http://www.sbpress.com/2010/03/feminine-boy-project/hough Stony Brook denies it, this campus was involved in a government-funded brainwashing project to keep children from “acting queer” for two decades. Some people involved still work on campus, and the Feminine Boy Project laid groundwork for current psychiatric abuses against transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
This project was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1972 to1986. The original stated goal on the grants was “treatment of pre-homosexuality”–the, idea that if children were kept from stepping outside gender stereotypes, they wouldn’t turn out gay. When being gay was taken out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973, the goal was changed to “treatment of pretranssexuality,” conflating gender identity and sexuality as the same, based in biased assumptions that anything other than stereotypical gender identities and heterosexuality were wrong. Children were declared “pathological” for behavior like boys playing with dolls, wearing dresses or helping in the kitchen, or girls climbing trees, playing with boys’ toys or wearing boy clothes.
This was collaboration between anti-LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex) members of the psychiatric establishment and the “religious right.”
Richard Green is a colleague of John Money. Money instituted the “Money protocols” for nonconsensual surgeries on intersex children after forcing David Reimer to live as a girl (until Reimer changed back to male before killing himself). During the “experiment” Green co-wrote the book Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment. Green has made a career of pathologizing LGBTI people. This has included making inflammatory comments like his 1995 Dateline remark “plays with Barbies at five, sleeps with men at twenty-five.” While head of the now closed Human Sexuality branch of Stony Brook’s Psychology Department he got NIMH to approve nearly $1 million for the project.
George Rekers belongs to several anti-gay fundamentalist groups, published his essay “Gender Identity Disorder” through the notoriously anti-gay Family Research Council and is “scientific advisor” to National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), which claims to “cure” gays despite the American Psychiatric Association (APA) condemning “reparative therapy.”
Drop the Barbie!
If You Bend Gender Far Enough, Does It Break?
http://www.brainchildmag.com/essays/fall2001_wilkinson.htmAfter three years of research and writing, Burke's Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female was published in 1996. It quickly became the focal point of a gender storm. In the book, Burke traces the genesis of the GID designation and treatments back to the 1950s. In the 1970s, a psychologist at UCLA named George Rekers opened a clinic for children. He got hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund his studies, finding children (often through newspaper ads) and testing treatments on them.
All the precision of science was applied in developing these tests to measure such things as how far the hips swayed as the child walked across the room.
The tests--many still used today--strike Burke as Orwellian. In one, a child being tested is asked to draw the figure of a person. Girls who draw boys first, predominately, or in positions of power and strength, are suspect, as are boys who draw princesses or mommies. The Barlow Gender-Specific Motor Behavior test examines such things as how far from the back of a chair a seated child's buttocks are--farther is "masculine," closer is "feminine." All the precision of science was applied in developing these tests to measure such things as the angle between the wrist and the hand, how often a child touched his or her hands together in front of his or her body, and how far the hips swayed as the child walked across the room. Especially damning for boys was a lack of hand-eye coordination.
snip
Kraig's treatment continued in this vein. He was also put on the "token system" at home. Inappropriate, feminine behaviors earned him a red token, masculine ones, a blue token. Each red token earned him a spanking from his father. After more than two years of treatment, Kraig's behavior had turned around. He was now described by his mother as a "rough neck," and he no longer cared if his hair was neat or his clothes matched. But when he was eighteen, after years of being held up (under a pseudonym) by Rekers as "the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy," Kraig attempted suicide, because he thought that he might be gay.
Five years after publication, Gender Shock is out of print, yet it still serves as a touchpoint for the anti-GID activists. Burke remains concerned that this "shocking pocket of psychiatric practice" is still thriving. "The government is still subsidizing this," she says. "Since the 1970s, more than $1.5 million has been awarded from the National Institutes of Mental Health for the study of children who don't meet the gender norms. George Rekers--the same man who declared Susan Smith sane, by the way--still believes that girls who don't wear dresses are disturbed. These clinics have a vested interest in finding these children and 'treating' them--it's their livelihood. There are still cases of teenagers being hospitalized against their will for GID."
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