Sexist History at the Heart of the ‘Science’ on Transsexualism, Part II: Robert Stoller, True Trans

Dr Em reveals how ‘true trans’ doesn’t exist & Robert Stoller’s work shows how the ‘science’ of transsexualism/transgenderism has always been anti-feminist.

Robert Stoller

As well as relying on Benjamin and Money’s work, Robert Stoller applied Lorenz’s concept of imprinting to the postulated idea of gender identity.¹ Originally published in 1968, Stoller’s first volume, Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity, argued that transsexualism was the result of faulty imprinting of appropriate gender (sex-role stereotypes). To blame? Women, of course! For example, regarding one child Stoller determined that ‘the child’s physical beauty and artistic abilities made his mother’s “task” of creating a transsexual easier’.² Stoller analysed the dreams and self-reports of three (yes, three) case studies of children he deemed transsexual boys and their mothers to formulate a deeply sexist theorem of why children do not conform to sex-role stereotypes. Stoller explained his use of such a limited sample because ‘these three were the only cases of childhood transsexualism seen in the first 10 years of this research project… our having seen so few probably indicates that this is a very rare condition’.³ Stoller assessed how ‘all the mothers comment that at two or three, these little boys were talking with them as equals concerning feminine matters, and were already well on their way to a later-developed impeccable feminine taste’.⁴ He observed of the children that ‘all have a remarkable precocity with regard to painting, dancing, costumes, designing of clothing, acting, hair-dressing, story-telling, and love of music’ and concluded that this was a sign of a female gender identity.⁵ This is testament to how the idea of gender dysphoria cements rigid sexist designations of appropriate behaviour for the different sexes. A boy has a flare for creative activities – he must be born wrong according to the gender scientists. These abnormalities, according to Stoller, can be detected before the child is one. Stoller reported of the first child how ‘this boy had actually shown manifestations of femininity which his mother recognized were unusual when he was less than a year old; sitting on her lap, he would look at magazines with her and stop her whenever there was a photograph of a beautiful woman, expressing intense pleasure with loud cooing sounds’.⁶ According to Stoller this is part of the proof that the child requires medical correction and is truly transsexual. Go figure.

Stoller looked for similarities amongst the mothers which had enabled the women to create a transsexual child by disrupting natural imprinting of gender identity. Firstly, the three mothers of the supposedly transsexual boys Stoller claimed ‘heterosexuality does not arouse much enthusiasm in them’.⁷ Stoller noted that the women do not fulfil their natural responsibility to be conventionally beautiful and ‘all were virgins when they married (and by easy choice)’. ⁸ Stoller recorded how all three mothers had a deep sense of emptiness but ‘all busy themselves through the day with housewifely activities which they feel are necessary but meaningless’.⁹ In the case of a ‘maternal mother’ Stoller blamed the child’s nonconformity to gender roles on the mother’s bisexuality disturbing her infant son’s development.¹⁰ Stoller remarked that ‘the first aspect of her bisexuality was her appearance. She always dressed either in suits or a skirt and blouse’, suggesting the mother’s fashion choice damaged the child’s natural development.¹¹ Unsatisfied with blaming just one woman, Stoller asked ‘What are the causes of her [the mother’s] bisexuality? First in importance is her mother, an empty woman’.¹² One imagines Stoller picturing an infinite chain of empty women. Stoller considered bisexuality in women to be a masculine defect, influenced by bad mothering and often the maleness of brothers.¹³ In Stoller’s theory of gender identity, the bisexual mother created a transsexual son to fulfil her penis envy. It is Freud on steroids. Stoller described how ‘as a result of the barren, frustrating, perfunctory care given her by her own mother, not having a penis and not having the attributes of masculinity caused a sense of emptiness, and, much more painful, resulted in intense penis envy’.¹⁴ Stoller concluded that ‘thus we find, as would be expected, a great nucleus of revenge as a source of her bisexuality’, therefore the mother communicated to her infant son a dislike of penises creating a transsexual child.¹⁵ Interpreting the mother’s dream of her child stealing something from a draw, Stoller asserted that ‘as is well known, such a woman says, in effect: “I do not need a penis for myself and I only admire those people who, like me, do not possess a penis: people with penises are really inferior”.¹⁶ This is some of the bedrock science which gender identity and gender dysphoria is based on. Susan Stryker, transgender activist, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona and Visiting Professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University (2019–20) described how Stoller’s work was part of the ‘legitimation of a newly-defined clinical entity, “gender identity disorder”, as an official pychopathology recognised by the American Psychiatric Association’ in the 1980s.¹⁷

If Stoller’s first volume of work has not persuaded you, maybe we will have better luck with volume two, first published in 1968. In Sex and Gender volume II: The Transsexual Experiment, Stoller rearticulated his argument that brain sex tailored towards imprinting of specific stereotypes produced masculine behaviours such as violence towards women in men, or feminine behaviours such as an innate desire to clean in women. Stoller was scathing of the women’s liberation movement, he stated that ‘Women’s liberation activists and other metapsychological romantics can make of this what they like, but what they make is… related to science as daydreams are to reality’.¹⁸ The male proposers of gender identity were working directly against the women’s liberation movement, and recognised this fact. Stoller continued his blaming of women – specifically mothers – for supposed childhood transsexualism and posited male aggression towards females as the natural and defining feature of a masculine gender identity which should be encouraged as a therapeutic route.¹⁹ In his analysis of ‘our little feminine boy’ Stoller delineated how ‘initial confirmation that the oedipal conflict is missing is found in treatment. Only when these boys have been treated for several years and masculine traits start appearing does evidence of oedipal conflict develop’.²⁰ This sounds like the treatment creating the disease. What looks like successful treatment? Male violence against women. Stoller described his successful outcome that ‘the boy starts to value their penis… they physically attack females – dolls and girls, with pleasure more than anger the dominant affect’.²¹ The ideology of gender identity asserts that if a male does not innately desire to commit violence against females, does not gain pleasure from aggression and assault of females then he is born wrong, abnormal. Stoller continued that ‘in their drawings, instead of showing only beautiful women, masculine males appear; and stories of attacks with guns and swords, with violence, danger, and damage are now invented’.²² This was deemed a triumph. Stoller stated that with ‘hostility… the boys do not feel it enough towards their mothers… before treatment. Then with the development of masculinity in treatment… ample hostility toward the mother begins to show – and not disguised at all’.²³ Recounting the treatment of a young boy for transsexualism , Stoller noted how ‘the patient began to feel affection for Dr. Newman and … no longer feared leaving his mother on entering the playroom… For the first time males began to appear in his stories… Dr. Newman showed his unmistakable pleasure. As men appeared more, aggression and cruelty, especially toward women, also surfaced’.²⁴ Once again, this aggression and cruelty towards women was thought to be natural in young boys and to be encouraged, it’s lack a sign of disturbed gender identity. Stoller celebrated when the boy became ‘angry and verbally abusive towards his mother’.²⁵ This was the point of gender identity therapy, the true nature of the sexes according to gender identity proponents.

Stoller understood rape fantasies as the epitome of natural masculinity and a goal of therapy. Stoller recorded the accomplishment of nearly four years of treatment of a patient that he had ‘moved from a totally feminine orientation… toward a considerably more masculine existence. As he began to identify with the therapist… themes of aggression, retaliation, and injury played a much larger part in his fantasy life… in a favourite theme gleaned from movie ads and redrawn by the patient, beautiful women are tortured and then raped by brutal men. The patient identifies himself as ‘one of the men who tie them up and abuse them’.²⁶ Stoller related how a different child positively responded to therapy, changing from wanting to play with Barbie to wanting to hurt and physically attack the doll, before he began to express his masculinity by punching his mother in the face.²⁷ As Barry Reay has outlined with regards to Stoller and transsexualism/transgenderism ‘the historian will be horrified by a therapy that defined masculinity in terms of fantasies of beating, torturing, and raping women and which viewed the cultivation of such imaginings as progress: “Lance wants to play murder with Barbie.”²⁸ Gender identity therapy was designed to create male hostility to females, and the mother in particular. It celebrated male violence and dominance as natural and is thus an expression of pure patriarchy.

True Trans

Being founded in sexist ‘science’, a sexist world view of the naturalness, sometimes, of stereotypes and women’s oppression, the concept of ‘true trans’ (occasionally worded ‘genuine trans’) is a way for people to argue with a smile that sex-role stereotypes are innate, don’t fall for it. It is sexism light. As Shelia Jeffreys has argued, transsexualism or ‘transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an “essence” of gender, a psychology or pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies’.²⁹ It proposes that sometimes children and people are born wrong, or that sometimes people can change sex. It disseminates the notion that sometimes sex-role stereotypes are natural and inborn and thus sometimes women really just align with their oppression, they really just want it. If sometimes a man is considered a woman then sometimes he is a lesbian. It is dangerous to deny one’s core beliefs because a man has asked nicely, it undermines all our arguments and turns an absolute – humans cannot change sex and women’s oppression is not natural – into a relative truth.   The bending of feminist beliefs and even reality to protect a male’s feelings does not enable us to tackle the problem of female oppression. Women and our rights are not vending machines where a man puts ‘good tokens’ in and gets a reward. One male in our space, no matter how he feels or dresses, alters that space to mixed-sex. One male legally a woman alters the definition of our sex. History has shown us that this, the ‘not all men’ argument around the subject of transsexualism/transgenderism, is how the problem began in the first place.³⁰ Furthermore, when a man claims to ‘feel like a woman’ and to be an ally, both of these cannot be true. Either he thinks sex-role stereotypes and women’s oppression is natural and innate (‘feel like a woman’) or he thinks women are fully human (ally).

Maybe the argument will change again on what the supposed trans status is based on in response to these criticisms and it will now be asserted that true trans is an autogynephilic male and autogynephilia needs to be accepted. Don’t kink shame now. An autogynephilic male is aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman. This is the ultimate objectification of women – women are reduced to parts (breasts, legs) and costume. These trans identified males mostly identify and seek to resemble a pornified women, with large breasts, stocking clad legs and ‘sexy’ outfits. I am yet to see a trans identified male covert and construct the body of a middle-aged woman who has had three children, dresses down for the school run, and doesn’t subscribe to patriarchal beauty myths, essentially a normal woman. This observation has been made for 40 years. Janice Raymond outlined in 1979 regarding transsexual surgery how ‘all these procedures are undertaken by the transsexual in the hope of conforming more to the fashionable, stereotypical feminine body image. Many transsexuals go to great lengths to fit themselves to the prescribed body measurements and gestalt of a man-made woman’.³¹ In the same year the award winning psychologist and psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, delineated the objectification of women when he asked ‘why should anyone (especially feminist women) object to men wanting to become women? Isn’t imitation the highest form of flattery? Precisely herein lies the “liberal” sexologists’ betrayal of human dignity and integrity: They support the (male) transsexual’s claim that he wants to be a woman — when, in fact, what he wants is to be a caricature of the male definition of “femininity.”³² As this sexual paraphilia doesn’t remain in private but is being indulged in public aren’t all autogynephilic males when getting others to refer to them as women or participating in women’s events dressed as women, making people participate in their sexual fetish? What other male sexual turn on is demanded to be indulged by everyone? All of the time. When children are coerced to use preferred pronouns – pretend that a man is a woman – is this not coercing children to participate in a male’s sexual fetish? Would we ask children to paddle a submissive, because of his feelings?

Maybe there will be a switch to try and argue that the true trans are those who have undergone surgery, well women are not dickless men and it is misogynistic to define us as such. The notion that plastic surgery and or removal of a penis could make a woman was strongly criticised as it emerged as a field. In 1974 the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie claimed that ‘what is miscalled “transsexualism” has led to the most tragic betrayal of human expectation in which medicine and modern endocrinology and surgery have ever engaged. In the name of gender transmutation they have led people to believe that alchemy was possible, thus fostering in individuals and in our whole culture conscious and unconscious neurotogenic fantasies whose only possible outcome is an intensification of the neurotic fantasies which underlie their expectation and ultimate psychosis’.³³ Billings and Urban had warned that sex-change operations represented the commodification and objectification of the human being to be sold by capitalists. They argued that ‘human experiences such as sexual fulfillment and gender-role comfort were… transformed into luxury commodities available at high prices from U.S. physicians’.³⁴ In terms of medical ethics, Harry Benjamin’s discussions of diagnosis, etiology, and treatment of transsexualism provoked hostile reactions from psychoanalysts such as  Greenberg in 1960; Gutheil in 1954; Lukianowicz in 1959; Northrup in 1959; and Ostow in 1953 ‘who charged that it is one thing to remove diseased tissue and quite another to amputate healthy organs because emotionally disturbed patients request it’.³⁵ A 1979 study produced by the research team at Johns Hopkins called ‘sex reassignment surgeries into question by suggesting that psychosocial outcomes in transgender patients who underwent reassignment surgery were not better than those who went without surgery… the study led to the closure of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic and an end to the sex reassignment surgeries offered there’.³⁶ In this follow up study of patients who had undergone SRS Jon Meyer and Donna Reter found that “sex reassignment surgery confers no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation”.³⁷ The psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, Dr Paul McHugh, stated that ‘just as these men enjoyed cross-dressing as women before the operation, so they enjoyed cross-living after it. But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with’.³⁸ In another paper McHugh asked people to ‘imagine what it’s like to get up at dawn and think about spending the day slashing with a knife at perfectly well-formed organs, because you psychiatrists do not understand what is the problem here but hope surgery may do the wretch some good’.³⁹ Richard Fitzgibbons, Philip Sutton and Dale O’Leary maintained that ‘Sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) violates basic medical and ethical principles and is therefore not ethically or medically appropriate. SRS mutilates a healthy, non-diseased body. To perform surgery on a healthy body involves unnecessary risks; therefore, SRS violates the principle primum non nocere, “first, do no harm.”  Candidates for SRS may believe that they are trapped in the bodies of the wrong sex and therefore desire or, more accurately, demand SRS; however, this belief is generated by a disordered perception of self. Such a fixed, irrational belief is appropriately described as a delusion. SRS, therefore, is a “category mistake”—it offers a surgical solution for psychological problems’.⁴⁰ Fitzgibbons, Sutton and O’Leary were clear that sex reassignment surgery ‘does not accomplish what it claims to accomplish. It does not change a person’s sex; therefore, it provides no true benefit’.⁴¹ Sex reassignment surgery rests on the misogynistic definition of women as absence and lack of a penis which has been present since Aristotle. Used to justify the submission of women to men for millennia, Aristotle declared the female to be ‘a misbegotten male’ or a ‘deformed male’.⁴² This idea was seized upon by Thomas Aquinas who claimed it made the subordination of women to men a divine goodness. Aquinas himself declared that women are ‘deficiens et occasionatus’ – defective and misbegotten.⁴³ As a feminist I don’t use the medieval church fathers to define women, I have moved on from that.

Perhaps there will be a switch to arguing that true trans or genuine trans have gender dysphoria. Let us unpack that. The term ‘gender dysphoria’ was a deliberate rebranding to make the concept of sex-change more acceptable and thus profitable. As Billings and Urban have assessed, ‘in the light of patient revelations, proponents of sex-change surgery were dangerously close to the accusations made by psychoanalytic critics – [that they were] collaboration with psychosis’.⁴⁴ In 1973 ‘Fisk proposed a solution. Instead of questioning the conceptual, clinical, and diagnostic substructure of the “disease,” he simply replaced the term “transsexual” with “gender dysphoria syndrome,” now a standard disease term’.⁴⁵ Alongside having to endorse all the sexist ‘science’ outlined above one is arguing that the true trans/genuine trans are those with oppression discomfort disease? I would argue that a dislike of discrimination (sex-role stereotypes) is natural and should be celebrated. To dislike sex-role stereotypes is not a disease. Surely radical feminists are thus all transsexual if the definition is based on gender (sex-role stereotype/oppression) dysphoria (discomfort)? To claim that an individual needs medical correction to conform to a man-made system is ghastly. This is sexist, it is arguing that sex-role stereotypes are natural and should not be challenged and dismantled. That women’s oppression and sex discrimination is the organic order of things. It is arguing that everyone must be chained so that a few may paint their chains and call them bracelets. As Janice Raymond argued in 1979, ‘transsexualism operates as an ideology which the suffix ‘ism’ is meant to denote’.⁴⁶ It is a worldview of what women and men can be.  Raymond argued that ‘what could be perceived as an initial protest against sex-role stereotyping (i.e., the transsexual’s initial gender discomfort and gender rebellion) becomes short circuited’ and it becomes a fetishization of the female.⁴⁷ Those who use the term ‘gender dysphoria’ are endorsing and propagating the idea that sex-role stereotypes are somehow innate and unchangeable.  Billings and Urban concluded their research that sex-change surgery as a treatment for oppression discomfort ‘by substituting medical terminology for political discourse, the medical profession has indirectly tamed and transformed a potential wildcat strike at the gender factory’.⁴⁸ The concept of ‘gender dysphoria’ being a medical disease means that society must change bodies to fix non-conformity to a system of women’s submission to male dominance.       

Maybe the argument and identity will shift yet again to ‘transsexual male’. I can’t reconcile this. Why are you not just a male? Why do you have a male body but claim trans – sex status? Humans cannot change sex. Fitzgibbons, Sutton and O’Leary questioned ‘The use of “transsexual” [as] problematic, since it… implies that a person can move from their true genetic sex to the other sex’.⁴⁹ Szasz, argued that transsexualism was not a disease or ‘just like any other illness’ because ‘the transsexual male is indistinguishable from other males, save by his desire to be a woman.’⁵⁰ He underscored that ‘not all desires are authenticated in our society as diseases’.⁵¹ What is it that is different about a male who desires one type of discrimination (gender) over another? What makes them different from any other male other than worldview, beliefs, likes and dislikes? As men, like women, do not have a hive mind don’t all men have different thoughts and personalities?  Why can males who disagree with sex-role stereotypes, who baulk at gender not be males who disagree with sex-role stereotypes and baulk at gender? It is as if they have elevated masculinity to such a level that they feel they can’t participate in male. This is sexist to the extreme – men are like this and women are like that. I think the cages of gender should be broken not reinforced and everyone’s full personalities should be expressed regardless of their sex. Lastly, endorsing the idea of gender dysphoria in adults endorses the idea of gender dysphoria in children. How can we argue that no child is born wrong but then claim that, actually, this adult was born wrong?

Conclusions

I don’t believe that humans can change sex, or that children are born wrong, or that there are male and female brains, or that sex-role stereotypes are natural and innate, or that clothes are magical, or that males can be lesbians. I cannot pretend that sometimes I don’t believe these things. My beliefs and adherence to science and evidence do not alter at a whim, or whether I like a person. I treat all people the same when it comes to reality, law and philosophy built on that foundation. I don’t believe that women or women’s rights are a mental health retreat for unhappy men. I don’t believe that women and girls are fetish objects who exist to please men and that we should restructure our very definition of ourselves to satisfy a man’s sexual fantasy – autogynephilia. I think it is entitled sexism for a man to claim he ‘feels like a woman’ or ‘lives like a woman’ or ‘has sex like a woman’. Women live a variety of lives, have a variety of thoughts and emotions, a variety of hopes and dreams – the only thing that links us is our biology and the oppression we face based on our sex. I know women are fully human and deserve their human rights being upheld. I know women are discriminated against based on their sex and thus we need sex-based protections. Simply put, I am a feminist.

International law recognises that gender stereotypes are a form discrimination against women, thus the notion that gender stereotypes are natural and innate as purported by transsexualism/transgenderism clearly conflicts with the rights and interests of women. The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was written in 1979 and Article 5 declares that all States should take ‘appropriate measures [to] modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudice and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women’. The British government’s policy paper on ‘Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)’, published 22 June 2011, explains that Article 5 deals with ‘Stereotyping and cultural prejudices’ and requires States to ‘take appropriate measures to eliminate stereotyping, prejudices and discriminatory cultural practices’.⁵² Article 10, focusing on education, further demands that ‘States shall eliminate stereotypes of the roles of women and men through revising school materials and teaching methods’.⁵³ This international political policy and national political policy, built on years of research, underscores how harmful gender stereotyping is to women and women’s rights. No endorsement of the idea that these stereotypes are natural and normal can be considered neutral to women.

The notion that those women who don’t believe, or will not pretend to believe to pacify men, in true trans are bigoted or mean or nasty is a repeat of the arguments that those women who don’t believe in transgenderism/transsexualism are bigoted and mean. We have all experienced the accusation of transphobe and the social exclusion when we stated our belief in biology, this is the same. It is undoubtedly appealing to refute the allegation of transphobia by saying ‘I have trans friends’ or ‘look, a trans person agrees with me’ but this both excludes women who need us (transwidows, daughters of trans identified fathers), muddies the waters and uses other people, those claiming to be trans, for one’s own ends. No person should be used as a means to an end. The belief that women have full humanity does not have to be defended by any kind of shallow show, our ideas and evidence stand on their own. With no reasonable scientific basis transsexualism/transgenderism remains at the status of an ideology, and an ideology which is antithetical to feminism.