Idle Worship
Fairy tales of conversion
Grace byron
God is a man and he is fertile. In Christian accountability groups, eerily similar to Men’s Rights groups and their obsession with semen retention, this is the one commandment. Be fruitful and multiply. In the purity groups I attended as a teenager, there were many horny men in emotional cock cages. Not all therapy is good, not all therapy is open to any outcome. Purity groups were only one extension of the enforcement of proper sexuality. For extreme cases, Christians can turn to conversion therapy. I was an extreme case. Not in the sense of being inordinary, but in the sense that I struggled with same-sex desire. “Homosexuality” was too unwieldy of a word, frightening in its lack of decorum. “Gay” was too idiomatic. The word “transgender” was never used, probably because it was unthinkable. Only one kind of change was desirable.
For so long, I wanted to be a good straight cis Christian boy. Now the girlhood I never had haunts me. Across the United States, the lives of trans children are played with like political toys. Parents of trans children and trans adults are fleeing Florida as DeSantis signs increasingly punitive laws into effect. The world is never different, if such bills tell us anything about the pendulum of political process. There is blood in the soil.
What if instead of mourning lost girlhood we looked further to see the girlhood that exists at the bottom of boyhood? The girlhood from hell. Often, histories of conversion therapy focus on the suppression of queer sexuality. Less often do they consider the possibility that a queer boyhood may have been the genesis of a girl. In fact, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” has been critiqued for failing to consider the possibility that some boys were girls. Perhaps if more nonnormative desires had been on the table, I would’ve come out as a girl sooner. Too many would-haves, not enough pro-trans therapists, not anywhere and certainly not in Indiana.
The history of conversion therapy is the story of two allegedly nonreligious institutions moving toward mysticism and fanaticism. Psychoanalysis and the state both found it to their advantage to create and regulate the category of the sexual deviant. Both the homosexual and transsexual became lab rats under the microscope. How had they come into being? Or, more to the point, how could they not come into being?
Psychoanalysis and the state both found it to their advantage to create and regulate the category of the sexual deviant.
In 1991, four years before I was born, Joseph Nicolosi published his influential Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality. Nicolosi is one of the grandfathers of conversion therapy, a man who would go on to speak at huge Evangelical conferences on the emptiness of homosexuality. In 1998, the American Family Association and the Family Research Council spent $600,000 advertising conversion therapy. I was still toddling around with an Obi-Wan bouncy ball on the west side of Indianapolis. I didn’t know it at the time, but Nicolosi was to have a powerful influence on my own psychosexual development.
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While the current resurgence of psychoanalysis in the United States has been led predominantly by leftists, the clinical field has not always been so open to radical political ends. Many psychoanalysts were concerned with normativity above all else, especially with regard to the development of sexuality. Some of Freud’s descendants wanted to repair their patients’ sex drives—from lost deviant to proper heterosexual. It wasn’t until 2019 that the American Psychoanalytic Association apologized for treating “homosexuality” as a mental disorder.
The longstanding relationship between psychoanalysis and conversion therapy is difficult to unravel; the two were not always so connected, but it was a question considered since its inception. Sigmund Freud—who argued that we’re all bisexual (and indeed, bigender)—wasn’t so sure such conversion of object choice was possible. He called one lesbian a lost cause, believing her beyond repair. Freud also wrote to the mother of a homosexual, stating that “homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.” This phrase has been cited by many gay psychoanalysts as proof that Freud was less conservative than his followers claimed. In his letter, he went on to say he could not promise to shift her son’s sexual orientation.[1] Anna Freud, Freud’s own psychoanalyst-daughter and keeper of his archive, tried to suppress some of these letters. This may be, to risk wild analysis, because Anna Freud herself was likely a lesbian.
But it was Anna Freud’s version of psychoanalysis that largely made its way to these shores. Those who followed in Freud’s footsteps believed that psychoanalysis could intervene in the process of psychosexual development. Psychoanalyst Jack Drescher’s incisive historical essay “I’m Your Handyman” traces the devolution of Freud’s work through analysts Sandor Rado, Hanna Siegel, and, of course, Joseph Nicolosi.
The second-generation Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Rado moved to the United States in the 1930s. Rado’s conception of homosexuality was primarily based on his refutation of Freud’s idea of bisexuality. Freud believed humans were born with unfocused sex drives and were innately bisexual. As they grew up, so long as nothing was disturbed, they would become healthy heterosexuals. Homosexuality was, however, one possible variation. Rado disagreed. For him, homosexuality was not at all natural. Rado argued only heterosexuality was a nonpathological outcome of sexual development.
Hanna Segal, Melanie Klein’s student and great interpreter, was a British analyst who rose to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s, before being appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College London (UCL) in 1987. Segal said her clinical work taught her something unpopular and unexpected. After analyzing multiple lesbian women, and fixating on their energies, Segal felt that lesbianism was pathological. She believed that lesbians “tried to heal their defective body images by seeking others like themselves.” Of twelve lesbian patients she treated, she claimed that more than half became heterosexual. One wonders how long that lasted and what kind of transference occurred in Segal’s sessions.
The work of these analysts, and many others like them, was subsequently taken up in the United States with little to no distinction on why state-side psychoanalysts disliked homosexuality. It only mattered that they disliked it. This became the transferential path of psychoanalysis to the church and state. If analysts thought it, the state could run with it. “Psychoanalytic theorists traditionally couched their moral condemnations of homosexuality within scientific and pseudo-scientific metaphors,” Drescher concludes.
Regardless of what developmental stage sent things off-kilter, analysts drew similar conclusions about how homosexuality develops. Gay men fear heterosexual sex as some sort of castration and never age out of an incestuous desire for their father. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick succinctly summed it up when she wrote: “The reason effeminate boys turn out gay… is other men don’t validate them as masculine.”
Joseph Nicolosi married psychoanalysis and spirituality. During the 1990s and early 2000s, he spoke to churches and purity groups across the country. “He offers a religious treatise on homosexuality thinly disguised as a scientific document,” Drescher writes. Nicolosi believed in traditional family values and the idea that queer people were seeking to fulfill themselves in an oblivion of sameness. He took his “findings” and brought them to the church, which propagated his teachings across the religious Right. The wall between analysts and Christians had fallen. Finally the two had found their prophet.
Mainstream U.S. psychoanalysts continue to retroactively reconstruct childhood in order to enforce normative sexuality and gender development. By tracing what disturbance may have knocked a child off the course of traditional heterosexuality, analysts believe they can pinpoint family trouble or even abuse. If trauma can explain queerness, then why not treat the trauma and allow children to grow up straight? A straight child is better than a gay child. A gay child is not better than no child at all. This is often the thought process of contemporary “gender-exploratory” therapy and it sounds eerily close to the work of analysts like Rado, Segal, and Nicolosi.
In Histories of the Transgender Child, historian Jules Gill-Peterson meticulously traces the creation of trans medicine as originally a “cure” for intersex children and homosexual children—in effect creating a form of conversion therapy in plain sight. White trans kids received treatment—often as lab rats—while Black trans kids were institutionalized. Trans kids are continually being saved from themselves in order to preserve their imagined happiness and status as property. Effeminate boys were often a primary target, though tomboys who crossed a certain threshold of gender fungibility were suspect as well. Homosexuality, transsexuality, and any form of gender deviance were treated as the same thing for much of the twentieth century.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) was slow to condemn the practice of conversion therapy. It took them until 1998 to issue a mea culpa. The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) apologized only a few years ago. Of course, the APA’s all-powerful Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-1), from its inception in 1952 until 1973, described . Queer people were a priori mentally ill. However, with the removal of homosexuality from the DSM, the development of gender identity disorder, or GID-C, shifted away from ensuring children grew up straight to ensuring children grew up cis.[2] Like Whac-A-Mole, when queerness was absorbed into normativity, transness became the new frontier for psychological experimentation. And make no doubt, many psychoanalysts were experimenting, shooting in the dark at their patients with half-baked ideas.
In 1973, the same year homosexuality was removed from the DSM as a mental disorder, the ex-gay ministry Love in Action was born. Love in Action (LIA, later euphemistically titled Restoration Path) was founded in Marin County, California. Never say Christians are idle. Exodus International, another prominent ex-gay ministry, was formed just three years after LIA. Their model argued that “people use homosexual conduct to medicate the pains of their past.” Heal the wounds, heal the sin. Even if Freud ultimately considered curing homosexuality to be outside the realm of psychoanalysis, clearly many of his followers did not.
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Conversion therapy was presented as a healing program. I would become whole again, holy and clean in God’s eyes. I would feel worthy. I would remember life was worth living. My conversion therapist and I talked about everything that was going on in my life. If I stumbled, I confessed my sin and tried to figure out what was missing from my life that made me turn to the “emptiness” of homosexuality. It was lack that turned me onto queerness, not true desire. During a 2009 Exodus International conference, famed conversion therapist Joseph Nicolosi said “the homosexual image is really a defense against that inner core emptiness.” Loneliness would become obsolete, a magic-bullet cure for a girl on the edge. In the documentary Pray Away, a woman introduces Nicolosi to a roaring crowd as a “maverick.” In 2010, a Guardian journalist wrote about witnessing Nicolosi treat a man in front of a live audience: “I felt like I was watching a blood sport.”
Debates over whether or not gay people were “born this way” were a regular part of my teen years. When Lady Gaga’s song came out, my youth pastor sent out an email saying the church did not believe in innate queerness. As the only queer in the youth group, I knew I was the intended target.
My crush was a senior in the youth group who played guitar and read Dostoevsky, a perfect heterosexual fuckboy from Colorado who smoked Marlboro Reds. As I descended into the madness of high school desire, I realized I had to break up with my girlfriend. I told her I would go to prom with her as we’d planned but I couldn’t be her boyfriend. My mom was the one who connected the dots. She asked me if I was gay, and I couldn’t lie so I said nothing.
The night of prom, I still had to put on my all-black Johnny Cash suit. Moments before, I had wandered the woods, having been briefly kicked out of the house after coming out. In all the pictures of that night, I’m smiling. I stand next to the beautiful women I so desperately longed to be.
Afterward, my parents took me to a Christian psychologist for a diagnostic visit. We fought in front of him. When he talked to me alone, I tried my best to stonewall him. We decided not to go back. I started behaving increasingly recklessly. I ran toward trains, I walked home along the sidewalk, I crashed my dad’s car into a telephone pole.
After my first “attempt,” a string of nurses interviewed me. The medical industrial complex was a well-oiled complicity machine. They were going to decide if I was a candidate for psychiatric hospitalization. Ultimately I was not deemed a threat. I was allowed to stay on the outside. Maybe if I’d been committed, I would’ve been spared the conversion therapy that came later. Maybe it would’ve just been a different kind of nightmare. One of the nurses who evaluated me told me it was weird for a guy to cut himself. Little did she know.
One night, overcome by demented post-nut clarity after watching two twinks fuck in a classroom, I messaged a conversion therapist.
One night, overcome by demented post-nut clarity after watching two twinks fuck in a classroom, I messaged a conversion therapist. He was also, funnily enough, my classmate’s dad. We met weekly for a year before he passed me off to his protégé, whom I saw for another year or so. My girlhood hung in the balance.
We started meeting in the basement of a stony church on College Road, only a few blocks from my first gay crush’s house and a few streets away from Mike Pence’s manor. I walked through the red door, down the basement stairs, and sat on a folding chair surrounded by locked filing cabinets. We talked about porn, my family dynamic, my friendships, loneliness, and my relationship with God. Every week I spent an hour searching myself for impure thoughts. I asked myself why I wanted to taste cum, why I so badly wanted to be fucked by assholes in leather jackets. I battered myself for an answer, branded myself with knives. I never let my anger show, except on the canvas of my body.
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CBT, Internal Family Systems, and psychoanalysis were all employed in our sessions. Many of my sessions remain murky to me. Trauma has obscured some of them behind a thick slimy haze. If I ever recover my full memory, will I learn the secret to heterosexuality? Some dark family secret? No. I already know all of them. I had to rehearse them into the narrative of my psychosexual development. So often the sessions were tense philosophical discussions about God, gender, and sex. Looking back, it’s strange to imagine a teenager disclosing so much of her sex life with an adult. We talked about my family, the way I held my hands, the women I tried to date, and what led me to feeling so depressed. I saw him every week. He had one earring and told me he was an ex-gay success story. He thought it was my parents’ fault I was gay. He also told me it was my responsibility to do the work.
It was just therapy, my mother told me years later when I briefly tried to bring up how hard conversion therapy was. And in a way, it was. But of course, the undercurrent was a ghoulish facsimile of therapy that made it nearly impossible to trust later therapists. I did not have privacy. My progress could be reported to my parents. While I didn’t tell my family about the first time I had sex, I was terrified my conversion therapist might tell them. Subconsciously I believed that in order to not go to hell, it was important that I confessed. This led to an OCD level of disclosure, like the private religion of neurosis. What started as confession turned into obsessive radical honesty. I remain, for instance, a terrible liar.
My conversion therapist told me many ex-gays found it hard to “go back” once they’d had a gay experience. Imagine it, something so good, once you taste it, you don’t want to go back. The fuck worth eternal damnation.
There is no way to recount those years without writing trauma porn. I can theorize, repeat, and rehearse my life as many times as I want, but in the end it still feels like a confession. I understand repetition compulsion, the problem is I can’t stop understanding it. Writing about self-harm, suicidality, and abuse often falls into a sanitized narrative of shame and relief. If I confess to you, the reader, I will be forgiven. I continue to reenact the dynamic me and my conversion therapist set up. The only difference is that now I know when it’s happening. I empty myself until I am clean.
I began my weekly lessons on heterosexuality with good faith, like Lauren Cook wrote in I Love Shopping: “My kinky role play: I am an honest person. I am not ashamed of myself.”
That was impossible to imagine.
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In 2005, Tennessee officials investigated Love in Action, one of the most prominent conversion therapy camps. A teenager named Zach made a complaint on MySpace, accusing Love in Action of rampant child abuse. “It’s like boot camp,” Zach said. “If I do come out straight, I’ll be so mentally unstable and depressed it won’t matter.” Officials decided his claims were unfounded. The founders argued God had guided the officials through faith. Faith-based organizations face a different legal scrutiny in the United States. As the White Paper notes, “state bans on conversion therapy do not reach religious organizations.” The church continues to pull the curtain on their activities.
Prayer camps and exorcisms have continued under the guise of legal exemptions. One Australian man was taught the same prayer I was: “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command the demon of homosexuality to leave me. I bind its power and I rebuke the schemes of the enemy.” Eight years earlier, Matthew Drapper had undergone an exorcism at Sheffield’s St. Thomas Philadelphia church. “They told me to speak to the gay part of myself as if speaking to a wild dog coming up to me—and for me to say to ‘leave my body’ . . . The people I was with told me they could see demons leave me and go out of the window.” Like Drapper, I too underwent an exorcism. Oil crosses were drawn on my walls. Prayer warriors huddled around me. “As reparative therapy increasingly moves away from the scientific mainstream, its mystical presuppositions become more apparent,” Drescher writes in his history of the practice. As conversion therapy continues to move toward the fringe, mysticism has taken hold.
There are many ways hairpulling can be fun. None of them involve demons. The summer after my senior year, only a year after finishing conversion therapy, I hiked the San Juan Mountains in Colorado with Young Life, a Christian group I had occasionally attended. As we were hiking the beautiful cliffs, we told each other stories. The stories of our lives, how we’d come to know God, and where we thought we were going. I knew what was expected of me. A conversion narrative. From sinful, dirty freak to good Christian boy. Everyone thought I would grow up to be a worship leader or a teacher.
We hiked for a week. I had no experience backpacking but enjoyed putting Cholula on everything and drinking gritty coffee in the fresh morning air. Every time we stopped, a new person told their life story. Time was running out. Already I was under suspicion for telling the group that I didn’t believe in hell. Finally, I told them I was gay and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. After a while, they told me I had gone over my allotted time by an hour. I was mortified. For the rest of the hike, I tried to say as little as possible. One of the other boys on the trip found my story genuinely touching. Another told me he thought I was a sinner and going to hell anyway.
The fuck worth eternal damnation.
My sexuality and what I thought about it changed daily. Most days, I was in a good place if I didn’t try to convince people I was straight. I hadn’t even started to sort out the gender part.
The last night of the hike, I was certain demons were pulling my hair. We were supposed to be sleeping alone under the black starless night. After I screamed, the head youth pastor came over and slept next to me. I’m not sure what he thought, but I was convinced I was under attack. Internally, I knew I had ruined something for him, some possible communion with the divine. My favorite exorcism—the kind that left me alone.
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In 2012, Robert Spritzer, a psychologist who pushed a controversial study that championed the success rate of conversion therapy, was forced to retract much of his research. At the time, I was still seeing my conversion therapist. Conveniently, no one told me about his retraction. In 2015, only a year after I “graduated” from my conversion therapy program, Barack Obama “called for an end” to conversion therapy. A few people congratulated me. I told them, perhaps bitterly, it meant nothing to me. For all intents and purposes, conversion therapy was still legal in the United States. It still is. There are simply too many loopholes. Besides, I’d already been through it.
Some continue to practice heterosexuality as a form of self-love. The documentary Pray Away follows many ex-gays as they prepare for a “Freedom March.” There was one such march in 2019, organized by two survivors of the Pulse shooting. It may be an understandable negotiation with faith and death, but it’s a bidding war that quickly got out of hand. Pulse was a wake-up call, they say. My mom told me she wanted to teach me how to shoot a gun after the Pulse massacre. Sometimes I wish she had.
Conversion therapy remains legal in most states, including Indiana, my home state. The bans that do exist only apply to minors. If an adult wants to change, they may seek out the company of ex-gays and give talks at churches. While countries continue to ban conversion therapy as the years go on, Christians continue to minister the gospel of change where they can. The church is certainly not changing their stance anytime soon. A 2017 Evangelical statement of values condemned “transgenderism.” All too often, gender and sexuality are conflated, both deemed deviant behaviors opposed to the nuclear family. Evangelicals have decided that, in a changing world, they will remain steadfast in sticking to their moral code. The document snidely advocates that homosexuals can be pure by not giving in to temptation. When I told one of my friends I was going to try to be gay and celibate, she told me she was worried I would end up like one of those Catholic priests.
Canada has enacted a notably strict ban on conversion therapy, and Australia has continued to condemn not just “above-board” conversion therapy but the covert kind too—the societal pressure that bubbles up in churches. But the ability of the state to shape religion and ethics is always skating on thin ice. One can’t legislate sin. Some conversion therapy survivors have turned to the law to receive compensation for their loss.
Legal suits in the United States have primarily attempted reparations through claims of consumer fraud. You failed to make me straight, therefore your product is defective. Reparations have been more successful in Spain. In 2009, Antoni Ruiz became the first to receive reparations for his imprisonment. He spent time in prison in 1976 on suspicion of homosexual activity, just a year after Francisco Franco’s death. In 1995, the year I was born, Ruiz was jailed yet again. As he was arrested, an officer called him a maricón under his breath. As trans theorist McKenzie Wark asks for reparations from the psychoanalytic community, I wonder what it would mean to feel repaid—to really absolve someone of their guilt.
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Love is one of the most politically fraught ways to fight for freedom. “Perhaps unbelievably, the many harms done to children in the name of care are conventionally rationalized as part of loving them,” Jules Gill-Peterson wrote. How can we imagine childhood as a time for curiosity and experimentation? A place where love is a space for exploration instead of a dead-end car crash?
Pray Away ends with footage of a woman named Julie’s lesbian wedding. It’s an emotional moment—the viewer can see scars on her arms. If I ever wear a white dress, someone else will see mine. So many conversion therapy narratives center romance as the end of trauma: But I’m a Cheerleader, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and many ex-gays’ coming-out posts. But love has never been the political force that saved me. Not sheer love alone. Surviving meant that if I never fell in love, I would still consider my life worth living. Surviving and transitioning weren’t worth doing because I knew they would make me happy or more able to love someone. They were worth doing because I wanted to do them.
As conversion therapy is outlawed and publicly dissected, we must continue to consider the afterlives of survivors. The violent reformation of a trans girl a decade before her first little blue estrogen pill who never got to wear fairy wings on Halloween. What counts as child abuse these days—and what doesn’t—is dizzying. Yet all of these efforts are done in the name of love, as were the attempts to save me from the pits of hell.
Becoming a girl was unthinkable when I was a child. I didn’t know people could even do such a thing. The irreversible damage is not from hormones. It is the cruel past that convinced me life could’ve been different. That in another life I could’ve been a very happy man. I am not broken by this vision, but it is my shadow life, drawn along with twine and shards of glass. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?
I used to think I would write tender stories of quiet desperation and yearning. But I am too angry for pastorals. I can no longer accept false doctrines. I can no longer swallow a gospel that longs for my destruction. Trauma has a way of catching up. For years, I found myself relying on masochistic coping strategies. Eating disorders, self-harm, the works. I don’t have a neat chronological recovery story. Brutality destroys chronology. Brutality is our tether being ripped apart. Brutality is a thief in its ability to mute identity.
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Gender without Identity, a fascinating new book by psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou and psychoanalyst and scholar Ann Pellegrini, takes as its central case study an effeminate child who was perceived by his surroundings to be a boy. The authors take care to point out the child could have been gender variant, trans, or simply gay. They intentionally don’t take a position, in an attempt to allow for the subject’s inner life and its many possibilities. This way the subject isn’t seen as pre-gay or pre-trans. Such a strategy is not, it should be noted, a way of so-called exploratory gender therapy, which often seeks to teach normative gender, but a way of allowing all outcomes. A subject is allowed to want to be queer or trans and can be affirmed in multiple directionalities.
Saketopoulou and Pellgrini suggest we all obtain gender through complex processes. This can include trauma—one of their more controversial statements. Drawing on the work of Jean Laplanche, they argue that identity is not created from a centered self but is still rooted in autonomy. Instead, we all spin a performance out of the enigma our parents give us. The writers traverse this slippery slope with curious style. They argue that the development of normative gender is often a psychoanalytic issue just as much as the formation of transness is—the only difference being that one is more stigmatized. “There are . . . many reasons why trans unhappiness may persist on the other side of transition, but not due to some ontology of transness.” The authors worry that psychoanalysts may give into trans broken-leg syndrome, blaming everything on being trans without digging into deeper psychic territory. At the very least, the whole context should be taken into account. Regardless of the outcome, “no gender is unspoiled by trauma or uncontaminated by parental conflict.”
The titular essay in Gender without Identity was nearly suppressed by the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP). IJP planned to publish the essay until they pulled out over its supposedly political content, leaving Saketopoulou and Pellegrini without an editor. Thankfully, Unconscious in Translation stepped up. But IJP nearly took legal action to quash the essay they deemed too political. All of this occurred in 2022. The queerness of childhood continues to be a battleground in both the secular and the religious world.
The authors of Gender without Identity take special care to welcome us into their book, taking note that their work could be used against queer and trans people. Looking at how gender is constructed can also be a backdoor into deconstructing it. While Saketopoulou and Pellegrini seek to move beyond the born-this-way versus “acquired-and-therefore-possible-to-eliminate” model, not all analysts have been so generous.
As Gender without Identity notes, the point is not to ignore how these processes contribute to our psychic landscape, but to integrate them without denial or fables. Janet Malcolm[3] once argued that “psychoanalysis seeks to mitigate our sufferings by loosening the hold of these stories on us—by convincing us . . . that they are stories, and not the way things ‘are.’” We do not let go of these stories, but analyze them and consider how we built them brick by brick.
This is not a story of overcoming conversion therapy. It is not a story at all, but a deconstruction of a specific fairy tale: the wish to be different. First to be straight, then to be a woman. One came true.
[1] Sigmund Freud, “Letter to an American Mother,” available at: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/freud1.asp.
[2] See Karl Edward Bryant’s PhD thesis “The Politics of Pathology and the Making of Gender Identity Disorder” (University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007), as well as Leah Tigers’s excellent essay “Little Miss Dysphoria: An Essay about Transgender Women and Madness” at http://www.trickymothernature.com/littlemissdysphoria.html.
[3] Janet Malcolm, “Dora,” in The Purloined Clinic (New York: Knopf, 1992).