion of opportunities and freedoms for all women, trans and cis, over the last 50 years is one of the great achievements of the 20th century.  Raymond attempts to present her flavour of feminism as Feminism, as if there were no others.  But of course there are many feminisms.  One of the best statements of how Raymond is an embarrassment to feminism is found in Califia’s book.   As a feminist I also find Raymond embarrassing.  But there are also trans women who say things that I do not like.
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