Thoughts while reading (about) Colin Wilson

Over the years I have read many of the books by Colin Wilson – one of those whom the newspapers in the 1950s designated as Angry Young Men - on existentialism, motiveless murder, Jack the Ripper, the occult, ancient civilizations etc, etc., although I never read either of his two autobiographies. There is a new biography out by Gary Lachman, previously Gary Valentine who played bass with Blondie and guitar with Iggy Pop, and then moved to London where he has published a whole slew of books on consciousness and the occult.

I have recently read his biography of Colin Wilson. Reading, as I do, lots of LGBT history it is useful and refreshing to read books in other areas. However trans history does seem to pop up everywhere these days. On page 7 we find:

“another example of what Wilson called his early ‘sexual perverseness’ was one he shared with other creative individuals, like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As a young boy Wilson loved to dress up in his mother’s clothes, including her underwear. Authorities such as the pre-Freudian sexologist Havelock Ellis suggest that such behaviour ‘indicates a tendency to homosexuality’, as did, for Ellis, Wilson’s attachment to his mother and dislike of his father. But Wilson never observed any trace of homosexuality in his makeup.”

This perhaps sounds rather old-fashioned. Most writers today would relate child transvestity to either Richard Green’s contentious Sissy Boy Syndrome, or, more productively, cross-dreaming. Lachman gives no indication of being aware of either of these approaches. He does, later, page 262-9 summarize Wilson’s interaction with the trans activist and theorist Charlotte Bach, but a check on his footnotes shows that it is simply a repetition of what Wilson says about her in his book, The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. There are a couple of attempts to compare Wilson to Bach’s theoretical schema: p265 “According to Bach’s system, he was a ‘normal’ male, and should therefore not be creative”; p383n27 “Wilson disagreed that the male sexual drive was to become the female, as Charlotte Bach argued. It was rather to possess her, which ultimately is an expression of will”. 

Reading from a trans perspective, several other trans persons appear or almost appear.  Kenneth Tynan – also an Angry Young Man – pops up several times, but his fondness for dressing female, and especially as the silent film star Louise Brooks is never mentioned. In 1960, Wilson and his wife went on a cruise to Leningrad. There, they sought out the palace of Felix Yusupov (where Rasputin was put to death) but there is no mention of Yusupov as transvestite. Kenneth Walker, Gurdjieffian and Harley Street urologist gave a positive review of Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, 1956 and they became friends. This was the very same time that Walker was introducing Georgina Turtle to surgeons – she had correction surgery in 1957, and then became Georgina Somerset by marriage. Walker wrote the Foreword to her 1963 book, Over the Sex Border. None of this is mentioned. 

Let us turn to Wilson’s The Misfits. Lachman tells us: 

“Following Charlotte Bach’s story, Wilson runs through a gauntlet of practices that some readers may find surprising, if not disturbing. What may also be surprising is that the people engaging in these ‘perversions’ are not anonymous case studies from Krafft-Ebing or Magnus Hirschfeld, although material from these and other sexologists appears. Wilson’s case studies involve some of the most famous creative individuals of the past two centuries. Among his sexual Outsiders we find philosophers, novelists, composers and poets, and we are treated to analyses of the intimate lives of, among others, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, Marcel Proust, Lord Byron, Algernon Swinburne, Yukio Mishima, Ludwig Wittgenstein, TE Lawrence, Paul Tillich, Percy Grainger, and aptly enough, the pre-Freud sexologist Havelock Ellis.”

Readers of this encyclopedia will quickly realise that all the persons on this list are men. On the other hand I would contend, even if it is based on anecdotal evidence, that 45-50% of persons indulging in heterosexuality are female. Wilson seems to have almost no interest in the female experience of sex, although there is no shortage of such persons writing about it. Off the top of my head, what about Anaïs Nin, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Erica Jong, Leah Schaefer, Anne Rice, the pre-transition Pat Califia, Kathy Acker (more). 

In 1971 Wilson wrote a book on Abraham Maslow, the US psychologist who developed ideas about hierarchies of need, and peak experiences. They agreed enough with each other that each referred to the other in several books. Here is Lachman’s summary of Maslow on women: [Maslow] “discovered that women could be divided into three dominance groups: high, medium and low. The level of dominance influenced their sexuality. High-dominance women enjoyed sex and were promiscuous and experimental, medium-dominance women were romantics looking for ‘Mr Right’, and low-dominance women were shy and afraid of sex.” Could a woman have written that sentence? We have a 21^st century word ‘mansplaining’ – does this apply? I think so. I went googling to see if any woman writer had ever done anything with this typology. While almost all women writers did in fact fail to find any use in the typology, one writer does discuss it and use it: Betty Friedan in her foundational feminist text, The Feminine Mystique.

In reading Wilson’s The Misfits, one can see that Wilson’s readings in sexology are Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. That is: nothing after the Second World War – no Benjamin, Green, Stoller, Money; no Butler, Halberstam, Faderman etc. And certainly no queer theory. He reports at second hand that Hirschfeld wrote a book on transvestites and found that most were not homosexual. However he did not read it. His book was 1988, and the English translation of Hirschfeld’s Transvestites did not come out until three years later. Wilson’s source was Charlotte Wolff’s biography of Hirschfeld and the volume Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, attributed to Hirschfeld but written/edited by Arthur Koestler and Norman Haire, which Wilson found for sale in what passed for a sex shop in the 1950s. He finds it an amazing source of sexual ‘perversions’ including ‘transvestism, sadism, masochism, necrophilia’. He continued to use the word ‘perversion’ even after John Money had persuaded most sexologists that ‘paraphilia’ was less offensive. 

Despite the reservations that I have expressed here, I am intrigued with Wilson’s suggestion that in the later 18^th century and afterwards there was an ‘imaginative explosion’ that we can trace in sex novels and this was accompanied by a greater variety of sexual and gender activity. He is therefore arguing for a social construction approach – although he never uses the term, nor does he mention Foucault or Trumbach who have developed competing social construction models. (In a later book, Below the Iceberg, 1998, Wilson did engage with some of the ideas of Foucault, Barthes and Derrida – he denounced Foucault as an ‘intellectual con-man’ out to deceive his readers).

• Colin Wilson. The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. Grafton, 1989.
• Gary Lachman. Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. Tarcher Perigee, 2016.

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.

Richard Green (1936 - 2019) Part 1: psychiatrist, lawyer.

Richard Green was raised in Brooklyn, NY. He earned an AB from Syracuse University in 1957, and an MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1961, where he was a student of John Money, who introduced him to gender variant children. Green had the idea of comparing the children to the recollections that adult transsexuals had of their own childhood. He published papers with John Money on such children.

Green did a psychiatric residency at the University of California at Los Angeles, Medical School 1962-4 with Robert Stoller. Money introduced Green to Harry Benjamin in 1964, and for two years he saw patients in Benjamin's New York office and wrote letters for them so that they could obtain surgery in Europe. He wrote the appendix on historical and cross-cultural aspects and the bibliography for Benjamin's book.

He did a further residency at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) 1965-6. Green spent 1966 in London and became friends with Yoko Ono, and part of his anatomy appears in her film, Bottoms.

He then returned to UCLA as a Professor of Psychiatry. In 1969 he co-edited the ground-breaking Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment anthology with Money, with an Introduction by Harry Benjamin. The same year, with encouragement from Stoller, Green arranged the first transsexual operation at UCLA, only a year after Stoller had retracted his conclusions in the Agnes case.

In 1971 he became the founding editor of Archives of Sexual Behavior, after Stoller nominated him to the publisher, and stayed as editor for 30 years. He was significantly involved in the removal in 1973 of ‘homosexuality’ as a diagnosis in the DSM. In 1974 he published Sexual Identity Conflict in Children and Adults, with a forward by Robert Stoller, which draws anecdotally on the children and adults whom he had seen as a psychiatrist. This book is still one of the very few to discuss the male spouses of trans women.

From the dust Jacket of Sexual Science and the Law

During the 1970s Green, Ivar Lovaas and George Rekers (more) headed the "Feminine Boy Project" funded by NIMH to at least $1.5 million.  The basic study was a 15-year follow-up of 50 'feminine' boys matched with 50 other boys of comparable age. ethnicity and parental education.  Both groups were studied using parental questionnaires, interviews with the boys, psychological testing and observations of playroom activity.  There were follow-ups, usually at one-year intervals.The project was mainly located at UCLA and secondarily at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and also at the Roosevelt Institute in New York City, the Fuller Theological Seminary and the Logos Research Institute.  The last two institutions are Christian, and their principal researcher was Rekers, who was the major advocate that the boys should be not merely observed, but treated, that is persuaded or cajoled back to gender conformity.  Twelve pairs of parents consented that their son should enter such a course of treatment.
 
Green was the founding president of the International Academy of Sex Research in 1973 and a founding committee member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) in 1979, and was a co-author of the first edition of the Standards of Care.

In 1978 he published a paper, which is still rather unique, to the effect that a parent changing sex has only a small effect on the children, and that there is no reason why the trans parent should not continue to see the children.

He testified as an expert witness for transsexuals who lost their jobs in transition: Smith v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co, 1978; Ashlie, aka Komarnicki v. Chester-Upland School District, 1979; Terry v. EEOC, 1980; Kirkpatrick v. Seligman and Latz, Inc, 1981; and most famously for Karen Ulane in Ulane v. Eastern Airlines, Inc, 1983. He was also co-counsel for Curran v. Mount Diablo Council of the Boy Scouts of America, 1981, where an assistant scoutmaster had been rejected for being gay. Green completed his JD from Yale University Law School in 1987.

Testifying for Ulane, Green defined a transsexual as:

"Transsexualism is a pervasive, severe and long-standing discontent, discomfort, belonging to the sex to which one was born.  It is accompanied by a long-standing wish for a variety of hormonal, surgical and civil procedures which would allow one to live in the sex role opposite to that to which one was born.  This long-term discontent, dysphoria, if you will, with being male or female, is not a product of some significant type of mental disorder" (Sexual Science and the Law p106).

He defined a transvestite less satisfactorily:

"A transvestite is an individual who is content being the sex to which he was born, does not wish to undergo sex-change surgery.  It is an individual whose primary gratification from cross-dressing or dressing in women's clothes is one of sexual arousal rather than a feeling of social comfort. (Ditto)"

Continued in Part 2.