Researchers Kenneth J. Zucker and Susan J. Bradley are names that every gay man and lesbian woman should know, especially if they were treated to become “straight” at a camp or a ex-gay affirming psychologist’s office — but almost no one knows who Zucker and Bradley are.
The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuals (NARTH) quotes Zucker and Bradley often in defense of treating children diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder (GID) — described as a “pre-homosexual condition” by Joseph Nicolosi in his book A Parents Guide To Preventing Homosexuality. (Update – See Further Reading‘s GID Reform Advocates: DSM-IV-TR: Gender Identity Disorder in Children, 302.6 for how the Childhood GID applies to LGB people.)
Kenneth Zucker and Susan Bradley are from the Clark Institute (CAMH), specifically the institution’s Gender Identity Clinic.
In Gene Chase’s review of Zucker & Bradley’s Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents, Chase states of Zucker and Bradley:
They are specialists in Gender Identity Disorder (GID), which is the last vestige of the characterization of homosexuality as a disorder in the old APA DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual].
Recall that GID is the feeling of conflict in one’s gender. It is not being transsexual (ts), since no biology is a part of the diagnosis. It is not being transgendered (tg) alone, since that may not be conflicting. It is not cross-dressing, since that is a behavior not a feeling.
Here’s what has been said about Zucker and Bradley’s work, some of it in their own words:
Reviewing their book Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents, an unidentified writer at NARTH writes:
Zucker and Bradley recognize a very important point missed by most gay activists–that homosexual attractions in adolescence may represent nothing more than transitory idealization of same-sex individuals, rather than a deep-seated sexual orientation. Their goal is to help the client find his “real”–i.e., most deep-seated on a feeling and fantasy level–sexual orientation.
One important question remains in this book: can treatment of the gender-disturbed child prevent future homosexuality? Although there are “no formal empirical studies demonstrating that therapeutic intervention in childhood alters the developmental path toward either transsexualism or homosexuality,” nevertheless Zucker and Bradley maintain a cautious optimism, saying there is some “indirect support” for the efficacy of treatment.
They discuss the success rate of therapy with children, as reported by Rekers. Rekers says that follow-up results of over 50 gender-disturbed children suggest permanent changes in gender identity, and he believes that a preventive treatment for “transvestism, transsexualism, and some forms of homosexuality has indeed been isolated,” although Zucker and Bradley express mild skepticism due to the lack of formal substantiation of this conclusion. . .
. . .Zucker and Bradley conclude: “It has been our experience that a sizable number of children and their families achieve a great deal of change. In these cases, the GID resolves fully, and nothing in the children’s behavior or fantasy suggest that gender-identity issues remain problematic…All things considered, we take the position that in such cases a clinician should be optimistic, not nihilistic, about the possibility of helping the children to become more secure in their gender identity.”
Quoting Richard Green, Zucker and Bradley say in their book Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents:
“The rights of parents to oversee the development of children is a long-established principle. Who is to dictate that parents may not try to raise their children in a manner that maximizes the possibility of a heterosexual outcome? If that prerogative is denied, should parents also be denied the right to raise their children as atheists? Or as priests?”
In NARTH’s How Should Clinicians Deal With GID In Children?
Dr. Zucker admits that there are complex social and ethical issues surrounding the politics of sex and gender in postmodern Western culture. He note that the “most acute ethical issue may concern the relation between GID and a later homosexual sexual orientation. Follow-up studies of boys who have GID that largely is untreated, indicated that homosexuality is the most common long-term psychosexual outcome.”
Zucker says that clinicians have an ethical obligation to inform parents of the relationship between GID and homosexuality. Clinical experience suggests that psychosexual treatments are effective in reducing gender dysphoria and that individual counseling and parental counseling are both effective methods of treating GID.
——
In the article Boys Will Be Girls, transsexuals protested Zucker and Bradley; specifically an award being given to Bradley. Excerpt:
On the morning of Mar 29 a group of trans activists crashed a celebration honouring Susan Bradley, the founder of the Child And Adolescent Gender Identity Clinic at Toronto’s Centre For Addiction And Mental Health (CAMH).
The featured speaker of the event was Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and current head of the gender identity clinic.
If ex-ex-gays and lesbians knew more about Zucker and Bradley, my guess would be that they would have been there too in some numbers.
——Further Reading——
TSRoadmap: Background: The Clarke Institute and Kenneth J. Zucker on transsexualism
Frank York for NARTH: How Should Clinicians Deal With GID In Children?
–ADDED–
GID Reform Advocates: DSM-IV-TR: Gender Identity Disorder in Children, 302.6
—————
Special thanks to Pam Ferguson for her assistance with this article.
Zucker and Bradley conclude: “It has been our experience that a sizable number of children and their families achieve a great deal of change. In these cases, the GID resolves fully, and nothing in the children’s behavior or fantasy suggest that gender-identity issues remain problematic
I’ve met several of his “success stories” who are transitioning in their 20s and have learned by painful experience to do so entirely outside of the Cluck, as it is called, if not outside of the entire Benjamin Standards of Care entirely.
WHOA!
“Indirect support” for the efficacy of their treatment?
WHAT?!
No, way….s’cuse me. But there should be direct, undisputable support for their treatment, AND the results of it’s efficacy!
AND, a wealth of professional peers, represented by NIMH, the APA and the AMA, who support it too.
Are you kidding me?
And not even differentiating homosexuality from GID is a very dangerous and stupid thing to do.
At what age do these people think is appropriate for their meddling?
And at which time and for how long are they convinced that a child is having a problem?
And do they know if it’s the kid with the problem, or if the problem is how the parents respond to a NON ISSUE?
These are VERY important distinctions that have to be made.
I don’t think there is a worse professional, than one who exploits prejudice and fear to make parents come to them.
This has to be illegal somewhere.
What so called, or alleged doctor or reasearch could legally get away with a misdiagnosis, GUARANTEED to frighten a parent…especially regarding something that isn’t life threatening or urgent to intervene based on impending or inevitable disability?
One’s gender isn’t a disability, whichever way, or transitional way it’s present.
And homosexuality isn’t a disbility either.
Boy…this s**t really makes me mad!
Exactly how mainstream is this group? From the support NARTH (and Focus, too I believe) give them, I have a hard time believing they’re widely accepted.
Focus and Dobson have a “preventing homosexuality gig that sounds a lot like these two- even heard some of the GID-homosexuality connection language.
Most telling that at least two “graduates” transitioned. Kids instictively know when to go underground about something (gender conflict) their parents disapprove.
Exactly how mainstream is this group? From the support NARTH (and Focus, too I believe) give them, I have a hard time believing they’re widely accepted.
Until it was delisted from Ontario health, they had a monopoly on deciding who got hormones and surgery and who didn’t.
They’re still widely quoted as serious researchers even by supposedly progressive sources.
I forget exactly when it was; but, I think that the “boys will be girls” thing was brought up ABC-TV’s news magazine show “20/20” which aired only four days before the 2004 national election. The show was called “Test Your Gaydar.”
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=207269&page=1
It was obvious that co-host John Stossel believed that stupid stuff. ABC-TV got a lot of negative comments about that show and I even posted one, too.
They decided to use an experiment and have 10 men involved in a test where members of a control audience –all of them were from NEW YORK, NEW YORK! – were to figure out which 5 men were straight and which 5 men were gay.
One straight audience member used stereotypical junk to correctly guess that one guy was gay. But, that was only because the gay man was dressed like Norm Abram of the “This Old House Hour” and “The New Yankee Workshop” and “Al” on the old ABC-TV comedy Series, “Home Improvement.”
Yes, the man was wearing work clothes, a plaid flannel shirt and work boots. If one of the straight men had dressed exactly like that, the same idiot would have sworn that man was gay. If that same New Yorker had come to Tulsa, Oklahoma and went to a housing construction site, he would have thought every man working there was gay, too, just by the way they dressed.
Exactly how mainstream is this group? From the support NARTH (and Focus, too I believe) give them, I have a hard time believing they’re widely accepted.
Zucker and Clark clinician Ray Blanchard also sit on the DSM sexual disorders subcommittee (or at least, they did for DSM IV) and literally wrote the GID diagnoses. If you talk to professionals in the trans field tho, they’re being taken less and less seriously. The main professional association WPATH (formerly HBIGDA) recently disavowed a book that heavily promoted the Blanchard/Zucker models.
As one tiny example of the massive weirdness that pervades their clinic, a few years ago they invited a trans speaker to talk about the strained relationship between the clinic and the trans community. They ended up having to discipline one of their own clinicians for harassing the speaker.
https://www.tsroadmap.com/info/james-cantor.html
about a third of the way down.
These groups are widely accepted by a collective identity of Fundamental Christian counselors that truly believe any sexual/relational orientation that is not heterosexual is not of God. I am in the process of writing a book to help Christian GLBT survivors of sexual abuse have another alternative for healing besides the work of the Ministry program Living Waters/Desert Stream.
May the Holy Spirit, the Truth, continue to unfold in our world to help all of God’s children and creation thrive and live in the unity of love.
Good luck on your book, Jennifer. There can’t be too many of them out there. Every Christian with a gay relative needs one.
My thanks to you too Jennifer.
We in Asia do not have much resources to refer to when dealing with our transsexual sisters, lesbian sistas and gay brothers.
Another set of ideas translated into print from the other side of the world would still do just fine.
Our Saviour bless you, and all LGBITs.
I should have written “I had forgotten exactly when it was; but, the “boys will be girls” thing was brought up ABC-TV’s news magazine show “20/20″ which aired only four days before the 2004 national election. The show was called “Test Your Gaydar.”
This Boys Will Be Girls idea reminds me of the true story I read many years ago before I ever though about owning a computer.
A young man wanted to his parents that he was gay; but, he wasn’t sure exactly how to tell then that. So, he had an uncle whom he felt he was close to and he decide to talk to him privately first.
When he told the uncle, “I am gay,” his uncle responded with, “How much is this operation going to cost?”
“What operation?” he replied. “I do not want to be a woman. I am a man and I want to stay that way. I thought I could talk to you first to find out how I could tell Mom and Dad that I am gay. I thought you would understand.”
Transgenders, aka transsexuals, are special people whose situation is not sexual orientation identification, but, gender identification. I feel the same way about those who wish to be called “intersex.”
Contrary to what Christians read in Genesis Chapter One in their Bibles and believe that humans are either male or female, variations of human gender do exist, too. Besides, all of the whole book of Genesis was oral history, passed on by word of mouth for centuries. The last thing that happened in that book occured over 400 years before it was put in writing.
So Zucker and Bradley obviously have a lot to say — but is there anything specific that is inaccurate or objectionable about what they say?
There is nothing in this article, or the comments thus far, that refutes Z&B’s various claims. So, are we to accept what Z&B say, at face value?
Gid Reform Avocates has a page up on Chilhood GID that
– describes the criteria for the condition
– indicates it’s an overinclusive diagnosis
– indicates it’s considered the “prehomosexual condition”
– there are disparate standards for boys and birls — one essentially is authorized to be a tom-boy, but not a jane-girl
– says Childhood GID is a pathologization of ordinary behaviors.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Richard A. Isay wrote the piece Remove Gender Identity Disorder From DSM. He asks the question:
Joseph Nicolsoi, in Chapter 2 of A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality is entitled The PreHomosexual Boy; Why Should Parents Intervene? The answer he gives is:
He then quotes Zucker and Bradley in saying:
Combining Kelly Winters thoughts with Richard A. Isay’s, as written Childhood Gid is a disease that is sexist in it’s diagnosis, pathologizes ordinary childhood behaviors, and of which the major concern is 75% of males with it end up growing up homosexual — a condition that since 1973 hasn’t been considered an adult disorder.
The treatments for Childhood GID aren’t to keep kids so much from growing up to be transgender, but to stop kids from growing up gay.
I think the question, Mike Airhart, is whether treating a child for a prehomosexual condition when the adult homosexual condition isn’t considered disordered leaves the room to question why Childhood GID is a necessary diagnosis needing treatment.
There is nothing in this article, or the comments thus far, that refutes Z&B’s various claims. So, are we to accept what Z&B say, at face value?
You mean beyond their admission that there’s no study showing their treatment actually works and one commenter’s claim to have met several people they claimed as successes who have since transitioned?
Autumn and Boo, thanks for clarifying for me, I was feeling a little lost before.
Here’s another good article to read:
https://www.critpath.org/pflag-talk/gid.htm
The “treatment” meted out to these kids often involves forcible behavior modification. An adult who goes into ex-gay treatment is at least there voluntarily and has an adult’s emotional resources, imagine how traumatizing it could be for a young child who’s there against their will.
Narth and Nicolosi are laughable in the scientific community…they have absolutely no credibility – nor do those who affiliate with them.