My fellow Bilerico blogger Alex Blaze has a great post on The Bilerico Project that helps to underscore the insidious poison that Rekers and similar self-loathing closet cases have inflicted on so many over the course of their efforts to transfer to others their own feelings of sinfulness and to stigmatize others who have done nothing more than accept the sexual orientation that God gave them - I like to think by intentional design. As I have noted before, we will never know how many LGBT individuals were driven to suicide because of the work of Rekers and his Christianist allies. Likewise, we will never know how many lives and families were damaged by the faux science knowingly and deliberately peddled to the gullible and ignorant by Rekers and his minions. Suffice it to say, the numbers are likely not insignificant on either count. Here are some highlights from Alex's summary of some of the garbage disseminated by NARTH and George Rekers - all in a quest to feel good about themselves and for political gain - and the toxic results therefrom: *
It looks like media outside of Bilerico and Zoe Brain's blog decided to take a little stroll down Memory Lane and revisit George Rekers's work at UCLA, where he told parents to spank their boys for being too femmy and to psychologically torture them as young as age 4 (which actually isn't that hard) in order to make real men out of them.
*
What we know now is from a passage in Phyllis Burke's Gender Shock. I'm sure that a plucky LGBT journalist working for an LA or a national publication could find out a bit more about how far Rekers's experiments at UCLA's Feminine Boy Project went. Were children hit by the researchers themselves? What were parents told and promised? How did they secure their government grant? And how many of children they experimented on ended up committing suicide?
*
Consider this from Rekers in 1977 on whether psychiatrists should help people accept their homosexuality or try to overcome it (remember, this is several years after the DSM removed its entry on homosexuality when it became apparent it was there for no reason other than to stigmatize gay people):
*
For example, it has been suggested that the only appropriate goal of the psychotherapist dealing with a homosexual individual is to help him adjust to his homosexual orientation and behavior. Some critics go so far as to suggest that a referral to a "Gay Counseling Center" is even more appropriate, with the goal of placing the individual in contact with others like himself. We find this line of argument to be totally unacceptable and irresponsible.[...]
*
The non-neutrality of "gay counseling" imposes further limitations on the individual's growth potential, and unnecessarily sanctions a debilitating pattern of personal adjustment.
*
Of course. And spanking boys for being to girly is completely neutral. This isn't anything that we haven't seen before, of course. Queer people don't need to be told that there are plenty of people who will punish sexual and gender non-conformists with poverty, humiliation, violence, and death.
*
What's often interesting about homophobia is that it isn't rash or enraged. Lots of times its violence is calm and cloaked in the language of science, law, philosophy, or religion. . . . it's therapeutic for society at large, especially people insecure in their own genders and bodies and sexualities, and especially people like George Rekers who devote their entire lives to researching ways to cure themselves, to see gender variant people get punished.
*
[T]heir persistence, after all these decades, in punishing gender variance and homosexuality, shows that it's about something quite different. It's about making these people feel good in their own skin. Unfortunately, it isn't just a few troubled individuals who experience this pain in quiet; it's the force that drives the movement against us.
It looks like media outside of Bilerico and Zoe Brain's blog decided to take a little stroll down Memory Lane and revisit George Rekers's work at UCLA, where he told parents to spank their boys for being too femmy and to psychologically torture them as young as age 4 (which actually isn't that hard) in order to make real men out of them.
*
What we know now is from a passage in Phyllis Burke's Gender Shock. I'm sure that a plucky LGBT journalist working for an LA or a national publication could find out a bit more about how far Rekers's experiments at UCLA's Feminine Boy Project went. Were children hit by the researchers themselves? What were parents told and promised? How did they secure their government grant? And how many of children they experimented on ended up committing suicide?
*
Consider this from Rekers in 1977 on whether psychiatrists should help people accept their homosexuality or try to overcome it (remember, this is several years after the DSM removed its entry on homosexuality when it became apparent it was there for no reason other than to stigmatize gay people):
*
For example, it has been suggested that the only appropriate goal of the psychotherapist dealing with a homosexual individual is to help him adjust to his homosexual orientation and behavior. Some critics go so far as to suggest that a referral to a "Gay Counseling Center" is even more appropriate, with the goal of placing the individual in contact with others like himself. We find this line of argument to be totally unacceptable and irresponsible.[...]
*
The non-neutrality of "gay counseling" imposes further limitations on the individual's growth potential, and unnecessarily sanctions a debilitating pattern of personal adjustment.
*
Of course. And spanking boys for being to girly is completely neutral. This isn't anything that we haven't seen before, of course. Queer people don't need to be told that there are plenty of people who will punish sexual and gender non-conformists with poverty, humiliation, violence, and death.
*
What's often interesting about homophobia is that it isn't rash or enraged. Lots of times its violence is calm and cloaked in the language of science, law, philosophy, or religion. . . . it's therapeutic for society at large, especially people insecure in their own genders and bodies and sexualities, and especially people like George Rekers who devote their entire lives to researching ways to cure themselves, to see gender variant people get punished.
*
[T]heir persistence, after all these decades, in punishing gender variance and homosexuality, shows that it's about something quite different. It's about making these people feel good in their own skin. Unfortunately, it isn't just a few troubled individuals who experience this pain in quiet; it's the force that drives the movement against us.
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