The psychiatrists and clinical psychologists specializing in Gender Identity Disorder in children insist that they are not trying to inculcate gender stereotypes. Yet when you cut away at the politically correct rhetoric in which they engage, and look at the actual treatment that is given to children diagnosed with GID, the message to the child is anything but flexible in terms of gender role, and the message is particularly strong in the domestic sphere.

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In his Sissy Boy book, Richard Green writes of a five-year-old named Richard ("Feminine Boy, Heterosexual Man"). When the parents first brought Richard for treatment, Green asked them, "How far back does his interest in taking the female role go?" We are informed that it went back two and a half years, which would have made Richard two years old. Initial dialogue between Dr. Green and Richard's parents:

Richard Green: What are his favorite toys?
Mother: Cooking utensils.
Father: Cooking ware, stoves.
Mother: Doll furniture.
R.G.: And when he asks for cooking utensils when he has wanted them, have you gone out and bought them for him?
Father: Oh, no. His desires are quite extravagant, so we haven't always gone out and gotten what he's wanted.
R.G.: The feminine toys he has, you purchased yourselves?
Mother: Yes.

Dr. Green believed that because these parents allowed Richard access to cooking utensils, cooking ware, stoves and doll furniture, they had contributed to his mental disorder. Perhaps if the parents had indulged Richard's "extravagant" cookware desires, the world might have had another five-star chef.

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As early as 1965, Robert Stoller made the following observation of the boys brought to the UCLA clinic: "We have noticed that they often have pretty faces, with fine hair, lovely complexions, graceful movements, and—especially—big, piercing, liquid eyes." In the 1970s, Richard Green asked parents to reconstruct their memories of their baby as an infant. Since the children were brought to the clinic because they were perceived as inappropriately feminine, the parents were likely to remember any detail which might tend to make them less culpable for their son's behavior. The parents were presented with a list of questions which included describing their baby, and what he was like as an infant. The size of the baby's eyes was targeted: If the eyes were "ordinary," they were connected to "never mistaken for a girl." If the eyes were large, they were connected to "perhaps occasionally mistaken for a girl." If the eyes were attractive, "perhaps with long lashes," they were connected to "occasionally mistaken for a girl." If the eyes were big, and "girl-like," they were connected to being "frequently mistaken for a girl." And finally, if the eyes were big, with long lashes, they were said to be "just like a girl," and "Everyone says the child should have been a girl."

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Richard Green is especially confusing in this regard. He argues for the idea that homosexuality is hereditary, that traditional gender roles have a biological drive, and that feminine role behavior in boys signals the presence of a homosexual gene or hormonal abnormality that leads to homosexuality. He advises that parents should not be concerned about their role in a boy's femininity, since they are not to blame if it is biological. (This argument does not account for the millions of "masculine" homosexual men and "feminine" lesbian women.) In the next breath, however, Green adds that "parents have the legal right to seek treatment to modify their child's cross-gender behavior to standard boy and girl behavior, even if their only motivation is to prevent homosexuality." The doctor himself does not seem to believe that changing a child's gender role behavior will alter future sexuality, yet he is willing to treat the child as if it will, because the parents have the "legal right to seek treatment."

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What then of the children who, for whatever reason, slip through the cracks in gender training? In 1995, Dr. Green quipped, "Barbies at five. Sleeps with men at twenty-five." Is that really true, or did Dr. Green and his cohorts simply reinforce for these boys the popular notion that, because they liked "feminine" roles and activities, and disliked "masculine" roles and activities, they were, or would become, homosexual? This is an extraordinary, absurd leap to take with a young child's growing identity. In effect, they trained these boys to believe that they were gay, and psychologically crucified their parents as being responsible for their child's deviance. The parents were accused of being lenient, phallic, distant; too masculine, too feminine; negligent, competitive, empty. They were portrayed as suffering from bad marriages, penis envy, rage, jealousy and impotence. The bottom line was, they had sons who, at their most flamboyant and for a wide variety of reasons, mirrored back to the world a vividly accurate cartoon of socially constructed gender roles. The artificiality of these roles is terrifying for the adult to witness, because we are taught that these roles are biologically natural and linked to sexuality. Our personal identity is threatened when we realize that what we took as a given, because of our sex, was really a choice, a choice we forgot we made, a choice that might have been made for us.

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THE FEMININE BOY PROJECT AT UCLA

Anything that challenges the definition of girl and boy fuels our cultural anxiety around gender. So deep is that anxiety that our government has sponsored many studies and experiments on children who do not fit the norm. Government records indicate that, since the early 1970s, at least 1.5 million dollars was awarded from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) alone for this purpose. For the most part, on the occasions when "normal" children were studied with these funds, it was to determine treatment goals for the "abnormal" children. The institutions that received these funds include UCLA, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the Roosevelt Institute in New York City,

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The single largest and most heavily documented government funded experiment in the United States with nonconforming children took place in the 1970s at UCLA, under the direction of O. Ivar Lovaas, Richard Green and George Rekers, and the target population was the feminine boy.

K R A I G
FOUR YEARS O LD

One night, when Kraig was putting his infant sister's clothing on her stuffed animals, his father became furious and spanked him while his mother stood by, watching. This incident might have been what this mother needed to convince her husband that Kraig should be taken to the clinic at UCLA, where they would be able to help him overcome his feminine behavior.

In 1973, Rekers and Lovaas devised a behavioral treatment plan for the feminine boy project. The study required access to feminine boys, and they needed to show dramatic improvement in the boys' conditions as a result of their behavioral treatment. In this same time period, Dr. Richard Green was at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he was the principal analyst for the feminine boy project.

Dr. Green was the one responsible for procuring the boys, and so he sent letters announcing the feminine boy project to psychiatrists, psychologists and family general practitioners in the Los Angeles area. In the letter, he described the features of such a boy as: "frequent dressing in girls' or women's clothing, a preference for traditional girls' activities, and statements of wanting to be a girl." He stressed that the boys had to be prepubertal, in order to "better study the association between early gender role behaviors and later patterns of erotic preference." Green appeared on a television talk show to discuss the effeminate boy and the UCLA project that might help him. Also on television was a man who explained to the viewers that, because he played with dolls as a boy, he grew up to be homosexual. The message could not have been clearer: feminine boys were suspected of being prehomosexual.

Kraig's mother was watching television that day. We do not know what she thought of her son's behavior before she saw that television show, but it is clear that she became alarmed, and began a campaign to convince her husband that Kraig should be taken to UCLA. (There is sometimes a contention that men are more gender-phobic than women, but the truth is that women are just as involved in inculcating gender roles, particularly in young boys, and that women did, and still do, figure prominently among the researchers and clinicians involved in this field.)

When he was four years and eleven months old, Kraig's treatment began with a genital examination to determine if he had any physical abnormalities that the doctors felt might otherwise account for his feminine behaviors. To this end, researchers working for the feminine boy project also tested his chromosomes, and performed a sex chromatin study. His mother knew that they were testing to see if Kraig was really a boy, or if there were some hidden girl component in his body. They found that Kraig was an anatomically normal male.

Kraig was then sent by Richard Green to George Rekers and O. Ivar Lovaas, and a ten-month behavioral treatment began. Rekers later wrote, "Before treatment, [Kraig] had been described by a psychiatric authority on gender identity problems as one of the most severe cases he had assessed . . . [Kraig] continually displayed pronounced feminine mannerisms, gestures, and gait, as well as exaggerated feminine inflection and feminine content of speech. He had a remarkable ability to mimic all the subtle feminine behaviors of an adult woman . . . He appeared to be very skilled at manipulating [his mother] to satisfy his feminine interests (e.g., he would offer to 'help mommy' by carrying her purse when she had other packages to carry)." It is difficult to know what condition Kraig was actually in when he was first brought to UCLA, but much is revealed in the transcripts recorded by Dr. Green in his retrospective study of these boys, which he published in 1987 as The Sissy Boy Syndrome.

Green's transcripts include interviews with the parents at the time they brought Kraig to UCLA, and with the mother and Kraig when he was seventeen, and again at eighteen years old. (It should be noted that Kraig's name was changed by Dr. Green to "Kyle" for The Sissy Boy Syndrome, and most recently, in 1995, by Dr. Rekers to "Craig" for his Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems

What of Green's determination that Kraig wanted to be a girl? It was the Vietnam era, and at seventeen, Kraig recalled, " . . before I started kindergarten I was afraid that all boys had to go to the army and be killed. I thought I had to go to the army and be killed, so then I wanted to be a girl 'cause I didn't want to go get killed." This was clearly not a prehomosexual or pretranssexual desire being expressed, and in particular, nowhere in the transcripts or reports does it anywhere state that Kraig was disturbed, or even unhappy, about his anatomy. Kraig also remembered playing with a "mixed" group of children, and that his best friend was a boy. This was not a boy who played only with girls, another symptom of "deviant sex role."

At the intake interview with Kraig's parents, Dr. Green asked them if Kraig had a history of cross?dressing, and if he ever expressed the belief that he was a girl. The parents had some memories of Kraig with a shirt on his head, pretending he had long hair, and a few other instances of mop and towel play. Kraig also wore his father's T-shirt to bed one night, and the next morning, looking at himself in the reflection of a glass oven door, Kraig said he was wearing a dress. These incidents were enough for Kraig to be labeled as "cross?dressing since he was two years old." Green and Rekers never documented if this child refused to wear boy's clothing.

"Sex role deviant" boys are also depicted as refusing to engage in any male fantasy roles and as believing that they will grow up to be women. Kraig's mother did report, at the time she brought her son to the clinic, that he wanted "to grow up to be a mommy." Yet, when she explained to him that "daddies go out and work . . . to make money—that's father's role," Kraig was also reported as saying, "Well, I want to grow up and be like daddy." No one ever asked Kraig what it meant to him "to be a mommy." From what has been written about his case, there is nothing to indicate that he wanted to have a woman's body when he was grown up.

When the parents were asked if Kraig had ever said he wanted to be a girl, they said that he did. When they were asked if the boy had ever asserted that he was a girl, they said, "No." A dozen years later, when the mother was asked if her son, at the time she brought him to UCLA for an initial evaluation, was confused as to whether he was a girl or a boy, she answered, "I think so. Oh, I'm sure . . . He saw nothing wrong with picking up a doll instead of a car." She also stated that Kraig did not know if he was supposed to play with the teacups or the cars. Perhaps, in the years that followed her son's treatment, this mother had a strong investment in rationalizing having turned her son over to the doctors, and to do this, she created a memory that he was confused about his anatomical sex.

Kraig was the first child to be treated by Rekers and Lovaas for "deviant sex role behaviors," and the treatment took place both in Kraig's home and at the clinic. Many other young boys would follow in Kraig's treatment path. Rekers and Lovaas go to great lengths to explain why it was important to behaviorally treat a child like Kraig. The first reason was that the child will be scorned by his playmates, and that it is easier to change the child, rather than the society in which he lives. Secondly, the doctors believed Kraig to be at risk for adult transsexualism, transvestism and "some forms of homosexuality." (Homosexuals whose gender identities conform to their sex are not considered to be quite as pathological as those homosexuals whose gender identities do not conform to their sex. Therefore, a gay carpenter is not as sick as a gay hairdresser, and a lesbian nurse is not as sick as a lesbian plumber.)

The most chilling claim by Rekers and Lovaas, which would certainly have alarmed any parent, was that Kraig was at risk not only for depression, but for "arrest, trial, and imprisonment" in association with his possible future as a transsexual. Their most remarkable assertion, however, is the following: "self-mutilation in the form of autocastration or autopenectomy was attempted in 18% and accomplished in 9% of one series of adult cases." Nowhere in the literature of Kraig's case is there a single statement, by the child or the parents, that even implies that this five-year old wanted to cut off his penis, or that his feelings about being a boy, or a girl, had anything whatsoever to do with his body. Rather, Kraig's thoughts about being a girl or being a boy seem to be based on socially sanctioned gender roles, including his strong self?preservation instinct which told him he did not want to die in war.

Rekers and Lovaas designed the primary clinical feature of this treatment, which Rekers later replicated in treating Becky, and continues to recommend: the play?observation room with the one-way mirror, and the masculine and feminine toy tables. To obtain baseline play behaviors, Kraig's dress-up table featured various clothing and grooming toys. "On one side were girls' cosmetic articles and girls' apparel, consisting of a woman's wig, a long-sleeve dress (child's size), a play cosmetic set (lipstick and manicure items), and a set of jewelry consisting of bracelets, necklaces, rings, and earrings . . . On the other side of the Dress-Up Table were boys' apparel: namely, a plastic football helmet, an army 'fatigue' shirt . . . an army belt with hatchet holder and canteen holder, and a battery operated play electric razor . . ." The affect tables in Kraig's playroom featured: "girl toys associated with maternal nurturance; namely, a baby doll in a 3-foot crib with sliding side, a baby bottle, baby powder, and a Barbie doll with two sets of dresses, shoes, hat, and miniature clothesline . . . On the other side were placed articles associated with masculine aggression, consisting of two dart guns with darts, a small target, a rubber knife, plastic handcuffs, and a set of plastic cowboys and Indians . "

Kraig was left by his mother at the door to the play-observation room, where a doctor, presumably Rekers, led him into the room. Kraig's memory of the doctor is that he had very big ears that stuck out. When Kraig entered, he saw the large mirror and the two tables of toys. The doctor instructed Kraig, "When I leave this room, you may play with any of the toys on this table." He pointed only to the affect table, the one with the baby doll and the handcuffs. "Even though you will not see me," said the doctor, "I can see you play; so, I will know if you are playing with this table or a wrong table. So remember, choose toys to play with from this table only." Kraig watched the doctor with the long ears leave the room and close the door behind him. It might have been difficult for this four-year-old to understand exactly how the doctor would be able to see him, and he might have wondered why he did not simply stay in the room if he was going to watch him anyway.

Kraig did not display interest in the "masculine" toys, although his attraction to the army belt was noted. In fact, he took the army belt and tied it around his head. Kraig did not receive a masculine play point on the observer's scorecard for playing with the army belt, however, because what he did with it was considered "inappropriate play (e.g., cross-gender role use of same-gender toy object, such as army belt for a bonnet)." A variety of "probe" conditions were used, to see if Kraig changed how he played depending upon who was in the room. The only time Kraig engaged in exclusive masculine play was in his father's presence, which is not difficult to understand considering the father's response to his dressing up the stuffed animals.

This was not a particularly difficult phase of treatment for Kraig, and the observations established a baseline of his gender behavior, which was predominantly feminine. Kraig's assessment then moved to his home. A checklist of deviant effeminate behaviors was made, and for four ten-minute periods every day, Kraig's mother would watch him, and make check marks to indicate if he had engaged in the behaviors on the checklist, which were: "(a) plays with girls, (b) plays with female dolls, (c) feminine gestures, which included limp wrist, swishy hand, arm or torso movements, sway of hips, etc., and (d) female role play, which included impersonating or pretending to be a female (like actress, mother, female teacher) when playing games (like house, school, etc.)." Every three weeks, research assistants went to Kraig's home to watch his mother watch him, to be sure she was catching the behaviors and recording them correctly. After the baselines were established, the therapy began at the clinic, three times a week, for three ten minute sessions in an hour.

In his early sessions, Kraig and his mother were alone inside the observation room with the one-way mirror. Kraig's mother wore a set of earphones, and she had a book on her lap. The toy tables were again present. The doctor entered the room and said, "You may play with any of the toys you like on the table, until I come back. You may talk with your mommy, too, if you want to. I'll be back in ten minutes." He then left the room.

Initially, Kraig engaged in some type of feminine-identified play behavior. Maybe he picked up the plastic tea dishes, and poured imaginary tea from the teapot. He would have taken a pretend sip, and then offered his mother some. She would have bent toward him, smiling. Kraig would have seen her suddenly jerk upright, and look away from him toward the one-way window. His mother was being prompted, through the earphones, by the doctor. She was told to completely ignore him, because he was engaged in feminine play. Kraig would have no understanding of what was happening to his mother. On one such occasion, his distress at her behavior was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him, but she just looked away. She must have seemed like a stranger to have changed her behavior toward him so suddenly and for no apparent reason. He went to her, pulled on her, did anything he could to get her to speak, even if she were just going to reprimand him, but he could get no response. He was described as being in a panic, alternating between sobs and "aggressing at her," but again, when his distraught mother finally looked at him and began to respond, she stopped mid-sentence and abruptly turned away, as if he were not there. Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room.

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