http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/07/sissy.boy.experiment/index....
This is an account of the effects of experiments from some years ago to try to be keep a feminine boy from becoming gay. It was carried out at UCLA, and this person was not the only one. He did, however, kill himself at 38, a very unhappy man who always felt he was "broken" after the "therapy" and the recommended re-inforcement on a reward and punishment system through physical abuse by the parents. Note that this is just part of the story on CNN tonight.
Retired Dr. George Rekers, for a long time a darling of NARTH and other organizations dedicated to fixing gays and preventing new gay people, was the psychologist involved (he was busted last year when he rented a male escort to go to Europe with him for "carrying luggage and massages").
Dr. Ken Zucker of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Canada is currently doing the same kind of Skinnerean reinforcement/punishment to "fix" feminine boys, and he wrote and was chairman of the DSM-5 portion covering TS,TG, and "gender variance and other paraphillias". Dr. John Money was responsible for the same kind of crap, which ruined the lives of the Reimer family. It makes me ill to consider what it was like for the kid, to suffer the beatings and the constant barrage of negative images of himself.
When are people going to learn that your gender and your sexual orientation are born part of you? Not in the near future, obviously. This is one of the reasons I so detest the "forced femme" fantasies.
I will take this opportunity to reiterate the need to comment on the portions of the DSM-5 dealing with gender variance and sexual orientation (and yes they are trying to pull sexual orientation as a back into the DSM-5 as a mental illness, just using different names).
Comments
Quack medicine
George A. Rekers is another sad case of a quack doctor claining success. Hopefully the media will treat him with the same disdain that eventually accrued to John Money.
DJ
Sadly...
Sadly, there are a LOT of Physicians that saw John Money's research - and have not bothered to see anything else since then. And, ASSUME that nothing since then has any validity...
John Money's "work" is NOT universally disdained. :-(
Anne
That man
I think you know exactly what I think of him. As a matter of interest, my therapist is quoting DSM-IV at me rather than DSM-V.
Unhappy man's suicide from Sissy Boy experiments at UCLA?
Such professionals care not for the patient. they care only for their narrow minded view. It matters not to them if a patient of theirs commits suicide.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
I've always said it.
Psychiatrists are the most dangerous people on earth for they are unable to be objective when dealing with transgenderism. They invariably bring their cultural prejudices to the table and strive to impose their views on the patient.
My advice to all transexuals is to avoid psychiatrists like the plague.
DSM 5 is a prefect example of their inane and archaic prejudices based upon their primtive monotheist cultures.
The best thing one can do with a psychiatrist is to destroy it and bury it if it tries to fuck with your mind.
Beverly Taff.
Growing old disgracefully.
Kirk
RAMI
Kirk, was from the story, mistreated, actually abused by not only the doctor, but by his father and mother as well.
It is not clear from the story, but did the recommended therapy, the reward and punishment phase, actually call for vicious, abusive, and sadistic physical punishment? Or was that simply the way the father, with the mother's consent, decide to punish him? Is it possible that, the recommended, so called negative reinforcement, was something different? Could the punishment have been done in a less abusive way? Would it have matteredat all?
My limited knowledge as to how psychologists try to determine if a child has gender questions is based on stories at this site and others. From those stories (which maybe total B.S. or are accurate) it would seem that a child would be tested in a similar manner as occured in the UCLA program. A boy with gender questions would be placed in a room to see which toys he plays with. If he picks girls toys, which apparently is what would be expected, then he is diagnosed as having a gender problem.
The basic difference, is not in the testing, but what is done with the results.
It seems that the only person that could have saved Kirk was his brother. But, he was just a kid himself. I wonder what happened to the father, since he is not mentioned at all. The mother protests too much. She can possibly be forgiven for trying to "help" her son to become a more normal boy (remeber the times), but she cannot be forgiven for the savage beatings he received.
RAMI
RAMI
Having lost decades of experience, I feel so connected...
...As my therapist said weeks ago, you grew up in an age where children didn't do this...if you were born a boy, you pretty much wouldn't have any hope of getting help if you presented your gender questions to your parents. But for me, it went much further than that; the part of the story that brings me to tears. I've said this before; all four of us were physically abused as children. My sister and I bore the brunt of my father's anger when he got home from work. My older brother spent a lot of time with his friends, being seven years older than me. My younger brother just avoided being home at all and stayed out of the way
The physical abuse that boy endured was exactly like what Joann and Vic and Jimmy and I experienced; to this day, if I hear the snap of a leather belt, I cringe. Joann would be defiant and I would dissolve into tears at the sight of him touching his belt. And in the late fifties, there wasn't any such thing as child abuse. So the welts that boy felt are the same we felt; the marks lasting for days as a reminder to be good. My mother insisted on my father following through with the classic 'wait 'til your father gets home,' so no innocent party there.Kristie, my therapist, agreed that any coming out would have been disastrous. As we said, if he was willing to beat us to the point of welts and bleeding for 'egging' the shed, what would he have done if his son came to him and said "I'm a girl?"
Sadly, the family likely has no recourse because while the connection between his suicide and the 'treatment' is highly implied, no direct evidence exists. The university owes this family and everyone else involved in this horrific treatment more than just an apology. It angers me most of all because I trained for and enjoyed working as a counselor, and the past two dear angels who have helped me through my own horror have been fantastic. While things may have been different then, this type of misuse of influence and 'education' is the exception, rather than the rule, and it pains most of us who do this work that children were abused in the name of research and misguided intentions.
There are so many who read and even contribute here who have been through this horror, and it's so sad. My heart goes out to you all.
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
The Whole Thing
sounded horrendous. Some bigoted pshrink spurring a violent, possibly psychopathic, homophobe to torture an innocent child. Sounds almost like the catholic church treating unwed mothers in Ireland. People are soooo disgusting, seemingly so often. Sometimes I'm so exasperated, I think that mothers should act like squirrels, chew the nuts off certain boy babies. Sorry guys; doesn't what Drea wrote make ya'll ashamed of your gender, societies machizmo and paternalism?
I don't know, maybe the blame should be on the plutocrats, the great depression and WWII. After all, this is the behavior of "The Greatest Generation". In my generation, during Viet Nam, it was common knowledge in the intelligencia than joining the Marines turned boys into wife beaters. I think WWII was a hell of a lot tougher than V N; units weren't rotated back to stateside, no R and R in Hong Cong or the Philippines or even the beaches of S. Viet Nam. Units went overseas and mostly stayed there, moving from one battle to the next. If one wasn't killed or seriously wounded (or maybe assigned to sell war bonds or train recruits) he continued the war until it was over. After conquering Germany, (mainly due to enormous Soviet losses and deprivations,) and Italy, US soldiers were sent to prepare for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, expecting half a million to a million casualties. That probably has an effect on all but the least sensitive minds.
Blah. Got to get off that topic.
One other thing; I think Kirk was M2F, not (especially) gay. Most gay men are not flaming fems or DQs. They like masculinity and like their partners to be masculine, too. Maybe femmy boys are really young straight wimyn. They go into a gay "life style" because it is less scorned and abhorred then being girly. Well, that sounds bogus... might be possible in a few cases.
Hugs and Bright Blessings,
Renee
Ready for work, 1992.
Hugs and Bright Blessings,
Renee
Gay/trans
That, unfortunately, is the attitude of the Iranians. SRS or the hangman, boys.
So much of the problem here is driven by religion. A classic example of the attitudes this produces is the Saudi woman who was gang-raped, and then, because she had been out without her 'guardian' and was therefore guilty of 'immorality', she was sentenced to be flogged. Yup, get raped, then get whipped for being a whore.
The Saudi ambassador to the UK was challenged over this, and in essence his reply was a puzzled whine of "But she was guilty!"
There it is in a nutshell. Beat the pervert, because the pervert needs beating, a circular tautology that brooks no negation.
Dr. Rekers' wikipedia entry...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Alan_Rekers
Makes for some interesting reading-- especially the bits about his travelling around Europe with a gay prostitute; and the six-figure fees he collected from the State of Florida for testifying against gay adoption. (The court completely rejected his testimony as unscientific and religiously motivated).
I do have to wonder what the parents were thinking. It seems like the mother was blaming everything on the "expert"-- who was a 22-year-old grad student at the time. And it sounded like the father really threw himself into the beatings.