Will "The Sissy Boy Experiment" Finally Mean Death For "Ex-Gay Therapy"?

From The New Civil Rights Movement: http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/will-the-sissy-boy-experiment-finally-mean-death-for-ex-gay-therapy/discrimination/2011/06/08/21551

by David Badash

June 8, 2011

Will “The Sissy Boy Experiment,” a three-​part series from CNN’s Anderson Cooper which began Monday night, be the death of so-​called “ex-​gay” therapy? It should be. So-​called “ex-​gay therapy,” the pseudo-​science of changing someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity to heterosexual, also labeled “conversion therapy,” has gotten its final nail in the coffin, thanks in large part to author Jim Burroway, whose extensive research – even more in-​depth and broader that CNN’s – uncovered the fact that the man responsible for the so-​called ex-​gay movement, George Alan Rekers, fraudulently reported on a pivotal study — his study, as a student — back in the 1970s.

The study? A four-​year old boy, known as “Kraig” to millions who read the 20+ research papers Rekers published on him, had exhibited so-​called “feminine” characteristics early on. “Kraig” went through Rekers’ emotionally and physically violent aversion therapy — not just “praying away the gay” — but attempts to physically beat homosexuality out of him. Rekers falsely reported that Kurt Murphy, aka “Kraig,” became a well-​adjusted heterosexual man intent on marrying a woman and having a family. In reality, “Kraig,” after ten months of “therapy,” between the ages of four and five, attempted suicide at seventeen, and succeeded after a miserably unhappy life, at 38.

“In 1972, George Alan Rekers wrote a dissertation that earned him a Ph.D. in Psychology,” Burroway writes at Box Turtle Bulletin. “His dissertation described his success in treating three young boys whom he diagnosed as having a ‘cross-​gender disturbance.’ The boys’ treatments were part of a federally funded study at UCLA. Two years later, Rekers and his mentor, Dr. Ivar Lovaas, published a groundbreaking paper based in Rekers’s dissertation. It featured one boy in particular, five-​year-​old Kraig. That paper launched Rekers’s career, and he would feature or mention Kraig’s case in at least twenty papers, books and chapters in the forty years following his dissertation.

“In 1987 another UCLA researcher, Dr. Richard Green, published a book, titled The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality. Kraig — this time his name would be changed to ‘Kyle’ — was one of a dozen feminine boys featured in his treatise on cross-​gender behavior. Green interviewed Kyle’s parents when Kyle was five, Kyle and his mother when Kyle was seventeen, and Kyle again when he was eighteen. That last interview left Green considerably more ambivalent about Kyle’s sexuality than Rekers was. Rekers described Kraig as ‘indistinguishable from any other boy in terms of gender-​related behaviors,’ but Green wrote that Kyle was bisexual. Green also revealed that Kyle tried to commit suicide when he was seventeen. Nevertheless, Green concluded that no one was ‘obviously harmed by treatment.’ (emphasis his).”

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