Beating The Girl Out Of The Boy

How many times have we seen in the news where a parent beats their child to death because they were trying to make a “boy” out of them? Or we see them commit suicide because their parents force the child to go to therapy to make them “straight?”

Wired News has an opinion article about Conversion/Reparative therapy,

We Must Put an End to Gender Conversion Therapy for Kids
By Dan Karasic and Diane Ehrensaft
July 6, 2015

LEELAH ALCORN, A trans youth who endured conversion therapy, wrote in her suicide note, “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights.”

Recently, a series of opinion pieces have been published in newspapers and magazines (including in WIRED) decrying President Obama’s statement condemning conversion therapy for LGBT youth, as well as the recently passed ban on conversion therapy for LGBT youth in the province of Ontario, Canada home of some of the practice’s defenders. Since the 1990s, major medical and mental health organizations have condemned conversion therapy for the purpose of changing a person’s sexual orientation. The recent controversy is in response to efforts to also ban conversion therapy attempts to change gender identity and expression in children.

Critics of the ban state that gender identity in gender-nonconforming children is as-yet unformed. They point out that some grow up to be gay or lesbian, rather than transgender, so therefore efforts to change their gender nonconformity may result in happy gay and lesbian adults, rather than transgender adults “doomed” to what critics perceive as a sad life of hormone treatments and surgeries.

Many of the people who are pushing conversion/reparative therapy are using outdated research; all the major medical and psychotherapy association have ban conversion/reparative therapy. The only ones that endorse the therapy are conservative political and religious affiliated.

This article from 2011 on CNN’s Anderson 360 illustrates the long term damage conversion/reparative therapy does.

Los Angeles (CNN) -- Kirk Andrew Murphy seemed to have everything to live for.

He put himself through school. He had a successful 8-year career in the Air Force. After the service, he landed a high profile position with an American finance company in India.
[…]
But in 2003 at age 38, Kirk Murphy took his own life.

"I used to spend so much time thinking, why would he kill himself at the age of 38? It doesn't make any sense to me," said Kirk's sister, Maris Murphy. "What I now think is I don't know how he made it that long."

After Kirk's death, Maris started a search that would uncover a dark family secret. That secret revealed itself during a phone conversation with her older brother Mark, who mentioned his distrust of any kind of therapy.

"Don't you remember all that crap we went through at UCLA?" he asked her. Maris was too young to remember the details, but Mark remembered it vividly as a low point in their lives.

What they did to Krik was use him for a human experiment that was deemed a success, they took a feminine boy and made him “straight” or so they thought.

Kaytee Murphy took Kirk to UCLA, where he was treated largely by George A. Rekers, a doctoral student at the time.

In Rekers' study documenting his experimental therapy (PDF), he writes about a boy he calls "Kraig." Another UCLA gender researcher confirmed that "Kraig" was a pseudonym for Kirk.

The study, later published in an academic journal, concludes that after therapy, "Kraig's" feminine behavior was gone and he became "indistinguishable from any other boy."

"Kraig, I think, certainly was Rekers' poster boy for what Rekers was espousing for young children," said Jim Burroway, a writer and researcher who has studied Rekers' work.

This study is the poster boy of the conversion/reparative therapy and it is still being cited when they try to justify the therapy. But in reality it was a horrible failure just like Dr. Money’s study of David Reimer.

According to Rekers' case study, blue chips were given for masculine behavior and would bring rewards, such as candy. But the red chips, given for effeminate behavior, resulted in "physical punishment by spanking from the father."

This is how they conditioned him to be “straight” and the long term effect was living with all the internalized guilt.

While Dr. Reker went on to become…

…a founding member of the Family Research Council, a faith-based organization that lobbies against gay-rights issues. Rekers was also on the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, an organization of scientists that says its mission is to offer treatment to those who struggle with what they call "unwanted homosexuality."

And until he was caught with a male escort,

Just last year, Rekers' days as an anti-gay champion would come to an end. He hired a male escort to accompany him on his trip to Europe.

Rekers denies any sexual contact with the male escort. Rekers says he's not gay. He claims he wasn't aware that his companion offered sexual favors for sale over the Internet until after the trip, and says he hired him only to carry his bags. But the reporters who broke the story about Rekers' trip say they saw Rekers pushing a luggage cart through a Miami airport, where they took his photo.

Times have changed when it comes to conducting experiments on human subjects because of the Tuskegee Experiment. Now all federally funded research must go before an Institute Review Board (IRB) to determine ethics of the experiment and if it will do any harm to the subjects. When I was taking part in a research study of the transgender community in the greater Hartford we had to go before the IRB and they suggested minor changes to our study and I also had to pass a NIH online certificate for working with human subjects and present it to the board. Hopefully this type of research will never happen again.

Here in Connecticut we are monitoring if any therapists are doing conversion/reparative therapy and so far there are no therapists who are doing it.