Zucker, Green and their ilk practice an extremely vicious form of reparative therpy on transkids. Some might even go so far as to call it abuse. Zucker defends this by saying he isn’t trying to prevent transkids from growing up gay or lesbian merely to prevent them from growing up transsexual or transgender.
This is another dark chapter in the history of psychiatric abuse similar to that sort of activity outlined by Naomi Klein in her book “The Shock Doctrine” or the way the Soviets used mental hospitals to silence dissent.
First of all comes the premise. Heteronomativity is the only acceptable behavior. This begs the question acceptable by whom? All this seems premised on some sky god based ideology that “God does not make mistakes.” Tell that one to the co-joined kids I saw the other day.
We have more birth defects than ever due to the massive numbers of chemicals that are poisoning the planet. Intersex fish and othe animals are being discovered all over the place. Human’s as top predators consume concentrated amounts of these enviromental poisons.
But I digress. What gives Zucker the right to abuse children in the name of treating them for something that is innate?
Here is a You Tube Video of Zucker’s pathetic rationalizations:
07/06/2009 at 6:16 PM
Ken Zucker and the approach he has to women born transsexual and transgender folks is the epitomy of the teatment I feared so much when my parents wanted to take me to doctors for treatment at age 14. (back in the 60’s) I’d been insisting I was female and a girl since I was 4 I really cannot understand why his institutionalised medically sanctioned “child abuse” is allowed to exist let alone flourish. In my book there can be no justification for it. Zucker here attempts to do just that and it is grotesque from what ever angle you attempt to look at this.
Sex identity is in itself and in isolation not that big an issue. Medically there are by and large good outcomes available. It is the social reaction to it that causes psychological damage. We all know that; what is lacking in this is any unified resistance to Zucker/Blanchard/Baily/money/Green et al The unanswered question is why is there such diversity within the many hundreds of those who feel they are women born transsexual (I use this term out of respect for you Suzan and the fact that this is after all your blog) It seems to me that while there is such disagreement the division will prevent any change taking place.
Lynn, Andrea, Becky Allison and a few others do commendable work but it seems so fractured and disjointed in my view and such lacks the credibility it deserves.
I am aware of your feelings towards the UK organisation “Press For Change” but at least that gave Government a very few groups to deal with and not the great many competing organisations in USA. Much of the sucess PFC had was due to the behind the scenes lobbying in Government departments. Is anyone doing that in USA? Sometimes public rallies just whip up opposition not support.
07/06/2009 at 7:02 PM
Zucker shouldn’t be a Psychiatrist, he should be a patient.
07/06/2009 at 9:42 PM
Something I wonder about–that I first read in a piece by Curtis Hinkle–is that the clinical population Zucker abuses (I can’t bring myself to say works with) is not the same as the one I, for one, am part of–nor I think Evangelina or Suzan.
Hinkle makes the point that the Clarke-Northwestern axis took over the DSM in the drafting of DSM-IV, removing transsexuality and adding Gender Identity Disorder in its place. This allowed Zucker to identify two disparate clinical populations. Empirically, it is pointed out that almost none of the male-bodied children who present as gender variant grow up to be transsexual women, but are gay or bisexual men.
The rationale he uses, as you point out, Suzan, is interesting, he is not preventing them from being gay or bisexual, but being transsexual/transgender. Putting to the side, for the moment, the increasingly accepted position–in Canada, at least–that gender non-conformity is part of “all things associated” with homosexuality.
Hinkle has alleged that Zucker is defrauding the Ontario health plan because he is actually using reparative therapy on these children to keep them from growing up to be gay/bisexual men even though homosexuality has been removed from the DSM.
No clinical population is homogeneous, but for me it raises the interesting question why do so many of us who grow up to be transsexual women NOT present as children.
Not only is no clinical population homogeneous, but like so much in this area it is culture dependant and changes as the culture changes.
For myself, growing up in Toronto, and later going to the University of Toronto in the early 70’s it was very clear this was not something I wanted to declare.
I believe Serano makes the argument that no one had to tell us but we simply knew how dangerous it was to come out.
I expect things change over the years.
Yet, if even adults confuse orientation with identity, why would it be any easier for children?
As the culture changes and it becomes clear that to be involved with a man one doesn’t have to be a woman, then in the future, children won’t confuse the question, Who am I attracted to? with Who am I?
07/06/2009 at 10:24 PM
I read a lot of material of the gay and lesbian liberation movements. I think in some ways the analysis is more developed than is ours.
I came out young but in working on the book I am writing I can see pivotal moments where certain events going one way instead of another made it more likely I would come out young than in middle age.
But and this is important I could equal look at how a different outcome in as few as a half dozen moments in my life could have shifted me towards the path of coming out in the second half of life after children had grown.
I can look and see how appearence made coming out easier than not. I could have never pulled off getting past the draft physical.
But the year before I came out I was gang raped in SF city jial and assaulted on the street so I knew a thing or two about fear. I had to work through the idea that I was doing something on the risk order of BASE jumping.
I can undersand how thinking one could find a cure of some sort combined with fear could cause someone to try every possible alternative.
07/06/2009 at 10:38 PM
I’m not convinced the analysis of the gay and lesbian movement is more developed than ours–how can it be if they exclude us?
We don’t exclude them. And no analysis can be complete if it excludes not only gender identity–as opposed to gender non-conformity–and subconscious sex.
I can’t say my life has been nearly as horrific as yours, Suzan; my time in San Francisco, 67-68, was simply a boy in Lick-Wilmerding HS.
I don’t know about trying any possible alternative–I just waited until the time was right. Not the usual path, I suppose, but one that has worked for me–increasingly so.
In the book I’m hoping to write, as I enter a career of social work/social policy, I’m concentrating on the difference between gender and sex, so often elided even among those I would count not only as ideological but personal allies.
The most pivotal moment in my life is the one I have not yet embarked upon, though it is near.
I have contributed to a university textbook, though am not yet sure of the form it has been permitted to take–but I believe that for the future there will need to be clarity of theory.
My life/biography is not something I feel the need, even desirability, to share, even if I could–it is the theory, the clarity, more than biography, that needs to be brought into the world–so that future biographies may actually happen.
07/06/2009 at 11:01 PM
When I say their analysis is more developed than ours I think is is because they have been analysing society and its structures regarding gay and lesbian people far longer than we have. They have hundreds of books and years of practice.
As for their not including us…
Why should they? We are only gay or lesbian as an incidental. We are not really part of the gay and lesbian community and hard as it is to admit the sticking a T or even a T/T there doesn’t make much sense.
T to F people have much more common cause with feminism as what we are fighting is not homophobia but misogyny.
In reality we also have little in common with T to M people either but that is often closer than with G/L people as they have empathy regarding the shared experience of feeling stuck in the wrong body.
07/06/2009 at 11:18 PM
Jessica…
You call my life horrific…
At one point I went into therapy. I stopped seeing my life as horrific the first time I saw the number on my therapist’s forearm.
Indeed I see my life has having been interesting and challenging.
I live my convictions and I wanted to do what I did. It took courage to choose the more difficult path.
I turn 62 this week. I am getting a tattoo of a star on my shoulder half purple/half black. It is an anarcha-feminist symbol.
Emma Goldman’s Living My Life is a great guide as to the living a self determined life.
07/06/2009 at 11:23 PM
I concur with everything you say about the voluminousness of G/L commentary and analysis, Suzan. Nor do they have to include us–regardless of the way we might feel about this exclusion.
Or how wrong this exclusion is–as wrong as the exclusion of gay people by straight people.
What I would argue is that the impetus brought to theoretical discussion by sexual orientation and queer people–defined as gender non-conformity–has just about expended itself.
I would further argue that if any of the areas openned up by gay/lesbian theorists–and heterosexual theorists arguing from a G/L perspective of gender non-conformity–are to proceed to novel, helpful and productive insights, they are going to have to come to terms with the perspective we bring.
And our perspective is yet to be see for the productive impetus it brings/the productive light it shines on issues now thought settled.
No, they don’t have to accept the gifts we bring, anymore than straight people had to accept theirs. But the shoe is now on the other foot–ours.
Only they can’t see it yet. And certainly won’t accept it for a while.
But then, we already have a template, even a timeline of sorts, for our acceptance–that of gay people accepted by straight people.
Replete with all the ironies that are apparent.
07/06/2009 at 11:30 PM
I suppose there is a relativity to it all.
I don’t feel my life is at all worth commenting about–though it has been pointed out it is more than I think and more ‘horrific’ that many of those around me.
We choose what we choose.
The pivotal moments you speak of are there for those of us who choose to see/decide.
In retrospect we see–if we are lucky–that we could have chosen no other path.
I am only 57, but I see so much of my life as barren. All I can do is resolve that my future will not be as my past–and that my life has been exactly the life I was meant/needed to have.
07/07/2009 at 8:48 AM
Ah this is opposite of what I said about pivot points. I’m an atheist and an existentialist I do not believe in divine anything, no invisible hand making life choice inevitable. In all likelihood I had already formed the decision as to the path I would choose prior to ever encountering those moments as I had a clear picture of coming out and living as female. Even if that meant being a queen because in the early 1960s SRS was rare and done in far away places.
Mostly though my obviousness made my life path more likely than my coming out later.
07/07/2009 at 8:53 AM
I do not think we have any “special gifts”. I think our gender develops just like everyone elses.
As for the Lesbian and gay communities we come late to the party and unlike the lesbian community we have a bunch of demands and haven’t done much work towards the L/G community outside our own special interest.
Add to that the extreme homophobia on the part of many in the heterosexual CD community that makes up a fair portion of the transgender “umbrella” and our relationship with L/G becomes more problematic.